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Merged Bitcoin - Part 3

psionl0 said:
Your original point was

Clearly, if neither can exist without the other then they must have come into existence simultaneously.
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And where in that post did wayerin say that both were created simultaneously. Ah well when you've been spending the lat ten years creating strawman versions of what those disagreeing with you have argued, and then claiming to be "winning", why should anybody expect you to start being honest from now?
 
Gulliver Foyle said:
And where in that post did wayerin say that both were created simultaneously.
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Wayerin posted that "crypto has no utility outside of the exchanges, and the crypto exchanges have nothing to do without crypto" in response to the claim that bitcoin doesn't need an exchange to exist.

How could one be created without the other if this is the case?
 
Dr.Sid said:
Is that good or bad ?
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It means that anyone who bought bitcoin since then and held on, is currently showing a loss (on paper). That loss doesn't become real until they try to sell.

(Of course it could get worse or better if they keep holding on, that's the nature of speculation.)

But anyone who took out a loan to buy bitcoin during that period, could be struggling, because they'd be paying interest on the loan, and not getting any growth on their asset.
 
novaphile said:
It means that anyone who bought bitcoin since then and held on, is currently showing a loss (on paper). That loss doesn't become real until they try to sell.

(Of course it could get worse or better if they keep holding on, that's the nature of speculation.)

But anyone who took out a loan to buy bitcoin during that period, could be struggling, because they'd be paying interest on the loan, and not getting any growth on their asset.
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Sure .. on the other, even with bitcoin being this "low", if you bought in March 2020, you would be still up 400-500%. And as you said, the loss is unrealized .. as long as you don't sell or the bitcoin crashes for good.
Which can IMHO totally happen. And it may be happening right now. While there were many crashes before, and bitcoin raised stronger than before, it's also slightly different every time. Especially the ecological burden in new thing. With every peak and crash the fame of bitcoin raises .. making it more likely it will get regulated, which might be great blow, possibly fatal.
 
psionl0 said:
Exchanges can certainly be regulated but how do you regulate a computer algorithm?
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Of course the algorithm will be fine.
But ownership of crypto can be made right out illegal .. even though that would be really hard to enforce. Exchanges are indeed the easiest to regulate. Without reliable exchanges bitcoin would drop to fraction of today's price.
But it would have to coordinated effort .. let's say EU and US. I think first will be China though .. and based on the effect, western countries may join.
 
Dr.Sid said:
Of course the algorithm will be fine.
But ownership of crypto can be made right out illegal .. even though that would be really hard to enforce. Exchanges are indeed the easiest to regulate. Without reliable exchanges bitcoin would drop to fraction of today's price.
But it would have to coordinated effort .. let's say EU and US. I think first will be China though .. and based on the effect, western countries may join.
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Cryptos won't be made illegal - unless vested interests find it more profitable to deal with a banned asset (as happens with drugs).

As for the notion that bitcoin would drop to a fraction of today's price without exchanges, that is a baseless claim.
 
Dr.Sid said:
Of course the algorithm will be fine.
But ownership of crypto can be made right out illegal .. even though that would be really hard to enforce. Exchanges are indeed the easiest to regulate. Without reliable exchanges bitcoin would drop to fraction of today's price.
But it would have to coordinated effort .. let's say EU and US. I think first will be China though .. and based on the effect, western countries may join.
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Actually enforcement would be easy and there is no need to ban bitcoins per se. Just prohibit servers' bitcoin blockchains. That would make it economically unfeasible for miners. The bitcoins owned by the multitudes would still exist but no ability to transfer. Bitcoin depends on having a mutitude of the same blockchains with miners blessing the new blocks as bitcoins are minted.
 
marting said:
Actually enforcement would be easy and there is no need to ban bitcoins per se. Just prohibit servers' bitcoin blockchains. That would make it economically unfeasible for miners. The bitcoins owned by the multitudes would still exist but no ability to transfer. Bitcoin depends on having a mutitude of the same blockchains with miners blessing the new blocks as bitcoins are minted.
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I don't see how that would work. Get rid of the big miners and the mining difficulty will drop until you could mine BTC using a simple PC. I'm sure that there is no shortage of people who would mine BTC if they didn't need expensive equipment or a cheap source of electricity.
 
psionl0 said:
I don't see how that would work. Get rid of the big miners and the mining difficulty will drop until you could mine BTC using a simple PC. I'm sure that there is no shortage of people who would mine BTC if they didn't need expensive equipment or a cheap source of electricity.
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Sure. And if you could mine bitcoins with a PC what do you think bitcoins would then be worth? The briliance of bitcoin is the increased capital needed to start and operate mining. A lot of outside capital has gone into mining. But mining all depends on multiple blockchain servers that miners can drop into for validation. My point was that if the world decided to ban bitcoin the simple approach is to ban the servers, not the bitcoins themselves. Far easier.

