I was wondering what viewpoints and opinions this community has when it comes to cryptocurrency.
Personally, I’m not against it, but I’m not for it either. I like the concept of bringing back cash anonymity, and also decentralization (obviously). Although I don’t think it will be viable for at least another decade.
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GNU Taler isn’t cryto. (Which makes much better)
The problem with crypto is that there really isn’t anything to give it value. It basically is a super unpredictable stock.
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Energy costs are magnitudes less than banks
imo i actually hate the idea of a public crypto currency
people think that the government having their hands on the levers of a fiat currency is a bad thing, but it’s an incredibly useful property to make sure that we can stabilise things and push away from recession etc! without those levers we can end up in a spiral a lot easier
i think though that where these problems don’t exist is behind the scenes: what if the whole world replaced SWIFT with a private blockchain? maybe a wire transfer wouldn’t take 5 days and cost like $20 (or maybe it would because it’s probably not the technology that makes these things slow)… in this case, you have a known group of semi-trusted actors (international banks), which is actually a perfect set of properties for a blockchain: they’re all able to cooperate but don’t implicitly trust, and can verify each other but mainly use blockchain so they can all automatically agree
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but that kinda defeats the point of a central authority having control: the value of any currency is entirely based on what you can use it for… unless you tied their value in a way that the government regulates - eg to have a banking license you must swap USD for eUSD and visa versa on a 1:1 basis without fees (perhaps they burn eUSD to get new USD; IDK - you can’t oversupply. it gets tricky)… anyway, beside the point: regular transactions is exactly what the government needs some control over
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Objection. Proof of work negates this. By making rapid block solving intentionally more difficult in order to slow down said solving, energy wasted on solving increases exponentially.
More transactions means a new block is completed faster. Last block was solved too soon, so tack another zero requirement to the next hash. More computation and energy wasted when there are perfectly acceptable hashes almost instantaneously.
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I like what you’re saying, but I see it differently.
What people should do is not what people will do. Because of the hype, people are still investing into ever more expensive rigs and consuming ever more electricity competing in races they have no chance in until they realize they can compete in other races.
Yeah, it should, but it isn’t. Personally I’d prefer excess energy drive electricity prices down, rather than demand increasing reliance on more stable and constant sources.
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you’re saying a buzz word without understanding the trade offs in designs… POW doesn’t have to imply higher energy cost for more transactions: shove more transactions in a block and POW cost is the same… that’s a trade off sure because then a block becomes a more valuable thing to 51%
POW is also only 1 of a lot of different consensus algorithms, all with their own trade-offs… POS benefits those with money for example (although you can still form mining pools - TBH i’d argue it’s exactly the same in this respect to POW in practice - good luck mining anything of value in POW without investing $ millions)
some blockchains aren’t built to be entirely trustless and uncoordinated, merely semi trusted and loosely coordinated (think a consortium of banks - they don’t trust each other entirely but a blockchain means no individual member working alone can cheat. in this case because it’s semi-organised they can use POS with a special token and delegate those “mining tokens” 1 per member of the consortium or something… you can even set this kind of chain up as an ethereum side chain!)
I wasn’t going to reply because this conversation will likely no longer go in a positive or productive direction, but I’m quite peeved and decided to allow myself the gratification of issuing corrections.
I understand quite well, and I resent you for not only assuming me to be an uninformed commentator, but for also having the audacity to state it as if it were fact.
But it does imply it for every major coin on the market today, and said coin owners seem quite content with how things are, Only the fooled are interested in investing in another new block chain, which will likely turn into a scam as soon as someone realises the money they can steal.
What the world could be is not a rebuttal to its current state. Further it’s quite disingenuous to tell people problems aren’t problems because of what could be.
Please have a pleasant evening. Good night.