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Coinbase to Suspend Trading in XRP

reuters.com

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Re: Coinbase to Suspend Trading in XRP

#181

Post by arcticbull »

noxer wrote: post #178
arcticbull wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I addressed your question: a "security of what" is not a relevant question in this context because you've misunderstood the definition of a security, and I corrected you. You do not need to answer that question for something to be deemed a security. I then gave you a legal test, the Howey test, which contains the question you should be asking. I also explained how it applies in my response. It's pretty cut and dried.

No you did not. You said it should be a security first and I asked you "of what" not "why". The Howey test and all your other argument are not news to me and dont answer the question. What is XRP the security of? And what is ETH the security of? If you wanna know why the Howey test is misused in this case you can read https://ripple.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/Ripple-Wells-S... And like I said on my preview post i…

I said "of what" is a meaningless question. It is. It's irrelevant to whether it is a security or not and does not factor into the definition of a security, anywhere. At most answering that question is a distraction. It's like asking me what flavor XRP is or what shape it is. Neither of these things factor into the definition of a security.

Re: Coinbase to Suspend Trading in XRP

#182

Post by jamoes »

nullc wrote: post #179
jamoes wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> a knock-off-name like "Bitcoin Cash" "Knock-off" is a curious word choice. Are you under the impression that someone owns the term "Bitcoin"?

Someone doesn't have to own it for it to be fraud to mislead someone using it. No one owns the word "gold" but if I sell you a bunch of gold plated tungsten as "gold" I'm still defrauding you.

Gold has had a widely agreed upon definition for thousands of years. Bitcoin is a ~decade old open source project with a clearly established philosophical divide between small-blockers and big-blockers. In other open source project variants, small name changes like adding/changing a suffix or prefix are common, why would Bitcoin be the exception?

Given that you accepted that BCH is the continuation of big-blocker's vision of the Bitcoin experiment, your comparison of it to gold-plated tungsten is flawed. BCH has a legitimate reason to exist. Your comparison might be more apt if BCH weren't born out of the block-size debate, but that's simply not the reality.

Ultimately, the market has spoken on this issue. The Bitcoin Cash name has been accepted as valid. It's not a trademark violation and it's not fraud akin to gold-plated tungsten. It's a legitimate continuation of big-blocker's vision of the Bitcoin experiment.

The term "bcash" on the other hand is quite clearly a pejorative and a transparent attempt to manipulation language. I'd expect better on a forum like this, but of course there will be some low-brow argumentation style anywhere you go. I'm frankly surprised you're still defending its use at this point.

Re: Coinbase to Suspend Trading in XRP

#183

Post by gruez »

CyberDildonics wrote: post #180
gruez wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Most people never sync with the chain and those that want to only need bandwidth far less than watching a low res youtube video. [...] I would love to hear how you can rationalize a statement like that. Except you know, the storage costs: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25570915

Over 11 years, bitcoin's full blockchain has grown to 1/25th of a $150 hard drive. When people say that you can't have more than a few kilobytes per second of throughput because VISA does 150M transactions per day, it doesn't make them sound like they have thought this through, it makes them sound like they are grasping at straws to try to rationalize nonsense that they want for reasons they won't say. There are lots…

> Over 11 years, bitcoin's full blockchain has grown to 1/25th of a $150 hard drive.

No doubt due to the 1MB/block limit that's in place.

>There are lots of cryptocurrencies now, no chain is going to suddenly have 150 million transactions per day while all the others die off

So large transaction volumes aren't going to be an issue because there's also going to be multiple blockchains to spread the transaction volume across? I'm not sure that's any better, because you'd either be heavily dependent on intermediary exchange services and be exposed to exchange rate fluctuations, or having to keep multiple crypto wallets synced and having to juggle disk space between them.

>Even then, it would cost a single person far less in disk space than the electricity to run their refrigerator

The problem is that the cost compounds, so comparing the cost to running a refrigerator isn't exactly fair. A refrigerator costs around $90/year to run today, 5 years ago, and 5 years from now. On the other hand, running a full node might cost $90/year today, but 5 years from now would cost $450 upfront + $90/year.

>and again, few people even sync with the chain.

This goes back to the decentralization debate. Needing a huge upfront investment to fully participate in the network is very much anti-decentralization.

Re: Coinbase to Suspend Trading in XRP

#184

Post by [deleted] »

onethought wrote: post #56
unwoundmouse wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They don't have great legal grounds to attack bitcoin imo, only threat to national security or treason or some bs

Well, rather than attacking alt-coins wouldn't lobbying for laws to allow them to block bitcoin exchanges (or tightly regulate them) as other countries have done be stronger evidence they were trying to undermine crypto? The GP has drawn a strange correlation in my opinion that doesn't follow logic. But I admit I could be missing the logic.

