from Hacker News

Hate Bitcoin? This might change your mind

by pshin45 on 3/10/18, 7:36 PM with 11 comments

• by skookum on 3/10/18, 9:58 PM

  If you know enough to hate bitcoin then you've likely already heard all the standard pro-Bitcoin arguments. By now you'd expect a "this will change your mind" article on the topic to bring up some new angle. Not this one. It's just the usual suspects ("No fees! No government meddling! Financial power to the poor!") complete with the standard sprinkling of opinions stated as facts.

  How does the author justify wasting bits on this in 2018? The righting of wrongs: "the result of all this low-quality Bitcoin journalism is that most newcomers never get to learn about all the new and exciting things made possible by Bitcoin’s core technology."

• by floatboth on 3/10/18, 9:59 PM

  > the foundation for a radically new type of financial system

  A radically terrible one. The financial system should not waste gigantic amounts of power on maintaining security under trustlessness. Unlike libertarians' ridiculous dreams, actual human society requires trust.

  > This transaction was transmitted and processed instantly, for $0 in fees

  No way it's been $0. And it's even worse now. Confirmations are slow, miner fees are large, exchanges have fees, you can quickly lose on exchange rate…

  (Mining rewards are mentioned later in the article… but not where they come from)

  > As the number of independent mining groups increases and becomes more geographically dispersed

  Still a few large pools dominate the network https://blockchain.info/pools

  > [cash] also means that they could be robbed of their entire life savings on any given day

  There's a whole subreddit, /r/Buttcoin, full of stories of bitcoiners losing their life savings on any given day. Scams, hacks, bugs, private key losses, scams, scams, and even more scams.

• by Yizahi on 3/10/18, 10:02 PM

  Yes I want cheap money transfer internationally and yes, I want a system capable to undermine authoritarian censorship. But I think that blockchain is extremely crude and unreliable technology to implement them. It is immutable, number of nodes (i.e. backups) is unpredictable, its hardware footprint is insane and will only increase in the future and bitcoin is going to be essentially centralized, with decisions concentrated in those lightning hubs and exchanges in offshore locations. I don't believe in the underlying technology, I think it may succeed but be very limited and not because some 3rd party will demolish it, but just because it is not a magical tech they claim it is. (and altcoins are mostly even worse in technology department)

  Maybe I'm wrong and don't see some really long term perspective, well then I'll admit it. For now I don't use any of them.

• by jacobr on 3/10/18, 9:34 PM

  > With Bitcoin, for the first time in history it’s possible for anyone with an internet connection to quickly and securely send any amount of money to anyone else, anywhere in the world (or even Mars!), for low or zero fees.

  > And this isn’t just theoretical. It happens every day on the Bitcoin network.

  I'm not 100% convinced about a wide spread adoption of decentralized cryptocurrencies, but if it is to happen it will be a coin with low or zero fees. What OP is not honest about is that there are no transactions on the Bitcoin network with low or zero fees.

• by bitconion on 3/11/18, 8:23 AM

  Just to feel SWIFT in some Europian countries: for $17 fee is about $72, and sometime it took about 2 weeks for confirmation maybe because of weekend days... plus all those warnings about the purpose etc... absolutely not user friendly input fields... BTC is simply manna of heaven comparing with that