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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

#21

Post by tylersmith »

QAPereo wrote: post #14
justboxing wrote: post #3

> I am fully cognizant of the perils of making bearish predictions about new technology. > But, to quote another well-worn and wholly unreliable aphorism, this time it's different. It really is. and >... because the only other alternative is chaos, and probably the end of the whole Bitcoin experiment. I'm very much a Bitcoin skeptic, but, I'm not sure this time is different, or that Bitcoin will die. For the last 8 y…

To be fair, the SEC losing their patience with ICOs and turning on the whole sector would do it. Edit To replies: It does if the SEC decides the concept of cryptocurrency is one which fundamentally exists to bypass regulations for the purpose of fraud. I’d disagree, you’d disagree, but only their agreement matters.

That has no effect on Bitcoin.

Re: The Bitcoin Apocalypse Is Coming in Mid-November

#22

Post by iopuy »

sillysaurus3 wrote: post #18
iopuy wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The implementation is guided by Charlie. Litecoin had SegWit months before bitcoin because the team doesn't have competing factions. He isn't a "leader" in the tradition since, he is the worker, hands on keyboard writing the code.

Sure, but that sidesteps the question: why does that matter? The answer isn't inherently obvious. Bitcoin seems to be doing just fine without a leader and with competing factions. The November issue will probably resolve itself just like all the issues that came before. And there are a lot of advantages to Bitcoin's model. Having a face means tying the fate of the currency to that face, one way or another. Their word…

I agree with your general sentiment for sure, why should any of this matter?

On a personal basis I feel much more secure knowing a respected member of the community has enough faith in their product to tie their identity to it. Litecoin also has features that bitcoin doesn't. Faster block generation time, different hashing algorithms, larger supply. Charlie gives me confidence that the leadership of Bitcoin has not.

Re: The Bitcoin Apocalypse Is Coming in Mid-November

#23

Post by AgentME »

RyanShook wrote: post #12

I disagree with this logic. Plenty of people said that SegWit was going to cause issues and it didn’t. If Bitcoin fails it will be from external market pressures, not internal politics.

Segwit wasn't a hardfork, which makes it very different from this situation.

Re: The Bitcoin Apocalypse Is Coming in Mid-November

#24

Post by altoz »

Opt-in replay protection was merged in a few days ago. https://github.com/btc1/bitcoin/commit/a3c41256984bf11d95a56...

In any case, if you believe Bitcoin's main value proposition is as a great store of value, then replay protection simply doesn't matter that much. You wouldn't be transacting enough to matter.

Re: The Bitcoin Apocalypse Is Coming in Mid-November

#25

Post by AgentME »

As a Bitcoin fan (and someone who owns a little), I think it's a pretty good article.

Some more tidbits of information from my perspective:

>The anti-2Xers argue that the NYA should not be binding because it was negotiated behind closed doors, and that a change of this magnitude needs to be more carefully considered before it is adopted.

No active developers were part of the NYA. Some in the NYA have said that they agreed because they believed Core was party to the NYA.

>But there is another school of thought, which is that Bitcoin is (or should be) a currency rather than a commodity, primarily a medium of exchange rather than a store of value. These are the folks who want you to be able to buy a cup of coffee at Starbucks with Bitcoins.

I don't think anyone, including Core, is against that (higher transaction throughput). But on-chain scaling alone can't get you very far, and it has large costs that need to be carefully considered. The (backward-compatible) Segwit capacity upgrade just happened, and it takes time for people to update their software to make the newer more-efficient transactions. (... If the consensus was that Bitcoin really was urgently hurting for transaction capacity, you'd expect people to be updating to Segwit transactions faster than they are now.) The idea that another capacity upgrade should be rushed so soon immediately after Segwit is kind of silly. The idea that it should be decided so soon behind closed doors by a few CEOs is sillier.

