I agree with NRP. I see so much of the endless new coins nowadays as a consensual ponzi scheme.
Honestly I have bigger disagreements between my best friends than you do with the owner of a laptop company, if you’re waiting for a laptop company that endorses/agrees with all of your philosophical/economic/political views before you make a purchase you will probably be using an abacus for a really long time. I think it is pretty shitty to dangle this like a carrot as if you would’ve bought one if he hadn’t given his opinion on cryptocurrency. Most laptop manufacturers do not have CEOs you can speak with in forums publicly, and likely hold many political, philosophical, and economic worldviews that would run counter to your own.
Proof-of-work based cryptocurrencies are a pointless drain on society. Investing in them just perpetuates the massive amounts of energy wasted to process transactions. We should work to eliminate Bitcoin and other PoW coins.
To be fair we could push to end these energy wasting transactions, or we could push for a more renewable energy solution. There are multiple solutions to the bitcoin problem, but there some are definitely easier than others.
Then don’t buy it. People respect Framework for their commitment to cutting waste and providing a machine that the consumer invariably owns. You don’t share that sentiment, so don’t buy it.
Perhaps don’t also frame your complaint as a discussion topic. You clearly have an opinion about bitcoin, but your method of delivering it here and claiming that the Framework laptop is a “Mac clone” helps nobody, not least yourself.
If bitcoin is the future of currency, then prove it by exchanging it for money and use that to buy your laptop. Otherwise, don’t. Nobody is obligated to accept Ponzi currency because you feel obligated to support speculation (which, in turn, depends on demand and utilization).
There are PoW mechanisms like RandomX which don’t give all the power of the “decentralized” network to a small groups of miners with specialized hardware.
There’s no free lunch in crypto, but there is something called INCREASING THE DAMN BLOCKSIZE (Bitcoin scalability problem - Wikipedia), which bitcoiners like you should become familiar with, seeing as you will have to deal with consequences of your inaction for eternity. I mean, with transaction fees like these, why bother exchanging bitcoin? just HODL right?
Except, when sticking to the rules, each key pair is used exactly once. Before you sign a transaction, the only thing known about your public key is its hash value, which is considered to be relatively secure against attack by quantum computers.
(And yes, this is automatically enforced by hardware wallets.)
I believe you’re referring to the public keys being used once and discarded per the transaction. That’s entirely different from having a compromised private key, which is what those public keys are generated from. Once a private key is known the bad actor is now a co-owner of the account. There is no cryptographic way to differentiate between the original copy of the private key (the original owner) and the copied/reconstructed version. To a computer, It would be the equivalent of you showing up to a bank and having someone there with your face, ID, biometrics, and expecting the bank to tell you apart.
@Moffintops fundamentally goes to the fact that there’s an algorithm called Shor’s algorithm that can find the prime factors of any number of arbitrary size. It’s incredibly computationally expensive for normal computers, and basically trivial for a decent true quantum computer. This video does a much better job explaining than I can.
Thanks for posting this, I will have a look.
Yet, I feel like we are talking about different things: You are talking about finding the secret key given the public key, correct?
Yet, as far as I know, the public key is not known up until you spend your UTXO (unspent transaction outputs). After you’ve spent your utxo, the key pair is useless. (because there is nothing left to spend)
What is known, a priori, is the 256-bit hash of the public key. Even with quantum computers, you need 2^128 steps to find a pre-image. Hope this clears the confusion
I have avoided passing comment on this thread as it seems acrimonious. But I did read this article. Whatever your views on energy usage we can all agree that Framework is a company that set out to address electronic waste (WEEE). Since massive amounts of WEEE is baked into the Bitcoin “economy”, Framework have no choice but to avoid doing business this way or face charges of hypocrisy.
A single bitcoin transaction generates the same amount of electronic waste as throwing two iPhones in the bin, according to a new analysis by economists from the Dutch central bank and MIT.
While the carbon footprint of bitcoin is well studied, less attention has been paid to the vast churn in computer hardware that the cryptocurrency incentivises. Specialised computer chips called ASICs are sold with no other purpose than to run the algorithms that secure the bitcoin network, a process called mining that rewards those who partake with bitcoin payouts. But because only the newest chips are power-efficient enough to mine profitably, effective miners need to constantly replace their ASICs with newer, more powerful ones.
