Topic: Bitcoin: The Social Phenomenon - page 2. (Read 2624 times)

But there are a lot of times that it is getting destroyed.

A lot of hacking and scams, talking about scams, I just watched a video about Onecoin and this Dr. Ruja behind it that is said that will take Bitcoin down. Just imagine the damage they did with the people that might invest in cryptocurrencies and the ones that already invested in it and said to lose 250K euro.

Teşekkürler, mindrust!  Bitcoin: Bir Sosyal Fenomen is now sung in the Turkish language; for:

Thanks for sharing this. I like and agree to the perspective that you cannot stop people from attempting to go their own way and try to get a shot at glory with their own projects and that the problems arise when lot of these people try to paint bitcoin's future by taking analogies from other technologies.

To entice newbies as well as the marketing types, it is very easy to say things like "Bitcoin is like Vacuum tubes used in old radio system. The muliti-chain, multi-token, Federated voting, Distributed PoS bullshit we are working on is the Insulated Gate Bipolar Transistor you need.". The understanding that bitcoin is technologically the best at what it does and that it is impossible and fraudulent to replicate/ replace the network effect comes too late or never does.

We do need a bit of exposition on this idea that bitcoin is in itself the technology that will evolve. Bitcoin is not Yahoomail that will be taken over by Gmail. It is not DEC that will lose the computer business to IBM. For an analogy, Bitcoin is more like internet itself for which Yahoo and Gmail are the same thing. Its like semiconductor manufacturing for which Vacuum thyristor and IGBT are the same thing.

A social phenomenon that I don't think has been fully studied yet. But on the other hand, the appearance of bitcoin is very important not only for the financial but also for the social sphere.

I am glad I was involved in this wonderful piece of art, by translating it in Romanian.
Welcome and thank you as well, nullius!

Există un singur Bitcoin!

The Bitcoin Social Phenomenon now comes to us from Romania as “Bitcoin: Fenomenul social”.  Mulțumesc, GazetaBitcoin!

For I repeat:

My thanks to taikuri13 for the Russian translation of “Bitcoin: The Social Phenomenon”.  It is an important message for all peoples and all languages, because:


OP has been edited to add a Translations section.  (Pre-edit archival snapshot.)

Some people begged for BIG BLOCKs too, but did not mean that they were representative.

You can find all kinds of people saying all kinds of shit, and that does not mean that they are representative.



Fair enough.  Yes, sometimes people say all kinds of shit, about what is needed, or what would be best for bitcoin, and sometimes you will even catch yours truly engaging in various expressions about what he wishes.... but so what?  You think honey badger cares?

O.k.  Yes, I have seen both sides regarding "we need an ETF," but still who cares?  Just because a bunch of people are saying it?



O.k.  maybe I will give up on this argument regarding whether people are advocating for x, y or z.... and change my argument to "who cares?"

or I could change my argument to ... "uncle... I concede that people say a bunch of shit"



O..k. Let's say that I concede regarding the facts that a lot of people are saying that they want some safety BIG players to come in and pump bitcoin to the moon.. such as custody solutions etc etc...

You are wanting to assert that people also want KYC and AML and all of that too?   

I just see that you are trying to get too much out of this.  Bitcoin is designed in a certain way that it can still grow whether the BIG players embrace it or not.


Bitcoin is also designed in such a way that sooner or later BIG players are likely going to have to come into bitcoin in order to be relevant.  BIG players need bitcoin, bitcoin does not need BIG players, even though there is likely going to be measurable benefits to having orange coin go up, in the form of various pumps.  Hard to complain about orange number going up, even if it is NOT exactly a necessity for orange coin to survive and even prosper.  So again, maybe you are arguing about dynamics that likely happen through the progression of the various network effects and a kind of inevitability of greater and greater regulation, but there is disruption effects with bitcoin too because it is a paradigm shifting technology that we have never had before, so we cannot be sure exactly how it is all going to play out.  We have a little development and regulation here or there that might be facilitating bitcoin or hostile to bitcoin but it still seems quite difficult to kill bitcoin completely because it is like a multi-headed monster across jurisdictions, so even if some jurisdictions might want to control and contain bitcoin, the ones who are smart enough about it, recognize that attempting to control it is quite difficult, and that they can only do so much in the so difficult to win, so why not join them instead of fighting them.



