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Bitcoin Sees Wall Street Warm to Trading Virtual Currency

nytimes.com

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Re: Bitcoin Sees Wall Street Warm to Trading Virtual Currency

#61

Post by brandonsometig »

tobiaswk wrote: post #59
lrvick wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bitcoin fees were cut in half on a technical level by those that chose to adopt segwit which made transactions roughly half as big. Schnoor signatures can further compress transactions to get even more in a block. If in spite of these innovations blocks end up full, a block size increase is still a tool kept in reserve. In reality BCH did not make any hard won technical innovations and simply reached for the bigger b…

That's my point. BCH did not include some technical innovations like you stated. It simply increased hardcoded block size limit. Simple as that. Even Satoshi himself mentions this in his whitepaper. Other stuff has also changed. The difficulty adjustment (DAA) algorithm has changed to allow are more stable difficulty for miners. Segwit just changed what parts of a transaction counted as size in a block. In reality we…

You need a second layer(and possibly more on-top of that) for several reasons.

How do you expect to propagate and store 1GB blocks (hell, even 100MB blocks) every 10 minutes for the foreseeable future. I understand that the cost of storage and bandwidth has been falling for some time however if you want this system to gain 'mainstream' adaption it cannot everyone's coffee purchases for the rest of time. How do you keep a system like that decentralised if you aren't even paying people to run these nodes? There certainly wouldn't be as many as there are currently.

In a world of 1GB blocks and ultra cheap transactions it means people can simply use it as online storage. You could upload your movie collection and have it propagated to all of the nodes on the network.

The internet would not have scaled if we still broadcasted every single packet to all of the nodes on the network, it had to be split up and routed and the very same will happen to Bitcoin.

Re: Bitcoin Sees Wall Street Warm to Trading Virtual Currency

#62

Post by Nursie »

lrvick wrote: post #53
doug3465 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Proof of Stake is the answer.

There is even -less- evidence this can actually work at large scale without becoming centralized. By design the rich get gradually richer via staking and once enough nodes/coins are controlled by a single party they can change the rules of the network. Maybe social dynamics work out to avoid this, but humans have a long history of trending towards various forms of plutocracies. One of the reasons Ethereum forked was…

Greener?

It's not free to manufacture hard drives, in terms of materials, energy, CO2 etc. Proof of space and time merely shifts the pressure away from compute power to storage.

It has the potential to do for the storage market what PoW as done for the graphics card market - pump up prices and move useful tech out of the reach of most consumers.

Re: Bitcoin Sees Wall Street Warm to Trading Virtual Currency

#63

Post by cpplinuxdude »

jonny_eh wrote: post #22
DINKDINK wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I [...] worked as an engineer at a well-known Bitcoin company). >Having said that, "Wall Street" should be wary of enabling the use of a system that is using more electricity than the country of Switzerland [0] without any productive output You worked at a Bitcoin company and don't understand the value of proof of work? Being able to trustlessly settle shared stated across the entire globe is unproductive output? Th…

Has the growth in popularity of BTC affected the perceived value of gold? You seem to be asserting that crypto-coin popularity will save the planet by reducing gold mining, I'm very skeptical.

I happen to know an exec in gold mining (we had a brief fling), and she mentioned they do see bitcoin as a clear competitor to gold.

For what that's worth.

Re: Bitcoin Sees Wall Street Warm to Trading Virtual Currency

#65

Post by roenxi »

mvindahl wrote: post #52
VMG wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 5) Doesn't corrode and doesn't depend upon hardware or storage media to be working. Bitcoin corrodes? You can encode your private keys in Gold if you want to.

Well, the whole thing is computer data, stored on media. Already these days it's hard to find hardware to read the 5.25" floppy disks that I stored my code on in the late 1980s, and that's just three decades. Preserving digital data is a continuous effort. And yeah, you can encode your private keys in gold, and I kind of think that everyone should do that, to keep future archaeologists puzzled :-P

If your house burns down, there is a reasonable chance of recovering, eg, gold slag. Not so much chance of recovering the markings that were on that gold before.

It is difficult to compare the durability of gold and bitcoin. It does seem plausible, given the length of time we've been using it, that gold's value is completely related to its intrinsic properties and difficulty of mining.

Bitcoin can't possibly be valued on its intrinsic properties, because I can fork the entire technical edifice, start a new blockchain called it Bitcoin+1, and the fork will have no value vs the original.

