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Bitcoin and Other Cryptocurrencies Are Useless, The Economist Says (economist.com)
With few uses to anchor their value, and little in the way of regulation, cryptocurrencies have instead become a focus for speculation, The Economist magazine said this week. From the story, which may be paywalled: Some people have made fortunes as cryptocurrency prices have zoomed and dived; many early punters have cashed out. Others have lost money. It seems unlikely that this latest boom-bust cycle will be the last. Economists define a currency as something that can be at once a medium of exchange, a store of value and a unit of account. Lack of adoption and loads of volatility mean that cryptocurrencies satisfy none of those criteria. That does not mean they are going to go away (though scrutiny from regulators concerned about the fraud and sharp practice that is rife in the industry may dampen excitement in future). But as things stand there is little reason to think that cryptocurrencies will remain more than an overcomplicated, untrustworthy casino.
Can blockchains -- the underlying technology that powers cryptocurrencies -- do better? These are best thought of as an idiosyncratic form of database, in which records are copied among all the system's users rather than maintained by a central authority, and where entries cannot be altered once written. Proponents believe these features can help solve all sorts of problems, from streamlining bank payments and guaranteeing the provenance of medicines to securing property rights and providing unforgeable identity documents for refugees. Those are big claims. Many are made by cryptocurrency speculators, who hope that stoking excitement around blockchains will boost the value of their related cryptocurrency holdings.
Can blockchains -- the underlying technology that powers cryptocurrencies -- do better? These are best thought of as an idiosyncratic form of database, in which records are copied among all the system's users rather than maintained by a central authority, and where entries cannot be altered once written. Proponents believe these features can help solve all sorts of problems, from streamlining bank payments and guaranteeing the provenance of medicines to securing property rights and providing unforgeable identity documents for refugees. Those are big claims. Many are made by cryptocurrency speculators, who hope that stoking excitement around blockchains will boost the value of their related cryptocurrency holdings.
I bet they'll say my Magic cards & Beanie Babies are useless as well!
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
'The Economist' might not see evading capital controls as useful, but they are wrong.
Not an investment vehicle, but for 'in and out' in a day, good enough.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Bitcoin is useless until big players enter the game then suddenly it'll become vital for the country.
You're looking for domething useless and dangerous ? Look no further than high frequency trading.
The two most common elements in the universe are hydrogen and stupidity.
"All art is quite useless." - Oscar Wilde
It's not their best headline writing, but TFA makes the point clear: cryptocurrencies are not currencies, let alone useful currencies. Their only "use" is speculation, and to an economist, that doesn't count as "useful".
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These are best thought of as an idiosyncratic form of database, in which records are copied among all the system's users rather than maintained by a central authority, and where entries cannot be altered once written. Proponents believe these features can help solve all sorts of problems, from streamlining bank payments and guaranteeing the provenance of medicines to securing property rights and providing unforgeable identity documents for refugees.
I don't see how blockchain is better than a centralized database in any of these use cases. The refugee example especially has many humorous angles: are refugees going to start mining identity-coin on their phones to keep the database up?
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
You forgot their greatest two benefits: money laundering and international transfers of an interloping currency state.
Yes, it's currency, bizarre as that might seem. Consider the state of the Turkish Lira. Or the fates of Iran, Zimbabwe, Venezuela, and a dozen more nations where there are either controls in place for international transfers, or worse, hyper-inflation.
The world's alternate currency used to be the US Dollar, Swiss Francs, the Euro, and pounds sterling. Even the yuan has caved to the whims of "the west". If you wanted an alternate currency to say: Fuck You, or change out that truck load of dope, crypto currency has its attractions.
Just like the Internet has pseudoanonymity, so does BTC. For now, no one knows you're a dog.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
All cryptocurrencies are underpinned by the belief that people will trade something of value for them. That usually means currency, but it could also be material goods or intellectual property.
On top of that value, you have speculation based on other factors; in this case, scarcity and demand. The more the perceived mania continues, the more volatility there will be.
What is different here is that a number of early adopters held onto the currency, and others bought in late. That distorted people's perception of the cryptocurrency where they thought they could all make money fast. Well, lo and behold, the currency crashed since its peak, and seems to be teetering currently.
