Homeless people living under a bridge have the same ability to participate and get Bitcoin as SV tech bros running racks of ASIC miners in their three car garages?
So by your standards medieval Britania was a democracy too.
Bitcoin is dominated by extremely wealthy miners. The only way it comes close to profitability mine is to get into big industrial power plans and buy tons of highly specified computing equipment. Only then are you breaking even (eventually, after the years of paying off the capex). But then you'll finally have a tiny billionth of the overall network speed and can make a tiny wave in choosing what transactions to include and push the chain any particular direction. It's practically democracy but you can pay $5 to vote again and can do it however many times you want, meanwhile lots of people pre-purchased votes at $0.50/ea and bought millions already. Sounds like a level playing field to me!
I never suggested anything even close to that.
> Bitcoin is dominated by extremely wealthy miners.
No, it recently had a drop in difficulty as the big box miners have had to shut down due to bankruptcy (making it more accessible to more people). That means it's both cheaper to get the equipment you need and easier to earn Bitcoin. What's great is that's by design.
> But then you'll finally have a tiny billionth of the overall network speed and can make a tiny wave in choosing what transactions to include and push the chain any particular direction. It's practically democracy but you can pay $5 to vote again and can do it however many times you want, meanwhile lots of people pre-purchased votes at $0.50/ea and bought millions already. Sounds like a level playing field to me!
This reads like you don't understand how Bitcoin works. I really don't know what you're referring to here. The network operates according to the current consensus around the protocol. If you want to influence the direction of said protocol, you can submit a proposal and if others want to support it, your changes can be implemented as an upgrade. There is zero prerequisite to spend anything to participate in Bitcoin. If you can offer a product or service to someone and are willing to be paid in Bitcoin, you just participated in Bitcoin. Just like every economy, the more you participate, the more opportunity you have.
> No, it recently had a drop in difficulty as the big box miners have had to shut down due to bankruptcy
A few miners shut down. The difficulty barely moved. Its still massively unprofitable for me to mine with any hardware I still own, and many friends of mine with ASICs can't profitably mine either. Leaving...those with extremely cheap energy sources (i.e., not residential rates, i.e., industrial plans, i.e., using lots of power total, i.e....big miners!) or those who have cheap generation sources they've already invested in. How much does a MW of solar panels cost again? How much land does that take up? Sounds easy for someone living under a bridge to put together.
So mining hardware has gotten a lot cheaper huh? Difficulty has dropped a lot? I guess I can mine on my Ryzen 5 2600 CPU then? No? Huh. Maybe my 1070 GPU? No? Huh. Clearly a $2k Macbook Pro M1. Still no? I wonder what a normal used miner goes for these days.
https://www.ebay.com/itm/334660278672 $2,255, 100Th.
https://www.ebay.com/itm/334660278672 $1,680, 100Th.
So easily $1,600-$2,255 for a noisy purpose-built box to mine. What's that gonna cost to operate? ~3kW of power usage, at $0.15/kWh, that's ~$10.80/day, assuming you're not spending any extra on cooling. What's my revenue for that 100Th of mining power these days? ~$6.60/day? Cool, so after spending somewhere around $2k on used mining hardware, I'll be generating -$4.20/day in profits when converting back to USD. Wait, that's a minus symbol... Wait, I'll have some losses from pool fees? Now I've got exchange fees as well?
Well at least I'll have generated some bitcoins. How many did I mine my first day? 0.00036715BTC? Over a year I'll have ~0.134, assuming the difficulty doesn't continue its few year history of continuing to go sky high. We'll say BTC is back to ~$20k, that means for that ~$2k capex investment and $3,942 in power costs (ignoring the fact I had to pay to have space to put the things and might have needed to cool them) I'll have generated ~$2,680.
Yeah, definitely seems like a normal thing average people are gonna be able to participate in. That guy living under the bridge is gonna be able to mine so many bitcoins.
> If you want to influence the direction of said protocol, you can submit a proposal
I can petition the lords for change. They can also just choose to ignore me. Some people wanted larger block sizes. Some wanted faster generation times. We've seen how those changes have turned out over and over. In the end, Bitcoin is what the miners want it to be.
No, I didn't. You said "have the same ability to participate and get Bitcoin" to which I said yes. You reworded what I said, disingenuously, to force an incredibly weak argument.
> Its still massively unprofitable for me to mine with any hardware I still own, and many friends of mine with ASICs can't profitably mine either.
