> Bicycles are nice but have lower capacity for cargo and passengers; mass transit is less flexible. So they aren’t strictly superior.
Mass transit in much of the world is perfectly acceptable. You build cities around transit, walking and biking instead of giant chasms between buildings. This is not a problem that exists in Europe.
You don't have to get rid of all cars, just most of them. And the best way to start is by getting rid of free parking, which is a regressive tax on the poor.
> How else do you propose to have a distributed ledger that is resistant to inflation?
That's not a real problem. You solve it by ignoring it and getting back to things that actually matter.
Again inflation is easy: once you obtain money, purchase assets. So long as wages keep pace with inflation, which they do, this is not an issue. In fact if you purchase your necessities on a credit card the 0% APR until your bill comes due makes inflation work for you.
Exactly, you purchase BTC instead of watching the value of your fiat drop every day. Apps like Celsius offer far superior APY than traditional savings accounts. Also, look at all the institutional BTC purchases near BTC ATH. Are they all wrong?
Literally anything you buy is 100% inflation resistant. Literally. Anything. Shoes, gum, dryer lint, stocks, real estate, crypto. Once you're not in fiat currency the only thing that matters is ROI, not inflation.
Anything offering you 15% APY for "no risk" is a great way for you to go bankrupt because obviously something hasn't been priced in. If the benchmark interest rate is 0% ask yourself why on earth you're getting 15%. If someone offers you something that seems too good to be true it absolutely is.
I'm actually known as quite an optimist when im not dealing with speculative manias :) I would caution you however that such replies aren't in the spirit of site rules. I suspect that is why so many of your comments are flagged and deleted.
I'm sorry you still think it's a speculative mania. Optimists don't go out of their way to put down things that are seemingly useful to others. Just because you don't find it useful doesn't mean it's useless. Bitcoin is a decentralized, non-state asset and the market is valuing it appropriately, and it will continue to do so.
What you seem to be saying is that the market participants are idiots and are in a state of mania, and that you somehow "know better" than them. This is equally bad, maybe HN rules should add this in too, because the condescension is tiresome.
I'm not sure why you felt the need to "caution" me about the way I write my posts on here and point me to the rules, but I'll have you know that the "fake points" I gained were a (large) order of magnitude greater than the "flagged" posts.
Optimists aren’t optimistic about everything haha, there’s very few optimists about global warming or oil consumption. Optimism isn’t blind support of technology no matter what evidence appears. It’s taking early signs and pushing good ideas forward.
Speculative mania doesn’t mean participants are idiots it just means they’re playing musical chairs, and once the music stops whoever’s left without a chair is left with nothing. And yeah some people get swept up through confirmation bias, seeing number go up and convincing themselves there’s something where nothing exists. Those will be the ones most likely left without a chair.
As for “knowing better” I have my theories which I back with evidence.
I’m not into keeping score here just saying net karma of 0 is not the objective per se, I’m pointing out your post was clearly not in the letter or spirit of the site rules, this isn’t Reddit.
It’s been 13 years now and even the most hardcore blockchain enthusiasts have been unable to point to a single measurable concrete thing achieved better with blockchain that a classical solution. Not one and no path in sight. Only number go up and money laundering? 13 years of time from some of the smartest most ambitious and optimistic folks in all of the tech world. And nothing.
This is ill informed and not in the spirit of HN. I don't even want to argue against this because you haven't done the bare minimum in terms of "research", speaking of confirmation bias, have you considered that you may be confirming your own biases by spouting things like "number go up and money laundering"? really? bitcoin is probably the worst way to launder money. You are yet another irrational critic.
>just buy assets
What?
You think like that everyone can JUST buy assets that is preposterous
Moreover and in regards to your arguments no the wages of lots of people do not go up with inflation like have you ever talked to anyone that isn’t in the software industry? Lots of jobs don’t do that and that set of people want to be saved against inflation if inflation is not a problem for you that is one thing but it sure is for a lot of people
> You think like that everyone can JUST buy assets that is preposterous
Who's "everyone" exactly? My comments are broadly speaking applicable to a US audience as I don't have sufficiently deep first-hand knowledge of other markets. If you don't have money, then you don't have anything to invest and it's not really a problem. If you do have money, you shouldn't have any trouble with services like Robinhood, Acorns, Betterment or Wealthfront.
