How is this "biased toward FUD"? The article is written and published by Kraken, one of the largest cryptocurrency exchanges. They've discovered valid vulnerabilities and I'm not sure how it's FUD.
1) The Yemen number is for the whole system. The energy to send one transaction is tiny and much smaller than using the existing remittances system.
2) With a bank, it's not even clear you could send $5 to Yemen as there's a civil war going on. And if you did find a money transfer company willing to do it, it would be very expensive. With Bitcoin, as long as the person in Yemen has a phone and can get online, you can send them any amount, it will cost ~$2, and take minutes to do.
My favourite benefit of Bitcoin is bypassing the hideously inefficient and corrupt Wall Street financial vampiric system that provided the world with the Global Financial Crisis for which it suffered the punishment of being given billions of dollars by the US Government.
Attacking another user like this (edit: and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28567074 - yikes!) will get you banned here, regardless of how wrong they are or you feel they are. Whether or not you owe that person better, you definitely owe this community better if you're posting to it—much better. So no more of this, please—we're trying to have an internet forum that doesn't burn itself to a crisp.
Please get some perspective. Read more actual facts and data from various different angles, you've obviously dived deep into one side with little consideration for any other.
You give me the kind opportunity to quote a favourite lyric of mine:
The do-er and the thinker: no allowance for the other
The append-only ledger is surprisingly efficient, to the point where you can process the entire thing on a decent laptop in a couple days.
And judging the costs bank are able to charge for international wires, even when comparing them to the horrendous fees for Bitcoin (Core, BTC) on-chain transactions, I'm not convinced Bitcoin is that much less efficient.
- inviolable property rights
- sound money enables accurate investment valuation and less inflation and wealth inequality
- low cost, high security, international final settlement
- instant payments on lightning network
Once you find out you'll panic about not having enough. The benefits are apparent when analyzed from the perspective of money as a technology that enables strong property rights defended by cryptography. Robert Breedlove does a podcast on the nature of money which great. This video also does a great job of addressing the "waste" by elaborating on "unforgable costliness" : https://youtu.be/b-7dMVcVWgc
All of these "uses energy per transaction" people are being underserved by their news sources on the development of the lightning network, which is like going from a LAN with global broadcast to NATed and routed TCP/IP (Bitcoin is a global broadcast layer and lightning is a transaction bundling / routing layer/network). I mean an entire country has adopted it and we still have folks on hacker news missing the disruption for the trees!
Turns out monetary expansion does cause price inflation: “ 1849 Sky high “gold rush” prices at a fashionable eating house in San Francisco: Corned Beef & Cabbage (1.25), Sweet Potatoes (50¢), Apple Pie (75¢).”
But many people shouting this, they bought at levels below 5k for btcusd. Then it retains purchasing power fine. I am going to say we will see below 5k again within 2 years though, so you can have another chance to get purchasing power for btc yourself.
Yeah, and it went all the way up to 60k+ in about the same time. People who bought the top in 2017 have literally doubled their money. I wonder how much purchasing power bitcoin holders will have 10 years from now.
It’s over 40k, so either you don’t have access to real time data or you are trying to paint a picture that you prefer to believe. You can’t expect zero volatility in a new money while its being adopted. It’s the only fixed supply money in a world that’s printing paper like crazy, where do you think that trends trends to?
Strike is the government sanctioned one, however, so saying options exist is a bit inconsequential. After all people on HN can barely keep abreast of why Tether is bad - I hardly expect the average Salvadoran. A government-endorsed Tether wallet is awful.
Baffling that tech types here aren’t grasping digital money, basicaly a self custody PGP key with value, and instead defending the status quo with poorly researched FUD like layer 1 scaling limits, power usage, and fear of regulators!? You guys sound like Paul Krugman, meanwhile Tesla and MicroStrategy are taking all the trending bitcoins off the table… the only point I disagree with LynAlydn, who wrote a great article, is that Bitcoin doesn’t offer yield. You can get yield on Bitcoin by either loaning it out or staking in in the lightning network to collect fees for providing liquidity.
The reason is that this is a societal and economical issue, beyond tech.
American education is not helping either, like most people don't know about Austrian economics for instance - which is kind of a background you need to have been exposed to, to have in depth discussions that go beyond the typical posts you get on forums.
Yeah, we're not teaching people that Austrian economics doesn't work so they end up getting redpilled into thinking it's some kind of secret awesome suppressed knowledge.
It's interesting because it seems that democratizing money is what we should be good at based on founding principles - rather we have bunch of flawed central planning disasters and bailouts.
> Under a system with hard money and free banking we would instead have occasional emergent disasters and nothing could be done about them.
And my understanding is that such disasters used to happen with some regularity, but they weren't wars so people don't typically learn about them in school.
That would be natural selection, which might be preferable in a free market. Small constant corrections, rather than larger distasters we experienced the last 50-100 years (bailouts and going to war every 10-12 years)
It would arguable allow people to safe their wealth rather than being forced to spend money all the time.
Here is a thought experiment. The current fiat system requires negative interest rates. Austrian economics doesn't believe in the existence of negative interest rates as a result of market forces. If there is a central bank in the world that introduces negative interest rates on bank accounts and cash (via serial numbers) and it works, then Austrian economics is completely wrong not in just this aspect but wrong about fiat currency in its entirety.
They would have to acknowledge that:
* negative interest rates are necessary
* austerity and permanent saving don't work
* moderate inflation is necessary for a functioning economy
* central banks are doing a good job managing the economy
Plenty of people grasp digital cash but (1) they don't want cash and (2) current cryptocurrencies aren't good digital cash. And most people don't want (digital) gold either.
Bitcoin uses less energy to immutably log transactions than the manipulated rube goldberg system we currently use for keeping track of money balances, that should be all that matters.
Still plenty of comments about how to “make money” with bitcoin, completely missing the point the bitcoin is money. Ironic really since this group has been digitizing everything else in the world to make money they miss that software now actually is money!
Crawlers is top down approach, a distributed list that people pay digital money for listing will both incentivize nodes to be online and transforms sybil attacks into paid advertising.