That there are systemic problems with exchanges and blockchain goes without saying. This is unlike traditional currency because the transaction costs are increasing exponentially and putting additional pressure that a normal paper currency managed by a sovereign central bank doesn't have. That reduces monetary velocity through the system and impedes cryptocurrency use for fine-grained transactions. I won't get into the back door idea or breaking the cryptography, although those might become factors in the future. These translate to additional volatility and uncertainty that hurt the value.
The other big difference between an independent cryptocurrency and a regular currency is who and what backs it. That's probably the greatest concern for The Economist and for those who favor classic economics. This is uncharted territory, and uncertainty will always be punished by the market by participatory withdrawal and diminished value. Only time will tell, but something tells me that Bitcoin and the like may be a game of musical chairs.
.. but not accepted in the major places to buy stuff :/
The transaction fees are often substantially less than actual exchange rates between fiat currencies so if you want a discount when transferring money you can use crypto currency exchanges that deal in both currencies instead. That is if you don't mind the slight gamble in delay between buying and selling.
I honestly believe the single biggest impediment to the public accepting crypto as an alternative currency were all the hacks and corrupt coin exchanges that took people's funds and vanished.
Crypto-coins had the promise of being extremely secure and anonymous, but we quickly saw that unravel as folks learned how to trace transactions back through blockchains and as all of the web site compromises and coin-stealing malware arrived.
It's still too complicated for the average person to take a payment or spend crypto-currency. The unique wallet ID, alone, is a big, long, messy string of characters that nobody can remember. So they have to pretty much launch their wallet app and copy/paste the thing any time they want to instruct someone else to pay them. So that's another big problem. But really, a lot of this stuff can be coded into a more user-friendly UI, if someone is motivated to do it. (I think that's one of the promises of the new project out there to let independent musicians get paid directly for use of their music, without needing a middle man.)
But we're far from seeing the whole thing get stable enough so folks have a good handle on just what a given crypto-coin is worth. Everyone I know hanging onto any of them does so with a hope of reselling them at a profit at some later point in time. They're not keeping them like folks collect spare change in jars at home.
Some people love to gamble. To them it's a chance to win money. Losing or the thought of losing doesn't really register. They're hooked on the game and the possibilities.
With a bitcoin or a non-voting, non-dividend-paying stock, or art, they're all inherently useless. But once that pool of gamblers becomes "large enough", I think the system becomes self sustaining. An emergent property of such a game perhaps, kind of like a siphon becomes self sustaining. As long as there is more money coming in than leaving the game, prices should rise; vice versa for more money leaving than coming in.
But what about historic bubbles? Tulips, South Sea, etc? What prevents an item with little or no use from going to zero? Note that making people feel a certain way, no matter how silly it seems, is a use.
Color me surprised.
Ugh...
I tend to rant.
The fact it's existence depends on other actual currency means it is worthless on its own. Everyone who owns bitcoin is hoping to cash out for real money.
The scale and scope of crypto is going to take a long time to work out because its such a large, world changing idea. Crypto maximalists know this fully, its not a feeling of 'if' its a feeling of 'when' no matter who talks shit
And then you pay something in Dogecoins and your cover is blown.
#DeleteFacebook
... from when 1 BTC value was a fraction of a dollar.
What the Powers That Be don't like is gold. Keynes called it a "barbarous relic" and Warren Buffett derided it. But, central banks have bought a lot of it. Some countries have tried to limit its private ownership, now and in the past.
Currencies started out as mutually valued, divisible objects. Wampum, cowry shells, etc. For whatever reasons, everyone valued gold. It was divisible, didn't tarnish, didn't burn - essentially indestructible. It had all the qualities of an excellent means of exchange and a store of value, over the millennia.
Then people started putting gold into storage and using slips of paper which represented that gold. They could get gold for their slips of paper at any time. The system grew. Fractional-reserve banking was discovered (you can lend out more than you have in your vault because everyone is not going to try and withdraw at once). Emergent properties appeared. People stopped using gold to transact altogether. In 1971, the US "gold window" was closed - cash could not be redeemed for gold. The system continued to function (though the price of gold skyrocketed, and around that time is the mark is the stagnation of the wages of the lower wealth percentiles of society. Coincidence? Maybe, maybe not. Side note: it seems to me to be much easier to skim paper you're printing, and to distribute it to your favored partners than it is to skim gold. But that's another topic).
