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Bitcoin Is Dead, Long Live Bitcoin

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Re: Bitcoin Is Dead, Long Live Bitcoin

#21

Post by phaet0n »

Bitcoin is simply going through a discontinuity brought on by a fixed blocksize. Personally, I feel uncertainty is the real issue. The "community" should either accept this, or opt for a potentially unlimited ceiling (limited by physics and network size and topology).

If you choose to remain with the fixed blocksize, then you're betting the system will reach another equilibrium (which may be total collapse). This equilibrium will revolve a natural evolution in the pricing of transactions.

Either way, at some other point in the future another source of discontinuity will be the circulation limit. Again, which may or may not kill the system.

Bitcoin is simply evolving, as it necessarily needs to.

It's definitely interesting to watch as an outsider.

Re: Bitcoin Is Dead, Long Live Bitcoin

#22

Post by yc1010 »

mabbo wrote: post #9

The problem with bitcoin, as I see it, is that discussion of problems that may exist can lower the value of bitcoin- whether the problem is real or not. If you're heavily invested emotionally with bitcoins, you need to discuss these problems so that they can be solved. If you're heavily invested financially , you need to make sure no one talks about these problems, at least until you have a plan for how you're not go…

Well the problem is THAT DISCUSSION OF SOLUTIONS to bitcoin issues are being censored, with key people being banned from the usual discussion forums

A decentralized currency where the development, mining and discussion is controlled by less than a dozen people which is a joke

Re: Bitcoin Is Dead, Long Live Bitcoin

#23

Post by manyoso »

maaku wrote: post #11

> At the core of the debate is whether the Bitcoin blockchain should be a settlement layer that supports a number of new blockchains that can be scaled to achieve various goals or whether the Bitcoin blockchain itself should evolve in a way that it can scale to achieve those various goals. No, among the developers actually working on Bitcoin that is not what the debate is about at all. Bitcoin is a decentralized ledg…

This is very interesting and another rephrasing of "what the debate is actually about!" At this point, as a complete outsider to Bitcoin I must say I am a bit confused. Here are the camps I am seeing:

Hearn seems to be saying that Bitcoin right now is not really decentralized - aka the Chinese firewall problem and so much power already centralized in a few peoples hands. He also seems to be saying that the motivations for Bitcoin Core developers are not based on good faith technical disagreements, but more about bad faith political disagreements.

Fred Wilson seems to be saying that he concurs with Hearn's concerns about Bitcoin already being centralized, but would characterize Bitcoin Core developers as having good faith political disagreements and advocates for "hard fork(s)" as a way to resolve these good faith political disagreements.

You seem to be saying that, in fact, BitCoin Core developers have good faith technical reasons - nay - empirically validated reasons to believe BitCoin has no real choice and that it can not ever become a visa-like transactional currency without destroying the decentralization qualities that make it so interesting. I assume you also believe that Hearn's qualms about the current centralization are wrong in some way.

So that makes for very conflicting stories about what is going on for this outsider to have any hope of judging. Very interesting though.

Can you tell me why the decentralized ledger can't just be made more granular so that increasing the block size might make kick out current under-powered nodes, but those nodes could be turned into virtual nodes where under-powered machines could pool resources to establish a virtual node and thus maintain decentralization?

Re: Bitcoin Is Dead, Long Live Bitcoin

#24

Post by kang »

TD-Linux wrote: post #6
manyoso wrote: post #2

This is interesting to me because it presents the blockchain size dispute in a way that seems much more sympathetic to the "no, we shouldn't increase the blockchain size" crowd than Mike Hearn's essay. Is it really true that the people who are objecting to increasing the blockchain size see Bitcoin turning into a reserve "currency" to hold wealth instead of a liquid currency used to make real time transactions? Is th…

The opinion, of course, widely varies. Mike's piece was Mike's opinion, so of course it's not going to be very sympathetic to Core developers. The limits on transaction size have been known since the beginning of Bitcoin. VISA level transaction rates require insanely high block sizes, much larger than those proposed so far. People have come up with many, many different solutions to this problem. One thrown around a l…

> VISA level transaction rates require insanely high block sizes

No. There are many other ways to scale bitcoin.

