Topic: For Bitcoin to survive in the long term: thoughts? (Read 343 times)

Bitcoin marked the beginning of the crypto industry.He will be gold among the other coins.There will be great technology.Will different companies.But bitcoin will still be the number one

That's a very good post. My opinion too. Add Japan but I think Japan is very Bitcoin friendly already.
China, I cannot trust them too much though.

Positive regulation from dominance countries such as: USA, Russia, China, South Korea.

I don't think Bitcoin will ever estrablish itself as a mass payment system. However, it is becoming a store of wealth, and some of the new cryptos are providing methods of exchanging their currency into Bitcoin for long term investment. The price is extremely volatile, and likely to remain so, so it isn't for the faint hearted. My feeling is that the long term value of Bitcoin can only increase, and I see these massive price drops as good investing opportunities.

Take care if you are going to speculate on the price movements, and don't gamble with more than you can afford to lose.

Yes bitcoin long term is good for investment, not only talk about bitcoin, every investment long term is very good to earn more profit.
But in bitcoin my experience just only in 9 month will earn 2 times profit, when the bitcoin rise so faster.
I believe invest in bitcoin is more profitable more than gold, so that's reason I still invest in bitcoin.

I agree with much of this.

Adoption is the most important factor to any mass-scale payment method, of course.  Once something is trusted as money, it has to be able to be used as money.  Scaling a blockchain is very difficult, there are many more considerations to be taken into account than many believe.  Off-chain solutions such as LN, and probably others, are needed to handle transaction volumes that can overtake credit and debit cards, etc.  These take time to build, perfect, and then scale (fixing whatever problems arise along the way).  Promotion as a payment method is absolutely important, but if we get too far ahead of ourselves and create a situation where the network is maxed out due to scaling problems, that could blow it.  Consumer confidence is not always easy to get back once its lost.  Slow and steady wins the race.

Legalization of bitcoin is assured, the question is how many hoops will they make us jump through.  My focus is to make those hoops as little as possible.  We have to remember that huge vested interests, centuries and even millennia in their entrenchment, are only "with us" to the extent they can find a market for themselves.  Some of that we can work with (i.e. legalization overall), some of that we're going to have to fight against (i.e. making regulations draconian).  A good factor we have in our favor is that some countries are seeing the power of Bitcoin and overall decentralization, distributed ledgers and are making good policy choices.  Other countries won't want to be held back.  It will take time, but expect the overall outcome to be positive for the new paradigm.  Advocacy at all levels of government is needed.  I also believe that common-sense, industry-supported voluntary standards are needed to show that the industry (yes, industry) can self-regulate.  Regulators work with responsible industries, and work against what they perceive to be "bad actors".  They look at things through the eyes of a regulator.  Does this industry cooperate with us?  Or are they a bunch of outlaws?  Do they really think they can escape ME, the all-powerful SEC/CFTC/IRS/FinCEN/etc/etc/etc?  Cooperation when possible gains you credibility.  The ostrach approach ("sticking your head in the sand") doesn't work in the long run.

What people do with their Bitcoin is their business, absolutely.  And I am most libertarian at my core, but I also know how this system works, and a pragmatic view is that cooperation to make some standards that are voluntary, but if applied, will reduce things like ICO fraud, ridiculous code exploits, KYC fraud, etc., can go a long way in the eyes of a regulator.  That's why I believe that BTRIC Institute is going to offer real benefits to the industry with advocacy as well as standards maintenance, IETF style.  We just made a commitment to the Blockchain Defensive Patent License yesterday, even though we do not yet have any patents.  But it's the right thing to do.  The technology we all use to build a better world is too valuable to be subject to restrictive controls on its usage.

On the technical side...

I am in favor of rapid adoption of innovations such as SegWit, LN, and bech32.  The market must demand this from those they transact with.  Coinbase, or any other business, is not required to do anything more than what is necessary for them to keep the profits rolling in.  If customers say, implement SegWit or I will go, they'll implement it.  (And they just have.)  Same goes for other improvements and innovations.  In my view, best practices is that an exchange should be implementing in testnet what is being developed in core, so they can launch it on their production servers/mainnet as soon as possible after a launch.  That requires engineering resources but it would set yourself apart from many of the other exchanges.  It's what I would do if I ran an exchange, but I understand why others cannot afford that sort of engineering for something that may eventually get scrapped.  That's part of what we hope to do with BTRIC Labs, R&D projects that can be used by many people, as soon after things launch into production as possible.

