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Both Schiller and Stiglitz should be ashamed of themselves
Their comments only demonstrate how corrupt and hypocritical these angels of the Nobel Prize board are. They're all too eager to push themselves forward as critics of the dominant financial system, but when the great unwashed adopt a superior solution to the holy order of Nobel laureates (which involved continuing to trust the same institutions that were so irresponsible in the lead-up to the 2008 crash), Schiller and Stiglitz do nothing but heap scorn.
What's wrong boys, upset that no-one cares about your ideas? They're behaving like intellectual gangsters: suggesting that anyone transgressing against their own divine prescriptions for economic success should be heavily punished. History will punish Schiller and Stiglitz.
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It's quite interesting that all these experts, central banksters, hedge funds, and the list goes on, find it necessary to explain their view on something that has no value, no meaning, is a ponzi, and its bubble will burst. Yep, and I'm sure these "experts" would say they're "only trying to protect the innocent". Yet so many people predicted the 2008 financial crash in advance, all of whom the financial establishment "experts" dismissed as cranks or paranoid bears; one should wonder who exactly is an expert on what in the financial world. People like Stiglitz seem to specialise in one type of expertise only: telling lies to protect the status quo |
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Stiglitz is at best a hypocrite. He engaged in popular condemnation of the corruptions of the dominant financial system in the wake of the 2008-9 meltdown aversion. And yet when an alternative is born from those circumstances, he condemns that also, refusing to acknowledge that any view of a possible incorruptible financial system except the current corrupt system should be allowed.
Sadly, Stiglitz is incapable of recognising that Bitcoin cannot be successfully outlawed, and so represents a paradigm shift in the fundamental system of money & finance. When the law itself becomes corrupt, only outlaws can possibly act with morality.
Well, what should we expect. Winning the Nobel Prize for anything is fast becoming a badge of ill-repute, awarded mostly to those who helped prop up the worldwide system of gangsters represented by it's banks, governments and corporations. Alfred Nobel himself was, of course, one such human of ill repute: a military weapons manufacturer.
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Coindesk must be idiots if they don't understand how Bitcoin works after, what is it, 4 or 5 years of being a top search result for "cryptocurrency news"?  First of all, their disclaimer at the bottom clarified that the author's opinion does "not necessarily reflect the view of CoinDesk". CoinDesk bring a variety of opinions to the table. Secondly, they were simply using that a metaphor (admittedly not an ideal one) to refer to the fear that new users may experience in the event of a price fall. Ok, I will try again: if Coindesk understands how Bitcoin works, why are they giving a platform to those that have zero clue? Sure, their BTC is safe, but the value of it is not constant. Similarly, in a run on the bank, their digital fiat money is safe, but it won't mean a lot to them when they find out that the digital fiat isn't worth as much as they thought it was.
A price fall could cause a similar domino effect to what happens during an actual run on the bank, and cause quite a hefty best market.
The fluctuation in value of Bitcoin is inevitable, given that it's an immature market in a valuable good. How does that improve the ("admittedly not ideal", in your words) appalling analogy of Bitcoin bank runs? The business of money is exceptionally psychologically influenced. Your inept assessment will only help those that wish to manipulate those who are poorly informed on how money works to their own detriment, and to the manipulators' gain. It would be far better if we understood these phenomena better, and help others to understand, instead of blindly repeating psychological scare-stories. |
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Coindesk - "EXPERT: BANK RUN ON BITCOIN IMMINENT" Coindesk must be idiots if they don't understand how Bitcoin works after, what is it, 4 or 5 years of being a top search result for "cryptocurrency news"? The real newsflash: Bitcoin was designed to prevent anyone else taking control of your money. Bank runs are meaningless when you have 100% control of your money. |
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Nothing really new and surprising. Whether Mugabe is still ruling that country or not, it changes absolutely nothing regarding what mess the financial position of that country is, and I'm afraid that nothing will change at all. Indeed. A glaring difference between Robert Mugabe and new Zimbabwean president Emmerson Mnangagwa is that Mnangagwa was for a long time operationally responsible for the appalling murder, corruption and general abuse meted out by the Mugabe regime, i.e. Mnangagwa is directly responsible, while Mugabe spent most of his own efforts protecting himself. |
