8 ms·

Context: Bitcoin miners have just adopted a 50% pay cut for themselves. This pay cut was baked into Bitcoin protocol at the launch of the network (mostly, see "

• worik 2y ago
  > speaks volumes to what makes Bitcoin interesting: Yes It is interesting It is not useful It is a huge waste
• phantomathkg 2y ago
  > Nobody can stop it. Hypothetically, government can with severe enough punishment. Governments will do anything to squeeze tax from things, and as long as any digital transfer is not being taxed, it will find way to stop it or squeeze tax out of it.
  • whimsicalism 2y ago
    There are tons of countries with severe capital controls where crypto is thriving.
    • XorNot 2y ago
      There's also an endless stream of very surprised crypenthusiasts who owe large tax bills. The tax department may not get you on any given year, but they will eventually get you.
      • whimsicalism 2y ago
        There are thriving dollar and crypto black markets in Nigeria and Argentina. Government does not appear to be getting them. I am not talking about the irs as you seem to be imagining.
        • nullityrofl 2y ago
          Right but _they_ are talking about the IRS. If the US government wanted to end crypto, they would give it a whole lot better shot than Nigeria and Argentina.
    • smallmancontrov 2y ago
      There are countries that can mount credible attacks by partitioning the largest mining operations and shutting down the largest on/off ramps, and there are countries with severe capital controls where crypto is thriving. The test doesn't enter hard mode until the venn diagram grows an intersection.
    • mbesto 2y ago
      "tons"...which?
  • lanstin 2y ago
    I think many governments could buy enough compute to mine most blocks and not have any transactions in them. If they wanted to. And isn't GenAI attentional deep networks the currently more interesting way to use excess compute now?
    • latchkey 2y ago
      Nope. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ncPyMUfNyVM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ncPyMUfNyVM
• JohnTHaller 2y ago
  It keeps chugging, but it's not terribly useful for a typical person. Close to $20 for a transaction that takes an hour or so to complete is kinda rough.
  • jkoudys 2y ago
    Crypto "currency"
  • dzhiurgis 2y ago
    For a secure long term store of value thats kinda fast and cheap
    • cqqxo4zV46cp 2y ago
      Yeah. Way to move the goalposts from the praises that Bitcoin evangelists historically, and currently, sing though.
    • bpye 2y ago
      It may be technologically secure, but it is still very volatile compared to more traditional options. That doesn’t seem to be a good thing.
  • whimsicalism 2y ago
    yeah the uses will be on the l2s
    • talldayo 2y ago
      ...which themselves are unique projects that might as well separate from the L1 chain entirely if they intend to actually solve the transaction bottleneck issue. Stuff like Lightning is cute on paper, but it really only stands to make you realize how horribly doomed the main currency is conceptually. L2 chains are where I stopped being interested in crypto. It's like reading the plaque of Ozymandias and thinking to yourself "Ah, the desert. What a lovely place to build my next palace."
• deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
• hwbunny 2y ago
  But it's unusable in a warlike scenario. During war there is no internet...
  • cableshaft 2y ago
    Stocks and bonds and commodities and 401ks and CDs aren't useful in that scenario either, but it doesn't stop people from putting most of their money into those.
    • cqqxo4zV46cp 2y ago
      Yes but techno-anarchist fetishists don’t line up to spout the immovable perfection of government-controlled fiat currency.
      • cableshaft 2y ago
        Maybe not techno-anarchists, but there's plenty of people on the internet that are loud and vocal advocates of stocks and 401ks as well (nothing against them, most of my savings are in that myself).
    • kube-system 2y ago
      But they are backed up by SIPC/FDIC which is effectively backed up by the world's most powerful military. The US's financial power is strongly linked with their ability to project military power.
      • cableshaft 2y ago
        When the war has gotten so bad that there's no internet? That's what the parent was arguing (and yeah, sure, bitcoin can't really work that well without the internet). I've got a little precious metal in case of a SHTF situation, although I'm not sure how useful even that would be. People probably care more about food or fuel or maybe some pills than they do about bartering for silver or gold in that situation. Might be able to convince a few people to go for it, but still might be difficult.
• wslh 2y ago
  > Nobody can stop it. Simple answer: yes, they can. For example a state actor or a crazy billionare could spend enough money to launch a 51% attack. Indeed the theoretical attack requires only around 20% of mining power. Also, the next generation of people could choose another blockchain, Bitcoin turns irrelevant because another blockchain surpasses it in the audience.
