8 ms·

My personal take: There might well be ponzi schemes on top of the bitcoin infrastructure, but the technology behind bitcoin is not a ponzi scheme. It might we

by zpeti 5y ago

My personal take: There might well be ponzi schemes on top of the bitcoin infrastructure, but the technology behind bitcoin is not a ponzi scheme. It might well be that a lot of people are crazed over it and want to buy bitcoin and push up the price, but that's because there is something here with cryptocurrency. It definitely is a new way of accounting, and it could potentially be a hedge against the fiat system. There's a lot of IFs, but I still think it is revolutionary technology that may well revolutionise things in 5-10 or 50 years, who knows.

Retric 5y ago
At the purely technical level, Bitcoin’s current transactions per minute heavily limit it’s utility. The original goal was solving micro transactions which crypto coins could do, they just need to scale to ~100 Billion transactions a day +/- orders of magnitude. Unfortunately, miners benefit from the current artificial limitations. Which demonstrates an inherent issue with crypto currency, miners and users have very different goals yet only miners get a vote.
- greg7mdp 5y ago
  Ethereum will solve both issues, removing miners and the energy use by moving to Proof of Stake at the end on this year, and increasing the transaction throughput by 100x factors with level 2 solutions.
  - ulzeraj 5y ago
    How does PoS solves anything when people will just stake on exchanges so that it literally replicates the current financial system with central banks and permissioned cartels? How new PoS coins will be generated and distributed? The stock has to be generated somehow right? How does this not resemble a central bank? This is an honest question. It looks like PoS is a full circle towards the same centralized system we have today. Please correct me if I'm wrong.
    - AlexandrB 5y ago
      The history of cryptocurrency seems to be the re-discovery of why the global economy is structured the way it is from first principles.
    - inter_netuser 5y ago
      You are exactly correct. It is plutocracy, but with emojis.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- doomroot 5y ago
  I think the layer approach seems to make the most sense. Much like our current system now. The difference comes from building from a strong sound money base.
- intotheabyss 5y ago
  This might be shocking to people, but there are people in crypto that own zero Bitcoin. You can dislike Bitcoin and still be bullish on crypto.
  - UncleMeat 5y ago
    I'm not sure it is possible to be bullish of crypto in general. Surely at most a small number of tokens will win and the rest will drop to zero. Owning the entire ecosystem isn't diversification like investing in many companies.
    - intotheabyss 5y ago
      Oh I absolutely agree. I think cryptos will be top heavy from a market perspective, where the top cryptos will have something like >80% of the total marketcap by the end of the decade.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
- inter_netuser 5y ago
  base layer tps is low because it is designed for survival in most adversarial of conditions. It is a heavy duty tank, not a sport bike. Would you take M1 Abrams tank to race at Nurburgring? They have a different function. Lightninig/Payment channels, backed by the same baselayer security guarantees, can operate at literally unlimited tps. The only ceiling is how fast you can send packets back and forth. Miners do not vote, they are nothing but security guards paid by the network users. Miners do not get paid if they produce a block with rules not accepted by the rest network. Counterintuitive, but that is the reality.
  - mellavora 5y ago
    Well, to be snarky, if that M1 could take out the other cars, then it wouldn't have to be the fastest to win. Only the fastest which is still capable of motion...
  - deschutes 5y ago
    What's stopping your adversaries from seizing hardware? Nothing? So the system relies folks playing nice in the physical world? The whole thing is a ridiculous fantasy with an asinine threat model.
    - gruez 5y ago
      Because there's threat models with less threat than "US sending a fleet of aircraft carriers to go after you".
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
      - inter_netuser 5y ago
        Even that would not work very well against miners in China, Russia, Iran, Venezuela...
    - inter_netuser 5y ago
      The same that stops people from invading your house, caging you, and confiscating everything you own. Violence. Either monopoly on violence in the state under whose protection miners operate, or private security for smaller threats. Miners in China, Russia and Iran are essentially absolutely immune to threats from the West. and vice versa. It's not designed to gamble and make a quick buck, but to survive even a nuclear war. Just like TCP/IP wasn't designed for streaming porn.
enkid 5y ago
How do you differentiate the infrastructure from the technology? The technology drives the infrastructure.
lottin 5y ago
The technology has no use outside the scope of crypto-currencies.
- greg7mdp 5y ago
  Have you heard of DEFI (decentralized finance)?
  - lottin 5y ago
    Ah, yes, it's taking over traditional finance except they still haven't figured out how to make loans, but never mind that.
    - intotheabyss 5y ago
