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Bitcoin has died 166 times, so far

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Re: Bitcoin has died 166 times, so far

#141

Post by al452 »

speedplane wrote: post #74
RachelF wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of simple uses I see being put forward for blockchains could just as easily be done by a simple signing certificate. Perhaps, for a new generation, certs are too old fashioned, or many have never heard of their uses?

Most uses of blockchain I see have been put forward by very large companies... but large companies are the least likely to benefit. Blockchain gives you a decentralized source of trust. Large companies (e.g., banks, governments, etc.) specialize in providing a centralized source of trust. I'd think that small banks/financial institutions would benefit far more than large companies. They can confidently share data wit…

You miss the point about trust. The trust issue that blockchain addresses for big banks is not "I'm worried you're a scam that will disappear with all my money". It's "I'm worried that you've not got every single number exactly right and there will diaagreements". Hence it takes 2-3 days in the US to settle a simple financial trade, to allow for multiple batch reconciliations to verify that the information that each party holds about the trade matches up. Using a shared, distributed database to store all this information, instead of every party keeping their own copy, has the potential for colossal efficiency gains. That's why big institutions are interested in blockchain.

Re: Bitcoin has died 166 times, so far

#142

Post by cesarb »

vinchuco wrote: post #65

The sun has risen at least 166 times already, but it is not proof that the sun will rise tomorrow. My point is not to confirm or deny the bear or the bull, but to point out this is simply noise. When are market news reliable indicators of supply and demand?

> The sun has risen at least 166 times already, but it is not proof that the sun will rise tomorrow.

If the sun has risen at least 166 times, the probability that it will rise tomorrow is at least 99.4% according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunrise_problem

Re: Bitcoin has died 166 times, so far

#143

Post by paxpelus »

ship_it wrote: post #64
paxpelus wrote: post #59

Many people on HN are so negative in bitcoin that it seems that they are focused on the tree instead of the forest. This technology can solve the main problem human society faces and this is corruption. Human greed is what keeps bitcoin alive but this is not a bug, it is a feature.

To be honest, Bitcoin in no way does solve corruption. Actually, Bitcoin in current state can only increase corruption in society by giving a sense of anonymity. Political corruption on other hand, might be solved through it, but thats the case we are left to see.

Bitcoin is not completely anonymous. The discussion is not only about Bitcoin or PoW. We found a way to do transactions that nobody can tamper with. We managed to solve a really serious problem and this is that when money is involved people get greedy and corrupt. No human being should be in a high enough position to steal money or tamper the transactions or commit fraud. It is so obvious that distributed ledgers are a solution to this and it disappoints me that the HN community cannot see it.

Re: Bitcoin has died 166 times, so far

#144

Post by SCdF »

drcross wrote: post #123
SCdF wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But dollars, Euro's and all other physical currencies are about to die(soon). Are you seriously suggesting that in 10 years there will no longer any physical currencies? Or is soon 50 years? Or 100 years? Can you give a concrete vision for how that would work? > banks can create as much cash as they like, it's virtual value, not real. No they can't? The government can, but not arbitrary banks. > And again you see t…

>Are you seriously suggesting that in 10 years there will no longer any physical currencies? Or is soon 50 years? Or 100 years? Can you give a concrete vision for how that would work? Physical currency is already less than 10% of currency. >As I understand it, it's more that it's incredibly unstable, and can be taken over by whomever has the most cpus at any given moment. Stability decreases as value stored in it inc…

> Physical currency is already less than 10% of currency.

I got my terminology wrong here. I didn't mean physical currency like notes or whatever, I really just meant currencies backed by a government, £/USD etc.

> It prevents fraud from Governments

Doesn't it just replace it with another form of fraud, but this one without any ability to democratically replace it? Specifically, consensus algorithms that fall over if you manage to own enough computing power?

> You are mixing up a currency with a payment merchant.

Sorry, you're right. As someone who has tried to learn about bitcoin et al and never seen the point, the fact that I have to trust another payment provider for no obvious benefit is where I lose interest.

Presumably in the future that won't be the case.

Re: Bitcoin has died 166 times, so far

#145

Post by wruza »

I assume my question will be lost in comments, but I'll ask it anyway here, because it seems to be very interesting side of cryptocoins. My boss is somewhat educated in economy and routinely tries to model the bitcoin economics. He came to the conclusion that the amount of bitcoin turnover is supported not by regular players, but by country-sized economies like China and probably few other states. Most of capitalization comes from really, really huge amount of money, because there is not so much many money even in criminal activities like drugs, trafficking, arms, etc. Bitcoin is alive not because of blockchain mining and not because of human's freedom, but because it enables to move capitals and gray industry volumes across the borders with no usually defined penalty.

If that is true, there is strict confidence that it's not going away in near future. But that also means that it is surely regulated or at least heavily monitored. Or it leads all of us to such economical crashes that world never seen (and can't just deal with). Idk where it goes and how one evaluates it, do you have any ideas on that hypothesis?

The basic idea that regular people use it for freedom and security is parallel to this one, and is of no interest since the volume of it in ordinary currencies is too low to consider.

