Topic: Analysis and list of top big blocks shills (XT #REKT ignorers) - page 54. (Read 46564 times)

With 'as of this moment' he meant that the data is present and not outdated. However, I do agree that it is better than most. Polls on this forum are of near zero value considering the amount of votes and people with alts/shills. A single user could easily manipulate a poll if he or she wanted to.

Ideally yes both but if the poll was changed to "What do you use Bitcoin for?" (A store of wealth or a currency) and have no 3rd option you would see a 'Store of wealth' as the most common use case.

>you have an exchange for Beanie Babies
When people see Beanie "value rise 400% per year," they'll build exchanges. Same as Bitcoin.

>Being able to produce bitcoin by yourself is a very important aspect
Oh? You mean one can spend $100 to mine $20, that sort of a thing? Because that's roughly what non-factory miners can expect.
If you want, I could create Giant's Place, a Beanie Cloudmining website, where you can pretend that you're mining Beanies while I return $20 out of each $100 you give me.
How would that be different from Bitcoin?

He clearly states "as of this moment," and cites the data he's relying on by linking to the poll. Better than most, I'd say

I do not think higher fees would substantially hinder the growth of the community or its network effect as long as those fees stay between 1 and 5 USD, in the distant future when we have a better internet and a better tor network and a better bitcoin network (with stable fees) then by all means go wild.

Sorry I never heard about Beanie Babies until last year, just like almost no one heard about bitcoin during 2009. But now there are so many exchanges out there to provide the bitcoin conversion to fiat currency world wide, if you have an exchange for Beanie Babies, it would also have its market value decided by the users

Scarcity is one of the reason for bitcoin's value, but there are more to it. Being able to produce bitcoin by yourself is a very important aspect, this does not apply to Beanie Babies

That's exactly what I said: Question is, what people use bitcoin for AND what the network is capable of doing.

Problem is there exist several different oppinions about the second question. You think bitcoin needs higher fees to survive the reward droppings. That's ok, many people think so.

But also many people believe the opposite and think that in the long-run bitcoin can only survive if it processes a lot of transactions with little fees and for that it's growth must not be cutted now by high fees. As long as there is a substantial reward and as long as price rising equals the drop in reward there is no need to let raising fees cut adoption. In some time, when reward becomes insignificant, miners have to feed themselves by fees. This will be ~2025/2030.

Either Bitcoin achieves a status of digital gold that is not usefull for daily transactions, but usefull enough to feed a constand demand for transactions with 5-10 Dollar fee.

Or it will be a combination of digital gold and a daily payment systems that is usefull enough for a constant demand of a mass of transactions with a 0.5-1 cent fee.

Both scenarios can work. You prefer the first, I prefere the second (but would be ok with the first). I think we should avoid to decide things we can't influence. Neiher me or you nor single economic actors nor the core devs are able to decide this. It's only the market.

Wrong. This is a ignorant statement and you have no data to back it up. You can't draw to conclusions from only 30 votes.

You're in the minority.  Only 20% as of this moment think Bitcoin should be a store of wealth only rather than a currency also.
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1313494.new#new

Why would I want to buy BTC period? To "store value"? Why not use Beanie Babies for that?

How many BTC are there gonna be total, 21 mil? You know how many First Edition Princess Di Beanies there are? That's right, *fewer*. Moar scarcity.

And while the 21 million could be changed on a whim, with a simple fork, there'll never be another First Edition Princess Di Beanie. By definition.
Princess Di Beanie scarcity is guaranteed by logic, its value could not be diluted according to fundamental and unalterable metaphysical laws.

"But how do you transact in Beanies? That's, like, the dumbest thing I ever heard!!" you protest.
"Why do you want to use the Beaniestalk directly when all you want is zero fee transaction?" I reply. Beanies are not for transacting, use sidesprouts for that. Beanies are for storing massive amounts of wealth.  

