You are assuming they can't pay for services in Bitcoin - which they can. There are a number of things that currently accept Bitcoin, and that number is only growing imo.
3. I frequent similar places everyday - 2 out of the 3 places that I frequent almost everyday are now accepting btc within the past 3 months - My coffee shop and bar.
4. Musing about Venezuela from crypto podcasts, and articles.
I'll admit I'm biased as I do think it's a good invention, and tend to support Bitcoin. Despite that, I am open minded and would happily check out any information that would propose things are tending in the opposite direction.
1. LN won’t serve the worlds needs it will take 35 years to open a channel for everyone on earth and another 35 years to close it again, assuming the population doesn’t grow.
2. Coinbase merchants take out fiat like bitpay merchants because their suppliers take real money, and so does the tax man. Holding crypto exposes them to unbelievable forex risk. If they took bitcoin and held it over the last year how on earth would they pay their tax bills? Taxes are due on the face value of the crypto at acquisition.
3. That’s an anecdote.
4. Venezuela is zero sum unless you can trade bolivars for bitcoin with outsiders in which case that’d be better off with dollars by any measure. If you’re buying locally you’re moving the bags around. Real mining equipnent just gets nationalized. It’s not a solution for Venezuela or any other developing nation because you haven’t solved the initial distribution problem.
1. I have to admit, if you are going to be so vehemently angry against anyone who even talks about Bitcoin as being potentially useful, I'd suggest you do at least 5 minutes of googling. Channel Factories -> https://www.tik.ee.ethz.ch/file/a20a865ce40d40c8f942cf206a7c... Cool stuff, I doubt you'll actually read it, but there's the link anyway.
2. Whoa look at that -> You can pay your taxes in Ohio in Bitcoin. So apparently "how on earth would they pay their tax bills" means send them BTC if they live in Ohio :). Suggesting that because you can't pay taxes or pay suppliers right now with Bitcoin, and therefore it will never be useful or capable of those things is such a silly argument. I certainly don't believe we live in a world where you can buy anything with BTC right now, but like I said my statement was about us trending in that way (Still waiting on all those graphs showing the opposite by the way).
3. Damn, I forgot I can't use anecdotes to influence my opinion. Thanks for reminding me.
4. Don't ask me -> ask the data. https://coin.dance/volume/localbitcoins/VES/BTC "35,000 Bitcoin (worth around $127 million at today's prices) was traded for bolívar on the LocalBitcoins crypto exchange over the entire course of last year." Maybe they would be better off with dollars, but Bitcoin is much easier to transfer across borders, and much easier to hold on your person without signaling that you are carrying thousands of dollars.
I'm happy to talk more about crypto with you, although I'm not sure you are open to actually talk honestly about it - seeing as how you took the time to negatively respond to every post I made on this subject. If there is something that has made you so angry about Bitcoin, I'd be happy to learn it to see if I'm supporting something that I shouldn't.
I'm certainly not arguing that Bitcoin is the perfect solution, nor that it's super helpful or accessible today. But, I don't think absolutely denying any use is a smart strategy, and I'd rather have you make legitimate counter arguments where you've actually spent the time to learn things rather than the lax effort you've put in so far.
I’m not angry at bitcoin or at you. I’m frustrated seeing intelligent people throw themselves at something that appears to be a pyramid scheme built on an ancap view of the world where we should all just rely on ourselves and the magic of the blockchain to save us all from the tyrany of... everything, I guess? And everyone who knows about it now will be rich! Bolstered by a lack of understanding of how finance works, they go out there and shill systems that are actively user hostile and rife with manipulation. Scammers on every doorstep and transactions are always final. A vote for Bitcoin is a vote for the scammers, the manipulators, the shady exchanges. The uncensorable, decentralized (excluding China of course) deregulated payment network functioning as designed. It’s a beautiful theory that just doesn’t fit the real world.
1. I spend a lot of time learning and reading about Bitcoin and the blockchain -- that's why I don't like it. The technology is fine, it's just a database with hashes. Proof of work dates back to 1997 (22 years ago) with HashCash. Bitcoin is over a decade old. In all that time, nobody has found a good use for blockchain -- at least one that isn't better solved otherwise. Think of what else has happened in 10 years to technology that adds actual value. Remember the iPhone 1 (2007)?
I didn't have to get half way through the abstract to find the problem, and it's the same exact one I pointed out. You still need an on-chain transaction to open a channel ("Instead of one blockchain transaction per channel, each user only needs one transaction to enter a group of nodes") or in this case join a group. Each person needs to do this. There are 7,000,000,000 of us and if we dedicated the entire blockchain (7tx/sec) to opening channels that would take 34 years just to open a channel (or here, join a group) for everyone on earth. The paper you linked references a paper explaining it for you, as #9 in the references [1].
