The bitcoin network is run by miners, computers that maintain the shared transaction ledger called the blockchain. A new study estimates that this process consumes at least 2.6GW of power – almost as much electric power as Ireland consumes. This figure could rise to 7.7GW before the end of 2018 – accounting for almost half a percent of the world’s electricity consumption.
Bitcoin is – quite literally – destroying our environment. It’s erasing the meagre progress we’ve made on reducing our overal energy consumption, for a glorified Tulipmania.
Just as they did with Tulips and early 1990s comic books, the speculators will soon have extracted their fill, and move on to something else. They always do.
Consider looking at the big picture before you get stuck at the nanoscopic detail.
You mention reducing our “overall energy consumption”.
Imagine the foolish energy consumption that governments have been engaged in for too many decades regarding rampant militarism (amongst other things). Missiles, bombs, planes, tanks, guns, weapon-systems, nuclear material, etc. all contributing to foolish blowback-ridden foreign wars driven by stupid foreign policy stances that all have a foundation in the “funny money” system.
There’s an old saying ….
“Man makes money but God makes gold.”
Politicians do not like tangible-based (e.g. gold, silver) currencies since it restricts their options. Nixon got off the gold standard since the financial foolishness of USA government policies started to be problematic and a “hard-currency” like gold was an impediment.
The solution … a more accessable “funny-money printing press” brought to you by the Federal Reserve central bank (USA). Here, the government politicians make their dreams come true through printing money from thin air. More (easier to fund) wars, wasteful (less frugal) stances concerning government policy for citizen infrastructure since money “falls from trees” and no worry of nation’s future … just keep delaying the servicing (payback) of national debt to next government in office. Bailout of foolish entities that were not meant to be bailed out and for them to be bailed out they probably had wasteful/redundant practices indirectly linked to significant energy consumption.
Blah, blah, blah … you get my drift.
Enter Satoshi’s blockchain (implicitly decentralised) model, pre-2010.
There exist fake “blockchains” which are basically centralised database systems, meant as an attack on the decentralised ideas pushed by the Satoshi-related phenomenon.
Decentralised money (currency) transactions, e.g. Bitcoin or any of those “ALT” coins that respect the decentralised model, represents the first great use of this decentralised blockchain technology; a technology still in it’s infantcy and still evolving.
The BTC/ALT transactions are not funny-money based, their value is derived from the electricity used to power the computers to run those mathematical operations that lead to generation of the mined blocks (say, at least, solution to the “double spending” problem).
Due to this a BTC/ALT coin has inherent value and is debt-free.
Where’s the inherent value in fiat-based paper money ?
Paper money does not contain gold/silver/platinum/etc. dust.
Coins have much less silver (or none) in them as compared with the same coin denomination decades ago.
It is only the government’s word (or their monopoly on the nation’s currency) that still keeps the debt-ridden paper/fiat currency in action. History has shown that in general fiat currencies do not have a relatively long shelf-life; representing another wast of resources. It is conceivable that the debt-based nature of fiat currency would represent linkages to wasteful energy consumption on too many occasions. Easy-money can promote impatient/foolish decision-making leading to wasteful actions and most actions require energy.
Trump is now proposing a $716 billion defense budget for fiscal 2019 while USA has a 21 trillion USD national debt. This is crazy/wasteful stuff.
The BTC/ALT coin systems cannot be pumped up by newly generated coins from thin air, the coins have to be generated through computation. This takes time and is an enemy to those respective impatient economically foolish politicians.
On considering the above ramifications, do you still think it’s relatively costly to generate a BTC/ALT coin ?
Also, the BTC mining arena is not purely decentralised since a class of market-driven powerful hardware (ASICs) has taken up the mining slack to the exclusion of the general population. I do not think Satoshi’s decentralised philosophy imagined the mining to be segregated (say, less decentralised) amongst relatively fewer players. Other coins exist which recognise this “deficiency” and are based on mining algorithms that are ASIC-resistant, pro-CPU, switchable, etc. This would also have an effect on the broad energy calculation for mining.
