I'm really shocked by the number of companies in this industry making under-collateralized loans, loans with risky collateral, or simply not reacting quickly enough. I hope lenders and depositors have learned something from this catastrophe. One good rule of thumb is to avoid depositing money in any company that has its own token -- it is basically a pyramid scheme and it is destined to fail.

If every bank produced their own stablecoin, there would be a huge problem of interoperability. For example, I have Bank of America coins but the merchant only accepts Wells Fargo coins. A few coins would be manageable, but if there are 1000 coins it would never work.

So, that brings up the next problem. If there can only be a few coins, it would put small banks out of business because they couldn't compete with the big banks.

Regardless, the idea of a CBDC really doesn't make sense. A CBDC would not provide any benefit beyond what banks and central banks already provide. At least in the U.S., the Federal Reserve is run by banks, so it would not do anything that would put banks out of business.


The advantage of the stablecoin is that you can send the coins directly, something that you would not be able to do with a CBDC. In order to allow sending coins directly, the central bank would have to give up control of the money, and that's something it will never do.


What are you talking about? I use online dollars to pay my bills and send money to friends all the time. I use credit and debit cards to buy stuff with online dollars.

Your questions are not clear, perhaps because you are confused by the terms.

A UTXO (unspent transaction output) is simply the output of a transaction that has not yet been spent. For example if you send 1 BTC to an address (legacy or segwit), you will create a UTXO that remains until that 1 BTC has been spent.

By "cost of energy", I mean the cost to purchase a joule of energy. In short, the energy consumption (in joules) to produce a bitcoin, E, approaches

E ⟶  P  / C

where

P is the average price of a bitcoin in $
C is the average cost of electricity in $/J

The reason that hash rate and efficiency are irrelevant is that the difficulty adjustments keep production constant, regardless of the hash rate, the amount of energy used, the efficiency of the equipment, and the amount miners are willing to spend.

However, assuming that miners (in the aggregate) are striving to be profitable, they will spend as much as they can on energy up to the value of the bitcoins they produce. So, the value of the energy consumed producing a bitcoin (E x C) approaches the value of the bitcoin (P). Thus, E ⟶  P  / C. Note that there are other variable costs, but energy is the biggest and it's what we are concerned about here.



Small contradiction there. If using the same amount of energy, the energy required per bitcoin would be the same and would not increase. Note that I am assuming a time frame that includes difficulty adjustments and time for miners to add or remove equipment. An increase in efficiency would reduce energy consumption at least until the next difficulty adjustment, but consumption would return as miners compete for a bigger share.

The ultimate display of laziness is complaining about the lack of a feature in open source software.

In order to stop Bitcoin, you must stop mining everywhere. You can't stop Bitcoin by stopping some people from mining. Even if mining is prohibited in the EU, it can be mined somewhere. Even the ban on mining in China has not stopped Bitcoin.

In short, it is possible to make valid copy of a transaction by modifying a signature in a certain way, and the copy has a different transaction ID. Now, that is not a problem for Bitcoin because only one of the copies will make it into the block chain and the others will be forgotten. The problem occurs in software that monitors transactions using the transaction ID.

For example, suppose a customer of an exchange wants to withdraw some bitcoins. The exchange creates a transaction and records the transaction ID. Normally, the exchange debits the customer's account when it sees the transaction ID in a block. However, if a copy of the transaction with a different transaction ID is included in the block instead, then the exchange doesn't know that the bitcoins were received and it won't debit the account as it should.

This is an interesting post: Surprisingly, Tail Emission Is Not Inflationary


I think his analysis is a little naive, but it could be the start of something interesting.

That leaves 37 percent of the world who have no choice but to use physical money.

To those that insist that "physical" bitcoins have no use, I want to point out the interesting fact that most of the paper USD in the world is used by people outside of the U.S.

Don't forget that many people in the world have limited access to banks and telecommunications. For them, no electronic form of currency is available and they must rely primarily on paper money or perhaps "physical" bitcoins.

I haven't noticed this to be a problem. Can you go into more detail about it? Having multiple accounts has been an approved practice for a long time, so I think it would be helpful if you could point out the people that are giving negative trust to penalizing users simply because they have multiple accounts so that we can be more aware of their behavior.

FYI, I have given negative trust to many scammers on all of their multiple accounts because they are scammers and not because they have multiple accounts. I don't see anything wrong with that.

Also, I have heard that people try to cheat signature campaigns somehow by having multiple accounts, and they are given negative trust. TBH, I don't really know anything about that and I don't really care, unless the signature campaign people are expanding their agenda beyond just signature campaigns.

Edit: Apparently, negative trust is not relevant to this discussion.


I don't understand why someone can't return under a new identity. Can you explain specifically what would prevent someone from doing that?

Because of the economics of Bitcoin mining, improved efficiency does not reduce the overall energy consumption. Bitcoin energy consumption depends primarily on the cost of energy and the value of the block reward, and efficiency affects neither of those.

alexey14 is a NSA disinformation agent. I have proof but I cannot reveal it here.

... assuming your model is accurate, of course.

That reddit post is so incredibly biased that it would be smart to disregard it because many of the statements made by the author are likely to be false.

A blockchain explorer can be useful for monitoring a transaction, but do not use it to monitor the balance in your wallet. Your wallet uses multiple addresses and a blockchain explorer is not aware of that.

If you expect your wallet to have 0.0001 BTC and it says that it has 0.0001 BTC, then it probably does.

A stablecoin such as UST?

FTX's bailout of blockfi is concerning, but what bothers me more are the withdrawal fees. It costs $25 to withdraw stablecoins, for example. If you have $1000 in blockfi, it will take 5 months of interest to pay for the withdrawal. Also, I think many people will be withdrawing all of their money before the fees start and that will create even more problems for blockfi.

You can continue repeating that 1edgy... is yours as many times as you want, but there is no reason to believe you without a signature. Somebody else could claim that they own 1edgy..., and their claim could be just as valid.

It's not a big deal as long as the address is never compromised, and as long as you never need to prove that you are the person that posted the 1edgy... address or that you owned the edgycorner account before now.

Simply stated, there is no issue with signing with the 1SiD... address, but if somebody signs with the 1edgy... address, we should believe them over anything that you say. That's how signature proofs work.

Typically, if you want to use a different address, you would sign a message with the original address saying so. Then there is no question, even if the original address is compromised.


Signing the address initially is not strictly necessary. It's a good idea in order to make sure that you can sign a message with the address, but it is really just a formality. The reason is that there is no benefit to claiming that you own a random address. You don't really need to prove that you own an address until you want to make a statement that requires a proof. In this case, the purpose of posting an address is to be able to prove that you are the original owner of the account at some time in the future.