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Eventually more and more use cases for Bitcoin will emerge, as the government becomes less competent and more reckless with its fiat. It costs $35,000 for a rea

by cft 3y ago

Eventually more and more use cases for Bitcoin will emerge, as the government becomes less competent and more reckless with its fiat. It costs $35,000 for a reason.

chx 3y ago
We just discussed this on the occasion of SBF being convicted as a fraudster: all crypto is a scam. Them being negative sum games makes them so. Whether the scam is a ponzi, a pyramid scheme or something novel is a matter of debate. That it's a scam is not in debate, that's a plain mathematical fact. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/06/08/bitcoin-isnt-the-future-of-money-its-either-a-ponzi-scheme-or-a-pyramid-scheme/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/06/08/bitco... https://prestonbyrne.com/2017/12/08/bitcoin_ponzi/ https://prestonbyrne.com/2017/12/08/bitcoin_ponzi/ https://ic.unicamp.br/~stolfi/bitcoin/2020-12-31-bitcoin-ponzi.html https://ic.unicamp.br/~stolfi/bitcoin/2020-12-31-bitcoin-pon... https://ic.unicamp.br/~stolfi/bitcoin/2021-01-16-yes-ponzi.html https://ic.unicamp.br/~stolfi/bitcoin/2021-01-16-yes-ponzi.h...
- krupan 3y ago
  All crypto is a scam. Bitcoin is not crypto
- krupan 3y ago
  Fine, I clicked and read a couple of those. I like the 3rd one that defines a ponzi scheme: "A Ponzi scheme, or "ponzi" for short, is a type of investment fraud with these five features: 1 People invest into it because they expect good profits, and 2. that expectation is sustained by such profits being paid to those who choose to cash out. However, 3. there is no external source of revenue for those payoffs. Instead, 4. the payoffs come entirely from new investment money, while 5. the operators take away a large portion of this money." This is great because points 3 and 5 are trivially proved false for Bitcoin and shows that is no more a ponzi scheme than stocks or real estate or any other common investment. Thank you for the insight.
  - krupan 3y ago
    UPDATE: you also have to love this amazing piece of either ignorance or straight up lying in the later part of the article: "By that definition the USD is a ponzi. No, national currencies too fail to fit the definition, because people do not 'invest' in them with the expectation of gain..."
  - djaro 3y ago
    Really? What external payoff is there for Bitcoin, besides other people investing in Bitcoin? And gas fees means a large portion of money goes towards the "operators" (miners) of the network.
    - krupan 3y ago
      In the article the author claims stocks have an "external" pay off because stock is tied to a company that sells products and if the company does well they might pay shareholders dividends or do a stock buyback. I can accept that a dividend is an "external" source of income, but those are not guaranteed in the stock market by any means. Most people buy stock in hopes that the price will rise due to simple supply and demand (a company buyback is just more demand). If that counts as external then Bitcoin should be covered too, especially since the overall supply of Bitcoin is guaranteed not to rise over a set amount. That's not the case with any other investment in the world (except maybe real estate, depending on how you look at it) Bitcoin miners do collect rewards and fees (but not "gas" because that's an ethereum thing not a Bitcoin thing) and Miners are a key part of the operation of Bitcoin, but they are not "the operators" of Bitcoin in the same sense that Bernie Madoff was the operator of his fund. Anyone who wants to can become a miner, no permission necessary. Miners do not actively direct the activity of Bitcoin, they cannot change the rules (especially about how much revenue they collect), allow or disallow certain people from participating (and stay profitable), or anything like that. There are other cryptocurrencies (most of them actually) where the developers of the currency act a lot more like Bernie Madoff type operators. They own a vast majority of the tokens and the source code that runs the network and they make executive decisions about operations, supply of tokens, protocol (code) changes, etc. That is why those of us who have been around a while point out that Bitcoin is the only one that is not a scam.
- trotsky666 3y ago
  We as in "Socialist Party of America"? I did not have a chance to contribute to this "discussion". What happens when this unbanking is practiced en-masse or when the US defaults on its foreign debt, with USD failing as the global reserve currency? The second one is imminent, and not only in my opinion.
  - genewitch 3y ago
    That second one had better happen before 2030, because after that the US and one south american country being the only nations with net positive birth rates - and therefore populations that aren't aging out of productive work - coupled with the fact that it will take the rest of the world a couple of centuries to catch up to our military, means that the U.S. just needs to not be stupid for another 6 years or so. So really, it probably is imminent; what with fighting 2 (and maybe up to 5 or 6) proxy wars and letting corporations continue to erode the tax law and environment to the detriment of the average taxpayer. I was told the US was the greatest country in the history of countries and i should be proud i was accidentally born here...