In a decentralised-driven blockchain (etc. ?) utopian society where:
– there is no need for war
– humanity is free from the scourge of central banking
– humanity spends more time on creative endeavours, being more happy and able to realise on more occasions that there can be more clarity/substance in minimalism, etc.
– micro/nano-based transactions are very feasible (e.g. a people in Australia/etc. can send micro-transactions for funding/donation to a remote African startup/charity)
– etc.
using a few percent of the world’s electricity potential would be worth it.
Who knows, if the potential for this utopian model is realised then we may actually spend our time on more important things like leveraging more energy from the Sun (deserts, roads, buildings, solar panels, etc.) to power blockchain-mining infrastructure (especially good for CPU-based mining) and spend less time on foolish/wasteful endeavours like self-driving car technology.
So many words to describe a strictly pyramid scheme.
A scam.
cade,
The problem with bitcoin/blockchain is that it doesn’t scale as a currency. I’m not even referring to energy consumption, but it’s ability to process transactions. This is evident when you do the math, it’s not even close to handling the number of transactions it would need to in order to replace currencies, and yet it already consumes too much bandwidth for a typical user. It’s grown far beyond the resources of a cell phone, even some desktop computers would need to be upgraded to handle the blockchain locally, which could take several weeks to sync, could push some ISP customers beyond their monthly quotas. and keeps growing exponentially.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/647523/worldwide-bitcoin-blockch…
In short, pure speculation has made bitcoin very valuable, but it doesn’t seem very practical for bitcoin to be used by the masses without a centralized broker to handle the blockchain. Once we come to terms with this arrangement, bitcoin looses a lot of it’s theoretical trust advantages over other centralized services. The trouble is that a lot of bitcoins have already been stolen from centralized bitcoin services, and unlike a bank where money is guarantied against fraud and they will get your money back, stolen bitcoins are gone permanently. This makes bitcoins particularly dangerous for ordinary consumers.
Full disclosure: a lightcoin mining pool that I participated in shut down and we all lost coins. That was the end of my speculative foray into crypto currencies
The BTC “scaling” issue has had technical-news-media attention but I think it’s still early days. BTC and many ALT coins are 1st generation crypto-coins and even with 3rd generation stuff like Cardano there is still new intellectual territory that is being learned/explored. I believe it’s too early to write-off the practicality of a wide-scale decentralised-blockchain model.
There is too much focus on the ills of the bitcoin model.
Sure let’s learn from the BTC experience but it’s premature to assume that the BTC case will necessarily resemble an ideal solution arrived at about, let’s say, 50 years from now. In future, we may have a basket of coins with isolated blockchains or efficiently connected (side-chained ?, etc.) blockchains. Also, we have the IOTA tangle scenario which is designed to implicitly handle scalability. As in any R&D, time will tell where the apple will fall.
I always advised people against long term storage of the their crypto-coins in exchange-related wallets. Use a Trezor/etc. device, use a non-Windows (say QubesOS Linux) box for any software wallets and also make triplicate backup of your keys/seeds/etc. I advise friends/relatives that if they do not want to become a “banker” and take responsibility for securing their own crypto-funds then keep banking the standard way.
My foray into cryptos is more ideological than financial.
With crypto’s, the financial donation avenues for truthseeker/whistleblower activists can still be intact even if the “system” is targetting those activists. If activists solely rely on banking/Paypal/etc. institutions then the “system” can potentially pressure these institutions and starve the activist from donations.
This is what happened to Assange initially (Paypal) but then he found a solution to his problem via BTC.
I presume with mining pools, if you track (i.e. check) the timed-payouts and ensure that they pay to your own wallet (not their wallet) then “disasters” can be avoided. I’m more of a CPU mining guy and do it irregularly for fun/experience.
I hear that like 90% of all bitcoins are hold by a handful of Chinese speculators that have ties to the communist party and massive farms to mine them.
cade,
Yeah, people like bitcoin for ideological reasons. I’m concerned by the amount of misinformation sometimes, but you are right there are plenty of reasons to be disappointed with traditional financial institutions, and I get the motivation to leave them.