[deleted]

Re: Coinbase to Suspend Trading in XRP

#185

Post by haolez »

nullc wrote: post #167
haolez wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's only safe in the sense that most people aren't trying to rip you off. A moderately technically sophisticated attacker will concurrently broadcast one txn version near miners, and another to as many other nodes as they can reach. Their success rate on double spends can easily be >90% and the marginal cost of the attack is approximately zero. Other than the technical know-how to setup the transaction broadcasting…

Can't this attack be made impractical with some heuristic? For example, only accept 0-conf transactions if a given number of nodes have this transaction in their mempool. (I'm thinking of both BTC and BCH)

Re: Coinbase to Suspend Trading in XRP

#186

Post by CyberDildonics »

gruez wrote: post #183
CyberDildonics wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Over 11 years, bitcoin's full blockchain has grown to 1/25th of a $150 hard drive. When people say that you can't have more than a few kilobytes per second of throughput because VISA does 150M transactions per day, it doesn't make them sound like they have thought this through, it makes them sound like they are grasping at straws to try to rationalize nonsense that they want for reasons they won't say. There are lots…

> Over 11 years, bitcoin's full blockchain has grown to 1/25th of a $150 hard drive. No doubt due to the 1MB/block limit that's in place. >There are lots of cryptocurrencies now, no chain is going to suddenly have 150 million transactions per day while all the others die off So large transaction volumes aren't going to be an issue because there's also going to be multiple blockchains to spread the transaction volume…

> So large transaction volumes aren't going to be an issue because there's also going to be multiple blockchains to spread the transaction volume across?

No, large transaction volumes aren't going to be an issue either way. However there already are multiple blockchains and anyone that can watch youtube can sync with all of them if they want to.

> I'm not sure that's any better, because you'd either be heavily dependent on intermediary exchange services and be exposed to exchange rate fluctuations

This makes zero sense. Anyone can choose whatever combination of whatever they want and most people never touch the normal chain. This is the reality right now, there are lots of choices, people can use any or all of them. Why would transaction volumes change any of this? This isn't a prediction of the future, this something that has already happened years ago.

> The problem is that the cost compounds, so comparing the cost to running a refrigerator isn't exactly fair.

No it doesn't.

> On the other hand, running a full node might cost $90/year today, but 5 years from now would cost $450 upfront + $90/year.

That makes absolutely no sense at all. A full node for every crypto currency can be run on a $35 raspberry pi with a hard drive hooked up by anyone that can watch a youtube video. Your numbers are just a lie, the entire bitcoin chain is 1/25th of an 8TB hard drive which can be bought new for $150 USD.

> This goes back to the decentralization debate. Needing a huge upfront investment to fully participate in the network is very much anti-decentralization.

Then it's a good thing that isn't true, since most people never touch it and those that do probably don't have to spend anything at all.

These are lies, there is no truth to what you are saying and you know it. If there was any validity you would have a better explanation than made up numbers and nothing else. You are predicting something as if it hasn't already been passed by. No amount of circular logic warps reality to what you want it to be. The bigger question is why you are so desperate to convince people that cryptocurrencies can't scale.

https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/transactions-btc-eth.ht...

Re: Coinbase to Suspend Trading in XRP

#187

Post by gruez »

CyberDildonics wrote: post #186
gruez wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Over 11 years, bitcoin's full blockchain has grown to 1/25th of a $150 hard drive. No doubt due to the 1MB/block limit that's in place. >There are lots of cryptocurrencies now, no chain is going to suddenly have 150 million transactions per day while all the others die off So large transaction volumes aren't going to be an issue because there's also going to be multiple blockchains to spread the transaction volume…

> So large transaction volumes aren't going to be an issue because there's also going to be multiple blockchains to spread the transaction volume across? No, large transaction volumes aren't going to be an issue either way. However there already are multiple blockchains and anyone that can watch youtube can sync with all of them if they want to. > I'm not sure that's any better, because you'd either be heavily depend…

>No, large transaction volumes aren't going to be an issue either way.

elaborate?

>This makes zero sense. Anyone can choose whatever combination of whatever they want and most people never touch the normal chain. This is the reality right now, there are lots of choices, people can use any or all of them. Why would transaction volumes change any of this?

It makes zero sense because I was trying to infer your argument. Let's try again then: what does having multiple chains have to do with scalability?

>That makes absolutely no sense at all. A full node for every crypto currency can be run on a $35 raspberry pi with a hard drive hooked up by anyone that can watch a youtube video. Your numbers are just a lie, the entire bitcoin chain is 1/25th of an 8TB hard drive which can be bought new for $150 USD.

Those are with present numbers which have the 1MB limit in place. Clearly those assumptions won't hold if we have much larger blocks.

>Then it's a good thing that isn't true, since most people never touch it and those that do probably don't have to spend anything at all.

Sounds like you're not denying the anti-decentralization aspect at all, but rather arguing that it doesn't matter.

>These are lies, there is no truth to what you are saying and you know it.