Fast forward to today, and people are moving away from even using the slips of paper, going to cashless systems where only the balances of an account are tracked. "Purchasing power" is now totally virtual. Some countries and economists are pushing "cashless societies" (Note: most economists missed the oncoming 2008 Financial Crisis).
The digital accounts represent cash. Cash used to represent gold. Now it just represents "purchasing power". What does bitcoin represent that is mutually valued?
I originally heard about BTC on /. when people had "faucets" which would just give you BTC now worth hundreds of dollars. At first they didn't even try to stop you from using it multiple times. These things were relatively common for a time.
"vote back to you" - no it doesn't. it gives the vote to the existing whales, which for the hoi poloi entering the field, means "not you". it's like people trumpeting how the right to bear arms keeps them safe from "tyranny", when they have no chance to fight against an entity that can field APCs and drones.
Insults offered
Poorly communicated
Without evidence
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Like I said before, these currencies still have the problem of "99% of it being owned by the 1%" - with that 1% being the geeks this time around.
AC comments get piped to
Your understanding of how Coinbase and others work is lacking. You can trade dollars for cryptocurrency readily. Yes, they take a fee if you change it back to another currency, say BTC to USD.
The US hasn't used gold as a currency backer for decades. The price of gold mirrors paranoia more than any other perceived trait. You can buy crypto coins easily, and you used no energy, someone else did. Maybe their energy was cheap Probably not.
You can mint your own coins. Takes hardware and brains and electricity. Some coins are easier to make with one kind of hardware vs another. Some really need ASICs. Some do not, but accumulate asset values at a different rate, made non-linear by moment-to-moment trading.
You won't be a millionaire using your laptop, unless you're a thief. But if you have a data center that has too much hardware for the current workload, and cheap electricity, making coins might work.
Today, my Coinbase account is a real asset. I can change BTC/etc into any "hard" currency that I want. Takes seconds. I'm not sure you understand the topic sufficiently.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
Not stuff that's blindingly obvious and has been from the start.
This is my signature. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
The publication belongs to the Economist Group. It is 50% owned by the English branch of the Rothschild family and by the Agnelli family through its holding company Exor.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Economist
Hydrogen is relatively hard to find.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
Let's not forget that the power consumption is crazy high for what is really a minuscule fraction of the global economy.
If it *were* to scale to significant portion of the economy, we'd have to magically find more energy than the rest of our uses combined.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
"All art is quite useless." - Oscar Wilde
Not a great comparison, I suspect Wilde was making a point about judging art, art has no intrinsic value, it's true value is entirely subjective.
But I don't think people want Bitcoin so they can admire the blockchain, they expect an eventual payoff.
It's not their best headline writing, but TFA makes the point clear: cryptocurrencies are not currencies, let alone useful currencies. Their only "use" is speculation, and to an economist, that doesn't count as "useful".
Because it's not useful, aside from gambling (which is a losing proposition for everyone but the bookie) speculation relies on an eventual practical payoff. Tomorrow if everyone realized that the value of cryptocurrencies was purely for speculation their value would vanish overnight. Heck, if every non-motenary use of gold vanished tomorrow it would become worthless in short order as well.
As mentioned by others the only two things crypto currencies are good at are facilitating illegal activities and taking monetary power out of failing states. But people in failing states already have access to other currencies, and if the only crypto-currency activity is illegal then governments will eventually ban the buying and selling of crypto currency, and when that happens they'll die.
I stole this Sig
Bitcoin is literally useless.
Nearly useless as money but it is useful as a money transfer system. Convert a real currency to bitcoins, transfer to whoever, they convert to a real currency. For the very short time the bitcoins are held the volatility isn't a problem.
Now if you want to argue that proof of work algorithms are useless given the power consumption, there is that, but Bitcoin does not have to use proof of work, there are other way to maintain a blockchain.
And speaking of blockchain, Bitcoin is use as a field test of that technology. Bitcoin may not be with us in the future, there is no reason it cannot be displaced by some other crypto coin, but blockchain will likely be with us and not just in the cryptocurrency sense.
