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I'm ready to be downvoted to oblivion, especially by all the Bitcoin purists, but I hope my message sparks at least some curiosity. Bitcoin is getting "weaker"

by gnrlst 6y ago

I'm ready to be downvoted to oblivion, especially by all the Bitcoin purists, but I hope my message sparks at least some curiosity. Bitcoin is getting "weaker" every year for several reasons: - emerging centralization due to economies of scale. If this trend continues the mining power will be so consolidated that a 51% attack will be likely. The Nakamoto coefficient is already at 4, and tending towards 3. - energy usage due to Proof of Work is growing astronomically, and the higher the price of bitcoin, the less incentive there is to use renewable energy. Bitcoin uses more energy than the country of Argentina. - transaction times are SLOW, and expensive. The lightning network is incredibly buggy and won't actually solve the problems it's promising. There is a better alternative. RaiBlocks, named nano since 2018. It got a bad rap due to the BitGrail hack, but it's picking up steam again. The developer community is great, the main dev team on the Nano protocol has been consistently chugging along regardless of the 3 years of crypto winter on a shoestring budget and the nano community is made up of users, not speculators. This article sums it up quite nicely: https://senatusspqr.medium.com/why-nano-is-the-ultimate-store-of-value-and-reserve-currency-3b0318844bc8 https://senatusspqr.medium.com/why-nano-is-the-ultimate-stor... I'm happy to receive downvotes, but all I ask in return is that you give it a read with an open mind.

