So, what do you think about BitCoin?

[kristus]

Honestly Bitcoin is one of the few things I just can't seem to wrap my head around and as a result I am very curious about passing judgement on something I don't understand. I get the anonymity. But the techinicalities is above my head and that means I stay away from it for the time being.

 

To those who criticize it for the volatility of the currency, that's really to be expected with something new that pricing will greatly fluctuate until the market settles as the players get a sense of what the "actual" value is.

[Gez]

Bitcoin is the perfect currency for you if you're rolling coal. "Why yes I do believe that every single commercial transaction should consume about as much power as lighting for a large city." If that's you, then you will love the whole "proof of work" thing -- what makes the value of a bitcoin is the impressive amount of gigawatts that go into mining it. It's something that is inefficient by design, this inefficiency being what is supposed to ensure that everyone stays with a single shared transaction history despite the decentralized nature. Basically, the only way to cheat at bitcoin mining is to have the majority of the bitcoin processing power.

 

And when you examine it, this very idea is completely stupid. Instead of creating a money that's free from government control, it's a money that's controlled by whatever bothers to expend the most resources into controlling it; and guess what, government have more resources than individuals. That's why Bitcoin is controlled by China now.

 

And then there's still the thing about it being incredibly wasteful. You can make millions of Visa/Mastercard/etc. transactions for the same processing cost as one single Bitcoin transaction. With Internet trade growing and growing exponentially, what makes the most sense to use, something that works fine for very large numbers or something that gets congested easily?

[FractalBeast]

Sometimes I feel bad that I used all my bitcoins to buy... chemicals for research on the nervous systems of mammalian lifeforms.

 

Even by today's bitcoin price, the bitcoins I used for that are worth enough to fuel some big investments. If I had kept those bitcoins in my wallet and sold them at the top of the bitcoin bubble, I'd be fucking rich.

But, luckily for me, my dealings with bitcoin were REALLY REALLY early, so I don't have any economic shame. No one could have predicted bitcoin would raise so hard (and drop so low).

[geo]

My friend lost all his big Bitcoin money investing in the new fad and units to mine said fad. I however, still have yet to do anything with my Bitcoin money from a few years ago. I still have 10% of what I had 2 - 8 years ago. No one I work ever bothered to ask hey weren't we paying Europeans in Bitcoin 8 years ago before business went sour? What ever happened to that?

[Kristian Nebula]

10 hours ago, Gez said:

Bitcoin is the perfect currency for you if you're rolling coal. "Why yes I do believe that every single commercial transaction should consume about as much power as lighting for a large city." If that's you, then you will love the whole "proof of work" thing -- what makes the value of a bitcoin is the impressive amount of gigawatts that go into mining it. It's something that is inefficient by design, this inefficiency being what is supposed to ensure that everyone stays with a single shared transaction history despite the decentralized nature. Basically, the only way to cheat at bitcoin mining is to have the majority of the bitcoin processing power.

 

And when you examine it, this very idea is completely stupid. Instead of creating a money that's free from government control, it's a money that's controlled by whatever bothers to expend the most resources into controlling it; and guess what, government have more resources than individuals. That's why Bitcoin is controlled by China now.

 

And then there's still the thing about it being incredibly wasteful. You can make millions of Visa/Mastercard/etc. transactions for the same processing cost as one single Bitcoin transaction. With Internet trade growing and growing exponentially, what makes the most sense to use, something that works fine for very large numbers or something that gets congested easily?

 

I think the total energy consumption of Bitcoin now is about the same as the energy consumption of Las Vegas. Another reason why I like XRP is that it uses very little electricity compared to Bitcoin and even VISA.

 

 

 

EDIT. this chart is from May 2019, from this blog post: https://xrpcommunity.blog/introduction-to-xrp-2019-edition/

[fraggle]

It was recently estimated as being more energy per year than the whole of Switzerland.

 

If you know anything about the technical details of the system you'll know that it runs on wasting energy and incentivizing people to waste as much energy as they can. At the time when we're grappling with climate change being a serious looming threat, it's frankly kind of obscene that we're even allowing a system like this to be run.

[Graf Zahl]

How would you stop it? Its main drivers are greed and stupidity which cannot be contained.

 

If you try to regulate it, those thriving on it would just move to other countries that don't.

The only way would be to make energy sufficiently expensive that the whole thing collapses, but this will fail for the same reason: Someone always will sabotage the effort and keep it viable.