      There are undercollaterized / no collateral loans on Ethereum. You can build a credit score using decentralized identities. But yeah, keep dismissing it. You'll eventually use Ethereum or something like it whether you want to or not.
      - Faaak 5y ago
        undercollaterized loans are valid for one transaction only. You should research what you preach before dismissing others
        intotheabyss 5y ago
        Uh no, Aave has credit delegation for no collateral loans and it uses OpenLaw contracts to secure a credit line. And there's also TrueFi https://truefi.io/ https://truefi.io/. And a bunch of others. You can get loans based on credit on Ethereum.
        lottin 5y ago
        I can buy a car on credit using DeFi right now, is that what you're saying?
SavantIdiot 5y ago
> I still think it is revolutionary technology that may well revolutionise things in 5-10 or 50 years, who knows. If there's one thing I love most about the technology behind bitcoin, it is the permanent, public, unalterable ledger of every purchase I've ever made and every purchase I'll every make, and who I gave the money to. I'm super excited about the complete lack of personal financial privacy that Bitcoin's blockchain enables! /s
- serverholic 5y ago
  There are technologies people are working on to solve that. One is called ZK-SNARKS and ethereum is working to integrate the tech. Another is Monero, which is a privacy focused crypto.
  - SavantIdiot 5y ago
    Right, I was talking about Bitcoin only. mimblewimble and zcash also both have shielded transactions. I believe they use an ECDH secret for each transaction so that only the two people involved in the transaction can decode it.
- icoder 5y ago
  It's a bit more nuanced isn't it (or am I mistaken)? All you see in the ledgers is the (hopefully single use) addresses the money is sent to, plus all addresses that come after it. There's not much in the system itself that links people / organisations to addresses, right? You'll have to get that information from outside the system: you know yourself, and maybe the receiver as a person, but where it then ends up requires you to obtain knowledge that's not readily available. Sure there's a lot stored, which does bring privacy concerns that are quite different from our current financial system, I'm not debating that, but it's not as obvious as you put it, as far as I understood it.
  - SavantIdiot 5y ago
    "We've killed people based on metadata" - Former USA CIA director. [1] It really isn't that nuanced at all for Bitcoin. If I know your wallet I can see all of your transactions. Period. And if you want to trade money with me, you need to give me your wallet. Once I find it, thought, it is game over. [2] There are "tumblers" that attempt to obfuscate the chain by turning one transaction into millions of little ones, but it is just a matter of tree search to reconstruct. [1] https://www.rt.com/usa/158460-cia-director-metadata-kill-people/ https://www.rt.com/usa/158460-cia-director-metadata-kill-peo... [2] https://www.blockchain.com/explorer https://www.blockchain.com/explorer
ArtWomb 5y ago
It's unfortunate that the space has attracted "pump & dump" opportunists. But if one is a student of technology and networks and markets, Decentralized Finance (DeFi) is fascinating. Two recent innovations to check out: Uniswap, the decentralized exchange protocol, and Bitclout, a social blockchain that just went open source last nite https://uniswap.org/docs/v2/protocol-overview/how-uniswap-works/ https://uniswap.org/docs/v2/protocol-overview/how-uniswap-wo... https://github.com/bitclout/core https://github.com/bitclout/core
- ddeyar 5y ago
  If you're not aware of https://tezos.com/ https://tezos.com/ then it is definitely worth to look into it. It's PoS since 2017, has smart contracts since 2018. It's a self amending protocol. A lot of improvements are already injected and a lot in the pipeline. For more information about the recent upgrade: http://doc.tzalpha.net/protocols/009_florence.html http://doc.tzalpha.net/protocols/009_florence.html Lots of defi products are already live on mainnet. https://better-call.dev/dapps/list https://better-call.dev/dapps/list
Balantio 5y ago
Technology can be revolutionising without investing in a very specific cryptocurrency like bitcoin. I'm betting my ass of that cryptocurrency in a different way might be the future of fiat BUT from the countries themselfs. I'm not sure why anyone in the long run would trust a system which is controlled by some totally unknown and new individuals who invested in some cryptocurrencies. There is no need at all to assume that the crypto technology is limited to btc and other current cryptocurrencies.
- 8note 5y ago
  Countries can just use a database and do the same stuff as crypto incredibly efficiently by comparison
  - Balantio 5y ago
    I just don't know how it works in detail on the bacnking side as i havenot worked with it. My thought was that a crypto based system could replace perhaps a sea of different approaches and alignment efforts across banking systems and if a central bank/banks are just need to approve a block, instead of mining it, the basic idea of a transparent cryptosigned blockchain might be useful. But yes i don't think they need something like this as the current system seems to be very trustworthy. I have never heard of a bank creating money out of thin air.
paulpauper 5y ago
there is no tech though. it is just math