Please follow the HN guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. Specifically "Assume good faith".

> If there was any validity you would have a better explanation than made up numbers and nothing else.

I don't get it which numbers are made up? The $90/year figure came from a sibling comment that was discussing the hypothetical storage requirement for bitcoin if it processed half of visa's transaction volume. That was surprisingly close to the annual electricity cost for the best selling refrigerator on bestbuy.com[1], so that's what I assumed you were talking about when it comes to costs. If you don't agree with these numbers, feel free to present your calculations.

[1] https://www.bestbuy.com/site/samsung-26-5-cu-ft-large-capaci...

Re: Coinbase to Suspend Trading in XRP

#188

Post by noxer »

arcticbull wrote: post #181
noxer wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No you did not. You said it should be a security first and I asked you "of what" not "why". The Howey test and all your other argument are not news to me and dont answer the question. What is XRP the security of? And what is ETH the security of? If you wanna know why the Howey test is misused in this case you can read https://ripple.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/Ripple-Wells-S... And like I said on my preview post i…

I said "of what" is a meaningless question. It is. It's irrelevant to whether it is a security or not and does not factor into the definition of a security, anywhere. At most answering that question is a distraction. It's like asking me what flavor XRP is or what shape it is. Neither of these things factor into the definition of a security.

Are you incapable of grasping the concept of me just assuring someone is right to ask a followup question? It's not relevant to determine if it is a security but if it is one it still must be of something and since you think it should be a security I asked you. Again that's me asking you for your personal opinion of what XRP/ETH shall be a security. If I wanted legal advice I wouldn't ask an internet stranger.

Re: Coinbase to Suspend Trading in XRP

#189

Post by CyberDildonics »

gruez wrote: post #187
CyberDildonics wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So large transaction volumes aren't going to be an issue because there's also going to be multiple blockchains to spread the transaction volume across? No, large transaction volumes aren't going to be an issue either way. However there already are multiple blockchains and anyone that can watch youtube can sync with all of them if they want to. > I'm not sure that's any better, because you'd either be heavily depend…

>No, large transaction volumes aren't going to be an issue either way. elaborate? >This makes zero sense. Anyone can choose whatever combination of whatever they want and most people never touch the normal chain. This is the reality right now, there are lots of choices, people can use any or all of them. Why would transaction volumes change any of this? It makes zero sense because I was trying to infer your argument.…

> elaborate?

That's all I've been doing.

> Those are with present numbers which have the 1MB limit in place. Clearly those assumptions won't hold if we have much larger blocks.

There is a lot of head room. Anyone can see this. Ten years of transactions has taken up $6 of hard drive space TOTAL while the average fee PER TRANSACTION is almost $9 right now.

> Sounds like you're not denying the anti-decentralization aspect at all, but rather arguing that it doesn't matter.

That's ridiculous. Decentralization is important and none of this has much effect on decentralization at all. You haven't actually explained why there would be any problem with decentralization because you can't. There is no barrier to entry for anyone who wants to sync with any chain so they can mine it or accept it.

> Specifically "Assume good faith".

Say something reasonable that isn't contradicted by grade school math. You haven't backed up anything you have said with anything that makes sense.

> I don't get it which numbers are made up?

Correct, you don't get it. Your idea that someone has to spend $450 on what would be 24TB is nonsense.

Why don't you explain to me what exactly you think will happen if throughput is more than a few transactions per second? Ethereum already exceeds bitcoin's volume. Bitcoin Cash tested huge blocks years ago, what exactly do you think will happen and why? Maybe you just don't want people to realize that there is no systemic reason for bitcoin being capped, because if they do it will become a relic.

Re: Coinbase to Suspend Trading in XRP

#190

Post by ineedasername »

pmiller2 wrote: post #134
llamataboot wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s lots of things worth lots of money that don’t have much use value. So yes, in a market, the definition of price/value is generally where supply and demand meet. As for why people currently /want/ bitcoin, I assume some people find it a good speculation instrument, some people hope that it will be a more stable store of value than fiat currencies, some people have political reasons for wanting to own some, som…

This is roughly what I've been telling the HODLers among my friends and acquaintances for years: there is no intrinsic, fundamental reason why BTC has value. It has value because people say it has value. And, if that sounds awfully like the "fiat currency" they tend to heap so much derision on, well, it should. The USD is nothing more than an "economy token" to show how much one is winning capitalism. Likewise, BTC i…

It's not about "winning capitalism". Money is simply an abstraction layer over something like direct bartering which has liquidity problems that increase with the complexity and number of goods & services on offer. I might agree that capitalism is about "winning" and money is used to keep score, but not that money is intrinsically tied to that game. And there might be a better abstraction layer you could place over people's time & effort than either money or direct bartering. Command economies are one option, but economies seem quite a bit too complex for that to be a feasible alternative at the moment. There's probably other options, but I'm certainly not smart enough to think of something new on that topic.
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