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Bitcoin is none of the things it was supposed to be

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Re: Bitcoin is none of the things it was supposed to be

#101

Post by bb88 »

t0mbstone wrote: post #93
QML wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But that was the original goal of Bitcoin — the paper states specifically transaxtions. I personally found it interesting when I bought shoes over Overstock via BTC earlier this year; only problem was my phone didn’t have a default QR scanner.

The original goal was to have transaction fees cover network processing costs, but anyone who does the math can quickly see that the number of transactions allowed by the current block size is an issue, and prevents bitcoin from scaling to visa/mastercard levels of usage. The reason why this flaw was accepted back then was because "space is cheap", and "we can always make the blocks bigger later". Basically, it was a…

> The problem now, is that people are actively preventing bitcoin from evolving.

So an 'evolving' BTC market is not a stable market. Doing something that increases the transaction speed is good, but doing something that changes the fundamental rules is not.

If your income is based upon artificial scarcity, then you're going to be invested in keeping it that way.

Re: Bitcoin is none of the things it was supposed to be

#102

Post by bb88 »

pc2g4d wrote: post #14

The high transaction fees are forcing Bitcoin in this direction. If buying a hamburger cost you $30 in fees on top of the $6 burger, you'd stop using dollars for everyday purchases, too. Seems we're stuck in this situation so long as the block size remains where it is. That artificially reduces the supply of transactions, forcing the price up. No matter how many miners there are competing for those transaction fees,…

> But given the relative failure of forks that increase that block limit, it seems Bitcoin is what it is and other coins will have to pick up that slack.

So here's a question. Should a miner move to a fork that decreases the block limit? Would it be more beneficial or less beneficial for a miner?

Re: Bitcoin is none of the things it was supposed to be

#104

Post by the_gastropod »

lend000 wrote: post #89
pseudonom- wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you give an overview of or pointers to critiques? My prior is that Krugman is more likely to by correct than the average crypto person, even after adjusting for interest in and attention to crypto.

For a celebrated economist, Krugman has a poor grasp of certain facets of economics. It's probably a subconscious way of rectifying his political views, which many of us are guilty of. In this case, he does not understand how Bitcoin can be a store of value, because it is not backed by a government. How come gold or any other commodity has value? Value it what the market decides, not the government. He obviously did…

How are immutability and “full control of funds” intrinsically valuable?

Re: Bitcoin is none of the things it was supposed to be

#105

Post by MBCook »

zbentley wrote: post #69
MBCook wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem I see with that analogy is that Obamacare has been actively undermined at every step by the Tepublican party. Nothing like that is happening to Bitcoin. I think this was all inevitable. How could you make a new currency and not expect all the people who take advantage of monetary systems to move in? I’m not sure it’s preventable.

I think the undermining of Bitcoin's original promise by speculators is just as inevitable as Obamacare's undermining by conservatives. Both are driven by hype. Both are primarily driven by greed ("temporarily embarrassed millionaire" greed, in many cases). Both are aspirational. Both run counter to the cynical "humans will always subvert" narratives of their times. That's not a judgement on either one. Just an obser…

What I meant about undermining is that I don’t think the speculators are out to sabotage bitcoin, it’s a side effect of what they’re doing. When it comes to Obamacare it’s very clear that the sabotage is intentional.

The more I think about it the more I wonder if bitcoin could have ever worked. The way my name works pretty much guarantees a individual or small group would end up with the majority of the hash power if bitcoin was ever actually valuable. And that immediately undermines the peer-to-peer decentralized no one in charge of it aspect.

Without something that disincentiveses people with significantly more cpu power people are just going to run away with it. That kind of seems like a flaw in all of these crypto currencies, even if it’s not CPU power that you use.

Re: Bitcoin is none of the things it was supposed to be

#106

Post by oculusthrift »

coryl wrote: post #96
wott wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> People have never managed software where if you lost your "password", your money was gone forever. They never had to keep a 12-24 word recovery phrase. They've never sent money to addresses that look like hash strings. Their money value was never this volatile (in some countries anyway) and never this complicated to use (understanding and waiting for block confirmations, looking up transactions in the blockchain ex…

I doubt that blockchain was invented by a fresh out of school computer science graduate. The breadth and depth of technical complexity (even if just the white paper) that blockchain covers requires time and experience to accumulate.

more likely an out of touch phd professor (or team of them)

Re: Bitcoin is none of the things it was supposed to be

#108

Post by curyous »

pc2g4d wrote: post #14

The high transaction fees are forcing Bitcoin in this direction. If buying a hamburger cost you $30 in fees on top of the $6 burger, you'd stop using dollars for everyday purchases, too. Seems we're stuck in this situation so long as the block size remains where it is. That artificially reduces the supply of transactions, forcing the price up. No matter how many miners there are competing for those transaction fees,…

This is all fixed with Bitcoin Cash.

Re: Bitcoin is none of the things it was supposed to be

#109

Post by PeterisP »

mirimir wrote: post #103
grigjd3 wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What an awful limitation. I may not want a burger next week.

OK, Bitcoin-backed debit cards.

Who cares about what they're backed with? If it's not bitcoin, then you don't get the benefits of bitcoin.

The only difference between a normal debit card and a bitcoin-backed debit card is that the bitcoin backing layer is more expensive than the usual one.

Re: Bitcoin is none of the things it was supposed to be

#110

Post by PeterisP »

gruez wrote: post #6

>Bitcoin was designed so that users had to take care of their private cryptographic keys for every address they used, and Nakamoto advised making a new address for every transaction. This proved too confusing and burdensome, so along came wallet services, which stored users’ Bitcoins like a bank account and substituted a password for the private key wut? if you used a online wallet, you still had to manage addresses.…

"i don't think anyone realistically thought if bitcoin came along, all the AML/KYC laws around handling fiat will magically evaporate"

I disagree - I've seen and debated far too many people claiming essentially that viewpoint; IMHO it's a naive and unrealistic expectation, but a lot of people did think that.

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