by zpeti 5y ago

Retric 5y ago

At the purely technical level, Bitcoin’s current transactions per minute heavily limit it’s utility. The original goal was solving micro transactions which crypto coins could do, they just need to scale to ~100 Billion transactions a day +/- orders of magnitude. Unfortunately, miners benefit from the current artificial limitations. Which demonstrates an inherent issue with crypto currency, miners and users have very different goals yet only miners get a vote.

greg7mdp 5y ago
Ethereum will solve both issues, removing miners and the energy use by moving to Proof of Stake at the end on this year, and increasing the transaction throughput by 100x factors with level 2 solutions.
- ulzeraj 5y ago
  How does PoS solves anything when people will just stake on exchanges so that it literally replicates the current financial system with central banks and permissioned cartels? How new PoS coins will be generated and distributed? The stock has to be generated somehow right? How does this not resemble a central bank? This is an honest question. It looks like PoS is a full circle towards the same centralized system we have today. Please correct me if I'm wrong.
  - AlexandrB 5y ago
    The history of cryptocurrency seems to be the re-discovery of why the global economy is structured the way it is from first principles.
  - inter_netuser 5y ago
    You are exactly correct. It is plutocracy, but with emojis.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
doomroot 5y ago
I think the layer approach seems to make the most sense. Much like our current system now. The difference comes from building from a strong sound money base.
intotheabyss 5y ago
This might be shocking to people, but there are people in crypto that own zero Bitcoin. You can dislike Bitcoin and still be bullish on crypto.
- UncleMeat 5y ago
  I'm not sure it is possible to be bullish of crypto in general. Surely at most a small number of tokens will win and the rest will drop to zero. Owning the entire ecosystem isn't diversification like investing in many companies.
  - intotheabyss 5y ago
    Oh I absolutely agree. I think cryptos will be top heavy from a market perspective, where the top cryptos will have something like >80% of the total marketcap by the end of the decade.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
inter_netuser 5y ago
base layer tps is low because it is designed for survival in most adversarial of conditions. It is a heavy duty tank, not a sport bike. Would you take M1 Abrams tank to race at Nurburgring? They have a different function. Lightninig/Payment channels, backed by the same baselayer security guarantees, can operate at literally unlimited tps. The only ceiling is how fast you can send packets back and forth. Miners do not vote, they are nothing but security guards paid by the network users. Miners do not get paid if they produce a block with rules not accepted by the rest network. Counterintuitive, but that is the reality.
- mellavora 5y ago
  Well, to be snarky, if that M1 could take out the other cars, then it wouldn't have to be the fastest to win. Only the fastest which is still capable of motion...
- deschutes 5y ago
  What's stopping your adversaries from seizing hardware? Nothing? So the system relies folks playing nice in the physical world? The whole thing is a ridiculous fantasy with an asinine threat model.
  - gruez 5y ago
    Because there's threat models with less threat than "US sending a fleet of aircraft carriers to go after you".
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - inter_netuser 5y ago
      Even that would not work very well against miners in China, Russia, Iran, Venezuela...
  - inter_netuser 5y ago
    The same that stops people from invading your house, caging you, and confiscating everything you own. Violence. Either monopoly on violence in the state under whose protection miners operate, or private security for smaller threats. Miners in China, Russia and Iran are essentially absolutely immune to threats from the West. and vice versa. It's not designed to gamble and make a quick buck, but to survive even a nuclear war. Just like TCP/IP wasn't designed for streaming porn.

enkid 5y ago

How do you differentiate the infrastructure from the technology? The technology drives the infrastructure.

lottin 5y ago

The technology has no use outside the scope of crypto-currencies.

greg7mdp 5y ago
Have you heard of DEFI (decentralized finance)?
- lottin 5y ago
  Ah, yes, it's taking over traditional finance except they still haven't figured out how to make loans, but never mind that.
  - intotheabyss 5y ago
    There are undercollaterized / no collateral loans on Ethereum. You can build a credit score using decentralized identities. But yeah, keep dismissing it. You'll eventually use Ethereum or something like it whether you want to or not.
    - Faaak 5y ago
      undercollaterized loans are valid for one transaction only. You should research what you preach before dismissing others
      - intotheabyss 5y ago
        Uh no, Aave has credit delegation for no collateral loans and it uses OpenLaw contracts to secure a credit line. And there's also TrueFi https://truefi.io/ https://truefi.io/. And a bunch of others. You can get loans based on credit on Ethereum.
        lottin 5y ago
        I can buy a car on credit using DeFi right now, is that what you're saying?

