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BTC Endgame

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Re: BTC Endgame

#261

Post by eloff »

heidar wrote: post #239
eloff wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The OP was not taking about the Chinese people, he was taking about China the Chinese government. It was very clear to me reading that, I'm not sure why you're all confused.

The wumao and supporters of the CCP have been pushing this racism nonsense for a while now to try to divert criticism against the CCP. It’s unfortunately very common.

I have seen people doing this and it's deeply annoying to reframe criticism of the CCP as racism. Not everything is about race. I'm deeply annoyed by how much race is becoming a thing in general - that seems like it's going to end up being counterproductive to ending racism. I'm not going to go so far as to say it's purposeful by the CCP. But it could be.

Re: BTC Endgame

#262

Post by tromp »

CyberDildonics wrote: post #256
tromp wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is discussed in this bitcointalk thread [1]. By constraining the block size, bitcoin is developing a fee market where transactions have to bid up the fee in order to be included in the next few blocks. Without such a constraint, transactions would only pay around 1 cent to be included (just to cover network broadcast costs), and it's next to impossible to make up for that tiny fee with a huge tx volume. In the n…

Bitcoin talk is basically propaganda for the lightning network since everything that goes against increasing throughput is deleted. Right now the average transaction costs $25 and the throughput is about 1.5 KB/s (900KB block every 10 minutes on average). The entire blockchain over 11 years takes up about $6 of hard drive space. It is technically trivial for the few people who need to sync with the actual chain of an…

The cost of diskspace is not as limiting as the time needed to do an Initial Block Download, which would become too burdensome with huge blocks. Transacting on 2nd layer makes a lot of sense as txs are instant, more private, and don't need the whole world to download and verify them (except for an open and close). It improves scalability by orders of magnitude

Re: BTC Endgame

#263

Post by ruined »

Hasnep wrote: post #249
ruined wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

why do you expect that? you're talking about tens of thousands of individuals and companies, all themselves invested in bitcoin, being asked (through no existing command or enforcement mechanism) to essentially destroy their own personal wealth. even assuming the chinese state could achieve compliance from 77% of the existing hardware, it would optimistically take several days. the only way around that stumbling bloc…

Remember, China is a country with concentration camps, so they (the CCP) clearly have the ability and desire to do extreme things and convince their people it's the right thing or that it's not happening.

and america has the largest prison population in the world. we still have plenty of people that don't immediately comply with whatever the president says at any moment.

yall act like china is populated entirely by robots. it's a complex society just like anywhere else.

Re: BTC Endgame

#264

Post by CyberDildonics »

tromp wrote: post #262
CyberDildonics wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bitcoin talk is basically propaganda for the lightning network since everything that goes against increasing throughput is deleted. Right now the average transaction costs $25 and the throughput is about 1.5 KB/s (900KB block every 10 minutes on average). The entire blockchain over 11 years takes up about $6 of hard drive space. It is technically trivial for the few people who need to sync with the actual chain of an…

The cost of diskspace is not as limiting as the time needed to do an Initial Block Download, which would become too burdensome with huge blocks. Transacting on 2nd layer makes a lot of sense as txs are instant, more private, and don't need the whole world to download and verify them (except for an open and close). It improves scalability by orders of magnitude

> The cost of diskspace is not as limiting as the time needed to do an Initial Block Download, which would become too burdensome with huge blocks.

The current throughput is 1.5KB/s. Regular users don't even need to sync with the blockchain. Anyone can rent a server for $10 a month that will download the entire chain of the last 11 years in a single hour. What math are you doing where you think the -current- max block size makes sense?

> Transacting on 2nd layer makes a lot of sense as txs are instant

No they aren't, they still have to make it to the main chain.

> more private

Anyone could make a new address and use VPN for each transaction if that's what they want. At least they could if they weren't in danger of transaction fees becoming larger than what is in their address, which essentially disables it until transaction fees go down. Other cryptocurrencies are already much more private if that is what people want.

> don't need the whole world to download and verify them

Very few people actually need to sync with the whole chain unless they want to. Exchanges, payment processors and of course miners. Most people never sync with the whole chain and few of those that do are doing it out of a neccesity. Even so, syncing with the blockchain was never a technical limitation.

There is nothing that a second layer offers that simply using a non-crippled cryptocurrency doesn't already solve. Ethereum and bitcoin cash have already exceeded bitcoin's transaction volume over the last week. Ethereum has had far more transaction volume for a long time now.

https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/transactions-btc-eth-bc...

