The Bitcoin/Crypto Thread
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@lufins-dad I think a lot of those store credit cards are just co-branded with synchrony, citi, visa, etc.
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@lufins-dad said in The Bitcoin/Crypto Thread:
@ivorythumper said in The Bitcoin/Crypto Thread:
@klaus said in The Bitcoin/Crypto Thread:
@ivorythumper said in The Bitcoin/Crypto Thread:
If Bitcoin continues to exist for the next few hundred years, we will see the reverse problem: A house costing 0.00000000001 Bitcoin or something. The amount of Bitcoin will soon start to shrink every year. Bitcoin that is lost can never return.
Bitcoin (tm) is just one brand. There can be a whole lot of competitive ways to buy and sell with other alt coins, right? So if Shiba Inu is capitalized for 1,000,000,000,000,000 coins, and there are a couple of other dozen competitors, how does ever get to a useful money supply to peg to any hard currency?
Their are hundreds or even thousands of Credit Card/Charge Card systems. Most of the major ones are built off the Visa, MasterCard, Discover, and American Express platforms, but there are also innumerable retailers with their own unique platforms. Kohl’s, Macy’s, Target, and on, and on, and on…
Ethereum and possibly Solana stand primed to be your Visa and MC platforms… Then you have other currencies built off of these platforms such as Cardano… These fill the slot that the individual banks fill such as Chase or Citibank. Many of these little alt coins are built for specific and limited use in different gaming or specialty platforms. These are comparable to your small retail cards for specific stores.
There are several competing currencies and marketplaces to handle transactions and tying it to hard currencies.
The concern about decimalization is that if Shiba Inu is targeted 1 quadrillion units to peg at $1.00 (for example), then buyers would have to support that valuation with $1Q of purchasing power (hard money or the crypto equivalent.
So let’s say everyone eventually shifts to crypto— which makes sense for several billions of people who don’t have access to stable currencies and safe banking — IOW most of the world— then all the total wealth of the world might be held in crypto, and as wealth was continued to be created the crypto supply would grow or the value would rise.
What is everything in the world valued at in 2021 USD or Euro or any relatively stable currency? Maybe hundreds of trillions or quadrillions or even quintillions (over time)—. But then cryptos are competing for that market share of the wealth to hold the value. So how many $1Q cryptos are needed for this? And how are these stable against market competition?
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It used to be fun! I had a mining rig in 2012 (it was just a gaming PC, but you could get coins back then). I sold all of it when I went to grad school.
Among techies there was a lot of optimism around blockchain. I haven't seen a single useful and valuable application developed in the last decade.
If it were so useful, I would have expected something by now. (And we know there’s no shortage of money or top minds)
I could be completely wrong though.
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If you have 80 min to kill, watch this.
Link to videoIt blew me away how fees in Bitcoin work: the game theoretical considerations about incentives, the potential attack vectors, the interaction with block size, the interaction with transaction frequency variability etc.
I particularly liked the considerations of how miners should behave rationally if there's a block with an absurdly high fee, e.g. how they should try to "steal" the block from another miner who has already successfully mined it. That part starts around 58:20.
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@klaus said in The Bitcoin/Crypto Thread:
If you have 80 min to kill, watch this.
Link to videoIt blew me away how fees in Bitcoin work: the game theoretical considerations about incentives, the potential attack vectors, the interaction with block size, the interaction with transaction frequency variability etc.
I particularly liked the considerations of how miners should behave rationally if there's a block with an absurdly high fee, e.g. how they should try to "steal" the block from another miner who has already successfully mined it. That part starts around 58:20.
Very interesting video. Thanks for sharing. It’s different than a one-time game like a spectrum auction. Miners need to keep their software updated in response to the “meta game” of strategies being deployed by others.
The other factor is that it’s inherently not a fair game. Speed wins. Better equipment means better speed.
(I think today something like 95% of mining is done by 6 players).
It’ll be interesting to see when / people start ditching Bitcoin because of its technical design.
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@xenon said in The Bitcoin/Crypto Thread:
The other factor is that it’s inherently not a fair game. Speed wins. Better equipment means better speed.
(I think today something like 95% of mining is done by 6 players).Those who invest more gain more. What could be more fair?
Are you sure those 6 aren’t mining pools? I think it’s more distributed than that.
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Cryptocurrency miners are using compromised Google Cloud accounts for computationally-intensive mining purposes, Google has warned.
