Topic: Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP. - page 1139. (Read 2032266 times)

You think so? That seemed in the cards last time as well. I suppose the China/Gox/China/Dorien/China/China/IRS/China/China news got in the way. But it still feels early....we still need better exchange infrastructure, and wall-st integration before bitcoin can approach gold as an easily acquirable and safely-holdable asset class for most people.

But to date I've thought every phase of bitcoin's adoption would take longer than it has, so whatevs...

Let me know if/when you have something written about this perspective. I would like to translate it into Spanish.

I agree with you for now in that Bitcoin will not see a rival and satoshi's technical contribution won't be matched in innovation. But there are hundreds and thousands of smart minds who can't contribute to Bitcoin directly the primary barrier being political.

Investors can't easily avoid the scam coins and given your insight all will likely evolve into $#!±coins so how does the technical input from the innovators at the start of the adoption cycle get leveraged?

I'm glad these late comer innovator are earning Bitcoin it's growing our network.

Ultimately we will never agree that Bitcoin's confirmation time is too long or too short. But we can say it's too long for X application  or too short for Y situation.

So ultimately the value will come from Bitcoin's distribution and the ideas of spin-offs.
These new alts - the anonymous ones aside will hopefully wake up before they lose there Bitcoin.,

They will take turn to generate the next block which saves the transaction, and will receive transaction fees to do so.

The software client will monitor what the delegates are doing and automatically remove a delegate from his position if he has a bad behavior.

Then there is the transaction as proof of stake (TaPos) part, where each users validate on the long run the short-term consensus establish by the delegates.

I am not a tech guy tough: http://bitshares.org/delegated-proof-of-stake/

so yes, the fact that Bitcoin is money is what brings us all here. it's the most liquid and generally accepted of all "assets".  Bitcoin is first and foremost a financial concept.  that being a fixed supply new form of money.  Satoshi took that precept and racked his brain trying to figure out a way to bring technology to bear to enforce that concept.  he came up with the blockchain as a specific technological implementation to achieve this.  it employs POW to incentivize mining.  miners jump all over this and mine like hell to try and capture block rewards and fees which comes in the form of money.  not stock, not bonds, not debt, not assurance contracts, not derivatives.  money.  with any of these Bitcoin 2.0 platforms, i don't see a truly strong incentive to mine those blockchains.  as a miner, i wouldn't.

all those different forms of assets can be thought of as play tools of Wall Street=the minority.  the masses represent the majority in terms of sheer numbers, however, and they possess very little of those investments today.  they just want their money to be safe.  Bitcoin represents the first time in history where they have that chance.  the stakes are much higher in inventing a new form of money compared to these other assets.  look at the forex markets compared to all other markets.  they're huge in comparison.  and it's in the markets involving money where the real problem lies due to the Fed and central banks.  i think in the long run the masses prefer Bitcoin as an investment than any alt.

hence, the blockchain may end up being only applicable to Bitcoin as money.  i can't be sure of this but i think it's quite possible given how things are evolving.

"It's as good as bitcoin"   

I've been saying this for years. Think of all the tricks that people have to do to protect their savings nowadays. Even in its current form, Bitcoin is easier - and perhaps safer - than every other way, at least for people that are able to manage (or learn how to manage) secure passwords.

can you tell us exactly what delegates responsibilities are?

In Bitcoin mining pools are in effect delegates. There are about 10, whereas with Bitshares they will be 100. Plus users will be able to vote in order to fire delegates if they mess up.

what you're arguing about is about the Bitcoin concept as a whole. 

what i'm discussing here assumes Bitcoin will be successful, arguably, and brings up the concept that the blockchain may only ever be applicable to Bitcoin as money.

I see fanatic people...

Because Bitcoin can not be used in the real world for purchases, in a reliable manner. Nobody wants to wait an hour or more to purchase gasoline, or buy groceries. These things hold Bitcoin back. Lowering the confirmation times would only cause more issues with the entire system, not to mention the majority of people would have to agree on the change.

