rspeele

26 ms·

211.
by rspeele 5y ago
The price of bitcoin determines how miners get paid, which determines how much energy they can (and rationally should) spend on mining. This news appears to have spiked the price of Bitcoin. Presumably, if El Salvador actually implements th
212.
by rspeele 5y ago
After reading the "Summary" of that patent twice, I believe you patented everything that ever is, has been, or will be done on a computer in 2016.
213.
by rspeele 5y ago
The level of "you don't need that!" judgement is weird. I guess it's just a matter of degree though. Here in the southeast US if somebody drives a pickup instead of a sedan or minivan or whatever, it doesn't registe
214.
by rspeele 5y ago
I think it's a clever point, but it falls flat for me on closer inspection because: #1: The whole point of preserving the environment is to keep it inhabitable for humans. Fueling humans is non-negotiable up to at least a baseline leve
215.
by rspeele 5y ago
People buy Bitcoin expecting that holding onto it for a few years will vastly increase their purchasing power. "lambo", "to the moon", etc. People are starry eyed over the 1000x return they could have made if they boug
216.
by rspeele 5y ago
I agree that miners don't have control if the social consensus goes against them I think the exchanges have the most power, given the current state of the network where very, very few businesses will directly exchange goods and service
217.
by rspeele 5y ago
I see this in the Bitcoin community too. Lots of people say "I'll never sell my Bitcoin for dollars. I'll use it once it becomes the world's reserve currency." But selling, and trading for goods, are equivalent.
218.
by rspeele 5y ago
If smoking is so bad for you, how come the government has to tax cigarettes and put warning labels on them?
219.
by rspeele 5y ago
> I don't see how an exchange is making money unless it charges ++% pr. transaction As far as I know, they all do. An exchange's users foot the bill (plus a premium) for on-chain transaction fees if they want to withdraw their
220.
by rspeele 5y ago
> Aren't transfers in and out of wallets basically free? For Bitcoin, not even close. Median fee is $10 now. Several days ago it was as high as $25. The mean is much higher, roughly double the median at any given time.
221.
by rspeele 5y ago
If the dollar inflates to hell, I wouldn't lose much. I'd still have my skills, to work for a living. I'd still have my house, my car, my workshop, my tools, my computers, etc. Unless it's a total collapse I'll stil
222.
by rspeele 5y ago
Oh, I understand that accidentally exposing my private key is a problem in my system, too. It's definitely not an advantage of my public/private key example, over NFTs. What I don't get is what the advantage is in the other
223.
by rspeele 5y ago
It's not quite universal to say inflation robs from the poor. Some poor people like your fixed-income grandma example are hit hard by inflation. Some are hardly affected since they live paycheck to paycheck and don't keep savings.
224.
by rspeele 5y ago
> - immune to spoilage: bitcoin can’t dissolve in water like salt (a previous form of money) and is quite robust, and can be backed up! I presume that in societies that used salt as money, anybody who lost it to "spoilage" was
225.
by rspeele 5y ago
> The easiest non-hype example I can think of right now is identity. If you literally own your identity then you're in control. Can you explain what you mean by this? I can understand using public/private key cryptography for i
226.
by rspeele 6y ago
Yep, just with a stuxnet level of sophistication.
227.
by rspeele 6y ago
Just as a fun hypothetical to think about... an effective way to crack down on cryptocurrencies would be to do it under the table. Don't make any official policy about crypto other than recommending that US citizens don't invest i
228.
by rspeele 6y ago
While I agree that there can be pitfalls to parsing, most of the time it isn't as bad as this. The "test" or "[" program has a unique challenge in that it never gets to see the quotation marks or variable references
229.
by rspeele 6y ago
Wow, thanks for that glimpse into the past. Really fascinating how it always sounds the same "if it's a scam how come I've been making money" and "they've been doing this for 9 years so if it was a scam it woul
230.
by rspeele 6y ago
But the security is still good enough, right? As long as the mining expenditure exceeds the potential illicit rewards of a double-spend, it's not profitable to out-mine the network just to be able to double-spend. So the security of bi
231.
by rspeele 6y ago
Why was trust worth 12.5 BTC every 10 minutes at the beginning of May 11 2020, but only worth 6.25 BTC every 10 minutes by the end of the day? How did trust get instantly cheaper without causing a disaster? Was Bitcoin paying too much for t
232.
by rspeele 6y ago
True, but if I've got a lot of ETH, is there anything stopping me from buying/minting a cheap NFT and then wash trading it between wallets I own for seemingly large sums of money -- all of which is actually staying within my posse
233.
by rspeele 6y ago
Sorry, I didn't intend to sound condescending, though I see how I did. I was responding to your "I do not follow...". I suspect mining expenditure would still be mostly spent on energy usage, not finding more efficient hardwa
234.
by rspeele 6y ago
Let me see if I can help you. One of Bitcoin's biggest selling points is that there is a limited supply of it. For it to be the world's reserve currency, each 1 BTC would represent a stunning amount of actual wealth. You can find
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by rspeele 6y ago
So it's kind of like the Year of Linux On The Desktop?
236.
by rspeele 6y ago
"Bitcoin will end wars" has got to be the weirdest take I've encountered, but this isn't the first time I've seen it. Does anybody really believe this? Wars have been fought since the first time a human picked up a
237.
by rspeele 6y ago
If "another layer" means in centralized exchanges by day traders, that's probably true. If "another layer" means lightning network, I doubt it.
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by rspeele 6y ago
Sorry for yanking your chain. I tried to be absurd enough in my initial post to make it clear. When that failed, my reaction was to add more absurdity. It's not the first time this has failed. I should have known better when imitating
239.
by rspeele 6y ago
It's the law of supply and expand. Any object is worth approximately (all the world's wealth) / (number of that object in existence). This guarantees Bitcoin will always have value since supply is limited to 21 million. It&#x
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by rspeele 6y ago
Yes, but because it's centralized, there can be more USD printed and that's how destabilization works. Let me give you an example. Chuck E. Cheese tokens are hardly worth anything. They're a terrible store of value. Why is th

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