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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)

#151

Post by shajznnckfke »

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…

> Inflation is a vector NOT a real number, any asset that people care about has become generally unaffordable i.e: housing, education, healthcare.

Inflation is not the cause of unaffordability in those areas, the cause is limited supply. Using bitcoin as our currency wouldn’t make more houses, more medical professionals, or less administrative bloat in universities. However, it would probably mean a complete collapse of the economy during times like these when a central bank can intervene to stabilize things.

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

#152

Post by dylkil »

kylebenzle wrote: post #30
petertodd wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the most interesting Bitcoin meetups I've ever been to was in Nairobi, Kenya, where I met a bunch of farmers who had modern, large scale, industrial operations in Kenya and other african countries. They were using Bitcoin to buy supplies like fertilizer and farm equipment, as well as sell their crops, evading border controls in the process. It was a lot safer and less prone to confiscation than carrying around…

Bitcoin Cash is what we call Bitcoin now. Lighting is obvious vaporware nonsense that solves only the problem of how to keep Blockstream in control of the GitHub repo they (Adam Back and Greg Maxwell) hijacked years ago.

bitcoin cash is the real bitcoin, but ethereum is gonna take the throne

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

#153

Post by Spooky23 »

DennisP wrote: post #77
slickrick216 wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“ The question then is whether 7 tx/sec really is sufficient to support broad global adoption, even if it's just for savings. Dollars and physical gold have no such limits.” Yes they do, it takes even longer to move physical dollars or gold around and depending on where and who you are sending them too it might be impossible. Sure in some mainstream cases you can send the digital derivative of gold and dollars to som…

Their latency is high but they are massively parallel. There's no practical limit on global throughput. To get low latency on dollars/gold you have to go with centralized digital representations, but Bitcoin has to do the same to get more than 7 tx/sec. I might still be a fan if that were the only option, but with other blockchains eliminating this restriction I have a hard time seeing the long-term value proposition…

Moving currency around is expensive and difficult, one of the reasons why credit cards exist.

I worked at a retail store that turned over lots of cash — as much as $1M on a holiday weekend. The costs, risks and time associated with dealing with that amount of currency was very real.

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

#154

Post by BMSmnqXAE4yfe1 »

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.

Lightning Network has been in development for a very long time and still doesn't work well enough. For example, payments are not assured to complete, and the probability of transaction failure increases dramatically if transaction value exceeds $100. Fees on LN are also pretty high, on the order of 1-2% of transaction value. Maybe these shortfalls will be ironed out, maybe not ...

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

#155

Post by Retric »

TheDong wrote: post #148
Retric wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Memory-hard hashing algorithms are basically the same idea.

They use less power simply because people are going to spend the same total amount of money in terms of compute hardware + energy, however RAM consumes less energy per per dollar spent on it than ASICs/CPU’s etc.

3W per 8GB of DDR4 is a reasonable baseline. https://www.crucial.com/support/articles-faq-memory/how-much...

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

#156

Post by BMSmnqXAE4yfe1 »

wmf wrote: post #75
trident1000 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also means people can save without needing to be financial wizards to not lose much of what they have over their lifetimes. Keeping what you earn in real terms over a lifetime should not be as complicated as it is today.

Target date funds aren't complicated at all.

There is a lot of young people who think that stocks only ever go up. Wait until the the stock market crashes, and target date funds with it.

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

#157

Post by R0b0t1 »

doopy1 wrote: post #134
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.

Exactly! The first sentence from the original white paper is literally: "A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution." Bitcoin was intended to be MONEY, instead it's pretty fucking useless for anything other than hoarding. I think it will remain an asset class, but history will not be kind to i…

It is money in an important way not shared by dollars: it can't be devalued. Based on current valuation people see this as extremely desirable.

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

#158

Post by xwvvvvwx »

BMSmnqXAE4yfe1 wrote: post #154
lozf wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Lightning Network has been in development for a very long time and still doesn't work well enough. For example, payments are not assured to complete, and the probability of transaction failure increases dramatically if transaction value exceeds $100. Fees on LN are also pretty high, on the order of 1-2% of transaction value. Maybe these shortfalls will be ironed out, maybe not ...

Have you tried Breez [1] on ios or phoenix [2] on android? Non custodial mobile lightning wallets have come a long way.

Lightning still has some rough edges (async payments) and unsolved issues (spam resistance) but it’s a lot closer to being a convincing private scalable p2p payment network than many realise.

[1]: https://breez.technology/ [2]: https://phoenix.acinq.co/

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

#159

Post by ahallock »

joosters wrote: post #53
d4c wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Decentralized finance, which includes lending, asset management, automated market making and fund-raising via tokens. See https://defipulse.com/ for recent growth.

Defi is just the last incarnation of the blockchain-related 'get rich quick' scams, like the ICOs before it. It's proponents think that somehow it generates amazing returns out of nothing. In reality, insiders and cheats are profiting from the gullible. (again, just like ICOs)

It's easier to call everything a scam than actually spend time to learn. There are tons of Youtube channels, Twitter accounts, Reddit pages, Discord/Telegram groups, etc. with all the information. It's hardly "insider" knowledge. Are there scams and pump & dumps? Sure. But if you manage your capital, a few rug pulls aren't going to ruin you.
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