mmastrac 6y ago
> The lightning network is incredibly buggy and won't actually solve the problems it's promising I'm curious to know why this is the case. I don't know much about it - ELI5 or a good link to read more?
- rawtxapp 6y ago
  It's not, it's fully functional and there are many users. Only people who haven't actually tried using it says things like "it's incredibly buggy".
  - ketamine__ 6y ago
    How many? What is the transaction volume like compared to Ethereum, Bitcoin, BSC, etc?
    - OGWhales 6y ago
      I found this site after reading your comment and being curious myself. no promises on it being trustworthy data: https://1ml.com/statistics https://1ml.com/statistics
      - rawtxapp 6y ago
        Keep in mind that a lot of lightning end-users would have private channels that are truly peer-to-peer, so number of users is likely much higher than any public stats you could gather.
paulmd 6y ago
> The lightning network is incredibly buggy and won't actually solve the problems it's promising. it's actually worse than that - lightning only works in the context of centralized banking. It presumes there is some other entity with whom you can hold a channel open, who you do roughly equivalent amounts of deposits and withdrawals from. If that criterion is not met, then you have to keep closing channels and re-opening new ones, each of which incurs a new transaction fee just like if you did it yourself. So it is still expensive to send arbitrary transactions, it is just now relatively cheap to do "banking" with a single entity. That entity sending money for you may still be expensive as well. If they have another entity who they do roughly equal amounts of transactions and withdrawals from then yes, they can nominally transact that for free, but they will still probably charge you for the service, and having that bank send a payment to an arbitrary user with whom they don't have balanced deposits/withdrawals incurs the normal bitcoin transaction fee. You can see where all of this is going - Lightning doesn't really solve anything, it still is only optimized for transactions between large, centralized entities. Oh, and if you ever lose power or internet then your channel has to be closed and resolved, then reopened if you want to do further business. So you have to pay a transaction fee every time you lose internet (or there is a routing problem somewhere on the net) or power.
- rawtxapp 6y ago
  > you have to keep closing channels and re-opening new ones, each of which incurs a new transaction fee just like if you did it yourself. Channel factories will significantly reduce the need to go to the blockchain to open and close channels. > if you ever lose power or internet then your channel has to be closed and resolved This is complete non-sense, your channel lives on as long as you don't close it, if you're concerned about counterparty risk, you can use a watchtower.
- la_fayette 6y ago
  This is not true! RTFM
  - zepto 6y ago
    Can you offer one contradiction to it? That would be more helpful than just saying it’s not true.
yholio 6y ago
So it's a 100% premine that already pushes on 1 billion market capitalization. How is that any different from the Bitcoin bubble?
- keymone 6y ago
  Valid observation. The difference is that bitcoin isn’t a premine.
  - yholio 6y ago
    That's hardly relevant for someone looking at them in 2021, of for choosing a "global reserve currency" which involves a staggering appreciation of both. Bitcoin 2021 has been 85% "premined", the only difference is that it is (much) more widely distributed.
    - keymone 6y ago
      The difference is that it was not a premine. I don’t know how can you say it’s a small difference..
      - kflzufkrbzi 6y ago
        Nano was distributed via solving capchas(pow) no different than mining bitcoin.
        keymone 6y ago
        Bitcoin was being distributed for a decade, nano was “distributed” in a matter of months and there is no way to tell what is the real distribution, for all its worth a single entity could be in control of 95% of it.
jes5199 6y ago
can you explain your point about renewable energy? I'm not sure I see how that follows
- diego 6y ago
  It doesn't follow. Bitcoin chases cheap energy, so wherever green is cheaper than carbon that's where Bitcoin will be mined. Eventually carbon will be more expensive everywhere.
  - cool_dude85 6y ago
    And wherever green is not cheaper, Bitcoin prefers to use dirty and send the externalities to my grandkids.
- aeturnum 6y ago
  I think the idea is that, as mining fees and power generation requirements increase, you have less incentive to build the most efficient power generation (renewables) and increasing incentives to build financially reliable proven technologies. Coal power plants, though less efficient than solar, have a much better known lifecycle and are easier to plan around.
Sparkyte 6y ago
There is also no meaningful contribution for the work. Imagine if there was a blockchain crypto attached to folding@home it would work that has value.
- monkeydust 6y ago
  Isn't that Gridcoin (GRC)
  - Sparkyte 6y ago
    Not sure. Let me check that puppy out.
- Franciscouzo 6y ago
  That's by design, if you use a proof of work that's validated outside of the blockchain, the work could be valid for multiple forks, thus being a really bad proof of work system.
birdsbirdsbirds 6y ago
From the article: > they [the central banks] can expand the money supply to keep the system propped up. They have to expand money supply to keep the value of the currencies stable as long as most money is not spent. The economy depends not on the supply of money but on the stability of the money. By which force do central banks have to keep increasing the money supply once people start spending? There is no reason to do so and thus no reason for fiat currencies to collapse. It's more likely that they increase interest rates when people start spending again, and thus reduce supply and as a consequence, keep the value of money stable.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- spiralx 6y ago
  > The economy depends not on the supply of money but on the stability of the money. The supply of money is adjusted to match how much is needed, it's the entire reason why countries switched to fiat currencies. Everything else being equal, if the GDP is growing 5% each year you need 5% more money each year to keep the same velocity of money i.e. how much is being used in the economy. https://www.investopedia.com/terms/v/velocity.asp https://www.investopedia.com/terms/v/velocity.asp
benlivengood 6y ago
There's also the other Bitcoin, BCH, which suffers from basically none of the problems you listed. If a 51% attack was actually lucrative then shouldn't at least some miners attempt it given that BTC hash-power is about 100X that of BCH?
- xirbeosbwo1234 6y ago
  It suffers from all the same problems. The only advantage it has is that they chose a slightly larger arbitrary constant. It still does not and can not scale. One order of magnitude makes little difference when we're dealing with something that is four orders of magnitude slower and four orders of magnitude more power-hungry than the competition. 100 maximum transactions per second is still orders of magnitude too low to be useful on a daily basis outside of niche uses (read: drugs). Ten minutes confirmation time is still orders of magnitude worse than credit cards or cash. Obviously, what we need is the REAL Bitcoin from the confirmed legitimate Satoshi Nakamoto: Bitcoin SV.
  - gruez 6y ago
    >Obviously, what we need is the REAL Bitcoin from the confirmed legitimate Satoshi Nakamoto: Bitcoin SV. This is sarcasm right?
    - xirbeosbwo1234 6y ago
      Yes.
WanderPanda 6y ago
But a 51% attack (with e.g. a double spend) will be easily spotted by the community, right? What would be the incentive for an actor with such a vast amount of specialised hardware just for Bitcoin mining, to undermine its security? Its not that I'm saying it is not possible but its your usage of "likely" that I would argue against
- betterunix2 6y ago
