Ending Bitcoin Support • Hacker News Board

Re: Ending Bitcoin Support

#621

Post by fastball » Wed, Jan 24, 2018, 10:47 AM UTC

undoware wrote: post #551

fastball wrote: post #533

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your sentiment and your plan do not align. Ethereum is so far head and shoulders above other cryptos in the "coolness" factor that it's unreal. Do you realize how many popular tokens are ERC20 tokens?

Yes, that's why I bought it! But it's still proof-of-work-based. The future is proof-of-state. I know folks are trying to retro PoS into Ethereum, but I'll believe it when I see it. Many others are already there. I'd say: Bitcoin is first gen, Ethereum is second gen, and there are a variety of third-gen coins with good UX and proof-of-stake already on the market. I expect one (and probably only one) of these latter t…

Vitalik is enough of a force that if PoS becomes a priority it will happen.

Gas prices? A standard transaction that will confirm in ETH isn't accepted in as many places because people are building DApps and ERC20 tokens, which are what you transact with on these services. But in order to get these tokens, you need ETH. That being said, ETH is getting wider and wider transactional attention. Coinmarketcap even lists all other alts wrt to ETH now (in addition to BTC). Most big exchanges now have many ETH/ALT pairs.

1. https://www.ethgasstation.info/

Re: Ending Bitcoin Support

#622

Post by lhl » Wed, Jan 24, 2018, 11:30 AM UTC

koheripbal wrote: post #49

vec wrote: post #18

For what it's worth, we just spent two weeks trying and failing to get Stripe's Bitcoin integration working on our site. The short version is that Stripe guaranteed a USD BTC exchange rate for an hour, after which they would automatically cancel the transaction. Given that most transactions now take well over an hour to be verified on the blockchain, that means basically every transaction fails.

I honestly don't know what use-case remains for Bitcoin. If you have large value transactions you'd probably choose something with privacy like Monero, and if you want something cheap and fast, maybe Bitcoin Cash. In both use-cases, you have a few competing alternatives. In no circumstance is Bitcoin preferable to one of the mature alternatives. ...and if no one is using it as a transaction medium, then acting as a s…

As a preface, I am long-term bearish on Bitcoin, and have been since it became apparent to me that the community and development process had basically been terminally broken in 2016 - everything that's happened since then has been utterly predictable, and I'm pretty sure that while it might not go away, it's basically a legacy product.

That being said, Bitcoin currently has the highest market liquidity (trading volume, markets, stability, convertability) and has the most mature investment infrastructure. It has the most fiat rails and trading pairs (almost all alt markets are pegged to BTC) and for moving sufficiently large sums around internationally it can still be considered relatively fast and cheap.

There's a large SoV use case for a cryptoasset that is censorship and seizure resistant, although personally, I have questions on whether something can be a long term SoV if it doesn't functional well as a MoE (maybe Gold proves the case).

Also, I feel like the financial side is currently not very savvy on the actual blockchain mechanics side of things and agree that it seems like you would absolutely want to use the most private blockchain you could find for SoV, but I don't have much expertise in that part of the world (offshore assets, wealth management, etc).

While it feels like we're a bit in '98 for the speculative bubble after last year, for blockchains/DLT, I think we're maybe '94 on the tech. Still, cryptoassets have seemed to make a jump to a legitimate asset class last year, one that's big enough for the financial world to pay attention to, and that has some very interesting investment properties and a lot of potential (when I sat down to total up the amount of long term economic impact, I came to the conclusion that it may be a bigger deal than the Internet.)

Re: Ending Bitcoin Support

#623

Post by consultSKI » Wed, Jan 24, 2018, 11:31 AM UTC

this is a good read for the reasons cited. it made no sense (or cents) for stripe or anyone else to put bitcoin on top of networks with traditional fees. i love stripe and hope they continue to allow me operate various businesses without the need for a traditional bank or processor. can't wait for them to do an IPO and pay off the VCs so i use them for my firearms clients.

