Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Bitcoin Is an Escapist Safe Haven

bloomberg.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 130 posts

Re: Bitcoin Is an Escapist Safe Haven

#121

Post by TGilmour »

bduerst wrote: post #117
TGilmour wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not saying NPR is lying, but your argument is based on it being a fact that a TX has failed, where we don't have the details of that TX or if it exists. I also don't think you understand what confirmation bias is. I don't mind disclosing have holdings in XBT, ETH, DASH, XRP, and others. None of my investment portfolio relies on Bitcoin increasing in value significantly, crypto is a small percentage of my overall…

Do you think NPR is lying about the transaction failing? (y/n question) So you have a year's worth of wages tied up in Bitcoin?

You can try and spin this any way you like. Is there any evidence, not hearsay, regarding this TX? (y/n question). Your whole argument is based on this one link, haha.

No, I do contract work for bitcoin. As I already stated, "crypto is a small percentage of my overall portfolio." so not sure your point there. I manage my finances just fine thanks, it seems you're upset none of your ponzi schemes have paid off.

Re: Bitcoin Is an Escapist Safe Haven

#122

Post by bduerst »

TGilmour wrote: post #121
bduerst wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you think NPR is lying about the transaction failing? (y/n question) So you have a year's worth of wages tied up in Bitcoin?

You can try and spin this any way you like. Is there any evidence, not hearsay, regarding this TX? (y/n question). Your whole argument is based on this one link, haha. No, I do contract work for bitcoin. As I already stated, "crypto is a small percentage of my overall portfolio." so not sure your point there. I manage my finances just fine thanks, it seems you're upset none of your ponzi schemes have paid off.

I think the tone of your comment just demonstrated what I was getting at. Thanks.

Re: Bitcoin Is an Escapist Safe Haven

#123

Post by TGilmour »

bduerst wrote: post #122
TGilmour wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can try and spin this any way you like. Is there any evidence, not hearsay, regarding this TX? (y/n question). Your whole argument is based on this one link, haha. No, I do contract work for bitcoin. As I already stated, "crypto is a small percentage of my overall portfolio." so not sure your point there. I manage my finances just fine thanks, it seems you're upset none of your ponzi schemes have paid off.

I think the tone of your comment just demonstrated what I was getting at. Thanks.

Great! Glad this is on public record.

Re: Bitcoin Is an Escapist Safe Haven

#124

Post by kristianp »

alexmingoia wrote: post #55
kristianp wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Bitcoin fails to satisfactorily answer von Mises' regression theorem." Can you explain this for the non-economists here please?

Economists (notably Ludwig von Mises and Carl Menger) attempted to answer the question, "Why does money have value?" with the explanation that people have a desire for goods (including money) because of what they use them for. With money, they expect to trade it for other goods in the future. But the problem is that argument is circular when using it to explain the market origination of money: Why did people original…

Can't we say that originally someone bought a pizza with Bitcoin, and that the induction started from that point?

Re: Bitcoin Is an Escapist Safe Haven

#125

Post by abecedarius »

bduerst wrote: post #108
abecedarius wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How can the Zcash company deanonymize users? I haven't studied their system, but that sounds completely against the design goals. (Not to mention to mention the personality of those Zcash core developers I've worked with in the past at leastauthority.com. But security engineering is about not having to rely on their probity.) I don't understand what you're saying about liability and authorities either. In online disc…

From the whitepaper: >A powerful attacker could potentially fabricate an additional block solely for a targeted user. Spending any coins with respect to the updated Merkle tree in this “poison-pill” block will uniquely identify the targeted user. If ZCash works with that person or organization, then they're able to deanonymize the inputs on the transaction. As a privately owned U.S. company they can be compelled to d…

Thanks. You're talking about section VI.c of http://zerocash-project.org/media/pdf/zerocash-oakland2014.p...

It's saying if an attacker extends the blockchain just for you, and makes only you know about its forked blockchain, they would then know that if someone creates a transaction against the unique part of that chain, it must've been you. That attack appears to have nothing to do with the Zcash company as an insider -- the software is open source and hosted from Debian, etc. Am I misunderstanding? How does Monero stop an analogous attack?

(The paper continues "To mitigate such attacks, users should check with trusted peers their view of the block chain and, for sensitive transactions, only spend coins relative to blocks further back in the ledger (since creating the illusion for multiple blocks is far harder)." I don't know whether current software does this for you -- that paper's from 2014.)

Re: Bitcoin Is an Escapist Safe Haven

#126

Post by tlrobinson »

bduerst wrote: post #118
tlrobinson wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sidechains and Lightning Network are not the same thing. https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Lightning_Network https://lightning.network/ https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/greg-maxwell-lightning-... It's basically a network of "payment channels" you can route instantaneous off-chain payments over, which occasionally settle on the blockchain. And you don't need to trust anyone in the network with your funds.

So it's an alt-coin that still requires bitcoin?

No, you're still transacting in Bitcoin, it's just using fancy smart contracts to allow you to do it (mostly) off the blockchain in a secure way.