Re: Bitcoin has died 166 times, so far

#146

Post by VMG »

Laforet wrote: post #119
VMG wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> [..] there is no 'payment layer' on top of it, only pie-in-the-sky designs. That is completely false. Development of Lightning Network and other solutions by multiple teams has been steady and robust. To cite a few working on LN: * https://github.com/ElementsProject/lightning * https://github.com/acquia/lightning * https://github.com/lightningnetwork/lnd

> * https://github.com/acquia/lightning This project is a web development tool and has nothing to do with crypto. Back to your comments on the state of LN development, I would not call it robust when the current implementation requires every client to monitor the blockchain 24/7 just in case a node attempts to cheat the system, and there is a good chance the cheater will succeed when the settlement layer becomes cong…

Sorry, I was thinking of https://github.com/ACINQ/eclair (probably because of the letters a c q)

Channel monitoring will be outsourced. I did not claim everything was finished, but it is far from pie-in-the-sky.

Off-chain scaling is the only way to scale bitcoin as a day-to-day payment system, and always has been. This must have been clear to everybody from the start.

Re: Bitcoin has died 166 times, so far

#147

Post by cesarb »

notahacker wrote: post #94
fsniper wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In what sense this lists, and bitcoin are different from these? https://trader2trader.co/2012/11/28/list-of-590-dead-currenc...

Well for a start half those dead currencies were replaced with new currencies issued by a different authority and their holders compensated, often at parity. As for the ones that collapsed, they tended to involve dictators and wars rather than people simply deciding they weren't worth wasting time on because nobody was interested in exchanging them.

> Well for a start half those dead currencies were replaced with new currencies issued by a different authority and their holders compensated, often at parity.

Indeed, I see on that list the several Brazilian Cruzeiro/Cruzado currencies. The only difference between each of these and their predecessor is that three zeros were cut: if you had 1000 of the old currency, you had 1 of the new currency. The last of these was replaced by the current currency (Real) at a slightly different rate (2750 instead of 1000). That is, it was more like a renaming than the currency actually dying and being replaced. And there was no different authority in these cases, they were all issued by the same central bank.

Re: Bitcoin has died 166 times, so far

#148

Post by chx »

marcosscriven wrote: post #116
chx wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Trust... someone typed in instead of copy pasting an Ethereum address, made a typo and lost five figures.

Addresses have a checksum for just that reason. It would be remarkably difficult to acccidentally mistype an address that had happened to have the correct checksum, and also be a valid address.

https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/4yru3h/scared_and...

tl;dr: Neither Ethereum nor Bitcoin have address checksums on the protocol level (remember this HN thread here is about trust) but by now all Bitcoin clients decided to implement it. In this case, the exchange used an Ethereum client which didn't.

Re: Bitcoin has died 166 times, so far

#149

Post by sametmax »

Laforet wrote: post #12

And what is the point? Does the price prove that bitcoin has not failed? To me, bitcoin died sometime in 2013 when mining became hopelessly centralised, breaking the economic and security models Satoshi had set forth. The bitcoin thereafter has been a soulness Frankenstein animated by a mixture of ego, greed, and hubris. I don't want to make any predictions, but when the crash comes it will be over before you knew it…

Bitcoin started as a social experiment. When we invested in it at the "5000btc/pizza" time, we did it because we wanted to try something new. Shake things up.

Most of us weren't driven by gain. The last bank crisis burnt everyone. The hackers did what hackers do: trying to find a workaround to this stupid bug. Build a POC for another paradigm.

In that sense, Bitcoin is a tremendous success.

Yes, it didn't become the alternative currency we hoped for, turning into a speculative mess. But boy, shake things up it did.

Bitcoin changed everything. The tech scene. How we perceive money and exchanging values. It opened a new door that will never close, a new paradigm that is changing the way we are living.

It's so new that we see dozens of alternatives, with variation, trying to be the new big things. It's so important people can't stop talking about it to the point it triggers a bubble. It's so influential a gigantic country such as China had to take measures to coerce it. And yet, it's just a piece of code...

Bitcoin was spot on.

Thanks for everybody that took, with all the little guys like me, the time, risk and resources to believe in it when nobody did. When we were mocked for trying. When we were doubting but having so much fun. It was a beautiful thing.

I'm glad to have now the feeling those kind of people will always be around, and that we can always try to build something. Can't wait for our next failure :)

Re: Bitcoin has died 166 times, so far

#150

Post by chx »

WheelsAtLarge wrote: post #43

The reality is that bitcoin has the first mover advantage. Any other virtual currency has a big mountain to climb to catch up to it. 100 years from now bitcoin will be around since there is no one entity that defines it and control it. What the community has shown is that they are willing to adapt to the situation. Right now bitcoin has problems but as time moves the code will be modified. What's happening now is tha…

I am running a , what would you call, reform micro school for the first four graders. Our biggest challenge as educators is that we really have no idea how the world at large will look like in 20-30 years and yet we need to prepare our kids for that (our answer is they need to love learning, the rest will follow). But assuming anything a hundred years out... may I borrow your crystal ball for a few minutes please? I have a few things I need to check.
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