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Coinbase to Suspend Trading in XRP

reuters.com

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Re: Coinbase to Suspend Trading in XRP

#151

Post by ineedasername »

nepthar wrote: post #122
shawnz wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it is a paradox at all but simply a separation of concerns. I believe government regulation is essential to a healthy economy, but it can still be useful to have methods to store and transact value outside of centralized control in case there is a failure of government. It's kind of like how the fourth amendment makes it easier to commit crimes, but we accept it as a society anyway because it is more im…

I agree. There is nothing to suggest that something can't both behave in a regulatory environment and exist if that environment fails. Cars, for instance - They require registration so long as the body enforcing registration exists. If that changes, cars can still run.

The paradox is in both wanting the cars (well, crypto) alive & function and also not be subject to the regulatory environment, while that environment is alive & functioning. That seems to be the dream of a certain subset of crypto enthusiasts: Widespread crypto that bypasses existing regulations. I don't think it can get to that point. In order to gain widespread adoption, you need on-ramps & off-ramps for people to actually use it. Those are the regulatory choke points for crypto. Like an unregistered car you can drive on your own property, but the minute you take out on the highway you're obligated to play by the rules that govern the highway.

You can't buy crypto without the consent of banking systems that are subject to regulatory frameworks. You can't make a loan payment with crypto without converting it to the local currency, putting it in a bank, and writing a check or ACH transfer or getting the bank to convert it to local cash.

The vast majority of major transaction that require money cannot be done with crypto, and as that changes they will still only be done with crypto by interfacing with systems subject to regulatory structures. That keeps unregulated crypto in relatively small scale shadow economies. Sort of like cash, except cash is more or less dead as a means of making large transactions.

Re: Coinbase to Suspend Trading in XRP

#152

Post by kallewoof »

etrabroline wrote: post #31
est31 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think there are any major implications. The point of blockchain currencies is to be decentralized so hacking a random github repo shouldn't have major implications. It's not even the only bitcoin node implementation out there at this point.

Before wall street involvement there was a single fork of Bitcoin that was a viable currency with low transaction fees. After Wall Street involvement there are at least 3 forks, the biggest of which had fees spiking at 60 USD per transaction making it nonviable for anything but speculators, and the others having very low adoption. The protocol was decentralized but enough of the community that controlled it was bough…

Or:

Bitcoin has an incentive model based on transaction fees. This is currently being "boot-strapped" by a mechanism called subsidy, where miners get "extra" bitcoin aside from the transaction fees.

That subsidy shrinks every 4 years and will eventually be zero.

As we move towards that point, the transaction fees need to be high enough that the miners are incentivized to continue protecting bitcoin.

For regular coffee-style orders, this becomes infeasible; that's why you can use layer-2 (or higher) tech to pay really low fees for each transaction.

As Bitcoin usage increases, we hit new speed bumps -- transaction fees spiking was one of them. While this is the inevitable (for a successful bitcoin) future, there need to be ways to make cheaper payments, but everyone (who's given it some thought, and who doesn't have an agenda of some kind) agrees that permanently storing coffee sales in the blockchain directly is not the way to go, if we can avoid it, and we can.

Re: Coinbase to Suspend Trading in XRP

#153

Post by Barrin92 »

jeofken wrote: post #79
root_axis wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

lol, how do you propose to power your mining rig and connect to the internet without a government?

Assuming free people could not create internet and electricity infrastructure is like an East German assuming free markets could not provide a Trabant alternative

https://unherd.com/2020/12/libertarianism-never-ends-well/

given that free people can't even fend off a bunch of garbage stealing bears I have little confidence that they can get an electricity grid running.

The East Germans were wrong to assume that central planning is very good, they weren't wrong to assume that public governance and central authority is pretty good, which it is.

Re: Coinbase to Suspend Trading in XRP

#154

Post by jeofken »

ineedasername wrote: post #120
jeofken wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Assuming free people could not create internet and electricity infrastructure is like an East German assuming free markets could not provide a Trabant alternative

What exactly are you proposing? Anarcho-capitalism or some variant?

If you follow to it’s end the principle that makes gifts moral but theft immoral, or sex moral but rape immoral, or work moral but slavery immoral, yes you reach “anarcho-capitalism”

Re: Coinbase to Suspend Trading in XRP

#155

Post by FreeTrade »

nullc wrote: post #145
FreeTrade wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Bitcoin's capacity has been limited its entire life, the limits were coded in by Bitcoin's creator. I researched this and found that Bitcoin had no initial capacity limit and that one was added as a temporary spam measure, not as a design choice. When I see misrepresentations like that, I'm more suspicious of everything you've written.

> I researched this and found that Bitcoin had no initial capacity limit That is simply untrue. From the very first version it had two capacity limits, an explicit one ( https://github.com/trottier/original-bitcoin/blob/master/src... ), and a smaller implicit and unintentional one (of about 500k) owing to the maximum locks that could be grabbed in a single BDB transaction. Satoshi later reduced the explicit limit fur…

It looks to me like Satoshi clearly intended for this to be a temporary limit that would be raised over time - https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1347.msg15366#msg153...

>It can be phased in, like:

>if (blocknumber > 115000) > maxblocksize = largerlimit

I did try to have an open discussion on r/Bitcoin, but what I found was that answers to my questions were removed, and even my questions were removed. My conclusion was that that forum existed to push a narrative rather than have an open discussion.