  • yownie 2y ago
    It would now requires more like a trillion and they would also have to KEEP spending or everyone could just switch chains at point.
    • zooq_ai 2y ago
      Delusional, The cost of energy to carry out 51% attack is a few millions / minute.
      • cdchn 2y ago
        Delusional is also thinking "oh they'd just hard fork and roll back the transactions." And then they just keep doing it over and over again.
  • bufferoverflow 2y ago
    Even if you had the money, there's not enough hardware for sale to get 20% of mining power. Not even 2%. High-end mining hardware (most efficient) is almost always sold out.
    • wslh 2y ago
      State actors could build those ASICs or use proxies.
      • bufferoverflow 2y ago
        It's not that easy. Russia has been trying to build their own competitive chips for decades with no luck. All their attempts lag modern chips by multiple generations. You would need to duplicate TSMC to create enough ASICs.
• hakdbha 2y ago
  [dead]
• michael_vo 2y ago
  As someone who's travelled to about 30 countries in the last 2 years, I used to dismiss until I went to Turkey few months ago. It is the only country I've been to where there are BTC ATMs and signs everywhere. At the Airport there are bitcoin company logos on hangars, and in the terminal. On the streets you see the bitcoin logo everywhere. It's very useful for Turkey as it has 100% inflation yearly and the ATM fees are 10-20% to withdraw money. Apparently (from other travellers), it's very useful for the Russians to withdraw money in Turkey as well.
  • monero-xmr 2y ago
    This has been happening for many years. There is a lot of commerce in Lebanon and Argentina conducted in crypto, usually USDT or USDC (dollar-backed stablecoins). At this point to argue crypto has no utility with a straight face is just being willfully blind.
    • aforwardslash 2y ago
      "commerce". There is a reason why its performed in cryptocurrencies
    • antoniuschan99 2y ago
      How does that work? It seems to make a lot of sense in Lebanon as they were freezing or only allowing $150 a month withdrawals. Do people really self custody their funds? When they need local currency they just go to the bitcoin atm’s to withdraw? Also fees would be somewhat high so do they use something Monero?
  • Arainach 2y ago
    >it's very useful for the Russians to withdraw money in Turkey as well. "This product makes it easy to illegally bypass international sanctions" is not the compliment you think it is.
    • trappist 2y ago
      Do you think that the world is a better place if ordinary Russians can't access their own money?
• shuckles 2y ago
  > It's a rare combination of economic incentives and technology that keeps chugging. Nobody can stop it. About as rare as email spam? Or SEO content farms? There's a lot of phenomenon that are hard to control in a distributed network; Internet Protocol was designed for exactly this.
  • nailer 2y ago
    Oddly enough if email had adopted proof of work (spam was the original incentive for PoW, originally called ‘hashcash’) spam would be less of a problem
    • tromp 2y ago
      The notion of PoW predates hashcash. Hashcash is just the simplest PoW algorithm. There are PoW that work entirely differently from Hashcash, such as finding fixed length cycles in random bipartite graphs.
  • jMyles 2y ago
    > About as rare as email spam? This strikes me as a defective comparison: are there people who are trying to receive email spam, but are unable to do so due to international borders? The health of the internet in resisting censorship is well-documented, as you point out - and it has ramifications both desirable and otherwise. The innovation of blockchain tech is that it adds a mechanism for transmitting value in this censorship-resistant environment.
    • shuckles 2y ago
      People circumvent currency controls and financial regulation over the internet with gift cards, airline miles, WoW gold farms, and more. Bitcoin's notable quality is not technology; it's the social psychology which drew enough speculation that it covered for laundering black market financial transactions at unprecedented scale. Some of that illegal volume might be sympathetic oppressed citizens; my guess is the vast majority is old fashioned crime and terrorism. Notably, there is nothing technically notable about Bitcoin's censorship resistance. It's no more resistant than the internet itself. What's notable is the scale and efficiency at which it attracts clean money to wash dirty money, and none of that is about Proof of Work or Merkle DAGs. The argument I was responding to falls apart when you notice that The Pirate Bay, Libgen, and Scihub are all extremely resilient despite lacking all the Game Theory gobbledygook which BTC adds.
