> The reality is that if you scaled up the bitcoin system linearly so it provided as much transaction capacity as Visa... it would require a number of times more power than the entire world produces
Scaling Bitcoin's tps does not increase its energy usage. The tps and energy usage vary independently of each other. Bitcoin does not require any more energy usage to handle more tps than Visa. In fact, if we include off-chain transactions which are settled on-chain it already can.
> The US Army protects the US not the dollar
What is the value of the dollar if the United States ceases to remain a sovereign polity? The dollar is part of the United States.
I disagree- I have many of the same questions this person is asking. And like them, I haven't seen answers that really address the questions.
To add another voice: I "get" Bitcoin- I've owned some myself since 2014. I have never been able to "get" Ethereum. Its proponents always talk about "smart contracts" and the like, and how powerful the language is and all of that. Can you provide a real-world, actual example of how this has been used? Something to help it "click" for me?
The actual difference is that Bitcoin has problems with lacking incentives for developing the software. Ethereum has much more development happening because they were able to create useful social norms around funding the research & development of new products. The current capabilities of the two platforms and how they compare right now are secondary.
I challenge you read his various responses. To me they read as a person who is totally anti-crypto and trying to egg people on with borderline troll comments, not someone interested in changing their mind. Hence why many were flagged.
Crypto is easy to transfer and keep and has more lasting value in countries that are facing hyperinflation, often moreso than USD. This particularly applies to Venezuela, which is exerting extra pressures and taxes in foreign currencies.
Venezuelan here, to scape from inflation I buy USD. I dont need anything else other than that green bill or a zelle transfer. Bitcoin is pretty much useless in venezuela and the few people who uses it, also uses it to buy "cheaper" currency exchange of VES/USD since its literally just a bunch of corrupts and drugdealers trying to wash their USD so you usually get more VES per 1USD/BTC than per 1 USD
PS: bitcoin holder since 2014, so im not here with anti crypto propaganda
PS2: i find it weird that noone here talks about USDT
I'm an American living in Europe. My money is in the US banking system and in crypto.
There's no easy way for me to "Venmo" money to my friends here, I'd have to use an international bank transfer which would take over a week and cost high fees.
But with my friends in crypto: I can just transfer them Dai. It takes about 15 seconds and costs less than a dollar (and will get cheaper with things like Eth2)
And what about the costs of then converting eth for each person to a useable currency? What if you were to make a mistake and send money to the wrong person? What if someone hacks into whereever you are storing your eth and you lose them?
I mean I get what you are saying, but you just leave out all the pesky little details which at the end of the day are very important and why there are costs associated to banking.
1. with crypto you go on dark net and pay some people to drop illegal chemical substances somewhere and message GPS coordinates of that drop place to you
2. you can break into computer network of large company, encrypt their data with ransomware and get ransom in crypto
> But I don't think you should go around telling people that a keto diet will cure them of their psychosis
They didn't say this. They described their own experience. Read their message again. You are, in fact, criticising the post for something not written in it.
> People should make their medical decisions based on consultation with their doctors or other medical professionals
This is exactly what the user described as their experience.
If you, god forbid, ever have a life-destroying ailment and discover a shockingly effective treatment for it, please tell many people what happened for you just as the user above is doing.
>If you, god forbid, ever have a life-destroying ailment and discover a shockingly effective treatment for it, please tell many people what happened for you just as the user above is doing.
this idea of espousing effective cures loses a lot of steam when the patient in question was cured by psychic healing, quartz crystals, or energy projection.
That's why there should exist a level of self-moderation with regards to cure cheerleading; did the psychic crystal surgery remove the cancer, or did your body make a natural recovery? Many would be inclined to believe that the crystal made the difference, and that's a dangerous public opinion.
I believe there was a movement to change the name to compassionate communication, maybe even led by Rosenberg himself, but I don’t think it has had as much traction as NVC.
I don't really see how protection against invasion helps you maintain a fiat currency. I don't think an army is either necessary or sufficient. These just seem like two different issues.
