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Why Ethereum is outpacing Bitcoin

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Re: Why Ethereum is outpacing Bitcoin

#71

Post by polskibus »

cap3 wrote: post #43

the only way to be in on ether is to hold it. That's true for individuals and for large institutions joining the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance. Behind the scenes, large institutions are buying up Ether and anticipating that it will become a part of the financial system (either that or it will become a shadow financial system, and they are therefore incentivized to be early adopters). There's no way to short ether or b…

Do you have a citation for large organizations buying up ether? I only came across articles mentioning corporations forking ethereum code and testing it out for other purposes.

Re: Why Ethereum is outpacing Bitcoin

#72

Post by [deleted] »

cap3 wrote: post #43

the only way to be in on ether is to hold it. That's true for individuals and for large institutions joining the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance. Behind the scenes, large institutions are buying up Ether and anticipating that it will become a part of the financial system (either that or it will become a shadow financial system, and they are therefore incentivized to be early adopters). There's no way to short ether or b…

[deleted]

Re: Why Ethereum is outpacing Bitcoin

#73

Post by mquander »

root_axis wrote: post #37

> As a “hard fork” looms, which looks set to split Bitcoin into two separate currencies that will have to fight for custody of the Bitcoin moniker This already happened to eth when the creators hard forked the chain in an effort to roll back operations of an eth application that was used in a way that the creators did not anticipate. If this didn't kill ethereum why would it be a problem for bitcoin? Fortunately for…

Except this isn't actually happening in practice. I am yet to see any "new kinds of decentralized applications", just toy applications that have no practical purpose besides internet roulette

So, uh, how about all those ERC20 ICOs? I admit that you may wish to classify them as "Internet roulette."

Re: Why Ethereum is outpacing Bitcoin

#74

Post by nas »

opportune wrote: post #7
JohnJamesRambo wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The miners only process transactions that have higher and higher fees. This makes lower fee transactions take forever to be processed or never happen at all. Since bitcoin limits how many transactions that can occur in a set amount of time it creates this awful fee-based backlog. The self-serving and shortsighted bitcoin community has argued and bickered amongst itself so long about how to fix this that it may be too…

Is this a conscious decision on behalf of the miners themselves, or is it a result of mining becoming increasingly more difficult?

The limit on transactions per second is a function of the block size, currently 1 MB. Based on what the miners say, they would be interested in increasing the block size. Understand that the miners like high fees but they like high bitcoin prices even more. The fees are only a fraction of the block reward. If the system becomes too expensive then the miners will lose a lot more than just some fees.

The 1 MB limit is set by the bitcoin software. The software that most everyone runs is developed by a group called the "bitcoin core". That group has mostly been taken over by the company Blockstream (this is my opinion, others would argue the team is diverse and not controlled by any one company). Blockstream's business is based on off-chain transactions (i.e. the Lightning network).

It is in Blockstream's interest to get a feature that enables Lighting into the Bitcoin software (SegWit). Miners have been refusing to upgrade. One theory is that SegWit will disable a special optimisation that one of the biggest miners uses (ASCIBoost). In any case, Bitcoin core team refuses to increase the block size and the miners have been refusing to enable SegWit.

The SegWit upgrade is a good thing, IMHO, even though it seems like a pretty complicated feature. Having the ability to open "payment channels" and make cheap transactions off the main chain would be great. However, I feel that a block size increase to 2 MB or 4 MB is long overdue. I don't understand all the technology issues so maybe there is some really good reason not to do it.

It is clear to me that Satoshi (founder of Bitcoin) and Gavin (previous leader of Bitcoin core group) felt that the block size could be scaled to keep fees low. Both software improvements and hardware/network improvements would progress quickly enough to scale with demand. The current core team does not think so and think off-chain transactions are the only way to scale now.