That said, I don't see any risk of the world doing that given how much capital investment has gone into mining. But it certainly could be done.
 
marting said:
Sure. And if you could mine bitcoins with a PC what do you think bitcoins would then be worth?
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Too many people have tried to predict a bitcoin price and ended up looking like idiots so I won't hazard a guess.

However, the mining rate is constant and independent of the mining difficulty so getting the big players out won't affect the supply of bitcoins. Of course, as long as there is a demand for bitcoins, the mining difficulty is unlikely to quite get down to PC level anyway.
 
psionl0 said:
Too many people have tried to predict a bitcoin price and ended up looking like idiots so I won't hazard a guess.
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It's not a prediction. Quite simply if bitcoin mining profitability declined to the point that it was worth it to use PCs to mine bitcoin then bitcoin value would be proportional to the capital need to buy and use PCs (electricity and initial capital for the PCs. That's the intrinsic supply and demand relationship.

Again, It's not a prediction. It's a fact if bitcoin mining drops to that level. You were the one that mentioned PC's used to mine BTC. I don't see that as likely.
 
marting said:
It's not a prediction. Quite simply if bitcoin mining profitability declined to the point that it was worth it to use PCs to mine bitcoin then bitcoin value would be proportional to the capital need to buy and use PCs (electricity and initial capital for the PCs. That's the intrinsic supply and demand relationship.

Again, It's not a prediction. It's a fact if bitcoin mining drops to that level. You were the one that mentioned PC's used to mine BTC. I don't see that as likely.
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This is a different argument to the one you originally made which was that if you "just prohibit servers' bitcoin blockchains" then there would be no ability to transfer bitcoins.
 
psionl0 said:
This is a different argument to the one you originally made which was that if you "just prohibit servers' bitcoin blockchains" then there would be no ability to transfer bitcoins.
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You are quite correct. It was a response to your notion that somehow, if the big players drop out, mining costs would drop. I was just pointing out that if they did drop to the point PCs would be useful, the price of bitcoins would have to have droped as well.

But my main argument stands which was to Dr. Sid re outlawing bitcoin as it wouldn't be hard. If bitcoin blockchain servers were outlawed it would be a simple task to monitor their existance since knowledge of them is essential for folks to transfer BTC as well as miners to aggegate and validate transfers. BTC would cease to be exchangeable. No need to outlaw individual BTCs held by millions.

But again, I don't see that happening. At least in the forseable future.
 
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marting said:
You are quite correct. It was a response to your notion that somehow, if the big players drop out, mining costs would drop. I was just pointing out that if they did drop to the point PCs would be useful, the price of bitcoins would have to have droped as well.
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Although you didn't include it when you quoted my post, I made that point already.

marting said:
But my main argument stands which was to Dr. Sid re outlawing bitcoin as it wouldn't be hard. If bitcoin blockchain servers were outlawed it would be a simple task to monitor their existance since knowledge of them is essential for folks to transfer BTC as well as miners to aggegate and validate transfers. BTC would cease to be exchangeable. No need to outlaw individual BTCs held by millions.
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That is just not possible. You can't shut down web sites nor prevent computers from running certain software. I don't know what a "bitcoin blockchain server" is anyway.
 
psionl0 said:
That is just not possible. You can't shut down web sites nor prevent computers from running certain software. I don't know what a "bitcoin blockchain server" is anyway.
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Sure you can. The number of bitcoin processors is a small fraction of the number of bitcoin hodlers. And bitcoin processors require communication with other processors for trust purposes. See this:

https://bitcoin.org/en/full-node#what-is-a-full-node

These (somewhat under 20k of them) are servers that keep copies of the blockchain and communicate with others and miners to update requested transactions. Be pretty easy to shut them down because they have to communicate with each other to sync up.
 
psionl0 said:
That is just an opinion piece and is not immune to scrutiny just because the ECB is a "legitimate" authority.
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why didn’t you scrutinize it then?
Most of the so called "experts" in finance haven't dealt with bitcoin before and, like the idiots in this forum, believe that bitcoin came into existence yesterday and will be gone tomorrow.
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Nice ad hominem there. Go fallacies.