  You are assuming that the attacker would not gain more from a general loss of faith in Bitcoin than they would gain from controlling Bitcoin itself. That is a bad assumption. What if the attacker is trying to push a competing system? What if the attacker holds short Bitcoin futures contracts?
- vngzs 6y ago
  I see the ideological foundation for a theoretical 51% attack more aligned with causing mass disruption & chaos than some kind of financial gain. Yes, it would likely be detected. But it would undermine BTC, lots of people would lose lots of money, lots of businesses would go under, portions of the global banking system would be disrupted and likely pushed back to more centralized alternatives. The most likely threat actor for such an attack would therefore be a nation-state. China is the only country pushing that kind of hash rate at the moment, so we should analyze whether the move would be beneficial to them in order to determine the risk.
- PragmaticPulp 6y ago
  > But a 51% attack (with e.g. a double spend) will be easily spotted by the community, right? The real problem is that if it happens once, it's proven to be both possible and practical. And once it's proven to be possible and practical, how do you know it won't happen again and again? > What would be the incentive for an actor with such a vast amount of specialised hardware just for Bitcoin mining, to undermine its security? Most mining hardware is specific to hashing, not Bitcoin specifically. The obvious attack is something like this: Imagine someone invents a Bitcoin competitor that is somehow more resistant to these types of attacks, yet can use the same mining hardware. To convince everyone to switch to their new alternative (which they have accumulated significant amounts of, similar to Satoshi), they spend the money to crash Bitcoin, while advertising themselves as the more secure alternative to Bitcoin.
csomar 6y ago
The difference is that Bitcoin success was largely accidental. People are very touchy about others getting a head start. Miners got their Bitcoins by burning electricity, this makes it a "fair deal" despite destroying the environment. Satoshi disappeared and never moved his coins, which removes the "pre-mine" aspect.
tarsinge 6y ago
> The lightning network is incredibly buggy and won't actually solve the problems it's promising. Not an expert but I found that a readable summary of different layer 2 scaling strategies and why Ethereum developers prefer Rollups instead of Channels (like Lightning): https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/05/rollup.html https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/05/rollup.html
- westurner 6y ago
  "Bitcoin scalability problem" could link to the Ethereum design docs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcoin_scalability_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcoin_scalability_problem The Ethereum design docs could link to direct-listed premined [stable] coins as a solution for Proof of Work and TPS reports: https://github.com/flare-eng/coston#smart-contracts-with-xrp https://github.com/flare-eng/coston#smart-contracts-with-xrp (edit) re: n-layer solutions: The https://interledger.org/ https://interledger.org/ RFCs and something like Transaction Permission Layer (TPL) will probably be helpful for interchain compliance. > Interledger is not tied to a single company, blockchain, or currency. From https://tplprotocol.org/ https://tplprotocol.org/ : > The challenge: Current blockchain-based protocols lack an effective governance mechanism that ensures token transfers comply with requirements set by the project that issued the token. > Projects need to set requirements for a variety of reasons. For instance, remaining compliant with securities laws, limiting transfer to beta testers, or limiting transfer to a particular geo-spatial location. Whatever your reason, if a requirement can be verified by a third-party, TPL will be able to help. In the US, S-Corps can't have international or more than n shareholders, for example; so if firms even wanted to issue securities on a first-layer network, they'd need an extra-chain compliance mechanism to ensure that their issuance is legal pursuant to local, sovereign, necessary policies. Re-issuing stock certificates is something that has to be done sometimes. When is it possible to cancel outstanding tokens?
- wmf 6y ago
  Talking about different layer 2 scaling strategies implicitly ignores much simpler layer 1 scaling, e.g. Avalanche.
sphix0r 6y ago
It's really sad to see the current state of bitcoin. We can't really justify the current energy consumption while mainly being used as a financial instrument to speculate on. Nano has been on my eye for a while now. I hope Nano will get the attention it deserves. Sub second feeless money settlement transactions is such a game changer. Nano just works.
- akudha 6y ago
  Any thoughts on Cardano? They seem to be moving slow, but they also seem to be taking a more rigorous approach.
  - fwiwm2c 6y ago
    Cardano is the daddy of shitcoins. It is the Ripple of this bull run. Literally the only thing it is being used for is speculation. Everything else is "coming soon".
domatic1 6y ago
- 51% attack is unlikely, pools have mining power but every miner on the pool has to agree to the attack so it is still decentralized. - energy usage of gold is worse, that's not a good argument. What is the energy use of air conditioners? - transactions are slow yes but bitcoin is now used as a store of value - I'm sorry but nano doesn't have the network effect Bitcoin has and never will.
- lxgr 6y ago
  > every miner on the pool has to agree to the attack so it is still decentralized Do you think most miners are continuously auditing the blocks they are solving? Yes, long-term they'd switch away from a dishonest/non-value-aligned pool, but the damage might already be done at that point.
- imhoguy 6y ago
  > 51% attack is unlikely, pools have mining power but every miner on the pool has to agree to the attack so it is still decentralized. Ok, what if they agree somehow either by govt order or massive worm hack (Stuxnet like)?
fwiwm2c 6y ago
Stop shilling. And to have the galls to say something like Nano has the ability to take on Bitcoin just indicates that you very new to this market - and thus want to make a quick buck by shilling your random shitcoin. The thing which Bitcoin has, and that few others can match, is acceptability from a large swatch of investors and predictable security/emission schedule. And, just fyi, Nano is not made of users. Go to its reddit and you will see everyone shilling it and having price targets on it. Stop giving such these weak arguments - most of us are in here for the money and don't give two hoots of the technology.
- swagonomixxx 6y ago
  > And, just fyi, Nano is not made of users. Go to its reddit and you will see everyone shilling it and having price targets on it. Not saying you're wrong, but this feels like every subreddit dedicated to a crypto.
  - duskwuff 6y ago
    That's because the problem is endemic to the cryptocurrency space. There has been very little serious work done on making any cryptocurrency usable as a medium of exchange, even for projects which claim to have that as a goal. Speculation is about the only activity that's possible for most coins, so that's what people do.
- Judgmentality 6y ago
  > most of us are in here for the money This seems a little ironic after complaining about shilling.
  - willis936 6y ago
    Is it? It seems pretty consistent with their "cut the bullshit" theme.
- koonsolo 6y ago
  The Nano reddit is split up because of this reason: You have NanoTrade where these things are discussed, and you have NanoCurrency where Nano itself and adoption is discussed.
hfsp 6y ago
The market has spoken: https://www.tradingview.com/symbols/NANOBTC/ https://www.tradingview.com/symbols/NANOBTC/.
- pcthrowaway 6y ago
  I'd take a look at Cardano: https://coinlib.io/en/compare/2020-06-01/ADA/NANO https://coinlib.io/en/compare/2020-06-01/ADA/NANO
  - hfsp 6y ago
    F* off scammer
kache_ 6y ago
Is it really getting this easy to create a shill account and bot it on hnews?
