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Ending Bitcoin Support

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611–620 of 659 posts

Re: Ending Bitcoin Support

#611
post #379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow. The short-sightedness in this comment is astounding. Check out on some of those "advantages" that trusting those thirdparties can mean for you: https://www.google.fi/search?q=paypal+destroyed+my+business&... https://www.google.fi/search?q=amazon+destroyed+my+business&...

You probably should've checked https://www.google.fi/search?q=bitcoin+destroyed+my+business before posting that, considering there's twice as many results as the other two combined. Not to mention things like entire exchanges evaporating...

Not a single link on the first page relates to actual business getting destroyed.

Also, amount of google searches does not mean much. You should know better.

Re: Ending Bitcoin Support

#612
post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

..What? 1. You can't create new bitcoin at any time - not after all blocks are mined 2. Same as bitcoin, Gold needs to be mined. This is basically "conjuring" gold. 3. Wiped cryptocurrency can be returned. 4. Gold can be destroyed as well.

> You can't create new bitcoin at any time - not after all blocks are mined Bitcoin Cash did exactly that. New value was conjured up out of nowhere - Bitcoin didn't drop, and every owner of a Bitcoin suddenly had $2-3k worth of Bitcoin Cash. > Wiped cryptocurrency can be returned. ... What? Are you sitting on a SHA-256 exploit we don't know about?

Bitcoin Cash is not Bitcoin. It did not create new Bitcoin. It created another currency called Bitcoin Cash. Not sure what is so hard to understand from this.

Let me break it up to you again:

1. Bitcoin (In it's current form) has a limited supply. If nothing changes, there will be a time when new Bitcoin cannot be mined anymore.

2. Forking Bitcoin does not mean new Bitcoin is created. You are confusing value and supply. Forking creates an alternative currency (which can be called anything you want) that uses the former ledger of Bitcoin to distribute its initial wealth.

3. It is not a guarantee that addresses with lost secrets will be lost forever. Like you said, SHA256 exploits, or maybe quantum computing would be able to recover them.

Re: Ending Bitcoin Support

#613
post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But what does it matter which one has a larger "intrinsic value"? Both prices are determined more by speculation and group consciousness.

> But what does it matter which one has a larger "intrinsic value"? It matters a lot of part of the reason to invest in them is as a hedge against general collapse of social institutions.

But are you really hedging against the collpase of _everything_ so that we are at a completely primative level. Or do we mean collapse as in another collapse of the world economy?

If you mean the former, then yes, gold is a good hedge. But if you mean the latter, then I would argue Bitcoin beats gold 100x.

Re: Ending Bitcoin Support

#614
post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But what does it matter which one has a larger "intrinsic value"? Both prices are determined more by speculation and group consciousness.

It matters because one is a physical object with static properties and the other is a digital abstraction with characteristics that can change arbitrarily based on network consensus. One is fundamentally a thing that can be looked at and held , the other isn't even a thing you can know you have without consulting a quorum of nodes about the status of the ledger (for all you know, you don't actually own any tokens bec…

But what does that matter in a world where people spend numbers on a bank account, never questioning if the money is actually there or not? I fear you are putting too much emphasis on physical things, as if the quality of being "able to be touched" somehow matters in the modern world.

Re: Ending Bitcoin Support

#615

I've said this elsewhere, but it bears repeating. Bitcoin is capable of handling high transaction volume with low fees. The BCH fork was created to support this case. The BTC chain's devs mostly work for Blockstream, who's business model is to create layer 2 payment solutions, so it's in their interest to choke off the main chain. And it looks like they are succeeding.

A minority of core devs work for blockstream. There are routinely dozens of devs every months comitting to github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin and only half a dozen work for blockstream. Chaincode labs commit more code than Blockstream.

Bitcoin is sound money like gold was a long time ago. MOE is going to happen as a use case, it's just far from being the most important use case.

Re: Ending Bitcoin Support

#616

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think Bitcoin is the AOL of blockchain technology. It was a first mover, it had huge uptake and valuation, but in a few years (or perhaps already) someone is going to build a protocol that is capable of hundreds of thousands of secure transactions a second, and it will make Bitcoin look archaic.

There's a few different ones that have made huge jumps forward; RaiBlocks can apparently do around 7,000tx/s.

Someone did a stress test the other day. Nowhere near 7ktx/s and a lot of nodes started to crash. https://medium.com/@bnp117/stress-testing-the-raiblocks-netw...

Honestly it is scary to see how easy is to launch a DoS attack just by precomputing the PoW.

Edit: Here are some people saying their nodes went out of sync https://www.reddit.com/r/RaiBlocks/comments/7rzlid/minor_str...

Re: Ending Bitcoin Support

#617
post #508

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gold at least has some unique purposes besides a store of value. Over half of it is used for jewelry and commercial reasons, so at worst it can be considered an over-speculated commodity. Bitcoin literally has nothing going for it besides being the current market leader.

Hardly anyone uses gold as a storage of value.

> Hardly anyone uses gold as a storage of value

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_reserve#Officially_report...

Re: Ending Bitcoin Support

#618

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you think the story would end for gold, if it became unpopular and the exchanges closed? You can sell your gold bar, and you can sell your private key. I see them as the same and no, I don't own Bitcoins.

> You can sell your gold bar, and you can sell your private key. I see them as the same and no, I don't own Bitcoins. If there's no support network for your bitcoins, their value is 0, exactly. Even if you assume people stop caring for shiny imputrescible metals, its intrinsic property (of being shiny and imputrescible) pretty much ensures there will always be some demand for gold, and thus it will keep a non-zero pr…

I would say, the intrinsic property of gold is insignificant. Other metals which are naturally more abundant and in a usable shape would have more value, in other words, probably you would get more money by selling your monitor stand than a gold bar, if gold were to lose its scarcity.

Re: Ending Bitcoin Support

#619
post #477

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The lightning network will be far less effective than people are hoping. You have to a) pay to open up a channel with each person you wish to use it, and b) each stake capital in that channel for it to be functional. This is useful only in specific scenarios like exchange-to-exchange transfers. Exchanges are going to be very unlikely to ever set up channels to customers. They haven't even implemented segwit yet, ther…

> You have to a) pay to open up a channel with each person you wish to use it This simply isn't true. You open one channel and then payments are routed over channels to your destination. It's no different to TCP/IP in this way and the reason why that analogy is used a lot in describing the network Having a one channel single destination can be done with Bitcoin alone and the new timelock transactions - the purpose of…

"Getting into Lightning" won't make you money as you might think.

The network isn't a coin as such - merely a way of sending other kinds of coins. Hence it doesn't have a value which could skyrocket making one rich.

I worry that could hamper it's uptake.

Re: Ending Bitcoin Support

#620

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you've been kicking yourself about not getting into Bitcoin early - you have a new opportunity with Lightning now. Why not just delete the rest of your post and just leave this? This once sentence is what really drives all of the rest of your breathless hype. Naked greed. It's the only thing the entire crypto "space" has. Lightning network is pure vaporware. It was "coming any day now" when Mt Gox collapsed. It'…

Bitcoin is the multi-level marketing of millennials.

I don't know how you are not ashamed to state something so stupid.
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