The purpose of bitcoin and proof-of-work crypto currencies is to generate value by decrypting blocks of data. They become harder to break as the computational power used churn them out increases, right?
What is being used to produce these currencies? Hardware and energy, right? And how is this equipment being purchased? Cash or crypto?
The resellers of those videocards and processors aren’t mining; they’re selling and they accept non-crypto currencies. Using crypto functionally adds extra steps to a two step process: take money; deliver item.
So isn’t it all kinda pointless? Increasing the overhead to produce more of a given coin eventually means sinking the coin out of the system and into cash money, so the only aspirational goal is to either get it into wider use and acceptance, or to continue promoting it to investors. The third aspirational goal - getting it recognized as a currency - is dead in the water if you can’t get the government on board. And that’ll be hard because, by design, they cannot be easily tracked (this is one of its selling points), and can’t be insured. Sure, cash can’t be tracked, but then we just… use cash.
If the only purpose of convincing a company to use bitcoin is to provide some real-world value to it, then what actual purpose does a company have in using it at all? Whether they accept bitcoin/crypto currency or not isn’t a zero sum game for them, but it provides no benefit and in fact might burden them as a capital gains instrument instead of currency. You’d probably have an easier time convincing Visa or Mastercard or whoever to accept it as a payment method, and you’d rack up reward points to boot; at least they’re in a position to assess risk.
In short: if anybody wants crypto currency to be accepted, don’t argue with businesses; deal with the government. And if they’re not on board, then companies are only going to open themselves to it if the gains outweigh the volatile nature of the market and the costs of doing business with it.
It’s pretty clear the same community from hackernews has made it’s way to this forum. Likely because framework has been advertised on there frequently the past few months. We get it, hackernews trusts the all knowing fed and monetary policy.
For the rest of us, inflation is real and inflation is destroying our savings and wages. History clearly demonstrates no authority can be trusted with the power to print money. The best solution we have to this problem is proof of work.
Unfortunately proof of work and decentralization requires small blocks to reduce the effects of propagation delay and guarantee basic hardware can operate a full node. Sure, many projects claim to solve perceived problems with bitcoin by simply “increasing the block size” or introducing “proof of stake” but those things don’t actually work. Proof of stake is essentially the system we have today – those with the most coin make the rules. Vitalik with his 70% premine would certainly love that. Solving transaction throughput by simply moving to big blocks would result in a geographically centralized system.
Thankfully bitcoin engineers are conservative and careful. SegWit was essentially a blocksize increase (typical blocks are now 3-4mb). Lightning network is functional and growing - I just paid at a farmers market using LN the other day. And proof of work is still the only form of distributed consensus that works.
To all the haters and those complaining it’s ‘wasteful’ - have fun having your life’s energy stolen from you by central bankers and corrupt governments. That sort of waste is far more damaging to both humanity and the soul.
Who can be trusted? The mob? No, I do not trust my fellow man and while clearly a central authority has is pitfalls(just look at Congress playing Russian Roulette will the value of our currency) pretending that a modern return to the gold standard is a boon to society is burying your head in the sand to my thinking
Bitcoin and all crypto for that matter are fiat currencies, they have no purpose beyond a means of exchange, just like the euro or dollar or yen
I’m leery of 51% attacks and automatic or algorithmic changes in the value of currency-if the value of a coin can vary for day to day so wildly, it has no use as currency
Inflation is certainly real and I would argue that the Fed keeps the prime rate artificially low to goose consumption-after all why should I save money for it to lose value when I could spend it on durable goods that might retain value?
Crypto is a scam waiting for the ax to fall…again
The current system isn’t ideal but your solution is worse than the problem it proports to solve
As someone who is pro-crypto and has been in the space for awhile, and honestly kinda feeling like the only Framework user who is atm, I really enjoyed reading this thread. I did have a few comments though:
You really shouldn’t make purchasing decision based on whether or not someone accepts crypto as a form of payment. Especially considering all the good Framework stands for and what they are trying to do and how much this industry needs it, why would you hold that against them?
I did buy my Framework with crypto (and got 3% back in crypto), using a crypto visa card, and it was super simple. Honestly, there are so many ways today to spend and buy things with crypto I am not sure why you would put the burden on Framework when they have enough on their plate getting a company running smoothly and getting laptops out to people.
