I am just surprised how much negativity is in HN towards Bitcoin. This is the first case of decentralised open source tech winning against big established powers - governments/faceamagoos. We should be celebrating this. I sure hope that Bitcoin is going to be Linux of money/finance.
Lightning might not be at the scale it needs to be now but it will improve greatly. maybe it is good enough already? Like Ruby on Rails. People keep talking about it being slow while massive web applications are being built with and billions of dollars being processed.
I'm not. Bitcoin has stagnated, and it hasn't delivered its promise of being used as a DeFi currency.
I bet if it was Ethereum that El Salvador had chosen, the opinion wouldn't be as harsh. Proof of stake doesn't have the same energy consumption concerns.
imo this is still a great development for all of crypto and DeFi. It will also help protect people who aren't connected and wealthy from losing their value due to ever higher levels of inflation (it is currently much higher than 3%) http://www.shadowstats.com/alternate_data/inflation-charts
it's part of the larger argument: proof of stake systems give up explicit and transparent cost of decentralized permissionless currency for obscure and hidden costs of centralized and permissioned currency. and that cost is generally higher, because proof of work is the most efficient known (or possible) solution of such problem.
If BTC used proof-of-stake or some other scheme that was less energy-intensive/made graphics cards a scarce resource there would probably be less hostility towards it.
Just a small correction: You can't mine BTC using graphic cards, so BTC mining has nothing to do with the shortage of those. Ether on the other hand...
by comparing it to Linux do you mean where the backbone of finance is run by Bitcoin (like Linux running servers), or where <1% of users directly use Bitcoin themselves?
Linux's Unix predecessor originated in the mid-1960s and into the early 1970s. It's almost 50 years old at this point. It didn't even get POSIX compliance until the 1980s, and it was 20-25 years old (2x BTC) when Linus got around to building the Linux kernel.
Bitcoin (and blockchain generally) is only 12 years old. Time will tell how well this comment ages... but it's a bit unfair to compare the two directly at their respective ages.
well, Linux is hugely successful open source project. Virtually everyone is "touched" by it directly or indirectly.
It is one of core components of internet infrastructure.
Bitcoin could be that.
(of course I am aware that desktop/direct usage is really small)
I think a lot of the negativity comes from the fact that this is largely a forum of technologists, and Bitcoin is objectively inferior technology. That's not necessarily a knock against Bitcoin, it was revolutionary when it was introduced, but it was the 1.0 cryptocurrency and it's already essentially fossilized and become legacy technology. Miners hold sway over the community and they're not really interested in changing anything significant about Bitcoin, so now people are talking about absurdities like Lightning layered over Bitcoin to try to mitigate some of the flaws. We can save the effort and fix the flaws of Bitcoin by just moving on from Bitcoin. It's as though we were stuck with SSL 3.0 forever or something.
The only reason the vast majority of people advocating for Bitcoin are advocating for Bitcoin specifically is because they have invested in Bitcoin specifically, and they want the price of Bitcoin specifically to go up. Seeing people advocate for us all to be stuck with inferior technology forever because they have a financial stake in the inferior technology is exactly the sort of thing you should expect negativity about on HN.
well would be good to clarify, because there's no project that followed that is better on fundamental level. lots of solutions that trade decentralization and independence for performance, lots of hype and marketing, lots of bells and whistles of questionable value, lots of money being made in scams and rug-pulls.
> well would be good to clarify, because there's no project that followed that is better on fundamental level.
This is also a statement that need clarifying. What do you even mean when you say "on fundamental level"?
> lots of solutions that trade decentralization and independence for performance, lots of hype and marketing, lots of bells and whistles of questionable value, lots of money being made in scams and rug-pulls.
All of this can be said about btc too. Except the part about trading decentralization and independence for performance. Btc has really bad performance and decentralization and independence (from what?) can be questioned.
> What do you even mean when you say "on fundamental level"?
Fundamental properties of bitcoin are its decentralization and security achieved via and expressed in, very transparently and using very simple formula, in terms of energy expenditure, tying it unambiguously to the real world physics.
No other project has such properties or comes close to the level to which those properties are achieved in bitcoin.
> All of this can be said about btc too.
Nope.
> Btc has really bad performance and decentralization and independence (from what?) can be questioned.
Only if you don’t understand what performance of a cryptocurrency is, or what decentralization of cryptocurrency means. And independence is from marketing campaigns, politics and other shenanigans that crypto world is full of.
> Fundamental properties of bitcoin are its decentralization and security achieved via and expressed in, very transparently and using very simple formula, in terms of energy expenditure, tying it unambiguously to the real world physics.
>No other project has such properties or comes close to the level to which those properties are achieved in bitcoin.
There are other PoW coins. Some of those do calculation that are actually useful on their own. That means that there are coins with better, as you say, fundamentals.
> Nope.
Yes.
> Only if you don’t understand what performance of a cryptocurrency is, or what decentralization of cryptocurrency means.
Only if performance and decentralization mean something completely different in cryptocurrency than anywhere else. If so, can you explain or provide a source that explains it that I can check.
> And independence is from marketing campaigns, politics and other shenanigans that crypto world is full of.
BTC is full of marketing campaigns, politics and other shenanigans. To claim otherwise is to ignore, or be completely oblivious, to bitcoin history and present.
> Some of those do calculation that are actually useful on their own. That means that there are coins with better, as you say, fundamentals.
no, getting anything valuable out of PoW function besides security of the chain is a subsidy to the attacker and lowers the security of the chain by that same amount. it also introduces unnecessary complexity, potential of bugs, point of contention over consensus rules, etc. objectively worse.
> Yes.
trade decentralization and independence for performance - bitcoin doesn't, it's the most performant and decentralized financial network in the world
lots of hype and marketing - there's barely any compared to shitcoins
lots of bells and whistles of questionable value - barely any compared to shitcoins
lots of money being made in scams and rug-pulls - zero scams perpetrated by bitcoin developers, shitcoin world is built on scams
so no, none of it aplies to bitcoin, all of it applies to shitcoins.
> Only if performance and decentralization mean something completely different in cryptocurrency than anywhere else
i don't care enough to argue with you about definitions of performance and decentralization, ultimately you decide what matters to you. what matters to me at the moment is best represented by bitcoin - security per joule, cost of attack and cost to participate. every other shitcoin is far behind.
> BTC is full of marketing campaigns, politics and other shenanigans. To claim otherwise is to ignore, or be completely oblivious, to bitcoin history and present
false. bitcoin ecosystem is full of people that will market things to you, some honest, some not very much. shitcoins on the other hand are built on and of marketing and scams. if you don't understand the difference, we can just stop here, no point to continue.
> The only reason the vast majority of people advocating for Bitcoin are advocating for Bitcoin specifically is because they have invested in Bitcoin
And people only hate on it because they missed out. It doesn't matter how hard they try to justify the negativity with technological argument. Everyone still knows it's just jealousy speaking. I'm guilty of this and so are you.
To add to this the blockchain solution that's likely to be adopted will ultimately be multilateral agreements between democratically elected governments deciding to use a technology not designed to align with financial incentive/greed for its adoption, unnecessarily transferring wealth from later adopters weighted tiara towards the earliest adopters.
Lightning might not be at the scale it needs to be now but it will improve greatly. maybe it is good enough already? Like Ruby on Rails. People keep talking about it being slow while massive web applications are being built with and billions of dollars being processed.