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Bitcoin Is Dead, Long Live Bitcoin

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Re: Bitcoin Is Dead, Long Live Bitcoin

#171

Post by such_a_casual »

bduerst wrote: post #113
StavrosK wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know, have you tried to buy plane tickets with a credit card? It takes me a solid half hour every time, between the "verified by Visa" crap, the merchant not accepting the card and some failure on their system. With Bitcoin, you tap the link and press "confirm". It's miles ahead of any other payment system I know, including cash (because you don't have to be in proximity of the recipient).

>have you tried to buy plane tickets with a credit card? It takes me a solid half hour every time Who exactly are you buying plane tickets from? The last time I bought tickets, it took less than a minute to pay with a credit card. I spent more time searching for a flight with wifi.

Maybe his country has different rules about this sort of thing? Or maybe airlines/credit card companies have different rules for his country?

Re: Bitcoin Is Dead, Long Live Bitcoin

#172

Post by milkey_mouse »

ErikAugust wrote: post #85
snowwrestler wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The problem however is that a nation's currency is arguably the primary source of it's sovereignty. The reverse is also true--any significant currency creates sovereignty by elevating the power of those with the greatest influence over that currency. In the case of Bitcoin, the "core" developers, in addition to the highest-volume miners, have been elevated to the sovereign position. Rather than a distributed statel…

Well, right. One may frame this whole "failed versus not failed" as a power struggle between two camps: a. Those who own a large stake in the original BitCoin - such as the developers, miners, venture capitalists, the Winklevoss Twins, etc. and b. Those who don't own a large stake in BitCoin currently, but wish to own a large stake in the dominant cryptocurrency. Wall Street... When you attack BitCoin on any grounds,…

This is super nitpicky but it's "Bitcoin" when referring to the currency (e.g. "the Bitcoin blockchain") and "bitcoin" when referring to an amount ("0.2 bitcoin"); it's never "BitCoin".

Re: Bitcoin Is Dead, Long Live Bitcoin

#173

Post by saalweachter »

bdhiehihhd wrote: post #156
pbreit wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When it comes to volatility, bitcoin is at one end of the spectrum and every other currency at the other.

This is an ignorant view. Bitcoin is tiny, its measured in billions. How much did the Canadian currency just lose in the last view weeks? That amounts to hundreds of billions of vaporized wealth.

> How much did the Canadian currency just lose in the last [few] weeks?

Huh, that is a really interesting question.

It's not as trivial to calculate as it is for Bitcoin, where you can multiply the moneys held by the change in exchange rate -- essentially no prices as denominated in BTC, while most prices most Canadians deal with are denominated in CAD. For most Canadians, the ratio of their income and rent or groceries will stay the same, so in some senses they haven't lost anything. But the price they pay for imports, like computers and oranges, will go up, so they have definitely lost something. I wonder what the balance comes out to.

Re: Bitcoin Is Dead, Long Live Bitcoin

#174

Post by nikolay »

The big drawback to the consumer is the speculative price. Of course, this attracts the scum of the Earth, but that's another r story. Bitcoin can be saved by applying the concept of a Currency Board [0]. All speculator will leave and only the serious players will stay and then regular folk can jump in. Of course, you can't make a million dollars from a single bitcoin you bought at $400, but you won't make it anyway if things go the way they've been going! Well, I know you can't apply the concept to Bitcoin, but just wanted to give some food for thought.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Currency_board

Re: Bitcoin Is Dead, Long Live Bitcoin

#175

Post by ErikAugust »

milkey_mouse wrote: post #172
ErikAugust wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, right. One may frame this whole "failed versus not failed" as a power struggle between two camps: a. Those who own a large stake in the original BitCoin - such as the developers, miners, venture capitalists, the Winklevoss Twins, etc. and b. Those who don't own a large stake in BitCoin currently, but wish to own a large stake in the dominant cryptocurrency. Wall Street... When you attack BitCoin on any grounds,…

This is super nitpicky but it's "Bitcoin" when referring to the currency (e.g. "the Bitcoin blockchain") and "bitcoin" when referring to an amount ("0.2 bitcoin"); it's never "BitCoin".

I see, thank you.

Re: Bitcoin Is Dead, Long Live Bitcoin

#176

Post by undefined0 »

yc1010 wrote: post #137
xorcist wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not just the fees, but the payment processors. You need a contract with them and you need to integrate with their systems at high cost. This is something you normally solve with yet another middleman, like a bank or Stripe. In contrast, Bitcoin is permissionless. Just install the software and receive payments just like anyone else. That's what something born in the Internet age looks like.

This, we went with Stripe before but apparently hosting is too high risk and (they claim) their banking partners did not want to do business with our little Irish startup. No such issues with bitcoin

> little Irish startup

Are you the owner of Ezfile/Filecloud by any chance? If you are, I'm actually quite curious to discuss payment processors with you. Last I checked, you're using Amazon gift cards and Bitcoin. Have you had any luck getting access to credit card processors? Also, what fee per transaction would you consider to acceptable from a CC processor for your category of website (with the ability to let users pay by subscription)?

