28 ms·

This is the article that made things finally click with me. Thinking about the pre-WWI gold standard and the issues that existed there and the improvements that

by olah_1 6y ago

This is the article that made things finally click with me. Thinking about the pre-WWI gold standard and the issues that existed there and the improvements that Bitcoin brings around time, consensus, etc. The baseless negative comments with no interaction with the article content confirms for me that Bitcoin is on to something. Sour grapes syndrome is a result of pride, I think.

user-the-name 6y ago
There is nothing baseless in saying that using 0.1% of the entire world's energy in order to do 3 transactions per second is beyond ludicrous, and an environmental disaster of massive proportions.
- olah_1 6y ago
  > using 0.1% of the entire world's energy in order to do 3 transactions per second is beyond ludicrous In comparison to what? What do we get in return? Many consider the benefits to be worth it.
  - yerwhat01010 6y ago
    > What do we get in return? Fantastic question. I've been waiting 10 years for a convincing answer; still waiting.
    - Erlich_Bachman 6y ago
      There are millions of people who use it, trade it, store their value in it, program more software for it etc. They see the answer, they get the point. Can you please just answer this - do you suppose they all halt what they are doing and wait for an undeterminate amount of time for you to also get it, before they can go on with their businesses and lives?
      - notahacker 6y ago
        I think the more pertinent question is, if they all halted what they are doing for an indeterminate amount of time for other people to get it, would the world [in future] be a worse place? And how?
      - threwawasy1228 6y ago
        I would upvote this a hundred times if I could. I don't understand where this kind of demand for further understanding even comes from we are well past the point where it could have been written off as a fad and it is obvious there is value to it. There is no reason why everyone should feel the need to "get it" or get value out of it to understand that other people do get it and do get value out of it. It is such a weird sentiment to me because it would never occur to me to devalue the value others get out of things I don't understand. I hate bonds, I don't "get" why anyone would want to buy bonds, people have tried to explain it to me. I decided that I will never buy a bond in my life because they are just the dumbest form of investment. I can hold that sentiment whilst saying "I don't get why they buy them but clearly there is a lot of value from the vehicle and it is clearly a valid form". I don't see why I should need to understand an monetary vehicle or like an investment vehicle to understand that some people do, and those people have a valid opinion.
      - yerwhat01010 6y ago
        Can we at least acknowledge how far the goal posts have moved? I can remember what people were saying about Bitcoin in 2013 - that it was a revolutionary technology on par with the creation of the Internet; that it was going to completely transform our global financial system; that it was going to replace fiat currency; that it represented a dazzling new future that you’d have to be an insane Luddite to not go all-in on. Well, where are we now? What significant advancements have occurred since 2013 as a result of Bitcoin (other than the catastrophic climate impact)? What new technologies are powered by crypto other than niche, nerdy shit which no-one outside of a handful of enthusiasts cares about? Bitcoin is now 12 years old - if Bitcoin is the next World Wide Web, then who is the Google of crypto? Who is the Amazon? Hell, does Bitcoin even have a Lycos or a Yahoo? And yes, I acknowledge that millions of people own Bitcoin and are trading it. But what reason is there to believe in Bitcoin, other than the fact that other people believe it? Yes, I know that you could say the same of fiat currency: dollars only have value because we believe they do. But the difference is that I use fiat currency every day to accomplish real things that have an enormous material impact on my life. The only thing I’ve ever used Bitcoin for is to buy drugs - what else am I ever going to do with it, except hope that the value increases so I can sell it to another speculator? Maybe the crypto enthusiasts are laughing at me for asking these rhetorical questions as if there isn’t an obvious answer - in which case, let me know! I don’t want to miss out on the crypto wave if it really is as big as people keep telling me. But I’ve read books about Bitcoin, delved into crypto-related code, and spent many hours of my life studying blockchain technology and trying to understand what all the fuss is about. That was a couple of years ago, and I got bored and gave up. I’ve been telling myself to take another look given the recent price surge, but I just can’t motivate myself. What am I missing? Why do people act as if this is all so obvious?
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
  - ben_w 6y ago
    What benefits? Bitcoin isn’t fundamentally better than a database running on a fraction of the power (i.e. every modern bank). The claimed benefits of BTC are (1) to remove government control of money, and (2) to eliminate the need for trust, but (1) ignores why we have chosen to give governments control of money in the first place when gold still exists (and can be traded electronically), while (2) requires you to ignore the other half of the transaction where you buy something with the money rather than just putting it in someone else’s account — reports of being ripped off by a vendor goes back to Akkadian cuneiform, and things like chargebacks and courts are there to deal with this, putting rules on what was once anonymous shiny rock that anyone could mine in a literal rather than metaphorical sense.
    - olah_1 6y ago
      > being ripped off by a vendor [...] things like chargebacks and courts are there to deal with this Third party escrow services, the better business bureau, the police... all of these can (and should in many cases) exist with bitcoin. It doesn't have to be either/or.
      - ben_w 6y ago
        When you have a society where those work, “trustless” is no longer a benefit. It’s a catch-22: to be useful, it can’t be useful.