Still it is a BIG so what.  Mass adoption is not going to be rushed anyhow.  Sure you hear some people saying that "we need mass adoption," but do we really need it?  I will assert mass adoption is going to come, so what is the real purpose of calling for it or saying that "we need it?"

What do we have now?  Something like 1% of world-wide adoption, at best?   The various bitcoin systems continue to get built and more people find more use cases for bitcoin. 

Yeah, there are some people who have accumulated way more coins than what they need on a personal level, and maybe that will work out for them, but if we run out of coins, we just move down to a smaller unit, and if we need more than 8 digits, then we can even expand beyond the 8 digits, which apparently has already been shown to be feasible on lightning network.

I am just having trouble seeing your arguments, and even if smart people are saying that we need x, y or z in order to achieve a, b or c, that does not even mean that they are right.... if we are relying on mere expressions of public opinion regarding what is needed.



Likely the phenomenon of people preaching, begging or asking for regulations is mixed, and a BIG so what?  Sure, what people ask for might be one kind of indicator regarding what is going on in bitcoin, but I doubt that it is a central indicator.  Probably more important indicator is what people are doing with bitcoin and what it is capable of doing and even money momentum and waves in the BTC price that show whether or not some of the price prediction models are correct, such as stock to flow, 4 year fractal, s-curve exponential adoption based on metcalfe's law and networking effect, etc. 
So the existence of regulation and the asking for regulations is just one piece of the puzzle.






Maybe we can even disagree what bitcoin was designed for, and it does not really matter too much what we think or what it was designed for.  We already have a whole lot of use cases that are likely going to vary based on location but also these use cases remain evolving concepts too, and it seems that I have already gone over this fairly thoroughly.

If you are trying to suggest that bitcoin is dominated by speculation or that bitcoin can be contained into predetermined categories, which seems to be partly where you are headed with these kinds of arguments, I remain unpersuaded by attempts to pigeon hole bitcoin in prescription kinds of ways or even to suggest that it ONLY has so much value because this is what the majority of what people want as indicated by this poll and that poll... Again, who cares what people say that they want, and one of the barometers of people valuing bitcoin continues to be its price movement.  Price movement shows that people want it and also shows that manipulators can only manipulate it so much before sometimes bitcoin's price will explode out of their control.

Consider bitcoin's price in early 2016.. there were a whole hell of a lot of attempts to keep bitcoin under $500, and bitcoin's prices had been manipulated the fuck out of during 2014 and 2015 and even through 2016.  At a certain point, the manipulators could not get the BTC price to go down any more or to stay below $500, so there was no real choice to go along to get along and to go with the momentum of BTC's then price, which was UP.

Development continued through that time.. and a variety of use cases were found, but likely a lot of the UP and DOWN between late 2015 and early 2017 and even proceeding into todays price had been pushed by speculation.  At the same time, manipulators would like all fuck to get BTC prices to go below $3k and to stay there for a while, but in late 2018 they could not get BTC prices to go below $3k, and there has been some troubles after April 1, 2019 to try to get BTC prices to go back down to $3k.. and in some sense $3k might be a lost cause, and we get a kind of Lindy effect that becomes prices way above $3k... and even now there are fuck all difficulties of getting BTC prices to get into the $6ks and preferably below $6k, but she just won't go down. 