Ah, there it is. It's not about other people, it's about you. Like I've already stated, if you want to participate in Bitcoin but mining is out of range, go offer services and/or products for Bitcoin and earn it (I've done it happily, and have paid others for their services using it, too). Nobody owes you Bitcoin.
> Yeah, definitely seems like a normal thing average people are gonna be able to participate in.
Do normal people participate in SWIFT? No. That's the level Bitcoin is operating on. But it doesn't exclude them from transacting in the currencies that rely on SWIFT as a network.
> I can petition the lords for change. They can also just choose to ignore me. Some people wanted larger block sizes. Some wanted faster generation times. We've seen how those changes have turned out over and over.
And they likely will with this attitude. And yes, their ideas didn't gain traction so they ended up forking, and lo and behold, it didn't work. Those experiments were failures. The system works.
If your argument is about participation, you could also participate in the medieval economy.
You your argument is about proposals, you could also petition lords.
There is nothing democratic about bitcoin, it is like every other system "people with money and influence set the rules"
"If you want to vote in a nation where only landowners vote, go offer services and/or products and earn land."
You can literally buy votes with capital. What a ridiculous system (and extremely undemocratic, btw!)
Guess what? People who don't own land still contribute towards society.
It seems like you may have a lot of vested interest in BTC. If so, that is very clearly clouding your judgement on this issue.
I have friends who have lost a lot of money to various schemes, and they sounded just like you sound here when I tried to talk to them about it (from MLM to crypto yield scams to penny stock newsletters) - they lacked the capability to criticize it b/c they needed it to be true.
It's setting yourself up for a lot of pain.
> You can literally buy votes with capital.
That's Ethereum, not Bitcoin.
> It seems like you may have a lot of vested interest in BTC.
Not really. I'd like to see it succeed, though, as it can help a lot of people.
> I have friends who have lost a lot of money to various schemes, and they sounded just like you sound here when I tried to talk to them about it
I've lost no money on Bitcoin and I've been in it since ~2013 (I do a simple dollar cost averaging scheme to do a daily buy and when I can, accept it as payment for my services). I have a deep disdain for MLM schemes. I don't "need" it to be true, I'd like it to be true.
If people fail to "get it," I'm not going to have an existential crisis. At worst, it will just confirm my suspicion that the majority of the world's population lacks the intelligence to free themselves from tyranny (ironically, by design via state education) and are forever-destined to be enslaved. I'll still be in my backyard picking vegetables. Might even have a soda. Or I'll be in some dystopian prison singing Promised Land [1] by Elvis Presley and throwing my shit at the wall.
"Fuck the poor."
I'm glad we got this far. "Oh it is democratic" to "yeah poor people are parasites who deserve to be crushed under my boot" in like six comments. Be honest and start there next time.
You said that, not me.
> "yeah poor people are parasites who deserve to be crushed under my boot"
You said that, not me.
> Be honest and start there next time.
Take your own advice—you seem deeply disturbed.
The only effective way to "vote" in the Bitcoin world is to mine. The only way to mine is to be wealthy, as I've established here. The only way to be wealthy is to not be poor. Otherwise, you're just sending a letter to the lords to maybe adjust how the system works. Just being a vendor that accepts Bitcoin is the same as just taking USD and hoping the Federal Reserve moves in your interests. You're exerting the same controls overall. In the end, some outside group you have little to no control over has influence in the Monopoly bucks you're trading in. Just in one case, its the miners/exchanges (global markets for BTC). In the other, the Federal Reserve/US Government/the global market for dollars.
Otherwise, making a lemonade stand or making a facebook post is the same as the right to vote in the United States.
If I'm wrong about how providing services in BTC is different in terms of providing services in USD as an example of exerting democratic forces in the currency feel free to share. I'm definitely down for more examination in the topic, but from what I see so far it doesn't seem like Bitcoin is democratic or disconnected from large capital interests than USD in the end.
At least with USD there's some loosely disconnected system from the people I vote for to the people actually appointed to the levers, in BTC its just the people who managed to buy the good mining hardware a few years ago or who manages to find a more efficient way to compute SHA hashes next year.
That's not democracy.
"All landowners get a vote according to the amount of land they own. Work for scraps you peasant."
Unethical nonsense.
You can propose changes to the network at any time via a BIP (Bitcoin Improvement Proposal) [1], so sorry, but you're just wrong. Bitcoin is the most ethical form of money that has ever existed.
