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Bitcoin Is Dead, Long Live Bitcoin

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Re: Bitcoin Is Dead, Long Live Bitcoin

#31

Post by kang »

yc1010 wrote: post #22
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

It is irrational to complain about censorship in a private location.

Re: Bitcoin Is Dead, Long Live Bitcoin

#32

Post by pavel_lishin »

yc1010 wrote: post #27
zanny wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Wait, did they keep the fact that they had over 13,000 BTC stolen for over a year and a half?

Re: Bitcoin Is Dead, Long Live Bitcoin

#33

Post by geofft »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #18
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…

Isn't this also how the stock market works?

Issues internal to a company are usually kept very confidential until they're able to be addressed in a managed press release/conference, and this is so respected that the state's monopoly on violence will come after you if you breach that confidentiality and trade on the result.

For a currency, the US Federal Reserve works the same way; there's only limited speculation (based on public data) until they make an announcement about monetary policy, and the discussions leading up to that announcement are also kept very secret to avoid disruption to the market.

Re: Bitcoin Is Dead, Long Live Bitcoin

#35

Post by zanny »

manyoso wrote: post #10
forthefuture wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this touches upon an even bigger problem in the Bitcoin community. Very few people actually know what they want other than the price to go up. And those who do are all at odds with eachother because Bitcoin can't do everything at once.

I have no history with Bitcoin, but if people want the value of Bitcoin to go up I think it'd behoove them to make Bitcoin useful to people as a solution to a problem. I'm not sure the idea of a decentralized reserve currency with unknown/random time-to-liquidity is a very useful solution to any problem. Bitcoin obviously has value right now as demonstrated by the fact that people can go out and exchange coins for th…

It isn't about computational difficulty. Larger block sizes simply mean larger blockchains and more network use to transfer them around.

The verification of transactions in bitcoin is central to its protocol. Its the whole reason its novel and relevant. You would have to change the proof of work system from sha256 hashing to something else to make it anything but optimal for computation on specialized ASIC hardware. If you do that, now you have another cryptocurrency - litecoin, peercoin, etc.

And when you use a hashing algorithm meant to be hard for general computers (cpu or gpu) to do, and can manufacture hardware that does them much more efficiently, you end up where we are now where big miners and a handful of people represent most of bitcoins mining power.

Re: Bitcoin Is Dead, Long Live Bitcoin

#36

Post by geofft »

brighton36 wrote: post #5

The actual story here is that the attempt to fork Bitcoin (Bitcoin XT) is dead. Hearn tried to do so, failed, and left. Anyone who doesn't run XT should be celebrating their victory.

But there's Bitcoin Classic now, right? Which is emphatically an attempt to fork Bitcoin (just an attempt to fork it even more aggressively than XT to the point where Core is the actual fork).

Would Classic have happened without XT? It seems to share some developers.

Re: Bitcoin Is Dead, Long Live Bitcoin

#37

Post by Dylan16807 »

kang wrote: post #31
yc1010 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It is irrational to complain about censorship in a private location.

No it's not.

Re: Bitcoin Is Dead, Long Live Bitcoin

#38

Post by rwmj »

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…

That's the same as ordinary currencies. If enough people believe (for example) that the Venezulan Bolivar is unsound, or the government of that country is unsound, then the price of the Bolivar will fall. Even if that government isn't necessarily doing something bad like recklessly printing currency.

Re: Bitcoin Is Dead, Long Live Bitcoin

#39

Post by lukifer »

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…

This is an important point, but it's worth noting that the relationship between social beliefs and personal benefit exists in countless other domains: company stock price, religious groups, political movements, adoption of a particular FOSS library/stack/protocol, etc. There are few people who have no stake in social ecosystems that are fragile to shifts in perception, and therefore to subject to perverse incentives in managing that perception.
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