Call that speculation domination, or speculation coupled by use cases coupled by development and adoption coupled by financialization or coupled by regulatory attempts to stifle various bitcoin uses cases or whatever you want to call it, the bitcoin space is way more complicated than attempts to narrowly describe what some people might wish upon it, including you and me.... and including governments and financial institutions, too.  Yeah, there are likely going to continue to be attempts to control and regulate bitcoin, but how far are these attempts going to go?  How successful are they going to be?  What is going to be your own chosen investment levels?  If you are too much of a naysayer or too much of a FUD dud believing that the governments are going to regulate bitcoin into a lack of disruptiveness, then good luck to you, because whether governments regulate bitcoin or not, it still remains as a force to be reckoned with and it already has been disruptive and seems to continue to have enough design power to continue to serve as a very decently-sized ongoing disruptor of various status quo systems, government, financial and other personal value holding/transfer options.



Didn't coinbase just come out with a report that they have nearly 1 million bitcoins in their possession?  Seems to me that people are putting their bitcoins with 3rd parties such as exchanges.  Maybe not everyone , but a decent number of people are leaving their coins on exchanges and with other 3rd parties.



You just seem to be drawing all kinds of weird conclusions in an effort to attempt to minimize the disruptive importance of bitcoin.  For what reason(s), I don't know, and I don't really care too much.  I mean bitcoin is what it is, and if you neither see bitcoin as important or even disruptive or valuable, then that is your choice. 

If you believe that bitcoin is overvalued and overspeculated upon in a way that is NOT sustainable then that is your choice, too.

There is all kinds of evidence out there in order that varying individuals such as you and me can arrive at our own conclusions regarding the extent that we consider something like bitcoin to be valuable or if we see value in its future direction or even as an investment vehicle for ourselves.  There is also sometimes information or evidence that seems to be contradictory and difficult to resolve, but there seems to be a lot of good information out there too, and even these days, bitcoin seems to be a much more solid investment than it was 6 years ago when I got started, but there are also some strange factors and indicators that can cause you to arrive at any conclusion that you want. 

For example, do you believe it or not? In the past year, there were about 12 million bitcoins that did not move at all.  What does that mean to you?  To me, it seems to show that there is a decent amount of HODLing that is going on, but sure, there also might be a decent number of those coins that are held by exchanges, so they do NOT need to move those coins in order to facilitate trades on their platform.  Also, seems to me that we cannot just move to a system of decentralized exchanges and people retaining their private keys because some of those decentralized exchanges are still being developed, built and tested, and NONE of those decentralized exchanges have truly gotten masses of HODLers to use those exchanges, rather than leaving their coins with 3rd party exchanges. 

Yes, a lot of this is likely to be tested out in the years to come, and surely if we have some exchange crises in which people demand their coins, then we could see a crisis.  What if coinbase only has 300k coins, but there are claims to a million coins?  Will coinbase go under in the event that they cannot cover all of their claims?  Some of these matters are still to play out, and on a personal level, each of us decides our own level of allocation based on these kinds of factors and also including our own personal factors, too..,. including our views on bitcoin as compared to other investment asset options, to the extent that we have any meaningful amount of money that we can afford to invest anyhow.  We also likely realize the statistic that about 50% of average americans do not have enough value available to cover an emergency $400 expense, so we have a lot of americans who live on the edge in regard to their personal finances, and I am not sure if that means that hardly any americans are investing towards the future, or if all of their investible assets are in home ownership.  In any event, sometimes what other people do or are able to do can affect our investment decisions and whether we consider bitcoin to be a good investment on its own or a hedge to balance out other investments that we might have in our total portfolio.

Sorry for the late reply,  It wasn't showing in my feed.
And thanks for the quality discussion, it feels good and it's rare in this board



What? People begged for it. You just have to see literally the thousands of posts saying "we need it to attract big investors or for this and that". I'm seeing it over and over the past 2-3 years here. I know that I have to look outside this forum too, but since they like to repeat what is said by media outlets it gives a good sample.
Anyway, I do it and what I see is, how many press articles have we read saying that regulations were necessary, inevitable and indispensable, the only way to see the mass adoption.
Contrary to what you think I see a lot of people preaching for regulations. Whether it's here or in the Bitcoin community in general.

I understand we have different uses of Bitcoin but It hasn't been 'designed' for what people are using it (in the majority). And surely not a quick rich scheme.