Re: Bitcoin Is Dead, Long Live Bitcoin

#177

Post by undefined0 »

TD-Linux wrote: post #6
manyoso wrote: post #2

This is interesting to me because it presents the blockchain size dispute in a way that seems much more sympathetic to the "no, we shouldn't increase the blockchain size" crowd than Mike Hearn's essay. Is it really true that the people who are objecting to increasing the blockchain size see Bitcoin turning into a reserve "currency" to hold wealth instead of a liquid currency used to make real time transactions? Is th…

The opinion, of course, widely varies. Mike's piece was Mike's opinion, so of course it's not going to be very sympathetic to Core developers. The limits on transaction size have been known since the beginning of Bitcoin. VISA level transaction rates require insanely high block sizes, much larger than those proposed so far. People have come up with many, many different solutions to this problem. One thrown around a l…

On topic of LN, I feel that is the best approach from a privacy perspective. It's unnecessary to make every single transaction in the foreseeable future get appended to the blockchain and it sounds Orwellian.

Re: Bitcoin Is Dead, Long Live Bitcoin

#178

Post by Anonobread »

zanny wrote: post #170
Anonobread wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No matter what crazy optimized-for-decentralization algorithm you come up with to mine cryptocurrency, large investors are going to buy a ton of it and put it in datacenters in China. Newbies and people invested in alternative attempts at Proof of Work often complain about this longstanding issue while utterly failing to solve it themselves.

Is it an issue? Of course you could spend millions to buy mining hardware. The issue in bitcoin is more that you spend millions on novel mining hardware nobody else has. If your hashing function is CPU or GPU friendly, suddenly everyone in the economy has hardware capable of potentially mining your crytocurrency. The problem with bitcoin is that those hundred million dollar datacenters are the only places top of the…

> Is it an issue?

Conundrum? Regardless, it's unsolvable, and I do empathize with the people who complain or offer their own (non)solutions.

> If they were just GPU cluster datacenters, despite their scale, they still would not compete with the distributed power of millions of home users desktops to as much a ludicrous degree as modern ASIC miners are in the Bitcoin space.

Do you suggest efficiencies of scale don't apply to GPU clusters in datacenters, or CPU clusters in datacenters?

As it pertains to mining centralization, do you suggest efficiences of scale only apply to sha256 ASICs?

The idea that this can be "solved" with clever code is utterly naive. The bottom line is investors in any cryptocurrency, regardless of its hashing algo, will buy up the majority of the hashing rate with high efficiency rigs in well-connected datacenters with low priced electricity. Tell me how to fix that with code. You can't do it - although I've certainly seen more than my fair share of altcoin investors try in vain to do just that.

Re: Bitcoin Is Dead, Long Live Bitcoin

#179

Post by Anonobread »

wmf wrote: post #125
Anonobread wrote: post #46

Block size isn't a free parameter. The team behind btcd, a Bitcoin full node written in Go, made the following observations about block size [1]: 1. a 32 MB block, when filled with simple P2PKH transactions, can hold approximately 167,000 transactions, which, assuming a block is mined every 10 minutes, translates to approximately 270 tps 2. a single machine acting as a full node takes approximately 10 minutes to veri…

Hasn't signature verification speed been improved significantly since 2014? And what year would 32MB blocks be needed in and what processors would be available in that year?

> Hasn't signature verification speed been improved significantly since 2014

Pieter Wuille's work in libsecp256k1 promises to improve verification speeds on 64-bit CPUs by as much as 700%, and it's set to be deployed on the network as early as February.

This will hopefully be enough of a boost to reasonably process 2MB blocks on a desktop PC. This desktop processing goes very underappreciated by most onlookers. Imagine if you couldn't run a BitTorrent client on a home PC? To put it mildly, I would have an issue calling BitTorrent "peer-to-peer" in that case. For example, it would be absurd to out-and-out need a remote compute cluster to seed or leech torrents.

> And what year would 32MB blocks be needed in and what processors would be available in that year?

The "big blockist" proponents actually contended Bitcoin dies without 20MB blocks starting this month, January 2016, and doubling every two years. Going by their original propositions, we would have >32MB block capacity by around this time in 2018. How much do you think desktop PC performance will have improved by then? And this is to say nothing of the bandwidth costs [1].

[1]: http://statoshi.info/dashboard/db/bandwidth-usage

Re: Bitcoin Is Dead, Long Live Bitcoin

#180

Post by esun »

saalweachter wrote: post #173
bdhiehihhd wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is an ignorant view. Bitcoin is tiny, its measured in billions. How much did the Canadian currency just lose in the last view weeks? That amounts to hundreds of billions of vaporized wealth.

> How much did the Canadian currency just lose in the last [few] weeks? Huh, that is a really interesting question. It's not as trivial to calculate as it is for Bitcoin, where you can multiply the moneys held by the change in exchange rate -- essentially no prices as denominated in BTC, while most prices most Canadians deal with are denominated in CAD. For most Canadians, the ratio of their income and rent or grocer…

Many domestic products become more expensive as the currency adjusts downwards as producers take advantage of higher foreign prices.

In the long run, this can depress foreign prices and even increase manufacturing demand here due to lower labour costs. But these changes don't happen overnight.

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