Is Blockchain Really the Killer App?

> Why do people keep trying to argue that dogecoin/litecoin/etc/etc don't have value, when people trade them for other currencies every day on open markets?

They have value but it's much more based on speculation. If you look at Bitcoin, there's an ecosystem of millions of users, over 100 thousand merchants including some of the world's biggest companies like Microsoft, hundreds of bitcoin-focused VC-backed startups of which one had a valuation nearing half a billion dollars etc etc.

While it's obvious that bitcoins are overvalued in relation to this ecosystem (i.e. a substantial part of its price is based on speculation that the ecosystem will become massively important in the future), there already is a genuine ecosystem out there with decent growth rates.

Dogecoin or litecoin don't have that. They have communities that keep them alive but there doesn't seem to be a long term viability. This is different from bitcoin's early days (which didn't have any real ecosystem either at one point) in that bitcoin actually offered something radically new, while litecoin for example isn't innovative, it was the first me-too that didn't totally screw over its early investors in a pump & dump scheme so it's stayed around but it doesn't offer anything special. Does that mean they have no value? Absolutely not. They do. But 'me-too' companies also have value in the short-term. In the long term they usually don't survive. We're already seeing that, litecoin for example dropped insanely in price (like 90%) in the past year and that's not just because bitcoin readjusted after late 2013's hype cycle, it crashed against bitcoin itself, too, i.e. the market is already identifying that litecoin versus just bitcoin doesn't have a future in the long-run. And if there's ANYTHING you have to know about bitcoin is that it's almost always spoken about in a long-term frame of reference. If we purely look at the short term then yes, we can say dogecoin & litecoin have value and so does bitcoin, but we would also have to say that all three combined are absolutely insignificant, a drop in the ocean, the size of a mid-cap fund of which there are thousands. The short-term isn't interesting, in the short-term me-toos exist, in the long-run they don't.

In short, the reason people say litecoin has no value is not because it's not being traded: that's speculation. It's that it is said to have no utility value over bitcoin. Bitcoin can power any utility litecoin can, with more liquidity, more market participants, more open-source libraries & development, more funding, more security etc.

I don't think we'll all be using bitcoins necessarily, but I do believe we'll all be using bitcoin (or no cryptocurrency at all, of course, that's very possible, too). i.e. yes there are niches in digital currency, but the cryptocurrency niches will, I think, if they exist in the long-term, be served by products running on top of the bitcoin network. Anything litecoin or dogecoin can do, a bitcoin treechain or sidechain or payment channel can do but with the above mentioned benefits. It's like saying there are different niches in internet protocols, as if to say the internet may run on many different protocols that serve different niches in the long-term, instead of saying TCP/IP powers the internet and it has higher-level protocols that serve niches like http or smtp. Within that line of thinking, anything but TCP/IP has no long-term value and any niche in internet technology will be built on top of that one protocol. Similarly many who say 'litecoin has no value' think of bitcoin as being the protocol for value transfer, and anything having to do with transferring value (or titles, contracts etc) will be built on top of it, rather than along side it.

In short, the claim that litecoin has no value (despite having a market value) makes a lot of sense depending on what you believe about the future of cryptocurrency.

> There comes a point when it's just no longer practical to store the entire blockchain

Why would you have to? The point of decentralisation is not that everyone has a copy of the truth. It's that a sufficient number of nodes have a copy of the truth, such that you can check a number of them and easily verify the veracity of the data. Many blockchain applications run not by querying their own blockchain but rather querying a number of trusted sources via their API. Coinbase, Bitpay, Chain.com, Blockcypher etc all offer APIs to interface with their blockchain nodes and others.

It's like saying Facebook will never work because you can't possible store the worlds' photos on everyone's smartphones. You don't have to, Facebook stores it on their server. Similarly we will see, and already see, dedicated servers that store the blockchain, and as long as you have enough independent ones you can maintain decentralisation just as if you were hosting your own node.

There's absolutely no need to host the blockchain on small embedded devices any more than any other data, like music or photos we normally host on dedicated servers instead.

> but truncating the chain (or only storing some kind of "working set") isn't feasible either.

Yes it is. What makes you say it isn't? Pruning the blockchain is something that's currently being worked on.