        olah_1 6y ago
        Unfortunately, the powers that be have ensured that we will never again be allowed to live in high trust societies because “diversity is our strength”.
        ben_w 6y ago
        I don’t recognise the world you’re describing.
  - user-the-name 6y ago
    In comparison to literally anything in the world.
- arbawk 6y ago
  Now do the gold mining industry, and then how USD is backed by armies. And then you can research Lightning Network on top of Bitcoin and how it can process an unlimited number of transactions.
  - casi 6y ago
    "unlimited" surely you mean limited? theres rarely tech with no limits. also the military/police/law/government defend you from being killed for your bitcoin.
    - Vecr 6y ago
      Pretty close to unlimited, if you imagine a channel as slider or a bead on an abacus, as long as both nodes using the channel agree where it is, the position can be updated an infinite number of times without touching the blockchain. Timelocks let a transaction pivot through many of these.
  - derethanhausen 6y ago
    This is just whataboutism. Gold isn't used as a currency. Seems a stretch to claim the armies exist solely for the USD. And until the Lightning Network is actually implemented it will remain theoretical.
    - Erlich_Bachman 6y ago
      Not sure where you get your news but LN is implemented and functional. There are wallets, services, software, etc, downloadable, functional, used every day. If what you mean to say "get all the marchants that support BTC to accept LN", then yes, there is still some progress needs to be done.
      - UncleMeat 6y ago
        > there is still some progress needs to be done That's an understatement. There are two restaurants within 100 miles of my home that accept BTC, let alone use LN.
- doomroot 6y ago
  Here me out. What if it was the only way to defund the US military? Would you be interested then? Why do we waste so much energy building killing machines? Why is there not a daily hackernews thread complaining about the energy consumption of the US military? Because it’s a necessary to ensure you can buy and sell things when you want to.
  - neatze 6y ago
    > Why do we waste so much energy building killing machines? In analogy, it is same reasons why we lock our doors and don't leave keys in parked car. Do you seriously assume that some nations and some organization, do not, actively seek, how to take things that do not belong to them ?
  - ben_w 6y ago
    If that was the argument, I would ask in response: if it could do that, why would the combined vested interests of the US military-industrial lot allow Bitcoin to succeed? It’s not beyond the reach of governments to ban unwanted trade, and even though bans are not magic, even a half-arsed enforcement of such a ban is enough to prevent a currency becoming endemic.
    - Erlich_Bachman 6y ago
      > It’s not beyond the reach of governments to ban unwanted trade Yeah, right, it worked so well for alcohol... It DOES (/s) work so well for drugs in the US right now... And hey imagine whether it's easier or harder to ban something that doesn't take any physical space in your suitcase and can be transacted with only internet connection.
      - ben_w 6y ago
        Did anyone in Prohibition USA purchase a house or car or pay their bills with a literal barrel of whiskey? """and even though bans are not magic, even a half-arsed enforcement of such a ban is enough to prevent a currency becoming endemic."""
      - 6y ago
toto444 6y ago
> Sour grapes syndrome is a result of pride, I think. Or maybe it comes from people who have read an Econo101 textbook and who have spent a lot of time trying to explain a crowd of Bitcoin enthusiasts why their reasoning is wrong but no one has been listening to them so far so they are bored. Back in the time I used to spend my days on a forum about Economics. Every other week there was a random guy who signed up just to explain us his grand new theory about money. It seems that tech has enabled a grand new theory about money to be implemented. That does not make it less true that money does not have magical properties and bitcoin will not create a new world order.
- Erlich_Bachman 6y ago
  > That does not make it less true that money does not have magical properties and bitcoin will not create a new world order. Is anyone really claiming that? The OP's post doesn't seem to be in this spirit anyway. It's more like "Bitcoin has true usefulness, it will keep some meaningful value for a long time, enable other use cases that didn't even exist before.". Nobody is saying that it is going to replace all other forms of money.
  - toto444 6y ago
    > Nobody is saying that it is going to replace all other forms of money. To be a money it somehow has to. What is the value of a dollar ? The set of goods you can buy with a dollar. As long as the value of a bitcoin is expressed in another currency that is weird to call it a money.
    - shawnz 6y ago
      The value of every currency is expressed in other currencies. How else would you do it? Are you saying there is nothing in existence which can really be considered "money" except maybe the US dollar?
      - toto444 6y ago
        If suddenly every land on Earth but the UK is flooded, £1 will still have a value : the set of goods you can buy with £1.
thewarrior 6y ago
I recently decided to think deeply about Bitcoin and I think my initial skepticism about Bitcoin was wrong. Most of the criticisms of Bitcoin are centered around the fact that Bitcoin has a very low throughput. However this is not necessarily a problem. And here is one hypothetical example of how we can overcome this issue: When countries owe each other money they used to transfer gold back and forth or trust someone else to do it for them. So all transactions within a country would happen in a local currency and then once in a while "settlement" would happen. Bitcoin is digital gold for settlements among digital currencies. For eg I could start a new Stable coin called MyDogeCoin HQed in Switzerland and each MyDogeCoin is backed by 1 Bitcoin. Anyone who trusts me can transact in MyDogeCoins and can convert their MyDogeCoins into Bitcoins if they are willing to wait and pay a sizable fee to account for Bitcoins slowness. However most people don't need this it just needs to be possible. Now anyone using MyDogeCoin can