    - trotsky666 3y ago
      That net positive birth rate will mostly come from the part of the population that is hardly capable of modern competitive productive work. They will be increasingly appeased with hand-outs, in the form of basic income, welfare and especially of make-work, which will put further pressure on the US dollar.
    - EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 3y ago
      >> I was told the US was the greatest country in the history of countries and i should be proud i was accidentally born here... If you think you were lied to, you obviously have not lived in other countries. As shitty as America is, most of the the world is far worse ...
- Beijinger 3y ago
  Paul Krugman, a Nobel Prize winner, does not talk well about Bitcoin: https://www.investopedia.com/news/what-paul-krugmans-problem-bitcoin/ https://www.investopedia.com/news/what-paul-krugmans-problem... He also said: " the Internet's Effect on the World Economy Would Be 'No Greater Than the Fax Machines" I consider Krugeman a clear contra indicator. Bitcon long... :-)
- x-complexity 3y ago
  > https://ic.unicamp.br/~stolfi/bitcoin/2020-12-31-bitcoin-ponzi.html https://ic.unicamp.br/~stolfi/bitcoin/2020-12-31-bitcoin-pon... > https://ic.unicamp.br/~stolfi/bitcoin/2021-01-16-yes-ponzi.html https://ic.unicamp.br/~stolfi/bitcoin/2021-01-16-yes-ponzi.h... (The following comment is a copy of what I've already said here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36951404 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36951404 ) Points 3, 4, & 5 apply similarly to any investments made in commodities (gold, silver, copper). A direct source of revenue for those commodities themselves is not provided: There are no dividends being paid out just because I hold 1 kg of gold in a safe. Instead, the people that want to use that gold for other purposes is what provides revenue. Point 1 & 2 can similarly be demanded from commodities as well. The only difference being is that the public market is where I can cash out my 1kg of gold to. > By that definition, gold too is a ponzi. No, gold clearly fails to satisfy that definition on two counts. > First, few if any gold investors have expectations of profits. They generally invest in gold as a hedge -- a "store of value" -- that they hope will retain its value in case other assets go sour. There is no difference between the expectation of profits & stores of value: They're facets of the same diamond - Value. The pursuit of one is a masked notion of the other & vice versa - Expectations of profit are a consequence of wanting to retain & accumulate resources against the eroding forces of inflation & entropy in general, & a desire for stores of value is of similar expectation that the overall value grows faster than the eroding forces themselves. > Second, as a commodity, gold HAS a source of revenue besides the investors; namely, the purchases by consumers like jewelers and industry, who take gold out of the market (2/3 of the production) for uses other than re-sale. When one buys 1 oz of gold, one gets a chip of a metal that one can sell to those consumers, and thus obtain some money that does not come from other investors. Again, as stated above, the gold itself doesn't have inherent value: It's value comes from what can be done with it after being transformed/used for something else. Similarly, digital services have already been shown to be commodifiable via AWS' EC2 Spot Instances & their fluctuating prices as demand changes. https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/spot/pricing/ https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/spot/pricing/ The consequence of this logic is that in the long term, such compute can eventually be accessed by anyone from anyone willing to sell it via public markets. HOWEVER, such a public market was not yet feasible due to the possibility of such computations not actually being done & fraudulently being reported as such. The stopgap between that future is what we have now: Centralized companies selling compute under trust-based assumptions that do currently work, but that present significant problems related to control over said compute. The technology was not there yet, but it's being launched now. EVM-based & Turing-complete VMs in general will generally be made more verifiable with the rollout & integrations of ZK (0-knowledge) proving systems into said VMs. When such computations can be verified to have been genuinely computed within 1/2^n (n >= 64) of an error rate, the addition of a public market to make such compute sellable to people that want said compute is the next logical step, to which Ethereum, its L2 solutions (zkSync, Polygon zkEVM, Optimism, Arbitrum, etc.), & all Lx (x > 2) markets that will come in the future, have already & will provide.
e44858 3y ago
Do anti-money-laundering laws apply to BitCoin? It would have the same problem because exchanges could share blacklists of high-risk wallet addresses.