Bitcoin was not designed to have strong “51%-attack-resistance”. This contrasts the multi-POW algorithm approach used by Myriad coin where block-mining involves simultaneous competition between multiple algorithms. You need to to control a range of hardware to find 51% of the blocks. 51% of a single myriad algorithm gives you only 11% of the total hash rate. Logistically, it would be very difficult to coordinate a 51% attack on Myriad. Also, the coin has the provision to replace algorithms once they have been compromised with new generation ASIC hardware. This has already happened once; the respective algorithm was initially CPU-only (ASIC resistant) and later new ASIC hardware was released and that algorithm was then non-ASIC-resistant. Myriad then replaced that non-ASIC-resistant algorithm with a new CPU-only ASIC-resistant algorithm. Myriad supports {ASIC, GPU, CPU}-minable (5) algorithms whilst any one of those algorithms only represents 20% of the hashrate.
Bitcoin was forked (Bitcoin Gold) due to mining not being so “fair”
(Re: “ASIC effect”). However, continually forking a coin due to compromise of the respective algorithm is not a favourable scenario and a mutli-algorithm approach like the one implemented in Myriad is a much cleaner solution. People have praised the main Myriad coder “8bitcoder” for deciding to implement the multi-algo approach as a fundamental design feature early in the evolution of the myriad source code (after forking from Bitcoin Core). Recently there was an idea about Myriad using Equihash as one of it’s non-ASIC-based POW algorithms but due to the recent ASIC support for Equihash an alternative will probably be considered. Myriad was designed for this eventuality but in the Bitcoin Gold case they will have to now tweak their equihash algorithm to fight against the new generation of equihash-supported ASICs (how long can this go on for before they need a new algorithm with associated blockchain-fork ?). Monero recently hard-forked it’s blockchain as a response against the ASIC miners. Even Andreas Antonopoulos commented in one of his books that Myriad’s mutli-algorithm fall’s in the class of “concensus innovation”.
This video clip show Andreas describing Myriad.
http://youtu.be/s3j5jlB0mmQ?t=1h21m43s
I have only written about the advantage of a fundamentally (not-tacked-on) supported multi-algorithm approach. There are probably other design-themes which are of interest that bitcoin does not support and not surprising since bitcoin is the “first”, the guinea pig for ideas in this crypto-currency space. Bitcoin has a role.
As alluded above, it’s dangerous to assume that the Bitcoin model will necessarily represent the major character of future things to come in the crypto-currency space. Like I have been saying, it’s early days. Let’s have an open mind.
I accept the points you make on other themes as being issues.
However, I have never accepted that the “final solution” (if we ever arrive at one in decades from now) in the crypto-space would have been the result of tweaking of the initial mould set by the Bitcoin model of the 2010’s. For an initial version of a serious piece of technology to ultimately rule at the end, this may be sub-optimal. Redesign after the initial years of a working prototype can be so sweet. I say this from the point of view of ~ 28 years of coding in “single man” software development projects ({consulting, own research} avenues) in certain technical sectors {metallurgy/crystallography, 3D-graphics, certain telco “systems”}. We have our moments, our moments of “intellectual epiphany” where designs are not only resusable beyond what we initially thought but they also open a door to redesigns that were never apparent previously due to lack of knowledge/creativity/etc. back then.
Also, back in the day (pre-2010) it would have been difficult to predict the morphology/distribution of the technological landscape (say, ASIC, GPU, CPU, IoT technology types and their approximate instance-counts) that would exist for block-mining usage. The unavoidable lack of insight of this and possibly other themes should be a sign that we should not necessarily have all our hopes on the “test case” that is Bitcoin.