You company held bitcoins to pay salaries? That is surprising. Not the paying a salary in bitcoins but the holding of bitcoins. What I've typically seen is a salary is denominated in USD, EUR, etc and on the payday a realtime fiat/bitcoin exchange rate is determined and the equivalent amount of bitcoin is transferred. The recipient typically immediately exchange it for their local fiat immediately unless we're talking zimbabwe, venezuela or some other country in the midst of economic collapse.
The problem is so long as it realistically must be exchanged for something more stable to mitigate risk for it to work as an exchange when it is too rough to be an investment vehicle, it becomes easier and easier to trace. Bitcoin transactions are transparent, though anonymous (everyone can see X BTC moved from wallets A,B,C to X,Y,Z, but those stable value alternatives are tracked and correlations are easy).
Further the act of moving BTC from some wallets to another requires relatively huge amounts of energy (and for there to be adequate interest for miners to operate to allow movement to happen..>) If you instead move some indirect representation of BTC correlated to partial ownership of a wallet, well that would address the energy issue but then it could be any made up number.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
fiat currencies have been around for a thousand years.
all cryptocurrency is a failure as money, it's a game token
Bitcoin is like a 1000-unit apartment complex served by a single two-inch water main. As long as most of the apartments are vacant, flipping from one absentee owner to another at ever-higher prices, no one notices anything wrong. Seven transactions per second is woefully inadequate for a global currency. Miners steadfastly refuse to raise this limit, preferring to cherry-pick the transactions offering the highest fees.
Fees are down lately only because so many vendors have stopped accepting Bitcoin. You even have to pay dollars to attend Bitcoin conferences!
The other problem, which Monero has solved, is that all transactions are publicly visible. Laundering is expensive because fake transactions cost as much as real ones. Criminals often buy and sell Monero to launder their ill-gotten Bitcoins; in the future they'll probably abandon Bitcoin and use Monero directly.
Bitcoin and alts are showing a strong week with lots of good press and impressive reach/significant projects. Queue the bad press for shorts to make a profit.
All the existing blockchain schemes use public-key algorithms that are susceptible to Shor's Algorithm running on a quantum computer, which would allow transactions to be forged at will. Sure, quantum computers may be a decade or two away, but why would anyone invest in any technology that has such a limited shelf-life? (Apart from pump-and-dump speculators).
Fiat currency exchange rates are often 2-3%. On 100k that's a few thousand dollars. Crypto currencies are usually below 0.5%, considering you are buying and selling in the same day if possible, other fees are minimal. No need to do it in secret, crypto currencies are legal in most countries.
I did not RTFA, but I was intrigued by the phrase about blockchains in the summary: about a database "where entries cannot be altered once written"
As I understand from reading dumbed down for the laymen explanations, blockchains are computationally expensive because they enlist a large number of players to maintain them, this being so no one player can outcompute everybody else and thus game the system. I gather this computation is mainly to do with encrypting or creating a sort of signature for transactions similar to the way one creates a digital signature with Pretty Good Privacy.
I just wonder if there couldn't possibly be some other less expensive way of recording a transaction that is unalterable? According to some of the dumbed down for the laymen descrptions of quantum mechanics, information can't be lost. Maybe there's something in physics that could be used. Two parties have to participate in the transaction, in somehow 'signing' the instrument (the contract or receipt or whatever), but then it's permanent. Would that do the work of the blockchain?
In theory, theory and practice are the same; in practice they're different. (Yogi Berra & A. Einstein)
3. There is no switch though. To seriously harm the network, you'd need to mount a 51% attack.
And even then you could patch and fork the chain.
Are you saying imaginary internet money was a poor investment on my part?
Things that you speculate with are by definition a very poor thing to use as a currency.
Without a stabile value, bitcoin is a complete failure as a currency. When I give somebody X amount of bitcoin to pay for a washing machine it would need to remain close to the value of the washing machine for at least a medium-term amount of time.
People can dink around with it speculating, but that destroys it as a currency. It can't even be planted to grow nice looking tulips.
Hydro or solar power that could have displaced energy used that was created using fossil fuel.
If you want to turn a hand crank generator to make bitcoin go ahead. Otherwise you're effectively comitting an environmental crime.
Get rich quick. Most of the ones that got in early, cashed out won this one, but the suckers who invested within the rise/fall/boom are the ones that lost out.
The grownups.
It's such a drag. Why don't you go out and play some hackey-sack.