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Of course that I wont just start criticizing bitcoin mining right away, because I think that we need to look at it's energy cost, and evaluate how useful it's energy consumption is to our society. Only after doing this, we can see if we are wasting energy or not. That's difficult to quantify. Those who use Bitcoin to make the most significant profits will keep BTC outside of the traditional financial system, i.e. the very information needed to measure Bitcoin's most significant societal benefit will be kept hidden, otherwise the owner will place their property rights in danger. Right now we don't really use bitcoin and we just store it. So from this point of view it could be kind of a waste of electricity. Obviously that we can't forget the potencial for bitcoin to be used as a currency as well, so if we ever get there, then it's energy consumption wouldn't look that bad anymore. No, this is wrong. Bitcoin has been using most or all of it's transaction capacity for several years now. The recent blocksize increase hasn't yet reached the new saturation point, but it will eventually get there. Additionally, you're amply demonstrating that you don't know why Bitcoin is mined at all. Even if there were little to no transactions (as you apparently believe), Bitcoin's proof of work does perform a beneficial task: cumulative protection of Bitcoin's censorship resistance (every new block in the blockchain strengthens it's immutability further) So, although we must not forget about the environment, and we should try to use as much renewable energy as possible, I think the the energy used to support the actual fiat system, is way larger than the energy used to support the bitcoin network.
But that's generally true of all industry anyway. I suspect it's the gap in understanding of why Bitcoin uses proof of work (to strengthen the blockchain) that causes this misinformed protesting of blockchain waste. |
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The Bitcoin blockchain is resistant to censorship precisely because of the difficulty of mining a block.
That's a highly useful property, and a very significant part of what makes Bitcoin valuable. Any talk of Bitcoin's electricity usage is a subtle attack on the entire premise of the system (and anyway, as has been alluded to already on this page, alot of Bitcoin mining is sourced by non-polluting renewable electricity).
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I think our main problem is the huge electricity expense induced by mining and its noxious effect on the climate. This is, to my mind, the only serious argument against Bitcoin.
Unfortunately, anthropogenic climate disaster is based on bad science, deviously fabricated by corrupt scientists and (bug surprise) the world's most honest profession; politicians. It's not a scientific movement, it's a religion. Because the people involved do the precise same thing that religious zealots/fundamentalists do; when their beliefs are questioned with rationality or empirical evidence, climate disaster believers simply attack the person saying it. Which is not science. The "End of the World" has been predicted by charlatans selling something fake to foolish adherents since time immemorial. For some strange reason, these people never go out of business  |
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Max Keiser has also attacked Bitcoin's economic basis and it's focus on freedom for it's users, saying "Bitcoin is not subject to libertarianism or Austrian economics".
Unfortunately for Max Keiser, Satoshi designed Bitcoin very deliberately to have a limited supply and absolute control of money for individuals. This is not just inherent to Satoshi's code, but also referenced more explicitly in the Bitcoin white paper and as an encoded message in the genesis block (i.e. the first block on the blockchain).
Keiser's mouth has always been too big for his brain, sadly.
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Jimmy Song's blog lost me in the part when he starts explaining "Block Weight". Is there another way for someone to explain this "like I am 5"? I am not a very technical person but I really want to learn everything about Bitcoin.
Before, only one aspect of a transaction determined how large a block could be: it's size in bytes. Now that Segwit is activated, there are two components: the size of the inputs + outputs, and the size of the signature. Inputs/outputs are the information that says "I'm paying this money from this address to that or those address/es". The signature is the part that proves you've got the right (i.e. the private keys) to pay. Inputs & outputs can only use the 1MB of block space that Bitcoin previously had, they are "weighed" differently to signatures. Signatures are weighed at 1/4 of inputs & outputs (sometimes referred to as the "witness discount"), and so they can use a total maximum of 4MB of block space (but they've got to sign some inputs, it's not possible for a block to contain only signatures signing nothing). Typically, this will mean each block will be about 1MB of transactions and 1MB of signatures (because the average transaction is roughly one half input/output data and the other half signature data). That's means typically we'll have 2MB blocks (apparently it's more like 2.1MB). But increasing use of transactions with multi-sig (needed for Lightning and other future innovations) that increase average signature size will change the balance between in/outs and signatures, and blocks would get closer to using the 4MB total that is allowed. |
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Here in Northern Europe you are considered as "bad person" if you use energy without a cause. Why mention that at all? There is a cause for using hash mining to secure a blockchain. The only evidence is that Bitcoin mining is both useful and efficient. But that doesn't seem to stop uneducated people waving their hands on the internet about "using too much energy". I feel tempted to retort that such people are using too much oxygen. |
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You could refer to the SegWit2x fork's alteration as increasing the base block size to 2MB.