The paper cites being able to reduce on-chain transactions 96% for a group of 20 people with 100 channels between them -- I'm saying we can't even get to 1 person with 1 channel to 1 other person.
2. Big difference between paying your taxes with bitcoin and paying taxes denominated in bitcoin. If you received 1BTC ($19,000) renumeration for your services January 2018 then went to pay your taxes "with Bitcoin" in Ohio April 2019, expect to pay approximately 2BTC ($7600 / 40%) in taxes. That's a 200% tax rate. If you could pay your taxes denominated in Bitcoin you'd be paying 0.4BTC ($1300) -- or 40% of unit of account, 6.8% of value. Make no mistake you're paying in US dollars, they're just providing a convenient forum for exchange. I'd image they'd do the same with a goat exchange if people decided to be equally backwards and everyone wanted to start using goats as payment.
3. Anecdotes aren't really worth much. It's just as irrelevant as my telling you 100% of the places I frequent don't take bitcoin. I don't hold that up though, I look for studies.
4. Re: LocalBitcoins and the bolivars, if they were traded with foreigners, they'd be unequivocally better off with a USD denominated account and a debit card. They'd have saved (up to) 80% of their net worth relative to what they did. But who on earth would take their bolivars? Zero sum.
If they traded it with each other the same amount of net worth was lost because the total number of BTC in Venezuela and the total number of bolivars remained unchanged, all that changed was who had them. No problems were solved by Bitcoin here.
Btw that VES/BTC chart isn’t adjusted for the 10,000,000% (by next year) inflation rate, so in constant dollar terms I’d wager that BTC/VES volume went down over the period highlighted.
1. Regarding the fees: $0.46 is (I presume) only the transaction fees. To make an accurate comparison, you'd have to include the exchange fees to convert from USD to BTC and then from BTC to JPY.
Right now Coinbase is charging me $59 to buy 1 BTC, and I don't know how much more it would be to sell exchange that back to JPY.
You can send $4000 (about 1 BTC) to someone in Japan for $30.14 with TransferWise.
And guess what? Last time I had to send money to my family in Europe, that's exactly what I did.
2. Regarding trust:
> don't have to trust anyone in between to get my money to him.
Yes you do. Both your friend and you need to trust your Bitcoin exchange. Which sometimes, cannot be trusted. Remember Mt Gox?
a. If you do not currently own Bitcoin and want to own it there are many ways you can get it. They range from fast (generally more expensive) to slow (generally less expensive). Sure, if you want to buy Bitcoin on Coinbase you can do that and you will pay them a fee for that service - which I've done. You can also mine it - which I've done, be paid it in - also done, etc.
b. Secondly you are assuming that my friend can't pay for services in Bitcoin. We have both had lunch together at a restaurant in which we paid for the entire meal in BTC.
So it's an unfair statement to say my transferring of BTC to my friend costs me these fees. If you want to make the statement of "transferring USD to BTC to my friend to JPY" then sure, your statement about fees is relevant. I'm not sure suggesting that a pure BTC transfer is not an "accurate comparison" is fair.
2. See the above point. There is no trust beyond math when it come to a pure Bitcoin to Bitcoin transfer. There are plenty of things that you can buy using pure Bitcoin which I, and many of my friends, have done.
1a. Mining is absolutely inefficient as an individual and barely economical if you're Bitmain. That's a complete red-herring.
1b. Effectively nobody accepts bitcoin. It's something like 3 major merchants and around a couple thousand total, world-wide. So yes, you will be buying BTC for real money and exchanging it for real money on the other side. Pretending we live in a land of hyperbitcoinization isn't helpful.
Further, you incur huge forex risk in between the time it takes to buy, transfer and re-sell. Do it at the wrong time and you could lose tens of percentage points. The parent post understates the cost as a result.
The real cost is much higher than that, because you are not paid in bitcoin in the US, and your friend in Japan cannot spend bitcoin to buy food or pay rent. You also have to trust multiple entities along the way.
You can send money to Japan using moneygram, or transferwise, or a number of other services for a lower all in cost.
In fact I am paid in Bitcoin -> On my weekends I accept code bounties for small amounts of Bitcoin for fun. I've used that Bitcoin to buy coffee at my local coffee shop and have lunch with my friend in Japan at restaurants that accept Bitcoin (which is actually what got me into it in the first place).
The $0.46 figure is deceiving though; at the moment the cost of running the blockchain is being paid for by the 4% inflation rate. That cost is being masked by the high volatility and speculative forces controlling the bitcoin price, so you aren't really paying it.
