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Bitcoin's Use in Commerce Keeps Falling

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Re: Bitcoin's Use in Commerce Keeps Falling

#201

Post by DINKDINK »

acdha wrote: post #74
jchw wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really. Was the goal of Bitcoin ever to be the successor to paper money? We're here today and Bitcoin is a functional payment network. Not only that, it's a fairly large one, and it has become a household name. I don't really use Bitcoin but I think it's hyperbole to consider it a unilateral failure just because it didn't supercede traditional currency.

It’s a household name because of speculation, however, and statistically almost nobody uses it for the kind of decentralized transactions for which it was originally pitched. The number of vendors accepting it has gone down over time (e.g. Steam, Microsoft) due to the endemic problems and many of the people who claim to use it (even here) are actually using the credit card network with government currencies for the a…

>nobody uses it for the kind of decentralized transactions for which it was originally pitched

You're misinterpreting absence of evidence as evidence of absence which is a logical fallacy. clearly there's enough of a market for trustless wealth storage enough to support a $100 Billion dollar market cap. Maybe you think that the world will need less and less trustless wealth storage in the future and you're short bitcoin; it looks like the market is betting against you though.

Re: Bitcoin's Use in Commerce Keeps Falling

#202

Post by gammateam »

ledriveby wrote: post #188
gammateam wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yeah I read and repeated all of that stuff without investigating too, at one point. they aren't fundamental flaws to the concept. just like with tcp/ip packets, routing will improve with robustness of the network. I saw a couple of work in progress efforts to address the full node requirements. they'll be growing pains but bitcoin is interesting because the protocol doesn't go away, even as the payment processing com…

A lot of software projects fail. Why the blind faith that LN will inevitably get better? ICOs are like this too. Billions of dollars are rallied for technologies that don't exist, for founders who don't exist (their headshots are usually pilfered from stock photos), for problems that don't exist. And yet, funding! This insanity would never happen if cryptocurrency wasn't involved. The multilevel marketing energy of c…

I don't have blind faith LN will get better. It already has gotten better from the first time I thought it was irrevocably broken.

There are also parallel scaling proposals.

All while on-chain transactions are extremely cheap and user experience improvements would help handle much more load than last year.

Re: Bitcoin's Use in Commerce Keeps Falling

#203

Post by DINKDINK »

adiusmus wrote: post #127
sgeisler wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Another fork of bitcoin. That's factually wrong. Lightning is a protocol on top of Bitcoin (like HTTP is built on TCP) and not a fork. It has a different set of trade offs: transactions on it are instant, but one should only store small amounts on it (like what you would carry in your purse) since your money on it can be stolen if you are offline for too long (and you did not pay someone to monitor the network for…

And having money stolen from my wallet because I haven’t logged in recently is NOT useful for a currency.

Goal post moving. You claimed Lightning was a fork of bitcoin which is patently false. You lost your debate.

Re: Bitcoin's Use in Commerce Keeps Falling

#204

Post by gammateam »

CryptoPunk wrote: post #184
gammateam wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yeah I read and repeated all of that stuff without investigating too, at one point. they aren't fundamental flaws to the concept. just like with tcp/ip packets, routing will improve with robustness of the network. I saw a couple of work in progress efforts to address the full node requirements. they'll be growing pains but bitcoin is interesting because the protocol doesn't go away, even as the payment processing com…

It's different than TCP/IP in that every transaction changes the topography of a payment channel network, by changing the maximum amount that can be sent across various channels. This is a fundamental difference. Moreover, even if LN worked as a full substitute for on-chain transactions (all indications point to only a very centralized hub and spoke LN model working efficiently), Bitcoin's three transactions per seco…

Yes this is something I'm following too.

So although Bitcoin has a low transaction per second limitation, the database Transaction objects can contain hundreds of transactions between users. This is what batching does. Segwit further helps lower the size of Transaction objects. And further proposals also lower that further.

Re: Bitcoin's Use in Commerce Keeps Falling

#205

Post by vit05 »

briatx wrote: post #10

It has been clear for a while now that Bitcoin is an inferior payment system for the consumer: * The fees are higher. * The risk to the consumer is higher. * The difficulty of use is higher. * It is accepted at an extremely low amount of vendors and even that is falling. So you really how to wonder why people ever thought consumers would use it en masse.