In lower-income countries, a $20 fee may be as much as 10% of GDP per capita, and therefore totally unsuitable.
Do you challenge that assertion?
> Moreover and in regards to your arguments no the wages of lots of people do not go up with inflation like have you ever talked to anyone that isn’t in the software industry?
This is tracked by the BLS. [1]
> Lots of jobs don’t do that and that set of people want to be saved against inflation if inflation is not a problem for you that is one thing but it sure is for a lot of people
Which is why we need meaningful social policy changes, such as a $15 minimum wage and one that's indexed to inflation. Changing the currency to one that doesn't inflate will simply lead to a flat or reduction year over year in nominal wages. What matters isn't the units, it's how much of what they represent that people get to take home.
You need to make social policy changes, not monetary ones to achieve your goal. Your cause is noble but your target is off.
> So long as wages keep pace with inflation, which they do, this is not an issue.
Lots of workers don't get inflation adjustments to their wages. And even if they do, you'll still lose money because a larger share of your income will go to taxes unless the tax brackets are adjusted for inflation very frequently, which they're not.
> Mass transit in much of the world is perfectly acceptable.
Thats a good demonstration of ignoring the interests of everyone who doesn’t share your opinion, but it’s not how representative government is supposed to work.
> That's not a real problem. You solve it by ignoring it and getting back to things that actually matter.
Then you can go back to ignoring bitcoin.
> Again inflation is easy: once you obtain money, purchase assets.
Again, this is not an answer for the problem, and pretending it is just ignores the reality that billions of people live with every day.
> Thats a good demonstration of ignoring the interests of everyone who doesn’t share your opinion, but it’s not how representative government is supposed to work.
No, not really. Democracy relies on the idea of majority rule. Frameworks for ensuring minority rights aren't trampled on are created but for the most part it is in fact the needs of the many that take precedence. That is mass transit, not individual transit.
> Then you can go back to ignoring bitcoin.
I'm actually short CME Bitcoin futures from 56,000, so I'm paying a lot of attention. Don't wanna end up on the wrong side of that one, it's a spicy meatball!
> Again, this is not an answer for the problem, and pretending it is just ignores the reality that billions of people live with every day.
This assertion is completely unfounded. Generally folks who have no money spend all of their income on necessities as they receive it. Folks who have money have access to places to park it.
> Apparently the many disagree with you, and like their cars.
Many people were into CFC refrigerants. Many people are into coal. Many people are into fossil fuels. An idea that enjoys a lot of support isn't automatically a good idea. We need to be prepared to argue ideas on their merits without appealing to the status quo.
> You can keep pretending that things you don’t like don’t exist.
Well, I was referring specifically to the massive roadways between buildings devoid of value - in that American cities were designed around cars whereas European cities tended to be designed around walkers and horses. Public transit is also substantially better on the whole, and so is walkability and bikeability. I'm confident it's not perfect but I was trying to focus on concrete things.
>> How else do you propose to have a distributed ledger that is resistant to inflation?
> That's not a real problem. You solve it by ignoring it and getting back to things that actually matter.
The distributed ledger isn't even secure. Just look where the cheap electricity is, create a network partition and all the other transaction will vanish after the network partition doesn't exist anymore.
What makes you think you alone will find that cheap electricity, that is so much cheaper than anywhere else that it allows you to beat everyone else that is also mining?
>Bicycles are nice but have lower capacity for cargo and passengers
My e-cargo bike with a trailer can hold more stuff than my sedan ever could. Did an Ikea trip with it last year, carried home a filing cabinet, a desk frame, and a small table.
> mass transit is less flexible
frequent mass transit is plenty flexible. If a bus comes by your stop every 5 minutes, you never need to worry about planning.
> distributed
multi-node database. Done.
> resistant to inflation
Not something that sane people should want. Economies grow from commerce and reinvestment, not people jealously hogging every dollar they can find so that they can stash it under a bed to be used at higher value later.
> frequent mass transit is plenty flexible. If a bus comes by your stop every 5 minutes, you never need to worry about planning.
I never once missed my car when I lived in London. Pop along to the end of the street for a bus every 5-10 minutes, or just a little bit further away and I was at a tube station where I could be on a train within 10 minutes that took me right across London far faster than any car could.
The one or two occasions I needed a car, I could rent one, and still be better off than if I'd been paying the month-to-month expenses of keeping a car on the road (insurance, MOT etc.)
