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> And yet you suggest a homeless person can reasonably assert influence on the Blockchain and mine it effectively. I never suggested anything even close to tha

> And yet you suggest a homeless person can reasonably assert influence on the Blockchain and mine it effectively. I never suggested anything even close to that. > Bitcoin is dominated by extremely wealthy miners. No, it recently had a drop in difficulty as the big box miners have had to shut down due to bankruptcy (making it more accessible to more people). That means it's both cheaper to get the equipment you need and easier to earn Bitcoin. What's great is that's by design. > But then you'll finally have a tiny billionth of the overall network speed and can make a tiny wave in choosing what transactions to include and push the chain any particular direction. It's practically democracy but you can pay $5 to vote again and can do it however many times you want, meanwhile lots of people pre-purchased votes at $0.50/ea and bought millions already. Sounds like a level playing field to me! This reads like you don't understand how Bitcoin works. I really don't know what you're referring to here. The network operates according to the current consensus around the protocol. If you want to influence the direction of said protocol, you can submit a proposal and if others want to support it, your changes can be implemented as an upgrade. There is zero prerequisite to spend anything to participate in Bitcoin. If you can offer a product or service to someone and are willing to be paid in Bitcoin, you just participated in Bitcoin. Just like every economy, the more you participate, the more opportunity you have.

vel0city 4y ago
You absolutely did when you said "yes" to the ability of a homeless person to exert as much influence and get bitcoin as a SV tech bro with racks of mining rigs in their garage. Its just a few comments ago. > No, it recently had a drop in difficulty as the big box miners have had to shut down due to bankruptcy A few miners shut down. The difficulty barely moved. Its still massively unprofitable for me to mine with any hardware I still own, and many friends of mine with ASICs can't profitably mine either. Leaving...those with extremely cheap energy sources (i.e., not residential rates, i.e., industrial plans, i.e., using lots of power total, i.e....big miners!) or those who have cheap generation sources they've already invested in. How much does a MW of solar panels cost again? How much land does that take up? Sounds easy for someone living under a bridge to put together. So mining hardware has gotten a lot cheaper huh? Difficulty has dropped a lot? I guess I can mine on my Ryzen 5 2600 CPU then? No? Huh. Maybe my 1070 GPU? No? Huh. Clearly a $2k Macbook Pro M1. Still no? I wonder what a normal used miner goes for these days. https://www.ebay.com/itm/334660278672 https://www.ebay.com/itm/334660278672 $2,255, 100Th. https://www.ebay.com/itm/334660278672 https://www.ebay.com/itm/334660278672 $1,680, 100Th. So easily $1,600-$2,255 for a noisy purpose-built box to mine. What's that gonna cost to operate? ~3kW of power usage, at $0.15/kWh, that's ~$10.80/day, assuming you're not spending any extra on cooling. What's my revenue for that 100Th of mining power these days? ~$6.60/day? Cool, so after spending somewhere around $2k on used mining hardware, I'll be generating -$4.20/day in profits when converting back to USD. Wait, that's a minus symbol... Wait, I'll have some losses from pool fees? Now I've got exchange fees as well? Well at least I'll have generated some bitcoins. How many did I mine my first day? 0.00036715BTC? Over a year I'll have ~0.134, assuming the difficulty doesn't continue its few year history of continuing to go sky high. We'll say BTC is back to ~$20k, that means for that ~$2k capex investment and $3,942 in power costs (ignoring the fact I had to pay to have space to put the things and might have needed to cool them) I'll have generated ~$2,680. Yeah, definitely seems like a normal thing average people are gonna be able to participate in. That guy living under the bridge is gonna be able to mine so many bitcoins. > If you want to influence the direction of said protocol, you can submit a proposal I can petition the lords for change. They can also just choose to ignore me. Some people wanted larger block sizes. Some wanted faster generation times. We've seen how those changes have turned out over and over. In the end, Bitcoin is what the miners want it to be.
- rglover 4y ago
  > You absolutely did when you said "yes" to the ability of a homeless person to exert as much influence No, I didn't. You said "have the same ability to participate and get Bitcoin" to which I said yes. You reworded what I said, disingenuously, to force an incredibly weak argument. > Its still massively unprofitable for me to mine with any hardware I still own, and many friends of mine with ASICs can't profitably mine either. Ah, there it is. It's not about other people, it's about you. Like I've already stated, if you want to participate in Bitcoin but mining is out of range, go offer services and/or products for Bitcoin and earn it (I've done it happily, and have paid others for their services using it, too). Nobody owes you Bitcoin. > Yeah, definitely seems like a normal thing average people are gonna be able to participate in. Do normal people participate in SWIFT? No. That's the level Bitcoin is operating on. But it doesn't exclude them from transacting in the currencies that rely on SWIFT as a network. > I can petition the lords for change. They can also just choose to ignore me. Some people wanted larger block sizes. Some wanted faster generation times. We've seen how those changes have turned out over and over. And they likely will with this attitude. And yes, their ideas didn't gain traction so they ended up forking, and lo and behold, it didn't work. Those experiments were failures. The system works.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - UncleMeat 4y ago
    > Like I've already stated, if you want to participate in Bitcoin but mining is out of range, go offer services and/or products for Bitcoin and earn it (I've done it happily, and have paid others for their services using it, too). Nobody owes you Bitcoin. "If you want to vote in a nation where only landowners vote, go offer services and/or products and earn land."
    - rglover 4y ago
      Yes. Your opinion is irrelevant if you're not contributing to the whole in some way (no matter how small). It's beautiful and immediately removes the potential for parasites to thrive. That's why government/statists hate it so much. They can't just steal from people under false pretenses and have to actually provide value or something of merit (which they can't do, because they've invested their entire being into parasitism).