>Lightning Network is..based around advanced Bitcoin scripting usage

Rather quite the opposite. Lightning Network does not uses the bitcoin scripting.

Re: Bitcoin Is Dead, Long Live Bitcoin

#25

Post by zanny »

mabbo wrote: post #9

The problem with bitcoin, as I see it, is that discussion of problems that may exist can lower the value of bitcoin- whether the problem is real or not. If you're heavily invested emotionally with bitcoins, you need to discuss these problems so that they can be solved. If you're heavily invested financially , you need to make sure no one talks about these problems, at least until you have a plan for how you're not go…

In this context btc is down about 10% overnight, probably due to a reaction to Hearn's blog post. It was stable yesterday at 430 on bitfinex and its down to 390 today, and its a fairly notable spike considering recent trends.

Re: Bitcoin Is Dead, Long Live Bitcoin

#27

Post by yc1010 »

zanny wrote: post #25
mabbo wrote: post #9

The problem with bitcoin, as I see it, is that discussion of problems that may exist can lower the value of bitcoin- whether the problem is real or not. If you're heavily invested emotionally with bitcoins, you need to discuss these problems so that they can be solved. If you're heavily invested financially , you need to make sure no one talks about these problems, at least until you have a plan for how you're not go…

In this context btc is down about 10% overnight, probably due to a reaction to Hearn's blog post. It was stable yesterday at 430 on bitfinex and its down to 390 today, and its a fairly notable spike considering recent trends.

Well there is also Cryptsy fiasco today

https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/411bqw/cryptsy_clo...

Bitcoin is a never ending drama rollercoaster but I still use it and I hope eventually some sort of solution is reached

Re: Bitcoin Is Dead, Long Live Bitcoin

#28

Post by zanny »

magicmu wrote: post #20

It seems like the potential fork in bitcoin is already happening to some degree with Elements and the sidechain ( https://github.com/ElementsProject/elements ) -- a super interesting project that I just found out about yesterday! I can't help but feel, to a certain degree, like forking bitcoin is re-arranging deck chairs on the titanic though. There already seem to be more viable alternative cryptocurrencies.

The problem is for almost everyone technical features are trumped by market cap when it comes to cryptocurrencies. Viability for almost everyone comes down to which economy commands the most investment into it.

Re: Bitcoin Is Dead, Long Live Bitcoin

#29

Post by kang »

magicmu wrote: post #20

It seems like the potential fork in bitcoin is already happening to some degree with Elements and the sidechain ( https://github.com/ElementsProject/elements ) -- a super interesting project that I just found out about yesterday! I can't help but feel, to a certain degree, like forking bitcoin is re-arranging deck chairs on the titanic though. There already seem to be more viable alternative cryptocurrencies.

This is not necessarily a fork. You can have a new blockchain & exchange it tokens for bitcoin using atomic swap protocol. To implicitly implement the two-way-peg would a fork be needed.

Re: Bitcoin Is Dead, Long Live Bitcoin

#30

Post by AndrewKemendo »

Back in 2009 when I was getting into bitcoin, it was widely described as a "stateless currency" and not just an alternative to Visa or credit cards. Having a background in economics, bitcoin looked to me like a truly revolutionary technology and if it was adopted en masse would change politics forever.

The problem however is that a nation's currency is arguably the primary source of it's sovereignty. Whomever controls the currency primarily used in a nation, controls the nation. So it's safe to say that no nation is going to let bitcoin or any other currency take hold for widespread commercial use in lieu of it's sovereign currency - that's a hallmark of a failed state.

In fact that's why when regulators declared bitcoin as a commodity it was such a big deal. The US doesn't really care because we haven't had commodity money since the 1970s, but the idea that if enough people decided that they wanted commodity money, they would arguably have a medium with which to do it with that wasn't tied to any state.

So as with every product, unless a massive number of people decide to stop using their home currency and start using bitcoin, then bitcoin will "fail."

Whether it pivots to some kind of credit system or not is largely immaterial because of the potential it had.

It's like if we created Artificial General Intelligence and it decided to just write movie reviews forever.

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