Hopefully, it will be an interesting future in the
“decentralised-blockchain-crypto-etc-*”
space.
cade,
There is a model not based not based on proof of work or real world resources: proof of stake. Unlike proof-of-work crypto currencies, there’s no incentive to waste tons of energy mining coins. Because it’s not based on the power of one’s CPU/ASIC/GPU/HDD/etc and only the currency itself, it would require owning 50+% of the currency to pull off a consensus attack. There are other caveats, and IMHO it is similar to a pyramid scheme, but if you haven’t already, you may be interested in reading about them:
https://blockgeeks.com/guides/proof-of-work-vs-proof-of-stake/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof-of-stake
Edited 2018-05-19 17:09 UTC
Ehh, without realising it you paint cryptocurrencies as even more insane – they actively try to not work on (relatively power efficient) ASICs, trying to force much more inefficient hashing on CPUs…
This is not an issue, I run Bitcoin Core 0.16.0 on a 10 years old computer with a dual core CPU and 2 GB of RAM and it works just fine.
The only “upgrade” I had to do was to add a separate drive to store the blockchain, but that’s it.
When it exceeds the capacity of the drive I can add a larger drive or prune the chain, and continue as usual.
It’s not an issue.
Edited 2018-05-19 18:40 UTC
gatosufridor,
The hard disk is exactly what I was referring to. The block chain is close to 200GB, not all computers have that much free plus room for growth. Not to mention transferring this much data to initialize the blockchain, plus P2P network overhead, may trigger ISP limits and possibly constitute abuse of service under their TOS.
I’m not saying this to change anyone’s mind about bitcoin, but I don’t think that we can ignore the problem either since it is an impediment to people running their own bitcoin P2P network clients. I’m afraid that things are only going to get worse.
Edit: I think it’s almost inevitable that the future of bitcoin for the masses will be handled through service providers rather than a P2P client capable of attesting the blockchain validity themselves. A lot of people don’t even have a computer or broadband, they are on mobile devices.
Edited 2018-05-19 19:24 UTC
I think the masses will be using things like the lightning network.
Edited 2018-05-19 19:51 UTC
Wow, why don’t you people downvote this comment too?
I wonder what’s going on with OSnews but this isn’t the first time I see an anti-bitcoin community, hacker news is another one.
I guess people are just jealous of bitcoin and/or bitcoin holders.
Keep downvoting! There isn’t much else you guys can do about bitcoin anyway.
Edited 2018-05-19 23:29 UTC
While I too think that Bitcoin is more a fatally flawed proof of concept than a future-ready implementation of the cryptocurrency concept, it’s not just Bitcoin that’s getting the downvotes.
I’ve seen a rise in downvotes lately on OSNews comments of my own which wouldn’t have been bothered in the past. (Things like the rationale behind my decision to stick to open-source for the non-game software I run.)
gatosurfridor,
I hope my posts weren’t too unwelcoming, I can tell you are a smart/informed guy and I really think you have some valuable insights. We can debate issues like scalability, but in the end none of that matters and all we get out of it is a discussion. Ideally we get to enjoy talking to each other, otherwise why be here, haha.
Anyways, a belated welcome to osnews!
Not at all, I enjoyed having this conversation with you, thanks for the welcome.
gatosufridor,
I apologize for the length of this post, it seemed necessary to get to the meat of the issues.
For the past few years, many users have reported trouble getting their transactions processed in a timely manor due to block space constraints.
https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/what-to-do-if-your-bitcoin-tran…
https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/21522/is-there-a-limit-o…
https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/9046/why-is-my-transacti…
As large as bitcoin is today, it’s still only a tiny fraction of the population using it. Bitcoin proponents including yourself suggest bitcoin is for everyone, however that would make it orders of magnitude larger than it already is. The fixed block size & transaction limits you just alluded to in conjunction with a growing user space imply that transactions will become harder and harder to commit.
The trivial answer (assuming we won’t fix the artificial block size limit) is “increase the transaction fee”. That makes sense from a supply and demand perspective, but let’s step back and think about what this means in practical terms.
Let T = transactions submitted
Let C = transaction capacity per block (on average)
Let B = blocks per day
C * B = maximum transaction capacity per day, regardless of demand.
If T < C*B, then those transactions should get processed in a day
However if T > C*B, then only C*B purchases will get processed and T – C*B purchases will NOT get processed and are forced to queue.