aeternum 6y ago
Suppose I create a new coin that I also call Nano. I create a bunch of bots and websites and post on message boards so it looks like my version is more popular and has more participants. How will people tell the difference?
- fwiwm2c 6y ago
  You won't. This is why Bitcoin is valuable since it has stood the test of time and has gained more acceptability. Nanos and other nonsense coins are just trying to attack the emperor in the hope that they come close to it and thus make the speculators a lot of money.
  - Tenal 6y ago
    It's weird how hard you go against literally anything except Bitcoin because of your rabid obsession with whatever paltry sum of money you've made over this one dated technologically is. You're literally like a cancer-ridden coal miner coughing his last lung to keep the mines open. Good riddance.
    - fwiwm2c 6y ago
      Wow - someone missed the train and is salty. HFSP. And you are not getting rid of me btw.
    - dang 6y ago
      I missed this at the time, but this sort of personal attack is absolutely not ok on HN and will get you banned for obvious reasons. You've unfortunately been breaking the site guidelines in a bunch of your other comments too. Would you mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart? We'd be grateful.
- barnbuilder 6y ago
  There are people and organizations attempting to do this with Bitcoin right now. How do people tell the difference? Sometimes they don't and they get scammed.
matheusmoreira 6y ago
Bitcoin is technologically obsolete but that doesn't matter. As the very first coin, its history is the main reason it's still relevant today. It's very well known and that makes its position as the number one cryptocurrency extremely hard to shake even though we have much better coins now such as Monero.
- Nursie 6y ago
  > Bitcoin is technologically obsolete but that doesn't matter. Which just underlines how much of this whole phenomenon is brand and hype.
  - fwiwm2c 6y ago
    Says someone who is using 1970s technology called ACH and SWIFT to send money over. At least be aware of what is happening around you before attacking other technologies.
    - tablespoon 6y ago
      > Says someone who is using 1970s technology called ACH and SWIFT to send money over. At least be aware of what is happening around you before attacking other technologies. Technology isn't a linear tech tree with newer == better. In some very real ways, Bitcoin is like a a new car design with some interesting new technologies (e.g. a satellite radio receiver) but that doesn't support other technologies like seatbelts. Dismissing something as "<past-time-period> technology" is lazy. You really need to compare explicit pros and cons.
    - briatx 6y ago
      Pretty sure ACH and SWIFT can do more than 7 transactions per second. Talk about a step backward.
    - spiralx 6y ago
      > Says someone who is using 1970s technology called ACH and SWIFT to send money over. In Europe SEPA Instant requires transfers take less than 10 seconds in anything other than exceptional circumstances, and costs the same to transfer between any of the 36 member countries. > At least be aware of what is happening around you before attacking other technologies. Ironic. So many discussions of Bitcoin's utility implicitly assume that the rest of the world also has the same sort of antiquated banking and payment systems used in the US.
trts 6y ago
What is the incentive for a 51% attack (on Bitcoin specifically) Wouldn't it take a large number of resources and coordinated effort to do this? And then the result of a successful attack means that the value essentially drops to zero ... so why invest the effort? Seems like the only entity to have this incentive would be central banks / fiat regimes.
- TobyBrull 6y ago
  Given that Bitcoin has become quite liquid, there might also be ways to short it. But yes, governments doing it for political reasons would seem like the most obvious incentive.
  - TheGrassyKnoll 6y ago
    https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/GBTC?ltr=1 https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/GBTC?ltr=1
- tablespoon 6y ago
  > What is the incentive for a 51% attack (on Bitcoin specifically) Besides trying to destroy bitcoin, couldn't such an attack be used to simply drive up transaction fees for anyone who wanted to use it? For instance, if they refuse to process transactions with a fee below a threshold, they'd leave money on the table in the sort term, but eventually the higher fee requirement would have to be discovered and transactions reissued to pay it.
keymone 6y ago
Nano is a scam. Nano fanboys don’t even get the concept of latency on the internet, forget anything more complex like recovery from network partitions. There are reasons behind most of the things that you consider drawbacks in bitcoin, shitcoin proponents don’t understand those reasons and simply copy bitcoin with some parameter changed, completely oblivious to the fact that it makes their shitcoin worthless.
- splintercell 6y ago
  Leave it to the bitcoin maxis to make the term "scam" meaningless. If bitconnect and nano are both scams, then the word has no meaning.
companyhen 6y ago
If you want to see a real Decentralized Central Bank I highly recommend digging into SORA Network. It's a self-funded project by the founder (No VC's, No ICO, No Presale, etc.) with a fair launch and the team has already developed a live central bank digital currency called Bakong in Cambodia. https://sora.org/ https://sora.org/ https://sora.org/blog/ https://sora.org/blog/ https://sora.org/soratokens/ https://sora.org/soratokens/ https://soramitsu.co.jp/ https://soramitsu.co.jp/
superbcarrot 6y ago
The sibling comments show just how difficult it is to talk constructively about these things even at a place like HN. I have no idea about the technical merits of Nano but the emotionally charged reactions with little argumentation aren't helping anyone. Is there a place online where people actually discusss cryptocurrencies on a technical/economic merit? That kind of discussion certainly isn't happening on reddit, and sadly not on HN either.
- companyhen 6y ago
  That is why someone created https://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoTechnology/ https://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoTechnology/
Solvitieg 6y ago
> energy usage due to Proof of Work is growing astronomically, and the higher the price of bitcoin Not true. The energy used to power the bitcoin network has been stable for a few years. https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption
crazypython 6y ago
"The Nakamoto coefficient is a way to quantify the decentralization of a blockchain or other decentralized system. It's the number of entities you need to compromise at least one essential subsystem." If a 51% attack occurs, the bitcoin full nodes are still fundamentally in control. Full nodes decide whether or not to accept a blockchain, they socially decide whether to accept a 51% attack. They can hard fork and change the hashing algorithm, firing all current miners. How does Nano prevent me from setting up two servers, sending the money to different nodes, and double-spending the money?
BLKNSLVR 6y ago
Yep, Nano is all the things bitcoin was attempting to be initially. Using Nano is a breeze, it feels like the future, especially compared to bitcoin in terms of speed.
drdeca 6y ago
not sure what you mean by "weaker". If you mean the security, then, I would think that would be a result of energy use going down, not energy use going up. (but as someone else pointed out, the power use seems to be steady, and neither trending up nor down) (that being said, it becoming more centralized might be an issue for security, yes. I don't know how (de)centralized it currently is though) Also, isn't there a rule or guideline or something discouraging talking about how getting downvoted?
chairmanwow1 6y ago
Bitcoin transactions are super fast compared to modern banks.
gge 6y ago
Why are people upvoting this obvious shill comment?
fredfoobar 6y ago
These nano shills are getting annoying.

