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In 2020 all of the commerce and inertia of bitcoin is drugs. No drugs, no bitcoin. Bitcoin doesn't go down when you think it should because almost all of the real money flowing into the bitcoin ecosystem correlates to a constant demand for drugs, priced in dollars, indifferent to the cost of bitcoin. This money flows into exchanges at a relatively constant rate in dollars 365 days a year no matter what happens in the bitcoin community, and at the end of the day the exchanges have all the cash and dealers have all the butts, which they can't possibly cash back out through the exchanges. This is the real scam here- exchanges vs drug dealers. This is why whenever a dark web drug kingpin gets busted he's living modestly somewhere with a fortune in butts under his mattress, because he's the one who has to do it in a back alley with a guy from localbitcoins.com and he can barely cash out enough that way to buy new product. Not that people aren't still speculating/manipulating the butts, but that's just window dressing for a drugs-backed currency and history's greatest scam on libertarian drug dealers. If everyone stopped buying drugs on the internet tomorrow the butts would crash and bitcoin would die and it would be plainly obvious in a week that no other actual real commerce was affected, but this will never happen, because society's demand for drugs just goes up Up UP, especially when the economy is bad. This is why in 100 years the US dollar will be backed by cocaine. This is the true innovation of bitcoin.
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Jan 30, 2020 16:08
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poverty goat posted:In 2020 all of the commerce and inertia of bitcoin is drugs. No drugs, no bitcoin. Bitcoin doesn't go down when you think it should because almost all of the real money flowing into the bitcoin ecosystem correlates to a constant demand for drugs, priced in dollars, indifferent to the cost of bitcoin. This money flows into exchanges at a relatively constant rate in dollars 365 days a year no matter what happens in the bitcoin community, and at the end of the day the exchanges have all the cash and dealers have all the butts, which they can't possibly cash back out through the exchanges. This is the real scam here- exchanges vs drug dealers. This is why whenever a dark web drug kingpin gets busted he's living modestly somewhere with a fortune in butts under his mattress, because he's the one who has to do it in a back alley with a guy from localbitcoins.com and he can barely cash out enough that way to buy new product. Not that people aren't still speculating/manipulating the butts, but that's just window dressing for a drugs-backed currency and history's greatest scam on libertarian drug dealers. If everyone stopped buying drugs on the internet tomorrow the butts would crash and bitcoin would die and it would be plainly obvious in a week that no other actual real commerce was affected, but this will never happen, because society's demand for drugs just goes up Up UP, especially when the economy is bad. This is why in 100 years the US dollar will be backed by cocaine. This is the true innovation of bitcoin. The purpose of bitcoin is and always has been to buy drugs, if you haven't realized that, I can see why you'd find it confusing
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Jan 30, 2020 16:09
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xtal posted:There are probably a lot of nerds in this thread with better credentials, so I don't like taking it in that direction. I wouldn't use it as one, but Redis is called a database on Wikipedia, albeit a poor one indeed, and works similarly (no relations; supports append-only-logging; clustering). If it used a secure consensus algorithm, it would be very close to a blockchain. So, it seems like a blockchain could be considered a database as well. Which kind of adds to my point; blockchain was clearly designed as an academic exercise instead of by people who actually design databases. If blockchain were a real relational database, you wouldn't need to download the entire thing to append your transaction. With a real database, all you'd need to do is upload your transaction AND add a huge encrypted number to a master table in the database and boom, transaction complete. There, a real programmer has literally just solved 3 of the major problems with Bitcoin; transaction speed, energy requirements per transaction and improved security for the transaction. Please leave programming to people who know what the hell they are doing. Please. tango alpha delta fucked around with this message at 16:21 on Jan 30, 2020 |
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Jan 30, 2020 16:12
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tango alpha delta posted:Which kind of adds to my point; blockchain was clearly designed as an academic exercise instead of by people who actually design databases. If blockchain were a real relational database, you wouldn't need to download the entire thing to append your transaction. With a real database, all you'd need to do is upload your transaction AND add a huge encrypted number to a master table in the database and boom, transaction complete. That system would have different properties and security guarantees, which is why it wasn't done that way. (Upload to who? What master table?) Although who knows, maybe the newer coins do it a better and different way. One thing I'll be clear about is that I'm not saying you should replace Postgres with blockchain, but a blockchain is basically an append-only-database plus secure clustering. The "secure clustering" part may imply "poor man's database" for other use cases. It doesn't make it not a a "real database." The "real programmer" stuff is also unappreciated, which I tried to hint at before, because my credentials are better than yours. xtal fucked around with this message at 16:29 on Jan 30, 2020 |
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Jan 30, 2020 16:23
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Its like an antivaxxer explaining vaccines to a doctor.
