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What Bitcoin’s White Paper Got Right, Wrong and What We Still Don’t Know (2018)

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Re: What Bitcoin’s White Paper Got Right, Wrong and What We Still Don’t Know (2018)

#161

Post by formalsystem »

geofft wrote: post #150
petertodd wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Avoiding capital controls like in Lebanon I personally know someone whose Lebanese family had food on the table for awhile in large part because of Bitcoin. They aren't even particularly interested in Bitcoin. It just happened to be the thing that worked best for their situation. I live in a Canadian neighboorhood with lots of immigrants from poorer countries. There's a Bitcoin ATM near me that seems to get a decen…

How do they actually use that Bitcoin to buy things of real value like food on the table? That is, if you're a family in Lebanon, what actual steps do you go through, having received some bitcoin from somewhere, to get some flour or chickpeas or whatever in your hand? Do you exchange the Bitcoin for local currency first (and if so, how) or do you pay the mill or butcher directly in Bitcoin (and what do they do with i…

You would go to an exchange and get local currency or US dollars instead if you need to spend it. But most people I know are just interested in it so they can preserve their wealth by bypassing capital controls. I’m Lebanese

Re: What Bitcoin’s White Paper Got Right, Wrong and What We Still Don’t Know (2018)

#162

Post by BMSmnqXAE4yfe1 »

xwvvvvwx wrote: post #158
BMSmnqXAE4yfe1 wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lightning Network has been in development for a very long time and still doesn't work well enough. For example, payments are not assured to complete, and the probability of transaction failure increases dramatically if transaction value exceeds $100. Fees on LN are also pretty high, on the order of 1-2% of transaction value. Maybe these shortfalls will be ironed out, maybe not ...

Have you tried Breez [1] on ios or phoenix [2] on android? Non custodial mobile lightning wallets have come a long way. Lightning still has some rough edges (async payments) and unsolved issues (spam resistance) but it’s a lot closer to being a convincing private scalable p2p payment network than many realise. [1]: https://breez.technology/ [2]: https://phoenix.acinq.co/

I used LN many times, it works very nice for small payments ... maybe we need another layer 2 network for medium sized payments $100-$10000?

Re: What Bitcoin’s White Paper Got Right, Wrong and What We Still Don’t Know (2018)

#163

Post by wyldfire »

kylebenzle wrote: post #35
slickrick216 wrote: post #21

The fact that every time a blockchain/crypto thread hits HN and many of the responses are talking about time stamps is in itself a bit of a meme. Seems very reminisce of people in ages gone by talking about what was the point for any advances from trains to telegram to the internet. The answer for what to use it for is to make things trust less and decentralized if you can’t see the advantage or limitless possibiliti…

HN hates Bitcoin. I have never seen such a smart group of idiots in my life.

Bitcoin is great, but could be improved upon. Some interesting cryptocoins out there. But there's an enormous amount of dead weight P&D tokens and shitcoins that turn a lot of folks off.

Plus there were a lot of businesses in the 2010s who decided to make some kind of centralized-bit-distributed-conensus version of some thing like supply chain. It's easy to be cynical with so many of these popping up.

Re: What Bitcoin’s White Paper Got Right, Wrong and What We Still Don’t Know (2018)

#164

Post by nyhc99 »

jhoechtl wrote: post #120
DennisP wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact that bitcoins can be transferred is the only reason they have value at all. You have to be able to exchange them for something else or they're worthless. The question then is whether 7 tx/sec really is sufficient to support broad global adoption, even if it's just for savings. Dollars and physical gold have no such limits. Other blockchains are vastly expanding scalability, as well as eliminating the energy…

> Other blockchains are vastly expanding scalability, as well as eliminating the energy usage. The energy usage combined with proof of work is the backing. If you break that for Bitcoin als is left is trust. The energy used and consumed is like the USD tied to gold (which it is no longer since quite some time)

It is hoped among Ethereum enthusiasts that moving from Proof of Work to Proof of Stake in Ethereum 2.0 will solve those massive energy usage problems without introducing vulnerabilities into the system.

Re: What Bitcoin’s White Paper Got Right, Wrong and What We Still Don’t Know (2018)

#165

Post by Barrin92 »

jamisteven wrote: post #96

I just want to know one thing: What percentage of the world population actually uses Bitcoin?

There's about 300k bitcoin transactions happening per day and apparently a few million active users. So about a very small fraction of a percent probably.

Re: What Bitcoin’s White Paper Got Right, Wrong and What We Still Don’t Know (2018)

#166

Post by mudlus »

It definitely was wrong about being digital cash, but it may provide the basis currency for an economy which has a form of cash. Bitcoin could be your savings account, and then there are a plethora of options for consumers directly using their Bitcoin: stable-coins, lightning network, hell even Bitcoin Cash, that work like checking accounts of functions of apps like CashApp and Venmo.

Re: What Bitcoin’s White Paper Got Right, Wrong and What We Still Don’t Know (2018)

#167

Post by stale2002 »

uniqueid wrote: post #117
kneel wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not tax evasion if the hops are non taxable events, and the privacy of wallets enable anyone to deny it. This is why Bitcoin is an existential threat to government power. I personally think it's empowering and great for the individual, however if you tend towards more statist views then this would seem like anarchy.

Many of our governments are liberal democracies. It sounds less positive when you rephrase it like that; ie: "Bitcoin is a threat to liberal democracy" I don't want some drug lord to pump/dump/coerce/tax-evade their way into being the richest person on my continent, and then hire an army to take my nation over. That is easier with crypto currency than it is with fiat. The tech community dropped the ball in the '90s b…

> Many of our governments are liberal democracies.

The liberal democracies are pretty open and positive on cryptocurrencies. So no, it does not seem to be threat to them.

Instead, it is more of a threat to the less liberal countries.

Re: What Bitcoin’s White Paper Got Right, Wrong and What We Still Don’t Know (2018)

#168

Post by textfoo »

xorcist wrote: post #142
opportune wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The idea of bitcoin as a store of value and not a currency is a revisionist interpretation that became popular with the blockstream devs around 2017-18 when it became apparent that the bitcoin network was unsuitable for handling payments at scale and had fees too high to be useful for mundane payments.

> 2017-18 when it became apparent that the bitcoin network was unsuitable That's an extraordinary statement. The scaling aspects of Bitcoin was apparent to everyone involved in the project from the start, including Satoshi. The limits of an architecture where everyone processes everyone else's transactions should be obvious to anyone reading the whitepaper. It is also the focus of the very first email replies. Few re…

Seriously. Like an append, write only database is going to scale.

Contemporarily, lightning is a thing that covers most of the gripes that I've seen above your comment.

Re: What Bitcoin’s White Paper Got Right, Wrong and What We Still Don’t Know (2018)

#169

Post by [deleted] »

opportune wrote: post #122
formalsystem wrote: post #24

It's important to remember that the main thing Bitcoin needs to maintain is it's monetary policy and you can find it at any time right here https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/blob/master/src/validatio... Anyone can query at any time the total amount of Bitcoin that have been issued without relying on anyone. After downloading the Bitcoin client just run gettxoutsetinfo You can try to guess how many dollars have been…

The idea of bitcoin as a store of value and not a currency is a revisionist interpretation that became popular with the blockstream devs around 2017-18 when it became apparent that the bitcoin network was unsuitable for handling payments at scale and had fees too high to be useful for mundane payments.

[deleted]
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