Cryptocurrency as the next significant stage for computing technology, not just an investment

[chenGOD]

A computer network refers to the physical computers. BTC is a P2P application layer that runs on the TCP/IP protocols.

 

12 minutes ago, cyanobacteria said:

bitcoin has no energy cost per transaction,

Lol you ignoring the actual cost per Tx doesn't magically make them disappear.

If you think that article is just standard Tether FUD, fine. When the price drops to 3K, and the underlying fundamental issues of network congestion and lengthy Tx times remain, more people will understand there is no value in BTC as anything beyond an investment vehicle, and recognize that it is one that is inherently susceptible to market manipulation.

[chenGOD]

46 minutes ago, cyanobacteria said:

second layer networks like lightning will exponentially increase the transaction

Lightning network is DOA, because the average person is not going to (and likely is not capable of doing so) create a multisig wallet for each vendor they wish to transact with.

Also: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2006.01418.pdf

 

[zlemflolia]

2 minutes ago, cichlisuite said:

i'm not defending anything, apart from the environment, which we rape again and again. see, this is the fundamental problem with corporate thinking: you calculate "efficiency" in comparison to all the numerous layers of human exploitation of resources and call it "progress" or "development" or "achievement". meanwhile, it's still just another layer of excessive power demand on a system that is already strained to the breaking point. the baseline of such analysis is ever shifting upwards, obscuring the ever weakening foundations that it stands on. and if i use an analogy of tetris: instead of eliminating rudimentary layers beneath it and keep within manageable parameters, you stack one upon the other until it's GAME OVER.

fully agreed, but bitcoin is just a technology which has no volition.  your critique is of power plants being built and the blame for that rests upon capitalism

[zlemflolia]

8 minutes ago, chenGOD said:

A computer network refers to the physical computers. BTC is a P2P application layer that runs on the TCP/IP protocols.

 

Lol you ignoring the actual cost per Tx doesn't magically make them disappear.

If you think that article is just standard Tether FUD, fine. When the price drops to 3K, and the underlying fundamental issues of network congestion and lengthy Tx times remain, more people will understand there is no value in BTC as anything beyond an investment vehicle, and recognize that it is one that is inherently susceptible to market manipulation.

if youre going to get into trivial semantics games at least do it right.  i never once used the term "computer network" I said "computing network" which bitcoin is - a decentralized hash and smart contract computing network

im not ignoring the "actual cost per Tx" it is you who is doing so for visa, did you just not read my post at all? because you sure didn't attempt to even respond to any of its content

i've been hearing tether FUD for years forgive me if I'm desensitized.  when it happens you can claim victory on that point, but simmer down for now

[zlemflolia]

14 minutes ago, chenGOD said:

Lightning network is DOA, because the average person is not going to (and likely is not capable of doing so) create a multisig wallet for each vendor they wish to transact with.

Also: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2006.01418.pdf

 

theoretical attacks such as these are always going to be present.  they can also dox you and come torture you for your bitcoins.  given that this mainly affects people commiting large values into LN, practical solutions such as out of band network connections exist, and for small holders, the LN is just a hot wallet which is always up for risk, the same as your physical fiat wallet from pickpocketing

furthermore, as this very paper you linked says in the bottom, there are decentralized watchtower capabilities implemented through smart contracts and timestamps that protect users who disconnect from LN for any period of time, rendering eclipse attacks irrelevant

Edited February 17, 2021 by cyanobacteria

[chenGOD]

Lol simmer down. You realize that btc relies on all those things too. Because you need to keep the computer network safe and secure. 

[zlemflolia]

4 minutes ago, chenGOD said:

Lol simmer down. You realize that btc relies on all those things too. Because you need to keep the computer network safe and secure. 

okay please justify this post by providing a proof that statism is a universal eternal requirement then.  its a really big claim.  whos going to bother stealing a heater with an antminer powering it or even find it?

then theres monero the eternal system that will continue even if humanity went extinct because of how many fridges and microwaves its running on through malware

Edited February 17, 2021 by cyanobacteria

[hijexx]

My GBTC is up 37% 

[zlemflolia]

7 minutes ago, hijexx said:

My GBTC is up 37% 

sell it and get real bitcoin

[cichlisuite]

1 hour ago, cyanobacteria said:

fully agreed, but bitcoin is just a technology which has no volition.  your critique is of power plants being built and the blame for that rests upon capitalism

you cannot separate the purpose of the technology's existence from direct consequences of its use. and you say you're against capitalism. .... incredible parable

[hijexx]

6 minutes ago, cyanobacteria said:

sell it and get real bitcoin

Easiest way for me to trade it, I’m not a hodler. I traded actuals 4 years ago and the taxes are a PITA

[chenGOD]

1 hour ago, cyanobacteria said:

then theres monero the eternal system that will continue even if humanity went extinct because of how many fridges and microwaves its running on through malware

This is up there in your list of quotes. 