>The 2X advocates have refused, citing the NYA, and secure (at least apparently) in their belief that enough people will update their code that there will be no doubt that 2X is the One True Chain.

Let's be clear about the word "update": it means to switch their software to a fork that none of the active community Bitcoin developers contribute to and that none plan on contributing to. Many have said that if Bitcoin "fails" after the fork, they have no interest in contributing to the Segwit2x fork's software. (The big-blocker anti-segwit movement stalled work for years, politicized the Bitcoin space, and contributed to making many of the core devs be the target of harassment; imagining that unpaid volunteers are going to switch to working on a project made by the latest iteration of that is ... to call it wishful thinking seems too kind.)

Re: The Bitcoin Apocalypse Is Coming in Mid-November

#26

Post by s17n »

sillysaurus3 wrote: post #10
iopuy wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I may not be as technical as the author but I truly believe Litecoin is the future. Charlie Lee is about the best face of a digital currency as possible. He's and ex-googler, MIT grad, with a clear vision and an outstanding team. Like VC's bet on people and not always ideas, he is the one to take us to the next step.

I'm skeptical of hero worship in general. Why does any of that matter for a commodity?

Ultimately a cryptocurrency needs a functional governance model to survive - it has to be possible to update the code, and so people have to decide somehow on which version is valid, and this creates the opportunity for a power structure to exist, and where there is such an opportunity, someone will fill it. Having a "hero" in charge is not the best way but Bitcoin is a fucking mess right now.

Re: The Bitcoin Apocalypse Is Coming in Mid-November

#27

Post by canoebuilder »

AznHisoka wrote: post #5

the dumb money isnt even all in yet, so how can it be coming to an end? stuff like pension funds, mutual funds, there isnt even a bitcoin etc yet. Until this happens it will rise even more.

Call me old-fashioned, but I think that type of institutional money going into inflated tech stocks is a completely different ball game than that kind of money going into something like bitcoin, that weird "internet money" thing most people don't really grok, or understand how to use or indeed what exactly the use is.

dot com stocks themselves may have been a lot of hype but at least they had the precedence of several hundred years of capital market infrastructure around them to lend some credence.

Re: The Bitcoin Apocalypse Is Coming in Mid-November

#28

Post by Alex3917 »

jacquesm wrote: post #16
QAPereo wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, the SEC losing their patience with ICOs and turning on the whole sector would do it. Edit To replies: It does if the SEC decides the concept of cryptocurrency is one which fundamentally exists to bypass regulations for the purpose of fraud. I’d disagree, you’d disagree, but only their agreement matters.

What does that have to do with bitcoin?

The current price of Bitcoin is mostly driven by the fraud taking place within the Ethereum ecosystem. Let's see where the price is after a few rounds of SEC crackdowns.

Re: The Bitcoin Apocalypse Is Coming in Mid-November

#29

Post by partiallypro »

Alex3917 wrote: post #4

The interesting thing is that unlike in July where the price crashed, this time the price is completely stable despite the fact that it's a much bigger clusterfuck. It seems like perhaps the "you can't bet against the apocalypse" rule is being applied.

Probably complacency, and people refusing to sell because they think Bitcoin always recovers. The same happens in stocks.

Re: The Bitcoin Apocalypse Is Coming in Mid-November

#30

Post by tfha »

altoz wrote: post #24

Opt-in replay protection was merged in a few days ago. https://github.com/btc1/bitcoin/commit/a3c41256984bf11d95a56... In any case, if you believe Bitcoin's main value proposition is as a great store of value, then replay protection simply doesn't matter that much. You wouldn't be transacting enough to matter.

You are right, I suppose because we don't trade gold much, it doesn't make sense to ensure that it's secure when we transfer it. We transfer it so infrequently, there's nothing to worry about...

For the opt-in replay protection, that is a proposal which requires people to update their software to protect themselves. That's unacceptable, many people are unlikely to even know that a fork happened. Replay protection needs to be automatic for un-upgraded nodes.

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