send money to each other quickly as long as they trust me. This isn't any different to how you trust a country. And many countries like Zimbabwe aren't trust worthy at all. This has BTC behind it. Now suppose you want to send MyDogeCoin to MyMemeCoin HQed in Singapore and is similar. We trust each other and hence we do the transfer. Once in a while we do a "settlement" on the BTC blockchain. This way we don't need that many TPS. And large untrusted nodes can use the BTC blockchain as a trustless settlement layer. Since BTC is the final trustless layer its a foundation. Now I realized how BTC can have long term value and it could be around even a 100 years from now. Doesn't mean its not over priced now but it will have a non zero value over the long term and is revolutionary. Unless the government goes to war against it. The US government used to use gold and then basically defaulted and forced everyone to accept dollars by force. Thats not sustainable.
- inter_netuser 6y ago
  And down the rabbit hole we fall.
- nickysielicki 6y ago
  > Bitcoin is digital gold for settlements among digital currencies. What are the implications of this on the network stability wrt mining? Doesn't bitcoin need transaction volume to remain a stable network? My read is that the incentive structure changes. Right now, miners are motivated by block rewards. In the future, they'll be motivated by transaction fees. If transactions are rare, mining profitably is going to become much more difficult. Pair this with 51% attacks, and the long ramp-up of mining capabilities starts to look like it will regress after the the rewards go to zero. Can the network survive that?
noxer 6y ago
>Bitcoin is onto something What if it "was"? The "hate" people express against bitcoin especially here on HN is often towards the implementation. People clearly see the flaw in PoW if they are not emotionally attached to it because they have no money at stake. You should not misinterpret that as hate because they missed the train to richness. Objectively PoW does not scale. Objectively we have DLTs (blockchains) with Federated Byzantine Agreement (FBA) instead of PoW/PoS that can do everything Bitcoin can and more without the most severe downsides that come with PoW/PoS. The future will probably bring even better tech and if we learned something from the past then its that better solution always take over the old worse solutions. Bitcoin ultimately has to fail because its not a system that could be upgraded. Its most fundamental core properties are intentionally not changeable.
- Erlich_Bachman 6y ago
  But did you really include Lightning Network in your mental calculations? If so, care to elaborate on what exactly would stop it from working? (I mean it already works now, there is nothing technical that is going to stop it from scaling)?
  - olah_1 6y ago
    Exactly. Lightning was anticipated from the very first email group conversation on Bitcoin. It is not ready for primetime usage, but it is rapidly approaching that point as Lightning improves. The "killer app" of Bitcoin is the shared CPU power / consensus, not necessarily the plain layer-1 transactions.
    - noxer 6y ago
      No clue where you got that from but satoshi expressed in his emails that he was under the impression that bitcoin would scale on its own in the early days. Just like he tough that millions of people would us their desktop to mine and therefore decentralization would only ever increase over time.
      - 6y ago
loceng 6y ago
Lazy people who don't read an article and comment becomes a proof point that Bitcoin is onto something? That's an extremely weak argument point. And arguably there's a much larger mob of people who haven't critically thought through any of Bitcoin - who own Bitcoin - but that are financially incentivized to promote Bitcoin or are biased to want Bitcoin to become something. Convincing yourself that someone commenting negatively about Bitcoin is simply jealous is also a common thing I've seen many Bitcoin owners use to justify ignoring legitimate counter-narratives of a lot of propaganda.
Aunche 6y ago
Bitcoin is nothing like gold. Gold has inherent value. If I buy 100% of the world's gold, gold would still be valuable. If I buy 100% of the world's bitcoin, it's the same as owning no Bitcoin. Gold would be immensely valued during an extreme global crisis (WWIII, massive solar flare, etc) whereas bitcoin would be entirely useless.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- olah_1 6y ago
  > If I buy 100% of the world's gold, gold would still be valuable Sure, yes. It would be valuable in the way that a barrel of oil is valuable. It has a number of practical uses in electronics, medicine, etc. Valuable as a currency or means of transferring wealth? Not as much. It's cumbersome for that role. Bitcoin's value is not "coins". It is valuable for what it does (transfer wealth). It's a ledger, not really "coins". Did you read the original article? It's actually worth the read if you didn't yet.
  - Aunche 6y ago
    The point of this comment was to debunk how Bitcoin is a good store of value. Gold is great in that aspect because the unique color, density, and stability make it trivial to identify, which gives it has immense strategic importance. This is why nations hold much more of it in reserve than they would need from industrial applications. This comment of mine explains why I think Bitcoin is not a good form of money. Transferring wealth may be the most important function, but it's far from the only one. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26319657 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26319657 The article is certainly interesting. Unfortunately, the main source of inconsistencies with ledgers comes from human factors rather systemic ones. Fat finger errors, identity theft, credit card chargebacks, and fraud are all inconsistencies created by humans and can only be resolved through trusted centralized authorities.
ssss11 6y ago
Yes, you're right. It's very common for people to refuse to attempt to understand something new and change their mind on a topic. At the same time, crypto has the potential to change the status quo for everyone and those invested in the existing financial systems don't want their pride hurt, adding to the refusal to impartially analyse crypto and make their own decision.

