Earlier quoted context omitted.
how is this good for Bitcoin?
It's a long-standing joke about how Bitcoin proponents tend to show up in comments about bad-news-for-Bitcoin threads to explain how this latest development is actually good for it.
thks!
Ending Bitcoin Support
231–240 of 659 posts
Re: Ending Bitcoin Support
#232Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's a ridiculous example, of course. But it's something. Not to mention the actual real applications that were mentioned above. The point is - crypto-currencies are fairy dust. There is nothing real or tangible about them.
> The point is - crypto-currencies are fairy dust. There is nothing real or tangible about them. Most money in circulation is 0/1's on hard drives. I'm bearish on cryptocurrencies because frankly the entire thing is hilarious but modern currencies aren't entirely dissimilar.
Those 0/1s on hard drives are backed by trillions of dollars of debt and tax obligations people are obliged to trade labour and physical goods for though.
Being backed by demand from the entire economy of a stable polity is certainly better than being backed by sunk (energy) cost fallacy and speculator enthusiasm.
Re: Ending Bitcoin Support
#233Earlier quoted context omitted.
Store value / Investment. You can buy gold, stocks, foreign currencies as means of investment. You can't pay your restaurant bill with them but that doesn't mean they don't have a future.
Gold, unilike Bitcoin, cannot be forked overnight with minimal effort, which makes gold much better store of value.
The network effects don't go along with the fork. Same if you copied and deployed Facebook's codebase on your own domain.
Re: Ending Bitcoin Support
#234Earlier quoted context omitted.
> To be fair, people could also stop thinking gold is worth much. They've already noted that: > people's perception of its value will change But as they say, a gold bar will remain a gold bar, until and unless it is actively destroyed. Not so for bitcoins, which only remain so as long as they're actively maintained (not just individual coins but the mining networks which allows the creation of new transactions)
How do you think the story would end for gold, if it became unpopular and the exchanges closed? You can sell your gold bar, and you can sell your private key. I see them as the same and no, I don't own Bitcoins.
Just look at the gold price over the past 100 years, even the last 10-15 years have seen an modest increase. It will only go up & it is highly unlikely that it won't ever be perceived as the asset compared to other precious metals.
Re: Ending Bitcoin Support
#235Earlier quoted context omitted.
Countries and their economies collapsing now and then are not that rare.
Seems rather rare to me. If a Dotcom type of an event affected bitcoin ecosystem, it would not have recovered - it had millions of participants actively winding up and unwinding positions in real time, which is not something that bitcoin is capable of supporting at this time. If a Housing Bubble type of an event affected bitcoin ecosystem, it would not have recovered. Lots of special purpose leveraged positions neede…
Sure, but not everyone has the privilege of living in a first world country. See for example the Republic of Georgia utilising blockchain tech to secure real estate transactions [0]. Now I am actually less afraid of investing my money as I don't trust their government.
[0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/laurashin/2017/02/07/the-first-...
Re: Ending Bitcoin Support
#236Earlier quoted context omitted.
Okay....livestock bludgeoning explains 0.001% of gold's value.
It's a ridiculous example, of course. But it's something. Not to mention the actual real applications that were mentioned above. The point is - crypto-currencies are fairy dust. There is nothing real or tangible about them.
I don't have a horse in this race, but what about pyrite? It has most of the aesthetic properties of gold (which I think everyone agrees is where most of the value comes from), but almost none of the value. Pyrite is a real, physical thing that will not disappear tomorrow. However, it has almost no value.
I guess what I am trying to say is that there is a lot more that goes into value than utility. That's why I do not think that people always act rationally. Clearly there is something irrational about people's relationship with gold that makes it valuable. I don't see why crypto cannot have a similar irrational evaluation. Sure, it could go "poof" tomorrow, but I don't know if that will stop people from seeing it as valuable.
Re: Ending Bitcoin Support
#237I've said this elsewhere, but it bears repeating. Bitcoin is capable of handling high transaction volume with low fees. The BCH fork was created to support this case. The BTC chain's devs mostly work for Blockstream, who's business model is to create layer 2 payment solutions, so it's in their interest to choke off the main chain. And it looks like they are succeeding.
All BCH did was increase the block size limit from 1mb to 8mb. It solves the scalability problems in the short term, but will run into exactly the same issues a year or two from now. Then it'll be 32mb blocks, then 128mb, then 1Gb. An O(n) approach won't work in the long term.
Re: Ending Bitcoin Support
#238Stellar which they mention as alternative would probably suit them way better. It doesn't have any of the issues that were problem with Bitcoin, but it's adoption is significantly less.
Litecoin support would be very nice to have, it is kind of obvious step for transaction processing.
Re: Ending Bitcoin Support
#239We have integrated Coinbase recently. Transactions take over a day to get verified. This is fine because the product is an annual subscription. That being said, except as an alternative to an international transfer, BTC has not much e-commerce value from our end.
Are you converting straight to USD (or your local currency), or keeping the BTC?
I know most storefronts that accept crypto do the former, but I can't help but wonder how much more they could have made if they had done the latter.
Re: Ending Bitcoin Support
#240Earlier quoted context omitted.
To be fair, people could also stop thinking gold is worth much. Maybe a modern-day alchemist finally figures out the formula. I don't know. Probably far less likely than the Bitcoin scenarios though.
Consider aluminium. At one point it was more expensive than gold (due to mining+refining challenges). When those were overcome the cost plummeted to it's current "cheap" level. Personally, I think a better comparison is to the diamond trade. Through a series of machinations (price fixing, artificial supply constraint, marketing) diamonds are deeply overvalued if you consider just the fundamentals of them - aka they'r…
>decades
Centuries.