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The anti-crypto thread

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njdevilsfan87 said:
Bitcoin is backed by a huge amount of hash power supporting the network ensuring the odds a 51% attack, or any sort of hostile takeover are near zero. You can safely use the Bitcoin network. That's not the case for Bitcoin2 or any of your clones.
Click to expand...
Bitcoin's price has nothing to do with its use as a currency, or that the consortium/cartel of 3-4 mining pools with a majority of hash power are slightly more diversified than other crypto's. It's a terrifyingly inefficient network that uses 1% of global power to choke and die on seven transactions a second. Even if Lighting Network worked (it doesn't), it would take a decade to onboard everyone on earth in an ideal case. On-chain transactions are stagnant since 2017, and most activity happens on centralized exchanges.

The only thing it has is inertia and blind hype. It's a shambling corpse that the deluded and the outright conmen keep insisting is actually alive and well.
 
Since you're always on my ass and want to divert away from the original points I make, with this latest one being Bitcoin vs Bitcoin2: new cryptos have 100-1000x the transaction capacity of Bitcoin, use about hundred households worth of power (less than the Visa network), and can actually have apps built ontop of them. What's your counter there again on why those are bad for humanity? The preventable crypto ransoms?

dullard said:
Fixed that for you.
Click to expand...

If you're referring to quantum computing - that won't break Bitcoin within our lifetimes, and by the time such computing is available if Bitcoin (or just society in general) is still somehow around, it will have updated away from SHA-256 as that would obviously be in everyone's (who participate in the network) best financial interest to do so.
 
igor_kavinski said:
Which ones are these? Are they less secure because they require lower computing power?
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Cardano, Polkadot, Algorand, Cosmos, Tezos. There are a few others in top 50, but I'm not familiar with all of them. They are not identical networks, although for the purpose of just passing crypto back and forth would look functionally identical. Each has a niche they're trying to focus and capitalize on.

Proof-of-stake is less secure than proof-of-work. To attack to a proof-of-stake network someone would have obtain/buyout over half the circulating supply. That's theoretically a smaller barrier than control over half the hash power on the Bitcoin network. But if the supply is well distributed, buying out half the supply might actually end up being a more expensive task than just throwing hash at Bitcoin (because think of what such an attack would do to exchange price - an attacker would have to deal with the token doing a ~100x while buying).

Realistically speaking, I don't see crypto surviving long term if proof-of-stake doesn't work out.
 
njdevilsfan87 said:
Since you're always on my ass and want to divert away from the original points I make, with this latest one being Bitcoin vs Bitcoin2:
Click to expand...
I'm not diverting, I'm replying to the silly idea that bitcoin's price has anything to do with its crippled network. It's blind hype.

new cryptos have 100-1000x the transaction capacity of Bitcoin, use about hundred households worth of power (less than the Visa network), and can actually have apps built ontop of them. What's your counter there again on why those are bad for humanity? The preventable crypto ransoms?
Click to expand...

And how much power do they use per transactions? Sure, Visa uses more — but Visa handles thousands per second. PoW can't scale, it's too adversarial and grows exponentially. PoS is better, but any network that has to jump through that many hoops just to secure its network will be less efficient that one that doesn't. I'm open to the idea of there being some use case that justifies that cost, but trading all that computation efficiency for trustless immutable decentralized transactions has been a real big ask in the real world. Unless you're dodging international sanctions.

I'd also say the crypto user experience is hot garbage (irrevocable keys that, if they ever get compromised, lead to all your money being irrecoverably lost are a terrible idea), that dapps still haven't been useful (and the unpatchable smart contracts they run on are eternal bug bounties and an unstainable programming pattern) and that yes, crypto is responsible for the big ransomware boom.
 

I have full faith in it. That must mean something right?
[/QUOTE]
Full faith and credit of the US government. Also, a $20 Trillion GDP and untold assets well in excess of that, which are not fake at all. If people want to 'mine' it to make some money - fine I guess. But billions of dollars of investment in it - cray cray. Freaking pension funds have invested in this crap.
 
DisarmedDespot said:
And how much power do they use per transactions? Sure, Visa uses more — but Visa handles thousands per second.
Click to expand...

A somewhat recent paper:


A few key figures in this paper:
Table VI, and Figure 1.