At some point, miners aren't going to be paying for themselves by inflating the monetary supply, and then the cost of what they are doing is going to rise to be more than a centralised database tracking everything. Because the mining process for bitcoin is so expensive relative to updating a database controlled by trusted entities, ie, banks. And that will manifest in transaction fees.
I don't disagree with you at all -> In fact most people who I read about in the space actually want high transaction fees.
I think that's what makes Lightning Network very exciting. I've used it a few times, and it's a very pleasant experience although definitely still early - only has a capacity of about 3 million at the moment.
What are you trading the 1 bitcoin for? Given that the typical use case is to purchase some product or service (rather than just transferring bitcoin for fun), how do you secure that aspect of the transaction?
A successful transaction is when one party pays and the other party delivers the good/service. If one party delivers but the other fails to hold up their end, blockchain technology doesn’t help and the solution is to seek recourse via the courts. You can mitigate this via escrow but that’s no different than non-blockchain transactions.
Is it wasting though? Do you consider vaults a waste? Do you consider 2-3% CC fees a waste?
We already have costs built into the current system (e.g. cc fees to make up for fraud, security systems around protecting gold + cash). Electricity is just the cost of that specific system - I think calling it a waste is not necessarily justified.
Credit card fees are 2-3% for a reason -- you can get 2% cash back as a customer with a no-annual-fee card for instance. Then there's the fact that credit cards are loans, and there's a cost to lending. Finally, credit cards come with protections (chargebacks), guarantees, additional warranties and all sort of other customer-friendly services that people want. And obviously are willing to pay 2-3% for.
In the EU where people don't want the system to work like that interchange fees were capped in 2015 at 0.2% for debit and 0.3% for credit [1]. If that's what you want, there's a proven model for establishing it. In Australia it's capped at 0.88% for credit and the greater of 16.5c or 0.22% on debit [2].
Did you know Bitcoin alone ALREADY used 0.5% of world electricity at the end of 2018, even though nobody really uses it? [3] It's like we're all paying a 0.5% surcharge on top of everything we do, which is double the price of EU interchange. Just to support some ancap pyramid scheme that people agree solves largely 1 class of problem: payments for illegal goods and services, while pretending to solve all the worlds problems, just poorly.
2-3% CC fees are a waste. But you don't need blockchains to fix that. You need someone to legislatively force the CC companies to stop playing the cashback bullshit game, which is the real cost driver (much more than fraud) as it funnels money from cash and debit card users to high-reward CC users, while burning a lot of it on the way for managing all of that overhead that is of no help at all when it comes to making financial transactions.
It happens to be that the EU is such a "someone". In EU countries, CC interchange fees are limited to 0,3%, debit fees to 0,2%, effectively resulting in much cheaper rates to be paid by merchants (whether big or small) for card acceptance.
Thoughtful legislation and an effective, fair and trusted executive branch, both with the necessary checks and balances, trump any blockchain, at least as long as we are talking about legal transactions.
To be fair, I think most people who have given blockchain an honest 30 minutes of brainstorming aren't arguing for real world assets connected to a chain.
I would argue that there is potentially a use case when it comes to things that can be completely represented digitally e.g. money.
> To be fair, I think most people who have given blockchain an honest 30 minutes of brainstorming aren't arguing for real world assets connected to a chain
You say that, and then look at the number of companies selling blockchain based services promising exactly that, and enterprises paying for projects...
It's understandable why as well. Pure "digital world" businesses that blockchain can deliver like provably actuarially fair gambling exist, but they're pretty niche.
I'd question whether money can be completely represented without recourse to the outside world - what gives money relatively stable value is the real world enforcement of contracts, debt obligations and taxes. Take those away and whilst your blockchain can validate the integrity of some numbers you hold, you can't guarantee anyone actually exchanges it for anything actually useful in future.
No doubt that there are a lot of people selling those services, but I think they are capitalizing off the fact that a lot of people don't know/spend the time to understand where blockchain actually improves things - and it's no fault of those people.
From my understanding, blockchain is essentially "cheap trust" . You can pay the system a fee to trust math rather than a human. Once I learned that, I realized there are very few scenarios where cheap trust is needed.
So perhaps I should adjust my first statement with "people who understand blockchain" - although even that's not necessarily fair as it assumes that I "understand" it.
I suppose what I'm getting at is that I think it's unfair to look at the number of scammers/people selling "blockchain" services and make an assumption on the industry as a whole. Most of the developers in the space that I know completely write off those people and don't even consider them in the industry.
On whether money can be completely represented without recourse to the outside world -> Agreed, I should again amend my statement to say "value". There is no doubt that 1 Bitcoin represents a certain amount of "value" right now and that value has so far proven to be un-censorable. Whether it will be successful money is a different question.
