rspeele

27 ms·

241.
by rspeele 6y ago
It's astounding how these nocoiners refuse to understand Bitcoin is the ONLY asset that is always worth exactly 1 BTC. The rest of the world's unstable goods like gold, fiat currency, real estate, stocks, cars, and even groceries
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by rspeele 6y ago
Do you agree that some things have value in isolation, in addition to their trade or network value? If so, perhaps you can also agree that making that distinction might be useful, at least in certain situations. In particular, the post th
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by rspeele 6y ago
> The point of a currency is to trade it. If you disallow that then you might as well ask about food that I'm not allowed to eat, art I can't look at, or a language I'm not allowed to speak. Yes! You get it. Currencies nor
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by rspeele 6y ago
You know, if you want to just ignore the premise, you could also point out that genies aren't real, magic doesn't work, and heck, even for the physical objects there's no way I could be prevented from reselling my brand new s
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by rspeele 6y ago
I don't know how else to say it. To me it is almost a tautology. In fact I would not even want a currency to have intrinsic value. I want my money to have value, but not intrinsic value. Maybe we have a mixup of definitions. Let me
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by rspeele 6y ago
For the record, I doubt the US will ban bitcoin. But let's imagine what would happen if it did. It wouldn't eliminate access to bitcoin but it would hurt its value quite badly. The demand for heroin and cocaine is driven by intrin
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by rspeele 6y ago
Are you comparing the cost of the entire banking system's existence, to the cost of a single Bitcoin transaction? That seems like a pointless comparison. Or are you dividing the cost of that banking system by the number of transactions
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by rspeele 6y ago
Isn't talking about how good or bad NFTs are in the media a big part of how the market works this stuff out? Like, some people will go buy an NFT because they read an article saying how they're awesome and the future of artwork or
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by rspeele 6y ago
It's possible, I just consider it a more charitable interpretation to assume they're trying to make a buck, than that they're trying to protest in the dumbest way since self-immolation. To be clear, the make-a-buck version of
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by rspeele 6y ago
The solar part, I'm very unconvinced about. If solar becomes 100x cheaper than today's energy sources, but bitcoin mining still pays a large reward, bitcoin miners will just use 100x more energy, right? They're in a race with
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by rspeele 6y ago
Bitcoin definitely has some neat properties. It is interesting having control of your funds being driven purely by your signing keys. That drew me in with some geeky allure as something quite unique. And the scenarios like "crossing a
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by rspeele 6y ago
I mean, we're never going to get a 1:1 comparison, but I'll put it this way: Visa's not-quite-really transferring money is a whole lot more useful than Bitcoin's not-quite-really transferring money. And I'm sure th
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by rspeele 6y ago
Those things are valued for more than their resale price. The only reason I would ever want to hold a Bitcoin is that I trust that somebody else will give me something of value for it in the future. If governments make it very difficult for
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by rspeele 6y ago
Well, a basic element of Bitcoin is that its energy usage per 10 minutes can be calculated roughly as: dollars-per-btc * btc-reward-per-block / kwh-per-dollar The network is paying out $X every 10 minutes to miners. If miners,
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by rspeele 6y ago
This is kind of like the old joke that falling from a great height is perfectly safe, it's only landing that's dangerous.
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by rspeele 6y ago
I mean, you could just as well say Bitcoin isn't actually transferring money, it's just changing whose private keys are able to move a token around. If you define "money" as something you can pay your rent, taxes, and gr
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by rspeele 6y ago
That scenario is so bad, if it happens, the numbers in your computer will not even be in the top 10 things you're worried about.
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by rspeele 6y ago
So when you said "Bitcoin would do just fine if its energy consumption dropped to 2008 levels.", the phrase "do just fine" means "rapidly grow its energy consumption back to present levels"?
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by rspeele 6y ago
Of course not! I thought we were just listing things paid for in dollars. Like "the US military which backs the dollar, and the other armies which compete with it". The armies of the world ain't going away either. Nor banks.
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by rspeele 6y ago
Um, if it was at 2008 levels, wouldn't somebody do a 51% attack?
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by rspeele 6y ago
And don't forget: - space exploration - streaming videos - grocery stores - cars - shipping containers full of fidget spinners - building and maintaining zoos - giant casinos in Las Vegas - hospitals And all the other things associated
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by rspeele 6y ago
I think the political side of it "screwing hedge funds" is a bunch of BS. It's about as real as Bitcoin being for "enabling worldwide payments free from censorship". It's a nice story but the big price swings a
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by rspeele 6y ago
I think we're talking past each other. I'm saying that the reddit-power short squeeze to-the-moon fantasy is a fantasy because the market is composed of many participants and lots of them will choose to sell at a price that's
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by rspeele 6y ago
It's the prisoner's dilemma playing out with millions of participants. Sure, if everybody holds, there's nobody to buy shares from. But it just takes some defectors to sell and take the sure profits leaving the rest as bag-ho
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by rspeele 6y ago
But wouldn't we always want block space to be at least a little bit of a bidding war? After all anything I add to the blockchain is stored permanently and massively georeplicated. Miners don't have to store the full chain, end use
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by rspeele 6y ago
Can you name some that wouldn't have happened if the world ran on Bitcoin?
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by rspeele 6y ago
I didn't downvote you, but I suspect the reason people did is that for gaming, energy usage is a cost and for bitcoin energy usage is the point. They are completely different systems. Bitcoin's energy usage expands more and more a
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by rspeele 6y ago
Mostly the price of jetpack fuel and all the pigs I keep running into during my sky-commute.
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by rspeele 6y ago
What is the correct block size for a PoW cryptocurrency?
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by rspeele 6y ago
There's no way to measure either directly, but I bet Lightning network has been used an order of magnitude more times to handwave Bitcoin's scaling issues in internet discussions, than it has been used to actually transfer money.

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