Anybody who knows anything at all about bitcoin knows that the only cost of a transaction is the fee that must be offered to get the transaction on the blockchain and that you can get 6 confirmations (the irreversible standard) in as little as 30 minutes. Calling that "cumbersome, slow and expensive" reeks of ignorance.
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What fee must you offer to get six confirmations in as little as 30 minutes? “As little as” suggests “often much longer than”. I’m not impressed. Visa is significantly faster.

Also you seem to be ignoring the environmental problems.
 
psionl0 said:
It is not possible. Even if a country passed a law banning mining and validation, it would be almost impossible to police. Not to mention that there are plenty of places where the law could not touch you.
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It is not possible. Even if a country passed a law banning mining and validation murder, it would be almost impossible to police. Not to mention that there are plenty of places where the law could not touch you. :rolleyes:

But they don't need to ban it. Bitcoin will eventually implode by itself. Meanwhile though it's causing a lot of environmental damage. That is the issue that should be addressed. Bitcoin miners shouldn't be allowed to waste cheap electricity that would otherwise be used to reduce our carbon footprint. Most of that is going on in China, the most populous country in the world and the most polluting. But unlike most western countries, if the Chinese government decides to ban something it will be policed.

Now before you jump all over me for trying to destroy bitcoiner's fortunes, raising the cost of mining would make it 'worth' even more! So bitcoiners should be all for making it cleaner.
 
jeremyp said:
why didn’t you scrutinize it then?
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Who says I didn't? It has two false statements: "real Bitcoin transactions are cumbersome, slow and expensive" and "Bitcoin has never been used to any significant extent for legal real-world transactions".

Obviously the author has never heard of El Salvador before. They may have been stupid to adopt bitcoin as an official currency but that doesn't make their transactions illegal (nor out of this world).

jeremyp said:
What fee must you offer to get six confirmations in as little as 30 minutes? “As little as” suggests “often much longer than”. I’m not impressed. Visa is significantly faster.
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The average fee is currently about 0.00008 BTC (less than $2) per transaction.

jeremyp said:
Also you seem to be ignoring the environmental problems.
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Only if you ignore all of the posts of mine that criticize POW for its excessive energy consumption (and I'm sure you WILL ignore them).
 
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psionl0 said:
Who says I didn't?
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Ah, so you did scrutinise it but chose to use the fallacy fallacy against it instead of a reasoned argument. I understand.

It has two false statements: "real Bitcoin transactions are cumbersome, slow and expensive" and "Bitcoin has never been used to any significant extent for legal real-world transactions".
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Excepting speculation on the value of BTC itself, what real world transactions has it been used for to a significant extent?

Why do you think Bitcoin transactions are not slow and cumbersome when you can only do six confirmations in 30 minutes (source: you) and you have to use the electricity of a medium sized nation to prop it up?

Obviously the author has never heard of El Salvador before. They may have been stupid to adopt bitcoin as an official currency but that doesn't make their transactions illegal (nor out of this world).
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But is it being used to any significant extent there?


The average fee is currently about 0.00008 BTC (less than $2) per transaction.
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Seems like quite high to me. What's the fee for converting BTC to usable currencies? I guess that depends on which exchange you use. If it was FTX the fee seems to be $all-your-money.

Only if you ignore all of the posts of mine that criticize POW for its excessive energy consumption (and I'm sure you WILL ignore them).
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Yes, but you seem to be ignoring the environmental cost in all your other posts.
 
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psionl0 said:
Wayerin posted that "crypto has no utility outside of the exchanges, and the crypto exchanges have nothing to do without crypto" in response to the claim that bitcoin doesn't need an exchange to exist.

How could one be created without the other if this is the case?
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As I said, your argument relies on "intelligent design" style understanding of how things can come into being.

Crypto having no utility other than scamming people is obviously not an impediment for creating crypto.
 
psionl0 said:
When all your arguments fail, just go back to your original argument as if the discussion never took place. :rolleyes:
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Ah, yes, the ever so convincing "nuh -uh!" that seems to be all crypto fans have any more. Well played, it totally won you the points.
 
psionl0 said:
ftfy.
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I quoted you. You made exactly **** all for an argument. Despite this thread being in the 3rd iteration, you have yet to even come up with a non-criminal utility for bitcoin. All you have been able to do for hundreds of pages now is claim that you did, and whine about anyone who doesn't agree that cryptocurrencies will always increase in value if you hold them until the end of time.
 
