The Bitcoin Apocalypse Is Coming in Mid-November • Hacker News Board

Re: The Bitcoin Apocalypse Is Coming in Mid-November

#111

Post by DennisP » Sat, Oct 07, 2017, 1:28 PM UTC

kbaker wrote: post #39

RyanShook wrote: post #12

I disagree with this logic. Plenty of people said that SegWit was going to cause issues and it didn’t. If Bitcoin fails it will be from external market pressures, not internal politics.

SegWit was an upgrade though, this is more like a coup. SegWit2x is basically the mining faction stealing the network away from the Core development group, forcing everyone in Bitcoin to switch software if they still want their transactions confirmed. Not that I really disagree with them - as _something_ needed to happen, as demand (whether real or manufactured) has led to 100% full blocks for months, resulting in lo…

The "mining faction" is just carrying out the governance model described in Satoshi's Bitcoin paper:

"The proof-of-work also solves the problem of determining representation in majority decision making. If the majority were based on one-IP-address-one-vote, it could be subverted by anyone able to allocate many IPs. Proof-of-work is essentially one-CPU-one-vote. The majority decision is represented by the longest chain, which has the greatest proof-of-work effort invested in it."

https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf

Just because one group of devs calls themselves the arbitrators of all things Bitcoin doesn't make it so.

Re: The Bitcoin Apocalypse Is Coming in Mid-November

#112

Post by olegkikin » Sat, Oct 07, 2017, 1:29 PM UTC

Flowdalic wrote: post #80

toomim wrote: post #75

This author confuses a hard fork for a github fork : > The bitcoin chain has been hard-forked at least five times, [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_bitcoin_forks Ouch! Those aren't hard forks— they are forks of the github repo! In reality Bitcoin has only been hard-forked twice. Once, to fix the bug as described in BIP 50, and once for Bitcoin Cash. Here's a better resource: http://homepages.cs.ncl.ac.uk…

A common mistake made by "self-appointed" bitcoin experts and IMHO a good indicator for more red flags. > On one side are those who believe that Bitcoin is … money, currency, …. On the other side are those who believe that it is a commodity, …. That is the other red flag: Trying to construct two different exclusive camps. This goes along with not mentioning the Lightning Network (LN). Some people still don't see that…

LN has been vaporware for a long time, and it's always 18 months before it's ready. Recently the developers openly admitted they don't know how to scale it beyond 10000+ channels, because they don't know how to solve distributed routing.

https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/719vis/lightning_dev_t...

https://medium.com/@jonaldfyookball/mathematical-proof-that-...

Re: The Bitcoin Apocalypse Is Coming in Mid-November

#113

Post by mrb » Sat, Oct 07, 2017, 1:40 PM UTC

solotronics wrote: post #73

mrb wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A block size increase is in fact very urgently needed. 99% of blocks are maxed out at ~4M weight DESPITE segwit, because segwit's adoption is too low (7%). Adoption isn't happening faster not because it's unneeded, but because of inertia among wallet developers. Consequently, full blocks and high fees have caused Bitcoin to lose many users to alts (LTC, ETH, ETC, DASH...) All this user loss and tx market loss has bee…

the only reason the blocks have bene full is from malicious actors filling the blocks with nonsense transactions ( miners pumping fees, and seditious big blockers trying to dissolve core )

No. It's a myth that keeps being repeated. Check the "Moby Dick" spam report: attacks stopped in Jan 2017. Since then tx growth is purely legitimate. Or use common sense: consider that 5000 BTC are paid in tx fees per month... no one pays $20 MILLION a month just to be able to say "hey look blocks are full".

Re: The Bitcoin Apocalypse Is Coming in Mid-November

#114

Post by mrb » Sat, Oct 07, 2017, 1:48 PM UTC

wpietri wrote: post #67

justboxing wrote: post #3

> I am fully cognizant of the perils of making bearish predictions about new technology. > But, to quote another well-worn and wholly unreliable aphorism, this time it's different. It really is. and >... because the only other alternative is chaos, and probably the end of the whole Bitcoin experiment. I'm very much a Bitcoin skeptic, but, I'm not sure this time is different, or that Bitcoin will die. For the last 8 y…

In one sense, it's already dead. In theory, Bitcoin is supposed to be a payment system, digital cash. But that seems to be pretty much dead. Consider the opinion of Fred Wilson, a big Bitcoin booster, who has stopped using it for payments: http://avc.com/2017/08/store-of-value-vs-payment-system/ Merchant acceptance is actually in retreat: http://www.businessinsider.com/merchants-arent-accepting-bit... It is still bei…

«Merchant acceptance is actually in retreat»

Wrong. Bitcoin payments processors report growth, eg. BitPay processes $1 billion in payments per year, up 328%! https://blog.bitpay.com/bitpay-growth-2017/

The source you quoted is laughably bad: it tries to estimate payment growth by looking at how many of 500 retailers accept Bitcoin. That's like saying "out of 500 persons only 3 own (not bought) a Porsche this year compared to 4 last year, so worldwide Porsche sales are down."

Re: The Bitcoin Apocalypse Is Coming in Mid-November

#115

Post by VarFarYonder » Sat, Oct 07, 2017, 1:52 PM UTC

chrisco255 wrote: post #46

Alex3917 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The current price of Bitcoin is mostly driven by the fraud taking place within the Ethereum ecosystem. Let's see where the price is after a few rounds of SEC crackdowns.