All of your points are problems that can, and will eventually be, solved by engineering.

The main problem is to believe that Bitcoin will be the solution for markets that have their banking system and governments functioning perfectly.

The reality is that most of the world does not have this efficiency found in the US and Europe. Opening a bank account is not a trivial task in every corner of the world. Acquiring a loan, importing or exporting a product, sending values to a person, organization or company in another country. All these activities are extremely difficult to do for more than 80% of the world's population.

Not being centralized is an advantage that entails enormous difficulties. But none of them kills the initial purpose.

Re: Bitcoin's Use in Commerce Keeps Falling

#206

Post by drdeca »

WJW wrote: post #199
conanbatt wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree with several of your statements. First, bitcoin has a monetary policy, and the key is that it cant be changed, which is very appealing: more appealing that storing gold vs fiat, since gold has a less predictable monetary policy. Gold had been chosen as currency for most of history, across cultures and languages. In countries where the currency breaks down, things like chocolate, potatoes or corn get into c…

> and the key is that it cant be changed, which is very appealing This is only very appealing if: - It is never necessary to change monetary policy. - The same monetary policy is appropriate for all nations. - The monetary policy that was chosen by the bitcoin dev team is exactly the right one.

Well, if they picked a policy that is very good, and the degree to which it falls short of the exact correct policy is small enough that the possibility of improving it doesn't outweigh the risks of it being changed for the worse, then the policy being unchanging could be a genuine advantage over other alternatives that aren't unchanging.

Right?

Re: Bitcoin's Use in Commerce Keeps Falling

#208

Post by Lerc »

conanbatt wrote: post #151
TACIXAT wrote: post #21

A currency with no mechanism for monetary policy is not going to be adopted. Bitcoin is purely deflationary for more reasons than just people losing their keys. For example, a fixed reward split between a growing group of miners will also cause a rising price floor. The miners will not sell for less than their electricity costs, which makes the smaller piece of the block reward they receive have a higher price. So yo…

I disagree with several of your statements. First, bitcoin has a monetary policy, and the key is that it cant be changed, which is very appealing: more appealing that storing gold vs fiat, since gold has a less predictable monetary policy. Gold had been chosen as currency for most of history, across cultures and languages. In countries where the currency breaks down, things like chocolate, potatoes or corn get into c…

Bitcoin monetary policy can be changed. If there is a significant consensus then you can move to any set of rules. Bitcoin monetary policy cannot be unilaterally changed.

Consensus is difficult and slow, but when it comes to the world economy, that's probably the least-bad solution.

Re: Bitcoin's Use in Commerce Keeps Falling

#209

Post by Nursie »

gammateam wrote: post #122
Nursie wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> better UX and lightning network will help with that. Lightning appears to be a bit of a joke - routing payments is almost impossible, lots of attempts seem to fail, and there also appear to be requirements like keeping a node up constantly.

yeah I read and repeated all of that stuff without investigating too, at one point. they aren't fundamental flaws to the concept. just like with tcp/ip packets, routing will improve with robustness of the network. I saw a couple of work in progress efforts to address the full node requirements. they'll be growing pains but bitcoin is interesting because the protocol doesn't go away, even as the payment processing com…

I've investigated.

AFAICT your only response there is "It will get better". I personally don't believe it will or that it can, given factros like having to tie up BTC in the network to facilitate channels, and race conditions/contention on payments.

It's far from trustless and decentralised, and it appears to be far from functional.

Re: Bitcoin's Use in Commerce Keeps Falling

#210

Post by beefield »

dmichulke wrote: post #142
pg_bot wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a reason why an investor that holds a security until it is worthless is called a "bag holder". It makes no sense to "invest" in any currency when you can own productive assets instead. If you are concerned about the government seizing your assets, I would suggest emigrating to a country that respects private property rights. Countries that undergo hyperinflation are fairly rare, and the citizens of those cou…

Your argument is also applicable to gold yet it doesn't hold there

Just wait for a day when there is a central banker that simultaneously has half a brain cell and tiniest set of balls. That day you see price of gold crashing in a way that has never seen before. Really, there is no more reason for a modern central bank to hold gold reserves than there is reason to hold ponzicoin reserves.
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