The idea is that if I send you $1 a million times and you send it back $1m times, every day, for the next 1 billion years, we could either store terabytes and terabytes of data of all these transactions, or we could store the end result (= no change occurred) and the last couple weeks of transaction data. The rest can be pruned. Because each block has a hash of all its transactions, and this hash is used to mine the next block (hence a chain of blocks, blockchain), we needn't store each individual transaction, we have the hash to verify the truth of transactions.

We might have some universities saving all transactions for posterity & research, and some businesses for data mining, but the vast majorities of nodes that just need to secure the network can indeed, without security issues, not store long-spent outputs. (i.e. bitcoins that have already been spent many times over. e.g. if I give a dollar to you and you give it to the next guy, and he to the next girl, and so on 100 times, at that point there's absolutely no reason to store on every node the fact I gave a dollar to you for the security of the network.)

> Not to mention the gargantuan download that's required for that initial setup to get up to date with the latest network transactions.

Again, no need to have all redundant transactions. The pruned blockchain would currently be under a gigabyte large. Second, headers-first has already been implemented which made the initial setup much, much faster.

Beyond that, we mustn't forget that the average American makes 2 transactions a day. And one such transaction is about 400 bytes or so, in bitcoin. If you compare this to tweets, or an hour of netflix, it's puny. If you count up all the data, it's about $8 to store one day of all of US consumer transactions on a retail harddrive. Imagine the cost of storage for Mastercard for one of their nodes was $8, and instead of just powering a fraction of US retail, they'd literally handle every single transaction by themselves and store them all for $8. Even if you wanted to have thousands of nodes and store the last year of data (and given the velocity of money, you wouldn't have to as again, you can prune data after money has been spent a couple times), that's a puny amount of money to power an entire consumer financial system of the world's biggest economy. And given storage, like CPU and bandwidth, on a 50-60% yoy growth rate (Kryders, Moore's and Nielsen's laws), I think by the time bitcoin becomes important enough to run 100% of US retail (which is likely never, but hypothetically speaking), that $8 will have dropped to below $0.10 easily.

I know I'm taking big shortcuts here but this is just to illustrate the economics are extremely favorable today and in the future. I don't know if bitcoin will succeed or fail, but I'm pretty near certain it won't fail because storage/cpu/bandwidth isn't affordable enough for nodes to make it viable to run the network. I and many others have looked into this quite a bit and these aren't big problems. Bitcoin has big obstacles (no gigantic consumer benefits in a world of decent fintech like every OECD country to use bitcoin directly, is one), but storage probably isn't one of em.

To unpack this claim:

> The value of something is "what you can get someone to pay for it." That is the only concrete, objective, and rational way to determine value.

Most if not all traded financial assets have conditional values, values that are fixed only at discrete points in time by actual transactions, and only in retrospect. Outside of that there's no guarantee that a stated value is concrete, objective, or rational at all.

The value of a given share of Bill Gates's MS stock for example is X if he attempts to sell a token amount today, and it's Y if he attempts to sell a large amount today. And X So tell me then, what is the concrete, rational, and objective value of Bill Gate's MS stock? The "correct" answer has to include a version of "well, it depends".

You claim that the value of something is "what you can get someone to pay for it" without realizing that by definition your measure of value is vague, indistinct, and subjective.

You could make an argument that the value of something is "what you actually got someone to pay for it at a specific date and time" but you didn't say that.

> Bitcoin code, protocol and marshaling formats are a mess.

Which is why people are working on e.g. Libconsensus.

There are dozens of functional Bitcoin clients based on entirely different codebases, which indicates that it's entirely possible to start from scratch.

>payments with a single token.

While the Bitcoin transaction format is a bit inflexible, you're wrong about the assumptions it makes. Even from the beginning, there has been in-protocol support for more advanced transaction types, like escrow transactions. You can even use a lot of these transaction types right now! There are still some transaction script opcodes that haven't been fully enabled yet, but that's just a matter of tweaking the consensus rules once we're sure that the opcode was implemented correctly and won't have any bad side effects. This has happened several times already with no major problems.

Fiat is just an IOU, it's worth exactly what it's worth. There's a small admin cost to e.g. printing notes, but it's tiny in proportion to the overall currency value. Bitcoin is unique because it has a big negative externality - a huge amount of energy is simply thrown away, powering computers to do something non-worthwhile. A bitcoin is an IOU for something that's already been spent.