It would suffer a temporary drop then inevitably climb back up again. Bitcoin is global at this point. No one jurisdiction is going to shut it down.

> Bitcoin is global at this point. No one jurisdiction is going to shut it down.

Especially as countries like Japan are embracing cryptocurrencies. That must make other countries wonder whether trying to attack cryptocurrencies will end up leaving them at a competitive disadvantage.

Re: The Bitcoin Apocalypse Is Coming in Mid-November

#116

Post by sanxiyn » Sat, Oct 07, 2017, 1:58 PM UTC

tfha wrote: post #63

kbaker wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just for some balance, the Hong Kong Agreement (which is absent from the article) is really important in this timeline - in Feb 2016, an agreement was reached with miners and signed by a few Core devs (however, possibly under duress?) to work on Segwit _and_ a safe hard fork. The NYA happening with a few CEOs "behind closed doors", was pretty much a result of the year and a half of no progress on the safe hard fork p…

I believe the core devs agreed to make a proposal, and then the proposal got rejected by the other devs.

Is the proposal publicly available somewhere?

Re: The Bitcoin Apocalypse Is Coming in Mid-November

#117

Post by xorcist » Sat, Oct 07, 2017, 2:03 PM UTC

DennisP wrote: post #104

xorcist wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> block size increase is in fact very urgently needed [...] segwit's adoption is too low (7%) 7% in two months . What kind of adoption had you expected? Everyone won't switch over night, that's the whole problem behind why flag dates in distributed systems are hard, and why many people adocate backwards compatible changes whenever possible. > if Core simply agreed to double the block size Core is the name of the Bitc…

Ethereum has pulled off several hard forks, which they ran within weeks of finalizing the software. There's no reason Bitcoin couldn't do the same, especially for non-contentious forks.

Absolutely, and Bitcoin sort of had too. That knowledge isn't very helpful for managing changes today unfortunately. Today people actually buy stuff for Bitcoin and it's not very helpful to ask all economic activity to cease until a fork has settled down.

None of this is very relevant to the uptake of segwit transactions however, unless as a what-if scenario had segwit been done as a hard fork instead. That was the original intent of the proposal, if I remember correctly, and there was a lot of discussion at the mailing list exactly how this should best be deployed. Looking back at it, it is quite clear it could have been deployed quicker had another mechanism been chosen.

Re: The Bitcoin Apocalypse Is Coming in Mid-November

#118

Post by sidko » Sat, Oct 07, 2017, 2:04 PM UTC

haywirez wrote: post #109

xTrader wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But inevitably, people die, and the knowledge of their private key with them, removing bitcoins from circulation. The amount of bitcoin will therefore decrease impredictably Maybe a bit late, but you finally understood why Bitcoins get more valuable over time: their number grows slowly or maybe decreases, while the number of people wanting them increases. That's why Bitcoin is the best Store Of Value ever devised.

People also don't appreciate that Bitcoin is infinitely divisible, so the total numbers are meaningless. At the same time, inflation is super low and decreases over time, giving it more and more edge over nation-state currencies.

Bitcoin is NOT infinitely divisible. Each Bitcoin is divisible into 10^8. There were reasons to choose this number and isn't arbitrary [1].

[1] https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/31933/why-is-bit...

Re: The Bitcoin Apocalypse Is Coming in Mid-November

#119

Post by pointsphere » Sat, Oct 07, 2017, 2:06 PM UTC

espadrine wrote: post #76

wpietri wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In one sense, it's already dead. In theory, Bitcoin is supposed to be a payment system, digital cash. But that seems to be pretty much dead. Consider the opinion of Fred Wilson, a big Bitcoin booster, who has stopped using it for payments: http://avc.com/2017/08/store-of-value-vs-payment-system/ Merchant acceptance is actually in retreat: http://www.businessinsider.com/merchants-arent-accepting-bit... It is still bei…

It was set to die by design. Bitcoin has a predetermined graph of coin production with time that converges soon. In 2022, 90% of all bitcoins will be produced, and the ideal inflation will be lower than most fiat currencies. But inevitably, people die, and the knowledge of their private key with them, removing bitcoins from circulation. The amount of bitcoin will therefore decrease impredictably All in all, it will b…

Yes, the number of coins in circulation decreases over time.

But the precision can be increased from the current 8 decimals. Even if all but 1 Satoshi/0.00000001 BTC is lost, it could still be split into smaller units, or used to bootstrap a chain with higher precision. It can be fixed as required.

Volatility decreases as the number of users and therefore liquidity increases. It should decline further with rising use of the network for payments instead of a pure store of value.

I agree that "viability as a payment system" is where Bitcoin is stuck right now, but scaling the system is the stated goal of all current Bitcoin developer groups. One of them will get it right eventually.

Re: The Bitcoin Apocalypse Is Coming in Mid-November

#120

Post by invesari » Sat, Oct 07, 2017, 2:12 PM UTC

justboxing wrote: post #3

> I am fully cognizant of the perils of making bearish predictions about new technology. > But, to quote another well-worn and wholly unreliable aphorism, this time it's different. It really is. and >... because the only other alternative is chaos, and probably the end of the whole Bitcoin experiment. I'm very much a Bitcoin skeptic, but, I'm not sure this time is different, or that Bitcoin will die. For the last 8 y…

While bitcoin is no longer a good currency, it's still the best store of wealth - the crypto version of gold, due to massive PoW mining infrastructure.

While other cryptocurrencies may give you near perfect anonymity or sub-second transaction times with no fees, none of them are so secure and dependable.