 

 

[Doom Marine]

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Edited March 18, 2022 by Doom Marine

[Doom Marine]

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Edited March 18, 2022 by Doom Marine

[holaareola]

On 7/6/2019 at 4:57 PM, Doom Marine said:

 

1. Bitcoin sucks, Ethereum is everything bitcoin strove to be. If your crypto antenna is sharp and you have skin in the game, the industry mantra of "blockchain, not Bitcoin" is coming true.

I agree, but a step on the way. "blockchain, not crypto" is how I think it will ultimately turn out writ large.  Many of the use-cases of a distributed immutable database do not require an ever-appreciating currency.  I see things like Hyperledger and the major cloud provider's blockchain offerings taking the biggest role in light-side blockchain usages.  True immutability isn't even such a desirable property in many real-world use cases when combined with a lack of accountability. Links to child porn, doxxing info and other nasty things are already irrevocably stored in the btc and eth chains.  Of course, this trade-off is already accepted for the regular internet, but resisting censorship is not, I'd argue, a mainstream use case.

 

That said... going against my own argument, I could see IoT presenting a bunch of possibilities enabled by smart contracts plus cheaply transferable digital currency.

 

As for eth, specifically, while I think Vitalik one of crypto's most trustworthy figures and the protocol governance is much better, Ethereum's even worse IIRC than bitcoin in terms of mining group power distribution. Think between two to three groups typically control over 50% of the network hashrate.

[Doom Marine]

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Edited March 18, 2022 by Doom Marine

[Doom Marine]

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[Doom Marine]

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[Gez]

Impact of cryptocurrencies on the real world.

 

Act One: "In light of the sudden changes in the crypto mining situation in Kazakhstan with the restrictions on Bitcoin computational processes by the Chinese government that escalated into the recent strict measures implemented in June 2021, Kazakhstan’s bitcoin mining has dramatically surged into third place on the global market." (August 2021)

Act Two: "In fact, to demonstrate how much power crypto mining consumes, it appears that over in Kazakhstan, the country is experiencing power shortages in which according to The Financial Times, crypto mining is partly to blame." (November 2021)

Act Three: "Protests first triggered by rising fuel prices in Kazakhstan have turned violent, prompting a Russian-led military coalition to send troops to the oil-rich country." (January 2022)

 

So we have a country that exports oil and gas and where energy is very cheap. Bitcoin miners arrive in drove, and they hungrily suck all the power out of the grid, so there's shortages everywhere. This causes the price of fuel to rise, which in turn causes people to protest, which ultimately results in the Russian army being called in to help murder all the protestors. Fun!

[insertwackynamehere]

That is an extremely tenuous connection.

 

Kazakhstan is a country run by an autocrat and his family/underlings who have been extracting the natural resource wealth of the country since the end of the USSR. The people meanwhile are much poorer on a global scale than they should be given the relative wealth their country has to offer.

 

The government removed price caps on LPG which is used for vehicles there and made the cost of fueling your vehicle spike as the prices reverted to market level. This is just greed by the Kazakhstan state, they already make sure their citizens don't share in the resource wealth and now they remove subsidies to further make it more economically stressful. This isn't a scarcity issue, they are producers and exporters of energy, it just was another straw and slap in the face to the people who don't get to experience any significant portion of that wealth.

 

This straw broke the camels back about the post-Soviet oligarchical looting of the country by a couple of families as well as the autocratic, undemocratic policies of these same elites and the various ties to Russia who no doubt have at least a fantasy of reabsorbing Kazakhstan along with the rest of the old Soviet states, even if they have been perhaps okay with the Kazakh elite kicking money up to them instead. Russians and Kazakhs live together in Kazakhstan but are ethnically and culturally distinct and there is tension about how Kazakhstan is currently in Russia's sphere of influence and fear they will become a full on Russian vassal state or annexed, more so than they arguable already are.

 

I'm sorry but tying this to bitcoin is just really ignorant and reaching, it is tied to people angry at greedy elites who pushed them one final inch too far and the elites desperately clinging to power, even if it means getting their criminal boss to send in suppressive forces. There have been decades long ethnic, economic and political tensions there that were mostly assuaged through relative stability (their leader is a dick but not a complete parody of an autocrat like Turkmenistan's leader or NK leaders) and so now suddenly their country is hitting the western news without just being a footnote in a review for a new Borat movie. It's dismissive of the real issues at play to say this is Bitcoin or Bitcoin miners fault.

 

If this is tl;dr, the basic takeaway is that liquified petroleum gas, a "common car fuel in Central Asia", had its price caps removed triggering a cascade of built up outrage against an oligarchical autocrat and his cronies. There isn't any scarcity of fossil fuels or energy, just a poor population on a resource rich ancestral land who have been exploited by the post-Soviet billionaire looting class.

