cflynnus
cflynnus on Hacker News
I have no problem with the Tesla touchscreen. I don't want a car with physical buttons.
Thinking CBDCs are “safe” is extremely naive. They’re a dystopian nightmare. They’re every dictators wet dream. This is why Bitcoin matters. Bitcoin = freedom.
It's not good money if it's properties can be changed, especially it's supply.
If it's centralized it's garbage and it doesn't matter whatever its roadmap is. Also ETH wont implement sharding because its breaks composability. It's just marketing.
Gold standard was nixed because the government wanted to be able to create new money out of thin air and give it to itself. Simple as that.
> the ruinous consequences if a Proof-of-Work-based currency were to rapidly overtake the current payment networks, in terms of the cost of electricity and environmental impact.
https://endthefud.org/energy
I don't care about securities law or what the US government does towards crypto. My point is that these ARE securities and bitcoin IS a commodity. When people truly understand this they realize owning anything crypto is akin to buying penny stocks and Bitcoin is basically digital gold 2.0
Having a roadmap is no merit. A roadmap means the system is centralized because a core group of people can change the rules. If it's centralized it's not censorship resistant and the supply can't be guaranteed to not increase and dilute holders therefore it's garbage.
> Bitcoin does not have Turing-complete scripting
Feature not a bug. Base layer that will serve as foundation for entire global economy should be as simple as possible to make it as reliable as possible. Like all complex systems, functionality is added in layers. Things like lightning network and fedimints are examples of such layers.
> It's great that there's 21M supply cap.
Fixed supply is an essential requirement for the entire system to have any merit whatsoever. If supply can change at direction of core group of insiders it's just the same thing as the existing fiat banking system and the real value of the tokens will be diluted in perpetuity.
> But absolutely useless for software engineers to build financial primitives on top of.
No. See comment above about layers.
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Bitcoin is a commodity, ETH & all of crypto is just (unregistered) securities lying/pretending to be commodities.
IMO it applies to anything/everything "crypto" - it's all just unregistered securities lying/pretending to be commodities. It's all just scams.
Bitcoin, however, truly is a commodity and is decentralized.
Ethereum is a foundation of sand. The protocol and the rules change at the whims of the senior insiders. It's not a stable platform and since we don't know what the rules will be in the future you can't plan for the future and build anything long term.
Bitcoin is signal, all of crypto is noise.
It’s your opinion that what PoW produces is “waste”
The markets disagree with your opinion
> >In the stormy world of crypto, Bitcoin is the port.
This is an idiotic statement. Bitcoin development has completely succumbed to corporate capture at this point by Blockstream and the likes.
I disagree. Bitcoin has never had a hard fork. There isn’t a “Bitcoin classic” chain floating around with an old set of consensus rules. Block stream and/or minors can’t force a hard fork like ETH devs can.
And yet it stores a lot of value…
well the PoS fork tokens will acquire 99% the value of the current ethereum tokens, so if you want to access that you've got to upgrade your software. You are right tho you'll continue to be able to interact with the PoW network.
> It's also a software upgrade because that $194 billion transaction only happens if enough users of the software have chosen to upgrade and run the new software by then instead of the old software (don't worry, it looks like most of them have). The necessary software was only ready to use a couple of weeks ago.
"upgrade" is the wrong term. Not 100% of users will accept the new software so after this event called "The Merge" there will be 2 competing Ethereum networks (actually 3 because there's already "ethereum classic" from the last time Ethereum forked). The correct term is "fork." Yes the Vitalik endorsed fork will acquire most of the economic value, but that just highlights the degree to which Ethereum is centralized. There are key figures in ETH that force breaking rules changes on users. Bitcoin is very different.
In at least one nation state, El Salvador, Bitcoin is an option for buying a sandwich with.
I don't think this is correct. The book "The Blocksize War" by Jonathan Bier does a good job of covering this topic.
Strongly disagree that PoW is a form of "shackles"
PoW = bad is an Ethereum marketing narrative.
The Bitcoin community has many robust counterarguments to this narrative.
Labeling Bitcoin mining as "wasteful" is a subjective opinion not an objective truth. Mining does produce something: physics backed security guarantees, which has a value that's determined by a free market (see Bitcoin price/market cap).
Bitcoin gives individuals the ability to better protect their wealth/savings by storing it in a form where it can easily be hidden (thus protected). It amazes me some people think that's a bad thing.
If you don't upgrade your client software you wont be able to transact w/ the new/forked ethereum network. Ok so maybe "upgrade your software or your funds remain locked" is more accurate. Still not good.
"ultrasound" money is not money where the issuance and protocol rules can/do change at the direction of a core group of developers like they do in Ethereum
Disagree. This is a centralized project forcing a set of breaking consensus rule changes on users. Literally "upgrade your software or your money is gone"
Bitcoin has hard guarantees of user rights. Ethereum is a centralized project masquerading as decentralized.