Therefor one must increase the fee to assure their transaction is processed, yet because both B and C are limited by bitcoin’s algorithms, no amount of fees will help process all the transactions that users HAVE to get processed.
I HAVE to pay rent, I HAVE to buy a car, I HAVE to pay my mortgage, I HAVE to pay my loans. As more users switch to bitcoin, naturally more of them will HAVE to use their bitcoins for something (other than speculative currency trading). Telling them to pay a higher fee is obviously a non-solution when there isn’t the capacity to handle them all. The net result of all this is actually quite ugly as T gets much bigger and T >> C*B: bitcoin gentrification. The transactions of those who can afford the high fees will completely displace transactions of those who cannot. This is something to think about for those who consider bitcoin a kind of monetary utopia.
There’s actually a lot more to discuss, but it’s way too long already so I have to end it here.
No, but I don’t think we should hard fork all the time to increase the block size, I think hard forking is destructive because when you hard fork you’re spawning a new currency.
And when you hard fork from 1MB to 2MB and then to 10 or 32MB you’re creating multiples currencies, I think that’s insane, how do you get everyone to agree at the end? This is why I don’t agree with altcoins like bitcoin cash and others.
I believe a saner and a more prudent approach is to do what the bitcoin core developers did and soft-fork bitcoin with segwit, segwit is a block increase to 4MB but it’s one done as a soft-fork. i.e. not splitting bitcoin but instead simply allowing blocks to be bigger.
Ultimately I think we’ll see cash-like transactions being done in second layers like the lightning network, I don’t think it’s feasible to do that on-chain, because it means having to increase the block size and that therefore creating centralization, only a few entities will be able to afford to run nodes in this case.
Additionally, I believe second layers are a better approach for cash-like transactions, because they do not require any kind of confirmations, it’s instantaneous: I pay a fee to open a channel and then I can make as many transactions as I want, and when it’s time to close the channel, the transaction is recorded on the blockchain.
This is already happening, albeit it’s not as widespread yet.
Edited 2018-05-20 19:50 UTC
gatosufridor,
I have trouble seeing how these secondary off-blockchain transactions would work for ordinary purchases though. You can record the contract in the block chain to be committed later, but in practice most real world currency transactions aren’t left open/unsettled in such a way that would benefit from having secondary layers.
As a seller, I don’t want to use bitcoin for open ended contracts. The only point in my opening a contract would be to then close it and complete a sale. But if secondary layers are used this way, it would actually result in two blockchain contract transactions rather than a simple one off transaction.
You probably know more than I do about this so maybe you can help me better understand how it would be used in practice. Say I had bitcoins and wanted to buy a motercycle from someone who accepted bitcoins, how do we complete our transaction using a secondary layer?
This may not be the intended transaction type for secondary layers, but then what is the intended transaction type? How should it be used in ordinary commerce?
Edited 2018-05-20 21:44 UTC
Have a look at this article, it describes the actual use case better than I could: https://blog.lightning.engineering/posts/2018/05/02/lightning-ux.htm…
I haven’t used lightning myself yet but I know it’s currently working on main net, I believe Eclair on Android already supports it and the network is currently active with ~2000 nodes on main net.
Right now bitcoin is a bit more difficult to use for the average person but I think second layers like lightning will solve this.
Let me know your thoughts after reading the article.
Edited 2018-05-20 22:26 UTC
gatosufridor,
Ok, I’ll let you know in a later post.
gatosufridor,
I read article yesterday but my immediate impression was that the article is a PR piece with insufficient technical info. However I searched for other information and I found a more technical article here:
https://coincenter.org/entry/what-is-the-lightning-network
Combined with information from this article one can finally begin to piece everything together
https://coincenter.org/entry/what-are-micropayments-and-how-does-bit…
I still don’t know that I’ve had enough time to process all the implications and there are still open technical details I would need to take a closer look at in order to provide a proper critic, however I need to respond before the comment period closes, so here’s my take so far…
It’s a very interesting idea. Lightning does a lot of complex money forwarding behind the scenes to achieve it’s goals. All of the examples so far illustrate the best case scenario for lighting, which is recurring transactions between the same parties. I take some issue with that since the best case scenario is not necessarily representative of consumer transactions in general. IMHO more complex use cases merit more explanation and scrutiny. It’s not entirely obvious to me that there will be a significant reduction in blockchain requirements for typical shopping scenarios. I’m sure someone’s done the analysis, but I haven’t come across it yet.