>To be fair, I think most people who have given blockchain an honest 30 minutes of brainstorming aren't arguing for real world assets connected to a chain.
The comment above says that the blockchain provides a satisfactory answer to enforcement of contracts. People really do seem to think that contracts made on the blockchain will magically enforce themselves in the real world.
Slightly ridiculous. Blockchains enforce the contract on the blockchain.
The contracts don't, and can't, concern themselves with anything that is off the blockchain. Once the ether is in your account, the contract is complete.
They enforce the contract on the blockchain, but that's pretty much irrelevant, since breaking a contract usually doesn't involve anything a blockchain solution would control.
As an example, fradulent fish is a huge problem in the fisheries and food industry. At every step of the supply chain, there is temptation to substitute expensive for cheap fish. Most Chilean sea bass you buy isn't actually Chilean sea bass, for example.
A lot of people are hyping blockchain as a solution to this serious problem, not appreciating the fact that the technology cannot actually tell different types of whitefish apart. I really would like a solid counterexample where blockchain actually would help, but I've never heard one.
I'm not sure I'd necessarily call those problems - it's a weird definition I know, but perhaps tradeoffs?
1. On Electricity - It needs to be expensive to try to cheat or steal from the system. Currently with gold you would need to hire a private army to steal from and break into vaults - that's so expensive and crazy that I don't think most people are willing to undertake that risk. Currently I think electricity is the best way to make digital native things expensive. I'm not sold on anything else yet (definitely open to new solutions, but I'm not convinced think PoS is a viable one).
2-3. I think this is an interesting tradeoff. The way I look at it you pick 1 of 2. Either you trust someone or some people to return lost funds/remove "problematic" data or you trust the system in which case those things can never be recovered/removed.
I think calling those "problems" might be premature as they could actually be "benefits" depending on how you look at them.
Re 1: So why again are we wasting an entire country worth of electricity to secure some numbers? Because we haven't found a good replacement yet doesn't cut it. It's like saying why am I dumping dioxin in the rain gutters? Oh, well, I haven't figured out a better plan so back off, socialist :P
Re 2-3: Tell that to customers of Quadriga and MtGox and the countless scammed, those who paid ransom to kidnappers. Everyone who lost their keys. It's a problem, let's face some reality here.
I frequently see commercials that must have cost millions of dollars to create and place that make the opposite argument. If what you're saying is true, the whole industry is just selling snake-oil, and (I think?) people are buying it. The more likely scenario, it seems to me, is that lots of these people actually believe in good faith that this is actually useful technology. If you assume that's the case, it makes sense for people to continue pointing out why that may not be true.
> The whole industry is just selling snake-oil, and (I think?) people are buying it.
No, not people in the sense of end user customers. The industry is selling snake oil and some investors have bought into it and subsequently promote it.
10 years down the road and they're still trying to find a mainstream use case, but they won't find it because in the end using a blockchain makes everything harder if you are a legal enterprise.
Not necessarily for or against "blockchain" in any one specific use case, but I'm curious why you would define anything that can't use contracts and the legal system as "illegal".
I can imagine that for many non-first world countries where people wouldn't trust things to the legal system or contracts - I wouldn't necessarily define those things as illegal.
This is a real scenario where I think cryptos will change the ecosystem in the next few years. There is a LOT to figure out in this space (ICO Madness), but I believe once the dust settles, this is a real problem that could be solved.
agreed - what we're seeing is essentially a peer distributed stock market or "blockchain-like" linking of salaries to perf and voting to stock (proof of stake).
I view it as a good first step, but I am expecting an ethereum-based platform to one-up this idea in a few years.
Caddy is pretty awesome. I use it to run my personal website (love that it can serve statically compiled Brotli assets out of the box). I maintain it's docker image here: https://github.com/ZZROTDesign/alpine-caddy :) Should be incredibly simple to set up!
If you happen to use React, I built a React component that helps you manage this! :) Hopefully it helps a bit! It also reports whether or not a user is idle, such that you can reduce cpu usage during that as well.
React is in the business of limiting its API surface, not increasing it. I think they have done a great job of it - libraries like this should exist in userland.
It seems like React could listen for visibilitychange itself to throttle its own events or virtual DOM processing. It wouldn't necessarily need to expose visibilitychange as a library API.
Because there is no sufficient magic for that. App developers have to think about when they do work, how much work they do, and if and when it should be rendered. For any rule you can give, I can give you an example of an app that would break.
In general, the mantra for people who find this tough to fix should be, "Why didn't I use MVC, what a cretin I was!"
It's not a full node implementation yet, but will be there soon!