I have been using crypto since 2017, made plenty of dumb trades which caused me to lose out a lot. Currently my portfolio is about 80% BTC and while the new USA admin seems they may do more damage than good to the crypto space I’m still positive about Bitcoin.
This sub seems like a meme or anti-btc sub mostly. Anybody here who isn’t that way?
It’s an environmental disaster where the worst people in the world use vast resources to power and cool entropy machines
It’s money. It’s private property. I’m anti- both of those. But, I am coerced and compelled to participate in a monetary economy. So, as long as we are stuck in this situation I choose to save my money in a form that is the most reflective of my rejection of existing centralized hierarchical institutions and one that I believe can leverage those rather toxic aspects of capitalism to springboard it’s value. Like, you don’t have to be a monetary luddite just because you’re a communist (In fact, some people are communists and socialists specifically because they understand money more intimately and exactingly than most capitalists).
So I’m money negative overall, bitcoin positive within that negative space. I’d be cool if it sucked a bunch of the inflated value out of real estate, though I don’t know if it’ll actually do that. Governments for sure will never allow it to hamstring their ability to raise military funding through inflation as a lot of anti-war libertarians envision.
It’s private property.
Why does it count as private property and not personal property?
To be clear I am referring to marxist definitions of property and not common law definitions. It’s not personal as it has no personal practical use to me, it is very purely an asset, a fungible and liquid capital. The possession of which necessarily deprives others of doing the same (Finite supply). I own it specifically to leverage it’s value and that alone.
Bitcoin is a better gold than gold. It will be in central bank reserves and trade settlement currencies/mechanisms. In terms of price, gold going up is always bullish for Bitcoin, because there is a cap on gold price rise that is more gold mining, and because bitcoin is a better gold than gold, retail sales of gold for bitcoin.
I am, it’s a nice currency.
Lemmy is just not a great platform if you value personal property and individual freedom, it was started by socialists/communists and it shows. It’s pretty random that I even answer to this post because I check lemmy only once every few weeks. >97% bitcoin here.
Lemmy is just not a great platform if you value personal property
Personal property vs private property.
and individual freedom
Bravo! Thanks for making my point.
I’m an ETH-head. I understand it. It makes sense. Bitcoin? Bitcoin doesn’t make any sense to me. I have severe concern about its long-term security model and the community’s overall lack of desire to change anything about the protocol, including its security model.
That said, I’m overall negative about crypto in general these days. VCs, corporations, institutions, politicians, etc have all seemingly co-oped crypto in a big way. There’s not much about the original cypherpunk ideals that remains anymore.
I’m part of Breadchain, a project spearheaded by The Blockchain Socialist to promote and fund left-aligned crypto projects that help workers and coops, etc. But again, these days I’m getting very jaded about the trajectory of crypto.
My biggest worry about Bitcoin is that it’s still on proof of work. Even if it has shown itself to be bulletproof, it uses as much electricity as a small country and I don’t think the environmentalists are going to just let that slide.
Aside from the long term security guarantees that every Bitcoiner is just ignoring, the narrative around energy usage has pretty much gone away. Why? I have no idea. Ethereum in comparison has gone to PoS and reduced its energy usage to near trivial amounts while at the same time democratizing securing the network in a way more sustainable way.
Ethereum’s long-term security model is Proof of Stake.
At best, it’s economic rent with holders getting free money from workers. At worst, it’s a game of musical chairs that only people who don’t use the money can win. Profits from securing the network ought to automatically adjust towards zero.
PoS is why Ethereum bailed out everyone with money in the DAO. PoW is why Bitcoin didn’t bail out anyone with money in MtGox. The cost of auditing smart contracts ought to be internalized to the people using them, not an external cost for all users.
Upgrading Bitcoin is a great idea. Ethereum’s flexibility has been proven useful by the huge variety of projects that run on it. So we should support BIP 300 and get some of that. But I would not consider Ethereum’s security model to be an upgrade.
At best, it’s economic rent with holders getting free money from workers.
The workers are the ones securing the network. Anybody can participate, providing they have as little as 0.01 ETH to put up as collateral.
At worst, it’s a game of musical chairs that only people who don’t use the money can win. Profits from securing the network ought to automatically adjust towards zero.
Ethereum base fees are in fact sent to a burn address and removed from circulation. Validators get priority tips only.
PoS is why Ethereum bailed out everyone with money in the DAO.
PoS is unrelated to the DAO hack. PoS is a consensus mechanism change from PoW. Instead of solving increasingly more difficult and energy-intensive puzzles to determine who gets to process the next block, in Ethereum it’s randomly chosen amongst the validators.
-
Firstly, the DAO fork was not a rollback or bailout. It was a unique situation where the hackers had to wait 28 days for withdrawals, so a smart contract change was executed.
-
There was strong consensus across developers, users, miners and community alike - it was hardly a centralized decision.