Regarding increasing block weight, I'd be in favor of some type of scaling block weight that was a reasonable increase over the current limit.  But I believe that any increase should be sliding/scaling, based on the size of the mempool.  To me, that seems a balance between the need to have blocks of a reasonable size for propogation purposes and the need to uncongest the network.  I am not a blockchain expert, so perhaps I'm missing some important consideration, but that's my view based on what I do know about Bitcoin.  I imagine Bitcoin nodes in places with crap internet, I think about what Bitcoin would be like on dial-up.  Bitcoin is everywhere in the world and there's places out there with pretty bad internet.  I want Bitcoin to be accessible by those people too.

I am not sure how I feel about an increase in the max supply of Bitcoin.  I've never thought about it, I'd have to spend some time thinking to come up with my personal view on the subject.  Regardless, we are some time away from having to decide about that.

What I do think would be something that should be considered is some sort of non-profit, decentralized backbone of a mining pool.  It should not be controlled by any one entity, it should not be based in any one country, on any one continent, etc.  It should be decentralized as much as possible.  This means that some places that are mining would be paying more in electricity than others.  The costs would be shared by everyone, it would be a non-profit venture, any profits would be put back into development or increasing the decentralization.  It is not a good idea for an important global currency to be dependent on a cheap source of electricity, and have mining power concentrated in those places alone.  It gives power to governments to make tax-incentives or offer to subsidize electricity and then abuse that power.  So I envision a collective where some nodes are just breaking even or even going backward a little bit, but it's more than made up for by the other nodes.  In this way, the overall network is protected by a concentration in mining hashrate, government action, a single company or organization, etc.  I think that type of resilience can increase the quality of the network.

Well, that's my two Satoshi worth.

Best regards,
Ben

Nobody expect bitcoin able reach current position but of course bitcoin can't be like this not without people.
The people who keep interest on this technology !
The people who trust on technology that
The people who want to change how they do transaction more effectively

So how long will it last ?
Depend on how long do you keep trust on bitcoin !

I wouldn't worry too much about the recent drop in price. It was the result of a coordinated attack. That being said, I expect the lightning network to be a failure for various reasons - to the point where there will be no large switch over. I suspect that Bitcoin will instead turn out to be the gold standard of cryptos and will be used in large transactions, including transactions between sovereigns. In addition, Bitcoin pretty much still dominate the market and has a lot of network effect going for it. It will take a lot of effort to dethrone it.

For me continuous using and advertising bitcoin will helps to stretch the existency of this coin also it would helps to make life of bitcoin would be stronger in the future.
But for now we are in the first quarter of the year and its to early to give negative thoughts about bitcoin. Just continue believing that it will be remain the best coin in the future.

It's about mass adoption, less fees, increase in the TX confirmation period, all these would make it survive for longer

Having solved the digital scarcity problem in a meaningful and useful way without a trusted third party is not a joke. So much so that I think Bitcoin will survive no matter what.

If I had to take a guess at what it will look like in the future then I think that governments and corporations will move to the other side of the spectrum when it comes to trying to control it. Quick example, instead of trying to ban crypto, punish miners or prohibit using credit cards, there may be a move to limit/control those who submit to Bitcoin's code base.

I aggreed your ideas but last few months bitcoin meaning is profit for people bro . They thought it will be higher than then . Everyone bought bitcoin but there is no evolution about it and some banks and governments block transactions. And every dump reason for disappointment for investors.  In my opinion hard days coming for bitcoin if bitcoin can survive against it there is nothing can't stop agains it !

Hi folks,

I think 2018 will be a crucial year for bitcoin. Price is going down and will probably keep going down for a while, but if we forget all speculation talk, do you think bitcoin can survive and become a real currency with LN technology?

For me, the fact that bitcoin does not promote anonymity anymore is perhaps a good thing. Let's be honest, our western governments will never allow anything for anonymous payments.
So the point is not to escape (totally) from the system. To pay taxes, I am personally fine with it.

Whether it is an exchange currency, independent from banks and especially not held by central bank allows to have a global reference.

In my mind, you pay taxes on each payment. It's called "bank operating costs". And banks stuff themselves like crazy. In 30 years these banks managed to lay down their law whereas they were only intended to make exchanges fluid (and for instance help producing wealth). We saw that this system is wobbly, but some organizations have become too big to fail (therefore  "above the laws" of the market and democracy).

Instead of paying these fees to the banks, you pay a fee to the miners AND to the government (tax). Instead of paying the fee to a bank, you feed the redistribution of wealth at the State level. The State finds again some control over its currency, and uses a neutral and free of intermediary payment vector.  

The fact that the quantity is limited? Yes maybe it is an issue. But it is divisible almost to infinity. So we can talk in BTC or satoshi, it's just a change of reference. Knowing that in absolute terms,  there is no value reference it does not bother me (but speculation will need to be stopped at some point and I believe that's what is happening right now).

Then bitcoin is not a way to help the "dark market". It's just a technology that eliminates the trust 3rd party in a transaction.      

Right, this is purely a mathematical vision but it's worth a discussion!