| ▲ | Aeroi 4 hours ago |
| you guys can downvote this, but it's a useless waste of compute, detrimental to resource scarcity and energy constraints, not really solving problems in society. |
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| ▲ | AureliusMA 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| You would be surprised at how efficient cryptocurrency mining is compared to other ways of storing value. And most improvements happen to reduce the overall cost of securing value (PoS, PoST, etc) |
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| ▲ | Hilliard_Ohiooo 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| You'll get nothing but up votes here on HN, a lot are still angry they missed the boat. But solving the problem of how to transfer value trustlessly and anonymously, instantly anywhere in the world is one of the biggest breakthroughs since the Internet. Amazing how in a few short years kids started growing up with Bitcoin and don't understand how it work or why it exists :( |
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| ▲ | dgellow 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | It’s an interesting technical problem to solve. But after 15y still has no meaningful benefits for our societies. Other than gambling/speculation/illegal stuff. The transformative cryptocurrency shift didn’t happen | | |
| ▲ | tardedmeme 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | When the USA collapses it could become the new global reserve currency (it won't but it could) Point is, it's a currency you can use right now independently from the increasingly unstable-looking US dollar. You could also use euros, yuan, rupees, or Australian dollars but it's really hard to get an account in those currencies if you don't live in those countries. Crypto is much easier to get access to. | | |
| ▲ | dgellow 30 minutes ago | parent [-] | | We can create various use case scenarios, that‘s what has been done since 2009, but there is no signs that’s something we are moving towards and so far the only use cases that stuck are the ones I mentioned. For a global currency you would need something stable and while the US is declining, in comparison cryptocurrencies (ignoring stablecoins) are a nightmare of instability |
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| ▲ | sowbug 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Some people think communication mechanisms shouldn't enforce policy. They don't want their phones automatically disconnecting if they talk to a friend about illegal or immoral things. They don't want their TVs shutting off if they watch stuff that's politically unacceptable. So it follows that they don't want their money throwing an exception if they try spending on an transaction too unsavory for Stripe or your bank. Free speech is for all the stuff you personally detest and personally choose to avoid. In a free country you hold your nose and allow others to engage in it. If money is speech, then having a kind of money that doesn't pass through policy gates is an essential component of a free society. | |
| ▲ | AureliusMA 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | We are very far from 2140, the year the last bitcoin will be mined. 15 years is nothing, this is a very long term paradigm shift. | | |
| ▲ | dgellow 40 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | You seem confused. The claim has never been that the paradigm will shift when all bitcoins have been mined. When all bitcoins are mined BTC will be even more deflationary and miners won’t get rewards from mining. But that has nothing to do with bitcoin being useful for society. And it should be pretty obvious that a deflationary currency is a terrible currency.
If it is actually useful as a currency in 2140 it is also way more likely that it will be forked to postpone that deadline, but that’s beside the point. We are 15y in and there is still no trace of a meaningful use case outside of the ones I mentioned. I don’t think it’s a failure of bitcoin itself (it’s a neat proof of concept), I see it more as a complete delusion of people pushing cryptocurrencies | |
| ▲ | thinkingtoilet 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Is 2140 how far we're moving the goal posts now? All these resources burned will totally be worth it in over a hundred years? | | |
| ▲ | hyc_symas an hour ago | parent [-] | | No, Bitcoin is absolutely a waste by every measure. It was a prototype that never should have continued after all of its flaws became apparent. |
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| ▲ | holysantamaria 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | There was a boat to jump on? To gain what? | | |
| ▲ | tardedmeme an hour ago | parent [-] | | Uh, billions of dollars? If you bought or mines bitcoin when it was new and sold it today, you're now at least a hundred millionaire. |
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| ▲ | jayd16 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | If it's actually a transformative technology, there's no boat to miss. But it's still mostly about the speculation, it seems. | |
| ▲ | nmz an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Well, it seems he wasn't, he's not gonna get upvotes though, HN is startup culture and startup culture is selling dreams until it works or you notice too late you got robbed. And who's gonna admit that bitcoin is a ponzi scheme when all of their savings are in it? you can't, it would devalue your own money, so you're trapped, you can only further invest in it. | |
| ▲ | mothballed 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | It was mainly the early wall street types that cashed in big. If it was used as suggested by satoshi, then you were using it as spending cash rather than an investment to sit on, in which case you shouldn't have made much money on it. | | |
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| ▲ | tardedmeme an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| It's both a waste of compute and it also solves problems. Namely, how to transfer money without the government stopping you. |
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| ▲ | iammrpayments 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Hackernews is completely oblivious to cryptocurrencies. There we major hacks in April involving values 100x bigger than whatever gets upvoted here, and still I saw 0 posts commenting about it. Just as an example, aave lost 295 million last month due to a hack in another protocol, and nothing was posted here. |
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| ▲ | tt24 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| This talking point is so silly I can use my compute and energy how I like, whether that’s for AI or crypto or a Minecraft server. You don’t have a right to call one “wasteful” and one not |
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| ▲ | CactusBlue 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| is privacy of financial transactions not a valuable problem to be solved in your opinions? |
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| ▲ | 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
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| ▲ | Jtarii 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| It's great for buying drugs though! (Which is funnily the only actually legitimate usecase) |
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| ▲ | nunobrito 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | And sending donations to causes the government doesn't endorse. A good example was the truck manifestation in Canada a few years ago, they went after all the donors for what was a legitimate protest. Anyone using bank transfers or any crypto that wasn't Monero was persecuted. Those who used Monero had their privacy assured and zero issues. | | |
| ▲ | tardedmeme an hour ago | parent [-] | | I'm not sure that I'd cite being able to donate to terrorists as a legitimate use case. I mean, at the protocol level, donating to a terrorist is the same as donating to anyone else, so a system that lets you donate to anyone will necessarily let you donate to terrorists, but it wouldn't be the example I'd bring up in polite conversation. |
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| ▲ | rationalist an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | I've bought legal things with Monero a while back when I was into "crypto". I've never bought illegal things with Monero (or any other currency/cryptocurrency). I was interested in Monero because it actually was what people thought Bitcoin was. |
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| ▲ | logicchains 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| It's solving a lot of people's problems, they just aren't your problems. |
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| ▲ | littlecranky67 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| Absolutely true, no one needs monero when you can have bitcoin (and lightning for private instant bitcoin payments). |
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| ▲ | Hilliard_Ohiooo 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | Lightning Network, ready in 18 months for the last 5 years! Lol. | | |
| ▲ | littlecranky67 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | What exactly are you missing that i.e. PhoenixWallet or Electrum is providing? The only thing missing is merchant adoption - but bitcoin is far ahead monero in this field. | | |
| ▲ | mothballed 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | Monero has utterly failed in merchant adoption. If you go to something like cryptwerk, which is what getmonero themselves recommends as a vendor list, It has about 1/2 the vendors of even the roughly same market cap coin Litecoin. | | |
| ▲ | tardedmeme 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | Well that's because it's illegal in most countries, and the reason it's illegal are the same reasons it's a good currency. States can't tolerate competition. Still a global blockchain though with the associated throughput limits. You can't buy cereal with monero because you do that too often. |
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| ▲ | earnesti 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I have used LN quite a lot for the last 3-4 years or so. Seems to work good enough for quite many use cases. | |
| ▲ | AureliusMA 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | It's very usable. It's just not the PoS some expected. |
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