Algorand has pretty much caught Visa, when Algorand is fully utilized. Tezos either already has, or is about to update to 1000tps with the same power requirements - so it's about where Algorand sits on Figure 1. Solana wasn't even included in this paper, and it beats Visa in power efficiency afaik, but it isn't well decentralized like the blockchains mentioned in this paper.

From the conclusion:

Our work shows that PoS-based systems can contribute to this and could even undercut the energy needs of traditional central payment systems, raising hopes that DLT can contribute positively to combatting climate change.
Click to expand...

However, to not be totally biased:

Further, while our model suggests that PoS systems can remain energy-efficient while scaling up to VisaNet throughput levels, there is no hard evidence in support of this argument, as no DLT-based system has experienced a sustained volume of this magnitude to date on the base level.
Click to expand...

But then again, to even counter that part:

We ignored the possibility of achieving effectively higher throughput than the specified maximum through layer 2 (L2) solutions, such as the Lightning network or via optimistic and zero-knowledge (zk)-rollups that are receiving increasing attention.
Click to expand...

Now consider this and what one can actually do with a blockchain (push code up to it, run applications on top of it, L2) versus the nothing you can do with Visa other than pay for something.

While there is uncertainty, things look pretty promising for proof-of-stake networks right now.
 
njdevilsfan87 said:
A somewhat recent paper:

Click to expand...
Huh, interesting! I'll dig into it, I wonder how Algorand got that low. I'm still skeptical, there has to be a sacrifice somewhere for all the redundancy built into PoS.

njdevilsfan87 said:
Now consider this and what one can actually do with a blockchain (push code up to it, run applications on top of it, L2) versus the nothing you can do with Visa other than pay for something.
Click to expand...
See, here's the kicker with all cryptocurrencies: trustless decentralized immutable transactions aren't all that useful useful, and often immutability is completely undesirable. Smart contracts and all kinds of code on the blockchain are one of those ideas where it's terrible, even if all network questions are answered. Smart contracts are essentially unpatchable bug bounties and a pattern I considered wholly unsustainable.

Right now essentially every developer everywhere assumes their code is flawed (because it probably is), so they take precautions. Lock it down to limit access and add monitoring, and take action if something goes wrong. It's an imperfect system, but crypto replaces it with nothing.

Smart contracts are freely exposed to everyone with no way to lock it down and anyone with a decompiler can get at your source code. It's unpatchable by default and if you add a patch function you've just added a massive back door to be exploited. Even if you do find a vulnerability before it's exploited, your options suck. It's immutable, best I've ever heard is burning hours trying to get decentralized DNS-equivalents updated to point to a new contract, all the while the old one is still up and vulnerable.

If crypto's ever going to gain serious use, it needs to actually leverage those three features (trustlessness, decentralization, immutability) instead of stapling itself to whatever comes along. Remittances are far closer to something it's suited to than smart contracts.
 
Bankruptcy Specialist Trying To Save $12 Billion Crypto Bank Made Its Name Saving Sears

www.forbes.com.ico
Forbes|15 minutes ago
Struggling crypto lender Celsius Network has hired a heavy-hitting law firm behind the restructuring of Sears, Washington Mutual and a number of other banks to advise on possible solutions for its financial difficulties.



Ummmm .... 'saved' Sears?


Sears basically does not exist any more as compared to what it was.

.
 
www.theguardian.com

Crypto exchanges Coinbase and BlockFi lay off hundreds of staff

Employees hit by cryptocurrency crash as bitcoin price has plummeted in recent weeks
www.theguardian.com www.theguardian.com

I bet these people were all totally being paid in crypto and not fiat, amrite?

igor_kavinski said:
Newbie question: what are the elements/factors causing a market crash? Does it have anything to do with the whales who want to cause the crash so they can buy the shares of the smaller players for pennies and put themselves in an even stronger position?
Click to expand...
It's like a religious cult. The leaders only maintain control while there are enough lunatics that believe. As soon as the followers start waking up and disbelieving, the whole travesty collapses on itself.
 
Too many individuals, companies, organizations, and firms have foolishly tied themselves to cryptocurrencies over the past few years. As the decoupling continues, I hope to see other investments rise while crypto crashes and burns.
 
Will say that unless crypto implodes completely there probably will be another crypto bull run at some point. You know the Fed can't resist the money printer forever.

Lets say 2 years.
 
jpiniero said:
Will say that unless crypto implodes completely there probably will be another crypto bull run at some point. You know the Fed can't resist the money printer forever.