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Jan 30, 2020 16:25
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my shoebox could be considered a database as well, who cares there are vanishingly few places where 'blockchain' has any benefit over existing approaches other than where the value of the word 'blockchain' alone is enough to carry the day
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Jan 30, 2020 16:29
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xtal posted:That system would have different properties and security guarantees, which is why it wasn't done that way. (Upload to who? What master table?) Although who knows, maybe the newer coins do it a better and different way. I'm not really interested in throwing down credentials, because on the internet I could be John Von Neumann for all you know. (That's a programmer joke, by the way; Von Neumann is dead but the computer you are currently using is a Von Neumann machine unless you are posting on some kind of ancient Harvard architecture Cray Supercomputer.) Seriously though, the fact that blockchain requires so much code to create a new entry means that it just wasn't designed that well. It's like the creators couldn't wrap their heads around how relational databases work and got lazy. tango alpha delta fucked around with this message at 17:24 on Jan 30, 2020 |
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Jan 30, 2020 16:33
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klafbang posted:AliX is on the crypto wagon. Mine bitcoins directly from the app. The only way to spend your bitcoins is to exchange them for coupons which you can sometimes (never) use for discounts on products and services. I don't think AliExpress coins have anything to do with Bitcoin or cryptocurrency in general, and aren't mined. See this article for details.
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Jan 30, 2020 16:34
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tango alpha delta posted:Which kind of adds to my point; blockchain was clearly designed as an academic exercise instead of by people who actually design databases. If blockchain were a real relational database, you wouldn't need to download the entire thing to append your transaction. With a real database, all you'd need to do is upload your transaction AND add a huge encrypted number to a master table in the database and boom, transaction complete.
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Jan 30, 2020 16:37
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Splicer posted:I can't remember if it was in the white paper elsewhere but satoshi at one point describes trubcating the chain every so often, snapshotting everything and purging all transactions records before it. He said this was an obvious requirement for a production version of bitcoin, as opposed to the proof of concept he and a few friends were dicking around with. Purging transaction records is the literal opposite of the entire point of a database. There seems to be more and more evidence that blockchain was designed by people who don't understand how real databases work. The most ridiculous part about all this is that so much electricity and computer hardware have been wasted on this poorly executed academic exercise.
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Jan 30, 2020 16:42
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tango alpha delta posted:Purging transaction records is the literal opposite of the entire point of a database. There seems to be more and more evidence that blockchain was designed by people who don't understand how real databases work. The most ridiculous part about all this is that so much electricity and computer hardware have been wasted on this poorly executed academic exercise.
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Jan 30, 2020 16:50
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Splicer posted:Exactly. It was never supposed to be a database. It was supposed to be a way to buy trains on the internet. trains made of drugs and porn! toot toot!
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Jan 30, 2020 16:55
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quote:“nascient”
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Jan 30, 2020 17:01
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This is all fascinating but have you considered, number go up tango alpha delta posted:Purging transaction records is the literal opposite of the entire point of a database. There seems to be more and more evidence that blockchain was designed by people who don't understand how real databases work. The most ridiculous part about all this is that so much electricity and computer hardware have been wasted on this poorly executed academic exercise. HELLOMYNAMEIS___ posted:I don't think AliExpress coins have anything to do with Bitcoin or cryptocurrency in general, and aren't mined. See this article for details.
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Jan 30, 2020 17:03
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HELLOMYNAMEIS___ posted:I don't think AliExpress coins have anything to do with Bitcoin or cryptocurrency in general, and aren't mined. See this article for details. Yeah, I know – I mas mostly just shitposting because a coiner had shown up  It's as much crypto as most (probably all) other big crypto projects, and as somebody already mentioned, it is just a skinner box designed to get people into the app every day to buy stuff with real money.