Re: Bitcoin Sees Wall Street Warm to Trading Virtual Currency

#66

Post by lrvick »

Nursie wrote: post #62
lrvick wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is even -less- evidence this can actually work at large scale without becoming centralized. By design the rich get gradually richer via staking and once enough nodes/coins are controlled by a single party they can change the rules of the network. Maybe social dynamics work out to avoid this, but humans have a long history of trending towards various forms of plutocracies. One of the reasons Ethereum forked was…

Greener? It's not free to manufacture hard drives, in terms of materials, energy, CO2 etc. Proof of space and time merely shifts the pressure away from compute power to storage. It has the potential to do for the storage market what PoW as done for the graphics card market - pump up prices and move useful tech out of the reach of most consumers.

Graphics cards and ASICs are high up front cost and ongoing electricity cost that forces them to geographical areas with cheap electricity. Disk based systems are still up front cost, but substantially less cost to operate. Chia style nodes could be very low compute/electricity overhead and could potentially run off raspberry Pis on solar or using spare storage on mobile devices that are already powered on for other uses.

Re: Bitcoin Sees Wall Street Warm to Trading Virtual Currency

#67

Post by sparkie »

Fomite wrote: post #39
DINKDINK wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Advantages of gold over bitcoin: If there's a total internet && computer && electricity apocalypse, a physical barter exchange with gold is more trustless than bitcoin. You can still transact bitcoin but there's trust involved. Advantages of Bitcoin over gold: No trusted third party (If you're moving sizable sums of gold, you're doing it with a trusted third party[TTP)) 99.99226%[1] transaction uptime (Your TTP keep…

I've always thought the Bitcoin use-case (admittedly from a subset of Bitcoin users) of "Complete collapse in the banking system" but somehow the internet still works without issue was...somewhat tenuous.

It's not a collapse of all banking systems, but the fiat money system which is dictated by central banks (which are mostly private entities, not government bodies).

It means when governments want to borrow more money, their lenders actually need to have the liquidity available and can't just magic it out of thin air.

Re: Bitcoin Sees Wall Street Warm to Trading Virtual Currency

#68

Post by comboy »

r32a_ wrote: post #3

How are people surprised by this? If Cryptocurrencies become huge, these banks will just buy up crypto companies and also point their resources at building cryptocurrency applications. They are in the business of making money. If they can make money in crypto then they will do it.

Looking at your username and comment reminded me about this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R3_(company)

Re: Bitcoin Sees Wall Street Warm to Trading Virtual Currency

#69

Post by hndamien »

jMyles wrote: post #41
hndamien wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are focusing on the wrong thing. Energy production is the issue, not energy use. There is an equilibrium to be found in the free market based on the value of BTC that is provided and the economic expenditure to mine it with the cost of electricity used to get there. Oh wait! I found the link in the causal economic chain! We don't put a price on carbon! Put your energy into yelling there and not at yelling at Bitc…

Somehow, I had never encountered this argument before. This makes great sense. It's not entirely clear how to put a price on carbon, though. And, bitcoin's censorship-resistance (which of course I laud as an amazing and important innovation) might make it harder to force everyone to account for externalities. Is someone doing serious research, writing, and thinking on the relationship between crypto-blockchain tech a…

It isn't really crypto specific. It is energy producing utility economics. If we had a price on carbon it would effect this equilibrium everywhere. If you accept that we have to change, and sooner rather than later due to inevitability - see Elon's turd in a punchbowl reference, and you accept we aren't going to curtail the things that we find useful that cost us energy, then a price on carbon would bring this about much quicker than without it and is really the only sensible option. Compared with the status quo, burn more dirty fuel faster and cheaply to prevent the economics of green tech coming online, and then, hoping we can innovate our way out of the shitty punchbowl.

Re: Bitcoin Sees Wall Street Warm to Trading Virtual Currency

#70

Post by sparkie »

blackrock wrote: post #64

How do you guys buy your Bitcoin? What exchange do you use? Do you use Coinbase? Or do you have an offline wallet?

You should always have your own local wallet, and if you use an exchange, you should immediately transfer your funds to your local wallet once you buy them.

In terms of exchanges, there are many alternatives to Coinbase which you should look into. Coinbase has some sketchy history like insider trading, blocking Wikileaks without giving reasonable explanation, several times they've turned off their markets when conditions aren't favorable to them (sudden price drops). They're also not able to keep up with the technology as they've lagged way behind many of the other exchanges when it comes to implementing technical updates like segwit, bech32 addresses, transaction batching. God only knows how long it will take them (if ever) to be ready for the Lightning Network.

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