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What Bitcoin’s White Paper Got Right, Wrong and What We Still Don’t Know (2018)

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Re: What Bitcoin’s White Paper Got Right, Wrong and What We Still Don’t Know (2018)

#141

Post by bufferoverflow »

formalsystem wrote: post #24

It's important to remember that the main thing Bitcoin needs to maintain is it's monetary policy and you can find it at any time right here https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/blob/master/src/validatio... Anyone can query at any time the total amount of Bitcoin that have been issued without relying on anyone. After downloading the Bitcoin client just run gettxoutsetinfo You can try to guess how many dollars have been…

> I never understood how "But Can I buy Starbucks with Bitcoin" became a meme

Because you've never read the white paper. Which is titled "Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System".

Unfortunately the payment aspect of bitcoin got ruined by the people who decided to lock the block size at 1MB (+segwit). Which resulted in blocks being permanently full, transaction pools clogged, and transactions fees insanely high.

Re: What Bitcoin’s White Paper Got Right, Wrong and What We Still Don’t Know (2018)

#142

Post by xorcist »

opportune wrote: post #122
formalsystem wrote: post #24

It's important to remember that the main thing Bitcoin needs to maintain is it's monetary policy and you can find it at any time right here https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/blob/master/src/validatio... Anyone can query at any time the total amount of Bitcoin that have been issued without relying on anyone. After downloading the Bitcoin client just run gettxoutsetinfo You can try to guess how many dollars have been…

The idea of bitcoin as a store of value and not a currency is a revisionist interpretation that became popular with the blockstream devs around 2017-18 when it became apparent that the bitcoin network was unsuitable for handling payments at scale and had fees too high to be useful for mundane payments.

> 2017-18 when it became apparent that the bitcoin network was unsuitable

That's an extraordinary statement. The scaling aspects of Bitcoin was apparent to everyone involved in the project from the start, including Satoshi.

The limits of an architecture where everyone processes everyone else's transactions should be obvious to anyone reading the whitepaper. It is also the focus of the very first email replies. Few respondents chose to focus on what is possible instead of what is impossible.

Re: What Bitcoin’s White Paper Got Right, Wrong and What We Still Don’t Know (2018)

#143

Post by bufferoverflow »

joosters wrote: post #51
formalsystem wrote: post #24

It's important to remember that the main thing Bitcoin needs to maintain is it's monetary policy and you can find it at any time right here https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/blob/master/src/validatio... Anyone can query at any time the total amount of Bitcoin that have been issued without relying on anyone. After downloading the Bitcoin client just run gettxoutsetinfo You can try to guess how many dollars have been…

You can try to guess how many dollars have been printed or how many bars of gold exist. No-one in their day-to-day usage of dollars (or gold) directly cares how many currency units exist. What they care about - and what is very easy to know, is what the purchasing power of their currency is.

> No-one in their day-to-day usage of dollars (or gold) directly cares how many currency units exist.

I do. Because it affects its value. Why do you think USD is falling against the EUR?

Look at Venezuelan Bolivar or Zimbabwean dollar if you want to see how bad inflation can be.

Re: What Bitcoin’s White Paper Got Right, Wrong and What We Still Don’t Know (2018)

#144

Post by Daniel_sk »

pingec wrote: post #108
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> what bank in the world would charge only $23.46 for transferring $166 M? I have never paid for a wire. I’ve also overseen multibillion-dollar wires for which there were zero transfer fees. If you send and receive wires, get a bank account that doesn’t charge for them. (This is almost every account at e.g. Fidelity or First Republic.) Consumer accounts usually optimise for a different basket of needs than large inst…

Please tell me how to send a 10k USD from US bank account to EU bank account for $23.46 or less. Transferwise is one of the cheapest and it costs $50 USD in fees.

I transfered a few milions within EU banks with zero fees. As long as it’s in EUR and you use IBAN...

Re: What Bitcoin’s White Paper Got Right, Wrong and What We Still Don’t Know (2018)

#145

Post by saalweachter »

lozf wrote: post #135
opportune wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The idea of bitcoin as a store of value and not a currency is a revisionist interpretation that became popular with the blockstream devs around 2017-18 when it became apparent that the bitcoin network was unsuitable for handling payments at scale and had fees too high to be useful for mundane payments.

These days there's the Lightning Network - an off-chain "layer" that enables both fast and small, cheap transactions - perfect for "mundane payments" - and even micro-payments with Bitcoin. It's already usable and still improving. Adoption will grow as the infrastructure continues to be built out. It's still early days for Bitcoin - no one sends AT commands to their modem to get online any more.

Eh, the Lightning Network has been a thing long enough that the appropriate question is no longer "when will it be ready?" but "how much is it being used and for what?" and if the answer is "not much for anything", "why?".