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Jan 30, 2020 18:23
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kw0134 posted:Yes, which is the same trilemma for literally all computer systems. There isn't a single thing in the world where you can't also apply that analysis to, which is why everyone has decided that decentralization is in the end a pointless distraction. Could you elaborate on this? Decentralization is key to many approaches to scalability, and can reduce per-transaction cost versus scaling vertically, in a lot of systems ranging from service discovery in an application cluster to Google’s Spanner to DNS. I haven’t heard “cost/decentralization/scalability” presented as a CAP-like theorem of exclusion before—where does that come from?
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Jan 30, 2020 18:54
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Subjunctive posted:Could you elaborate on this? Decentralization is key to many approaches to scalability, and can reduce per-transaction cost versus scaling vertically, in a lot of systems ranging from service discovery in an application cluster to Google’s Spanner to DNS. I haven’t heard “cost/decentralization/scalability” presented as a CAP-like theorem of exclusion before—where does that come from? I think you could call it an interpretation of Zooko's triangle? vv: good post! xtal fucked around with this message at 19:25 on Jan 30, 2020 |
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Jan 30, 2020 18:56
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Subjunctive posted:Could you elaborate on this? Decentralization is key to many approaches to scalability, and can reduce per-transaction cost versus scaling vertically, in a lot of systems ranging from service discovery in an application cluster to Google’s Spanner to DNS. I haven’t heard “cost/decentralization/scalability” presented as a CAP-like theorem of exclusion before—where does that come from? Yeah, that's not true at all. It basically boils down to what kw0134 also dismissed in the same post, the Byzantine Generals' problem. The Byzantine Generals' problem is undecidable in its general formulation, but very solvable otherwise. The triple is pretty much meaningless if put any thought into it (how about that cheap, easily scalable but centralized solution?) Bitcoin does not solve the Byzantine Generals' problem, but instead solves a similar problem probabilistically (basically, what breaks bitcoin's solution is the 51% problem). You can solve consensus in other ways too, e.g., by introducing trust. DNS requires trust and is not truly decentralized. You have designated root nodes, which act as a (distributed) central authority. I am not 100% certain of how Google Spanner works, but my best guess is it breaks consensus subtly (my guess is that if you update the same record in disconnected mode, you'll get a conflict or lose data on reconnect). Byzantine Generals' problem is very close to solvable, so if you remove (os even just relax) pretty much any assumption, it becomes solvable. that is often the trade-off in distributed systems.
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Jan 30, 2020 19:24
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dhrusis posted:Sounds good.. I'll go ahead and take your comment seriously because it provides so much clear and convincing evidence.. I do this cause I don't normally want to blow someone off as an idiot cause I don't agree with them, but gently caress it is nice to be able to call greedy morons such right to their face and not feel bad about it. Bitcoiners are awful people. They are exceptionally racist and sexist. They care not for anyone else, if you believe that they do then see the previous cult comment. That doesn't even touch on the needless pollution generated by a system that could run on a 1985 Nintendo Entertainment System. On the positive side I've learned quite a bit about economics while watching you idiots relearn lessons solved literally 100s of years before the lovely block chain existed.
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Jan 30, 2020 19:48
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quote:I do this cause I don't normally want to blow someone off as an idiot cause I don't agree with them, but gently caress it is nice to be able to call greedy morons such right to their face and not feel bad about it. Bitcoiners are awful people. They are exceptionally racist and sexist. That post seems kind of crazy, like in the actual way? xtal fucked around with this message at 20:18 on Jan 30, 2020 |
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Jan 30, 2020 19:57
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Every time I check this bookmark and read some crypto enthusiast serious post it makes my day
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Jan 30, 2020 20:01
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We always get literally the same arguments from coiners over the last ten years. Never change! 
