Topic: Bitcoin XT - Officially #REKT (also goes for BIP101 fraud) - page 128. (Read 378996 times)

0/1000 despite the tricks to pump hash rate, the bounties and the hash rental.

The market could not have spoken any louder.  

Bonus laughter material, the concept of "objective" from an academic charlatan, Peter R. Rizun.



"Sinking deeper into the red zone" using linear scale for the colouring, logarithmic for the graph, wrapped up in a sensational title. Together with his staple "Blockstream" character attacks.

The hindering would not be artificial if it's necessary for the system to be viable, so no, we don't agree to that either.

What would you consider prohibitively expensive?

Do you realize that others could have different "financial pain" thresholds?

I do not necessarily think that fees are to low since the block reward is still high and adoption is still relatively low. I would agree with you however that I would not want to see this cap artificially hinder adoption. Which is really the primary scenario I would want to avoid, where the blocks became consistently full causing transactions to become unreliable and prohibitively expensive. If you can agree with that then we are not really in disagreement.

Fair enough, but all in all these are mostly marginal use cases that appear to me based more on the novelty of the thing than actual value adding functionality.

As for the rest of your post...
 

FTFY  

Actually if I look at the parameters objectively I'd say the cap is currently too high and a lot of nodes are overstretched as we approach anywhere near cap sizes with some consistency. Fees also remain too low. No real signs of having a cap that artificially hinders adoption.

But since it has been like this for a long time and lowering would be massively contentious I concede keeping it like this for the time being.

If scalability requires of a big jump in block size rather than other technical means it would be sort of a defeat for the dev community. We will see.

Using Bitcoin disempowers the current status quo. Bitcoin enables peaceful revolution through co opting of the currency and blockchain technology. The current banking system through quantitative easing acts like hidden taxation and further enables governments to wage wars and other draconian policies, while also increasing inequality. The use and adoption of cryptocurrencies can circumvent these structures of centralized power. I can explain in much greater depth the political potential that Bitcoin has, however let me just say that the changes that it can bring for our civilization are profound to say the least. It was my interest in political philosophy that drew me to Bitcoin initially once I realized its great potential.

To answer your other question, I personally use it to transfer value between myself and people I know, like family and friends. Recently I had somebody help me with building a website and I sent them Bitcoin for that as well. I am also a miner so I have purchased most of my equipment using Bitcoin. I have bought beers at bitcoin meet ups, and other computer components online. I accept Bitcoin at a brick and mortar store I am involved with now, however admittingly we have not had a lot of customers use Bitcoin at our store.

In the Netherlands where I am living at the moment there is a food delivery network that accepts Bitcoin so when I order take aways I almost always pay with Bitcoin, and I do consider it to be faster and more convenient in this case, the website uses BitPay as its payment processor, I have a big TV screen where I do the order on and then I pay with my smartphone using the Airbits wallet, it works very well.

https://www.thuisbezorgd.nl/en/

There are other use cases like remittance and black markets for example. The Wikileaks case is also a good example of an important use case, in short Wikileaks got its funding cut by visa, paypal, mastercard ect. Wikileaks started accepting Bitcoin as an alternative way to receive funding, this was in 2011. This is a good example of how Bitcoin enables more financial freedom through its transactional capabilities.

I was also referring to the incentive and game theory of the Bitcoin network actually, I also still think that it is working fine now, I do not think that the underlying design is broken, which is why I would like the development to continue in the original direction of the vision of Satoshi, which is to increase to block size.

I can actually agree with you that keeping a cap could be good. Surely however one megabyte would not be the perfect cap now and for all time?

 

Can you give an example? I'm actually curious to know what do you use it for.

For some things Bitcoin is better, and I am ideologically motivated. So i like to use Bitcoin as much as I can because I am aware of its potential to change the world. There are many legitimate uses for transacting in Bitcoin, after all one of the advantages of Bitcoin as a commodity is that we can send it across the world over the internet, unlike gold for example. Transactional capability and use cases are important for Bitcoin as it strengthens its value proposition as a commodity and as a currency.

I'm talking about the incentives of the actors that keep Bitcoin working, where you as a user are just a tiny bit, not about your incentives to buy whatever.

The incentives of nodes, miners and users (transactors) as a full system. The system for it to work without strict caps should be such that any transaction you send that gets included makes sense for the equilibrium of the system to include. Currently it's not the case for the majority of transactions. The reasons have been elaborated a gazillion times and I don't think another instance will change things.

In one line and without going into detail: miners and nodes are doing work against their individual short term interest, trying to keep their long term interests but without good information on how to do that. That's why keeping a cap that guarantees "some" domestic nodes can stay afloat is not a bad idea, without even going into miners, latencies, orphaning and propagation.

It's clear the incentives are not there to spend your BTC over fiat right now.

Too volatile, not practical (confirmation delays), security issues, economically counterintuitive.

Any sane person realizes that the tradeoff just so you can feel all warm and fuzzy because of the novel experience of Bitcoin transactions are not worth it right now.

*Insert bullshit ideological motivation*

Question: Why don't you use your credit/debit card instead of BTC. Any online and offline shopping by using credit/debit cards is free of charge. Cheaper than that you cannot find

I use Bitcoin frequently as a currency, and I re buy my Bitcoin when I spend them. I think that the incentives of Bitcoin are working fine, we just need to increase the blocksize, which would make it more expensive to attack Bitcoin by overloading it with transactions. Miners can choose not to include low fee transactions anyway if that is what the situation requires. Higher volume with a lower fee would be better then a lower volume with a higher fee.

The only reason to use/sell and not replenish is that you believe the price is going down.

I've bought stuff and immediately replenished, the exchange rate didn't bother me at all. If I went back to the stuff I got pre 2013 for BTC at today's rates I paid fortunes, but that makes no sense so long as you rebuy.

If you pay a sensible fee and the system is sustainable, transacting as much as you want and can afford to is fine. The system is currently unstable in that we have to be praying for people not to overuse it because the incentives are fucked, and that is the problem. The system should be such that nobody can afford to deny service. Blocks have to stay manageable and people need to pay higher fees if they don't want their txs lagging for ages or rejected.

A couple years ago some people had instant, and delayed, gratification when they exchanged BTC for $1200 of fiat, waited, and then gratified themselves by replacing those BTC for $250 each, or so. 

There's more than one way to gratify one's self.  Anyone professing to be a master of self-gratification needs to provide credentials.

but tricky.

that is, quite naturally i must admit, free black market stuff - at your very own risk obviously

besides, buying other daily things is economically nonsense because of its volatility.

you dont wanna end up like that dude buynig a pizza with bitcoins 4 years ago!

Unless you mine or get paid in BTC you are buying it with fiat.

So yeah buying BTC to buy "stuff" makes little sense apart from niche use cases.

Bitcoin is a hard, fixed supply asset that rewards delayed gratification. It is quite simply poor economic acumen to prefer it to debased fiat for de minimis daily transactions