[zlemflolia]

1 hour ago, cichlisuite said:

you cannot separate the purpose of the technology's existence from direct consequences of its use. and you say you're against capitalism. .... incredible parable

there is no ethical consumption under capitalism

1 hour ago, cichlisuite said:

you cannot separate the purpose of the technology's existence from direct consequences of its use. and you say you're against capitalism. .... incredible parable

to elaborate a bit more i would hazard a guess that fully achieved communism with cryptocurrency being used as one aspect of a cybernetic decentralized central economic planning system would render its electricity usage well worth it given that we would abolish the state and surplus labor extraction in the process. the only issue is of course the currency aspect given that communism abolishes it.  but it could be reformed into a single-person single-address or temporary revokable single-address assigned to an individual person with well defined currency issuance, for use within decentralized democratic processes i.e. votes

Edited February 18, 2021 by cyanobacteria

[Alcofribas]

ok consider this: digital currencies, racing through "the web." i say racing bc they are absolutely going fast, sonic levels of speed. if you think about it, sonic is the symbol of crypto par excellence. you're in tokyo. it's 2099. it's raining of course and of course, it's night. this is the permanent climate in 2099 tokyo. neon lights glimmer all around causing the rain to sparkle in a way that is distinctly "cyber" in its overall impression. tall women dressed entirely in black with chunky platform boots and sunglasses (at night, remember) move around radiating contempt for men. they have swords, some of them have "cyberly" replaced their limbs with cool blades. there are new tattoos called "liquid ink" that swirl around the skin depicting writhing snakes, dragons, curious scripts. cyber currencies. you're looking for a smoke. all smoke is electronic, but your battery got nicked when a gang of neo-yakuza youth sped past you with their slippery fingers grabbing from their kawasaki cycles. you ask the guy at the vapor kiosk for a "pack" of Digital Spirits and you hold out your wrist so he can scan your wallet. $2,000,000 cybies down the drain. you inhale the digital smoke, squinting into the rainy scene. an old woman holds a newspaper over her head. it's soaked and has the consistency of a runny egg. where did she get that? you wonder. paper has been banned since 2082. the old ladies here probably have stores of this junk. you pull out your iphone79. it's just after midnight. you scroll through only fans, sucking down huge pulls of digi-air. no one is on tonight. in the distance you see the familiar glow of the sign for Only Fans iClub. might as well see if there are any good "fleshies" tonight. the bouncer frisks you, patting you down with his massive paws. a little eager, you think. he scans you for the cover charge. $500,000 bitbucks. you make your way to a seat in the back, scanning out over the stages and screens for something new. you've been here every night for the past 40 years. the oldest performer is 23. they're getting old, you think. checking your phone again you see it's 10 seconds to your 15th shift today. you switch off your sim glasses and end your lunch break, returning to your home/job at the Bit Mines. servers stretch as far as the eye can see, a monotonous metropolis of toxic plastics, precious minerals, dull rubber wires. you get back to work digging for more space to fill the servers for the 32 people who live above ground and control everything. not a single human soul is to be seen and you have seen no one in 18 years. you are paid .-----------09 bits per year. the year is 2022.

[hijexx]

I’m with it

[Extralife]

31 minutes ago, Alcofribas said:

ok consider this: digital currencies, racing through "the web." i say racing bc they are absolutely going fast, sonic levels of speed. if you think about it, sonic is the symbol of crypto par excellence. you're in tokyo. it's 2099. it's raining of course and of course, it's night. this is the permanent climate in 2099 tokyo. neon lights glimmer all around causing the rain to sparkle in a way that is distinctly "cyber" in its overall impression. tall women dressed entirely in black with chunky platform boots and sunglasses (at night, remember) move around radiating contempt for men. they have swords, some of them have "cyberly" replaced their limbs with cool blades. there are new tattoos called "liquid ink" that swirl around the skin depicting writhing snakes, dragons, curious scripts. cyber currencies. you're looking for a smoke. all smoke is electronic, but your battery got nicked when a gang of neo-yakuza youth sped past you with their slippery fingers grabbing from their kawasaki cycles. you ask the guy at the vapor kiosk for a "pack" of Digital Spirits and you hold out your wrist so he can scan your wallet. $2,000,000 cybies down the drain. you inhale the digital smoke, squinting into the rainy scene. an old woman holds a newspaper over her head. it's soaked and has the consistency of a runny egg. where did she get that? you wonder. paper has been banned since 2082. the old ladies here probably have stores of this junk. you pull out your iphone79. it's just after midnight. you scroll through only fans, sucking down huge pulls of digi-air. no one is on tonight. in the distance you see the familiar glow of the sign for Only Fans iClub. might as well see if there are any good "fleshies" tonight. the bouncer frisks you, patting you down with his massive paws. a little eager, you think. he scans you for the cover charge. $500,000 bitbucks. you make your way to a seat in the back, scanning out over the stages and screens for something new. you've been here every night for the past 40 years. the oldest performer is 23. they're getting old, you think. checking your phone again you see it's 10 seconds to your 15th shift today. you switch off your sim glasses and end your lunch break, returning to your home/job at the Bit Mines. servers stretch as far as the eye can see, a monotonous metropolis of toxic plastics, precious minerals, dull rubber wires. you get back to work digging for more space to fill the servers for the 32 people who live above ground and control everything. not a single human soul is to be seen and you have seen no one in 18 years. you are paid .-----------09 bits per year. the year is 2022.