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Jan 30, 2020 20:09
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I made a mistake in saying "computer systems" when I should have said something to the effect of macro systems. You want to centralize things like a payment processor or your monetary system, as opposed to trying to figure out whether your barista accepts Visa, Mastercard, bitcoin, Argentinian pesos, etc. And in the marketplace, things tend to agglomerate. Amazon got to its position by selling everything to everyone at competitive prices (and also squeezing everyone from their employees to their suppliers dry.) It's the economically and psychologically efficient outcome; you click a few buttons, you get your goods and don't have to spend hours shopping across sites and figuring out which of five different stores selling marginally different versions of a tchochke is best for you. There are many moral, philosophical, legal and macroeconomic questions about whether this is desirable, but it's a self-reinforcing cycle. See, e.g., Walmart. The main point I wanted to push back on was the idea that decentralization, per se, was a self-evident good. Like saying "Bitcoin is decentralized!" is not something that stands alone as a marvel of persuasive argumentation; why should we care? Or indeed, this is a demerit because the cost of that decentralization is in the construction of a hugely wasteful arms race to do computational make-work.
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Jan 30, 2020 20:11
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kw0134 posted:The main point I wanted to push back on was the idea that decentralization, per se, was a self-evident good. Like saying "Bitcoin is decentralized!" is not something that stands alone as a marvel of persuasive argumentation; why should we care? Or indeed, this is a demerit because the cost of that decentralization is in the construction of a hugely wasteful arms race to do computational make-work. That makes a lot more sense. Decentralization is probably never a good idea, but something you do if you have to. Either for performance or availability reasons. Decentralization is not really that expensive, though. It is the absence of trust that kills bitcoin. Add a simple web of trust or a (possibly distributed) central authority, and Bitcoin could work without too much waste.
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Jan 30, 2020 20:26
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klafbang posted:That makes a lot more sense. Decentralization is probably never a good idea, but something you do if you have to. Either for performance or availability reasons. Even if it were possible to jam a political agenda free central authority into Bitcoin, the immediate problem after that becomes regulation and accountability for the exchanges. Good luck with that, because having the same central authority control the ledger AND actual finances violates about a dozen SOX regulations. tango alpha delta fucked around with this message at 20:47 on Jan 30, 2020 |
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Jan 30, 2020 20:39
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klafbang posted:That makes a lot more sense. Decentralization is probably never a good idea, but something you do if you have to. Either for performance or availability reasons. Bitcoin could be a lot more efficient; the actual part of recording the block could be done on an NES. But if you give up the trustless portion, then it arguable stops being bitcoin. The entire whitepaper was an exercise in exploring the notion of building an economy among two-faced pirates who want to backstab you at the first opportunity. The question all the bitcoin advocates dodge is why you'd want to do this, with varying amounts of handwaving. It's an ingrained part of its raison d'etre.
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Jan 30, 2020 21:12
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tango alpha delta posted:Even if it were possible to jam a political agenda free central authority into Bitcoin, the immediate problem after that becomes regulation and accountability for the exchanges. Not gonna disagree, but it is probably as likely to work as bitcoin is now. I was leaning more towards a distributed centralized authority. That is basically interbanking or the lighting network (coming real soon!) kw0134 posted:Bitcoin could be a lot more efficient; the actual part of recording the block could be done on an NES. But if you give up the trustless portion, then it arguable stops being bitcoin. The entire whitepaper was an exercise in exploring the notion of building an economy among two-faced pirates who want to backstab you at the first opportunity. The question all the bitcoin advocates dodge is why you'd want to do this, with varying amounts of handwaving. It's an ingrained part of its raison d'etre. This is also a good point. I'm mostly trying to devil's advocate in favor of bitcoin here: what if you really wanted blockchain, but also wanted it to work? You'd need to change so little (add almost any notion of trust), and it would be reasonably efficient without losing anything meaningful. You could have people not trusting each other sending money to each other as long as they both have a bank they trust. You could have it all run in libertarian hellscape without governments. You could even do the whole "be your own bank, lol" thing, though you would only be able to transfer to anybody where a chain of trust can be established. You could have public records, private records, mixed records, pseudonymous records. Heck, make it deflationary if you're that dumb. Heck, bitcoin already has all the disadvantages, often in worse form: centralized exchanges you have to trust and decentralized trusted authorities based on chains of trust (lightning), miners you have to trust. But they'll keep the dumb mining because the end-goal is still guns, drugs, kiddie porn and tax evasion.