Re: Ending Bitcoin Support

#624

Post by lhl » Wed, Jan 24, 2018, 11:46 AM UTC

Paul-ish wrote: post #440

hmcdona1 wrote: post #428

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The lightning network will be far less effective than people are hoping. You have to a) pay to open up a channel with each person you wish to use it, and b) each stake capital in that channel for it to be functional. This is useful only in specific scenarios like exchange-to-exchange transfers. Exchanges are going to be very unlikely to ever set up channels to customers. They haven't even implemented segwit yet, ther…

> a) pay to open up a channel with each person you wish to use it I think you only need a path to the person you want to pay, not a direct channel. eg if Alice wants to pay Bob, and they both have a channel to Greg, then Alice can send money to Bob through Greg. > They haven't even implemented segwit yet, The wikipedia[1] page seems to say that most miners implement segwit now. * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SegWit

Segwit is still not fully supported in the Core wallet [1] - change goes to P2PKH addresses and there's no GUI support for generating (or even sending to AFAIK) bech32 addresses.

While certain charts regulary show 10% usage [2], when analyzing UTXOs, the numbers are a miniscule 0.03% of transactions. [3]

[1] https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/11403

[2] http://segwit.party/charts/

[3] https://twitter.com/dukeleto/status/954759096544124928

Re: Ending Bitcoin Support

#625

Post by lhl » Wed, Jan 24, 2018, 11:56 AM UTC

sethgecko wrote: post #616

stanmancan wrote: post #426

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a few different ones that have made huge jumps forward; RaiBlocks can apparently do around 7,000tx/s.

Someone did a stress test the other day. Nowhere near 7ktx/s and a lot of nodes started to crash. https://medium.com/@bnp117/stress-testing-the-raiblocks-netw... Honestly it is scary to see how easy is to launch a DoS attack just by precomputing the PoW. Edit: Here are some people saying their nodes went out of sync https://www.reddit.com/r/RaiBlocks/comments/7rzlid/minor_str...

Radix is publishing some eye popping numbers on their DAG-based testnet: https://twitter.com/radixdlt/status/956087291696566272

We'll have to see how it functions in the real world later this year...

Re: Ending Bitcoin Support

#626

Post by Goladus » Wed, Jan 24, 2018, 12:43 PM UTC

hateduser2 wrote: post #495

Goladus wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Lots of assets have value without people buying things with them. Gold, houses, stocks, etc. That value is predicated on the notion that they're worth something to the holder apart from their market price. Gold can be used for jewelry and electronics manufacturing. In that sense it is a natural resource. Stocks are shares in a company that runs a business or multiple businesses that could be profitable. Companies h…

And what is jewelry’s worth? What is fine arts worth? What is fiat currency worth? The world is chock full of goods with no inherent value . None. Fine art is worth a lot BECAUSE it is worth a lot. Kim kardashian is famous for being famous. It’s clear the world is not utilitarian.

Jewelry and artwork are used for adornment and to signal status.

Artwork is also used to decorate or define your living space or working space. It can manipulate your emotional state, serve as a conversation piece at parties, or signal some other trait about you. Artwork is also used to express ideas. Is really high-end collectable artwork from famous dead artists priced far higher than its utility should warrant? Most likely this is because they're used as a store of value. The reasons why artwork became a convenient store of value are probably interesting and might be worth comparing on a detailed level with bitcoin-- but the simple fact that fine art exists as a store of value does not mean that just any arbitrary exchangeable item is likely to fill a similar role.

Kim Kardashian's story is a lot more nuanced than you give it credit for. Many famous socialites quickly fade back into relative obscurity. Kardashian (in full club get-up, anyway) was strikingly beautiful, had a bold but impeccable sense of style, and a willingness to repeatedly expose her personal life to the public. She proved to have a better-than-average ability to entertain audiences on her reality TV show, even if that ability wouldn't fit into any traditional definition of an entertainer.

Fiat currency has no value beyond its utility as a medium of exchange (or store of value). But then, my whole point is to distinguish currency from other types of assets.

Re: Ending Bitcoin Support

#627

Post by criddell » Wed, Jan 24, 2018, 12:52 PM UTC

sillysaurus3 wrote: post #514

criddell wrote: post #462

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Satoshi expected Bitcoin to scale to Visa-levels of 100 million transactions per day. He expected the cost of a transaction to be less than Visa forever, not just while nobody was using it.