by olah_1 6y ago

user-the-name 6y ago

There is nothing baseless in saying that using 0.1% of the entire world's energy in order to do 3 transactions per second is beyond ludicrous, and an environmental disaster of massive proportions.

olah_1 6y ago
> using 0.1% of the entire world's energy in order to do 3 transactions per second is beyond ludicrous In comparison to what? What do we get in return? Many consider the benefits to be worth it.
- yerwhat01010 6y ago
  > What do we get in return? Fantastic question. I've been waiting 10 years for a convincing answer; still waiting.
  - Erlich_Bachman 6y ago
    There are millions of people who use it, trade it, store their value in it, program more software for it etc. They see the answer, they get the point. Can you please just answer this - do you suppose they all halt what they are doing and wait for an undeterminate amount of time for you to also get it, before they can go on with their businesses and lives?
    - notahacker 6y ago
      I think the more pertinent question is, if they all halted what they are doing for an indeterminate amount of time for other people to get it, would the world [in future] be a worse place? And how?
    - threwawasy1228 6y ago
      I would upvote this a hundred times if I could. I don't understand where this kind of demand for further understanding even comes from we are well past the point where it could have been written off as a fad and it is obvious there is value to it. There is no reason why everyone should feel the need to "get it" or get value out of it to understand that other people do get it and do get value out of it. It is such a weird sentiment to me because it would never occur to me to devalue the value others get out of things I don't understand. I hate bonds, I don't "get" why anyone would want to buy bonds, people have tried to explain it to me. I decided that I will never buy a bond in my life because they are just the dumbest form of investment. I can hold that sentiment whilst saying "I don't get why they buy them but clearly there is a lot of value from the vehicle and it is clearly a valid form". I don't see why I should need to understand an monetary vehicle or like an investment vehicle to understand that some people do, and those people have a valid opinion.
    - yerwhat01010 6y ago
      Can we at least acknowledge how far the goal posts have moved? I can remember what people were saying about Bitcoin in 2013 - that it was a revolutionary technology on par with the creation of the Internet; that it was going to completely transform our global financial system; that it was going to replace fiat currency; that it represented a dazzling new future that you’d have to be an insane Luddite to not go all-in on. Well, where are we now? What significant advancements have occurred since 2013 as a result of Bitcoin (other than the catastrophic climate impact)? What new technologies are powered by crypto other than niche, nerdy shit which no-one outside of a handful of enthusiasts cares about? Bitcoin is now 12 years old - if Bitcoin is the next World Wide Web, then who is the Google of crypto? Who is the Amazon? Hell, does Bitcoin even have a Lycos or a Yahoo? And yes, I acknowledge that millions of people own Bitcoin and are trading it. But what reason is there to believe in Bitcoin, other than the fact that other people believe it? Yes, I know that you could say the same of fiat currency: dollars only have value because we believe they do. But the difference is that I use fiat currency every day to accomplish real things that have an enormous material impact on my life. The only thing I’ve ever used Bitcoin for is to buy drugs - what else am I ever going to do with it, except hope that the value increases so I can sell it to another speculator? Maybe the crypto enthusiasts are laughing at me for asking these rhetorical questions as if there isn’t an obvious answer - in which case, let me know! I don’t want to miss out on the crypto wave if it really is as big as people keep telling me. But I’ve read books about Bitcoin, delved into crypto-related code, and spent many hours of my life studying blockchain technology and trying to understand what all the fuss is about. That was a couple of years ago, and I got bored and gave up. I’ve been telling myself to take another look given the recent price surge, but I just can’t motivate myself. What am I missing? Why do people act as if this is all so obvious?
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- ben_w 6y ago