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Jan 30, 2020 22:15
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poverty goat posted:In 2020 all of the commerce and inertia of bitcoin is drugs. No drugs, no bitcoin. Bitcoin doesn't go down when you think it should because almost all of the real money flowing into the bitcoin ecosystem correlates to a constant demand for drugs, priced in dollars, indifferent to the cost of bitcoin. This money flows into exchanges at a relatively constant rate in dollars 365 days a year no matter what happens in the bitcoin community, and at the end of the day the exchanges have all the cash and dealers have all the butts, which they can't possibly cash back out through the exchanges. This is the real scam here- exchanges vs drug dealers. This is why whenever a dark web drug kingpin gets busted he's living modestly somewhere with a fortune in butts under his mattress, because he's the one who has to do it in a back alley with a guy from localbitcoins.com and he can barely cash out enough that way to buy new product. Not that people aren't still speculating/manipulating the butts, but that's just window dressing for a drugs-backed currency and history's greatest scam on libertarian drug dealers. If everyone stopped buying drugs on the internet tomorrow the butts would crash and bitcoin would die and it would be plainly obvious in a week that no other actual real commerce was affected, but this will never happen, because society's demand for drugs just goes up Up UP, especially when the economy is bad. This is why in 100 years the US dollar will be backed by cocaine. This is the true innovation of bitcoin.
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Jan 30, 2020 23:25
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klafbang posted:But they'll keep the dumb mining because the end-goal is still guns, drugs, kiddie porn and tax evasion. You forgot hitmen, ponzi schemes, money laundering, and extortion! So many fun things to do when you can take anonymous payments over the internet!
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Jan 31, 2020 00:28
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sitting here with my comfy investments watching all the nocoiners argue, knowing they're not going to make it  
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Jan 31, 2020 00:54
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Methylethylaldehyde posted:You forgot hitmen, ponzi schemes, money laundering, and extortion! So many fun things to do when you can take anonymous payments over the internet!
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Jan 31, 2020 00:58
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ghosTTy posted:sitting here with my comfy investments watching all the nocoiners argue, knowing they're not going to make it what do you mean by make it. what are you making
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Jan 31, 2020 01:00
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ghosTTy posted:sitting here with my comfy investments watching all the nocoiners argue, knowing they're not going to make it
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Jan 31, 2020 01:01
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ghosTTy posted:sitting here with my comfy investments watching all the nocoiners argue, knowing they're not going to make it please accept my donation of a cup of self-awareness. Oh, yeah, you're the guy making what? Seven and a half percent on 'investments' that may or may not actually exist, depending on how 'honest' the exchange is. I'm not sure you've thought this through. tango alpha delta fucked around with this message at 01:06 on Jan 31, 2020 |
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Jan 31, 2020 01:04
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gently caress if I can find it right now, but I was just reading something about the large intersection between crytpocurrency enthusiasts and doomsday preppers. Turns out it's more fun to imagine you're king poo poo of the wasteland than an average Joe in a pretty decent world.
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Jan 31, 2020 01:05
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odiv posted:gently caress if I can find it right now, but I was just reading something about the large intersection between crytpocurrency enthusiasts and doomsday preppers. Turns out it's more fun to imagine you're king poo poo of the wasteland than an average Joe in a pretty decent world.
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Jan 31, 2020 01:06
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I don't want anyone to fail, but you militant nocoiners just aren't going to make it 
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Jan 31, 2020 01:07
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Fleetwood Crack posted:The funny part about it is that unless you take some extreme risks (meeting a total stranger somewhere for large financial transactions), Bitcoin is in no way anonymous. People have been busted trying to e-hire hitmen who turn out to be cops. I never said it was a good idea, or that it wasn't traceable, but that's still what bitcoin seems to be used for. Kinda shocked that monero or whatever the actually anonymous coin-thing is hasn't taken over that payment space. ghosTTy posted:I don't want anyone to fail, but you militant nocoiners just aren't going to make it "It" being some pity party post on some lovely *coin reddit about how you're 6 figures in debt after selling your house, but you just have to hodl a bit longer to make it all back, here's my venmo and paypal, plz send cash.
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Jan 31, 2020 01:15
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Jan 31, 2020 01:16
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ghosTTy posted:I don't want anyone to fail, but you militant nocoiners just aren't going to make it Ham Sandwiches had a more entertaining gimmick than you. Sorry. Also I just remembered this and had a hearty lol
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