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No, BTC is not functionally a currency and hasn't been since the silk road era. Effectively no one is buying goods and services with BTC, it is a speculative as

No, BTC is not functionally a currency and hasn't been since the silk road era. Effectively no one is buying goods and services with BTC, it is a speculative asset. Even Musk stopped taking BTC payments for Tesla because of the astronomical fees and incredible long settle times. "You could build an online currency with a database much more easily than blockchain but people won't use it because it relies on a central authority to maintain the database and not enough people will trust that central authority not to misuse their power." Credit cards run 100% of online transactions and do a fantastic, quick, and cheap job of it. Crypto isn't creating something wholly new, it is attempting to compete with a network that charges 1-2% fees, works in seconds, and handles 1 BILLION transactions a day. With BTC you can't predict the fees or the transaction time and the network handles ~40k transactions a day, at extreme cost. Crypto currencies get more inefficient as more nodes come online (hence the proliferation of "side-chains" for games that need to actually, you know, make a non trivial number of transactions per second) and so they fundamentally break at scale. And don't try to spout some line about Proof of Stake, Ethereum will continue to push back the migration until the heat death of the universe. Now you will probably respond that credit cards use existing currencies and the fundamental shift here is that this is an "online currency" vs "online payments". To the average person this is a distinction without a difference. Really this is fundamentally political, an (openly stated!) war on the Dollar, the Euro, the Yen, etc and the associated governments by anarcho capitalist Libertarians who want to trade bureaucratic government services with profit-driven corporate services

mritchie712 4y ago
1. 2% is not low. 2. Crypto is mostly open source software. Most open source software gets better quickly. Writing off crypto completely because of its current state is a bit short sighted. 3. Could you say more about proof of stake? Vitalik[1] supports it and so do most eth devs. Seems to be a matter of time and implementation. 1 - https://vitalik.ca/general/2020/11/06/pos2020.html https://vitalik.ca/general/2020/11/06/pos2020.html
- dangerwill 4y ago
  1. At current fees, if you were to attempt to send less than ~$85 worth of btc then you are paying more than 2%. A year ago, fees skyrocketed such that you would need to transfer ~$3000 to have the fees amount to less than 2%. Not to mention the implicit potential fee of how much the price of BTC may change from when the transaction is started to when it is completed. 2. BTC, created in 2009. Eth, created in 2013. The projects have made little meaningful technical improvements and no actually-useful-outside-of-the-crypto-sphere projects have been launched on top of them. Open source software that is attempting to solve real problems move so much faster than crypto. This attempted justification is simply embarrassing 3. What more is there to say about POS? It isn't actually happening. It has been talked about forever, put on the official roadmap for eth in 2020 and has had been delayed every couple of months since then, including literally last week https://coingeek.com/ethereum-forever-new-protocol-launch-delayed-once-again/ https://coingeek.com/ethereum-forever-new-protocol-launch-de....
  - mritchie712 4y ago
    1. Fees on chains made for transactions are pennies (Google "X transaction fees" where x = solana, polygon, bitcoin lightning, etc.) 2. I'd expect a project trying to create digital money to take a bit more time then a JS framework[1]. Does that seem reasonable? It took React 6 years to "go mainstream" and had the backing of Facebook. It's hard to do consequential things in the real world, it will take time. 3. Why do you think it won't happen? Just because it's taking a long time? It's a big change with a ton at risk if it goes wrong. It's going to take a while to happen. 1 - https://blog.risingstack.com/the-history-of-react-js-on-a-timeline/ https://blog.risingstack.com/the-history-of-react-js-on-a-ti...
    - dangerwill 4y ago
      1. I looked up bitcoin transaction fees dog, that's where those numbers came from (just converting the btc cost into dollars for ease of discussion). And yeah I don't care about whichever "low cost" blockchain is being talked about this week. Every single time one of those begins to become popular the scale problem shows itself and transaction times or fees (or both) go up as more nodes are added. Even proof of stake suffers from this. 2. Sure but none of these projects are run by reputable people and have shown deep misunderstandings of financial systems and human nature. Why would I trust any of these to be a replacement for my bank? And like, just from a tech perspective, doesn't the Hacker News community love talking about solving problems at scale, maximizing transactions per second at the minimum cost? How can you look at how absolutely, nightmarishly dog shit crypto networks are by design at handling high throughput and think that they are cool? You have traded every single engineering best practice away and are using brute computing power to solve the distributed double spend problem. I'm frankly deeply ashamed at how many engineers are willing to put up with this. 3. There is a fundamental difference between a 3 year planned migration and a migration that is stalled for 3 years with a fresh delay announcement every couple of months. You can say I'm being overly harsh but given how 95-99% of people in crypto are scammers and vaporware vendors I am forced to have a default pessimistic view of everything in the scene.
bitxbitxbitcoin 4y ago
The “Silk Road era” is not over. It never has been and it never will. Speculation may have become the reason for a large portion of blockchain transaction volume but don’t for a second doubt that the actual velocity of money on dark net markets has been steadily growing. Put in an extreme way, if all the speculators left tomorrow, Bitcoin isn’t going to 0 because people are actually using it.
- dangerwill 4y ago
  Haha so that was never my game but if crypto crashes and all the web3 and speculator people leave and it just reverts to a means to get research chemicals in the mail, fine by me :)

