531–540 of 659 posts
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...And gold is a physical commodity with both industrial and consumer product applications.
... and stocks are a legal claim to some percentage of the assets of a corporation. The only things that I can think of that are somewhat similar to cryptocurrency as a "store of value" are things like baseball cards.
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All BCH did was increase the block size limit from 1mb to 8mb. It solves the scalability problems in the short term, but will run into exactly the same issues a year or two from now. Then it'll be 32mb blocks, then 128mb, then 1Gb. An O(n) approach won't work in the long term.
Yet nobody quantifies what long term is. Forgoing a solution that works temporarily, even if only for a year or two, isn't very bright if the alternative is this. Bitcoin is quickly loosing the network effect, the only thing it has going for it vs other altcoins.
A lot of the chatter in this post is about the underlying value of Bitcoin (and blockchain currency generally) as an asset class. I keep telling folks: yes, it absolutely does have value apart from sentiment; holding a blockchain currency gives you access to all the infrastructure built on that product -- regardless of whether that infrastructure is for exchange, or storage, or smart contracts, or whatever. It follow…
Ethereum is so far head and shoulders above other cryptos in the "coolness" factor that it's unreal. Do you realize how many popular tokens are ERC20 tokens?
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Gold as a metal has an inherent value though. If not only for jewelry, it also has important uses in electronics. The value associated with bitcoin seems purely sentimental.
This is why I hate the comparison of crypto to gold or any other "value asset'. Houses are lived in. Stocks act as a cashflow for companies. Even if the world economy collapses you can still use a solid gold bar as a blunt instrument to kill an animal and eat it. Cryptocurrencies have exactly 0 secondary uses.
In other words, owning a non-dust amount of Satoshis gives you some useful property. Anything scarce and useful will have value and market will price it. Anything with a price and good properties to become means of exchange, unit of account or store of value could under some circumstances become a form of money.
Similar as with gold. You can use it in electro-industry. That's its secondary value for people who see value in electronic devices. If you were to explain why gold is valuable in electro-industry to a member of native african tribe, he would not see that value, because electricity and electronic devices is something not considered in his mind. You are in the same boat with Bitcoin here :-)
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I honestly don't know what use-case remains for Bitcoin. If you have large value transactions you'd probably choose something with privacy like Monero, and if you want something cheap and fast, maybe Bitcoin Cash. In both use-cases, you have a few competing alternatives. In no circumstance is Bitcoin preferable to one of the mature alternatives. ...and if no one is using it as a transaction medium, then acting as a s…
Monero is fast as well.
It's nice to see they're still interested in payment-oriented tech in this area, such as Lightning and OmiseGO. Another one to watch out for is RaiBlocks. Currently has a functioning net, featuring instant, fee-less transactions. The thing that's really impressing me about RaiBlocks is the community that's around it - so much community dev effort going into payment adapters and services. People are already accepting…
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https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/bitcoin-transactionfees...
It's a bad idea to use the "average" for a measure of what the fee is "right now". https://bitcoinfees.earn.com/ is a much better source.
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[0]: VisaNet handles an average of 150 million transactions every day and is capable of handling more than 24,000 transactions per second. [1]: 65,000 Transaction messages per second [0] https://usa.visa.com/run-your-business/small-business-tools/... [1] https://usa.visa.com/dam/VCOM/global/about-visa/documents/vi... Also, consider there are other networks like MasterCard: [2]: MasterCard’s 2012 annual report asserts…
Id like to also add that there are an order of magnitude more transaction options provided by cryptocurrencies than there are for fiat payment systems. Id bet money that, collectively, the cryptocurrency ecosystem is able to process more transactions per second than all of the leading fiat processors combined.
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But isn't increasing the block size limit still just a temporary fix? Wouldn't Bitcoin Cash also be rendered useless as a payment system if it was handling a similar volume of transactions as bitcoin?
Arguably not. Based on testing, they're able to handle up to 25 tx/sec without any problems now, compared to Bitcoin struggling with only 5 to 10 tx/sec. And they have only a 8MB block limit currently, but are only using a small fraction of that on most blocks. And they have plenty of room to expand, given that a 10 terabyte hard drive is only a few hundred dollars now. I'm still incredulous that Bitcoin has resisted…
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Gold as a metal has an inherent value though. If not only for jewelry, it also has important uses in electronics. The value associated with bitcoin seems purely sentimental.
So is gold. Most gold ends up in vaults (see [0]), where absolutely nothing is done with it. If we would price it for practical stuff (for it's thermal and electric properties), it would be worth much, much less. Also, gold is not scarce by any means, just expensive to mine. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CTtf5s2HFkA