by cft 3y ago

Eventually more and more use cases for Bitcoin will emerge, as the government becomes less competent and more reckless with its fiat. It costs $35,000 for a reason.

chx 3y ago

We just discussed this on the occasion of SBF being convicted as a fraudster: all crypto is a scam. Them being negative sum games makes them so. Whether the scam is a ponzi, a pyramid scheme or something novel is a matter of debate. That it's a scam is not in debate, that's a plain mathematical fact. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/06/08/bitcoin-isnt-the-future-of-money-its-either-a-ponzi-scheme-or-a-pyramid-scheme/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/06/08/bitco... https://prestonbyrne.com/2017/12/08/bitcoin_ponzi/ https://prestonbyrne.com/2017/12/08/bitcoin_ponzi/ https://ic.unicamp.br/~stolfi/bitcoin/2020-12-31-bitcoin-ponzi.html https://ic.unicamp.br/~stolfi/bitcoin/2020-12-31-bitcoin-pon... https://ic.unicamp.br/~stolfi/bitcoin/2021-01-16-yes-ponzi.html https://ic.unicamp.br/~stolfi/bitcoin/2021-01-16-yes-ponzi.h...

krupan 3y ago
All crypto is a scam. Bitcoin is not crypto
krupan 3y ago
Fine, I clicked and read a couple of those. I like the 3rd one that defines a ponzi scheme: "A Ponzi scheme, or "ponzi" for short, is a type of investment fraud with these five features: 1 People invest into it because they expect good profits, and 2. that expectation is sustained by such profits being paid to those who choose to cash out. However, 3. there is no external source of revenue for those payoffs. Instead, 4. the payoffs come entirely from new investment money, while 5. the operators take away a large portion of this money." This is great because points 3 and 5 are trivially proved false for Bitcoin and shows that is no more a ponzi scheme than stocks or real estate or any other common investment. Thank you for the insight.
- krupan 3y ago
  UPDATE: you also have to love this amazing piece of either ignorance or straight up lying in the later part of the article: "By that definition the USD is a ponzi. No, national currencies too fail to fit the definition, because people do not 'invest' in them with the expectation of gain..."
- djaro 3y ago
  Really? What external payoff is there for Bitcoin, besides other people investing in Bitcoin? And gas fees means a large portion of money goes towards the "operators" (miners) of the network.
  - krupan 3y ago
    In the article the author claims stocks have an "external" pay off because stock is tied to a company that sells products and if the company does well they might pay shareholders dividends or do a stock buyback. I can accept that a dividend is an "external" source of income, but those are not guaranteed in the stock market by any means. Most people buy stock in hopes that the price will rise due to simple supply and demand (a company buyback is just more demand). If that counts as external then Bitcoin should be covered too, especially since the overall supply of Bitcoin is guaranteed not to rise over a set amount. That's not the case with any other investment in the world (except maybe real estate, depending on how you look at it) Bitcoin miners do collect rewards and fees (but not "gas" because that's an ethereum thing not a Bitcoin thing) and Miners are a key part of the operation of Bitcoin, but they are not "the operators" of Bitcoin in the same sense that Bernie Madoff was the operator of his fund. Anyone who wants to can become a miner, no permission necessary. Miners do not actively direct the activity of Bitcoin, they cannot change the rules (especially about how much revenue they collect), allow or disallow certain people from participating (and stay profitable), or anything like that. There are other cryptocurrencies (most of them actually) where the developers of the currency act a lot more like Bernie Madoff type operators. They own a vast majority of the tokens and the source code that runs the network and they make executive decisions about operations, supply of tokens, protocol (code) changes, etc. That is why those of us who have been around a while point out that Bitcoin is the only one that is not a scam.
trotsky666 3y ago
We as in "Socialist Party of America"? I did not have a chance to contribute to this "discussion". What happens when this unbanking is practiced en-masse or when the US defaults on its foreign debt, with USD failing as the global reserve currency? The second one is imminent, and not only in my opinion.
- genewitch 3y ago
  That second one had better happen before 2030, because after that the US and one south american country being the only nations with net positive birth rates - and therefore populations that aren't aging out of productive work - coupled with the fact that it will take the rest of the world a couple of centuries to catch up to our military, means that the U.S. just needs to not be stupid for another 6 years or so. So really, it probably is imminent; what with fighting 2 (and maybe up to 5 or 6) proxy wars and letting corporations continue to erode the tax law and environment to the detriment of the average taxpayer. I was told the US was the greatest country in the history of countries and i should be proud i was accidentally born here...