Did Satoshi say this directly? Try to find a quote and paste it. It's a useful exercise, because it forces you to constrain your thinking. Either from the whitepaper or from http://satoshi.nakamotoinstitute.org/ I don't think Satoshi said this, but I'll be happy to admit to being wrong. In fact, here is Satoshi's clear and complete vision from the very beginning: http://satoshi.nakamotoinstitute.org/emails/cryptograp…

http://satoshi.nakamotoinstitute.org/emails/cryptography/2/

You can also find copies of an email Satoshi wrote to Mike Hearn where he said essentially the same thing.

Re: Ending Bitcoin Support

#628

Post by Goladus » Wed, Jan 24, 2018, 2:36 PM UTC

psyc wrote: post #98

0xcafecafe wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gold as a metal has an inherent value though. If not only for jewelry, it also has important uses in electronics. The value associated with bitcoin seems purely sentimental.

Its usefulness as a metal/ornament is not why it's priced as it is. That's due to rarity, authenticity, and acceptance as a value store. And that's just another way of saying it's good for debt accounting. Bitcoin, seashells, obsidian, and gold share(d) those properties. The price is what people are willing to pay for N units in the literal or de facto “ledger”.

The question is, if gold did not have properties that made it useful as an ornament and symbol of high status (and therefore high mate value), would it have ever become accepted as a store of value?

Re: Ending Bitcoin Support

#629

Post by dragonwriter » Wed, Jan 24, 2018, 2:36 PM UTC

Jommi wrote: post #613

dragonwriter wrote: post #578

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But what does it matter which one has a larger "intrinsic value"? It matters a lot of part of the reason to invest in them is as a hedge against general collapse of social institutions.

But are you really hedging against the collpase of _everything_ so that we are at a completely primative level. Or do we mean collapse as in another collapse of the world economy? If you mean the former, then yes, gold is a good hedge. But if you mean the latter, then I would argue Bitcoin beats gold 100x.

> But are you really hedging against the collpase of _everything_ so that we are at a completely primative level. Or do we mean collapse as in another collapse of the world economy?

The world economy has never collapsed, and if it did, it would be equivalent to the first option.

If you mean a short-term market downturn like the one that occurred with the ~2009 financial crisis, why would I even bother to hedge against that—and, if I did, why would I use an asset with high volatility to hedge against short-term market movement?

Re: Ending Bitcoin Support

#630

Post by ceejayoz » Wed, Jan 24, 2018, 3:01 PM UTC

Jommi wrote: post #612

ceejayoz wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You can't create new bitcoin at any time - not after all blocks are mined Bitcoin Cash did exactly that. New value was conjured up out of nowhere - Bitcoin didn't drop, and every owner of a Bitcoin suddenly had $2-3k worth of Bitcoin Cash. > Wiped cryptocurrency can be returned. ... What? Are you sitting on a SHA-256 exploit we don't know about?

Bitcoin Cash is not Bitcoin. It did not create new Bitcoin. It created another currency called Bitcoin Cash. Not sure what is so hard to understand from this. Let me break it up to you again: 1. Bitcoin (In it's current form) has a limited supply. If nothing changes, there will be a time when new Bitcoin cannot be mined anymore. 2. Forking Bitcoin does not mean new Bitcoin is created. You are confusing value and supp…

When the fork occurred, Bitcoin's value didn't drop, and Bitcoin Cash's market cap was instantly in the billions. Everyone suddenly had more funny money, but we're somehow supposed to believe "Bitcoin isn't inflationary!" still holds.

It's going to get really exciting at tax time, when people declare bankruptcy, go into a nursing home and need to prove they don't have assets for Medicaid, etc.

> Like you said, SHA256 exploits, or maybe quantum computing would be able to recover them.

That's an insane defense of the point. Sure, if that stuff happens, you'll be able to retrieve lost coins. And non-lost coins. So will everyone else. Bitcoin's value would be instantly zero.