Quindecillion

Do you have any suggestions for an effective way to bring them down?

Perhaps building alternatives that can replace them on run in parallel is the best way to do that?

Damus was one of the first apps and is pretty good.

Lots of people also like Primal. It's well polished and replicates Twitter/X reasonably well.

It's still pretty niche. Built mostly for and by bitcoiners, but has potential as a new way of doing social media that isn't reliant on major tech companies.

I really hope this is satire.

Without being an expert on the topic I'm going hazard a guess that it's due to regulatory moats that keep challengers out of the arena, and banks endlessly lobby to maintain that regulatory capture.

What's wrong with energy consumption?

I think you might be confusing it with greenhouse gas emissions.

They provide a legitimate demand response service i.e. when the grid is generating excess energy that there's no other demand for, Bitcoin miners buy what no one else wants/needs.

Buyers of first and last resort.

This is the first time I've come into a crypto thread on HN and the pro-crypto people seem to outnumber the anti-crypto people.

Is there a vibe shift happening on HN?

[looks side ways as central banks and the state]

Inflation encourages investment because if you just sit on your money it gets eaten away by inflation.

People shouldn't be penalised for saving money.

"Oh, but just invest it!"

With investment comes risk. Why shouldn't people be allowed to save without risk or having their savings melted by lost purchasing power through inflation?

Inflation is a hidden tax and theft of those furthest from the newly "minted" money to benefit those that are closest to the source i.e. banks and large borrowers.

Why did the gold standard fail?

Was the inflation observed with the gold standard ever as bad as what's seen with government/central bank-issued money i.e. fiat?

ChainOfFools is tilting at windmills.

100 million baht in 2 years? So about $1.5m USD in a year.

That's not exactly "staggering" or significant in the context of the Bitcoin network. Unlikely that such operations have any meaningful control over the network or liquidity, even if it's just 1% of what's known.

You seem to think that these sorts of operations are somehow connected in a large coordinated cartel the controls the industry, but given that they're illegal, isn't it far more likely that these "black market" operators are fairly small by comparison to the legitimate players in the US?

The mining ban in China a couple of years back gave us a pretty good indication of the size of the legitimate industry in that country, and it absolutely DWARFS the biggest of the illegal examples you gave.

Interesting way to word it too, "illegal mining". They're just stealing electricity. If they used that stolen electricity for heating, you wouldn't call it "illegal heating", would you?

There's a lot of problems with your post, but I'm going to focus on the one that bamboozled me the most.

illegal mining

What exactly is "illegal mining"?

you cannot build scaling technology that inherits the self-custodial, permissionless, and censorship resistance qualities of the underlying ledger

Correct, and yet you seem to still miss the point. There are tradeoffs. You can't scale AND maintain those properties. This is why Bitcoin scales with layer 2 solutions like Lightning (and more ideas like Enigma, Ark, Cashu etc.), or things like RGB or Taro for expressiveness. Separation of concerns.

The best attempts to have their cake and eat it too have failed in crypto.

There is very little innovation to be had in the core function of what a blockchain was designed to achieve. There's plenty of innovation ahead of us for the layers that are built on top of it.

No.

Each coin has its own ins and outs, there isn't one that is the best. They have their own time and place.

This is just wishy washy rubbish trying to appear "diplomatic" and "balanced". Oh sure, you can mint some monkey jpegs or construct a needlessly complex and public smart contract for some esoteric "use case", but the truth is the majority of people in the world don't want or need those things.

People just want a money that works. You can send or receive it instantly across international borders, that no one can stop, and it doesn't lose it's value over the years.

Bitcoin is the only game in town, the "crypto bros" just don't realise it yet because they can make obscene amounts of money from pump and dump schemes with flashy marketing about "use cases" and "yield".

Wake up or get burned, again and again.

But neither currency has ever done a roll back of this nature again.

Maybe not a rollback, but Ethereum has proven it is malleable time and time again. As one example, compare the issuance of ether to Bitcoin. Eth's issuance is a dog's breakfast, indicative of changing opinions by those who call the shots... just like a central bank.

Bitcoin's issuance? Predictable and steady as a rock for 15 years.

Another example is replacing Proof-of-Work with Proof-of-Stake. A core part of how it works, important for censorship resistance and accessibility, and they removed it for something permissioned that makes censorship far easier.

Bitcoin? Still on PoW and never going to change. If you think it will change, you still don't understand Bitcoin. But never fear, there's already a PoS Bitcoin out there (that no one uses).

Can you describe to me what the main point of "blockchain technology" is? What is there to innovate in terms of its core function?

You obviously don't spend much time in, or interacting with, the Bitcoin community.

Best thing about this divisive action by Unity is all the attention it's giving Godot.

It's a project that deserves far more attention, and I hope in a few years that it's far more common in popular game development.