by gnrlst 6y ago

mmastrac 6y ago

> The lightning network is incredibly buggy and won't actually solve the problems it's promising I'm curious to know why this is the case. I don't know much about it - ELI5 or a good link to read more?

rawtxapp 6y ago
It's not, it's fully functional and there are many users. Only people who haven't actually tried using it says things like "it's incredibly buggy".
- ketamine__ 6y ago
  How many? What is the transaction volume like compared to Ethereum, Bitcoin, BSC, etc?
  - OGWhales 6y ago
    I found this site after reading your comment and being curious myself. no promises on it being trustworthy data: https://1ml.com/statistics https://1ml.com/statistics
    - rawtxapp 6y ago
      Keep in mind that a lot of lightning end-users would have private channels that are truly peer-to-peer, so number of users is likely much higher than any public stats you could gather.

paulmd 6y ago

> The lightning network is incredibly buggy and won't actually solve the problems it's promising. it's actually worse than that - lightning only works in the context of centralized banking. It presumes there is some other entity with whom you can hold a channel open, who you do roughly equivalent amounts of deposits and withdrawals from. If that criterion is not met, then you have to keep closing channels and re-opening new ones, each of which incurs a new transaction fee just like if you did it yourself. So it is still expensive to send arbitrary transactions, it is just now relatively cheap to do "banking" with a single entity. That entity sending money for you may still be expensive as well. If they have another entity who they do roughly equal amounts of transactions and withdrawals from then yes, they can nominally transact that for free, but they will still probably charge you for the service, and having that bank send a payment to an arbitrary user with whom they don't have balanced deposits/withdrawals incurs the normal bitcoin transaction fee. You can see where all of this is going - Lightning doesn't really solve anything, it still is only optimized for transactions between large, centralized entities. Oh, and if you ever lose power or internet then your channel has to be closed and resolved, then reopened if you want to do further business. So you have to pay a transaction fee every time you lose internet (or there is a routing problem somewhere on the net) or power.

rawtxapp 6y ago
> you have to keep closing channels and re-opening new ones, each of which incurs a new transaction fee just like if you did it yourself. Channel factories will significantly reduce the need to go to the blockchain to open and close channels. > if you ever lose power or internet then your channel has to be closed and resolved This is complete non-sense, your channel lives on as long as you don't close it, if you're concerned about counterparty risk, you can use a watchtower.
la_fayette 6y ago
This is not true! RTFM
- zepto 6y ago
  Can you offer one contradiction to it? That would be more helpful than just saying it’s not true.

yholio 6y ago

So it's a 100% premine that already pushes on 1 billion market capitalization. How is that any different from the Bitcoin bubble?

keymone 6y ago
Valid observation. The difference is that bitcoin isn’t a premine.
- yholio 6y ago
  That's hardly relevant for someone looking at them in 2021, of for choosing a "global reserve currency" which involves a staggering appreciation of both. Bitcoin 2021 has been 85% "premined", the only difference is that it is (much) more widely distributed.
  - keymone 6y ago
    The difference is that it was not a premine. I don’t know how can you say it’s a small difference..
    - kflzufkrbzi 6y ago
      Nano was distributed via solving capchas(pow) no different than mining bitcoin.
      - keymone 6y ago
        Bitcoin was being distributed for a decade, nano was “distributed” in a matter of months and there is no way to tell what is the real distribution, for all its worth a single entity could be in control of 95% of it.

jes5199 6y ago

can you explain your point about renewable energy? I'm not sure I see how that follows

diego 6y ago
It doesn't follow. Bitcoin chases cheap energy, so wherever green is cheaper than carbon that's where Bitcoin will be mined. Eventually carbon will be more expensive everywhere.
- cool_dude85 6y ago
  And wherever green is not cheaper, Bitcoin prefers to use dirty and send the externalities to my grandkids.
aeturnum 6y ago
I think the idea is that, as mining fees and power generation requirements increase, you have less incentive to build the most efficient power generation (renewables) and increasing incentives to build financially reliable proven technologies. Coal power plants, though less efficient than solar, have a much better known lifecycle and are easier to plan around.

