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I wish I never bought Bitcoin
- poetically 5y agoMakes a good point about the lightening network: > Even when taking the Lightning Network into account, which is technically impressive, but seems inherently redundant as one has to do an on-chain transaction to open and close a channel. E.g., if someone without bitcoin wanted to accept, say, his monthly $1500 wage in bitcoin on the Lightning Network, he's obligated to first buy $1500 worth of Bitcoin himself, open up a Lightning channel worth $1500 in bitcoin, then transfer this $1500 worth of bitcoin somewhere else in order to empty the channel so it can receive $1500 of bitcoin. Fantastic.
- kordlessagain 5y agoLightning is a PoS method built on a PoW network. Lightning is useful for staked transactions that need lots of little updates. Those little updates were too expensive for the B blockchain, so thus Lightning.
- poetically 5y agoI still don't see the point. Why can't this be handled with an escrow service?
- longitudinal93 5y agoUnless they can find someone to trade the LN for cash, which is increasingly easy.
- poetically 5y agoSo is using a paypal link to send someone money.
- jazzyjackson 5y agowhy can’t it be that the entity paying my wage opens the channel, allowing me to withdraw the $1500 ? (does the normal transaction fee apply if I want to withdraw from the payment channel?) is it really the case that a channel can only handle a maximum balance equal to its opening balance? sounds positively useless, so i’m confused by the hype if this is really the case
- poetically 5y agoI guess they can but the point is that cryptocurrencies have had 15+ years to develop some useful application and they have nothing to show for it.
- kordlessagain 5y agoThat’s because the killer use case has yet to manifest. Looking at you, AI.
- poetically 5y agoFunction approximation was always useful (e.g. autopilots, speech recognition, compression, etc.), the question was what one could do with such a trick when it was scaled up. What is the analog for cryptocurrencies? What is the underlying technology in cryptocurrencies that can be scaled up to make them useful like with function approximation?
- jazzyjackson 5y agoare you being sarcastic? I can’t tell
- jazzyjackson 5y agowell, that entirely depends on whether lightning channels work the way they are descibes by the article, because getting paid without dealing with cc/bank fees is a very useful application
- 5y ago
- jazzyjackson 5y agotechnical quibbling aside i enjoyed reading this personal journey It makes me wonder if holding bitcoin instead of any number of other ways to spend cash is a bit like rooting for economic collapse, and, as the blog points out, what’s the good of being “right” in that scenario? all the money in the world with nothing to spend it on
- erulabs 5y ago“Money incentivizes greed” The kinds of statements that within 3 words demonstrates we speak incompatible languages. Why is economic illiteracy, so long as it bashes crypto, becoming so common on HN? Ok, maybe saying “money causes greed” is not illiteracy but it’s at very least a non-statement. We’re supposed to read into that that greed is horrible - but again, economics 101 called and wants it’s hacker community back.
- bob332 5y agoCryptos are for morons