I did see that Adam Back was challenged to a public debate on these issues, which I was very interested to see, and might have found very enlightening. Adam Back refused to defend his positions in debate though.

I've read a lot of your responses in various forums too, and while you're obviously very clever, I do find whenever I dig a little deeper into what you're saying, that you've misrepresented facts to support a narrative.

Re: Coinbase to Suspend Trading in XRP

#156

Post by jeofken »

ineedasername wrote: post #149
jeofken wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Legal != ethical

Ethics are subjective. Asking "Is it ethical?" to a large group of people is little better than asking "Is chocolate the best flavor of ice cream?" Legality is a more concrete and easier to give a firm answer to. If you want to have a reasonable conversation on the internet with random strangers of different belief systems, questions like "is it ethical" go right out the window.

Are you objectively sure it’s subjective?

Ethics must be objective/universal, although cheating it is common and alluring.

Because ethics are universal the rules make sense even for children. It is wrong to lie, steal, rape, and kill, while it is right to honestly tell stories, receive gifts, have sex, and give life. In these words definition lies whether the receiving party partakes voluntary or is forced to.

Legality on the other hand is defined by who controls most guns. If might is right, why should not the strong group genocide the weak?

Re: Coinbase to Suspend Trading in XRP

#157

Post by nullc »

FreeTrade wrote: post #155
nullc wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I researched this and found that Bitcoin had no initial capacity limit That is simply untrue. From the very first version it had two capacity limits, an explicit one ( https://github.com/trottier/original-bitcoin/blob/master/src... ), and a smaller implicit and unintentional one (of about 500k) owing to the maximum locks that could be grabbed in a single BDB transaction. Satoshi later reduced the explicit limit fur…

It looks to me like Satoshi clearly intended for this to be a temporary limit that would be raised over time - https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1347.msg15366#msg153... >It can be phased in, like: >if (blocknumber > 115000) > maxblocksize = largerlimit I did try to have an open discussion on r/Bitcoin, but what I found was that answers to my questions were removed, and even my questions were removed. My conclus…

I feel like you're not engaging in a good faith discussion here. Above you falsely accused me of dishonestly misrepresenting the initial capacity limit. I believe I demonstrated in an objective and indisputably way that you were mistaken. Rather than acknowledging your error about Bitcoin and the inappropriate insult, you've simply changed the subject.

What purpose is there to continuing the discussion if you're going to do that?

> clearly intended for this to be a temporary limit

This is in a thread with him loudly urging people to NOT change it, in a message responding to someone saying that it could never be changed. Saying that it isn't impossible to change something does not mean that it is merely temporary. A concrete retaining wall is permanent yet can still be torn down if people choose to do so.

What do you think of his much later statement that "Bitcoin users might get increasingly tyrannical about limiting the size of the chain so it's easy for lots of users and small devices."?

> I did try to have an open discussion on r/Bitcoin, but what I found was that answers to my questions were removed, and even my questions were removed.

Where? If you demonstrated the kind of apparent bad faith approach you've done so here-- perhaps you should consider that you might have earned it?

If not, you might have just been made roadkill by an overactive immune system-- that subreddit was utterly mobbed by an endless stream of shill sockpuppet accounts arguing a particular agenda. :(

> I did see that Adam Back was challenged to a public debate on these issues

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sealioning But also... who cares what he thinks?

If you wanted to see debate there are literally hundreds of kilobytes on the subject written by people who have been actually involved with developing the Bitcoin system.

Re: Coinbase to Suspend Trading in XRP

#158

Post by jeofken »

stouset wrote: post #129
jeofken wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Assuming free people could not create internet and electricity infrastructure is like an East German assuming free markets could not provide a Trabant alternative

People like that have existed and yet in 100% of cases they’ve been outcompeted by and swallowed up by people who form governments. Funny that.

The same argument was surely made by slave owners since the beginning of history, but westerners managed to abolish slavery, and after that industry was invented

Re: Coinbase to Suspend Trading in XRP

#159

Post by noxer »

pmiller2 wrote: post #78
shawnz wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it is a paradox at all but simply a separation of concerns. I believe government regulation is essential to a healthy economy, but it can still be useful to have methods to store and transact value outside of centralized control in case there is a failure of government. It's kind of like how the fourth amendment makes it easier to commit crimes, but we accept it as a society anyway because it is more im…

What exactly makes XRP worth anything, though? Isn't it theoretically pegged to the USD?

Demand. Just that. And no, its obviously not pegged to the USD or to anything. Price is a direct result of supply and demand. It has value because people pay for it.

Re: Coinbase to Suspend Trading in XRP

#160

Post by haolez »

nullc wrote: post #147
haolez wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not only that. There is also the "replace by fee" stuff that allows BCH to make instant payments with 0 confirmations for small values. This was hinted by Satoshi as well, but was made impossible by the current BTC.

Wow that's super-confused! The original Bitcoin software supported transaction replacement. You could mark a transaction as non-final and then it could be replaced until it got confirmed (potentially gated by its locktime) or until a replacement was made that was marked final. As is necessary in a distributed system, the replacement and non-replacement was best-effort and an older version could be confirmed (or a ver…

Thanks for the thoughtful response. According to it, 0-conf transactions are possible in BTC as well. Why isn't more people using this? It seems safe enough, since attacking such a transaction is probably more expensive than the gains from the scam.
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