  What benefits? Bitcoin isn’t fundamentally better than a database running on a fraction of the power (i.e. every modern bank). The claimed benefits of BTC are (1) to remove government control of money, and (2) to eliminate the need for trust, but (1) ignores why we have chosen to give governments control of money in the first place when gold still exists (and can be traded electronically), while (2) requires you to ignore the other half of the transaction where you buy something with the money rather than just putting it in someone else’s account — reports of being ripped off by a vendor goes back to Akkadian cuneiform, and things like chargebacks and courts are there to deal with this, putting rules on what was once anonymous shiny rock that anyone could mine in a literal rather than metaphorical sense.
  - olah_1 6y ago
    > being ripped off by a vendor [...] things like chargebacks and courts are there to deal with this Third party escrow services, the better business bureau, the police... all of these can (and should in many cases) exist with bitcoin. It doesn't have to be either/or.
    - ben_w 6y ago
      When you have a society where those work, “trustless” is no longer a benefit. It’s a catch-22: to be useful, it can’t be useful.
      - olah_1 6y ago
        Unfortunately, the powers that be have ensured that we will never again be allowed to live in high trust societies because “diversity is our strength”.
        ben_w 6y ago
        I don’t recognise the world you’re describing.
- user-the-name 6y ago
  In comparison to literally anything in the world.
arbawk 6y ago
Now do the gold mining industry, and then how USD is backed by armies. And then you can research Lightning Network on top of Bitcoin and how it can process an unlimited number of transactions.
- casi 6y ago
  "unlimited" surely you mean limited? theres rarely tech with no limits. also the military/police/law/government defend you from being killed for your bitcoin.
  - Vecr 6y ago
    Pretty close to unlimited, if you imagine a channel as slider or a bead on an abacus, as long as both nodes using the channel agree where it is, the position can be updated an infinite number of times without touching the blockchain. Timelocks let a transaction pivot through many of these.
- derethanhausen 6y ago
  This is just whataboutism. Gold isn't used as a currency. Seems a stretch to claim the armies exist solely for the USD. And until the Lightning Network is actually implemented it will remain theoretical.
  - Erlich_Bachman 6y ago
    Not sure where you get your news but LN is implemented and functional. There are wallets, services, software, etc, downloadable, functional, used every day. If what you mean to say "get all the marchants that support BTC to accept LN", then yes, there is still some progress needs to be done.
    - UncleMeat 6y ago
      > there is still some progress needs to be done That's an understatement. There are two restaurants within 100 miles of my home that accept BTC, let alone use LN.
doomroot 6y ago
Here me out. What if it was the only way to defund the US military? Would you be interested then? Why do we waste so much energy building killing machines? Why is there not a daily hackernews thread complaining about the energy consumption of the US military? Because it’s a necessary to ensure you can buy and sell things when you want to.
- neatze 6y ago
  > Why do we waste so much energy building killing machines? In analogy, it is same reasons why we lock our doors and don't leave keys in parked car. Do you seriously assume that some nations and some organization, do not, actively seek, how to take things that do not belong to them ?
- ben_w 6y ago
  If that was the argument, I would ask in response: if it could do that, why would the combined vested interests of the US military-industrial lot allow Bitcoin to succeed? It’s not beyond the reach of governments to ban unwanted trade, and even though bans are not magic, even a half-arsed enforcement of such a ban is enough to prevent a currency becoming endemic.
  - Erlich_Bachman 6y ago
    > It’s not beyond the reach of governments to ban unwanted trade Yeah, right, it worked so well for alcohol... It DOES (/s) work so well for drugs in the US right now... And hey imagine whether it's easier or harder to ban something that doesn't take any physical space in your suitcase and can be transacted with only internet connection.
    - ben_w 6y ago
      Did anyone in Prohibition USA purchase a house or car or pay their bills with a literal barrel of whiskey? """and even though bans are not magic, even a half-arsed enforcement of such a ban is enough to prevent a currency becoming endemic."""
    - 6y ago