You're shifting the goalposts. Lack of protection against invasion doesn't mean you're going to get invaded. Maintaining a standing army isn't protection against invasion either.
Do you agree that if a nation is successfully invaded its currency will lose its integrity?
Do you agree that defense against invasion requires an adequate military or agreements with nations with adequate militaries?
If we agree on those two claims, it seems we must agree that militarily robust sovereignty is necessary but not sufficient for the integrity of a fiat currency.
> It moves it into trusting the protocol design, trusting the implementation of the clients, trusting your local hardware and OS to not be compromised
These are not central parties and they present risks with anything one does with a computer on a network.
> what to do if a transaction goes badly. In the cryptocurrency case, for the most part you're SOL, because cryptocurrencies by design don't allow anyone to e.g. void a transaction.
Transaction finality is a feature not a bug. Whatever conveniences that are enjoyed int traditional banking can be implemented in a layer on top of the base protocol.
> These are not central parties and they present risks with anything one does with a computer on a network.
If someone compromises my OS and steals my credit card details, the bank sends me a new card and handles the fraudulent charges on my behalf. I'm not out any money
If someone compromises my OS and steals my bitcoin private key, they can drain my entire wallet and I've lost everything, and have zero recourse.
If I'm a merchant and someone uses a stolen or cloned credit card, or simply performs a charge-back, they get my goods for free and I have basically zero recourse.
If I'm a merchant and someone pays me with bitcoin, I'm not out any money regardless, nor do I have to expend time/money/legal resources to ensure I keep that payment.
These are two claims popular with proponents of competing cryptocurrencies and contentious scaling roadmaps that have been rejected by the developer community. The claims have been refuted and generally aren't taken seriously.
"The root problem with conventional currency is all the trust that's required to make it work. The central bank must be trusted not to debase the currency, but the history of fiat currencies is full of breaches of that trust. Banks must be trusted to hold our money and transfer it electronically, but they lend it out in waves of credit bubbles with barely a fraction in reserve. We have to trust them with our privacy, trust them not to let identity thieves drain our accounts. Their massive overhead costs make micropayments impossible."
Most agree that Bitcoin privacy is currently unsatisfactory. If it is not improved it should not be adopted generally. Legal recourse and low-cost transactions are layered onto the base protocol.
The inventor was trivially wrong, though. This was all born out of looking at a complex system, failing to understand it, declaring you've got a better idea, then learning over the course of a decade why the current system exists and that in fact you did not have a better idea.
(1) Trust is not a problem, it's a huge optimization. The sheer power consumption of cryptocurrencies is hard, demonstrable proof that trust is an efficiency.
(2) Debasing money (aka inflation) is a feature. It's a regular haircut for unproductive capital, and is, as designed, completely irrelevant to people who invest their capital. Even in most people's biggest investment, their own homes.
(3) Banks are trusted and regulated. Exchanges are totally unrelated fly-by-night banks set up because being your own bank sucks. This is not an improvement.
(4) Fractional reserve lending is fine because the FDIC guarantees the funds in the event of a run. This is a further efficiency, allowing the economy to move faster with freer access to capital.
(5) Identity thieves draining your account at a traditional bank has recourse. As we've seen in crypto, that's where this is a real risk - you've got nobody to hold accountable.
(6) Micropayments aren't something people want as it turns out.
> (1) Trust is not a problem, it's a huge optimization. The sheer power consumption of cryptocurrencies is hard, demonstrable proof that trust is an efficiency.
This is a conflation. Trust can certainly be a problem, and the demonstrable proof is the 2008 bubble and any other historical bubble with similar features.
> (3) Banks are trusted and regulated.
Again, until they're not or they collude. This isn't slippery slope stuff, this has actually happened in the recent past.
> (4) Fractional reserve lending is fine because the FDIC guarantees the funds in the event of a run.
