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

Re: The Bitcoin Apocalypse Is Coming in Mid-November

#131

Post by ethn » Sat, Oct 07, 2017, 3:26 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…

Beyond what olegkikin mentions, the Lightning Network requires you to put stake (the total amount of bitcoin that can be used within those off-chain transactions). The illiquidity opportunity costs of that stake is greater than any value that the LN provides. There's a reason why we don't use pawn shops to buy groceries every week. Further, there isn't really a use case where you want to put some money at stake to do some transactions really quickly. Also, as Nakamoto† mentioned before, you can determine if a transaction is valid with very high probabilistic guarantee within a few seconds (with less risk than credit cards) without any change to the current network.

If for some reason you don't believe that, then there will always exist credit card companies that could provide instant transactions with guarantee as a middle man. Alternatively, there exists solutions like BitNotes.

†https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=423.msg3819#msg3819

Re: The Bitcoin Apocalypse Is Coming in Mid-November

#132

Post by wpietri » Sat, Oct 07, 2017, 3:28 PM UTC

mrb wrote: post #114

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…

« 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 c…

No, they are looking at merchant growth by looking at use among top retailers. It's a perfectly fine metric if what you care about is daily consumer use for common transactions.

If you're saying, as the blog post says, that it's getting used more for other things than typical ecommerce, that's a different argument.

Re: The Bitcoin Apocalypse Is Coming in Mid-November

#133

Post by wpietri » Sat, Oct 07, 2017, 3:34 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.

Isn't inflation strongly negative? In the link I posted above, Fred Wilson exhibits behavior typical of deflationary times: people hoard the currency.

That's a strong disadvantage vs nation-state currencies, which have clear inflation targets (generally in the 0-2% range) and the ability to hit them. It may be great for speculation, but it's terrible for a medium of exchange. For that, you want the value to be constant or very slightly decreasing.

And I don't think that's fixable. If the Bitcoin supply is limited but those tokens are used in a world of continuous economic growth, then Bitcoin will always be deflationary.

Re: The Bitcoin Apocalypse Is Coming in Mid-November

#134

Post by mrb » Sat, Oct 07, 2017, 3:40 PM UTC

wpietri wrote: post #132

mrb wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

« 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 c…

No, they are looking at merchant growth by looking at use among top retailers. It's a perfectly fine metric if what you care about is daily consumer use for common transactions. If you're saying, as the blog post says, that it's getting used more for other things than typical ecommerce, that's a different argument.

Yes there is a difference between acceptance and payment use. However they extrapolate that it's declining based on a way too small sample size: 2 retailers stopped accepting BTC so they infer global acceptance is declining... That's just ridiculous.

For all we know the JPMorgan report making this claim could be wrong, as it doesn't even list which 500 retailers it studied, and which are the 2 that dropped Bitcoin. I wouldn't expect quality Bitcoin research coming from JPMorgan anyway, as their CEO is staunchly anti-Bitcoin, so their analysts are probably not enticed or instructed to spend that much time and effort studying it.

Re: The Bitcoin Apocalypse Is Coming in Mid-November

#135

Post by tlrobinson » Sat, Oct 07, 2017, 3:41 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…

> stealing the network away from the Core development group

In theory, the "economic majority" controls the consensus rules, not miners or developers. https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Economic_majority

I'm guessing Core will be prepared to reluctantly merge segwit2x's consensus rules and release a new version in the case that segwit2x succeeds. Core wouldn't lose much market share if they act quickly.

Re: The Bitcoin Apocalypse Is Coming in Mid-November

#136

Post by omarchowdhury » Sat, Oct 07, 2017, 3:42 PM UTC

Alex3917 wrote: post #74

omarchowdhury wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's kind of an absurd claim to make. What exactly is your reasoning?

The price is 5x since after the ETH hype started a few months ago. Literally just look at the price history.

Correlation does not imply causation. Did I really have to tell someone on HN this?

Re: The Bitcoin Apocalypse Is Coming in Mid-November

#137

Post by mrb » Sat, Oct 07, 2017, 3:55 PM UTC

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…

The bug behind BIP 50 caused a fork, however the bugfix wasn't a hard-fork. By definition a hard-fork is a fork that require all Bitcoin nodes to be updated. In the case of that bugfix only some nodes had to be updated (the ones run by miners making up a majority of the hash power) then the rest of the non-updated nodes automatically reorg'd to the right chain, the one with the most work.

Re: The Bitcoin Apocalypse Is Coming in Mid-November

#138

Post by DennisP » Sat, Oct 07, 2017, 3:57 PM UTC

xorcist wrote: post #117

DennisP wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 o…

There's no need for economic activity to cease; hard forks can be very smooth. I agree that segwit should have been a hard fork.

Re: The Bitcoin Apocalypse Is Coming in Mid-November

#139

Post by DennisP » Sat, Oct 07, 2017, 4:04 PM UTC

psyc wrote: post #125

DennisP wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 chai…

Obviously, this refers to how automated ‘decisions’ are made by the software, and does not mean that hash power gives you weight in social decisions in the real world. More importantly, there are two levels of decision making that people tend to conflate. Hash power is relevant to 'regular' forks, as the longest chain that follows the rules will be followed. However hash power is not relevant for deciding what those…

I actually have a lot of sympathy with this point of view. But there's a counterargument: if one fork has much greater hash power than another, then the minority is vulnerable to 51% attack from a fraction of the majority. So it's not like we can just ignore mining power, unless we make a fork that changes the hash function.

For Bitcoin, the difficulty adjustment would also need to be sped up, to keep the minority chain from being very slow for a while.

Re: The Bitcoin Apocalypse Is Coming in Mid-November

#140

Post by mrb » Sat, Oct 07, 2017, 4:07 PM UTC

beaner wrote: post #61

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…

> 99% of blocks are maxed out at ~4M weight DESPITE segwit Hasn't been true since July: https://blockchain.info/charts/avg-block-size > full blocks and high fees have caused Bitcoin to lose many users to alts (LTC, ETH, ETC, DASH...) What's the evidence for this? All my friends own btc and alts... but none of them transact in it. They own them only for investment purposes. I don't think anybody is using alts for thei…

As to evidence for users moving from Bitcoin to alts because of full blocks:

The tx rate of ETH, LTC, and other alts started sharply increasing in March/April 2017, which is exactly when Bitcoin blocks reached capacity (~250k tx/day)