Topic: Bitcoin IS basically DESTROYED - page 27. (Read 47260 times)

Bitcoin is about rewarding actual work and investment. China has gone big and now will be rewarded. It's that simple. If you thought ass sitting was a way to be successful with bitcoin then you don't understand bitcoin's complex set of rewards and incentives. Any country, business, or individual is free to compete in mining and no entity has the authority to stop that.

Why? The hydroelectric dams are already constructed. The government isn't going to overthrown and replaced by a junta.

China is an economic powerhouse that will reap huge economic growth as it allows its economy to diversify. They don't have the problems with huge number of retirees and people on social welfare and unemployment insurance. The West can't compete because of the burden of the cost of socialism.

Their economy is starting to weaken, the energy there might start to become more expensive.

If that happens the problem might be solved.

There is no way to prevent centralization of any block chain design based on profitable proof-of-work as it scales up significantly. Period. It will always centralize to economies-of-scale. Period. Full stop.

The only possible way I can envision overcoming this is to make mining unprofitable but mandatory for signers of transactions. Even I am not sure this won't also become centralized. I'll explain this in great detail if I ever get around to writing a white paper (I wrote some of it).

As of the moment, I am trying to diversify my options, because I am losing hope for crypto-currency. I'd prefer to work on something that is more sane. If I can justify working on a CC as part of a diversified project that can make profit even if the CC fails, then I'll probably take a stab at it, if my resources allow me to.

Monero is decentralized for the time being because it is small and its proof-of-work hash is moderately ASIC resistant. I have a design for increasing the ASIC resistance. That is another aspect I might actually develop and not just talk about it.

I am tired of talking and trying to do more programming work. As of the moment I am bogged down in programming language design research. I am not in CC design at the moment, which all has been set aside for the moment for me.

Bitcoin might be a good investment. I have no opinion on that really. I have no idea to what degree confiscation will occur in the coming down years after 2017. We are headed into a turbulent time and we will just have to wait to see how it turns out.

Bitcoin will be increasingly centralized. I have no doubt about that. The impacts and timing of impacts of being centralized is something I can't know.

China control almost everything nowadays

You did not because you insist China will always have some type of competitive edge over the "inferior" west due to ingenuity or corruption.

China is a logistics nightmare and maybe they have a hard landing never to be heard from again once the shit hits the fan.

China's main fear is domestic political dissent for a reason.  The top is all crooked and the bottom is eventually going to riot and send the country into chaos while all the leaders flee to Vancouver.

Have you ever seen charts that show the wealth of a nation as a function of IQ?  It always shows higher IQ countries having more wealth, except in the case of authoritarian socialist regimes, then the IQ makes no difference and wealth of the nation plummets.  Due to China being a logistics nightmare, they will have to go more hardcore authoritarian than any other country on earth, and it will implode any type of ingenuity and it's impossible for them to keep up with other countries.  The second we put up tariffs it's over.

Its so obvious that the halving is already priced in.

Anyway, I agree with TPTB, long term both are SHIT as ETH is basically a scam and BTC is just digital fiat with potential worse controling outcomes that today fiat system

At least with monero we have a bit of financial privacy

I'm not playing your "move from one pump and dump to next pump and dump" scam game.  Better to just hold what actually has fundamentals.  I'm not buying garbage IPO scams issued by Eastern Europeans, issued for profit with no technical viability, whose entire purpose is to defraud people.  If I wanted to do that, I would just use fiat.

Neither Smooth or I agree with AnonymintTPTB_need_war (aka sockpuppet1) about BTC mining having a predictable endgame.  It's entirely plausible that commoditization of sha256d could make most big mining farms extinct, with the only miners remaining being people that use the waste heat to power some other type of utility:  water heaters, central heating, industrial use, etc.

You might risk the utility company diverting hash voting power for nefarious means in such a scenario, but what are the odds the utility companies of the US, North Korea, Iraq, Iceland, and whoever else all collude?

The usual term is commodification, meaning affordable and
efficient consumer-level ASICs

Say 75% of mining power is gone tomorrow. That means blocks take 40 minutes on average, after a while difficulty goes down, and all goes back to normal. Nothing lost there!
I would more worry about China disconnecting the internet for a while. When it comes back online, they have the longest chain and all transactions confirmed outside of China in that time are gone.

I think the rest of your comment is rather shortsighted (or careless?) though if you don't mind me saying. There is a very good reason why I personally like to "spell out" every point I try to put across. By limiting my audience to only a few "learned scholars" who would be able to understand abstract comments, I would be limiting my own scope and reach. It would be a little like in-breeding amongst snobs  really    
By having everything "spelled out" in plain English, you'd be able to gather a lot more data, ideas and experiences from people with a variety of different backgrounds. More data/input  means higher probability that you come across something unexpected that helps you expand your own sphere of knowledge. You're shortsighted if you think you can only learn from 'intelligent' people. Knowledge is devoid of bias.
I hope I don't come across as harsh. And this is certainly not a personal attack.
BTW I don't consider myself intelligent by any stretch of the word. I've failed way too many exams to even toy with the idea 

Amusingly, my "one offensive comment" was actually me repeating something my wife (not at all a "shitlady") learned in her MFA program at SF State (not at all a Hitler Youth academy). (This is the observation that the conquistadors began the slave trade with Africa because Native Americans didn't thrive as slaves, which is not at all controversial history.) I figured that this wasn't exactly the sort of thing I'd say, but coming from her it was probably okay.

