this post was submitted on 20 Jul 2024
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Privacy
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I see this comment every now and then, and it always forgets the cost of the transaction, confirmation time, and of course, the need for miners to exist to process these confirmations/transactions. The energy cost is extraordinary, and the end user is taxed for the use of their own dollars.
It's not really feasible on a broad scale. Bitcoin is a holding stock, not a valid currency. Its value only increases because it manufactures its own scarcity. And as its scarcity increases, it naturally moves toward centralization since mining becomes too large an activity for the individual to reap any benefit. You can argue for proof of stake to eliminate the need for mining, but then you open the doors to centralization more immediately.
Oh yes, it is also feels so good that the richer have priority on transactions because they can pay exorbitant fees while you sometimes need to wait more than a month for a transaction to be confirmed.
I had to make a transaction to a private tracker and I don't want to go through it never again.
The only crypto that is kind if useful is Monero and that's because it is really private and anonymous. The problem with private and anonymous is that is ends up becoming a tool for crime.
I really like Talers approach with protecting the buyer not the seller. From a mass surveillance and advertising perspective they only see half the picture which makes the deep surveillance hard. Also it keeps businesses honest and supports rule of law.
Bitcoin lightning is absolutely hilarious. Your solution to Bitcoins problems is - not using Bitcoin. Wow, galaxy brain move.
Yeah, that's bullshit. First of all, 1% of energy use for a network that serves a few million transactions per day is really bad. A single 1kW node in Visa's datacenter churns through that in an hour.
Second, it's not renewables. It's everything they can get for cheap. And that's often enough coal, gas, oil. Also, they're driving up power demand as a whole, which means fossil energy is actually needed longer.
As long as you ignore its problems it's great. I'm sure you do.
Meanwhile the rest of us who don't live in cloud Cuckoo land have to deal with your shitty system that takes 45 minutes to process a transaction and requires the burning down of several rainforests per transaction. So we can see it is probably not a good idea.
This is why Taler was created. It is a payment system not a payment form
I've had bitcoin transactions that literally took several days to process. This was also using an average fee. The more people using bitcoin, especially to handle common every-day transactions, the worse this problem would get.
"under a second for pennies in fees"
LOL you either kidding yourself or had never transfer Bitcoin.
At a high demand time, it could take hours to complete a transaction (if it even went through at all) and with an outrageous fee up to dozens of dollars.
Bitcoin has never been known for time efficient nor competitive fees (except for maybe in the beginning when nobody uses it).
There is so much wrong with that firehose of nonsense you just said I don't have time to correct it all. So I'll focus on this one point:
Bitcoin may not be run by "a single government" but it is run by a small group of billionaires. You're a fool if you believe widespread adoption of it can improve things for regular people.
Crypto won't scale
The computational requirements are high and its value fluctuates way to much. Also bitcoin isn't even private and you are basically shouting to the world every time you make a payment.