Bro. Take a break from cyberpunk and come talk about crusty 90s electronica w me in the New Releases forum.

[usagi]

I don't recall that chapter of Neuromancer.

[markedone]

5 hours ago, cyanobacteria said:

bitcoin is in the initial stages of scaling.  second layer networks like lightning will exponentially increase the transaction throughput, putting the environmental efficiency of bitcoin on par with or superior to that of other currencies and transaction networks built upon the petrodollar and all of the environmental destruction involved with it

pardon my ignorance but i'd like to understand this better. my understanding is that bitcoin is not under development or control by any entity.. so what is the way out or scaling process?

would it take the form of a competing service taking it over? and if so, why haven't the numerous projects addressing the environmental aspect already taken it over?

how would this transition look from the layman's perspective?(lets say for example, someone who dont hold any bitcoin but start to be interested in the future once it is more widely used for actual payment)

Edited February 18, 2021 by markedone

[chenGOD]

22 minutes ago, usagi said:

I don't recall that chapter of Neuromancer.

It’s from the outtakes. You got it as a bonus track (Japan only) but only if you paid in doge. 

[Alcofribas]

48 minutes ago, Extralife said:

Bro. Take a break from cyberpunk and come talk about crusty 90s electronica w me in the New Releases forum.

brother i'm too depressed to listen to music so i must find refuge in my visions, my mental images, my posts

[zlemflolia]

30 minutes ago, markedone said:

pardon my ignorance but i'd like to understand this better. my understanding is that bitcoin is not under development or control by any entity.. so what is the way out or scaling process?

would it take the form of a competing service taking it over? and if so, why haven't the numerous projects addressing the environmental aspect already taken it over?

how would this transition look from the layman's perspective?(lets say for example, someone who dont hold any bitcoin but start to be interested in the future once it is more widely used for actual payment)

right now bitcoin works by mining one block every 10 minutes.  right now, a single transaction takes a certain number of bytes in a block, and thus each block (since it has a fixed size) fits a limited number of transactions.  with second-layer solutions, or in other words network protocols such as Lightning Network built on top of Bitcoin, similar to how HTTP  is built on top of TCP, we can instead perform many thousands or millions of transactions "off-chain" or in other words in the Lightning Network protocol, which uses the Bitcoin protocol as a "settlement layer" underneath, where a Lightning Node can run for long periods "commit" its differences in Bitcoin balances every once in a while.  this provides security tradeoffs like chengod pointed out related to certain types of attacks, but it's a worthy tradeoff to increase transaction throughput exponentially without the need to increase the underlying Bitcoin block size, which has severe security implications related to bandwidth requirements to run a miner or full node Bitcoin client, i.e. you have to download gigabytes or terabytes of chain data instead of megabytes depending how much you increase the block size.  it will basically be like

Bitcoin = layer 0, the sturdiest and most secure chain, unfortunately requires lots of electricity to run it but that's required by the laws of thermodynamics

Lightning Network = layer 1, built on top of Bitcoin, much less secure and there are easier attacks that can be performed

Personal wealth storage

1) Bitcoin cold wallet (you never open this except every few years at most), contains 99% of your coins, NEVER touches the internet, ideally never sees the physical light of day or opens within hearing range of "attackers" if they monitor your keyboard strokes and use the frequencies to convert it back into your password

2) Bitcoin hot wallet (enough to last you until your next open your cold wallet)

3) Lightning Network wallet (enough to last you until you next open your Bitcoin hot wallet)

