this post was submitted on 24 Sep 2023
52 points (100.0% liked)

the_dunk_tank

15994 readers
3 users here now

It's the dunk tank.

This is where you come to post big-brained hot takes by chuds, libs, or even fellow leftists, and tear them to itty-bitty pieces with precision dunkstrikes.

Rule 1: All posts must include links to the subject matter, and no identifying information should be redacted.

Rule 2: If your source is a reactionary website, please use archive.is instead of linking directly.

Rule 3: No sectarianism.

Rule 4: TERF/SWERFs Not Welcome

Rule 5: No ableism of any kind (that includes stuff like libt*rd)

Rule 6: Do not post fellow hexbears.

Rule 7: Do not individually target other instances' admins or moderators.

Rule 8: The subject of a post cannot be low hanging fruit, that is comments/posts made by a private person that have low amount of upvotes/likes/views. Comments/Posts made on other instances that are accessible from hexbear are an exception to this. Posts that do not meet this requirement can be posted to [email protected]

Rule 9: if you post ironic rage bait im going to make a personal visit to your house to make sure you never make this mistake again

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
 

It wouldn't be a cult without proselytizing, would it? jesus-cleanse cryptocurrency dumpster-fire

top 15 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] [email protected] 20 points 2 years ago (2 children)

god the spectacular thing about bitcoin is that if it weren't a wildly unstable speculative asset, it would be literally nothing. the speed of the network just isn't sufficient to support its use as actual currency. this guy is calling transaction times of up to 15 minutes "instant transfer."

[–] [email protected] 13 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

lol 15 minutes is a fast transaction time on the bitcoin network, you have to pay a fairly hefty fee to get it to clear that fast (last time I had to deal with the network it was like over 20 dollars I think, and that was over a year ago).

(This is for a single-block confirmation; many places require 3 to 6 confirmations, which adds another 20 to 50 minutes, on average, and possibly a lot more than that if the network is unlucky.)

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 years ago

Making awkward chitchat with the barista for 15 mins while the transaction for your coffee completes.

[–] uniqueid198x 17 points 2 years ago

15 years ago, a global banking goldrush ended. Satoshi created bitcoin so the next goldrush would benifit him.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (3 children)

I miss the good ol' days of bitcoin. Back when people weren't wasting gigawatts of power mining this shit inside of warehouses full of vastly overpriced GPUs. All the way back when Bitcoin was widely ridiculed and you'd be called a rube for thinking of it as a sound investment. Back when techbros were begging people to spend it on actual goods and services to legitimize it as a currency.

Most importantly, back when you could use it to buy cool, illegal shit online like LSD. As far as I'm concerned, that was the only worthwhile reason for bitcoin exist at all, and it can't even do that anymore because of how inflated the price is.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Can't do it anymore because Bitcoin transactions are all public and police can easily trace who's buying what. Use Monero and you can still buy drugs online.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

I've never been too concerned about the traceability of bitcoin because I always got it by paying in cash, they wouldn't be able to connect the wallet to my identity.

But also because the police aren't going to launch an investigation into one person buying personal consumption amount of drugs online. Well, not unless they already knew your identity and were already coming after you, but in that case you'd be fucked regardless of which cryptocurrency you used. The traceability is something only dealers and people who buy in bulk need to worry about.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 years ago

Once you bust one vendor or market, it's pretty easy to take that list of customers and subpoena Coinbase/etc to get some low-hanging fruit. Buying in cash is good but increasingly rare nowadays and expensive. In the current legal climate, traceability is primarily a concern for vendors and markets. Most places will not sell via BTC, or charge you an extra fee because they have to run it through mixers. But who knows how US policy might change in the future, or if better chain analysis products might tempt law enforcement to keep putting in the same amount of effort with many more arrests to show for it. Once it's on chain it's there forever; don't make the mistakes of the early Bitcoiners.

(On a practical level XMR has much smaller transaction fees)

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

No one uses GPUs to mine Bitcoin specifically; GPU mining was on its last legs in 2012 when FPGA mining started up, and by 2014 it was totally dead because ASICs (application-specific integrated circuits, aka custom mining chips) came onto the scene. The GPUs are for altcoins now.

Source: Was a miner back then; got out in like 2014, after wasting most of my bitcoin buying ASICs that showed up too late to make back what they cost. (But on the bright side, I'd still be an awful smug techbro lib if I'd retired off my bitcoin gains, so in many ways this outcome is better lol)

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 years ago

No one uses GPUs to mine Bitcoin specifically; GPU mining was on its last legs in 2012 when FPGA mining started up, and by 2014 it was totally dead because ASICs (application-specific integrated circuits, aka custom mining chips) came onto the scene. The GPUs are for altcoins now.

Yeah, that's what I was getting at. Back during the early days of bitcoin, it was really the only major cryptocurrency. There didn't yet exist this kind of incentive to waste an entire small country's worth of energy and resources to mine the cryptocurrencies that exist now.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 years ago

I never got into it as I was into drugs. A friend of mine did, and spent most of his Bitcoin (that he mined for free on bog standard PCs at his work, because you could do that then) on drugs. He opened an old laptop a few years back and found 2 BTC though, and spent them on a small warehouse in Athens to live in! I can’t begrudge him that in the slightest!

[–] [email protected] 13 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

I thought way too long about this reply so I'll post it here too

If I point a gun to your head and tell you to send me all your bitcoin, you will probably do so, and then you will call the police to tell them that I robbed you at gunpoint. The police will then arrest me and make me return the bitcoin to you that I stole. When you call the police after I stole your Bitcoin, are you trusting a centralized authority to decide whether or not the transaction was legitimate? After all, if I check the blockchain, the transaction seems perfectly fine.

Blur and OpenSea, the leading NFT marketplaces, both have measures in place to attempt to stop the sale of stolen NFTs. Should we trust these centralized platforms to decide whether or not a token should be tradable? Should we demand they abolish these theft protections in the name of decentralization?

As long as there exists a state with an authority on violence, Bitcoin being decentralized is a mere technicality. All political power comes from the barrel of a gun. If the state wants to take your Bitcoin to pay for another war, they can do so regardless of what the code says by simply having the police knock on your door.

Do you want to abolish the state altogether? If you think all centralized authority is bad, what are your thoughts on the crypto space getting increasingly centralized? What do you think about Yuga Labs buying up other top NFT collections? Should they be allowed to do this and if no, who should stop them? How does Bitcoin solve any of the problems you outlined and do you really think that if the government hadn't been able to print money, they wouldn't have found another way to bail the banks out?

[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 years ago

My only concerns about popular cryptos are whales conquering coins on coins. Technology itself is solid and Satoshi is a god.

soypoint-2

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Imagine still believing Bitcoin was created by one guy called Satoshi Nakamoto.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 years ago

Great Man Theory is a helluva drug.