It's difficult to judge whether this is true because as far as I know it's never been put to the test. Historically, banks aren't great at guaranteeing funds during a run no matter what they say (Great Depression).
The majority of your arguments centre around efficiency over trust (i.e. you trust in the system enough that efficiency has become your only concern when it comes to transacting with value). For most day-to-day operations you're probably in the right here. The problem is when you're wrong (and there are always these events in economic history where the "system" fails) then you're really wrong.
Well cryptocurrencies do solve those specific issues, i.e. the ones inherent to centralised, government-backed financial systems. Of course, as you say, they introduce a raft of their own issues to deal with, but this would be a separate set that I imagine (in a reasonable economic system) would be hedged against by using our pre-existing financial system, and vice versa.
Good points, but I would argue that micropayments would be great if they required micro effort and no overhead. They would transform the ability of non profits to fundraise.
It's a tempting premise, though my counterargument is decision paralysis. Making any decision has some amount of fixed overhead in the human mind and eventually you just don't want to deal with making a decision - period - no matter how small. This is why Netflix/Spotify/Apple Music is so popular; you may well save money buying/renting via iTunes but you just don't want to deal with it.
Micropayments can exist, as simple ledger entries. You pre-load a, for instance, PayPal account then PayPal can allocate pennies or fractions of pennies on your behalf. There's no technical mystery. It feels like this hasn't been done due to lack of desire for it rather than any inability to execute.
It feels like this hasn't been done due
to lack of desire for it rather than
any inability to execute.
I always assumed it was three reasons:
1. A chicken-and-egg problem, where users don't join micropayment platforms because they don't have major content producers, and content producers don't join platforms because they don't have users.
2. There are actually a bunch of different visions for micropayments (articles costing $0.50 vs $0.05 vs $0.005 vs $0.0005; voluntary vs paywalls; drm-free vs drm; ad-free vs ads vs ad-blockers; articles vs music vs video; automatic vs manual payment vs automatic-with-refunds; quality professional journalism vs anyone can take part; free speech vs not funding hate groups....) and as your product vision becomes clearer, more and more stakeholders notice your vision isn't quite their vision.
3. If you're making a stored-value account in my country there's a bunch of regulation due to a history of scams. Presumably you would have to comply with regulations in every country you operate in, which would be nontrivial.
If you look at a country like Sweden, which is pretty much cashless, we can see that electronic micropayments are indeed transforming a society, but it can also be shown that this is actually not an ideal situation. There was an article on this very site a few days ago discussing this.
The problem with micropayments is microfraud, which can be scaled up to large amounts. It's bad enough with ad click fraud already, and that's a semi-closed system.
> (1) Trust is not a problem, it's a huge optimization.
This feels like a response to a straw man, or at the very least an uncharitable interpretation of pro-cryptocurrency views. The problem cryptocurrencies intend to solve isn’t that trust is bad, but rather that in the real world you are effectively forced to trust a single entity or a small group of entities. I don’t think any cryptocurrency advocate claims that cryptocurrency is great because there’s no need to trust the parties on the other end of your transactions.
"Forcing" a trusted party into the exchange is the optimization, and it only works because everyone does it. This is like pre-existing conditions. You only get coverage for them if everyone agrees to be covered all the time in the first place. As soon as one entity opts out and you have to build a system to accommodate it, the efficiency is rendered void/unworkable.
Your optional-trust model is effectively what we have now, with bitcoin + exchanges. You can opt to trust an exchange, and yes, that does reduce load on the network, however the network is still wildly inefficient because it needs to also support the use case of zero-trust transactions. Traditional banking is an exchanges-mandatory system, which is why it's so much more efficient.
NOTE: This is not an equivocation of the wild-west unregulated crazy-town exchanges of the crypto space and real banks, just the roles they play in their respective systems.
I don’t see how it is comparable to preexisting conditions. Two people using one payment system does not prevent two other people from using some other payment system.