toto444 6y ago

> Sour grapes syndrome is a result of pride, I think. Or maybe it comes from people who have read an Econo101 textbook and who have spent a lot of time trying to explain a crowd of Bitcoin enthusiasts why their reasoning is wrong but no one has been listening to them so far so they are bored. Back in the time I used to spend my days on a forum about Economics. Every other week there was a random guy who signed up just to explain us his grand new theory about money. It seems that tech has enabled a grand new theory about money to be implemented. That does not make it less true that money does not have magical properties and bitcoin will not create a new world order.

Erlich_Bachman 6y ago
> That does not make it less true that money does not have magical properties and bitcoin will not create a new world order. Is anyone really claiming that? The OP's post doesn't seem to be in this spirit anyway. It's more like "Bitcoin has true usefulness, it will keep some meaningful value for a long time, enable other use cases that didn't even exist before.". Nobody is saying that it is going to replace all other forms of money.
- toto444 6y ago
  > Nobody is saying that it is going to replace all other forms of money. To be a money it somehow has to. What is the value of a dollar ? The set of goods you can buy with a dollar. As long as the value of a bitcoin is expressed in another currency that is weird to call it a money.
  - shawnz 6y ago
    The value of every currency is expressed in other currencies. How else would you do it? Are you saying there is nothing in existence which can really be considered "money" except maybe the US dollar?
    - toto444 6y ago
      If suddenly every land on Earth but the UK is flooded, £1 will still have a value : the set of goods you can buy with £1.

thewarrior 6y ago

I recently decided to think deeply about Bitcoin and I think my initial skepticism about Bitcoin was wrong. Most of the criticisms of Bitcoin are centered around the fact that Bitcoin has a very low throughput. However this is not necessarily a problem. And here is one hypothetical example of how we can overcome this issue: When countries owe each other money they used to transfer gold back and forth or trust someone else to do it for them. So all transactions within a country would happen in a local currency and then once in a while "settlement" would happen. Bitcoin is digital gold for settlements among digital currencies. For eg I could start a new Stable coin called MyDogeCoin HQed in Switzerland and each MyDogeCoin is backed by 1 Bitcoin. Anyone who trusts me can transact in MyDogeCoins and can convert their MyDogeCoins into Bitcoins if they are willing to wait and pay a sizable fee to account for Bitcoins slowness. However most people don't need this it just needs to be possible. Now anyone using MyDogeCoin can send money to each other quickly as long as they trust me. This isn't any different to how you trust a country. And many countries like Zimbabwe aren't trust worthy at all. This has BTC behind it. Now suppose you want to send MyDogeCoin to MyMemeCoin HQed in Singapore and is similar. We trust each other and hence we do the transfer. Once in a while we do a "settlement" on the BTC blockchain. This way we don't need that many TPS. And large untrusted nodes can use the BTC blockchain as a trustless settlement layer. Since BTC is the final trustless layer its a foundation. Now I realized how BTC can have long term value and it could be around even a 100 years from now. Doesn't mean its not over priced now but it will have a non zero value over the long term and is revolutionary. Unless the government goes to war against it. The US government used to use gold and then basically defaulted and forced everyone to accept dollars by force. Thats not sustainable.

