Topic: Bitcoin halving to be canceled? - page 24. (Read 33769 times)

Using gold as money is an effect not a cause of gold's appeal to people. Bitcoin, like other fiat monies, doesn't have this attractiveness through its own existence per se, i.e. beyond the function of being money. In fact, its very existence is a result of deliberate conscious effort...

That was my point (natural vs artificial)

None of the money is natural, even gold has to be coined into unique form and weight to circulate as money. People usually do not accept gold bars/nuggets  because they can not tell the purity without professional equipment. Then the trust falls on the quality of those gold coins and the issuance of those coins, so they are usually made by authorities (gold smith centuries ago then later coinage organization). That's the key to money's value: An authority that people can trust

But later on in France, these authorities became untruthful and start to dilute the gold in the coins, and John Law even came up with the idea of fiat money that is backed by shares (Mississippi bubble), thus sank the credit worthiness of fiat money, and failed. But since then fiat money started to be backed by some complex securities that is totally out of understanding of average Joe, and became a supply/demand game

In bitcoin, those authorities are back, now they are mathematics and network. People have no problem to trust the authoritative of mathematics (law of nature), but they might not trust the network because it is prone to human manipulation. So it is essential the protocol is followed by all the network participants and even its users

For any type of money, even it has endless supply, the scarcity can still be observed by the end user, so scarcity of bitcoin does not really affect end users, but it indeed give speculators a long term positive prospect

i hope that will canceled,because some expert hope like that 

The halving cannot be delayed. If you want it to be delayed, you have to make your own coin and get the bitcoin community to move over to your coin and ask the retailers to accept your new coin too, which of virtually impossible at the rate normal bitcoin is being adopted.

Confidence in gold is based on inborn feelings and instincts (which are fixed and universal), while confidence in Bitcoin is purely rational and based on functions attributed to it (which can be called off). Without them it is useless. In this way it is no different from any other fiat money out there, as I said previously. Gold, on the other hand, is loved for what it is, in and of itself, not for what people set it to do. You are bringing forth concepts which are irrelevant to the question and trying to challenge what I have already at first made clear and then set aside as irrelevant...

Namely, the origin of value, subjective vs objective

Yes, I read it, I'm just disagreeing with your characterization of it. Value comes from two things: need and perception of value. Things that are not needs are not inherently valuable, and then value only comes from the perception that someone else will find value in it in the future. People like gold because it has value. Gold has value because people like it. Confidence in gold at this point is more tradition than anything else. You're saying that confidence in systems can't be compared to each other because the systems are different. That's not true at all. The systems can be radically different (like gold and bitcoin), and the value of each system still comes down to the confidence in the particular instrument. You can say that gold will always be valuable and cite its history as evidence and likely be right. That doesn't make it absolute, and the determining factor is always going to be whether or not people have confidence in the store of value.

Yes, it will happen, unless everyone stops mining bitcoin. Once a set number of bitcoins  have been mined the blocks are automatically halved. It's not some decision that's made by Janet Yellen or Theymos or Bad Bear....it's automatic. It was made by Satoshi years ago. It's a trigger in the coding!

When will always be a mystery, but if is not...once we mine to that number the blocks will be halved.

Thanks for the tip. I read another book by Baxter (gosh, about ten years ago now) called The Light of Other Days. I really enjoyed it.

You'd better go and read my posts carefully. I expected this argument and specifically have pointed it out that humans cannot change their own nature, "human perception" included, which is also a result of natural forces. Even more, I ended my post with the saying that "beauty is in the eye of the beholder". Did you read it? People like gold for its inherent qualities, and inherent means permanent and essential characteristics which cannot be taken or stripped off from an object possessing them without destroying it. Personally, you may not like gold, the way it looks and how it feels, but the rest of humanity would most certainly beg to differ with your opinion. And just like you can't change the law of gravity, you can't change the nature of man. That's why the confidence in gold is incomparable with that of Bitcoin...