No one can be trusted, so everyone should have access.

Open source is the way to go.

The real control is the hardware/infrastructure needed to develop these models.

What I find interesting is that most of what you said is applicable to Bitcoin miners too.

Yikes... digiconomist. Literally zero credibility there. His name is Alex de Vries and he works for the dutch central bank. To my knowledge, very little of his blog posts have made its way to peer review and academic publication. For some reason that doesn't stop his work from being distributed widely as an authoritative source on this topic.

This paper has it's own problems with conflicts of interest, but it has gained traction recently and is worth a read to see things from another perspective.

https://www.mdpi.com/2078-1547/14/3/35

Could also look into the work of Troy Cross, Margot Paez, and Daniel Batten who are climate activists and pro-Bitcoin because of the incentives it provides around building out renewable energy and mitigating methane emissions.

And NY Times is notoriously anti-Bitcoin, to the point you have to ask, "do they have an agenda"?

Here to add my voice to the 3000 crew. My first and only deep foray into the Sim genre, and man did I sink countless hours into that game. I've tried other games of that ilk and none capture the kind of magic that 3000 evoked. Dat soundtrack...

Which are both fruit!

When I played Breath of the Wild, I felt ... nothing.

Interesting. Opposite for me. Playing BotW reignited the feeling of playing OOT and MM for me.

Imperfections in vector images make me twitch

Yes... I'll never spend my Bitcoin. I'll just starve to death in a gutter as I watch my wealth sky rocket.

You say Bitcoin is real money because it is limited in supply

The limited supply just makes it better money.

(artificially since it's essentially a variable defined in the code)

Sure, anyone is free to change the necessary variables. It's open source code. Good luck getting everyone else to run nodes that use the changed code. That's the point of distributed consensus. You can change the rules all you want, but other nodes in the existing network will ignore you, creating a separate network. This kind of thing has already been tested with various hardforks and the blocksize war.

Anything deflationary in nature can't be money. I won't explain basic economics to you. Go find out why.

There's nothing to say money has to be inflationary, except the 'rules' and theories that people have made up, like MMT. The current system is built around inflationary money, but that doesn't mean it had to be that way. It's just one way to operate an economy.

But then you act like Bitcoin is a security, a speculative asset because it's value will only go up in future (again thanks to limited supply).

Currencies are speculative assets. That's what forex markets are for. People trade them against each other. Bitcoin is no different. It can be money and a speculative asset.

Also, your definition of a security is unclear. As far as the SEC is concerned it doesn't apply to Bitcoin as Gary Gensler has stated numerous times.

Real cash is something that you can buy real goods and services with. Something that I can pay my bills with.

You can pay for real goods and services with Bitcoin, albeit in a limited capacity at the moment, but we're only 14 years into this experiement (less for the Lightning Network), which is VERY early for a new form of money... adoption and trust will take time i.e. decades.

You guys have a problem with central governments seemingly creating money out of thin air because you think it devalues your money.

It does devalue your money. This is a fact. You can't deny that.

You can argue the virtues of inflationary money all you want, you could argue there are legitimate uses for that that type of money, but it comes at the cost of devaluing people's savings in cash. This entrenches generational poverty.

Your whole concept of money is wrong. You confuse money (a medium of exchange/short term store of value) with security (long term storage of value).

No, I understand those concepts well.

You know what gives money any value even if it is printed out of thin air? Trust.

This is literally Bitcoin 101.

"The root problem with conventional currency is all the trust that's required to make it work. The central bank must be trusted not to debase the currency, but the history of fiat currencies is full of breaches of that trust."

https://satoshi.nakamotoinstitute.org/posts/p2pfoundation/1/

"Trust" is mentioned by Satoshi 13 times in his short whitepaper.

I trust that I can exchange that money for food, for a house, for clothes, a movie ticket, anything that I want. Where does that trust come from? That trust comes from the stability of the government, the law and order systems, the ability of the sovereign to protect its land and people with those guns and tanks.

You talk as though you think money requires government to exist. Money has spontaneously emerged in various societies throughout human history that didn't require a top-down central authority to enforce its use, the best of which was gold for thousands of years. Governments minted coins from gold, but people only used it because they trusted the underlying asset as something that would hold its value, regardless of who was in power.

What gives Bitcoin a value?

It's digital money with credible scarcity that's global, permissionless, neutral, and open to everyone to use.

If I cannot find a bigger fool to sell my Bitcoin, it's worthless.

Not looking to sell my Bitcoin, only spend it. There's a difference.

Bitcoin is neither money (deflationary)

False.

nor a security (no inherent utility)

You have no idea what you're talking about.

This is plain truth

I guess if you say so it must be true. I guess I'll just have to... trust you?

Hope you get this simple truth one day.

I will be fine thanks. Hope you see the simple truth I've seen.