I disagree: The question is what is Bitcoin the network capable of. Right now the network we have not the one we want is capable of very little. And we can't grow it or even maintain it with fees at their current level and block rewards dropping every 4 years. The Bitcoin community may grow by leaps and bounds over the next 4 years and its price may jump up to meet the level of investment miners have invested but unless we have a stable fee for miner income and reinvestment the network will fall. Transaction volume is not the issue its fees, block size is an issue about fees first then user accessibility second (transaction count) and currency usability is a distant 3rd.

It's not an "this-or-that" thing. It's both.

If bitcoin was no usable payment system, it would have never had any worth. It's name is not bitgold, but bitcoin.

But if bitcoin would not have this aspects you describe, it would be just some kind of decentralized paypal (which is, btw, great). With those aspect it's some kind of decentralized paypal with gold (which is greater).

In this current situation, where it's unclear where Bitcoin is heading, too many people imho want to define what bitcoin is made for. There is no valid answer on this except: Bitcoin is made for what people do and what the network is capable to support. That's it.

Many people in eastern europe e. G. use Bitcoin to order from shops in western europe that don't accept credit cards from some countries in eastern europe. The same with people from africa.

Other people like to gamble in the internet, what is not allowed in their jurisdictation. Next people use Bitcoin to order drugs online. And other just use it to watch pornography without revealing their name.

And now there come some people and say: this usecases are not what bitcoin is made for?

Why do you want to use the blockchain directly when all you want is zero fee transaction? There are so many mobile payment solutions which charges zero fee and instant confirmation, why bother using bitcoin?

If all you want is zero fee transactions, then you can use some web wallet service. I think the high fee on blockchain will push them to establish their major clearing channel, then they will provide zero fee transactions, or even negative fee transactions if that makes you happy

Of course it will be good that the blockchain can also be used to purchase coffee, but there is little meaning in it, since the lower the transaction value, the less trust you need

Similar to existing centralized payment services like paypal or VISA, in future you can use large bitcoin service providers to do zero transaction fee and instant confirmation transactions, if that's the utility you want. I don't see why people would use the blockchain to do it, which is more expensive and slower. The only reason that you'd rather use blockchain to do the transaction is because you are moving large amount of money or have specific privacy concern, in that case you will be willing to pay a high fee

Is "400% per year" price growth likely for a currency costing $100 per transaction?
"Bitcoin 2.0: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic [Useless As] Cash System"?

I simply disagree. I see nothing wrong with pushing users out of the Bitcoin network for not being able to pay because as of now there is no better way. No one can guarantee will ever see higher transactional demand, demand that would need to be so high that if it was ever met would be 10k times larger then what we see today, so high our network would fracture into a million parts from latency and orphaned blocks.  

For me there is a clear difference between shilling and having an opinion about something and expressing that opinion strongly. A shill blends into the environment, but the

majority of the posts are concentrated on obtaining one specific goal. You only need to browse such a users post history to isolate them. The shill will troll some threads and

post something with little value... but when it comes to his/her main goal, they will post extensively and with vigor. The OP is 100% correct in saying that these people needs to

be identified and labelled... but it's not going to be easy to differentiate between a shill and someone who feel strongly about a subject. Many of these people joined in,

because they felt strongly about what they perceived as censorship and not really anything to do about block sizes.    

If bitcoin's value rise 400% per year and it is very expensive to transact in bitcoin (like 100 USD per transaction), I think everyone would still rush into bitcoin like there is no tomorrow. They will do like pooled miners, combine their transactions as a single one to save the transaction fee

You should understand why most of the people come to bitcoin: Because this is a gold rush in cyberspace. They don't desperately want cheap transactions, so the payment function is the least to worry about. The California gold rush created the boom of the west coast, similar to bitcoin mining frenzy created most of these bitcoin companies today

The most attractive part of bitcoin is that by mining bitcoin, you can become your own central bank, participating in the money creation. This is totally impossible in today's fiat money system, and this property already attracted lots of enthuthiasts around the world when bitcoin were still worth almost nothing

There is a false claim from banks that money's value are generated from its transaction demand (to cover the fact that fiat money does not have any cost), but for honest money with a production cost (like gold or bitcoin), their value are not generated through its transaction demand. The fact that gold has quit transaction for decades but still rise in value clearly denied that theory. In fact, even for fiat money like USD, its value is not decided by how many people use it, but by people's trust. That's the reason when you have much lower transaction demand during a recession, the value of USD even rises because people desperately want USD when they are poor

Once you cleared this misconception, you will understand that raised level of bitcoin transaction capacity will not raise its value, its value would still be mainly decided by the mining cost and long term storage demand

So the question is: To make bitcoin a forever prosperous gold rush or a mobile payment system like other similar solutions?