Sparkyte 6y ago

There is also no meaningful contribution for the work. Imagine if there was a blockchain crypto attached to folding@home it would work that has value.

monkeydust 6y ago
Isn't that Gridcoin (GRC)
- Sparkyte 6y ago
  Not sure. Let me check that puppy out.
Franciscouzo 6y ago
That's by design, if you use a proof of work that's validated outside of the blockchain, the work could be valid for multiple forks, thus being a really bad proof of work system.

birdsbirdsbirds 6y ago

From the article: > they [the central banks] can expand the money supply to keep the system propped up. They have to expand money supply to keep the value of the currencies stable as long as most money is not spent. The economy depends not on the supply of money but on the stability of the money. By which force do central banks have to keep increasing the money supply once people start spending? There is no reason to do so and thus no reason for fiat currencies to collapse. It's more likely that they increase interest rates when people start spending again, and thus reduce supply and as a consequence, keep the value of money stable.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
spiralx 6y ago
> The economy depends not on the supply of money but on the stability of the money. The supply of money is adjusted to match how much is needed, it's the entire reason why countries switched to fiat currencies. Everything else being equal, if the GDP is growing 5% each year you need 5% more money each year to keep the same velocity of money i.e. how much is being used in the economy. https://www.investopedia.com/terms/v/velocity.asp https://www.investopedia.com/terms/v/velocity.asp

benlivengood 6y ago

There's also the other Bitcoin, BCH, which suffers from basically none of the problems you listed. If a 51% attack was actually lucrative then shouldn't at least some miners attempt it given that BTC hash-power is about 100X that of BCH?

xirbeosbwo1234 6y ago
It suffers from all the same problems. The only advantage it has is that they chose a slightly larger arbitrary constant. It still does not and can not scale. One order of magnitude makes little difference when we're dealing with something that is four orders of magnitude slower and four orders of magnitude more power-hungry than the competition. 100 maximum transactions per second is still orders of magnitude too low to be useful on a daily basis outside of niche uses (read: drugs). Ten minutes confirmation time is still orders of magnitude worse than credit cards or cash. Obviously, what we need is the REAL Bitcoin from the confirmed legitimate Satoshi Nakamoto: Bitcoin SV.
- gruez 6y ago
  >Obviously, what we need is the REAL Bitcoin from the confirmed legitimate Satoshi Nakamoto: Bitcoin SV. This is sarcasm right?
  - xirbeosbwo1234 6y ago
    Yes.

WanderPanda 6y ago

But a 51% attack (with e.g. a double spend) will be easily spotted by the community, right? What would be the incentive for an actor with such a vast amount of specialised hardware just for Bitcoin mining, to undermine its security? Its not that I'm saying it is not possible but its your usage of "likely" that I would argue against

betterunix2 6y ago
You are assuming that the attacker would not gain more from a general loss of faith in Bitcoin than they would gain from controlling Bitcoin itself. That is a bad assumption. What if the attacker is trying to push a competing system? What if the attacker holds short Bitcoin futures contracts?
vngzs 6y ago
I see the ideological foundation for a theoretical 51% attack more aligned with causing mass disruption & chaos than some kind of financial gain. Yes, it would likely be detected. But it would undermine BTC, lots of people would lose lots of money, lots of businesses would go under, portions of the global banking system would be disrupted and likely pushed back to more centralized alternatives. The most likely threat actor for such an attack would therefore be a nation-state. China is the only country pushing that kind of hash rate at the moment, so we should analyze whether the move would be beneficial to them in order to determine the risk.
PragmaticPulp 6y ago
> But a 51% attack (with e.g. a double spend) will be easily spotted by the community, right? The real problem is that if it happens once, it's proven to be both possible and practical. And once it's proven to be possible and practical, how do you know it won't happen again and again? > What would be the incentive for an actor with such a vast amount of specialised hardware just for Bitcoin mining, to undermine its security? Most mining hardware is specific to hashing, not Bitcoin specifically. The obvious attack is something like this: Imagine someone invents a Bitcoin competitor that is somehow more resistant to these types of attacks, yet can use the same mining hardware. To convince everyone to switch to their new alternative (which they have accumulated significant amounts of, similar to Satoshi), they spend the money to crash Bitcoin, while advertising themselves as the more secure alternative to Bitcoin.

csomar 6y ago

The difference is that Bitcoin success was largely accidental. People are very touchy about others getting a head start. Miners got their Bitcoins by burning electricity, this makes it a "fair deal" despite destroying the environment. Satoshi disappeared and never moved his coins, which removes the "pre-mine" aspect.

tarsinge 6y ago

> The lightning network is incredibly buggy and won't actually solve the problems it's promising. Not an expert but I found that a readable summary of different layer 2 scaling strategies and why Ethereum developers prefer Rollups instead of Channels (like Lightning): https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/05/rollup.html https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/05/rollup.html

westurner 6y ago
"Bitcoin scalability problem" could link to the Ethereum design docs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcoin_scalability_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcoin_scalability_problem The Ethereum design docs could link to direct-listed premined [stable] coins as a solution for Proof of Work and TPS reports: https://github.com/flare-eng/coston#smart-contracts-with-xrp https://github.com/flare-eng/coston#smart-contracts-with-xrp (edit) re: n-layer solutions: The https://interledger.org/ https://interledger.org/ RFCs and something like Transaction Permission Layer (TPL) will probably be helpful for interchain compliance. > Interledger is not tied to a single company, blockchain, or currency. From https://tplprotocol.org/ https://tplprotocol.org/ : > The challenge: Current blockchain-based protocols lack an effective governance mechanism that ensures token transfers comply with requirements set by the project that issued the token. > Projects need to set requirements for a variety of reasons. For instance, remaining compliant with securities laws, limiting transfer to beta testers, or limiting transfer to a particular geo-spatial location. Whatever your reason, if a requirement can be verified by a third-party, TPL will be able to help. In the US, S-Corps can't have international or more than n shareholders, for example; so if firms even wanted to issue securities on a first-layer network, they'd need an extra-chain compliance mechanism to ensure that their issuance is legal pursuant to local, sovereign, necessary policies. Re-issuing stock certificates is something that has to be done sometimes. When is it possible to cancel outstanding tokens?
wmf 6y ago
Talking about different layer 2 scaling strategies implicitly ignores much simpler layer 1 scaling, e.g. Avalanche.