mritchie712 4y ago

1. 2% is not low. 2. Crypto is mostly open source software. Most open source software gets better quickly. Writing off crypto completely because of its current state is a bit short sighted. 3. Could you say more about proof of stake? Vitalik[1] supports it and so do most eth devs. Seems to be a matter of time and implementation. 1 - https://vitalik.ca/general/2020/11/06/pos2020.html https://vitalik.ca/general/2020/11/06/pos2020.html

dangerwill 4y ago
1. At current fees, if you were to attempt to send less than ~$85 worth of btc then you are paying more than 2%. A year ago, fees skyrocketed such that you would need to transfer ~$3000 to have the fees amount to less than 2%. Not to mention the implicit potential fee of how much the price of BTC may change from when the transaction is started to when it is completed. 2. BTC, created in 2009. Eth, created in 2013. The projects have made little meaningful technical improvements and no actually-useful-outside-of-the-crypto-sphere projects have been launched on top of them. Open source software that is attempting to solve real problems move so much faster than crypto. This attempted justification is simply embarrassing 3. What more is there to say about POS? It isn't actually happening. It has been talked about forever, put on the official roadmap for eth in 2020 and has had been delayed every couple of months since then, including literally last week https://coingeek.com/ethereum-forever-new-protocol-launch-delayed-once-again/ https://coingeek.com/ethereum-forever-new-protocol-launch-de....
- mritchie712 4y ago
  1. Fees on chains made for transactions are pennies (Google "X transaction fees" where x = solana, polygon, bitcoin lightning, etc.) 2. I'd expect a project trying to create digital money to take a bit more time then a JS framework[1]. Does that seem reasonable? It took React 6 years to "go mainstream" and had the backing of Facebook. It's hard to do consequential things in the real world, it will take time. 3. Why do you think it won't happen? Just because it's taking a long time? It's a big change with a ton at risk if it goes wrong. It's going to take a while to happen. 1 - https://blog.risingstack.com/the-history-of-react-js-on-a-timeline/ https://blog.risingstack.com/the-history-of-react-js-on-a-ti...
  - dangerwill 4y ago
    1. I looked up bitcoin transaction fees dog, that's where those numbers came from (just converting the btc cost into dollars for ease of discussion). And yeah I don't care about whichever "low cost" blockchain is being talked about this week. Every single time one of those begins to become popular the scale problem shows itself and transaction times or fees (or both) go up as more nodes are added. Even proof of stake suffers from this. 2. Sure but none of these projects are run by reputable people and have shown deep misunderstandings of financial systems and human nature. Why would I trust any of these to be a replacement for my bank? And like, just from a tech perspective, doesn't the Hacker News community love talking about solving problems at scale, maximizing transactions per second at the minimum cost? How can you look at how absolutely, nightmarishly dog shit crypto networks are by design at handling high throughput and think that they are cool? You have traded every single engineering best practice away and are using brute computing power to solve the distributed double spend problem. I'm frankly deeply ashamed at how many engineers are willing to put up with this. 3. There is a fundamental difference between a 3 year planned migration and a migration that is stalled for 3 years with a fresh delay announcement every couple of months. You can say I'm being overly harsh but given how 95-99% of people in crypto are scammers and vaporware vendors I am forced to have a default pessimistic view of everything in the scene.

bitxbitxbitcoin 4y ago

The “Silk Road era” is not over. It never has been and it never will. Speculation may have become the reason for a large portion of blockchain transaction volume but don’t for a second doubt that the actual velocity of money on dark net markets has been steadily growing. Put in an extreme way, if all the speculators left tomorrow, Bitcoin isn’t going to 0 because people are actually using it.

dangerwill 4y ago
Haha so that was never my game but if crypto crashes and all the web3 and speculator people leave and it just reverts to a means to get research chemicals in the mail, fine by me :)