Re: What Bitcoin’s White Paper Got Right, Wrong and What We Still Don’t Know (2018)

#146

Post by dane-pgp »

tromp wrote: post #119
dane-pgp wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Out of interest, what would you say is a reasonable minimum amount of disk space for a user to have to devote to their bitcoin node, such that the number of nodes does not cause significant extra centralisation (over and above the centralisation of mining pools and development teams)?

Only an archive node needs to keep a copy of the entire chain. But every full node needs to download and verify all of it, so it's more a question of bandwidth and time. It would be nice to be able to so within a day.

That's interesting, thank you. As a quick calculation, the bitcoin blockchain recently[0] reached 300 GB which, spread over a day, would require a download speed of 27.8 MBit/s.

For comparison, "the global average download speed on fixed broadband is 85.73 Mbps as of September 2020"[1] so even if block sizes were triple their historic values it would still be possible for average global users to wait less than a day to complete the initial download.

[0] https://decrypt.co/42427/bitcoin-blockchain-grows-to-300-gig...

[1] https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/internet-...

Re: What Bitcoin’s White Paper Got Right, Wrong and What We Still Don’t Know (2018)

#147

Post by seibelj »

raziel2701 wrote: post #137
seibelj wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They also all happened before crypto. But no one spoke about the evils of fiat currency then.

What do I, a regular Joe not interested in buying illegal things, gain from using bitcoin? What's the proposition? Where's the value?

The US government has an absurd amount of debt but neither major party cares and both have plans to explode it even further. As the global reserve currency the US has the ability to debase the value of it far more than any other country before serious pain occurs. But if you want a hedge against runaway inflation, plus the chance bitcoin replaces or at least eats some of the market share of gold, making bitcoin a small percentage of your retirement portfolio makes sense. It may wind up being an outsized portion of your wealth when you retire.

Re: What Bitcoin’s White Paper Got Right, Wrong and What We Still Don’t Know (2018)

#148

Post by TheDong »

Retric wrote: post #124
jhoechtl wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Other blockchains are vastly expanding scalability, as well as eliminating the energy usage. The energy usage combined with proof of work is the backing. If you break that for Bitcoin als is left is trust. The energy used and consumed is like the USD tied to gold (which it is no longer since quite some time)

You can do proof of work based on random memory access for example rather than pure computation. The monetary cost ends up being identical, but it’s much better for the environment.

I haven't heard of this sort of proof of work before. Do you have a reference to it?

If you're referring to memory-hard hashing algorithms, I believe those are just resilient to ASICs/GPUs, but still require significant CPU energy. I'm not convinced those would be better for the environment, so if you're referring to those, do you also have an explanation for why they'd draw relatively less power?

Re: What Bitcoin’s White Paper Got Right, Wrong and What We Still Don’t Know (2018)

#149

Post by mrkramer »

RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #98

I believe BitCoin is one of the very few successful crypto protocols that, instead of being developed in the open, pretty much came out fully formed. In addition, it was developed first as a Windows program. This makes the conspiracy part of me, suspect that BitCoin may in fact have been developed by the NSA to enable moving black ops money around more easily. It was released to the public so there would be enough ba…

Who the hell moves black ops money in open public ledger like bitcoin's blockchain is. It is easier to launder money though banks than bitcoin because bank transactions are not public and hence under less scrutiny. Bitcoin was made by still unknown C++ programmer and computer science enthusiast.

Re: What Bitcoin’s White Paper Got Right, Wrong and What We Still Don’t Know (2018)

#150

Post by geofft »

petertodd wrote: post #33
formalsystem wrote: post #24

It's important to remember that the main thing Bitcoin needs to maintain is it's monetary policy and you can find it at any time right here https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/blob/master/src/validatio... Anyone can query at any time the total amount of Bitcoin that have been issued without relying on anyone. After downloading the Bitcoin client just run gettxoutsetinfo You can try to guess how many dollars have been…

> Avoiding capital controls like in Lebanon I personally know someone whose Lebanese family had food on the table for awhile in large part because of Bitcoin. They aren't even particularly interested in Bitcoin. It just happened to be the thing that worked best for their situation. I live in a Canadian neighboorhood with lots of immigrants from poorer countries. There's a Bitcoin ATM near me that seems to get a decen…

How do they actually use that Bitcoin to buy things of real value like food on the table? That is, if you're a family in Lebanon, what actual steps do you go through, having received some bitcoin from somewhere, to get some flour or chickpeas or whatever in your hand?

Do you exchange the Bitcoin for local currency first (and if so, how) or do you pay the mill or butcher directly in Bitcoin (and what do they do with it at that point)?

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