vel0city 4y ago

You absolutely did when you said "yes" to the ability of a homeless person to exert as much influence and get bitcoin as a SV tech bro with racks of mining rigs in their garage. Its just a few comments ago. > No, it recently had a drop in difficulty as the big box miners have had to shut down due to bankruptcy A few miners shut down. The difficulty barely moved. Its still massively unprofitable for me to mine with any hardware I still own, and many friends of mine with ASICs can't profitably mine either. Leaving...those with extremely cheap energy sources (i.e., not residential rates, i.e., industrial plans, i.e., using lots of power total, i.e....big miners!) or those who have cheap generation sources they've already invested in. How much does a MW of solar panels cost again? How much land does that take up? Sounds easy for someone living under a bridge to put together. So mining hardware has gotten a lot cheaper huh? Difficulty has dropped a lot? I guess I can mine on my Ryzen 5 2600 CPU then? No? Huh. Maybe my 1070 GPU? No? Huh. Clearly a $2k Macbook Pro M1. Still no? I wonder what a normal used miner goes for these days. https://www.ebay.com/itm/334660278672 https://www.ebay.com/itm/334660278672 $2,255, 100Th. https://www.ebay.com/itm/334660278672 https://www.ebay.com/itm/334660278672 $1,680, 100Th. So easily $1,600-$2,255 for a noisy purpose-built box to mine. What's that gonna cost to operate? ~3kW of power usage, at $0.15/kWh, that's ~$10.80/day, assuming you're not spending any extra on cooling. What's my revenue for that 100Th of mining power these days? ~$6.60/day? Cool, so after spending somewhere around $2k on used mining hardware, I'll be generating -$4.20/day in profits when converting back to USD. Wait, that's a minus symbol... Wait, I'll have some losses from pool fees? Now I've got exchange fees as well? Well at least I'll have generated some bitcoins. How many did I mine my first day? 0.00036715BTC? Over a year I'll have ~0.134, assuming the difficulty doesn't continue its few year history of continuing to go sky high. We'll say BTC is back to ~$20k, that means for that ~$2k capex investment and $3,942 in power costs (ignoring the fact I had to pay to have space to put the things and might have needed to cool them) I'll have generated ~$2,680. Yeah, definitely seems like a normal thing average people are gonna be able to participate in. That guy living under the bridge is gonna be able to mine so many bitcoins. > If you want to influence the direction of said protocol, you can submit a proposal I can petition the lords for change. They can also just choose to ignore me. Some people wanted larger block sizes. Some wanted faster generation times. We've seen how those changes have turned out over and over. In the end, Bitcoin is what the miners want it to be.

rglover 4y ago
> You absolutely did when you said "yes" to the ability of a homeless person to exert as much influence No, I didn't. You said "have the same ability to participate and get Bitcoin" to which I said yes. You reworded what I said, disingenuously, to force an incredibly weak argument. > Its still massively unprofitable for me to mine with any hardware I still own, and many friends of mine with ASICs can't profitably mine either. Ah, there it is. It's not about other people, it's about you. Like I've already stated, if you want to participate in Bitcoin but mining is out of range, go offer services and/or products for Bitcoin and earn it (I've done it happily, and have paid others for their services using it, too). Nobody owes you Bitcoin. > Yeah, definitely seems like a normal thing average people are gonna be able to participate in. Do normal people participate in SWIFT? No. That's the level Bitcoin is operating on. But it doesn't exclude them from transacting in the currencies that rely on SWIFT as a network. > I can petition the lords for change. They can also just choose to ignore me. Some people wanted larger block sizes. Some wanted faster generation times. We've seen how those changes have turned out over and over. And they likely will with this attitude. And yes, their ideas didn't gain traction so they ended up forking, and lo and behold, it didn't work. Those experiments were failures. The system works.
- deleted 4y ago
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- UncleMeat 4y ago
  > Like I've already stated, if you want to participate in Bitcoin but mining is out of range, go offer services and/or products for Bitcoin and earn it (I've done it happily, and have paid others for their services using it, too). Nobody owes you Bitcoin. "If you want to vote in a nation where only landowners vote, go offer services and/or products and earn land."
  - rglover 4y ago
    Yes. Your opinion is irrelevant if you're not contributing to the whole in some way (no matter how small). It's beautiful and immediately removes the potential for parasites to thrive. That's why government/statists hate it so much. They can't just steal from people under false pretenses and have to actually provide value or something of merit (which they can't do, because they've invested their entire being into parasitism).