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The Bitcoin Apocalypse Is Coming in Mid-November

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Re: The Bitcoin Apocalypse Is Coming in Mid-November

#141

Post by psyc »

DennisP wrote: post #139
psyc wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ch…

This is all true. The way I think about it is this would be just like any other 51% attack, except that the motivation is specifically to compete by killing the former network. But game theoretically, it's still an attack, not a valid way to achieve consensus. So, as you say, the correct response is for the original network to hard fork.

To be clear, I'm not saying 2X is itself an attack (IMO, awfully close to crossing the line, though). I'm assuming that in your scenario, some mining faction is spending part of its compute on running 2X, and part on explicitly 51% attacking the original network.

Re: The Bitcoin Apocalypse Is Coming in Mid-November

#142

Post by wpietri »

mrb wrote: post #134
wpietri wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The largest 500 retailers is an excellent representation of the largest 500 retailers. I think it's also a fine proxy for mainstream ecommerce.

That's certainly a metric that Bitcoin advocates would have been happy with, say, 5 years ago. Then they were agitating for major retailers to accept it as the obvious coming thing.

The fact that new major merchants are not joining and old merchants are going to the trouble of taking it out is a sign that earlier vision was flawed.

Re: The Bitcoin Apocalypse Is Coming in Mid-November

#143

Post by Flowdalic »

olegkikin wrote: post #112
Flowdalic wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-...

That is a very pessimistic view on the current state of LN. There are three independent open-source LN implementations [1, 2, 3] out there that are being worked on and already implement basic functionality. All three contribute to an document, called Basics Of The Lightning Network (BOLT) [4], which forms an open standard for LN.

I wouldn't call it vaporware. Yes, there are unsurprisingly open questions. But nothing which can't be solved.

1: https://github.com/lightningnetwork/lnd 2: https://github.com/ACINQ/eclair 3: https://github.com/ElementsProject/lightning 4: https://github.com/lightningnetwork/lightning-rfc

Re: The Bitcoin Apocalypse Is Coming in Mid-November

#144

Post by cirgue »

xTrader wrote: post #100
espadrine wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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.

Deflationary assets can be good investments but are terrible mediums of exchange. The Fed has an inflation target and not a deflation target for a reason. Or did I miss the sarcasm here?

Re: The Bitcoin Apocalypse Is Coming in Mid-November

#145

Post by wpietri »

alexasmyths wrote: post #105
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.

"their number grows slowly or maybe decreases, while the number of people wanting them increases." Yes - you are right to point out that as BTC's disappear, it's not such a bad thing. But why do you assume people would continue wanting them? "That's why Bitcoin is the best Store Of Value ever devised." It's currently one of the worst 'stores of value' possible. It's massively volatile, and inherently risky: governmen…

I'm not sure why this is being downvoted. It seems spot on to me. People argue that Bitcoin is a great investment because it's going to go up, up, up! And people argue that it's a good store of value. But they can't both be true.

Reward and risk are strongly related. Nobody should know that better than startup people.

Re: The Bitcoin Apocalypse Is Coming in Mid-November

#146

Post by kbaker »

sanxiyn wrote: post #116
tfha wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

https://medium.com/@bitcoinroundtable/bitcoin-roundtable-con...

Re: The Bitcoin Apocalypse Is Coming in Mid-November

#147

Post by olegkikin »

Flowdalic wrote: post #143
olegkikin wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-...

That is a very pessimistic view on the current state of LN. There are three independent open-source LN implementations [1, 2, 3] out there that are being worked on and already implement basic functionality. All three contribute to an document, called Basics Of The Lightning Network (BOLT) [4], which forms an open standard for LN. I wouldn't call it vaporware. Yes, there are unsurprisingly open questions. But nothing…

In the broad terms, how do you even imagine LN to work? Let's say I want to buy a $3 coffee at some random Starbucks I'm walking by. Do we have to first open and fund the channel? How much will it all cost just for that one off purchase?

Give particular figures please, no vague nonsense I hear all the time.

As for these implementations, I will believe it when I see it. You didn't even try to address the particular issue I mentioned.

Re: The Bitcoin Apocalypse Is Coming in Mid-November

#148

Post by mrb »

wpietri wrote: post #142
mrb wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The largest 500 retailers is an excellent representation of the largest 500 retailers. I think it's also a fine proxy for mainstream ecommerce. That's certainly a metric that Bitcoin advocates would have been happy with, say, 5 years ago. Then they were agitating for major retailers to accept it as the obvious coming thing. The fact that new major merchants are not joining and old merchants are going to the trouble o…

The largest 500 retailers are a poor representation of all retailers. Especially because Bitcoin tends to be more often accepted at small—as opposed to large—retailers.

And again the sample size is way too small. Two (2!) retailers dropping it means nothing, in particular because other larger more significant data points contradict this small sample size: BitPay doing 1B/yr at +328% growth... hardly a sign the "vision was flawed".

Re: The Bitcoin Apocalypse Is Coming in Mid-November

#149

Post by kbaker »

awemany wrote: post #93
kbaker wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> SegWit2x is basically the mining faction stealing the network away from the Core development group That language is very revealing: It never belonged to 'the Core development group' in the first place.

That is technically true, but the Core group has been stewarding Satoshi's original client since the genesis block. So a switch to another code base (even if it is a semi-recent code fork) is still a major event in Bitcoin's history.

Re: The Bitcoin Apocalypse Is Coming in Mid-November

#150

Post by alexasmyths »

wpietri wrote: post #145
alexasmyths wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"their number grows slowly or maybe decreases, while the number of people wanting them increases." Yes - you are right to point out that as BTC's disappear, it's not such a bad thing. But why do you assume people would continue wanting them? "That's why Bitcoin is the best Store Of Value ever devised." It's currently one of the worst 'stores of value' possible. It's massively volatile, and inherently risky: governmen…

I'm not sure why this is being downvoted. It seems spot on to me. People argue that Bitcoin is a great investment because it's going to go up, up, up! And people argue that it's a good store of value. But they can't both be true. Reward and risk are strongly related. Nobody should know that better than startup people.

"I'm not sure why this is being downvoted. It seems spot on to me. "

Bitcoin is a religious subject among the tech crowd.

The most fascinating thing about BTC has nothing to do with 'block-chain' - it's the manner in which it has created hype among tech circles.

Techies look at it from a tech perspective, financial types from a financial perspective.

From a financial perspective, BTC is downright bizarre. Even the 'threat of disruption' aside, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense.

But from a tech perspective, is uber-cool.

So it's hard to have a discussion about BTC because almost nobody talks about it as a financial instrument - it's always about tech.

The amount of systematic hype is surreal - constant streams of articles etc. etc..

It's going to get bigger before it gets smaller as the hype is just starting to reach mainstream.

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