• makeasnek@lemmy.ml
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    4 months ago

    They’ve been saying this for years, the problem is that none of them trust each other’s currencies or banking systems enough to do it. Nobody trusts China’s economic stats. They really, really want to get off the dollar. But they can’t figure out how. Meanwhile, Bitcoin (with lightning):

    • trustlessly sends a transaction across the globe in under a second for pennies in fees. You don’t have to worry if “your bank trusts their bank”, Bitcoin will secure the transaction.
    • Is immune from influence or corruption. China or whoever can’t make Bitcoin print extra coins for them, spend money that they don’t have the key for, or otherwise do anything it isn’t designed to do. The protocol is enforced by the network.
    • All you need is a cell phone with a halfway reliable internet connection, no need for complex banking infrastructure. No single building with a bunch of money stored in it. No paying extra for your liquidity because your region is “risky”. This is a big deal for the third world.
    • It’s been doing this global transaction role for 15 years without a single bank holiday, a single hour of downtime, or a single hack. It. Just. Works.
    • For <1% of global electricity usage, mostly from renewables since off-peak renewable generation is the cheapest energy around. It helps incentivize adding more renewables to the grid by ensuring there is always a buyer for any surplus supply. And it helps keeps rates lot for regular ratepayers through that same mechanism. Moving value around costs energy and human time, we just don’t see headlines like “WESTERN UNION AGAIN CONSUMING TERAWATTS A DAY OF ELECTRICITY WE’RE ALL DOOMED” because there’s nothing novel about remittance services using tons of energy and making their customers pay exorbitant fees.

    Smaller countries like Ecuador are using this technology to bring Bitcoin to millions of people who don’t have access to (or don’t trust) banking infrastructure. Smaller countries can now participate in the global economy without using the USD and retain more of their sovereignty in the process. They have a plan B. And they don’t have to run their own central bank or having stable enough political/legal ifrastructure for a banking system. They just need old android phones and 3G connections.

    • 82cb5abccd918e03@lemmygrad.ml
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      4 months ago

      Doesn’t bitcoins blockchain use some sort of consensus algorithm, so if one party has more than 50% of the compute power they control everything?

      • slacktoid@lemmy.ml
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        4 months ago

        51% but thats slower so ideally around 66% so you can make quicker faster changes. but yeah you ll have the same issues with fiat at that point.

        • makeasnek@lemmy.ml
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          4 months ago

          66% doesn’t give you any more ability than 51% does. It doesn’t change the speed, it just increases the cost. There would be no reason to hit 66% to do a 51% attack.

      • makeasnek@lemmy.ml
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        4 months ago

        Except the IMF, World Bank, Moody, Standard and Poor, etc.

        They don’t trust it, they just have no other figures to work off. China has a long history of faking numbers or suddenly stopping the publishing of numbers when it can make the party look bad. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-08-16/china-is-hiding-more-and-more-data-from-the-rest-of-the-world

        lol

        Ok, be mad. A 15 year trend of growth on average no matter how you measure it: market cap, number of nodes, transaction volume, transaction capacity, etc. If you have though Bitcoin was a scam or a bubble about to burst or whatever, you’ve been wrong 15 years in a row, maybe it’s worth reconsidering.

        • slacktoid@lemmy.ml
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          4 months ago

          yeah but whats stopping rich people from working together to get 60% of the network and then change things as they deem fit?

          • makeasnek@lemmy.ml
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            4 months ago

            Firstly, rich people already do this with our existing currency systems. So that has to be what we’re comparing against. And nobody has done this because there’s zero benefit to doing so.

            The thing you’re talking about is a 51% attack and the answer is:

            • The cost of doing so, which continues to increase and is around a trillion dollars currently. Even if you had the money, there are very significant logistical hurdles which make it difficult and means people would see it coming a mile away. They don’t have to buy coins, they have to buy energy and equipment to turn that energy into mining and they have to keep buying energy as long as they want their attack to continue. That trillion dollar figure is for one block worth of attack (10 minutes). The longer you attack, the more the cost per block goes up too.
            • There is no benefit to doing so. The second your attack ends, the network reverts to the true “main chain”, the system is designed to be really robust

            There are only two things you can do with a 51% attack

            • “double-spend” meaning you spend the same coins twice. But if somebody is going to trade you 1 trillion dollars of stuff, they’re going to wait for more than a few blocks confirmation. The scenarios where this makes any economic sense for anybody to attempt are basically zero.
            • Delay (censor) transactions which will go through the second your attack ends

            Even if you controlled 51% of the network you cannot:

            • Spend money you don’t have the key for
            • Increase the supply beyond 21 million coins
            • Otherwise make invalid transactions

            Because all other nodes would reject your transactions as invalid.

            • slacktoid@lemmy.ml
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              4 months ago

              Youre just gonna recreate what we have today with more energy usage. So why not fix the core societal problem?

        • carl_marks[use name]@lemmy.ml
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          4 months ago

          They don’t trust it, they just have no other figures to work off.

          That’s why they publish it. Not like there are (western adaptations of) the Li Keqiang Index

          https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-08-16/china-is-hiding-more-and-more-data-from-the-rest-of-the-world

          1. At least have the decency to post the archive link https://archive.md/sgBQK
          2. Youth unemployment in the article:

          Calculating the actual employment rate is complex and it’s plausible the government decided the changing nature of the economy and labor patterns means their current model isn’t accurately reflecting reality.

          Obtuse way to say that the category 16-24 olds are studying and not part of the labour force

          1. Landsales: Communists don’t like speculation with real estate and land. Shocker. Not like they’ve been announcing a shift away from real estate to EV/Solar Panels/etc.
          2. Currency Reserves, Bond Transactions, Academic Information, Politicians’ Biographies:

          President Xi Jinping’s ideological battle with the US has also motivated Beijing to ringfence data it believes could advantage the Biden administration.

          Based.

          A 15 year trend of growth on average no matter how you measure it: market cap, number of nodes, transaction volume, transaction capacity, etc.

          If you think that’s the critique of bitcoin then you have been blinded by techbros optimizim on the tech. Also it’s funny how you wave away bitcoin using up 1% of global electricity usage lol