inter_netuser 6y ago
And down the rabbit hole we fall.
nickysielicki 6y ago
> Bitcoin is digital gold for settlements among digital currencies. What are the implications of this on the network stability wrt mining? Doesn't bitcoin need transaction volume to remain a stable network? My read is that the incentive structure changes. Right now, miners are motivated by block rewards. In the future, they'll be motivated by transaction fees. If transactions are rare, mining profitably is going to become much more difficult. Pair this with 51% attacks, and the long ramp-up of mining capabilities starts to look like it will regress after the the rewards go to zero. Can the network survive that?

noxer 6y ago

>Bitcoin is onto something What if it "was"? The "hate" people express against bitcoin especially here on HN is often towards the implementation. People clearly see the flaw in PoW if they are not emotionally attached to it because they have no money at stake. You should not misinterpret that as hate because they missed the train to richness. Objectively PoW does not scale. Objectively we have DLTs (blockchains) with Federated Byzantine Agreement (FBA) instead of PoW/PoS that can do everything Bitcoin can and more without the most severe downsides that come with PoW/PoS. The future will probably bring even better tech and if we learned something from the past then its that better solution always take over the old worse solutions. Bitcoin ultimately has to fail because its not a system that could be upgraded. Its most fundamental core properties are intentionally not changeable.

Erlich_Bachman 6y ago
But did you really include Lightning Network in your mental calculations? If so, care to elaborate on what exactly would stop it from working? (I mean it already works now, there is nothing technical that is going to stop it from scaling)?
- olah_1 6y ago
  Exactly. Lightning was anticipated from the very first email group conversation on Bitcoin. It is not ready for primetime usage, but it is rapidly approaching that point as Lightning improves. The "killer app" of Bitcoin is the shared CPU power / consensus, not necessarily the plain layer-1 transactions.
  - noxer 6y ago
    No clue where you got that from but satoshi expressed in his emails that he was under the impression that bitcoin would scale on its own in the early days. Just like he tough that millions of people would us their desktop to mine and therefore decentralization would only ever increase over time.
    - 6y ago

loceng 6y ago

Lazy people who don't read an article and comment becomes a proof point that Bitcoin is onto something? That's an extremely weak argument point. And arguably there's a much larger mob of people who haven't critically thought through any of Bitcoin - who own Bitcoin - but that are financially incentivized to promote Bitcoin or are biased to want Bitcoin to become something. Convincing yourself that someone commenting negatively about Bitcoin is simply jealous is also a common thing I've seen many Bitcoin owners use to justify ignoring legitimate counter-narratives of a lot of propaganda.

Aunche 6y ago

Bitcoin is nothing like gold. Gold has inherent value. If I buy 100% of the world's gold, gold would still be valuable. If I buy 100% of the world's bitcoin, it's the same as owning no Bitcoin. Gold would be immensely valued during an extreme global crisis (WWIII, massive solar flare, etc) whereas bitcoin would be entirely useless.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
olah_1 6y ago
> If I buy 100% of the world's gold, gold would still be valuable Sure, yes. It would be valuable in the way that a barrel of oil is valuable. It has a number of practical uses in electronics, medicine, etc. Valuable as a currency or means of transferring wealth? Not as much. It's cumbersome for that role. Bitcoin's value is not "coins". It is valuable for what it does (transfer wealth). It's a ledger, not really "coins". Did you read the original article? It's actually worth the read if you didn't yet.
- Aunche 6y ago
  The point of this comment was to debunk how Bitcoin is a good store of value. Gold is great in that aspect because the unique color, density, and stability make it trivial to identify, which gives it has immense strategic importance. This is why nations hold much more of it in reserve than they would need from industrial applications. This comment of mine explains why I think Bitcoin is not a good form of money. Transferring wealth may be the most important function, but it's far from the only one. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26319657 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26319657 The article is certainly interesting. Unfortunately, the main source of inconsistencies with ledgers comes from human factors rather systemic ones. Fat finger errors, identity theft, credit card chargebacks, and fraud are all inconsistencies created by humans and can only be resolved through trusted centralized authorities.

ssss11 6y ago

Yes, you're right. It's very common for people to refuse to attempt to understand something new and change their mind on a topic. At the same time, crypto has the potential to change the status quo for everyone and those invested in the existing financial systems don't want their pride hurt, adding to the refusal to impartially analyse crypto and make their own decision.