> , a Nobel laureate in economics, said recently that bitcoin "ought to be outlawed” because it’s designed to evade regulation and "doesn’t serve any socially useful function."
A world where if something is not required it is forbidden is not a world that I want any part of Nobel winner or otherwise.
Something I rarely see discussed is the gender breakdown of bitcoin ownership.
I'd be surprised if it wasn't something like 90%+ men mining, trading, and owning bitcoin. If bitcoin really takes over the world, it's going to look like a bunch of dudes printed themselves a fortune and then convinced the rest of the world to buy it from them.
"Bitcoin’s current estimated annual electricity consumption stands at 29.05 Terawatt hours"
I just leave that here...
I am really sad that Bitcoin is the only cryptocurrency that ever managed to touch "mainstream" (it's on Steam, it has Stripe support, etc) and we fucked it up so hard that you need a $4 fee just to pay for one thing with it. I was really hoping it would catch on as a medium of exchange, because there's value in being able to pay for things quickly, cheaply and without giving people a bunch of info, but nope. Digital tulips.
Interesting, are individuals factoring in the possible existence of quantum computers in the future? If Bitcoin does become a trillion dollar space I’d feel uncomfortable knowing there are technical limitations already in place.
Also, what does the end of Bitcoin generation look like? If Bitcoin is truly deflationary why would anyone trade it? The interesting thing about inflation is it requires investment to ensure your money doesn’t lose value over time. Would Bitcoin be incentivizing a market where growth is extremely limited due to greed?
Not taking any sides, trying to understand the long term reprucussions of a substantial Bitcoin market.
I got an international payment recently via bitcoin and the fee was under ÂŁ2 on the sender side. If it had gone through my bank It would've costed me ÂŁ7 to receive and way more on the other end to send.
So I do get the criticism about high fees when paying for a coffee, but maybe that's not the ideal use case for bitcoin. It could've been cheaper with another cryptocurrency but it's a tolerable enough percentage at the moment compared to another widely used solution for international transfers.
I haven't been understanding bitcoin for the longest time: It has been more than five years since I first heard about it. I tried to look it up, I can never quite get the overall picture, why it works the way it is.
I finally understood the bitcoin mechanism and I can explain the original paper well just two days ago. I feel dumb reading this paper. Intellectually, I think it's a hallmark of many great inventions in the 20th and 21st century: public-key cryptography (to verify transactions), micro economics - game theory (to incentive people to mine), hashing (bounty), macro economics (to combat inflation), distributed computing synchronization (to trust the system while not trusting any single computer), statistics (to combat fake chains). Only when one has all the pieces of the puzzle together then the whole thing is possible to conceive.
But I feel a sense of achievement when I finally figured the whole thing by myself. If you don't understand bitcoin, I think you should understand bitcoin as a hacker, even you don't need to use it or intend to store money in it.
I only own a small fraction of a coin, I'm not a risk taker. I'm not going to be rich from bitcoins, I have no reason to shill it with memes. It's unlike anything you have encountered before, notably that the only reason why bitcoin is worth money, is because we are better off with it. I do believe the world is a better place when everyone agrees that bitcoin has values and can be traded, because that means many people can buy their own "insurance" should wars happen, which they do. Your money might turn into paper, you might get killed if you smuggle cows, gold, and diamond when you're running for life, but no one can know if you have bitcoins.
Why was this thread nuked from the front page? It was like #2 when I checked and now a few minutes later it's gone.
Wow, another obnoxious self-playing video in the corner. No thanks.
Bitcoin is what’s wrong with our society: An obsession with money over health, community, housing, food, etc. Bitcoin epitomizes our embrace of the new capitalist dystopia.
Bloomberg? lol
Blockchain may be different. Deviousness is not: https://medium.com/@bitfinexed/spoiler-alert-the-institution...
Many people discuss how much one could buy from the bitcoins today that where used for the first pizza purchase. Few people consider though, that today's value of a bitcoin might not exist without that order.