Lowering the risk to get your coins hacked or locked by the platform itself, isn't it enough incentivizing?

I repeat myself but the majority of the transactions are related to trading, not real uses cases. So from a decentralized currency, it's rather online. investment, a new asset class. Bitcoin's ideology is gone for a lot of people, and capitalism is infesting the crypto world lol.

It's already changed the system.



Sure, bitcoin is a changing the system in progress - like the gradually and then suddenly kind of phenomenon in which it remains quite likely difficult as fuck to actually recognize or appreciate any kind of change that bitcoin has actually caused or contributed towards causing, except amongst a circle of computer nerds, like the demographic of the earlier stages of adopters, so yeah it could take years and years and years for regular people to take a stake in bitcoin or to find some kind of use case in which they actually believe that there is value, beyond speculation.  Nonetheless, adoption and use cases and even ease of use continues to expand, expand and expand, and pretty soon the neighbor finds out that he can process his gym membership and related activities through bitcoin's lightning network and get half off or some silly thing like that, and pretty soon he says what the fuck, and buys .05BTC so that he can have that available for his gym membership and even use that amount for a few years without even worrying about payment processing and various kinds of matters like that because each time he goes to the gym or participates in an otherwise related activity (a marathon or a MMA attendance or a concert or a movie, or when he eats at certain select restaurants that are in that system), he just scans payment from his phone and does not even think about it further.

So, yeah, it could take 10 years or even more for those various kinds of systems to develop or to be built upon bitcoin (or to be tethered or federated to bitcoin) but likely they are going to come with the passage of time and the multitude of developments, including lightning network, liquid and other affiliated bitcoin systems.



Why does it matter?  If there are systems that end up having value, then a way will be found.  It's a variation of the old saying, build a better mouse trap and they will come.  For sure, bitcoin is the best mouse trap, but not too many people realize that, yet... no need to rush.. the gravitation is likely to continue to happen because there is a system of decentralized computers all over the world that continue to back up bitcoin and no one has control over it... so even if there are a bunch of people who use a system (let's say defi) and they only put $2-$5 on such system, and if there start to become 10s of millions of people using such system, it becomes a kind of honeypot, and who the fuck is going to want to keep such value on ethereum or tethered to ethereum when they cannot even figure out what ethereum is.. It surely is not secure and it sure is a bunch of gobbledy-gook smoke and mirrors... Yeah, sure, now millions of snot-nosed 14 years olds might be willing to put their $2-$5 into various ethereum systems, but in the end, there remains a need for the kind of decentralized immutable security that bitcoin really offers rather than some bullshit imitation system that really does not have what it proclaims to have - which is the securing of the underlying value from various kinds of base-level chicanery, whether the mishaps are intentional or unintentional..


I am not negating the value of that.  It is just not sound money, but there surely remains value to having a variety of experiments as long as you recognize that they are not the real thing.  Personally, my main problems come from when they are making proclamations that they are the future blah blah blah and denigrating bitcoin along the way in order to pump their bullshit and using those projects as money printing machines... but sure, I don't have any problems with the facts that those systems are being worked on and attempting to be pushed out to the public in various kinds of attempting to find use cases ways.


You are not going to get any argument from me regarding your various points here...   We might not even really recognize some of the possible use cases that end up coming out of such experiments, and sure, it is possible that they might be built on other platforms for 20-30 years before they gravitate into bitcoin, and likely at that time several of us might be dead and we cannot even say whether we were correct or not.  We do not necessarily need to be correct in order to decide our own level and kind of participation that each of us chooses for today.  We might invest our time, psychology and money based on a 1-10 year timeline, and even if we are 5 years into our investment, we can choose to change our various investments based on our own circumstances, including changes in our views that might be (likely to be) somewhat different down the road. 