We already have limited options with different features regarding fraud/chargebacks, like paying for something with cash versus with a credit card. Clearly both cash and credit cards can exist together.
I was attempting to make the analogy that a system designed to support both untrusted peer to peer payments and exchanges must support the lowest common denominator, the peer to peer untrusted payment which forces huge inefficiency into the system.
Similarly a health care system designed to support people with and without preexisting conditions must be designed to support the lowest common denominator, those without cover, which forces huge inefficiency into the system.
Maybe a poor analogy.
Cash and credit aren’t really analogous to exchange and peer-to-peer as in crypto the former is built on top of the latter. Credit isn’t built on top of cash in the same way, as a trusted intermediary abstracts the two concepts. To some extent they’re both eventually built on top of ACH.
>>"Forcing" a trusted party into the exchange is the optimization, and it only works because everyone does it.
The point you're skipping over is that there are network effects in the role of trusted third party, leading to monopolies/oligopolies, which can extract artificially high fees.
This is where distributed consensus has an advantage: it can provide the same and even stronger guarantees on the integrity of records, while preventing any third party from using their monopolistic position to extract high fees.
Youve missed the most important usecase. Censorship resistant financial transactions.
If you don't find that useful, then you should consider yourself fortunate and privileged. There are literally billions of people in the world living under authoritarian regimes right now.
Bitcoin doesn't solve that problem; you still have to obtain these tokens by exchanging your authoritarian currency for bitcoin, which can be made illegal very easily.
And yet here we are, living in a world where this isn't happening.
People are using cryptocurrencies, today, in regimes such as Venezuela, and yet your prediction of it being successfully banned, has yet to come to pass.
Really, nobody's using it anywhere, which is why governments haven't tried to stop it. The Venezuela case is the only currency less stable than BTC, but that aside, as a thought experiment consider: where did the BTC in question come from?
(1) If you can't move currency out of the country the whole thing is zero-sum. You're just buying bolivars from one guy and taking his BTC. You're leaving others within the country holding more bags of bolivars. The problem hasn't been solved at all just redistributed.
(2) If you can move money out of the country, you'd have done much better just buying USD and holding onto it, or using it there.
> You're leaving others within the country holding more bags of bolivars. The problem hasn't been solved at all just redistributed.
The success of one's investment has nothing to do with censorship resistant financial transactions. It is irrelevant.
> If you can move money out of the country
You can move crypto of the country with the clip of a button.
Also, you can move it to the other side of the same country, quickly as well.
A financial transaction is an exchange of money, for a good or service. You send money to someone, and they give you a good. Crypto makes the money half of the transaction censorship resistant.
You have to move money to someone else via an exchange locally to buy that can be shutdown on a whim, or you have to move money out of the country to buy, and if you can do that there are myriad better options. Mining is not an option due to cost, and the successful ones get nationalized. I could see the argument in a world where everyone magically got preallocated some amount of Monero but that’s definitely not the world today. Obtaining the bitcoin in the first place is the blocker, not to mention it’s awful “store of value” problem.
People are also using USD, today, in regimes such as Venezuela. Enforcement is terrible and members of the government's inner circle are facilitating USD/Bolivar exchanges outside of the law already.
“Capitalism is the fullest expression of anarchism, and anarchism is the fullest expression of capitalism. Not only are they compatible, but you can't really have one without the other. True anarchism will be capitalism, and true capitalism will be anarchism”
"Anarchism holds the state to be undesirable, unnecessary and harmful."
As private property cannot exist without violence and capitalism cannot exist without the state, some forms of anarchism are incompatible with capitalism.
I'm not an anarchist, just stating some definitions.
Scaling Bitcoin's tps does not increase its energy usage. The tps and energy usage vary independently of each other. Bitcoin does not require any more energy usage to handle more tps than Visa. In fact, if we include off-chain transactions which are settled on-chain it already can.
> The US Army protects the US not the dollar
What is the value of the dollar if the United States ceases to remain a sovereign polity? The dollar is part of the United States.