-
Those who disagreed simply moved to Ethereum Classic. It’s a win-win situation for all.
-
Ethereum was still a very, very new project then. You know which other project did a rollback when it was less than 2 years old? Value overflow incident - Bitcoin Wiki
-
EIP-999 being rejected is the final deathblow to this hypothesis. There was a chance to rollback 500,000 ETH to an entity managed by one of its co-founders, and the community overwhelmingly rejected it. Rollbacks do not happen on Ethereum.
Upgrading Bitcoin is a great idea
An idea that virtually NOBODY in the bitcoin community agrees with. The entire value prop of Bitcoin is that it’s ossified and simple.
But I would not consider Ethereum’s security model to be an upgrade
Ethereum’s model is sustainable 10, 20, 50 years from now. In order for Bitcoin’s security to be sustainable, the price of BTC must rise. Each Bitcoin halving reduces the block reward for miners … so unless the price just goes up forever as Bitcoin literally burns the planet, the result is a decrease in the overall hashrate of the network, allowing for an easier attack.
This is demonstrably true: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4727999
At best, it’s economic rent with holders getting free money from workers.
The workers are the ones securing the network. Anybody can participate, providing they have as little as 0.01 ETH to put up as collateral.
The workers - people with jobs - are not securing the Ethereum network. The rich can more easily afford the opportunity cost and transaction costs of staking, and thus get a higher percentage return than the poor with mostly cash reserves. It recreates the feedback cycle we’re seeing with the dollar.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_rent
At worst, it’s a game of musical chairs that only people who don’t use the money can win. Profits from securing the network ought to automatically adjust towards zero.
Ethereum base fees are in fact sent to a burn address and removed from circulation. Validators get priority tips only.
I’m talking about net profits, not base fees. You would need something like difficulty adjustment.
PoS is why Ethereum bailed out everyone with money in the DAO.
PoS is unrelated to the DAO hack.
No, it was related. I was an ETH user myself until then. The reason they did the bailout was because they were afraid the hacker would risk PoS.
And there wasn’t a strong consensus. They explicitly said “the code is the contract” and pointed towards the code itself when asked about design intent before the hack. Those of us who disagreed with the bailout just left.
You know which other project did a rollback when it was less than 2 years old? Value overflow incident - Bitcoin Wiki
This was a bug in Bitcoin, not a bug in a user-created smart contact. Ethereum was working perfectly at the time of the hack.
There was a chance to rollback 500,000 ETH to an entity managed by one of its co-founders, and the community overwhelmingly rejected it. Rollbacks do not happen on Ethereum.
Not doing it every time proves that these co-founders were not as influential as Vitalik Buterin (who had invested in the DAO). The DAO hacker’s money was rolled back with a hard fork.
The entire value prop of Bitcoin is that it’s ossified and simple.
That would make altcoins worthwhile, wouldn’t it! The value proposition of Bitcoin has not changed since it was the most complicated cryptocurrency.
Each Bitcoin halving reduces the block reward for miners … so unless the price just goes up forever as Bitcoin literally burns the planet, the result is a decrease in the overall hashrate of the network, allowing for an easier attack.
This is addressed in the Bitcoin whitepaper. A block’s transaction fees alone are already worth more than the total block reward used to be.
-
The DAO happened six years before Ethereum switched to Proof of Stake. Forking was probably the wrong call but the users voted with their feet and Ethereum Classic is still there if anybody wants to use it. Payments do decrease as a larger percentage of all Ethereum is dedicated to staking. Proof of Stake is not economic rent, the stakers only receive payment while they continue to perform their duties faithfully, if they fail or cheat they are instead penalized and lose their status.
The DAO happened six years before Ethereum switched to Proof of Stake.
I know, I was an ETH user myself until then. The reason they did the bailout was because they were afraid the hacker would risk PoS.
Proof of Stake is not economic rent
Do you agree that stakers are making a profit - a higher return than the cost of bringing the factor into production?
They clearly do expect to make a profit, otherwise they wouldn’t stake. But rent is only one part of profit and in this case, where the activity does require some amount of effort, skill, and risk, and is subject to competition both from other stakers and from other chains, categorizing it as rent is an error.
Economic rent is when the owner of a factor of production is paid more than the costs of bringing it into production. It doesn’t imply literally zero skill/effort/risk.
I’m suggesting that it’s better to set those profits on fire than it is to give them away below cost, just for owning something.
That’s a greatly oversimplified definition that would capture essentially all productive activity. If I paint someone’s house and charge them more than the cost of paint, am I earning economic rent? As the owner of my tools and my own labor, the answer according to that definition would be yes.
In your hypothetical, you’re paying the cost of bringing the painted house into production with your labor, not getting paid just for owning something.
A closer comparison would be landlords who claim “being a landlord is a job” because they pay themselves to paint the house (or other property management).
