makeasnek

makeasnek , 5 months ago to Technology in Over 2 percent of the US’s electricity generation now goes to bitcoin

PoS inevitably leads to centralization and requires an inflationary currency supply. That is the problem. Coins in transit can't stake. Which means the only coins that can stake are coins that already exist and are sitting on a staking node. You are paying those stakers with an inflationary supply. Which means you are minting new coins and handing them to users who already have the most coins. This leads to centralization of the supply over time, and therefore, control of network consensus. A few rich, powerful people end up controlling the whole system, just like our existing banking system. No thanks.

Most of those PoS chains also have massive chain sizes/system requirements compared to Bitcoin, which means they can't be or remain nearly as decentralized, neutral, and secure.

makeasnek , 5 months ago to Technology in Over 2 percent of the US’s electricity generation now goes to bitcoin

"will transition to decentralized", "most likely", because we can always trust people to give up their vast power and wealth voluntarily right?

Or you could use Bitcoin. Which has been decentralized and reliable for 15 years and doesn't suffer from inevitably increasing centralization like every proof-of-stake coin does. And doesn't have massive requirements to run a full node/validator, which inherently increases centralization. Scaling crypto requires adding layers on top of the base layer, not making the base layer so huge you need a server farm to run a full node. Lightning scaled Bitcoin to essentially an infinite number of transactions per second without increasing the chain size.

makeasnek , 5 months ago to Technology in Over 2 percent of the US’s electricity generation now goes to bitcoin

There will be 21 million coins minted. Ever. That is Bitcoin's fiscal policy. There are 62 million millionaires in the world. There isn't enough Bitcoin for every millionaire in the world to have an entire coin. An entire coin currently costs around $40,000. Y'all do the math.

makeasnek , 5 months ago (edited 5 months ago) to Technology in Over 2 percent of the US’s electricity generation now goes to bitcoin

If everybody suddenly sold all their USD, EUR, or other currency, that currency's value relative to other currencies would also crash. That's not unique to Bitcoin.

People cash out their currency to buy goods and services, that's the whole point. You accept currency knowing you can spend it later. It's useless in and of itself. In order for them to spend it later, somebody has to be their "exit liquidity" and trade a good or service they have for that currency. You can call that a ponzi scheme if you want, or you can just call it currency, because that's how currency works.

makeasnek , 5 months ago (edited 5 months ago) to Technology in Over 2 percent of the US’s electricity generation now goes to bitcoin

Stablecoins are a house of cards built around stably relating to another house of cards which is the entire inflationary fiat system. Every single asset and currency is speculated on via the open market. Bitcoin is no exception. If it is overvalued or undervalued, that creates market opportunities for people to exploit the difference. The market has decided it's worth a certain amount today, it will be another amount tomorrow. Not unique to Bitcoin. Every year people have said Bitcoin was "overvalued" and powered purely by hype, on average, the market has decided they were wrong the following year.

Any honestly-run stablecoin inherently has to collateralize their coin with something. They can buy BTC (and do), they can buy USD (and do), they can buy wheat futures (but I'm not sure they do). Ultimately, a diverse portfolio would probably be wisest. Yet you don't see anybody complaining that "USD is being pumped by Tether/USDC". Why? Because it's not a problem.

makeasnek , 5 months ago to Technology in Over 2 percent of the US’s electricity generation now goes to bitcoin

sorts by controversial 🍿

makeasnek , 5 months ago to Technology in Over 2 percent of the US’s electricity generation now goes to bitcoin

Do you know that Tether and Bitcoin are different things? Because it seems like you don't.

makeasnek , 5 months ago (edited 5 months ago) to Technology in Over 2 percent of the US’s electricity generation now goes to bitcoin

I think the best solution would be to properly tax carbon. That way Bitcoin miners would either become unprofitable or move to greener energy.

I think cap and trade can be a good idea, the problem is getting all the countries in the world to sign onto it. Any country that doesn't ends up with a competitive advantage. But if you somehow got them to all agree, blockchain actually provides a perfect way to build a cap-and-trade system that every country can participate in, transparently, without having to trust one country or group of countries to run it honestly. That's the essential problem blockchain solves: administering systems trustlessly.

Bitcoin miners do by and large use green energy since it tends to be the cheapest (off-peak hours from over-provisioned grids). If electricity gets more expensive, it doesn't mean it becomes unprofitable to mine, that's only one side of the equation. The other side is how much people are willing to pay to get transactions added to the blockchain, which is a number, on average, that has increased year after year. Not that you ever need to make an on-chain transaction, with Bitcoin lightning you can do transactions off-chain while getting much of the security of on-chain transactions. You can move money internationally in under a second for pennies in fees. And it works just as easily as venmo. In fact, if you have cash app on your phone, you already have the ability to use the lightning network, though it's a custodial wallet (meaning you are trusting cash app not to take/lose your BTC).

makeasnek , 5 months ago to Technology in Over 2 percent of the US’s electricity generation now goes to bitcoin

Um.. we very much had ransomware and viruses before crypto. Bank wires have been irreversible.. forever. Before crypto, ransomware also demanded gift cards and prepaid debit cards. 99% of the crime on earth is paid for using fiat currency, not Bitcoin.

makeasnek , 5 months ago (edited 5 months ago) to Technology in Over 2 percent of the US’s electricity generation now goes to bitcoin

Some have tried, they have all failed. Bitcoin is international. A 51% attack is so implausibly expensive that nobody really has the resources to pull it off. Even if you had enough money and energy to burn, there is the small problem of acquiring enough of the specialized hardware to do it (ASIC miners), and potentially the specs and fab to make that hardware. People will see it coming a mile away. Don't want to use ASICs? Enjoy at least a 100x increase in energy and equipment costs. And it gets more expensive every year. If you had that much money to put into destroying Bitcoin, it would be much better spent on an ad campaign telling people Bitcoin was bad than doing a 51% attack.