Perhaps oddly, if anything I thought of this as a negative observation about Native Americans (I probably wouldn't do super well in the sugarcane fields either). Similarly, if I said that Greek Jews were more likely to survive in Auschwitz than Western European Jews (which is also true), this would strike me as a positive comment on the toughness of Greek Jews, not an opinion that they should be sent to the ovens first.

Somehow, which shouldn't have surprised me, this commonplace historical observation metamorphosed into "everyone of African descent is best suited to cutting sugarcane for the Noble White Man." I don't have a problem with "rescinding" that, since I never said it.

I said "character and intelligence." One thing that's hard for the 20th century to understand is that the ability to survive as an agricultural slave is a talent -- just like the ability to survive in Auschwitz. (Read Primo Levi.)

It was not necessarily the best, the worst, the smartest or the dumbest who survived in Auschwitz. Auschwitz selected for a very different set of talents than the normal, sane world, in which being nice and smart is better than being mean and dumb. Similarly, early American slavery selected for talents that Africans had and Indians lacked.

(It's not militarily hard to enslave people in their native land when you're as ruthless as a medieval Spaniard -- guerrilla war in Latin America is a postcolonial phenomenon, not a colonial one) As I understood and understand the matter, the complaint of the conquistadors about their Indian captives was that they too easily refused to work and eat, and essentially just died. This is similar to the fate of the last of the Tasmanians. Hunter-gatherer peoples don't do well when forced into inactivity/drudgery. Intellectuals also don't do well with drudgery, although we're just fine with inactivity. So the conquistadors imported agricultural peoples to do agricultural labor.

I would make a terrible agricultural laborer and an awful agricultural slave. (I am also not very good at being a master, though for different reasons.) Am I praising myself for this lack of talent?

Yes, it may have something to do with my high intelligence. (It also has something to do with my poor character.) Intelligence can be a liability. You don't have to be an agricultural slave to realize this -- all you need to do is go to an American high school.

What I learned in an American high school was that intelligence does not make me special or better. I agree that if I thought smarter people were better people, given the fact that no magic process has distributed the smarts equally, I would be a racist in the classic sense. (I also don't agree that the talent to be a master, or the talent to be a slave, makes a person better or worse.)

It's hard, especially for smart people, to give up the idea that smart people are better than stupid people. The ancient Greeks lent similar prestige to athletics; they believed a fast runner was spiritually better than a slow runner. They fought a lot of wars, so athletics mattered a lot to them; we write a lot of code, so problem-solving ability matters a lot to us. But one is a muscular talent, the other is a neurological talent. Neither has any mystical significance.

Once you stop believing in the mystical importance of intelligence, I think it's very easy to accept that it's unequally distributed (as athletic talent certainly is). I understand that this is very hard for our society, and especially for people like me who grew up believing that good grades were holy and professors were gods.

All I can say is: they're not. Or at least, so I believe. I hope this helps you understand the context of my remarks a little better.

So there masterplan is to invest millions of dollars into a mining farm, collaborate with other farms that have done the same, destroy bitcoin and lose everything?/ sounds like a solid business model...

If you are really concerned about chinese bitcoin miners and china's greed in general, you can try to stop using chinese made stuff.

Well, if it ain't China then those white devils look like they'll do a pretty good job too - https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/4isxjr/petition_to_protect_satoshis_coins/d30we6f

There's another downside of it. Chinese gov could easily take control over (vast) majority of hashing power (or shut just shut it down) if they only wanted to for whatever reason. It would require minor operations and, unlike western countries, they wouldn't even have to justify it (search for legal grounds etc).

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You are welcome to debate the validity of "g" with psychometricians

Well it's obvious that China owns most if not all of the hashing power in the world and that Bitcoin mining has basically become centralized but do you think the Chinese government might try to exert control over all the mining farms in order to mess with the Bitcoin network? I hope China realizes that tinkering with the network or trying to strong-arm changes in the core client that will favor miners more may cause an irreparable damage to the Bitcoin market.

But if you care to explain it to me, I'd love to hear all about the Gaussian distribution and how it validates his statement. In layman's terms of course  

Ahem. Did you not learn about the Gaussian distribution in high school like the rest of us did.

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Lol. But in order for your logic to work, you need to assume that he is dishonest with himself, i.e. blinded by their own ideologies, which I find to actually be the case with ideologues.

BTC will moon regardless of this.

Even if they wanted to, I don't see governments being competent enough to take over Bitcoin in the near future when the world economy implodes.  That's why I say no matter what you think about Bitcoin, it's going to play a vital role as a life raft to get to whatever is on the other side of "the great reset".  You can nitpick about random metrics of Bitcoin if you're able to survive past that point.  All I know is, Bitcoin will either be extremely useful and valuable then, or everyone will be killing each other in the street for cans of soup and no currency will have value.

Collectivism is a power vacuum and the argument is always about who gets to steal for and from whom.

Bernie: "Socialism can be repaired as long as I can be in charge of the stealing to insure it is fair".
Trump: "Stealing can be optimized if I am Dicktator-in-chief"
Clinton: "You'll tolerate my theft (for myself and my cronies) because as a Democrat I'll steal some for you too (and not remind you I funded it all by expanding an egregious future debt on your children's back)"