Car rentals are even easier these days than they were back then.
And deflation, where the value of your cash increases constantly if you do literally nothing with it, leads to good allocation of assets?
There have been two major periods of deflation in the history of the US dollar. 1930-1933, and 2007-2008. When the value of money increases, people don't spend it, they hoard it, commerce stops, and the economy grinds to a halt.
Just look at your beloved bitcoin, who is actually using it to buy and sell anything (besides illegal goods and money laundering)? The price is entirely propped up by speculation and fake Tethers, and because it is increasing, everyone who has any knows they would be a fool to use it, which is the whole point of currency.
What use is a deflationary distributed ledger to anyone? We've had 12 years of Bitcoin and no killer app for a reason. It's simply not a useful technology.
Let's see how easy this game is to play, now I only need to claim that any advantages you bring up are either irrelevant or not unique to PayPal. At least that's how every argument against Bitcoin usually goes.
A speculative store of value that everyone has coordinated upon is utility, and this has little to do with the quality of the underlying technology. The fact remains that I can pay merchants of varying degreees of shadiness in BTC much easier than I can send them a wire transfer. Now, you might not think this is good for the world, but it certainly is utility.
Because BTC is what they take. The coordination is more important than the tech. Granted, this is only because I don't patronize the super illegal Go To Jail Go Directly To Jail Do Not Pass Go type of merchants, but the point stands.
If you just need unfreezable funds and pseudonymity, not total cryptographically secured anonymity, you'll use Bitcoin instead of a dozen better methods (which are all crypto anyway, so wouldn't really count as a point against crypto, just BTC) because everyone else is using it.
So it's utility is for sketchy (but not too sketchy!) merchants in which a much cheaper wire transfer or free visa/mc payment would be unacceptable, but not illegal because it's a permanent public record of the transaction. Got it.
I mean, yes, they exist. And the public record is fine because you just create a new address for every transaction and cash out. Just because phone companies keep a record of who's calling who doesn't mean phones aren't useful for crime. You just use a burner phone in the full knowledge that the police can track you down, but won't because you're small fish doing minor crime.
To take one example, the global counterfeit brand market is worth trillions. They don't trade exclusively or even mainly in BTC (mostly you'd sell with physical cash), but they do use it for the reasons I mentioned above.
To be fair that argument could be made about any speculative asset. Art, classic cars, watches, etc. With btc currently the barrier to entry is lower. I can buy some satohis for a few bucks in hopes that they appreciate in value. I cant buy a piece of a Picasso or a Rolex. It is a speculative investment much like those, just one that has a wider audience.
For me its a speculative investment. For others your answer may vary. Doesn't really matter though, no one is buying it with an expectation that it wont appreciate so it can be a currency and a groundbreaking technology while still being a speculative investment.
It seems to me that it's a speculative investment for almost everyone, because the case for anything else is extraordinarily weak. And the case for it as a speculative investment is based on the other cases.
A single car lane can move 600-1600 people per hour while a two way bike lane of the same size can transport 7500 people per hour (https://nyc25x25.org/#report)
Proof of stake will give pervert the incentives of the network. It'll allow large stake holders to control the network, we don't want that. Proof of Work will ensure that nobody has control over the network and everyone is incentivized to participate honestly.
Unfortunately it requires one Argentina of power to do the work of a single raspberry pi, and I suggest environmentalists and the government won't look the other way indefinitely. Carbon pricing for instance makes the whole thing topple over.
bitcoin works just fine with any power source, not just conveniently located grid energy. you can mine bitcoin in a remote place and transmit the network data much more easily than you can transport/transmit energy. you could raise the price of fossil fuels by a factor of 1 million and crypto mining would be the least affected of any industry. so go right ahead and try it.
Is proof of waste not a suitable name? It's proof a huge quantity of resources were wasted on deriving some random garbage you can append to a piece of data to obtain a certain number of leading zeroes on a SHA lol. 600kWh per transaction. Horrifying.
I'm sorry, but how is you being "horrified" an objective measure of goodness? You described the process and just said it's horrifying, what do you expect me to respond with?
Bicycles are nice but have lower capacity for cargo and passengers; mass transit is less flexible. So they aren’t strictly superior.
> Bitcoin does not solve any problem that any other transaction network technology can't solve,
How else do you propose to have a distributed ledger that is resistant to inflation?