• zooq_ai 2y ago
  Governments, Big Corps can easily co-ordinate a 51% attack on any proof-of-work networks. If BTC's marketcap is $1T and it'll only take $5B for a 51% attack, there can be some arbitrage opportunity for a large hedge fund determined enough. The only thing preventing this is the attacker must execute this flawlessly including attacking all the forks that may happen.
  • monero-xmr 2y ago
    The problem is the government has to acquire the hardware. There isn’t 51% of the hash power in spare mining equipment lying around. It’s all decentralized.
    • zooq_ai 2y ago
      Ummm really?, is that your counter-argument for governments that have Trillions in their budget?
      • monero-xmr 2y ago
        The US government could spend trillions to surreptitiously manufacture extremely specialized equipment without anyone knowing, turn it on to do a 51% attack, and when it’s over the network will just fork and reverse the transactions. It’s illogical
        • nullityrofl 2y ago
          I think it's fair to say that western cryptologic agencies could likely repurpose hardware, perhaps to a degree unknown in the public space.
        • zooq_ai 2y ago
          delusional to think, the western governments can't attack the forked version too. Also, who decides which transactions to reverse? and why would an entity with 51% power agree to that? No one in crypto has thought through this
• bytearray 2y ago
  What happens when the last coin is mined and there's no incentive for people to run the network of computers that validates transactions? It seems like at that point the value would go to zero.
  • foldor 2y ago
    Miners would still collect transaction fees.
    • spenvo 2y ago
      This is the inevitable outcome. And yet it is (extremely) improbable that individuals will pay many many billions of dollars/year to move money around (which is what it takes to secure the network). The only way the network's security does not collapse is if bitcoin's value goes up faster than it declines over time (50% every four years (the halving)). No one does the basic napkin math on this and it drives me nuts. Unless the code changes, Bitcoin inevitably fails.
      • brokenmachine 2y ago
        So some miners would decide to not mine anymore, and the difficulty would automatically lower?
      • longdustytrail 2y ago
        [dead]
      • nostrademons 2y ago
        The financial industry is 20% of US GDP, and its sole purpose is "moving money around" (including forward in time, which Bitcoin isn't all that good at, but Ethereum is pretty effective for). That's about $5T that people pay.
      • mrb 2y ago
        "And yet it is (extremely) improbable that individuals will pay many many billions of dollars/year" And yet it is happening right now ! You should have looked at the data to see what fees are being paid :-) Looking at the average over the last 10 days: bitcoin users have been paying about 1 BTC in fees per block, so 6 BTC of fees per hour, or $8M per day, or $3B per year (yes, billion with a B): https://www.blockchain.com/explorer/charts/transaction-fees-usd https://www.blockchain.com/explorer/charts/transaction-fees-... I can't locate a source that calculates exact fees spent over the last 12 months, but per the chart above it seems to be around $1B per year.
• hn_throwaway_99 2y ago
  > Context: Bitcoin miners have just adopted a 50% pay cut for themselves. I fully understand what "the havening" is, and this statement is grossly misleading. Yes, the mining rewards for each block were cut in half. That does not mean "miners have just adopted a 50% pay cut for themselves". A lower block reward means some combination of (a) transaction fees will go up, (b) mining competition goes down because it doesn't make as much sense to spend electricity on a smaller reward and (c) the overall deflationary economics built into Bitcoin mean while the rewards are nominally less, they are worth more.
• deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
• throw0101c 2y ago
  > It's a rare combination of economic incentives and technology that keeps chugging. The "economic incentive" is a deflationary currency that rewards hoarding.
• matvore 2y ago
  > Context: Bitcoin miners have just adopted a 50% pay cut for themselves. Miners don't decide the consensus rules. The nodes validate blocks, and the miners generate them. The halvening timing was coded a long time ago, and in order to change it, the nodes would need to adopt the new code by installing updated clients, and at that point, you have a hard fork, because there will be nodes on the old rules, either accidentally through not updating or intentionally through using a modified core distro, and you have the new rules' valid blocks is a disjoint set from the old rules'. The new rules' block set being a subset of the old rules' is a strictening of the consensus rules. A strictening consensus scheme is a soft fork and can keep the network in one piece. So, there is no real way for the miners to avoid the halvening without a hardfork and a great risk to the network.