You could. But I referred to both forks in terms of their maximum block weight: - Segwit (4MB blocks)
- Segwit2x (8MB blocks)
I only used the expression blocksize so as to keep it simple; my intention was to highlight a confused set of posts, and present a very short & basic correction. |
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Main difference is that Sigwit block size is 2MB as a result difficulty level for mining it is easy and hence transactions are fast.
There are no segwit blocks. And no, we don't have 2MB blocks. You are talking about the SegWit 2x fork which should have happened a week ago. (The 2x stands for 2 times blocksize (2MB)) This is a very confused sounding exchange of posts, neither of you are getting the details correct. There are (were) 2 entirely different proposals: - Segwit (4MB blocks)
- Segwit2x (8MB blocks)
Segwit was a soft fork, and is now activated on the Bitcoin network. Segwit2x was hard fork, and was abandoned by it's developers and the miners who agreed to implement it. This makes talk of 2MB blocks (finally) irrelevant; the max blocksize is now twice that at 4MB. |
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Why is using energy "bad for the ecology" in and of itself. Or "bad for sustainability". Sustaining what?
Is this some kind of malthusian scientific case for genocide you're presenting? (all human activity, eating and breathing especially, consumes energy, it's called being alive)
Why are you presenting these vague, unscientific assumptions to be in any way relevant to Bitcoin's hashing security
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Even if the computation of hashes is useful it is also bad for the ecology. I think it would be interesting know which of these two systems is wasting more energy - FIAT or BTC?
These 2 statements are contradictory. If hash mining is doing something useful, how can it simultaneously be a wasteful system? PoW-denialists: make a coherent argument, I'm begging you |
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I know you cannot compare costs with energy directly but if you take into account that we talking about only a part of the FIAT energy costs and this only for EUR, it could turn out that BTC uses less energy than FIAT ... Why. Does. It. Even. Matter. It doesn't. BTC hashrate is doing something useful, and innovatively so. If someone can give some valid reasoning as to why using less energy for a task that depends on energy intensity is a good idea, I'd be genuinely interested to hear it. |
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The one in the best position to supplant proof of work is called “proof of stake.”
It is still possible to reduce this huge energy consumption by adopting proof-of-stake algorithm where coin owners create blocks rather than miners instead of proof-of-work.
It's unlikely that you could convince Bitcoiners to fork to PoS. But even if you could, this is a genuinely free market; some Bitcoiners would reject a proof-of-stake fork regardless of how convincing anyone's PoS rhetoric is. And because this is a market for cryptocurrencies, and because no PoS design has been shown to compete with PoW, we'd be right back where we are now really. |
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Bitcoin's price can easily be manipulated by few people if they want to and that is why authorities wants to do something about it since it is the interest of their citizens that they are protecting.
That's not a very good a idea. People got into Bitcoin to begin with because they don't want "the authorities" to "protect" them. People from Venezuela to Greece have experienced this inept "protection" in only the past 5 years. No-one wants to be "protected" from actually owning their money, and from that money actually being in scarce supply. People like the ECB (and you personally, it seems) don't get it yet. They are not the authorities any more. Bitcoin is a new authority, and there's nothing that can be done about that, Satoshi designed Bitcoin too well. |
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So, more copy and paste coding from Bitcoin Core's work I thought Bitcoin Cash was supposed to be independent? So far, they've changed 1 constant in the code (the only actual significant change in the Cash source code, the EDA, has been reverted back to how it works in Bitcoin Core's code, i.e. how Satoshi did it back in 2008) This is like a sophomore programming student cheating (very obviously) on an assignment by changing tiny bits of someone else's code |
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