And honestly if they did choose to accept crypto as a form of payment, Bitcoin wouldn’t be my first choice. It’s a good store of value which is what it was designed to be, but there are a lot better crypto options for a payment system.
@Josh_Cook
As more and more institutions are coming into the space this is getting better but what is really irritating is when those same people clearly know what they are doing, and turn around and buy a bunch more in the dip they caused. Since crypto isn’t regulated yet they aren’t going to be held accountable.
@Zax
Moves pushing 30%-40% in crypto is pretty normal. People who have been in the space for a bit are just going to short on the way down, buy the dip and wait. The people who I’ve seen really struggle with this though are people who are new to crypto and people who come from stocks where 3% is considered a big move. From a company perspective though, unless holding crypto is in your company’s strategy, you are just going to turn around and sell the crypto off ASAP. Of course, if you are accepting a crypto that can take 30 minutes to get enough confirmations… a lot can happen in that time.
@nrp
That’s really awesome! I’m glad it helped you start such an awesome company!!!
Guys if you are reading this and newly getting into crypto both @nrp and @Louis_Rossmann make really good points here. Crypto isn’t a good way to get rich quick unless you get really really lucky. While you are starting out look into holding long term (HODLing) or perhaps swing trading on a higher time frame like weekly or monthly until you get a good grasp of the space and try to learn as much as you can. Stay away from meme coins and do not leverage trade. Anywhere money is involved their are going to be ponzi schemes and scams. Crypto is no different. I wouldn’t suggest investing in any low cap coins until you learn how to research them.
I would love to talk for days about quantum computers and theorize how many qubits would actually be needed to pull this off for the current state of bitcoin and who I thought would get there first… fortunately blockchains can be updated and so can the encryption technology being used. Fun fact quantum computing has actually already hit bitcoin once in it’s early days due to Shor’s. But bitcoin was updated to a different encryption algorithm and other protections were put in place so that it would be much harder until quantum computers get more advanced. This will definitely be a cat and mouse game though just like everything else in cybersecurity but luckily there are already multiple researching groups working on quantum safe encryption algorithms since we use encryption for… well everything.
I am too. I’m heavy into some others that are already proof of stake and I like it a lot better. There is nothing better than “mining” (if you can call it that anymore) from your hardware wallet while it sits somewhere safely.
I’ve been looking into a crypto called PaxG (Pax Gold) as a possible diversification. Each token is backed by one fine troy ounce (t oz) of a 400 oz London Good Delivery gold bar, stored in Brink’s vaults. What is really cool about it is that you can redeem it for physical bars from them or smaller amounts from gold resellers. I do not know a lot about buying gold but I just thought it was neat.
As far as OEMs go Dell was the only one I was aware of and they stopped due to low demand. I think the best you could get right now (and isn’t an OEM anyway) is probably NewEgg.
Don’t get me wrong Bitcoin uses a ton of power and I vote for proof of stake… but that page is a bit misleading especially when it comes to per-transaction power usage.
You can’t calculate per-transaction energy usage by taking the total energy usage of a blockchain and splitting it across the number of transactions. And then they are “calculating” the energy usage by taking how much miners make and using the power output of one specific miner across all of that work. If we are talking about just a regular transaction (eg. me sending to you) that is highly skewed. In fact they say on the same page that if it switched to proof of stake (so no miners) they would expect the energy usage to go down by 99.95%. So a more realistic per-transaction usage is probably 99.95% less than what they are showing. I also didn’t like that they originally had a section for people to talk about their methodolgy and to either validate it or talk about issues with it and they removed that section. You can see it on the wayback machine though. I found this guys blog giving his opinion on it: Serious faults in Digiconomist's Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index. If nothing else the back and forth between him and the beci’s author is interesting. Either way thanks for sharing it.
Proof of work doesn’t decrypt any data. It’s who ever is first to find the correct way to generate a hash gets the block. And bitcoin can absolutely be tracked. In fact it’s one of the most track-able currencies. Every transaction is on a public ledger in plaintext. The only attempt at privacy you’ll get is if you create a wallet that no one knows is tied to you but people usually slip up. If you want privacy it would be better to use something designed for it like Monero. And you are right we need government changes for widespread adoption.