Bitcoin is a bit different for me now, as compared to 6 years ago, even if I have largely stayed invested financially, my understanding and my comfort has changed, and I have complete discretion whether I change my strategy or largely stick with a strategy that I had incrementally tweaked along the way in the last 6 years.  For me, it has not been "all or nothing" but some people prefer to think of bitcoin in that kind of way, and that may or may not work out too well for them.  I personally, don't feel hardly any need to hedge some of my bet into various shitcoin projects, but I am not going to totally denigrate someone else who does hedge into various side projects and tries to build those aspects of the ecosystem unless their practice is to denigrate/negate bitcoin while they are doing it and/or try to act like their project is a kind of bitcoin 2.0 or engage what I believe to be misrepresentations, when instead it might merely be some kind of interesting side-project in which it is o.k. to have a variety of people working on those kinds of side-projects (not like you can stop people from doing what they are going to do or that it is even desirable to attempt to stop them from working on what they do or even having various kinds of seemingly pie in the sky detached from reality visions regarding the speculative importance of their project(s)).

I don't know if it will really be "a lot of things".  There might be a few innovations we can incorporate, but there's so much gimmickry in the market right now that it almost seems to drown out anything that might actually be revolutionary.  Quite a few people talk about altcoins in terms of faster/cheaper transactions, but I think their greatest purpose is to field-test all the weird and wonderful ideas people come up with and hopefully screen-out the failed ones.  Then, on the rare occasion one of those features is a net positive and provides some additional utility that people actually benefit from, it's something we can potentially look at building on top of Bitcoin.  Assuming it doesn't compromise any of the existing qualities people like, that is.  So generally, I'd expect some new features built on top, but not that many.  Then again, who knows what the future holds?  I could be way off, heh.

I would call bitcoin a financial phenomenon that can still change the system, but it needs more time.

It's possible that we had been misunderstanding one another.  I personally believe that a lot of things are going to gravitate into bitcoin, and they are not necessarily going to be built on bitcoin right away, but frequently, there are people who say that they are working on a lot of projects that are on various shitcoins, including the amorphous defi concept, but their purpose is likely NOT so much about building upon a secure system, but instead engaging in some kind of means to print money or to pump and dump and they do not care if their system is secure. 

Sure, everyone needs to put food on their table, so I cannot really blame people for wanting to make money through whatever work they are doing, but I, personally, see a lot of seeming phoney baloney in the various systems that are built on ethereum, for example, because the whole ethereum project comes off as a big ass smoke and mirrors and confusion regarding what it is exactly, especially when it tries to imply that it is as good as bitcoin in terms of sound money and security, which is just baloney deception, so I have a lot of difficulty taking serious the various financial projects that are built upon such seemingly insecure coins like ethereum, but hey, even satoshi had recognized that there were going to likely be a lot of snake oil imitation products along the course of bitcoin's growth, yet in the long run the value of a lot of products are likely going to be hinged on bitcoin especially if they happen to have some redeeming features that can be tethered or federated into bitcoin (even if it might  be on a second layer or something like that), and maybe even if there has been a lot of years of development and experiments on those projects (whether defi or otherwise) on other blockchains that are not very secure, compared with bitcoin  (of course, bitcoin's security and its sound money are like a conglomeration of intertwined incentives packages that cause individuals to build upon it and to invest into it, even if it takes a long time to play out and to figure out).

For context, I asked, and said those things because JayJuanGee said,


Then it becomes a catch-22 in my opinion. How can those systems that want to be better, can be built upon Bitcoin?

“Basic” sounds to me like you’re saying “base layer”.  So, yes:  The Bitcoin blockchain is a rock-solid base layer that does one thing excellently:  Global, decentralized BFT transaction ordering, resulting in a single global ledger with a unit of account that provides the sound-money properties which JayJuanGee described.  (It also does some other things less-excellently; but I don’t really care about that, and it is irrelevant to the point I am addressing.)  Thereupon, we have a single global, public reference from which to synchronize private off-chain ledgers such as Lightning channels.


Hard forks are a risk, and also raise the question of just who has the authority to call for one.  I want to be conservative with risks in the base-layer handling of my money; and although I do hope that ongoing hardfork research can work out a good way to do a hardfork in a decetnralized system, the problem is so great (including its centralization risk) that I am automatically suspicious of anybody who even suggests a hardfork.

