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I'm old, and I don't get Bitcoin [Cryptocurrency and society].
manwiththemachinegun
METAL GEAR?!Registered User regular
METAL GEAR?!Registered User regular
So Bitcoin and its derivatives are essentially a consumer created form of currency independent of banks. Money, as a unit of trade, has no intrinsic value in it of itself other than what believe it holds. Bitcoin can be traded for other forms of currency, or goods and services by those who accept it. Because it's not tied to a bank or government, it's not subject to the same kinds of regulations. It is "mined" by solving complex math problems, usually via farming computer banks with high quality GPUs. In addtion, Bitcoin is difficult to crack because embedded in the currency itself is a ledger displaying whether or not it has been used. That's how I understand things as a moderate computer user.
It's also made people millionaires overnight. If you had bought $300 worth of bitcoin when it was traded for $1 per coin, that would have been worth 6 million at the heigth of its value (approximately 20k).
So to make a long story short, what implications does this have on the larger economy? Is Bitcoin and its ilk really the wave of the future or just a bubble?
It's also made people millionaires overnight. If you had bought $300 worth of bitcoin when it was traded for $1 per coin, that would have been worth 6 million at the heigth of its value (approximately 20k).
So to make a long story short, what implications does this have on the larger economy? Is Bitcoin and its ilk really the wave of the future or just a bubble?
manwiththemachinegun on
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Wave of the future? Not bitcoin itself, that's for sure. Bitcoin's cap is 7 transactions per second. Compare that to Visa's 24,000. Furthermore, the currency is inherently deflationary by its very nature, which means that you're actively encouraged to NOT use bitcoins as a currency, but rather hold onto them and have them appreciate. It's basically designed to create bubbles so people can try to get in and cash out.
What's more concerning is how much power is being wasted on it.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/12/bitcoins-insane-energy-consumption-explained/
It's fucking stupid.
Bitcoin is now something that's being advertised in phone games with adverts that look like this:
Aren't these two things true for all crypto? Not the exact numbers, but those being the two bottlenecks.
It basically makes the whole thing pants on head stupid right?
Its made people millionaires on paper
is there any evidence of people cashing out to the tune of millions of actual dollars?
It's also the method of choice for ransomware!
PSN/Steam/NNID: SyphonBlue | BNet: SyphonBlue#1126
Even gold isn't as bad. Mining output ebbs and flows but actually gets better over time due to better tech and methods.
The first yes, I think - it can vary depending on the encryption quality, but regardless.
The latter, no. If a cryptocurrency was built where instead of halving the number of coins mined every so often they slowly increase the number in circulation, it would be inflationary. But then it wouldn't be a ponzi scheme where early adopters get a bunch of money :V
Its the main reason gold is no longer a currency!
Millions I don't know.
I do know some folks who got into it before the first spike over $100 and have cashed out for a few thousand, so that's happened.
I also have a friend who lost thousands of dollars when Mt. Gox went down and is eagerly awaiting the court case/bankruptcy resolution so he can get in on the inevitable civil case now that the valuation has spiked again. Best case he probably breaks even, though.
e: But the real way any of them made money was buying video cards/ASICs, mining for a while, then reselling the used video cards for more than they were originally purchased for because the market is crazy like that (not a good time to build a computer, by the by).
My feeling is that it is exactly like any bubble: you could have made a lot of money on it if you invested early, but right now, everyone is just waiting for the pop. It might go back up before the end... but you cannot predict that.
Law and Order ≠ Justice
ACNH Island Isla Cero: DA-3082-2045-4142
Still waiting on Dan "Man of his Word" Ryckert to eat a hat
To this day, my opinion of Bitcoin itself is summed up by one card from the Android: Netrunner card game, printed in 2013.
http://www.beepboopbitcoin.com/
No, neither of those things are necessarily true for all cryptocurrencies.
All cryptocurrencies have a maximum realistic transaction rate, but what that specific rate is for the currency is a result of design decisions that went into that currency.
Really, the transaction limit in Bitcoin is a political problem as much as it is a technological one. Imagine every silly nerd argument you've ever heard about the strengths and weakenesses of a programming language or an operating system: spaces vs tabs in programming, whitespace matters in Python vs whitespace-doesnt-matter like in Java, Mac vs Windows, whether to run adblockers or not... Literally every design change that could be made to the Bitcoin design to accelerate transactions is mired in a similar nerdy holy war.
The terrifying silent submarines they are housed in certainly are.
The dollar isn't backed by gold anymore. So the only thing backing it is I guess that the US government will accept it for payments.
and the millions of Americans who go to work everyday earn dollars and pay taxes in them. And our entire military and civil apparatus that makes that changing anytime soon highly unlikely.