It’s unclear to me how well lightning will cope with realtime transactions when the parties involved aren’t online 24/7 to forward money within the lightning network behind the scenes. The documents describe a long term timeout on the bitcoin side to handle a party’s disappearance, but I’m concerned about how perfectly normal sporadic connectivity will impact the flow of payment processing in the lightning network.
Have you heard of second layers? Yes, I’m aware there was a time last year when fees increased through the roof, I was one of those who had to pay $50 to get my transaction into a block.
That said, segwit was activated last year and ever since its activation fees have been decreasing gradually, now a median transaction I believe is only a few cents.
That said, I believe in a world where we’re using bitcoin for every day payments instead of cash, and I think this will happen eventually with the rise of second layers like the lightning network.
Edited 2018-05-20 19:44 UTC
It would require much more infrastructure than Mastercard or VISA debit cards transactions (I already use those much more frequently than cash), why the world at large would go that way?
Cyryptocurrencies are nothing more than Ponzi schemes. The early miners make all the money and sell off their stake to bigger fools.
Edited 2018-05-19 01:43 UTC
Why are you so into the idea of money based on wasting random resource? (gold, silver, computation/electricity whatever) That’s really “funny money” system…
You are also “printing money from thin air” – there is no logical relation between the work cryptocurrencies are doing and money, no inherent value in calculations required.
It’s just a stupid digital analogy to real gold (with arbitrary limits to be similar to gold), that appeals mostly to those looking at the past through rose-tinted glasses. BTW those, wars were much more frequent and devastating in the past, with its gold or silver based money…
How can you even write this with a straight face under a news about how it is Bitcoin which wastes energy?!
I love the idea of crypto currencies, getting rid of Central Banks sounds great… but using tons of electrical power to get there is plain stupid and wrong… the remedy is worse than the disease.
There should be a better way and We have to find it.
Agreed, but in the meanwhile, the monetary system is still working properly.
Tell that to countries like Zimbabwe or Venezuela.
Bitcoin is not sustainable, but there are crypto currencies out there that barely use any electricity at all. Nano is an example of a “green” crypto.
All crypto currencies are basically useless in the real world of natural disaters and other such events. Tell me how just useful crypto currencies are in Gaza or anywhere else where their won’t be any real infrastructure (electrical power or otherwise) for this nonsense?
Central banks and free-floating fiat currencies are generally good things – they gauge supply of money to even out business cycles, increase the overall stability of the banking system and allow to regain competitiveness via mild inflation. Attempts at imposing inflexible currency regimes: be it the gold standard (made the Great Depression deeper due to a deflationary spiral), the infamous Argentine peso-dollar peg during the 1990s or the eurozone (one-size-fits-all monetary policy for different countries) often lead to imbalances and eventually serious crises.
Bitcoin is a travel back in time: its supply is completely unrelated to demand, lack of central control allows all kinds of frauds etc. Nonetheless, it is a bit more than pure speculation: it is useful in godforsaken, mismanaged places like Venezuela.
It was never intended to be this way. It was intended that users would leave their bitcoin clients running in the background, just like one did, back in the day, with their P2P file sharing client.
But then one discovered, more computation power is more financial gain, and greed took over the bitcoin network, with all their miners.
Bitcoin, it was never intended to be like this. Destroyed by it’s own success, destroyed by greed.
There are cryptocurrencies that address the power usage issue, like the NEM network with their XEM currency. Which sounds like a promising technology.
