81–90 of 109 posts
What I have seen is a lot of people in my space have dropped what they are doing to focus on blockchain/crypto. They are chasing novelty, they do not seem dedicated to their craft. I think this is a bit of a problem.
Reading the original Satoshi paper, the point of Bitcoin is to be decentralized/trustless and to enable microtransactions by lowering transaction fees. Both these goals seem to have failed in practice, the latter spectacularly (although other cryptocurrencies have done better in this regard). To truly be trustless, you can't generate keys/addresses on some website like bitaddress or use some other online wallet, as y…
This is a great analysis. The lack of trust as a feature in cryptocurrency is really a bug in society. Bitcoin rose out of the previous financial collapse by appealing to people who have lost trust in institutions. The problem with building a trustless answer to that problem is that (assertions ahead) life isn't compatible with an absence of trust. Trying to build a trustless financial system is a quixotic undertakin…
On the other hand, 2008 was partly enabled by entities trusting each other. They trusted AAA ratings, AIG, Goldman Sachs, and third party holders of mortgage records. In various ways, all these systems failed the people who trusted them.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> One could argue that a blockchain's only real world purpose is as a shared database, just as http's only real world purpose is the transfer of data between computers. So far it seems like the only thing anyone actually makes based on this shared database are new mini-currencies.
Again, useful applications being crowded out by speculative ones. Why bother making anything if you can apparently trivially print money. Until the bubble ends.
> Look at the dot-com boom. A lot of people lost a whole lot of paper money, but it brought us a cheap worldwide fiber backbone and companies like Amazon and Google. If the point the author is trying to make is that Amazon and Google were made possible by the dotcom boom, and that the collapse of the dotcom bubble was part of the price we as a society had to pay to have the services provided these companies, that's a…
It didn't hurt to have a large pool of ambitious and underutilized technical folks around to choose from.
Besides the rising fees (which can be mitigated with added protocol layers like lightning) the real problem is people understanding cryptocurrencies as investment. "Crypto investors" and people hoping to get rich quick who don't understand the fundamental philosophy of Bitcoin/Crypto are strangling innovation by adding "noise" attention to whatever developers like us "signal" are making.
Personally, I hope the bubble bursts, everyone lose their money and we go back to the original community of people building stuff, who see cryptocurrency as a technology, not an "investment". If Bitcoin drops to $1, I will still write software for it and won't miss the 'craze' factor.
> It remains an open question whether even much, much lower fees would be viable in the long run. The problem is not fees rather usability. If today I speak to a layman about bitcoin he is confused. It doesn't help that people start talking about hardware wallets, multisigs, Segwit etc. Most of those guys find that using cryptocurrency is a pain and want to stick to real money. Yes, it doesn't stop them from speculat…
> One thing has to be noted, while there is a constant parallel drawn with dot com people forget that there was at least 7-8 years head start for a layman to understand "internet". Bitcoin has been around for 8 years so it's not like there hasn't been enough time. The difference is that the internet was easy to explain to people because it had a number of immediately useful applications: you could almost immediately…
I think these benefits are tangible, but whilst the current block chain mechanism might demonstrate the utility, what we really need are the fee/transaction time problem to be resolved.
I really want someone far more intelligent than me to explain whether or not a zero-sum instantaneous transaction is formally, logically impossible (via a successor to block chain?) because that really is the killer app, imo.
What I have seen is a lot of people in my space have dropped what they are doing to focus on blockchain/crypto. They are chasing novelty, they do not seem dedicated to their craft. I think this is a bit of a problem.
Reading the original Satoshi paper, the point of Bitcoin is to be decentralized/trustless and to enable microtransactions by lowering transaction fees. Both these goals seem to have failed in practice, the latter spectacularly (although other cryptocurrencies have done better in this regard). To truly be trustless, you can't generate keys/addresses on some website like bitaddress or use some other online wallet, as y…
This is a great analysis. The lack of trust as a feature in cryptocurrency is really a bug in society. Bitcoin rose out of the previous financial collapse by appealing to people who have lost trust in institutions. The problem with building a trustless answer to that problem is that (assertions ahead) life isn't compatible with an absence of trust. Trying to build a trustless financial system is a quixotic undertakin…
It only requires us to trust the legal system
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Doesn't solve a problem that average american has right now . The key feature of crypto currency (to me) has always been that it can't be easily manipulated by a government. Specifically with bitcoin, were it not so expensive and have such high fees, it could be of real use in countries with hyperinflation and black markets (Venezuela, Zimbabwe, etc). Hopefully bitcoin and the myriad of alt-coins can fill the gap. On…
But it can absolutely be easily manipulated by a government. Governments have the resources to pump/dump coins, buy huge amounts of mining hardware, etc. Even a smaller nation state could, if it wanted to waste the money, launch a 51% attack against Bitcoin or any other cryptocurrency by just buying enough mining hardware. Beyond direct manipulation you have the ability of competent intelligence agencies to execute m…
Current estimates rate the cost of a 51% attack at approximatly 4.656.671.184$ for hardware only which is not a sum which even large countries will have easy (and certainly not unnoticed) access to.
This estimate is based on the current hash rate at 14.975.580.960 GHash/s and the fastest mining hardware available which is the AntMiner S5+ at ~2300$ with a hashrate of 7.722 GHash/s. That means you'll need about ~1.939.340 AntMiners which will consume 3436W each. At an electricty cost of 0.05ct/kwh (this is china, US is at about ~0.20ct/kwh) this gives you an additional cost of ~7.996.185$ per day not factoring in any labor/location costs and most notably no cooling costs which will be high with this kind of high performance asic.
This estimate only holds true though if you buy every bit of hardware yourself, in reality its probably more practical to simple coerce big mining pool owners to work for you, but thats another problem :)
edit: relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/538/