I can go get in the car and in less than ten minutes convert a dollar into a cheeseburger and eat it.
I suppose if I dorked aroung enough I could find somebody who would give me a cheeseburger for some small fraction of bitcoin. I would be pretty hungry by the time I had the burger in hand, though.
Maybe we can settle on an economy based on the game tokens Blizzard now sells for real $$ that can be sold for in-game gold in World of Warcraft. Farming gold in an MMO has to be more fun than sitting there watching your GPUs radiate waste heat.
I hope you don't consider the dollar to be a stable store of value. If you do, might want to check its value over the past 100 years or so.
What does bitcoin represent that is mutually valued?
Hype. If I can get you really excited about it, then maybe you'll buy in too. And that means I can exit the game of musical money and let you become the next hype-master.
It's a bloomin' widespread, non-changeable ledger. PERIOD. And it takes a lot of CPU power, Watts, and connectivity to make it work. There's the 51% problem as well as throughput issues: VisaNet: 56K transaction messages/sec. And then there's just so MANY to choose from, kinda like religion. Hell, JUST like religion.
*-COIN is the One True Coin, while all the rest are poor, evil heathens. Did I mention poor? So BUY *-COIN NOW and secure your way to Coin Heaven. Hurry, the supplies of hype are limited!
If the universe is someone's simulation -- does that mean the stars are just stuck pixels?
No... just.. no
You tree huggers.. For fuck's sake....
A person can have a home that is 100% solar. They CAN use their own electricity to generate those coins.. They don't have to back feed into the grid... Sometimes they don't even have the option to dump excess into the grid.. So take your holier-than-thou and cram it.
You people hate everything that makes our society what it is.. Life wasn't better before technology. It was WAY FUCKING WORSE. You dropped dead at 45.. Every cut or scrape was a potential death sentence. And every animal in nature is 1 of 2 things.. It's food or you are it's food.
Take off the rose colored glasses.
Environmental crime.... Go fuck off.
DIVX the defunct Video CD rental company and DivX, the MPEG4 video and MP3 audio in an AVI (or in later versions MKV) container video file format are two completely separate things.
It seems clear that prices are being manipulated by some of the bigger players. With mining concentrated in some dubious countries as well, expect this to continue
Tell that to New Hampshire and Venezuela and all the other places seeing increasing acceptance in the real world. Not to mention online usage. My company accepts crypto currencies from users around the world. We're based out of New Hampshire and ship mostly outside of the state and from Europe to elsewhere. We've had employees who've asked and been paid entirely in crypto currencies. I myself regularly spend crypto currencies both in my professional life and private life. From workers compensation and business insurance to vehicles. I have dozens of restaurants in my small town where every single employee knows how to accept payment in crypto and each receives regularly- daily-in most cases coming in and paying in crypto. My dentist takes it, my car mechanic takes it, and all of the places I spend the majority of my money take it. Crypto currencies offer a significant savings over credit cards and my business saves around 40% via use of crypto currencies give or take whether or not something is paid for in crypto and we can take advantage of liquidity in the market in the purchase of goods from upstream suppliers. The idea that fluctuation in the value of a currency somehow makes it unusable are mostly non-sense. The Canadian dollar dropped 40% in four years. Comparatively Bitcoin has rarely seen a year where it didn't increase in value substantially. Despite almost hitting $20,000 USD it's still up from $2,000 last year this time. For those unaware it's at $7,000. Anybody who wasn't a total moron and understands the basics and been on board with it has done extremely well over the past seven or so years. I'm not an investor and would not advise people to mortgage a house or anything like that. But you'd most likely have done significantly better with crypto as an investment than anything else in spite of that view. crypto currencies value is amazing in its ability to cut costs of conducting business and I wish more people would get on board faster. Compared to credit cards we make less on profit margins on some products than the credit card companies take. Meaning we can more than double our profit margins by accepting crypto currencies. We have customers who pay with wire transfers and have had businesses pay $120 or so in wire transfer fees for $117 worth of product. It's absolutely batshit insane to think crypto currencies don't have significant value. $105 or so of that wire was to send the wire, but also includes intermediary bank fees. Then $45 was charged by the receiving bank to receive it. None of this factors in that fiat currencies are subsidized by taxes. And as far as environmental impact nobody has ever been able to account for the environmental costs of all the financial systems in place, but what we can summarize about environmental cost is from the fact it reflects the transactional costs and based on that crypto currencies are significantly better for the environment than fiat currencies and that doesn't even begin to take into account the fact fiat currencies are subsidized by taxes so we don't know the actual transactional costs of said fiat currencies.