A 51% attack doesn't prove Bitcoin is broken, it proves the protocol is working exactly as expected. A 51% attack causes a temporary fork. This happens all the time organically when two miners find the next block at the same time, it's a natural part of the protocol. That's why for really large or important transactions on main chain, you wait a few blocks before considering them fully secured.

Bitcoin's value to society is the ability to easily transfer money from point A to B and having a clear fiscal policy it has kept to for 15 years, 365 days a year, 24/7 without a single hour of downtime, a bank holiday, or getting hacked. There's a reason big money like hedge funds and private banking are investing in it: it's actually useful and has massive potential. The market cap of Bitcoin is 850 BILLION USD, that's bigger than the GDP of Sweden or Israel or Vietnam. People use it to move over a trillion dollars of value a year. You can debate how much of that movement is trading & speculation vs use as a currency, but it's a trillion nonetheless. I personally pay for things regularly with Bitcoin, you'd be surprised how many places you can spend it when you start looking. And it's available to anybody with a cellphone and halfway reliable internet access, including the billions of people who are "unbanked" and lack access to stable banking infrastructure.

Transactions on Bitcoin lightning occur in under a second and cost pennies in fees. That's to send it across the room or across the globe. Remittance services and bank wires use just as much energy and cost 10x-1000x as much. And they waste not just energy but human capital as well, we no longer need humans manually sending bank wires like it's 1910. You just don't see headlines about the energy impact of bank wires or western union because it's not novel, we just accept it as a cost of our financial system.

That's not even getting into the secondary costs to the environment of running a society on an economy based on an inflationary currency which requires that currency be rapidly spent because it's getting constantly devalued. That's a great strategy to rapidly industrialize the world, but it's not a great strategy on a globe with limited resources. Tell me, if you knew your dollar would be worth 10% more next year, would you be more hesitant to spend it? Might you consume less if you knew saving money in your bank account would actually cause it's value to stay the same or increase over time? Might you focus your spending more on quality products that will last instead of just buying the cheapest thing because if it breaks, you can just buy a new one? This isn't just on a personal level, this same kind of calculus is used by big investment firms to build everything that won't last. Buildings, stadiums, entire cities, financed with money that is constantly losing value. Bitcoin's value relative to goods and services will fluctuate like any currency does, but the supply of the currency does not increase. There are 21 million which will ever be minted. Your 0.1BTC will always be 0.1BTC and will always represent 0.1/128M% of the total supply. If the Bitcoin economy grows, you share in that growth and the value it produces instead of seeing the difference printed away and given to whoever controls the money supply and whoever they want to give it to.

makeasnek , 5 months ago to Privacy in Best place to keep cripto

This is a great idea until you forget whatever trick you used to encode the words onto that page, which becomes more and more likely the longer you store it and don't look at it. Have fun trying all the combinations for the 250 words you put on the page, if you can even recognize the page in your pile of papers since there's I'm assuming you don't have "SEED PHRASE" plastered across it in big letters.

makeasnek , 5 months ago to Privacy in Best place to keep cripto

If you want low fees for buying and selling BTC, strike is awesome, supports more countries, and supports Bitcoin lighting which makes tx fees crazy low for sending money to other people or your other wallets. Coinbase doesn't, so getting BTC off coinbase is expensive as you have to pay main chain fees. Those can be $1-$12 depending on the day.

BISQ is also great, self-custody, and decentralized for making trades, but more complex. Look into it if you trade regularly.

makeasnek , 5 months ago to Privacy in Best place to keep cripto

Yes, if you have your 12-word seed, that's all you need.

Note: If you have a self-custody Bitcoin lightning wallet, you also need to backup your wallet "state". You also need to let your wallet access the internet every once and a while to monitor channel states to prevent theft of funds by somebody closing a channel and broadcasting an old state. Lightning is not designed for long-term storage, so don't use it for that purpose. Every wallet handles backup differently. Phoenix makes this automatic, it's awesome. Or you can just consider your lightning wallet your everyday spending money, not keep big amounts in it, not worry about backing it up. That's what I do. I figure the $25 I have on my phone is the least of my concerns if my house burns down.

Multi-sig is a type of wallet where in order to spend money from it, multiple other wallets need to sign off on the transaction. These wallets can be your friends/family, your bank, or other trusted custodian. You can set a threshold: 2 of 3 wallets, all wallets (bad idea! You lose all your funds if you lose a single wallet). It's a great way to custody funds long-term safely while eliminating single points of failure.

Shamir's secret sharing scheme can split your seed phrase into multiple parts. You can give those parts to other people, the key can't be re-assembled without the requisite number of parts (threshold) which is set by you. If somebody's part gets lost or stolen, no problem, nobody can do anything unless they have enough parts.

makeasnek , 5 months ago to Technology in Germany: Police seize bitcoins worth €2 billion

True. There are some pretty good effort estimates out there, idk what they are, but there are definitely some lost keys.

makeasnek , 5 months ago to Privacy in Best place to keep cripto

A hardware wallet is a great option, so is cold storage which you can do with a cheap $50 laptop. Most important is keeping backups. Think about how you will access your coins when your laptop or hardware wallet dies. Think about ways to prevent loss due to natural disaster. Multi-sig and shamirs secret sharing scheme are two ways to store coins in such a way that you won't lose them if your house burns down without having to trust a single party to custody them.