Re: Bitcoin Is an Escapist Safe Haven

#127

Post by lhl »

runeks wrote: post #98
lhl wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The bigger problem with Bitcoin today is that it can't be used for regular transactions. Due to the 1MB blocksize cap (that people having being trying and failing to fix for 2 years), Bitcoin has been limited to ~3tps, has permanent backlogs in the mempool in the thousands (and climbing to tens of thousands during busy times) and tx fees have risen to 10-20 cents (or more) for regular transactions, making it useless…

If by "regular" transactions you mean consumer-to-merchant transactions, then this is solved by off-chain clearing, much like VISA solves it for our current monetary system whose lowest level transfer protocol (SWIFT) is also too slow/expensive for consumer transactions. With Bitcoin, consumers can connect to clearing intermediaries via payment channels, allowing them to be in full control of their funds while having…

Payment channels, besides being alpha/never used in production, are also dependent on a transaction malleability fix. Since SegWit was rolled into this soft-fork disaster, I'm pretty confident in saying it will never reach 95% and activate (there are almost as much BU/BCl support as BCo/SW support at this point), so a non-starter honestly.

I'm not against PCs in principle, I just don't understand why the block size wasn't increased and then a fully tested version of LN being rolled out afterwards - instead we've 2 years where the blocksize cap has been looming, a year where Bitcoin functionality has actually been crippled (Bitcoin is the only "successful" technology I know of where it's getting more expensive and performing worse as time has been going on), and of course there's been a combination community and developer civil war/purge (and subsequent deadlock) that could have easily been avoided. This whole mess has been extremely counterproductive.

Note, even in Poon and Dryja's original paper, they outline that LN still requires bigger blocks:

"If we presume that a decentralized payment network exists and one person will make 3 blockchain transactions per year on average, Bitcoin will be able to support over 35 million users with 1MB blocks in ideal circumstances (assuming 2000 transactions per MB). This is quite limited, and an increase of the block size may be necessary to support everyone in the world using Bitcoin."

It's worth pointing out that Bitcoin currently has just under 52K unconfirmed transactions in the backlog (this will take hours if not days to clear) and that PCs still have risks/failure modes from that as well (failure of breach remedy transactions can actually break down the counterparty trust system from my understanding, making rollbacks and even double spends possible).

Re: Bitcoin Is an Escapist Safe Haven

#128

Post by runeks »

lhl wrote: post #127
runeks wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If by "regular" transactions you mean consumer-to-merchant transactions, then this is solved by off-chain clearing, much like VISA solves it for our current monetary system whose lowest level transfer protocol (SWIFT) is also too slow/expensive for consumer transactions. With Bitcoin, consumers can connect to clearing intermediaries via payment channels, allowing them to be in full control of their funds while having…

Payment channels, besides being alpha/never used in production, are also dependent on a transaction malleability fix. Since SegWit was rolled into this soft-fork disaster, I'm pretty confident in saying it will never reach 95% and activate (there are almost as much BU/BCl support as BCo/SW support at this point), so a non-starter honestly. I'm not against PCs in principle, I just don't understand why the block size w…

CHECKLOCKTIMEVERIFY/BIP65 fixes payment channels without fixing transaction ID malleability, so non-malleability is only a requirement for payment channels to work when we want to free received channel value while keeping the same channel ready for new payments.

Technically, this could be solved by the client sending funds to two different outputs, and switching to output #2 while the settling transaction redeeming output #1 is being confirmed, and vice versa. It's a horrible hack, I know, but it works right now. Of course, the client app should take care of all of this, making it transparent to the user.

I agree with Poon and Dryja that 1MB won't be enough forever, but payment channels is a bit like fiber, the capacity is basically unlimited. If you keep a payment channel open for a week, and then close it, it's completely irrelevant whether you made a single payment or 1 trillion payments over that channel, since nothing touches the Blockchain. In other words: if we are able to clear efficiently enough, it's also technically possible to get by with the 1MB limit, simply because payment channels have unlimited capacity, as they don't touch the Blockchain.

> I'm not against PCs in principle, I just don't understand why the block size wasn't increased and then a fully tested version of LN being rolled out afterwards [..]

Because a fully tested version of the Lightning Network doesn't exist. When it does, this plan will make sense, but that's not yet.

Personally, I'm focusing my attention on something that I know is possible right now: consumer-to-merchant transactions using digital promissory notes issued in exchange for payment channel payments. It's not the most elegant solution, but unlike all other proposed solutions it actually can work right now.

Much like is the case with Bitcoin, by the way. When Bitcoin was released, cryptographers/mathematicians weren't really pleased with it because of its "inelegance". But, in the end, it works better than anything else and it works right now.

Re: Bitcoin Is an Escapist Safe Haven

#129

Post by murbard2 »

MarcusBrutus wrote: post #9

Bitcoin fails to satisfactorily answer von Mises' regression theorem. It also has no scarcity since it can face competition by an infinite number of similar conceivable algorithms / block-chains / virtual currencies that offer much the same features, regardless of how hard its own mining gets. Not to mention that once it is perceived as more than just a nuisance by some major government it will be shut down in a hear…

And yet it managed to get monetary value. Ergo, the regression theorem is wrong.

Re: Bitcoin Is an Escapist Safe Haven

#130

Post by TGilmour »

bduerst wrote: post #122
TGilmour wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can try and spin this any way you like. Is there any evidence, not hearsay, regarding this TX? (y/n question). Your whole argument is based on this one link, haha. No, I do contract work for bitcoin. As I already stated, "crypto is a small percentage of my overall portfolio." so not sure your point there. I manage my finances just fine thanks, it seems you're upset none of your ponzi schemes have paid off.

I think the tone of your comment just demonstrated what I was getting at. Thanks.

Just so you know, he was completely dishonest about the failed TX. https://twitter.com/nathanielpopper/status/74850972378426572... https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/4qn7xr/npr_hit_pie...
Post reply on HN