Each layer is less and less secure and should hold less money at any given instant, since it's expected that you can lose it at a given instant depending on your security model

there's a lot of Bitcoin historical revisionism but Satoshi himself literally invented Lightning Network, he called them "payment channels", [https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/history-lightning-brainstorm-beta] though he disappeared before elaborating more or implementing it, it's other software engineers making it now, and it's all open source

Edited February 18, 2021 by cyanobacteria

[zlemflolia]

39 minutes ago, markedone said:

pardon my ignorance but i'd like to understand this better. my understanding is that bitcoin is not under development or control by any entity.. so what is the way out or scaling process?

would it take the form of a competing service taking it over? and if so, why haven't the numerous projects addressing the environmental aspect already taken it over?

how would this transition look from the layman's perspective?(lets say for example, someone who dont hold any bitcoin but start to be interested in the future once it is more widely used for actual payment)

1. The Bitcoin source code is free and open source, it can be forked at any time by anyone who end-users feel are better custodians of the source code or in other words better approvers of code pull requests.  i'm not really involved in it so I can't comment apart from general purpose open source concepts like this regarding who are the current controllers, but needless to say every commit is scrutinized heavily, and you can even personally scrutinize them all if you are capable of doing so and want to
2. network effects make it unlikely, there are other forks of Bitcoin with varying levels of success.  Satoshi defined the longest Proof of Work (PoW) chain as the real chain so if there is a fork and it gets more use, it becomes by definition the real Bitcoin even if others appropriate the name and current symbols.  other completely unrelated cryptos exist too, Ethereum and Monero are the most relevant https://coinmarketcap.com/
3. at present it's pretty hard to fully understand but as UIs improve it should get better.  the way we know it's early in the process is that things are pretty difficult and bad currently, but in theory you can have slick easy to use grandma tier wallets that hide all of these details I explained above, under the hood, within reason (it puts big responsibility on the users to secure their keys)

[zkom]

10 hours ago, cyanobacteria said:

building hydroelectric dams in the middle of untouched wilderness has nothing to do with bitcoin.

It was a comment on this:

On 2/12/2021 at 6:40 PM, realthanks said:

i read an interesting point somewhere else. it should be obvious to even the smoothest of brains that mining is significantly more profitable when using your own renewable energy. in fact it's only profitable at all with near-zero cost electricity, aka... excess capacity that would have been wasted because it costs too much to transport, e.g. hydro-dams in the middle of nowhere with not enough people around to consume all the power. now consider that excess capacity is a problem only renewable energy has (coal power plants never have excess capacity because you can't just stop burning coal if you're producing too much electricity)

Renewable energy isn't free or does it have zero environmental impact. We should move from fossil fuels to renewable energy but we should also reduce energy consumption. We should not increase energy consumption by calculating something that has no practical purpose other than a tool for speculative investments and black market dealing.

10 hours ago, cyanobacteria said:

defending currencies backed by widespread terrorism, war, and oil extraction, over bitcoin, is so mindless that it brings into question the general geopolitical intelligence of anyone making claims like this.  i say this as a communist who wants to abolish currency and yet i still acknowledge the superiority of bitcoin on many dimensions to imperial state backed fiat currencies

For me crypto currencies are almost an antithesis of communism. Communism is about a total government control of the economy with government representing the people. Crypto currencies create an opaque shadow economy that has no government oversight. If they are something it's more like an ultra-capitalist libertarian pipe dream of an economy totally beyond government control.

In my opinion we should increase the transparency of all economic activity to curb tax evasion, corruption, black market arms dealing, child pornography, extortion, etc, not willfully make that all easier in some misguided attempt at sticking it to the man.

[dingformung]

5 hours ago, zkom said:

Communism is about a total government control of the economy with government representing the people. 

That's not really what communism means, though. Communism means a money free and property free (except for personal property) and therefore class free society. Class based hierarchies don't exist. You'd have to be an idiot not to like this idea of communism

[zkom]

2 minutes ago, dingformung said:

That's not really what communism means, though. Communism means a money free and property free (except for personal property) and therefore class free society. Class based hierarchies don't exist. You'd have to be an idiot not to like this idea of communism

In practice it's always been centrally planned economy so far. The lack of central authority to define how the resources and workload are distributed is more anarcho-communism imo, but there are multiple branches of communism and sometimes the ideological differences are subtle.

I think communism is a nice idea but in practice just creates a new ruling class that has even less accountability than any elite in capitalist democracies and as an economic system is very inefficient, rigid and hierarchical. I much prefer democratic welfare states mixed with strictly controlled capitalism that still allows private enterprises but works on mitigating the worst aspects of free markets. Free education, healthcare, public transport, etc and welfare funded by taxes. Private companies to provide non-essential services and products.