I was a crypto enthusiastic in the early days, however, I have become sceptical. Rather then promoting freedom and independence, crypto is promoting greed. It has been a nice experiment, but I think we must conclude the human race is not ready yet.
edit:typo
Edited 2018-05-19 13:15 UTC
Richard Heart has a crypto whereby the mining algorithms produce useful results in the realm of fluid dynamics. So it’s not just wasted computing beyond transaction handling.
icicle,
Indeed. For the purposes of crypto currency, the simulation needs to be difficult to enumerate, but easy to verify. It also needs to be expressible in very few bytes.
One way hashes have almost ideal properties for crypto currency, but we end up solving totally useless hashing problems. It would be better to have some protein folding simulations that help advance medical science or something else so that at least the energy consumption isn’t a waste. It would be harder to implement than hash functions though.
I live in a third world country where there are possibly more unbanked people than anywhere else in the world.
Our economic situation is chaotic, so I have to resort to work remotely (I’m a programmer), and as you imagine, the only way for me to receive my payments/salary is through bitcoin.
If it wasn’t for bitcoin I wouldn’t be able to substain myself and my family, this article is beyond shortsighted.
You have internet access, but no access to a bank?
Yes.
gatosufridor,
Good on you for choosing bitcoin, but your assertion that it’s the “only way for me to receive my payments/salary” seems preposterous. Does your country not have any online banking at all? Maybe I’m pretty naive about banking in the rest of the world, but here it’s pretty easy to open up bank accounts without even visiting a branch. You can’t use paypall or one of the many competing payment services?
It wouldn’t raise my eyebrows if you said that you prefer bitcoin, but saying that you have zero options other than bitcoin is highly suspect. Where do you live? What did you do before bitcoin? How do you convert your bitcoins to food and shelter? Curious minds want to know!
I’ve used localbitcoins.com in the past for converting BTC to fiat, it worked great. The rest I save in BTC.
gatosufridor,
There’s a lot of options here but what I’m perplexed by is that on the one hand you claim that you don’t want to use these services to handle your money (because reasons), yet on the other hand you end up using these services anyways to access your bitcoins. That’s your prerogative and all, but do you agree the original post was just a tad melodramatic?
Either way, it’s interesting to hear your view, thanks for sharing.
Edited 2018-05-18 17:15 UTC
OK, I do agree with the melodramatic part, sorry about that.
I want to say that I do have access to a local bank, but it’s not as efficient when compared to BTC for international payments.
I think it’s much more convenient to recieve payments with BTC and then sell the BTC locally using the national bank.
Plus, this gets even more convenient when using services like Bitwage[1] which provides a bank-to-bitcoin gateway, i.e. if your client is in another country, your client makes a wire transfer to a local bank that bitwage creates for you, and then bitwage sends you the equivalent amount in BTC.
This is simply a way to reduce friction, bypassing the SWIFT method for international payments, I think it’s a much faster way to transact and requires a lot less bureaucracy.
I think it’s shortsighted to say that bitcoin is only about “tulip mania”, it solves problems for some people.
[1] https://www.bitwage.com/
Edited 2018-05-18 18:52 UTC
gatosufridor,
Yes it does.
What’s it like where you live in south america? Do you have trouble finding computer work locally or is there some kind of pent up demand? Of course there’s international jobs like you say, but are there many unfilled local opportunities? I haven’t visited third world countries so I don’t really know what it would be like for tech people like us to live there.
It’s good, that said, living in a small town means there are less IT jobs available, hence why I look for remote work.
Edited 2018-05-18 23:21 UTC
…and so you wouldn’t be able to dodge taxes, right?
Blockchain (specifically a central ledger that’s made BFT by mining or staking) is a brilliant initial stab at the problem space, but it’s starting to show its deficiencies in a serious way… taken on its own merits, it’s a really clever way of getting selfish free agents to cooperate. But holy cow, the externalities!
And off in the wings, building something really beautiful, there’s Holochain.
https://medium.com/holochain/beyond-blockchain-simple-scalable-crypt…
(Not a paid shill; I’ve just been involved in the community for half a year because I really love the project.)