sphix0r 6y ago

It's really sad to see the current state of bitcoin. We can't really justify the current energy consumption while mainly being used as a financial instrument to speculate on. Nano has been on my eye for a while now. I hope Nano will get the attention it deserves. Sub second feeless money settlement transactions is such a game changer. Nano just works.

akudha 6y ago
Any thoughts on Cardano? They seem to be moving slow, but they also seem to be taking a more rigorous approach.
- fwiwm2c 6y ago
  Cardano is the daddy of shitcoins. It is the Ripple of this bull run. Literally the only thing it is being used for is speculation. Everything else is "coming soon".

domatic1 6y ago

- 51% attack is unlikely, pools have mining power but every miner on the pool has to agree to the attack so it is still decentralized. - energy usage of gold is worse, that's not a good argument. What is the energy use of air conditioners? - transactions are slow yes but bitcoin is now used as a store of value - I'm sorry but nano doesn't have the network effect Bitcoin has and never will.

lxgr 6y ago
> every miner on the pool has to agree to the attack so it is still decentralized Do you think most miners are continuously auditing the blocks they are solving? Yes, long-term they'd switch away from a dishonest/non-value-aligned pool, but the damage might already be done at that point.
imhoguy 6y ago
> 51% attack is unlikely, pools have mining power but every miner on the pool has to agree to the attack so it is still decentralized. Ok, what if they agree somehow either by govt order or massive worm hack (Stuxnet like)?

fwiwm2c 6y ago

Stop shilling. And to have the galls to say something like Nano has the ability to take on Bitcoin just indicates that you very new to this market - and thus want to make a quick buck by shilling your random shitcoin. The thing which Bitcoin has, and that few others can match, is acceptability from a large swatch of investors and predictable security/emission schedule. And, just fyi, Nano is not made of users. Go to its reddit and you will see everyone shilling it and having price targets on it. Stop giving such these weak arguments - most of us are in here for the money and don't give two hoots of the technology.

swagonomixxx 6y ago
> And, just fyi, Nano is not made of users. Go to its reddit and you will see everyone shilling it and having price targets on it. Not saying you're wrong, but this feels like every subreddit dedicated to a crypto.
- duskwuff 6y ago
  That's because the problem is endemic to the cryptocurrency space. There has been very little serious work done on making any cryptocurrency usable as a medium of exchange, even for projects which claim to have that as a goal. Speculation is about the only activity that's possible for most coins, so that's what people do.
Judgmentality 6y ago
> most of us are in here for the money This seems a little ironic after complaining about shilling.
- willis936 6y ago
  Is it? It seems pretty consistent with their "cut the bullshit" theme.
koonsolo 6y ago
The Nano reddit is split up because of this reason: You have NanoTrade where these things are discussed, and you have NanoCurrency where Nano itself and adoption is discussed.

hfsp 6y ago

The market has spoken: https://www.tradingview.com/symbols/NANOBTC/ https://www.tradingview.com/symbols/NANOBTC/.

pcthrowaway 6y ago
I'd take a look at Cardano: https://coinlib.io/en/compare/2020-06-01/ADA/NANO https://coinlib.io/en/compare/2020-06-01/ADA/NANO
- hfsp 6y ago
  F* off scammer

kache_ 6y ago

Is it really getting this easy to create a shill account and bot it on hnews?

aeternum 6y ago

Suppose I create a new coin that I also call Nano. I create a bunch of bots and websites and post on message boards so it looks like my version is more popular and has more participants. How will people tell the difference?

fwiwm2c 6y ago
You won't. This is why Bitcoin is valuable since it has stood the test of time and has gained more acceptability. Nanos and other nonsense coins are just trying to attack the emperor in the hope that they come close to it and thus make the speculators a lot of money.
- Tenal 6y ago
  It's weird how hard you go against literally anything except Bitcoin because of your rabid obsession with whatever paltry sum of money you've made over this one dated technologically is. You're literally like a cancer-ridden coal miner coughing his last lung to keep the mines open. Good riddance.
  - fwiwm2c 6y ago
    Wow - someone missed the train and is salty. HFSP. And you are not getting rid of me btw.
  - dang 6y ago
    I missed this at the time, but this sort of personal attack is absolutely not ok on HN and will get you banned for obvious reasons. You've unfortunately been breaking the site guidelines in a bunch of your other comments too. Would you mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart? We'd be grateful.
barnbuilder 6y ago
There are people and organizations attempting to do this with Bitcoin right now. How do people tell the difference? Sometimes they don't and they get scammed.

matheusmoreira 6y ago

Bitcoin is technologically obsolete but that doesn't matter. As the very first coin, its history is the main reason it's still relevant today. It's very well known and that makes its position as the number one cryptocurrency extremely hard to shake even though we have much better coins now such as Monero.