> "All landowners get a vote according to the amount of land they own. Work for scraps you peasant."
This is an impressive contortion of reality, but nonetheless completely wrong. Your "voting" ability has nothing to do with participation in mining. Your vote is participation in the network, open ability to submit proposals, run a node to bolster the network, and if you wish, run a mining rig to validate blocks and earn Bitcoin. You can also earn Bitcoin from others directly providing products and services.
I don't agree that "the best ideas win." I certainly don't agree that the halving system is a "best idea." It massively and almost permanently privileges early adopters, creating a landed gentry of the modern world in a completely unjust. The ideas most valued by a particular set of people (either the core devs or the miners, depending on how you define BTC) are what wins. That's aristocracy.
I'm glad you got rich as shit off BTC. That doesn't make you a good person.
You would do well not to judge people so much; it's unbecoming and makes your entire point of view effortless to dismiss.
The Federal Reserve was created to manipulate and control currency. The removal of the gold standard made it so that they could, to their heart's content, produce any amount of money and distribute to anyone they wished, whenever they wanted.
It is, in its entire conception, an absolute ponzi scheme. It is only in favor because that favor is enforced at the barrel of a gun via the tax system and the petrodollar scheme.
Printing money debases the currency, it doesn’t increase borrowing. Not debasing the currency further is the reason all debt isn’t just printed away.
Bitcoin is entirely a ponzi, which is why I was surprised you cited it as an example of something better.
It does both. Where do you think that printed money goes? The business model of banks is to lend out money. They go to the Fed to get more dollars and then lend those dollars out to other people. The more dollars available, the more demand for debt.
> Bitcoin is entirely a ponzi
You'd have to explain why because it's fundamentally not. There's nothing about it that requires coaxing others into it. You either want to use it or you don't.
I (sincerely) hope it all works out for you and we’ll find out in time what it turns out to ultimately be.
You're probably not wrong, but this is your dust up. Give me a shot, I'm open to well-reasoned arguments.
Bitcoin has lost half its value compared to every other currency in the world. You know, those no-good-easy-to-inflate fiat currencies. Compared to gold, too, if that floats your boat. Compared to a basket of goods, which is how inflation is measured for everything else.
So, yeah. Compared to everything except itself, it's lost half its value in the past year. That doesn't make me feel like "Bitcoin is a necessity for the survival of Western civilization" is a very objective look at the reality of the situation.
It's not. [1]
> But we still say that the dollar is losing value to inflation, and we experience it every time we try to buy something else with dollars. (Buying dollars with dollars is rather pointless.) And I'm pretty sure you know all that, and the parent post was just an attempt at a deflection.
No, the dollar loses value to inflation because the supply of money continues to increase, therefore making an individual dollar less valuable (value of currency is drive by scarcity). The supply of Bitcoin is fixed, and therefore, anti-inflationary.
---
The price in X currency is whatever that market is willing to pay for Bitcoin, but that doesn't change the value of it. It's identical to the stock market. The stock market price of a company is not the book value of a company. Ironically, the money printing is what creates and worsens that disconnect as companies do stock buy backs with printed, un-backed dollars, artificially increasing their stock price.
[1] See "Buying Power of $1 over time, 1800-2022" here: https://www.officialdata.org/us/inflation/1800?amount=1
(We don't care about the absolute number of the thing, either, so your "supply of dollars is increasing" argument is also irrelevant. Though I will give you that the increase in the supply of dollars faster than the supply of things for dollars to buy causes inflation.)
You just contradicted yourself, then.
> Well, the purchasing power of Bitcoin tanked over the last year.
It didn't. The purchasing power relative to other currencies did. If your goal is to just use Bitcoin as a way to make more dollars, then sure, you lost something. If your goal (like my own) is to store your wealth in a way that can't be manipulated or confiscated, then you didn't lose any purchasing power.
It's an abstract argument and I understand exactly the point you're making, but ultimately, Bitcoin's inherent value is unchanged (1 Bitcoin = 100,000,000 Satoshi).
Bitcoin is worth whatever peaceful strangers agree that it's worth, not the most oppressive devaluation that an unaccountable cabal determines you will tolerate.
If we are fighting US government, I am not seeing the winning strategy here.
I'm good with either direction.
This is the result of fiat-based currencies and why Bitcoin is a necessity for the survival of Western civilization.
In the words of Max Keiser: "you can't taper a ponzi scheme."