Bitcoin Drops Below $8,000 as Cryptocurrency Pain Continues

Re:Bitcoin Drops Below $8,000 as Cryptocurrency Pain Continues by cousin_it on Friday February 02, 2018 @07:51AM (#16290126)

Bitcoin affects global welfare in three ways:

1) Positive sum: facilitate buying goods and services

2) Zero sum: move money from later to earlier adopters

3) Negative sum: warm up the planet

Right now (3) is destroying much more value than (1) is creating. Moreover, all trends show that (1) is falling and (3) is rising. So it would be better for mankind if Bitcoin didn't exist. Regulation is probably the best way to achieve that.

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Re:Bitcoin Drops Below $8,000 as Cryptocurrency Pain Continues by mavdi on Friday February 02, 2018 @08:06AM (#16290201)

There are a lot of cryptocurrencies that don't need mining.

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Re:Bitcoin Drops Below $8,000 as Cryptocurrency Pain Continues by lawlessone on Friday February 02, 2018 @09:57AM (#16290935)

could you elaborate? the only one i know of is IOTA , and it has many severe issues.

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Re:Bitcoin Drops Below $8,000 as Cryptocurrency Pain Continues by mavdi on Friday February 02, 2018 @10:03AM (#16291012)

There are a lot of pre-mined coins such as Ripple (XRP) and some are going to move to PoS (Proof of Stake) model instead of PoW (Proof of work, basically mining). Ethereum being one.

There are also plenty of PoS coins out there, although not yet commonly used, but people are aware of the problem and working to fix it.

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Re:Bitcoin Drops Below $8,000 as Cryptocurrency Pain Continues by xya3453 on Friday February 02, 2018 @09:17AM (#16290628)

While facilitating buying goods and services is a positive, the largest benefit to global welfare is in the invention of the blockchain.

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Re:Bitcoin Drops Below $8,000 as Cryptocurrency Pain Continues by cousin_it on Friday February 02, 2018 @10:27AM (#16291221)

That's not a consumer benefit in itself, but rather a cause of (1)-(3) and other possible effects in the future. It might well be negative in the end.

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