Segwit was a stroke of genius, because it added features necessary for Lightning (plus fixed some bugs) with only a softfork.  From there, I think it’s clear, the solution for most needs is to build on top of the blockchain layer, not to add to it.


Because he couldn’t do the fantastically stupid high-risk project of bolting a Turing-complete VM onto Bitcoin?  I guess so.

Imagine if the Ethereum DAO (to give only one example) had happened with Bitcoin.  Horresco referens.

I am currently entrusting the majority of my life savings to Bitcoin—yes, almost all my liquid wealth (excepting some small fiat cash reserve—as small as I can keep it).  I would not risk that on Ethereum, just on a technical level of asking myself, “What if this piece of oh so innovative technology loses all my money?”  The prudence of putting money I cannot afford to lose into Bitcoin is financially questionable.  However, I do think it is absolutely prudent to take that technical risk on the reliability of Bitcoin Core and the Bitcoin consensus rules.

I am not necessarily talking about short term building or even on-chain building.  If the systems are good, then down the road they will somehow be pegged to bitcoin. Right now those very systems are extremely experimental, and it is way more important to get bitcoin's sound money and security correct, first before getting distracted into too many side projects.

I don't have any problem with those various systems getting built and even various experiments in that direction, but it would seem to be too much and too fast to be build a bunch of crazy-ass stuff on bitcoin, when we still only have 1% world adoption and there is plenty use case in the mere sound money challenges and the potential battles that are going to come from that very innovative and never been tried before use cases.

In other words, there has never been any sound money that even approaches bitcoin's, and so it will be quite important and innovative if bitcoin were to be successful in that direction... .. needs a bit of a long view... but no problem if some system like defi shows promise and then gets pegged to bitcoin, but likely more on a second, third or fourth layer rather than potentially introducing bugs into the central sound money mission, which seems to be way more important.

Also, you are not really going to get meaningful defi if you have centralization issues or some dumb bug wipes out a bunch of value, so it seems way more important to get the sound money and security to be quite solidly established.  And, we will see with the passage of time, if bitcoin continues with the sound money vision and some of those defi systems end up gravitating to pegging to bitcoin because of bitcoin's security and soundness.

Maybe I can’t express myself with clever words, using professional terms and phrases, but I can say with the words of a simple layman who can understand a little how beneficial Bitcoin is for humanity.  I am one of those people who negatively regard the poor professionalism of governments and the manipulations of all officials during the leadership of their countries.  First of all, I pay attention to the economic decline and inflation, which affects a simple person.  I believe that creating a deficit in the state budget, the government will put into circulation too much money that is not confirmed by gold reserves.  In this case, Bitcoin would be much more profitable for people, because of its limited amount.  Perhaps because of this, the US is opposed to bitcoin.

But why wasn't anything built on top of Bitcoin? I believe it was because the Core developers wanted the blockchain to be as "basic" as possible, and because accommodating them required hard forks. Wasn't that the reason why Vitalik founded Ethereum? Because he can't build the things he wanted on top of Bitcoin?

I think that bitcoin is extraordinary, because many countries don't support bitcoin and there are some countries that prohibit circulation
bitcoin. Doesn't make bitcoin weak. What exists today after a decade is getting stronger and more popular. It's not apart from the role of
social media which is very massive. Especially youtube, tweeter and facebook make bitcoin very phenomenal. Moreover people who are
tired of fiat inflation increases, making bitcoin increasingly in demand.

One of the reasons may be because Bitcoin was created at the right time. I mean Satoshi created the Bitcoin once Fiat (dollars) was in decreased performance. So, people understand that Bitcoin has something to improve that situation and present hope for a better future word financial.

Indeed. Bitcoin trend around the world was happening naturally and massively. It is something rarely happens and surprisingly even many governments refuse it but in fact, more people are interested in using Bitcoin. I know some have the intention to be rich but others may think to support a new revolution in world financial or economy. However, finally, all join together even if having different purposes.