 

EDIT: Just out of curiosity, I looked up what Kazakhstan's energy grid is based on and it seems mainly coal. I thought maybe there could be some connection between LPG and the grid even if I don't buy into the "it's bitcoins fault" narrative, but it seems they aren't connected at all. I do know that cities in Kazakhstan indeed suffer from power outages from time to time, more often than one would expect/hope a developed country would, at least according to Kazakh friends (the main source of my understanding of all of this stuff).

Edited January 7, 2022 by insertwackynamehere

[Doomkid]

While Kazakhstan specifically is clearly dealing first and foremost with the greed of the autocracy, dismissing the massive ecological impact of crypto mining and run-on effects that has is not reasonable. To me it's kind of like saying "this has nothing to do with petroleum gas, or even price caps. Conceptually, it's all about greed! After all, petroleum and price caps aren't inherently bad!". While true, it's kind of massively understating the other relevant factors.

 

The amount of energy required to perform the computations associated with crypto mining is frankly mind-blowing, 30 kilotons of electronic waste are annually produced as a byproduct of crypto mining. Bitcoin mining alone, not including other currencies, uses 122.87 Terawatt-hours of electricity every year which is more than some developed nations (not just the poor countries either, there are Scandinavian countries that don't use that much power annually). If we add just Ethereum to the equation, the amount of Terawatt-hours of electricity used almost doubles. It is physically impossible for the amount of energy consumed by cryptocurrency mining to do anything BUT increase (exponentially!) over time. Mining efficiency MUST decrease over time due to the very nature of how it works in the first place.

 

So, while this doesn't automatically mean "bad stuff happened, therefore the crypto-miners done did it all", I don't think it would be wise to understate the destructive and largely unappealing side-effects of the increasing presence of cryptocurrency. (and I don't think you went whole-hog with that position anyway, never did I see you say the side effects aren't bad, but I think it's often seriously understated.)

 

[insertwackynamehere]

Proof of work mining is something that can be criticized for what it is, it's a cool idea that in practice uses too much energy to be sustainable. But what is happening in Kazakhstan with the protests is fully unrelated (it's not even like I'm minimizing a connection, the price of car fuel has nothing to do with bitcoin) and deserves the respect of being analyzed outside of westerners trying to just dunk on crypto hype

[Somniac]

I wasn't aware of the impact of mining until I read this thread and did some research. The reported energy footprint of some of these hardcore crypto mining rigs is staggering. The decentralized aspect of crypto is appealing, but the volatility of it is not and I think its justified to be sceptical of it and the intentions of people who create it. The pump and dump aspect is especially bad.

 

Also I find the concept of NFTs to be possibly the single most repugnant thing I've come across in my lifetime. Stuff like that convinces me that humanity doesn't deserve a future, if we're going to waste it on pointless nonsense for the sake of "clout". Just another status symbol though, like having a car when those were a novelty. Or a new iphone. Same as it ever was. 

 

[CBM]

bitcoin is a way for criminals to earn and spend money on criminal services and items

[AndrewB]

Bitcoin will replace the US dollar as the world's currency. It could be an ugly transition, with wars and attempts at banning and regulating it, but ultimately the world will be forced to give in and accept it. And it will an usher an era of prosperity and world peace.

 

People can go back to the early pages of this thread (and this one:

) and see my original predictions. I believe the "final" price of bitcoin will be between $2 million and $5 million when measured in today's dollars.

[Azuris]

18 hours ago, Doomkid said:

While Kazakhstan specifically is clearly dealing first and foremost with the greed of the autocracy, dismissing the massive ecological impact of crypto mining and run-on effects that has is not reasonable. To me it's kind of like saying "this has nothing to do with petroleum gas, or even price caps. Conceptually, it's all about greed! After all, petroleum and price caps aren't inherently bad!". While true, it's kind of massively understating the other relevant factors.

 

The amount of energy required to perform the computations associated with crypto mining is frankly mind-blowing, 30 kilotons of electronic waste are annually produced as a byproduct of crypto mining. Bitcoin mining alone, not including other currencies, uses 122.87 Terawatt-hours of electricity every year which is more than some developed nations (not just the poor countries either, there are Scandinavian countries that don't use that much power annually). If we add just Ethereum to the equation, the amount of Terawatt-hours of electricity used almost doubles. It is physically impossible for the amount of energy consumed by cryptocurrency mining to do anything BUT increase (exponentially!) over time. Mining efficiency MUST decrease over time due to the very nature of how it works in the first place.