Lets say 2 years.
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Oh Noes! We have put the country into a recession! We should lower rates, maybe we will go negative this time! That will teach those savers.
 
DisarmedDespot said:
Smart contracts are essentially unpatchable bug bounties and a pattern I considered wholly unsustainable.
Click to expand...

You're right, it's far from perfect. But a bad contract can be replaced with a patched one because there's at least the self destruct option.

For the past 2 years we've seen anyone throwing anything into smart contracts just because they wanted to be the first to do something with them. That presented lucrative scenarios that eventually ended up being exploited due to a bug or developers not having tested edge cases of fluctuating conditions that would cause the algorithm to do something undesirable.

I expect to change moving forward as people begin to understand the true nature and consequences of immutability. And then whether or not the benefits are worth it. One of which includes potentially never having to maintain that piece of code ever again. Or the fact that immutability also acts as a layer of security.

- In 2014 we had people creating new blockchains left and right. That's seldom done now compared to then, but a lot of those experimental features worked their way into modern gen 3.0 blockchains.
- In 2017 we had people creating ICO tokens left and right. That's seldom done now, but that opened up the path to NFTs and interesting self-governance tokens that we see now on gen 3.0 blockchains
- In 2021 we have people looking for solutions to problems, only because it finally became possible to do so thanks to the prior crazes driving evolution and growth of the tech. In a few years we're going to see far less of this guesswork.

For starters, a lot of code developers need to switch away from their previous mindsets of complexity, options, and more functionality being a good thing. With smart contracts, you should be constantly reminded yourself to remain as minimalistic as possible. It almost backwards - like going from everything I know how to do today, back to "Hello world" level of programming. But for some use cases, like currency (BTC/ETH/etc) or asset (NFT) or any small meta data (again NFT) storage or exchange, and full transparency of it all, that's all you need.
 
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njdevilsfan87 said:
You're right, it's far from perfect. But a bad contract can be replaced with a patched one because there's at least the self destruct option.
Click to expand...
I mean, sure, you can add a self-destruct just like you can add a patch function, but it's still then another attack vector. Look up the Parity multisig attack, where their kill function got compromised and led to millions of losses.

I expect to change moving forward as people begin to understand the true nature and consequences of immutability. And then whether or not the benefits are worth it. One of which includes potentially never having to maintain that piece of code ever again. Or the fact that immutability also acts as a layer of security.
Click to expand...
I strongly disagree that either of those benefits are useful in any way. They both assume the code is perfect and will never need to change.

- In 2021 we have people looking for solutions to problems, only because it finally became possible to do so thanks to the prior crazes driving evolution and growth of the tech. In a few years we're going to see far less of this guesswork.

For starters, a lot of code developers need to switch away from their previous mindsets of complexity, options, and more functionality being a good thing. With smart contracts, you should be constantly reminded yourself to remain as minimalistic as possible. It almost backwards - like going from everything I know how to do today, back to "Hello world" level of programming. But for some use cases, like currency (BTC/ETH/etc) or asset (NFT) or any small meta data (again NFT) storage or exchange, and full transparency of it all, that's all you need.
Click to expand...
Nothing's changed over the years, it's still solutions desperately looking for a problem. NFTs are the biggest example.

I also disagree smart contracts just need developers to change mindsets. What you described is already widespread. YAGNI and functional programming have been things for years, and stuff like AWS's lambda functions already encourage your code to be minimal. I think it's far more likely that immutable code you can't lock down is just an inherent liability.
 
IronWing said:
Bitcoin isn't backed by anything.
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Just like most if not all fiat currencies. And don't come with "it's backed by the US government". it is till it is until the GDP to debt ratio gets even worse and the inflation ends up in hyperinflation and collapse.

DisarmedDespot said:
PoS is better, but any network that has to jump through that many hoops just to secure its network will be less efficient that one that doesn't.
Click to expand...

of course secure, decentralized system will be less efficient than a centralized one. BUT: inform yourself about L2 and roll-ups.

DisarmedDespot said:
Smart contracts are freely exposed to everyone with no way to lock it down and anyone with a decompiler can get at your source code.
Click to expand...
Ah the good old security by obscurity logic. Linux source code is also open and anyone can look at it, yet most for the worlds infrastructure runs on linux without everything being down all the time due to hacks.

I do however see the immutability as a bigger issue and the biggest issue is for me privacy and anonymity. Monero is the only one that checks these 2 boxes. i will not want all my transactions to be public knowledge.
 
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