Re: BTC Endgame

#265

Post by tgsovlerkhgsel »

Robotbeat wrote: post #198
tgsovlerkhgsel wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no strict technical limit on the number of transactions per block. Due to the rising price, each block is currently worth something like $350k. The Bitcoin network rules restrict it to a couple thousand transactions per block. Even with that, each on-chain transaction would "only" need to cost $100 or so to replace the block reward. Infeasible for micropayments, perfectly fine for large scale settlements. An…

A million transactions per block would increase the block size to a Gigabyte or so. That means the blockchain grows at 52TB a year, significantly increasing the cost of maintaining a full node. But even that is really not fully taking into account how expensive transactions would be. The current Bitcoin block size and block rate and transaction size limit the network to 7 transactions per second. There are over 7 bil…

> That means the blockchain grows at 52TB a year, significantly increasing the cost of maintaining a full node.

Indeed, bigger blocks increase the cost of running a full node, but anyone who has a need to run a full node is likely processing many transactions each day, i.e. the increased cost of running a node is nothing compared to the transaction costs.

That's what I don't understand about the "oh, but full nodes will be more expensive" argument. Apparently, you can still run a node on a Raspberry Pi with a SSD attached to it, for a hardware cost of ~$200. That's less than the cost of 20 transactions (bitcoinfees.co, 6 blocks fee ~$12 right now). To me, that seems like the tradeoff between cost-to-run-a-node and cost-to-transact-on-chain has been chosen very poorly.

Re: BTC Endgame

#266

Post by lamontcg »

giantandroids wrote: post #241
lamontcg wrote: post #210

There's a way simpler endgame: We hit the peak of the bubble and people start pulling money out and it unwinds in a systemic bank panic.

That is possible, but it's also possible for any store of value , gold , fiat, stocks..

Stocks are held up because they do have a grounding in the value of the corporations in the broader economy. For their value to go to zero everyone would have to pull out of the broad economy, stop buying manufactured goods and go back to farming their land.

There are a huge number of incentives that make it extraordinarily difficult for people to just wake up one day and pull out of the economy, stocks and USD.

There's literally no such incentives for crypto. Nobody has to buy into crypto or they can't buy food or cars or homes or pay their taxes or anything else. Opting out of crypto is very easy, opting out of the US economy is very hard.

Re: BTC Endgame

#267

Post by kaonashi »

if a nation-state wanted to attack btc, they'd simply make transactions between its currency and btc illegal, and prosecute citizens and exchanges which transact with its citizens

Re: BTC Endgame

#268

Post by altspace »

WJW wrote: post #15
paulgb wrote: post #2

The linked Medium posts have a bit more content https://joekelly100.medium.com/how-to-kill-bitcoin-part-1-is... Note that this is from last July, when the price of BTC was significantly lower and thus the price of the attack is likely higher now. That said, this becomes more feasible in the long-run when mining is purely funded by transaction fees. Something I don’t see talked about much is the fact that, although Bi…

I always wondered about that and perhaps someone here can explain. After bitcoin reaches its "full" volume, mining rewards will go away and the only way miner income can stay the same is if transaction fees rise to match. Since the competition of miners basically converges to "block reward is equal to electricity cost equivalent", this would mean transaction costs increase to an insanely huge amount. Not paying the l…

Transaction fee will go up or value of Bitcoin will rise enormously to keep mining profitable with small Bitcoin reward. I believe it’ll be latter.

Re: BTC Endgame

#269

Post by eru »

dingus9 wrote: post #103
generalizations wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd make a wild guess that when parent is talking about 'control', they mean that if a miner is located within China, the Chinese government has the ability to put a gun to that miners head and tell them what to do.

China would benefit more by confiscating all hashrate & hoarding all of the BTC for themselves before announcing that BTC is their national currency and driving BTC price to millions per-coin. It's just as farfetched and unlikely, but anti-Bitcoiners just keep theorizing about a hostile China takeover crashing BTC price as if it's feasible, without considering the inverse.

The rest of the world can just use a forked BTC, then. (Or use one of the already established alternatives.)

Re: BTC Endgame

#270

Post by eru »

Laforet wrote: post #53
nostrademons wrote: post #17

You don't need a DoS attack under the assumptions of this project. It's already assumed that you control ~80% of hash rate, so you execute a 51% attack that mass double-spends coins and destroy all confidence in the integrity of the currency. Poof, nobody uses it. Note that China already controls ~65% of Bitcoin hash rate, so if they wanted to execute this right now, they probably could. That they haven't is one reas…

How would a hyperinflation on the US dollar cause civilization to stop? In any case, crypto trading since 2017 has been nothing but people buying and selling imaginary ticker symbols on unregulated exchanges. For example, XVG and ETC has been subject to successful 51% attacks more than once and every time the price was hardly affected. And each time the "solution" to deep chain reorg involved the exchanges freezing a…

> In any case, crypto trading since 2017 has been nothing but people buying and selling imaginary ticker symbols on unregulated exchanges.

You can trade regulated BTC futures. (Regulation by itself isn't much of a feature. But it can be a good indicator to see how well something is integrated into mainstream finance.)

> [...] other than a shared delusion of value headed by the bucket shops.

You shouldn't dismiss the original bucket shops like that.

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