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bitcoins show the nasty nature of the people all about profits, nobody care about solving problems, they just want the price to grow to make profit from their
by Shadonototro 5y ago
bitcoins show the nasty nature of the people
all about profits, nobody care about solving problems, they just want the price to grow to make profit from their investment
- throwaway803453 5y agoI recall attending Bay Area cryptocurrency meetups before the 2017 price surge. After mid 2017 the average IQ at the meetups was inversely proportional to the price chart and it has been that way ever since. I can't fault someone for making a profit by researching a technology, investing, holding for the long term, and selling. We want capital to flow to the best ideas. But this is more MLM-style dog-eat-dog money making. It's unclear how it could have been prevented. Ultimately greed and excess ruins everything.
- WrtCdEvrydy 5y agohousing, policing.
- tomcooks 5y agoBitcoins show the same aspects in those who've been charging you 1-4% for the pleasure of doing what bitcoin achieves
- axlee 5y agoRemind me the carbon footprint and transaction costs of Bitcoin again, and compare that to the costs from institutional payment gateways?
- dexen 5y ago>the carbon footprint of Bitcoin Still less than the carbon footprint of the people running our current fiat-based financial infrastructure. It's the bankers who have jets, mansions and yachts, not the bitcoiners. Edit to clarify: Not that riches is somehow "wrong" - it's just that with major value comes major costs, which in practice mean major energy usage.
- the_cramer 5y agoPlease take this from a guy who is not in any way a finance/economy expert: Why does the currency have anything to do with the wealth of the bankers. Bitcoin is, as far as i know, a fiat currency too. The value depends on the believe (demand-supply) of the people. You accepting it as means of payment gives it value. The reason bankers and others have yachts are interests, Investmens, tax avoidance schemes and so on. Nothing Bitcoin solves. The issue is a political one and how we do business and laws.
- axlee 5y agoThese people have been convinced by the same yacht-owners that they hate that fractional banking and inflation (and definitely not proper regulation, taxation and redistribution) are the keys to a more equal society.
- lm28469 5y ago> Still less than the carbon footprint of the people running our current fiat-based financial infrastructure. One is literally supporting the world and the other is used by a few million people as a speculative asset, money laundering scheme or to buy drugs online. And on top of that you're wrong...
- Scarblac 5y agoBitcoin uses far more energy than the jets, mansion and yachts of bankers.
- keymone 5y agoZero carbon footprint and zero carbon in transaction costs. You simply don’t understand what is that energy used for. It’s definitely not for processing transactions.
- tromp 5y agoIt will be in a few decades when Bitcoin can no longer rely on the ever dwindling block subsidy to provide enough security. Then it will be predominantly the transaction fees that keep bitcoin secure.
- keymone 5y agoBlock subsidy doesn’t provide any security, if you made a fork of bitcoin that paid 100 times the subsidy of the original, your fork wouldn’t be any more secure. Much less secure in fact.
- MereInterest 5y agoThe energy use is for processing transactions. The block reward exists to give an incentive to process transactions.
- keymone 5y agoCategorically false. Exactly zero energy is required to produce a block. If your statement were true and bitcoin required Switzerland’s worth of energy to produce a block - how on earth did satoshi mine all the early blocks by himself? Your understanding of how it all works is simply flawed. Energy is required to satisfy difficulty requirement, which has to do with chain security, not with transaction processing.
- MereInterest 5y agoGot it, so you're separating out the energy requirements into two buckets, then pretending that those two are unrelated. I agree that in general, processing transactions is not an energy-intensive task. This is why traditional payment processors with trusted nodes are able to do so efficiently. In the case of cryptocurrency, where the assumption is that all nodes are inherently untrustworthy, the resource requirement is stapled onto the transaction processing. When people say "transactions cost X amount to process", they mean "in the current state of bitcoin", not in the past when there were very few transaction validators. The more transaction validators (typically called "miners") there are, the higher the cost of validating a transaction, due to Bitcoin's difficulty scaling. I'm not sure why you separate out chain security from transaction validation and treat them as separate, when the chain security is there to protect against invalid transactions. It's sort of the entire point of it.
- nathias 5y agoBTC carbon footprint is smaller than USA government's
- axlee 5y agoHow is that statement supposed to contribute to the conversation? We all know that Bitcoin's consumption and environmental impact is absolutely massive for what is essentially - currently - an online casino.
- nathias 5y agoI don't know that its essentially an online casino. It's a digital currency that makes it able to transact outside of the domain of Visa/MasterCard and US dollar, so maybe compare it to that system and the energy requirements of those.
- luma 5y agoAllright, let's say I want to send you $5 using bitcoin to cover a coffee. How much of a fee can I expect to spend on this simple transaction? How long will that transaction take? Currently, the answer is a little over $6: https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/bitcoin-transactionfees.html https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/bitcoin-transactionfees... That number has been over $50 on occasion.
- krono 5y agoYes, I miss the good old days when it was just me and the boys. Now even the cleaning lady in my Moroccan summer home has an effortless way to partake. Where is this world headed?! But seriously, what's the difference?
- greyman 5y agoThere are also early adopters who are running their node and don't plan to cash their bitcoins. They just want this thing to exists for ideological reasons. What worries me more are some "inhuman" traits in cryptocurrencies. Most notable is one where if your crypto gets stolen, there is no standard way to "enforce the justice" by catching the thief, and give the money back to the rightful holder. This is something very non-intuitive and I doubt majority of people would accept this model.
- yawaworht1978 5y agoYou are being very generous,you are showing the bright side of the ones on the right side of this ponzi scheme. But there is more, it does solve some problems for some people. Drug purchases on dark web markets, ransomware settlements, money laundering. I agree, there is literally not a single wide spread us beyond the aforementioned.
- swebs 5y ago>nobody care about solving problems It solves the problem of corporate censorship. Visa for example is notorious for refusing to do business with people they don't like (porn companies, 4chan, etc). If the US government wants more people to use the dollar and less to use Bitcoin, they can come out with a public, first-amendment-protected payment system.
- camgunz 5y agoProtected classes aside, you can't tell a business whom they have to do business with. That's freedom of association and also in the First Amendment. For example, you couldn't force someone to sell a Coke to a Neo-Nazi.
- swebs 5y agoYes, that's my point. Read the parent comment again.
- camgunz 5y ago> It solves the problem of corporate censorship. Visa for example is notorious for refusing to do business with people they don't like (porn companies, 4chan, etc). You're saying here that it's a problem that Visa isn't forced to sell credit or payment processing to porn sites. I'm saying that's their right under the First Amendment.
- swebs 5y agoYes, and I agree. I'm not saying they should take that right away from Visa. But if a customer wants to do business online with someone Visa doesn't approve of, they have very few options. And currently Bitcoin is the best option. And if the government does not want Bitcoin to prosper, they should come out with a better alternative in the form of a public (government run) payment system so we have the digital equivalent of the dollar. Because unlike private entities, the government is bound to the first amendment. Unlike Visa, the government does not have the right to pick and chose who they do business with.
- Taek 5y agoThe people who care about actual problem solving are still around, and at the core development layer Bitcoin is absolutely dominated by people who care about making a healthy technology over making a profit on their investment.