561–570 of 659 posts
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To be fair, people could also stop thinking gold is worth much. Maybe a modern-day alchemist finally figures out the formula. I don't know. Probably far less likely than the Bitcoin scenarios though.
Or asteroid mining
It is amazing the number of shallow comments shouting doom and gloom over news like this and others (Steam, etc). Must be the end of Bitcoin because transaction fees are too high! And more generally everyone shouting doom and gloom over high transaction fees. Let's stop and think about this critically for once. Transaction fees on Bitcoin are high. And that's somehow a bad thing? By that same logic it's bad that Appl…
"Fees are good!" from an account named "fpgaminer" is a bit on the nose, don't you think?
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If your payment is denominated in BTC, you can't pay it with BCH even though they're a fork of the same blockchain. BTC proper is scarce, regardless of how many times the chain is forked.
The distinction between "BTC" and "BCH" (and "BTCS" and "BCD" and so on ad infinitum) is cultural convention. There's no inherent technical merit (or alchemical nature) to one ledger over all other contenders, it's entirely a state of mind of its users.
You're right though, cultural convention decides which blockchain is the "real" Bitcoin. Most people are using BTC at the moment, but Bitmain takes payment exclusively in BCH.
This might seem like a semantic quibble, but I think it's important. There will only ever be 21 million BTC, and only ever 21 million BCH. If Bitmain decided to charge 22 million BCH for their latest ASIC miner, nobody would ever be able to pay that bill regardless of how many forks there are.
For a blockchain fork to have any value whatsoever, people need to want to own it. Bitmain ASIC sales are driving demand for BCH. Every other Bitcoin fork is doing rather poorly.
Forks aren't diluting the value of BTC, because people know that BTC is the real asset. Everything else is like fool's gold.
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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.
This reads a bit like the sort of things people say when breaking up so as not to upset the other person too much. You're a great person, but you're just more of an asset than a medium of exchange, and what I need in my life right now is a medium of exchange. What future does an asset have if people don't actually buy stuff with it? That is not a purely rhetorical question; cryptocurrencies change things a lot. But t…
That's a hell of a line to use when breaking up with someone
It is amazing the number of shallow comments shouting doom and gloom over news like this and others (Steam, etc). Must be the end of Bitcoin because transaction fees are too high! And more generally everyone shouting doom and gloom over high transaction fees. Let's stop and think about this critically for once. Transaction fees on Bitcoin are high. And that's somehow a bad thing? By that same logic it's bad that Appl…
I'm sorry, but saying Bitcoin succeeded like the Model S succeeded is an argument that just holds no water to me at all. That makes no sense.
Elon Musk's goal with Tesla was to disrupt the entrenched auto and oil industries, for the betterment of mankind, by spurring a transition to electric vehicles. [This is not an argument for his altruism one way or the other, merely a statement of the company's goals.]
Bitcoin's goal was to disrupt the entrenched banking industry, for the betterment of mankind.
The two goals are thus quite similar, in kind.
My argument is that people saying "Bitcoin is dead because fees are too high" is like saying "Tesla is dead because their cars are expensive."
Tesla has sold 200k cars at $70k+ a pop. That's an indicator of success, to me. In the same way that people paying $0.02/byte to be part of the Bitcoin blockchain is an indicator of success; not an indicator of failure.
The comparison itself is not really important. I chose it merely because Tesla tends to be a darling among VCs and ... well this is Hacker News.
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But only a one-way retail value. No diamond dealer will give you anything close to their retail price, when you try to sell them diamonds.
I always wonder about this when I see films where criminals mastermind a plan to steal diamonds.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightning_Network#History
https://cointelegraph.com/news/lightning-networks-pizza-day-...
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Of course with enough effort and investment you can probably stop many things, the point is whether the increasing marginal costs of enforcement are worth it to the government and society. By that same argument, the US could round up every illegal immigrant and deport them, or every casual drug user and lock them up for life. We don't do that because it'd be ruinously expensive (not to mention immoral) and transform…
I'm shocked at how often tumblers come up on this site. It seems very clear to me that using a tumbler is straight up money laundering.
Imagine if every vendor you made a purchase from with your credit card also received a copy of your entire transaction history with that card. The mafia run business, the fetish porn shop, the megacorp, the government agency.
While it wouldn't be that easy to connect a wallets previous transactions to the real world sources, the more people use it, the more incentive there would be for databases/services to grow mapping wallets to people/companies. Just like the services now where you can provide an email address and get the persons full details.
And that transaction history is out there forever, to keep re-analysing as more wallet data is discovered.
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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…
Thats around the world, not in one town/city