Nursie 6y ago
> Bitcoin is technologically obsolete but that doesn't matter. Which just underlines how much of this whole phenomenon is brand and hype.
- fwiwm2c 6y ago
  Says someone who is using 1970s technology called ACH and SWIFT to send money over. At least be aware of what is happening around you before attacking other technologies.
  - tablespoon 6y ago
    > Says someone who is using 1970s technology called ACH and SWIFT to send money over. At least be aware of what is happening around you before attacking other technologies. Technology isn't a linear tech tree with newer == better. In some very real ways, Bitcoin is like a a new car design with some interesting new technologies (e.g. a satellite radio receiver) but that doesn't support other technologies like seatbelts. Dismissing something as "<past-time-period> technology" is lazy. You really need to compare explicit pros and cons.
  - briatx 6y ago
    Pretty sure ACH and SWIFT can do more than 7 transactions per second. Talk about a step backward.
  - spiralx 6y ago
    > Says someone who is using 1970s technology called ACH and SWIFT to send money over. In Europe SEPA Instant requires transfers take less than 10 seconds in anything other than exceptional circumstances, and costs the same to transfer between any of the 36 member countries. > At least be aware of what is happening around you before attacking other technologies. Ironic. So many discussions of Bitcoin's utility implicitly assume that the rest of the world also has the same sort of antiquated banking and payment systems used in the US.

trts 6y ago

What is the incentive for a 51% attack (on Bitcoin specifically) Wouldn't it take a large number of resources and coordinated effort to do this? And then the result of a successful attack means that the value essentially drops to zero ... so why invest the effort? Seems like the only entity to have this incentive would be central banks / fiat regimes.

TobyBrull 6y ago
Given that Bitcoin has become quite liquid, there might also be ways to short it. But yes, governments doing it for political reasons would seem like the most obvious incentive.
- TheGrassyKnoll 6y ago
  https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/GBTC?ltr=1 https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/GBTC?ltr=1
tablespoon 6y ago
> What is the incentive for a 51% attack (on Bitcoin specifically) Besides trying to destroy bitcoin, couldn't such an attack be used to simply drive up transaction fees for anyone who wanted to use it? For instance, if they refuse to process transactions with a fee below a threshold, they'd leave money on the table in the sort term, but eventually the higher fee requirement would have to be discovered and transactions reissued to pay it.

keymone 6y ago

Nano is a scam. Nano fanboys don’t even get the concept of latency on the internet, forget anything more complex like recovery from network partitions. There are reasons behind most of the things that you consider drawbacks in bitcoin, shitcoin proponents don’t understand those reasons and simply copy bitcoin with some parameter changed, completely oblivious to the fact that it makes their shitcoin worthless.

splintercell 6y ago
Leave it to the bitcoin maxis to make the term "scam" meaningless. If bitconnect and nano are both scams, then the word has no meaning.

companyhen 6y ago

If you want to see a real Decentralized Central Bank I highly recommend digging into SORA Network. It's a self-funded project by the founder (No VC's, No ICO, No Presale, etc.) with a fair launch and the team has already developed a live central bank digital currency called Bakong in Cambodia. https://sora.org/ https://sora.org/ https://sora.org/blog/ https://sora.org/blog/ https://sora.org/soratokens/ https://sora.org/soratokens/ https://soramitsu.co.jp/ https://soramitsu.co.jp/

superbcarrot 6y ago

The sibling comments show just how difficult it is to talk constructively about these things even at a place like HN. I have no idea about the technical merits of Nano but the emotionally charged reactions with little argumentation aren't helping anyone. Is there a place online where people actually discusss cryptocurrencies on a technical/economic merit? That kind of discussion certainly isn't happening on reddit, and sadly not on HN either.

companyhen 6y ago
That is why someone created https://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoTechnology/ https://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoTechnology/

Solvitieg 6y ago

> energy usage due to Proof of Work is growing astronomically, and the higher the price of bitcoin Not true. The energy used to power the bitcoin network has been stable for a few years. https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption

crazypython 6y ago

"The Nakamoto coefficient is a way to quantify the decentralization of a blockchain or other decentralized system. It's the number of entities you need to compromise at least one essential subsystem." If a 51% attack occurs, the bitcoin full nodes are still fundamentally in control. Full nodes decide whether or not to accept a blockchain, they socially decide whether to accept a 51% attack. They can hard fork and change the hashing algorithm, firing all current miners. How does Nano prevent me from setting up two servers, sending the money to different nodes, and double-spending the money?

BLKNSLVR 6y ago

Yep, Nano is all the things bitcoin was attempting to be initially. Using Nano is a breeze, it feels like the future, especially compared to bitcoin in terms of speed.

drdeca 6y ago

not sure what you mean by "weaker". If you mean the security, then, I would think that would be a result of energy use going down, not energy use going up. (but as someone else pointed out, the power use seems to be steady, and neither trending up nor down) (that being said, it becoming more centralized might be an issue for security, yes. I don't know how (de)centralized it currently is though) Also, isn't there a rule or guideline or something discouraging talking about how getting downvoted?

chairmanwow1 6y ago

Bitcoin transactions are super fast compared to modern banks.

gge 6y ago

Why are people upvoting this obvious shill comment?

fredfoobar 6y ago

These nano shills are getting annoying.