nmlnn

That just means we disagree on what humanity needs. Good thing I don't have to justify how I spend my time and energy to you.

Maybe they do maybe they don't, it's impossible to tell other people what they need. The best you can do is educate them on the options you think could help, people will ultimately make their own decisions.

Trying to get people to understand Bitcoin is without a doubt the most productive thing I can do with my time for the future of humanity.

If someone figures out a way to do it, then sure. Mining ensures that no one in the system is able to get a new monetary unit below the market price as well as making tampering with past transactions uneconomical. Ultimately it's a very elegant solution to what was a long-standing problem.

The system pays for itself via transaction fees, which are used to "lock" the transaction history in a completely decentralised way.

If you're in Venezuela, Argentina, Lebanon, Turkey, Nigeria, etc. where your government is stealing your savings via massive inflation it's pretty useful.

It would definitely be better if the learning curve was shallower and the UI's easier, so that more people could be saved.

It's not like excess hydro power in China is stored anywhere. It's literally wasted.. why do you care if people use it to mine bitcoin? How is it cutting in to the energy that other people can use?

You can't drive up the cost of "waste", all you can do is use it such that the waste is decreased. If people want to make hydrogen with it they should do so. As I said, the Bitcoin network is not capable of bidding for energy at higher prices.

Your argument boils down to: why aren't people doing this uneconomically viable thing that I think is better than this other economically viable thing.

*Citation Needed

Bitcoin doesn't waste energy. Bitcoin consumes energy waste.

The global market for adding bitcoin blocks is as competitive as it is possible to get. No barriers to entry, no one even has to know who or where you are. As such only miners who can secure the cheapest energy survive.

Excess hydro capacity in China during rainy season; capturing flared gas from shale oil fields in the US; geothermal in Iceland; any source of stranded or wasted energy.. bitcoin mining will soak it up.

Bitcoin mining using fossil fuels is simply not cost competitive.

This "#hashes => #GWh => #tonnes CO2", is broken logic full of unsubstantiated assumptions made by bitcoin haters.

Bitcoin doesn't waste energy. Bitcoin consumes energy waste.

The global market for adding bitcoin blocks is as competitive as it is possible to get. No barriers to entry, no one even has to know who or where you are. As such only miners who can secure the cheapest energy survive.

Excess hydro capacity in China during rainy season; capturing flared gas from shale oil fields in the US; geothermal in Iceland; any source of stranded or wasted energy.. bitcoin mining will soak it up.

Bitcoin mining using fossil fuels is simply not cost competitive.

This "#hashes => #GWh => #tonnes CO2", is broken logic full of unsubstantiated assumptions made by bitcoin haters.

Nope, that's why I'm so confident. The entire point of Bitcoin is to remove the need for trust and replace it with network consensus rules and proof-of-work, both of which you validate yourself. Since, to me, that's far superior to the current system - I just see it as an inevitable transition.

How would they enforce such a ban?

If people want to short bitcoin or tether, they should do so. However, I don't really get all the internet whining. If they're right they'll make a lot of money. I don't buy these concerned citizen FUD posts though, they reek of manipulation. If there's one thing I've learned over the last 25 years it's.. don't trust random people on the internet.

Am I missing something? That's how their backups work currently

Do people not realize they can run more than 1 messenger app at a time?

> sexual exploitation, human trafficking, modern day slavery, organ trafficking, high value thefts (petrol, or digits bank robberies), standard social engineering scams etc

That kind of logic can be used to justify putting government cameras and microphones inside everyone's homes too.

Sure, not until some entity gets over 50% of the stake

Sure, you just need to trust people.

They both want to scale transactions, they just disagree about how. Bitcoin Cash wants much higher transaction throughput at the base layer (i.e. the actual blockchain). While Bitcoin wants the high throughput lower value transactions to happen at layers built on top of the base chain, e.g. Lightning

Not really, the Wuhan lab received funding for the studies into gain of function for bat coronaviruses from the NIH (via EcoHealth Alliance). The incentive to bury the origin (if this was the origin) would be high for the US and China both.

Failure to understand NgU.

SEC deals with securities, bitcoin is not a security according to them. Ripple(XRP) is.

A lot do (but they don't get surveyed by Nature). I quit physics after one postdoc - never thought that would happen - but reality and expectations often don't match up.

HN is hilarious. Even after 10 years, majority of people here are unable to grasp that bitcoin IS money. MS and MSTR are performing a speculative attack on a soft fiat currency (supply increased >20% in 2020) using the hardest money ever. This strategy will only become more popular over time as it continues to pay off.

Bitcoiners have understood this part of the game theory for a while (see: https://nakamotoinstitute.org/mempool/speculative-attack/).

Have fun staying poor.

> so what's going to stop someone coming along and saying "Hey, $X a share, I'll liquidate the BTC and hand it back to investors" when BTC has it's next dip?

Maybe the fact that he has 72% of the voting rights and can basically do whatever he wants.

/s

I think they mean a fork of the codebase.

Technological advances can increase the gold supply. Asteroid mining, extracting it from sea water, mining lower quality deposits, etc.

There still has to be consensus on using gold as money, if there isn't it will lose its monetary premium to something that has better monetary properties.

> can be trivially changed if certain people decide that it should

This is simply not the case - see 2017 bitcoin cash fork or Segwit2X push. At the end of the day money is a human invention, meant to facilitate value exchange between humans. So it requires consensus between the users of the money, if some fraction want to change the rules they are free to.

We went for something we found in nature with properties that were pretty good for that, but with some downsides (not absolutely scarce, difficult to transport, easy to steal) to something created specifically for the purpose.