In short, you cannot "unmake" gold

Right, but now you're talking about utility as opposed to just perception of value. Using a resource for industrial uses gives it a value, but that value is a smaller subset of the total value which includes perception of the resource as an asset or store of value, which makes it usable as money. There are plenty of resources that are both scarce and have utility for industrial purposes but are not used for storing value or as money, and the only difference there is that they aren't widely perceived to be have a value to someone in the future. Gold is a special case, but its status is also arbitrary. It's just one of the resources that is scarce and that everyone agrees is valuable. It didn't have to be gold, but its ease of finding to early civilizations probably had a lot to do with why it was gold and not something else.

No no, gold has no inherent value. It is not set by the laws of nature, it is set by human perception of its worth. The laws of nature, as you say, influence the perception of gold in that it is a limited resource, but it is still the expectation that someone else in the future will consider gold an asset that gives it value in the present.

So you think that after a lot of people don't get their transactions confirmed for a few months (which would obviously crash the price, thereby essentially nullifying their Bitcoin holdings they got trapped with), peeps will continue to use it? I'm highly doubtful on this, wtf. Many folks here talked about confidence (and still more thought about it)...

I guess it is the right time they showed up (thought again)

I'm curious why you deny the evident. Even if 60 minutes today is occasional (which is not good, mildly speaking), then it will be 100 minutes on average, right? There is a lower limit on the mean time between confirmations above which the network becomes unsustainable (transaction wise) and disintegrates. I guess just 1 hour time span would kill the blockchain pretty fast...

What is +1 and +2 in that table?

Okay, let's take your figures. Now we allegedly have 10 minutes between confirmations on average. I don't believe these numbers (the transaction weighted mean interval should be significantly higher, simple average being useless), but given that it is often much more than that (50-60 minutes and above), it would amount to 500-600 minutes if 90% of the hash rate is turned off. 600 minutes is 10 hours, Carl. Now we have 10 hours of waiting within which the network is essentially down, and many thousands (millions?) of unconfirmed transactions piling up...

Do you really think Bitcoin will ever recover from that glut? After a week Bitcoin will be as dead as a doornail due to escalation effects


I don't quite understand what this table means. Care to explain?

Are you kidding? It is not uncommon to see new blocks mined as rare as one per hour. If the major mining pools (which mine over 90% of new blocks) stop operation, the blockchain will be frozen

This is what I had been told. But it's cold comfort, given that I got caught personally (for 2 days, Сarl!) and generally don't believe such stories, lol. The theory of the more expensive transactions crowding out normal transactions doesn't hold since it fails to provide a viable explanation for empty blocks...

That would be true only for a short time until the difficulty adjusted. If really so many miners stopped instantly, which would not happen in one day timeframe, then it could mean that new blocks are only found every 25 minutes or so. Then when the difficulty adjusted then it should be again at 10 minutes.

That was because the stresstests. Someone created piles of junktransactions with a sligthly higher fee than legit transactions so that miners included the more expensive transactions and normal transactions got stuck. The problem was not that too view miners exist but that each block only can hold transactions worth 1mb of data.

By the way... the last days we have full blocks without spam attack. Many transactions are not confirming for a long time even though they have a good enough fee. Only because some people think we should not raise the blocksize limit.

The empty blocks are normal. Some miners do that all the time. The idea behind is that a block with only one transaction can be propagated faster through the network. Reaching >50% faster and maybe orphan other blocks that are big and can be propagated slower.

But there is a network to spread big blocks in 2 seconds or so. Every miner using it will not need empty blocks anymore. It is no argument anymore that you need to use empty blocks for an advantage.

Okay, but IIRC, the Dogecoin had nevertheless been uncapped at some stage of its life course. So, what is made by one human can be unmade by another

Your OP is quite confusing. The Bitcoin halving cannot be canceled unless the whole bitcoin community agrees for an edit to the bitcoin source code that we all use. Then we all have to start using a new or updated bitcoin wallet. This will not happen, as it has been tried, with Bitcoin XT. Most people will reject this change, as when someone holds 21 BTC, they hold a millionth of all the bitcoins there will ever be.