SavantIdiot 5y ago

> I still think it is revolutionary technology that may well revolutionise things in 5-10 or 50 years, who knows. If there's one thing I love most about the technology behind bitcoin, it is the permanent, public, unalterable ledger of every purchase I've ever made and every purchase I'll every make, and who I gave the money to. I'm super excited about the complete lack of personal financial privacy that Bitcoin's blockchain enables! /s

serverholic 5y ago
There are technologies people are working on to solve that. One is called ZK-SNARKS and ethereum is working to integrate the tech. Another is Monero, which is a privacy focused crypto.
- SavantIdiot 5y ago
  Right, I was talking about Bitcoin only. mimblewimble and zcash also both have shielded transactions. I believe they use an ECDH secret for each transaction so that only the two people involved in the transaction can decode it.
icoder 5y ago
It's a bit more nuanced isn't it (or am I mistaken)? All you see in the ledgers is the (hopefully single use) addresses the money is sent to, plus all addresses that come after it. There's not much in the system itself that links people / organisations to addresses, right? You'll have to get that information from outside the system: you know yourself, and maybe the receiver as a person, but where it then ends up requires you to obtain knowledge that's not readily available. Sure there's a lot stored, which does bring privacy concerns that are quite different from our current financial system, I'm not debating that, but it's not as obvious as you put it, as far as I understood it.
- SavantIdiot 5y ago
  "We've killed people based on metadata" - Former USA CIA director. [1] It really isn't that nuanced at all for Bitcoin. If I know your wallet I can see all of your transactions. Period. And if you want to trade money with me, you need to give me your wallet. Once I find it, thought, it is game over. [2] There are "tumblers" that attempt to obfuscate the chain by turning one transaction into millions of little ones, but it is just a matter of tree search to reconstruct. [1] https://www.rt.com/usa/158460-cia-director-metadata-kill-people/ https://www.rt.com/usa/158460-cia-director-metadata-kill-peo... [2] https://www.blockchain.com/explorer https://www.blockchain.com/explorer

ArtWomb 5y ago

It's unfortunate that the space has attracted "pump & dump" opportunists. But if one is a student of technology and networks and markets, Decentralized Finance (DeFi) is fascinating. Two recent innovations to check out: Uniswap, the decentralized exchange protocol, and Bitclout, a social blockchain that just went open source last nite https://uniswap.org/docs/v2/protocol-overview/how-uniswap-works/ https://uniswap.org/docs/v2/protocol-overview/how-uniswap-wo... https://github.com/bitclout/core https://github.com/bitclout/core

ddeyar 5y ago
If you're not aware of https://tezos.com/ https://tezos.com/ then it is definitely worth to look into it. It's PoS since 2017, has smart contracts since 2018. It's a self amending protocol. A lot of improvements are already injected and a lot in the pipeline. For more information about the recent upgrade: http://doc.tzalpha.net/protocols/009_florence.html http://doc.tzalpha.net/protocols/009_florence.html Lots of defi products are already live on mainnet. https://better-call.dev/dapps/list https://better-call.dev/dapps/list

Balantio 5y ago

Technology can be revolutionising without investing in a very specific cryptocurrency like bitcoin. I'm betting my ass of that cryptocurrency in a different way might be the future of fiat BUT from the countries themselfs. I'm not sure why anyone in the long run would trust a system which is controlled by some totally unknown and new individuals who invested in some cryptocurrencies. There is no need at all to assume that the crypto technology is limited to btc and other current cryptocurrencies.

8note 5y ago
Countries can just use a database and do the same stuff as crypto incredibly efficiently by comparison
- Balantio 5y ago
  I just don't know how it works in detail on the bacnking side as i havenot worked with it. My thought was that a crypto based system could replace perhaps a sea of different approaches and alignment efforts across banking systems and if a central bank/banks are just need to approve a block, instead of mining it, the basic idea of a transparent cryptosigned blockchain might be useful. But yes i don't think they need something like this as the current system seems to be very trustworthy. I have never heard of a bank creating money out of thin air.

paulpauper 5y ago

there is no tech though. it is just math