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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

#61

Post by beaner »

mrb wrote: post #55
AgentME wrote: post #25

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 a…

A block size increase is in fact very urgently needed. 99% of blocks are maxed out at ~4M weight DESPITE segwit, because segwit's adoption is too low (7%). Adoption isn't happening faster not because it's unneeded, but because of inertia among wallet developers. Consequently, full blocks and high fees have caused Bitcoin to lose many users to alts (LTC, ETH, ETC, DASH...) All this user loss and tx market loss has bee…

> 99% of blocks are maxed out at ~4M weight DESPITE segwit

Hasn't been true since July: https://blockchain.info/charts/avg-block-size

> full blocks and high fees have caused Bitcoin to lose many users to alts (LTC, ETH, ETC, DASH...)

What's the evidence for this? All my friends own btc and alts... but none of them transact in it. They own them only for investment purposes. I don't think anybody is using alts for their higher throughput.

Re: The Bitcoin Apocalypse Is Coming in Mid-November

#62

Post by tfha »

mrb wrote: post #55
AgentME wrote: post #25

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 a…

A block size increase is in fact very urgently needed. 99% of blocks are maxed out at ~4M weight DESPITE segwit, because segwit's adoption is too low (7%). Adoption isn't happening faster not because it's unneeded, but because of inertia among wallet developers. Consequently, full blocks and high fees have caused Bitcoin to lose many users to alts (LTC, ETH, ETC, DASH...) All this user loss and tx market loss has bee…

We could double the block size. Then the capacity would raise from about 10 million users to about 20 million users. I'm sure that would solve all of Bitcoin's scaling issues for a long time.

Re: The Bitcoin Apocalypse Is Coming in Mid-November

#63

Post by tfha »

kbaker wrote: post #42
AgentME wrote: post #25

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 a…

Just for some balance, the Hong Kong Agreement (which is absent from the article) is really important in this timeline - in Feb 2016, an agreement was reached with miners and signed by a few Core devs (however, possibly under duress?) to work on Segwit _and_ a safe hard fork. The NYA happening with a few CEOs "behind closed doors", was pretty much a result of the year and a half of no progress on the safe hard fork p…

I believe the core devs agreed to make a proposal, and then the proposal got rejected by the other devs.

Re: The Bitcoin Apocalypse Is Coming in Mid-November

#64

Post by tfha »

altoz wrote: post #41
tfha wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not that simple. Once a transaction gets confirmed on one chain, it's permanently able to be spent on the other. If, due to fees or other reasons, that transaction is not confirmed quickly, the merchant may not be able to return the funds. Also, automated system may have no way of handling it if those automated systems are not upgraded. Which means a merchant could end up with thousands of payments that they hav…

> Once a transaction gets confirmed on one chain, it's permanently able to be spent on the other. That's simply not true. If the utxo gets spent on the other chain, the two coins are permanently split. > Also, automated system may have no way of handling it if those automated systems are not upgraded. Which means a merchant could end up with thousands of payments that they have to manually fix. And, those merchants w…

> And incur legal liability? Businesses will gladly do lots of manual work to avoid thousands of lawsuits.

Pretty sure that forcing thousands of businesses to upgrade their systems to avoid defrauding users is grounds for a lawsuit itself.

Imagine if Google, Apple, and Microsoft teamed up to make an incompatible change to web browsers that broke all existing websites and exposed all of the users of those websites to risk of finical loss of the website admins did not perform an upgrade.

Who is liable? The admins who didn't even realize an upgrade was required, or Google, Microsoft, and Apple for creating the situation?

Re: The Bitcoin Apocalypse Is Coming in Mid-November

#65

Post by kccqzy »

chrisco255 wrote: post #46
Alex3917 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It would suffer a temporary drop then inevitably climb back up again. Bitcoin is global at this point. No one jurisdiction is going to shut it down.