The search giant’s cybersecurity team provided details in a report published Wednesday. The so-called “Threat Horizons” report aims to provide intelligence that allows organizations to keep their cloud environments secure.
“Malicious actors were observed performing cryptocurrency mining within compromised Cloud instances,” Google wrote in an executive summary of the report.
Cryptocurrency mining is a for-profit activity that often requires large amounts of computing power, which Google Cloud customers can access at a cost. Google Cloud is a remote storage platform where customers can keep data and files off-site.
Google said 86% of 50 recently compromised Google Cloud accounts were used to perform cryptocurrency mining. In the majority of cases, cryptocurrency mining software was downloaded within 22 seconds of the account being compromised, Google said.
Around 10% of the compromised accounts were also used to conduct scans of other publicly available resources on the internet to identify vulnerable systems, while 8% of instances were used to attack other targets.
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The best technology is probably secret. Once the secret is out, the value diminishes.
Link to video -
Has anyone tried staking or delegating? Ian thinking of trying delegating on The Graph…
Me/rry/Christmas
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@lufins-dad said in The Bitcoin/Crypto Thread:
Has anyone tried staking or delegating? Ian thinking of trying delegating on The Graph…
I looked into it, but the risk I'd be taking is not clear to me.
I hate to invest in something I don't fully understand.
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@klaus said in The Bitcoin/Crypto Thread:
@lufins-dad said in The Bitcoin/Crypto Thread:
Has anyone tried staking or delegating? Ian thinking of trying delegating on The Graph…
I looked into it, but the risk I'd be taking is not clear to me.
I hate to invest in something I don't fully understand.
The delegating GRT on the Graph makes a little more sense to me, but there are still elements of all of this that I am still not sure about which again is why my investment has been weekly lunch money… As of this morning I am breaking even, but that’s mostly because two of my weekly buys of Solana were at low/value prices. It still hasn’t returned to the original price I bought at…
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@klaus said in The Bitcoin/Crypto Thread:
Got a link on that "The Graph" thing?
https://thegraphportal.com/how-to-delegate/
I’ve been tracking their price for a few weeks. Seems relatively stable with an upward trend. A good long term option to hold. As long as it’s holding, may as well put it to use… I’m just trying to figure out how much of an initial “buy” is needed. The larger the GRT the better the rewards for delegating, though there are some groups that pool their GRT.
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@89th Proof of stake allows the network to run more efficiently, but concentrates validation power in the hands of fewer, large entities.
Basically the trade-off is more centralization of power for efficiency.
It's the reason Bitcoin will never be a transaction network in its current form. Proof of work requires too much computation and doesn't scale well.
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@xenon said in The Bitcoin/Crypto Thread:
@89th Proof of stake allows the network to run more efficiently, but concentrates validation power in the hands of fewer, large entities.
Basically the trade-off is more centralization of power for efficiency.
It's the reason Bitcoin will never be a transaction network in its current form. Proof of work requires too much computation and doesn't scale well.
I think that's not quite accurate.
Proof of stake doesn't make the network more efficient. It makes block validators consume (way) less energy. But it doesn't change, for instance, how many transactions can be processed per second. PoS also doesn't necessarily put validation power in the hands of fewer entities. It puts more power into the hands of those who are willing to stake more money.
Scalability doesn't have a lot to do with PoW vs PoS.
The technologies that can make blockchains scale are "layer 2" approaches such as, for Bitcoin, the "Lightning network". Their idea is to have transactions that are "peer to peer" and immediate and do not cost (relevant) fees and are not stored on the blockchain. All you need on the blockchain is a so-called "funding transaction" (you can think of this as going to an ATM to get some cash), which you can then spend on the layer 2 network using a gazillion transactions that are never stored on the blockchain.
There's a lot of misinformation about this being spread, such as this article, which, however, seems to suffer from the common "the author doesn't understand what he's writing about" problem.
You can increase the number of transactions per second stored "on chain" by smaller block times or bigger block sizes. But you could do either with both PoW or PoS. The main argument against bigger blocks or smaller block times is that the storage requirements for nodes quickly become such that "normal people" could no longer install nodes and nodes would be confined to big data centers.
There are many other scalability ideas, such as "sharding", which basically means that you split the blockchain into parts and nodes only store a subset of the full chain. PoS provides an indirect benefit here because the "51%" attack would be easier to carry out in a PoW sharding architecture.