I find that there are some strange misconceptions here. I will attempt to address some of them in this post.

First of all, the idea that hitting the blocksize limit will just remove unwanted or spam transactions is false. First of all I reject the idea of discriminating between transactions thinking that some of them are desired and others are unwanted. Bitcoin is meant to be a permissionless network, so we should not discriminate between transactions, as long as miners include them in the blocks is all that matters. More importantly however is that once the blocks do become consistently full. It is not the case that you would simply have to pay a higher fee but that there would not be enough capacity for everyone to transact regardless of the fee.


If adoption did increase under these circumstances which I do not think it would, but hypothetically at least. Bitcoin would become a settlement network for larger payment processors, financial institutions and banks. Bitcoin would not be able to be used as a currency directly anymore. Since average people would not be able to outbid these type of institutions for block space. I do question how many people would even choose to run full nodes for these types of larger financial institutions considering that they can not even use Bitcoin directly themselves, it seems counter intuitive if that was the reason for this sacrifice? The vast majority of people would be reliant upon third parties build on top of the Bitcoin blockchain, this would not be that different compared to the system we live under today, with some very important differences granted, however it would not share all of the same and full benefits of the original vision of Bitcoin, which is that it can become a currency for the whole world. Thereby empowering people and fundamentally changing the power structures of our civilization for the better.

I do not think that a limited blocksize in Bitcoin would lead to its use as a global clearing house or a reserve currency in the first place, I find it utterly unrealistic. Since without mass adoption by the people as a currency first I do not see any reason why the current status quo would adopt Bitcoin, since they can design their own systems that they are in control off, which would benefit them more at this point, the only way that I see the establishment adopting Bitcoin on mass is if they are "forced" to do so in order to stay relevant. Exactly because of mass adoption by the people which I believe will not be possible with a limited blocksize, it would simply become out competed by better, faster, more reliable and cheaper alternatives.

Secondly allowing the blocks to fill up thereby overloading the network would make transactions much more unreliable and obviously more expensive, it would also make for a much worse user experience compared to today. This would not be good for adoption, I find it strange that anyone would even claim such a thing, it really is just basic economics.


I also do not consider moving transactions off chain as a solution to scaling the Bitcoin blockchain itself. The main Bitcoin blockchain itself needs to have great value in order to pay for its security into the future. This brings me to my next point.

I find the idea that we must have high fees in order to pay for security flawed. I would argue that it is better to have a high volume of low fee transactions compared to a low volume of high free transactions. An increased price is what would presently allow for increased security, I think that the price of Bitcoin is linked to its utility, by not increasing the blocksize we are decreasing Bitcoins utility which I think would negatively impact the price and therefore also its security. Over the long term we need a high volume of transactions to pay for this security, this also further supports the idea of adoption being critical for the long term survival, decentralization, utility and freedom of Bitcoin.


Lastly I would like to very clearly state here that Bitcoin is freedom.

Satoshi thought that in the future the block reward would be replaced by transaction fees, but he never mentioned how it would be done or really thought about it in depth. If the block is always half-empty, then the fees collected from each block will be minuscule and worth next to nothing. We can not have a mining network maintained with the cutting edge hardware needed to protect us from government intervention on these pathetic transaction fees. We need small blocks to keep transaction fees high 1+ USD each. We should not be changing block size based on the number of transaction requesting admittance into the blockchain but by the amount of money people are willing to pay to gain that admittance. We should be adjusting the block size based on fees not on the amount of spam. Unfortunately this means there will be no room for free transactions.