Here’s a thought experiment. Yes Bitcoin is global but like all other distributed systems, the CAP theorem applies. When there is a network partition, you can only choose between consistency and availability. Now what if tomorrow the Chinese government decided to totally block Bitcoin traffic, just like they block Facebook, Twitter, NYT, Tor and VPNs? Losing either consistency or availability would be a heavy blow. It’s either going to stop working at all, or fork into a Chinese and non-Chinese version. I don’t see how either of them inspires confidence.

Re: The Bitcoin Apocalypse Is Coming in Mid-November

#67

Post by wpietri »

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…

In one sense, it's already dead.

In theory, Bitcoin is supposed to be a payment system, digital cash. But that seems to be pretty much dead. Consider the opinion of Fred Wilson, a big Bitcoin booster, who has stopped using it for payments: http://avc.com/2017/08/store-of-value-vs-payment-system/

Merchant acceptance is actually in retreat: http://www.businessinsider.com/merchants-arent-accepting-bit...

It is still being used for speculation, of course. And for some crime. But the 2010 vision of a digital cash that replaces Western Union, Visa, etc? It certainly hasn't arrived, and it seems farther off than ever.

Re: The Bitcoin Apocalypse Is Coming in Mid-November

#68

Post by xorcist »

mrb wrote: post #55
AgentME wrote: post #25

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 a…

A block size increase is in fact very urgently needed. 99% of blocks are maxed out at ~4M weight DESPITE segwit, because segwit's adoption is too low (7%). Adoption isn't happening faster not because it's unneeded, but because of inertia among wallet developers. Consequently, full blocks and high fees have caused Bitcoin to lose many users to alts (LTC, ETH, ETC, DASH...) All this user loss and tx market loss has bee…

> block size increase is in fact very urgently needed [...] segwit's adoption is too low (7%)

7% in two months. What kind of adoption had you expected? Everyone won't switch over night, that's the whole problem behind why flag dates in distributed systems are hard, and why many people adocate backwards compatible changes whenever possible.

> if Core simply agreed to double the block size

Core is the name of the Bitcoin software. Perhaps you mean the Bitcoin community? The functionality needed to roughly double the block size was released last year and finally took effect in August. If that's too slow for your use case, then you are probably on the edge of where Bitcoin is useful anyway. It's hard to imagine any sort non-contentious hard fork planned and executed in less time than that, without endangering other people's money.

Re: The Bitcoin Apocalypse Is Coming in Mid-November

#69

Post by wpietri »

betterunix2 wrote: post #32
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.

Pension funds will not even consider Bitcoin until it becomes much more stable. Pensions are an obligation and therefore demand much lower risk -- if a 5% change in value in a single day is not considered newsworthy there is no way pensions will make that investment. What makes you think the end cannot come before pensions and mutual funds start investing? What if panic selling triggers a deep loss in value, which th…

Why would a pension fund get into this? They look for assets that over the long term will create significant economic value. E.g., VCs who fund startups. But buying Bitcoin and holding it is like holding gold: the asset isn't doing anything useful while you're holding it, so you're really just making a bet about future scarcity.

If a pension fund were bullish on Bitcoin, I think they'd be much better of going long a VC fund that is investing in the space.

Re: The Bitcoin Apocalypse Is Coming in Mid-November

#70

Post by xorcist »

The article correctly notices that the market was more worried around the time of the BCH fork, but misses some of the reasons why. The BCH was a more credible threat to the value proposition of Bitcoin because the market could be convinced it was like a dividend to the BTC chain, the market cap of the latter was clearly at risk.

The design of B2X is based on getting every user of Bitcoin to switch software before November. If commerce continues on the legacy chain, the value proposition falls in its entirety. B2X has no replay protection to speak of and no emergency difficulty adjustment is possible. The market correctly reflects the probability that B2X will replace BTC. Feel free to bet on it should you disagree, Bitfinex offers futures trading on BTC/B2X.

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