131–140 of 222 posts
Any Cryptocurrency used by banks or finance companies will be behind locked doors without public trading and no media will be involved if they are smart.
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No offense, but could you and the other people mentioning other chains in subthreads not do that? These threads just turn into ad pages and nobody has the ability to know what advice is valuable and what is just shilling. These claims have been made about every altcoin/feature since 2009. There's too much baseless hype. You guys want me to buy Raiblocks, Plasma, or Omise Go? Are you sure the devs know what they are d…
RaiBlocks is highly relevant to mention here since it's the only coin solving these very problems while still being decentralized.
Bitcoin is not remotely usable as a currency now. The fees are incredible, the confirmation times ridiculous. We need to move on to something more modern like Ethereum, Stellar Lumens, etc. immediately. Asking the current 1 mb blocksize version of Bitcoin to be a currency is like Goldman Sachs writing a report saying they want to run their website on Intel 486 processors. They mention Zimbabwe moving to it as an alte…
A currency does not have to be its own payment system. Not exclusively, anyway.
Hell, before bitcoin came out, the two concepts were entirely different things. It seems that everyone is quick to forget about this when dissing bitcoin.
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Ethereum has already surpassed Bitcoin’s transaction thoroughput and yet features significantly lower confirmation time and transaction cost.* Bitcoin core has made significant technical decisions that has hampered the project in these two areas. *Source: https://themerkle.com/bitcoin-vs-ethereum-transaction-throug...
While technically Ethereum's ~15tx/s is an order of magnitude more than Bitcoin's 7x max, that's not really what I had in mind, they're effectively equivalent in relation to where they need to be (hundreds or thousands/sec). And as expected Ethereum's tx cost is increasing with usage too. And Vitalik to his credit is clear that Ethereum still has significant work to do on this front: https://techcrunch.com/2018/01/15…
1 block per 10 minutes with 4000tx per block results in 7tx/s ... well, why not use blocks of 100x size for starters, that would immediately produce 700tx/s. Still not VISA, yet that would be at least something. The main reason it is not going to happen is probably that that the major Bitcoin stakeholders are completely satisfied with the current situation where they are collecting higher and higher fees (reaching 10BTC+ per block!).
The main promise of Bitcoin - the scarcity of coins - has even been much more exceeded by the scarcity of transaction slots.
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> There is no intrinsic value in gold. Or any other thing. The only value things have are the exchange and use values humans imbue them with. Your definition of “intrinsic value” does not match that of standard economic terminology. Gold has intrinsic value beyond speculation because it can be used for industrial supplies and because it’s a well-liked jewelry item. Extrinsic value contributed by speculation can drive…
> Your definition of “intrinsic value” does not match that of standard economic terminology. I am well aware of that—because using standard economic terminology in this case, that of ascribing the property of intrinsic value to gold, is dead wrong . It’s both a misuse of language and a confusion of terms. Value is a thing agents ascribe to objects; in economic theory, it is a measured result of social relations. It i…
And then I will buy the entire supply of gold and abuse my market power to force manufacturers to pay exorbitant prices and become a billionaire.
Why? Because even if all the speculators have left people still want jewelry and corrosion resistant metals.
Bitcoin is not remotely usable as a currency now. The fees are incredible, the confirmation times ridiculous. We need to move on to something more modern like Ethereum, Stellar Lumens, etc. immediately. Asking the current 1 mb blocksize version of Bitcoin to be a currency is like Goldman Sachs writing a report saying they want to run their website on Intel 486 processors. They mention Zimbabwe moving to it as an alte…
It has never been the goal of bitcoin. The original Satoshi paper rather implies the "unbank the banked" objective which is to remove corrupt middleman.
If you think bitcoin would make a good currency, ask yourself what happens if you have any debts, lease or mortgage denominated in bitcoin. At least hyperinflation wipes out debts, in hyperdeflation some people become millionaires and others owe millions based on whether you had positive or negative money at the start.
Exactly. Ask people in Italy or Greece whose banks made them take out mortgages in Euro.
Now, IF we exited the euro, devalued our currency, but my mortgage was still in euro, THEN I would be screwed...
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On-chain scaling is not sustainable. If you want to handle as many transaction as for example Visa, you would need 1 GB blocks every 10 minutes, which would make the whole blockchain heavily centralized because regular users won't be able to host full nodes to validate payments. About "adopting" and increasing block size. I think most developers agree that we would need to increase it at some point, but I believe cor…
Not sure why you and the other person mentioning lightning have been downvoted. I’ve noticed increasingly it’s not possible to have reasonable discussion about bitcoin on hacker news. It seems the folks from /r/btc have found this place.
Because it's a ridiculous proposition. Just opening and closing a channel will require a transaction on-chain, with the accompanying fees.
And if someone sends you coins, you can only spend them if there's a route to whoever you want to pay, otherwise you have to close the channel....and again pay the damn fee.
Lastly: it's not even a network. A network implies that there are multiple connected nodes, and AFAIK the number of merchants using LN in production is exactly zero.
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But we don't all agree on the price of bitcoin and I don't see why we would just because it's rare.
I don’t think it’s just the rarity. It’s also trustless, secure and easy to transfer. For ex, with gold, you’d have to carry blocks of it to move it around. And even then, you’d still don’t exactly trust it’s source 100% unlike bitcoin, where everything is in the ledger.