Re: Why Ethereum is outpacing Bitcoin

#76

Post by yellowapple »

theptip wrote: post #16
yellowapple wrote: post #5

"In a world where people are used to online payments being confirmed instantly, Bitcoin transactions can take anywhere from tens of minutes to several hours, depending on how busy the network is." Online payments (via traditional means) are by no means "confirmed instantly". The authorization happens more-or-less instantly, but that's only the first of multiple steps in the transaction process; the actual transfer of…

There's two ways of interpreting "online payments" here. Through the lens of ACH/wire payments, your point is spot on. However, I suspect the author meant Venmo/Paypal etc.; that's certainly how I interpreted the sentence. I'd argue that those services are better comparisons for P2P payments, especially in the US, where most consumers are not able or inclined to give out their bank information to receive an ACH payme…

"However, I suspect the author meant Venmo/Paypal etc."

And my remark is still applicable there, since they're basically just frontends to the traditional ACH/wire payment system (at least in the case of Paypal; I haven't used Venmo much, so I'm not as familiar with how it works). Unless Paypal is paying the seller before receiving actual funds from the buyer, I'm not really seeing how this would be any different of a situation.

Re: Why Ethereum is outpacing Bitcoin

#77

Post by dahdum »

cap3 wrote: post #43

the only way to be in on ether is to hold it. That's true for individuals and for large institutions joining the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance. Behind the scenes, large institutions are buying up Ether and anticipating that it will become a part of the financial system (either that or it will become a shadow financial system, and they are therefore incentivized to be early adopters). There's no way to short ether or b…

"There's no way to short ether or bitcoin"

Incredibly untrue, many exchanges and a couple derivative platforms allow this.

I haven't the chutzpah to short crypto, but plenty of people do.

Re: Why Ethereum is outpacing Bitcoin

#78

Post by gnarcoregrizz »

SCAQTony wrote: post #36
dpc_pw wrote: post #9

The whole reason why Ethereum is "outpacing" Bitcoin is easiness of taking money from clueless "investors" that feel like they missed the boat on becoming rich through Bitcoin. https://medium.com/@WhalePanda/i-was-wrong-about-ethereum-80... It's going to be a big mess, one this bubble pops.

WhalePanda in not an economist, not a digital coin developer, nor a professional coin analyst. At his website he describes himself as: "...I’m a Belgian Brand/Online Marketing/UX consultant with a passion for Bitcoin..." https://twitter.com/WhalePanda?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwca... Obviously partial to bitcoin but has no more "street cred" that I do: "a California fine artist, UI designer, with a passion for Ethere…

He also pulled off an insider trading stunt with the Monero maintainer. I'm not sure why people listen to this dude

Re: Why Ethereum is outpacing Bitcoin

#79

Post by root_axis »

drcode wrote: post #59
root_axis wrote: post #37

> As a “hard fork” looms, which looks set to split Bitcoin into two separate currencies that will have to fight for custody of the Bitcoin moniker This already happened to eth when the creators hard forked the chain in an effort to roll back operations of an eth application that was used in a way that the creators did not anticipate. If this didn't kill ethereum why would it be a problem for bitcoin? Fortunately for…

> it's essentially vaporware and all signs point to the conclusion that it will remain that way for the foreseeable future. Here's the ethereum proof of stake code that will go live on ethereum sometime this year: https://github.com/ethereum/research/blob/master/casper4/sim... This is the actual production code (though of course still in draft form, under review) > just toy applications that have no practical purpose…

> Here's the ethereum proof of stake code that will go live on ethereum sometime this year

Until it goes live, it's vaporware. The issue isn't "can proof of stake code be written" the question is "will eth continue to function safely and correctly using a proof of stake system"? We'll talk when it hits production.

> The UN uses an ethereum app to send aid to Syrian refugees via vouchers:

The details are not really clear from the article. How does this work? Why was this possible with eth but not with bitcoin or dogecoin or any other cryptotoken? How do displaced Syrian refugees accept, manage, and spend digital currency? I am highly skeptical of this without lots of details.

Re: Why Ethereum is outpacing Bitcoin

#80

Post by X86BSD »

I don't follow the cryptocurrency world much. The last time I tried to really look into all the coins I bought some Monero. Monero seems the most sound technically and cryptographically.

Can someone explain to me why one alt coin like etherum gets more attention/value than others? What is it doing that is novel, or makes it more secure, or more anonymous than say Monero?

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