Because eth is a circus: major cult of personality issues, major scalability issues, monetary policy is all over the place, changed at a whim of god knows who or in reaction to past shortsightedness and a planned transition away from the one thing that keeps at least some semblance of stability - PoW towards even less politically stable rich-get-richer PoS, being sold as scalability solution without having anything to do with scalability at all.
Twitter has announced support for lightning. Why would anyone use eth when streamable money in isolated payment channels on top of the most secure monetary network in the world exists, is beyond me.
It’s hard for me to praise Jetbrains, every time I start using Idea I have amazing experience, I feel like it’s totally one of the best IDEs out there and then couple days and non-trivial plugins later I have noticeable lags when typing text. I immediately give up and switch back to my previous setup. Why can’t IDEs prioritize reducing typing latency? That’s like one of the most important parts of text editing.
Anybody else had similar experience?
Edit: not trying to rain on Jetbrains parade here, I’m genuinely happy they have a business model that works and products that sell well.
Also Tether is special case - it’s not unrelated altcoin, it’s supposedly stablecoin bound to BTC.
“Supposedly” because no proper audit of tether assets and liabilities was done and there is little transparency.
Counterargument is that if tether is insolvent, it would affect Bitcoin but only to some degree.
Here’s the logic: if tether was printed without backing to buy and prop up price of bitcoin then somewhere somebody is sitting on a pile of USDT which they will want to get rid of. You can get rid of USDT by asking tether to buy them back from you for USD or you can trade them on the market for BTC. Assuming tether goes dark USDT owners will be forced to sell USDT at discount creating even more buy pressure for BTC. The whole thing will be a huge debacle and incur some damage to BTC but ultimately it’ll be perceived like one more exchange scams - not your keys not your Bitcoin, trusting that USDT can keep USD parity is purely on you.
Bottom line is - people are being manipulated, not Bitcoin. Bitcoin will continue to live up to its promise - distributed open ledger and transaction platform, solving consensus problem via proof of work and there will only ever be 21 million of them.
That’s like manipulating value of USD by printing more Euros. Sure it has effect because economies are interrelated by it can’t be sustained - Euro will be worth nothing eventually.
yeah, you're right, i think i got confused by the last statement. it's not final yet where he's being extradited. greece's ruling party's flirting with russia in past couple years makes me quite skeptical and pessimistic.
Did you miss the part about it being anonymous(pseudonymous)? Also did you consider the fact that it circumvents any government regulations / oppression / sanctions that parties involved in the transaction may have been subjected to?
Bitcoin advocates know very well that centralized systems are faster and more efficient, that’s just the trade off of actually owning your assets. Right now you own nothing but some promise in some database controlled by bunch of potentially corrupt individuals governed by potentially repressive institutions.
> The US, while legitimate in many ways, has a history of corrupt court practices.
I don’t know how can anyone with straight face compare US court system to Russia’s and not conclude that US is orders of magnitude more fair and less corrupt. Are you being serious right now? Russian court system is literally proxy for Putin’s decisions.
EDIT: disregard that, i somehow assumed extradition to russia was a sure thing already
you're right, 51% represents a certain barrier when the attack becomes much more destructive, but it's still a spectrum. you can destroy faith in the system and value of bitcoin by performing multiple long reorgs with less than 51%.
the amount of trivialization and conflation irks me
1. "51% attack" is not a thing as in "one has to have 51% of hashpower to perform it". it's just that with 51% of hashpower it becomes relatively cheap to perform such attack. one can throw enough money at the problem and get lucky to perform large reorg with just 10% of hashpower. the lower the number - the more lucky attacker has to get.
2. "rewriting a block" or "billion dollar bounty" as the GP put it are just conveying wrong ideas. there is zero chance for that $1B to get stolen even if attacker gets 100% of hashrate. all they can do is revert the transaction so that money goes back to original owners by generating a fork in the chain that doesn't include said transaction.
even that is not enough because competing miners (assuming attacker doesn't really have all 100% of hashpower) will still eventually include the transaction because it pays lucrative fees.
the trick here is that in Bitcoin parties agree to finalize the deal only after certain number of confirmations (blocks created after the one that includes the transaction). general rule is to wait for 6 confirmations.
if there indeed was some $1B deal where 94k BTC changed hands i wouldn't be surprised if their agreed upon number of confirmations was ~500 blocks (half the value of transaction in question in miner rewards), which is roughly 3 days wait.
ultimately though i'm pretty sure this was some kind of cold-storage consolidation so no BTC actually changed hands.
> If ethno-nationalists are not allowed to make their political case with speech, what alternative would they have but violence?
Plenty of nazi sites on the web where they make all sorts of “political cases”. Don’t confuse inability to make the case with repugnance to that case in general public.
> on top of the most secure monetary network
Because eth is a circus: major cult of personality issues, major scalability issues, monetary policy is all over the place, changed at a whim of god knows who or in reaction to past shortsightedness and a planned transition away from the one thing that keeps at least some semblance of stability - PoW towards even less politically stable rich-get-richer PoS, being sold as scalability solution without having anything to do with scalability at all.
It’s a joke.