A work colleague was trading bitcoin most of last year. towards the end of the year he chased his losses one weekend and came into work on the Monday stating "he was now down overall" - he didn't look to happy about it so I can only guess how bad things were for him. He was sacked on the Friday for not paying enough attention at work, he'd been under review for a year or so and had failed to show any improvement - I guess he thought bitcoin trading was his way out. The story that more than 95% of bitcoins are held by just 4 addresses is enough to put me off getting involved (whether it's true or not.)
>/dev/null 2>&1
slashdot, stop promoting hot air!
(Or, for the layman: Go into the direction of the visible lights.)
You could look at the price of gold in the same time, and you will see a much larger fluctuation. If you take the value of the dollar from 1918, and you calculate the Federal Interest Rate into it from year to year, the dollar is amazingly stable. The interest rate for gold is nil. No one will pay you gold for being able to hold onto your gold coins for some time. Instead, they will charge you a deposit fee.
That would be the same military with APCs and drones that can't beat a bunch of savages armed with assault rifles? Even after 17 years and trillions of dollars spent?
That's because those savages with assault rifles aren't facing tyranny.
They're facing a military that is (by and large) operating under rules and trying to (whether the plan would work or not, that's the ultimate goal, yes?) establish order such that a democracy can form.
(also, the main threat isn't the assault rifles, but IEDs and other booby traps that a military trying to maintain order is vulnerable to)
If you're facing true tyranny, having assault rifles won't help. If you're not facing true tyranny, you don't need them.
What are you talking about.. Btc has flat fees, not % based. You pay. 0005 BTC if it's 0.1 BTC or 10000. Of course, if it's a smaller transaction, you could use LTC, or a lightning payment.. I agree, guys who are overzealous are irritating (and wrong).. But do some basic research before talking shit..
You really are quite stupid if you didn't get it. you
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
that can't beat a bunch of savages
That presumption right there (which, by the way, brands you as absolute trash) is why "the same military with APCs and drones" can't beat them.
I have it on my shelf to read, but I've been stalled in the middle of the Baroque cycle for so long that Stephenson's newer books are road blocked off.
You've probaly burned more fossil fuel on airplane flights than are used for many crypto mining operations. Crypto-mining is concentrated around hydro and geothermal energy sources. Economics does more to help the environment than your indignation ever will.
really dollars are just game tokens too. a properly liquid and scalable cryptocurrency would also be a fiat currency; it's laughable that cryptocur fanbois say "the end of fiat is near" when their thing also has fiat value
See here. I dip my card at the store and by the time my stuff's in the bag I'm done and the bank has recorded the transaction and updated my balance. I know there are attempts to fix this (proof of stake coins come to mind) but they've got problems (proof of stake is open to all sorts of attacks from bad actors flush with cash).
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Apparently you can't read? Go back and read my comment again, every single word, before you make a dumb statement like that, okay? Sheesh.
No, they're not inseparable, but you on the other hand are dumb.
While many others say economists are useless. Still, I wonder how many of those negative economists are expressing sour grapes for not having invested in cryptocurrency earlier on?
This time it'll be Tron that booms. Better buy up now, once it goes up you'll be kicking yourself.
People are already wise to Bitcoin and etherium. Next in line is Tron.
You are wrong though. DivX the discs did not use DivX the pirate file format. DivX the pirate file format came significantly after DivX the discs.
There are no technical links between the two. DivX the pirate file format was named DivX to joke about DivX the discs. The only thing linking them is the name and the joke.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
I've used several wallets but they've been on computers. I have an iPhone and traditionally, Apple placed a lot of limitations on crypto-related apps they'd allow on the App Store, so I never really bothered to try to use one on there.
"We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
You people hate everything that makes our society what it is.. Life wasn't better before technology. It was WAY FUCKING WORSE.
You do know it's not either/or, right?
Technology is almost always three steps forward, one step back. We are heading in the right direction but we're kidding ourselves if we think anything is risk-free and drawback-free. And we're stupid if we think we can't do anything about that.