But the long and short of it will be that Bitcoin is a scam and can only be a scam. The equilibrium value of any deflationary currency can take only one of two values, infinity, and zero.
What this means, roughly, is that we know it’s final resting point but it’s going to be a wild ride getting there.
Yep. But a lot of the political impetus behind Bitcoin is motivated by an irrational fear of inflation.
A little bit of inflation is a good thing. There is literally no serious economist who believes that positive inflation is intrinsically bad. But Bitcoin culture is full of people convinced that fiat currency is speeding towards some kind of Weimaresque hyperinflation singularity.
I think my #1 wish for threads like these is that we'd get better at separating the technologies of cryptocurrency and blockchain from the cultural baggage. Obviously those aren't entirely separable, but plenty of technologies have been invented and popularized by people who were douchebags. (Thomas Edison?)
Gold still serves that purpose honestly. When faith in currencies plunge gold future go up as people hedge their bets.
The kicker is that not only does mining Bitcoins do some unspecified computing task for the NSA, but every Bitcoin is traceable because there's a central record of every transaction that occurs using Bitcoin. This is how they actually got Silk Road. There have also been multiple reversions of Bitcoin which have taken people's fake computer money.
If you are stupid and immoral enough to be involved in the criminal enterprise known as BitCoin, be safe. Don't get stabbed over fake computer money by some fedora who posts in r/physicalremoval.
This sort of post is not constructive.
1) nobody knows who Satoshi is or was. There is a lot of reasonable speculation but it's still just that: speculation.
2) "Bitcoin mining helps the NSA" is a conspiracy theory.
3) the silk road was brought down by old-fashioned police work. Auditing the blockchain had nothing to do with it. Unless you're claiming that the official story was just a parallel construction, which while plausible, would also be a conspiracy theory.
Certainly if you believed in a greater fool at the outset you could have made a load of money.
I'm skeptical of the value of crypto but particularly bitcoin. Transaction costs are no longer low, and some exchanges will provide regulators information about transactions.
Also, in many cases we don't know who created the cryptocurrency. Advocates will tell you that you can read the source code and be sure that nothing fishy is going on, but most of us don't have the ability, and who knows what could be hidden in there.
Aside of that there are development teams that make changes. I don't think anyone really knows what they can change, but we do know they can make significant changes to the cryptocurrency. Sure bitcoin might go to 10k or 100k tomorrow, but there is no reason inherently that it will continue to retain value.
The dollar is backed by the stability of the economy of the United States. The stability of the economy is backed by the full faith and credit of the US Government, the productive capital, domestic and foreign, owned by its citizens, a military that secures the ownership of that capital, and the productive labor of its citizens.
You can sell an apple for 1$ today and buy an apple for 1$ tomorrow. You can pay a gardener 20$/hr to take care of your lawn today, and the same price tomorrow.
If you don't want to buy an apple or gardener today, you can buy a US treasury bond. If apples and gardening labor go up in price with inflation in ten years, your treasury bond will probably track close to inflation and you will be able to buy the same amount of apples and gardeners as you could ten years ago.
Who knows what a bitcoin will be worth relative to anything in ten years. It could be worth one apple, it could be worth the entire global economy.
"Orkses never lose a battle. If we win we win, if we die we die fightin so it don't count. If we runs for it we don't die neither, cos we can come back for annuver go, see!".
I’d like some citations that don’t involve three hour YouTube videos or unverified conspiracy blogs for the first two paragraphs.
I think that's a large (if not the main) reason BTC bounces back from its crashes. There's an effective "floor" - even if speculation were to completely cease, there would still be some low but non-zero demand for cryptocurrency. If not Bitcoin, then some other cryptocurrency.
I think the bounce-back is mostly people assuming that since Bitcoin is constantly bouncing up and down, a downward bounce is a good time to get on.
The criminals/dissidents using cryptocurrency as an actual currency aren't enough to keep it sky-high. In fact, they'd probably prefer it stable. If you sell $10,000 worth of heroin in bitcoin and bitcoin instantly slumps, your drug gang is out on the deal.
The speculation fad is exactly why it has very little spending utility. If you had a dollar and thought in a month it would be worth 10 dollars would you be inclined to spend it?
However I'd say were closer than ever to a corporate entity trying to make their own version that isnt decentralized and the government going "lol you fucking what?"
"Orkses never lose a battle. If we win we win, if we die we die fightin so it don't count. If we runs for it we don't die neither, cos we can come back for annuver go, see!".