While Bitcoin is an awesome thing, it does have its flaws that are just not likely to be fixed.

but only as testing grounds.  anything worthwhile should be assimilated into Bitcoin when possible. 

the larger issue, as indicated by impulse above, is how do any of the alts implement a distribution mechanism that comes close to what Satoshi did?  he set a very high standard of what are now considered best practices in this new virtual currency world.  i'm thinking it's impossible unless you're willing to do the entire development model for free and somehow keep yourself anonymous.  but then at that point why wouldn't you just develop/enhance the market leader itself, Bitcoin, which stands to be the ultimate winner?

Bitcoin doesn't actually flow out when invested in alt projects, those developers are innovators in the adoption cycle.

They are late innovators they are accumulating BTC, yes people make bad investments with there BTC, but all the while Bitcoin is distributing according to a typical adoption cycle, the user base is growing, not all innovator are accumulating as you have noted with Vitalik, but they all want wealth and chase Bitcoin to get it, I think alts amplify Bitcoin potential.

The number of coins actually lost is theoretical, though. There's no way to know how many are truly gone. We're seeing some of the top accounts have coins moving around, and there are a lot of people that have just been sitting on theirs for years. We really have no idea if there are a thousand missing or a million.


This is definitely a possibility (based on the extremely long time-frame). That's a long wait, though. 126 more years before we can consider it a currency? We need to do things earlier to fix that problem.

Looks like Willett has really bad tax advisors. He didn't want to sell MSC, but was told he needed to sell some to cover capital gains tax. Problem is that his capital gains mostly evaporated after, and probably because of his selling.

well, i'm thinking that this equilibrium state will come sometime out around 2140 when the last satoshi is rewarded. by then, if Bitcoin has survived that long it is likely to be it's own unit of account w/o any reference to USD as you allude to.

this has been a bad weekend for news on Bitcoin 2.0 projects.  we all know about Ripple now.  Mastercoin allegedly has problems with Willett selling out (not confirmed by me), and now we have Bitshares:

http://letstalkbitcoin.com/blog/post/beyond-bitcoin-1-nxt-asset-exchange-and-bitshares-technical-update

listen carefully to Larimer describe how, just last week, he's had to redo the entire implementation of how tx's are handled within his protocol.  simple inputs and outputs structure like in Bitcoin have been discarded for database tables which will be required for every asset tracked by the Bitshare protocol.  blocks require "delegate" (read centralized) nodes to sign off and approve tx's.  apparently he had severe forking problems with his original code and lack of a mechanism to develop consensus.  

while listening to the podcast it dawned on me how centralized these Bitcoin 2.0 projects have become in the sense of depending on a core group of known devs who have a vested interest.  he even says that if something happened to him while the protocol had a problem there would be no one to really fix it.  that's bad.

Satoshi was wise to remain anonymous.  by leaving and turning the code management over to a distributed group of devs who don't have a vested interest in Bitcoin, other than whatever BTC they may have bought on the free market, he fortified the Bitcoin dev process from gov't pressure.  all the Bitcoin 2.0 projects have dev teams whose personal financial success depends on the success of their product.  if the devs themselves ever get attacked by gov't their project would be finished by the mere fact that most of them have awarded themselves an upfront disproportionate share of the equity.

i am beginning to believe that blockchain technology may only ever be applicable to Bitcoin as money.  you heard it here first.  i know what Satoshi said about scripting language and the potential to do more things like smart contracts et al but he said those things in a forum post and almost as an afterthought.  he also could be wrong about growing these products out from the blockchain from an economic and technical standpoint.  the masses don't care about these things, at least right now.  i think they just want their money to be safe.  here in the US, the arguably wealthiest country in the world, only a small % own things like stocks or bonds let alone assurance contracts or derivatives.

i think it's an interesting thought that blockchain technology may only ever be used to protect Bitcoin as money.  if i'm right, all that money directed at alt projects has yet to flow back to Bitcoin.

What is also interesting is that in a little over 2 years from now 75% of bitcoins that can exist will be created, and not long after that the number of bitcoins permanently lost will exceed those that are yet to be mined.

For Bitcoin to be priced in USD, the amount of USD relative to BTC created IS important. The only way for it not to be is if BTC were able to stand 100% on its own, completely separate from any fiat system. This is far from the case and won't be for many years, if it ever happens.