The ABS and seatbelts and airbags and other safety gear in my car are not anti-technology. They are technology.
I want technological progress and less pollution that we have now. I don't think that's unreasonable.
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The transaction fees spiked upwards when the volume of transactions was overloading the system but that was temporary. And the capacity of the system is being addressed.
And the high fees were not required unless you wanted a transaction to go through quickly. Offer a lower fee and it will likely still get processed more slowly, the lower the fee the more time required. During this past "fee crisis" many people simply waited for a day or time of day when the load on the system was not that great.
The fee is not flat as in predefined and relatively constant, it is flat in the sense that it doesn't matter what the amount being transferred is, as you say not a percentage. However that fee is based on bidding. When the system is overloaded one can offer a higher fee to make sure one's transaction gets processed quickly. This can create a bidding war and drive the fees up.
Also when bitcoin prices experience one of those occasional exponential increases the fees do not necessarily decline proportionally to the bitcoin/fiat exchange (ex. dollar price) increase, as you indicate the fee is denominated in a fractional bitcoin not in fiat. So such exponential price increases effectively drive up the fee from the perspective of fiat prices (USD, EUR, etc).
You're missing an essential difference, namely who controls the monetary supply. From Investopedia:
Fiat money is currency that a government has declared to be legal tender, but it is not backed by a physical commodity.
Bitcoin is something created by the market, outside of government control. No government can manipulate the supply of Bitcoins.
In addition, some cryptocurrencies are actually gold backed.
Well, I'll give you this; you are one of the rare and reasonable ones.
And you are absolutely correct. New technology does bring new problems but unfortunately a large portion of those who dwell on the left side of center act like all technology is bad or.. maybe more correctly, they act like it makes our life worse in the long run.
Right now, in my state, there is this anti-plastic campaign.. Total disregard for the quality of life that plastics give us (sterile food, sterile medicine, etc). We don't have a plastic problem, we have a plastic disposal problem. But that's not how they see it.. They've got entire lists of things they want banned.... Back to paper straws in some cities.. Fuck the trees I guess...
We have to deal with the issue we create, but on the whole our life has improved dramatically since the industrial revolution. Anyone who says otherwise is delusional.. I'm quite happy that my life expectancy isn't 45.
bitcoin isn't for investing, dumbass, it's for buying sketch chinese drugs, and it works pretty fuckin good.
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
I'm not accusing you of this, but one big fallacy that the climate deniers in particular seem to make is to think that climate scientists are anti-technology.
They're fucking scientists. Only a non-Slashdotter could possibly think that scientists didn't want gadgets and gizmos.
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Define "quickly" and "slowly". Both are just a few seconds, right? Because if someone thought slowly meant over an hour for payment transaction, I would disregard their opinion.
You seem unfamiliar with the bitcoin system. New blocks in the blockchain take about 10 minutes to create. Confirmation of a transaction is often 6 verifying blocks so that is about an hour. So "quickly" is about an hour. You could go with less than 6 confirmations but then one is acting more on faith and less on verification. During the recently crisis where a lack of capacity caused fees to skyrocket, offering only a modest fee rather than the highly inflated fee could cause verification to take many hours, double digit hour, sometime a day or more.
Solutions to increase transaction capacity are being tested.
crypto money supply is controlled too. it can be manipulated. governments have caused huge jumps in bitcoin price..
As far as "backed by gold", hahaha, what a farce.the ones I see either have a small fraction of value backed, or the actual store isn't mentioned.... snake oil
If you think that any of that amounts to government control of the money supply, you shouldn't attempt to discuss monetary policy or the meaning of fiat currency.
It sounds like you are either mixing up fractional reserve banking and gold based cryptocurrencies, or you have evidence of widespread fraud; in the latter case, you should go to the police.
You could look at the price of gold in the same time, and you will see a much larger fluctuation. If you take the value of the dollar from 1918, and you calculate the Federal Interest Rate into it from year to year, the dollar is amazingly stable. The interest rate for gold is nil. No one will pay you gold for being able to hold onto your gold coins for some time. Instead, they will charge you a deposit fee.
The interest rate for gold is zero but inflation means that it holds its value better than currency. Inflation is a negative interest rate which effectively taxes currency.