The Bitcoin/Crypto Thread
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The best technology is probably secret. Once the secret is out, the value diminishes.
Link to video -
@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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Has anyone tried staking or delegating? Ian thinking of trying delegating on The Graph…
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Has anyone tried staking or delegating? Ian thinking of trying delegating on The Graph…
@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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@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.
@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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I understand delegation and proof of stake (POS) even less than I understand crypto itself, so I'll probably stay away out of ignorance.
@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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@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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@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.
@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.
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Just reached my first $1.00… 1% in 6 hours….
@lufins-dad said in The Bitcoin/Crypto Thread:
Just reached my first $1.00… 1% in 6 hours….
Three weeks later and I’m finally in the black again. Not much, but a little. Solana took a nosedive price-wise when I first invested, and tanked even more the second week, but I stuck with my pick and my 3rd and 4th buys were at much lower prices. Now that it’s come back up, I am about 3% up. I’ll be curious to see where I am next week…
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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.
@klaus Helpful. I admit my understand of the technical details of crypto is not super deep - but I do try to grasp the basic factors at play. I should have been more clear when I mentioned "efficiency" - I was talking about computational (and therefore energy) efficiency.
Here's a very biased link - but it has some good examples of the changing narrative on layer 2 technologies.
It seems no one really knows for sure if L2 tech like lightning will work - and the only working solutions right now are custodial centralized nodes, which defeat the purpose of trustless/DeFi systems.
https://github.com/davidshares/Lightning-Network
This thread is (again) biased but enertaining:
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I think it was a liquidity issue. Bitcoin is fascinating (much moreso than the other coins, imo).
I think there is a real chance it replaces the role of gold in the economy. I've always been a gold-skeptic (just don't see the point long-term, I get the historical use) - so I've been disposed to being anti-Bitcoin.
Gold still has a $10T market cap though - so it doesn't matter what I think.
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@jon-nyc said in The Bitcoin/Crypto Thread:
Heard someone call crypto “Mary Kay for young men”.
I don't see the similarity. There's no "pyramid scheme" in crypto.
Crypto has value if we decide that it has value. We will decide that it has value if it's useful, or at least more useful than alternatives. The final jury is still out on that.