This post is destined for AAH, I know full well, should anyone report it, but I can't resist posting it nevertheless. psionIO, you two are like soul brothers, you know that, you and Belz? Regardless of whether or not you (or he) are right or wrong about something, or even really knowledgeable --- as you (or he) may well may be, or some subject, and as I believe you are on this one --- but these short snarky content-free posts, that you both revel in, they make for very enertaining reading should one be in the mood for that kind of super-light reading. I'd especially enjoyed it when the two of you had had a go at each other on this thread itself (or maybe a predecessor thread, I don't know, but about BTC) --- except in that exchange he'd had the better of you, in terms of snark I mean not content because this exercise isn't about content really, but that's not the point. The point is, it's curious, and ...entertaining, this content-free snark fest.*


* Again, not saying you're incapable of content-ful posts. You've supplied me with one, for instance, that I've acccepted and acknowledged. Just appreciating, kind of, and commenting on, this weird posting style.
 
Chanakya said:
Just appreciating, kind of, and commenting on, this weird posting style.
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This entire thread has a "weird" posting style. Many of the posters are at least ignorant of the thread or just plain dishonest.

So many of the exchanges are of the following style:
Poster: "Bitcoin is a <scam thing>"
Me: Gives explanation of why <scam thing> is different to bitcoin
(a few posts later)
Same Poster: "Bitcoin is a <same scam thing>"

Do you wonder why I get snarky?
 
psionl0 said:
This entire thread has a "weird" posting style. Many of the posters are at least ignorant of the thread or just plain dishonest.

So many of the exchanges are of the following style:
Poster: "Bitcoin is a <scam thing>"
Me: Gives explanation of why <scam thing> is different to bitcoin
(a few posts later)
Same Poster: "Bitcoin is a <same scam thing>"

Do you wonder why I get snarky?
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Haha, not quite true though, is it? At least not always?

Someone posts a pedigreed report criticizing bitcoin, and you launch into content free putdowns invoking logical fallacies, while committing those exact same fallacies yourself, except in reverse. For whole pages, before someone challenges you, and you then, and only then, deign to comment, briefly, about the content of the report. That's classic you. Again at risk of call-out sanction, that is, even more, classic Belz, that indefatigable content-free back and forth of snark.

But carry on. Not taking sides, either on content, or on personalities, means that I can have fun reading the thread. And get to learn from it as well, when the content-rich posts come in, from either side, and touch on something that interests me.

Not criticism, just an amused observation. Me, I don't mind in the least.
 
Chanakya said:
Haha, not quite true though, is it? At least not always?
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I have been debunking these BS claims about bitcoin since long before you joined this forum - which is probably why you have seen mostly "content free putdowns" instead.

I could repeat the arguments against the BS claims if you were interested but it seems as if you would rather have a good laugh.

Incidentally, Belz... hasn't logged into this site since August 18 last year. Normally when a prolific poster "quits" the forum they still pop in from time to time. To suddenly stop logging in for all time is a bit of a worry. I hope he is ok.
 
psionl0 said:
I have been debunking these BS claims about bitcoin since long before you joined this forum - which is probably why you have seen mostly "content free putdowns" instead.
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I gave a specific instance, recent enough, based off which I said what I did.

But hey, I'm not going to argue about this beyond just this much. Like I said, I'm cool, really.


I could repeat the arguments against the BS claims if you were interested but it seems as if you would rather have a good laugh.
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They're not mutually exclusive, like I said, the laugh and the other thing.

In any case, the content-free portions specifically, one can either ignore them (I do that sometimes), or take umbrage at them (makes no sense for a disinterested third party like me to do that), or else enjoy them and laugh at them (as I do, when they strike me as funny).

It isn't as if everything about BTC I'm drawn to learn about. But some things, and some times, absolutely I am. As you may have noticed, those times I do participate in this thread, beyond a light joke or two I mean to say.


Incidentally, Belz... hasn't logged into this site since August 18 last year. Normally when a prolific poster "quits" the forum they still pop in from time to time. To suddenly stop logging in for all time is a bit of a worry. I hope he is ok.
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Yep, I noticed that too. And in fact there's a thread in Community about his absence. I too hope he's fine, and merely taking some time out.
 
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