 

So, while this doesn't automatically mean "bad stuff happened, therefore the crypto-miners done did it all", I don't think it would be wise to understate the destructive and largely unappealing side-effects of the increasing presence of cryptocurrency. (and I don't think you went whole-hog with that position anyway, never did I see you say the side effects aren't bad, but I think it's often seriously understated.)

 

 

/signed

 

And is just brutally disgusting how many Companies now come out to jump on the Blockchain Train.

 

It should be forbidden globaly, there is just no need for this Technology, as it can be done everything with other server based Solutions that are not as Energy Hungry.

 

[Gez]

1 hour ago, AndrewB said:

Bitcoin will replace the US dollar as the world's currency. It could be an ugly transition, with wars and attempts at banning and regulating it, but ultimately the world will be forced to give in and accept it. And it will an usher an era of prosperity and world peace. 

Everyone will have a nuclear power plant in their backyard so as to power their own million-GPU server farm that they need so as to be able to perform their own transactions.

 

Meanwhile, in the automobile sector, the concept of blockchain and proof of work will be materialized in the form of attaching a plow to every car. The plow is designed to burrow ever deeper as it is pulled forward, needing to lengthen the chain by which they are attached. Fuel consumption is no longer in mile per gallon but in foot per gallon. Everyone agrees this is wonderful and smart and oh so clever.

[AndrewB]

The flaw in your argument is that the vast majority of bitcoin transactions will be moved off-chain, into derivatives and bitcoin-backed coins and bills and other inventions. Settlement-layer assets really don't need more than a couple transactions per second worldwide, even if the asset's total valuation is 100 trillion dollars.

[Katamori]

20 hours ago, CBM said:

bitcoin is a way for criminals to earn and spend money on criminal services and items

 

The definition of "criminal" is subject to change, and always has been. Sometimes you actually do the moral thing but new laws paint you as a criminal.

 

In those cases, helping them is not only "good" but should be encouraged, too. And sadly you can't decide who's using that money for drug trafficking, and who's using that for simple transfer to a relative (for example).

 

What you take from it is up to your ideology. Maybe you want to erase crypto because helping the innocent is not worth for our safety from criminals. Maybe you want to encourage it anyways because criminal activity is a sacrifice worth taking for helping those fighting for freedom.

 

What's sure is that "criminals" is a beautiful scapegoat that can be used by politicians very effectively.

---------

 

That said, after checking some of the comments since last time I wrote here (around 2017 I guess?), I had some regrets about joining the discussion. Through both the examples of past self and the examples of others, I see this topic brings the worst out of everyone. I'm deeply saddened about it.

Edited January 9, 2022 by Katamori

[Gez]

15 hours ago, AndrewB said:

The flaw in your argument is that the vast majority of bitcoin transactions will be moved off-chain, into derivatives and bitcoin-backed coins and bills and other inventions. Settlement-layer assets really don't need more than a couple transactions per second worldwide, even if the asset's total valuation is 100 trillion dollars.

So the way to make bitcoin work is to... not use bitcoin? Wow!

[Martin Howe]

So what do I think about bitcoin? I don't 😛

 

[DSC]

22 hours ago, AndrewB said:

Bitcoin will replace the US dollar as the world's currency. It could be an ugly transition, with wars and attempts at banning and regulating it, but ultimately the world will be forced to give in and accept it. And it will an usher an era of prosperity and world peace.

Good grief this reads like its satire, and it saddens me its not. Besides that, 99% of those kind of predictions about the future always end up not true anyways.

[AndrewB]

5 hours ago, Gez said:

So the way to make bitcoin work is to... not use bitcoin? Wow!

 

I don't see how anything I described can be called non-usage. The vast majority of people pay the vast majority of their expenses using bank transfers instead of withdrawing cash and delivering it by hand, because doing so saves a lot of cost and headache. So if you're pinning your hopes that this will never happen with bitcoin, I think you will be disappointed.

[AndrewB]

22 minutes ago, DSC said:

Good grief this reads like its satire, and it saddens me its not. Besides that, 99% of those kind of predictions about the future always end up not true anyways.

 

Have you ever heard of the phrase "give credit where credit is due"? My predictions were made on these forums many years ago, and have been extremely accurate.

[Mr. Freeze]

SHIB at least lets me purchase stuff off of Newegg. Bitcoin is good for what, money laundering and illegal dark web purchases? I'm not a pedo, I don't purchase stuff with Bitcoin.