  - trotsky666 3y ago
    That net positive birth rate will mostly come from the part of the population that is hardly capable of modern competitive productive work. They will be increasingly appeased with hand-outs, in the form of basic income, welfare and especially of make-work, which will put further pressure on the US dollar.
  - EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 3y ago
    >> I was told the US was the greatest country in the history of countries and i should be proud i was accidentally born here... If you think you were lied to, you obviously have not lived in other countries. As shitty as America is, most of the the world is far worse ...
Beijinger 3y ago
Paul Krugman, a Nobel Prize winner, does not talk well about Bitcoin: https://www.investopedia.com/news/what-paul-krugmans-problem-bitcoin/ https://www.investopedia.com/news/what-paul-krugmans-problem... He also said: " the Internet's Effect on the World Economy Would Be 'No Greater Than the Fax Machines" I consider Krugeman a clear contra indicator. Bitcon long... :-)
x-complexity 3y ago
> https://ic.unicamp.br/~stolfi/bitcoin/2020-12-31-bitcoin-ponzi.html https://ic.unicamp.br/~stolfi/bitcoin/2020-12-31-bitcoin-pon... > https://ic.unicamp.br/~stolfi/bitcoin/2021-01-16-yes-ponzi.html https://ic.unicamp.br/~stolfi/bitcoin/2021-01-16-yes-ponzi.h... (The following comment is a copy of what I've already said here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36951404 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36951404 ) Points 3, 4, & 5 apply similarly to any investments made in commodities (gold, silver, copper). A direct source of revenue for those commodities themselves is not provided: There are no dividends being paid out just because I hold 1 kg of gold in a safe. Instead, the people that want to use that gold for other purposes is what provides revenue. Point 1 & 2 can similarly be demanded from commodities as well. The only difference being is that the public market is where I can cash out my 1kg of gold to. > By that definition, gold too is a ponzi. No, gold clearly fails to satisfy that definition on two counts. > First, few if any gold investors have expectations of profits. They generally invest in gold as a hedge -- a "store of value" -- that they hope will retain its value in case other assets go sour. There is no difference between the expectation of profits & stores of value: They're facets of the same diamond - Value. The pursuit of one is a masked notion of the other & vice versa - Expectations of profit are a consequence of wanting to retain & accumulate resources against the eroding forces of inflation & entropy in general, & a desire for stores of value is of similar expectation that the overall value grows faster than the eroding forces themselves. > Second, as a commodity, gold HAS a source of revenue besides the investors; namely, the purchases by consumers like jewelers and industry, who take gold out of the market (2/3 of the production) for uses other than re-sale. When one buys 1 oz of gold, one gets a chip of a metal that one can sell to those consumers, and thus obtain some money that does not come from other investors. Again, as stated above, the gold itself doesn't have inherent value: It's value comes from what can be done with it after being transformed/used for something else. Similarly, digital services have already been shown to be commodifiable via AWS' EC2 Spot Instances & their fluctuating prices as demand changes. https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/spot/pricing/ https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/spot/pricing/ The consequence of this logic is that in the long term, such compute can eventually be accessed by anyone from anyone willing to sell it via public markets. HOWEVER, such a public market was not yet feasible due to the possibility of such computations not actually being done & fraudulently being reported as such. The stopgap between that future is what we have now: Centralized companies selling compute under trust-based assumptions that do currently work, but that present significant problems related to control over said compute. The technology was not there yet, but it's being launched now. EVM-based & Turing-complete VMs in general will generally be made more verifiable with the rollout & integrations of ZK (0-knowledge) proving systems into said VMs. When such computations can be verified to have been genuinely computed within 1/2^n (n >= 64) of an error rate, the addition of a public market to make such compute sellable to people that want said compute is the next logical step, to which Ethereum, its L2 solutions (zkSync, Polygon zkEVM, Optimism, Arbitrum, etc.), & all Lx (x > 2) markets that will come in the future, have already & will provide.

e44858 3y ago

Do anti-money-laundering laws apply to BitCoin? It would have the same problem because exchanges could share blacklists of high-risk wallet addresses.