Topic: Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP. - page 278. (Read 2032248 times)

You failed to incorporate the fact that larger markets can be obtained with new capabilities.

WYSIWYG (Windows, MacOS, etc) subsumed MSDOS and I went from selling 30,000 copies of physically distributed software in 1980s to distributing a million copies of CoolPage over the internet at the turn of the century.

Larger markets means a larger size of the global wealth pie for crypto.

Bitcoin can't scale to even a minute fraction of the economic activity coming the Knowledge Age. Thus you are highly limiting your slice of future global wealth with your stance.


Impossible with Bitcoin. Impossible. Apparently you don't understand well why I can state "impossible" with certainty?

Did you understand that one of the assumptions in Metcalf or Reed's scaling laws is that the Ends of the network must be able to freely interact with each other.

You are all excited about scaling to Visa scale, and I am all excited about scaling to millions of micropayments per second. It isn't just transaction volume rate limits that are the problem with Bitcoin, but also the fact that the Ends are not autonomous thus morass will constrain.

gmax is brilliant and educated mind.  ...

I'm pretty sure my return on investment from Monero will always exceed his, but no I'm not particularly profit motivated by it, to answer another question from the thread. It's just interesting technology. If useful ideas from Monero end up being incorporated into Bitcoin (such as the dynamic block sizes), and then Monero withers away financially, i consider that a complete success. If you look at 1000 crypto coins after Bitcoin you will only find a few that actually do anything interesting at all, or even try to. Monero is one of them.

This morning I conceived how I can pay my gratitude to Monero while providing an anonymity function that I must have. And I mean by driving the price in an upward spiral. If my plans come to fruition.

(yeah I know it sounds like bullshit)

And yes this is a subtle hint to buy some Monero, and I have no vested interest. I own 0 XMR.

Very interesting notes.
1. I totally agree that dominant market share by bitcoin is currently misleading and Palm Pilot and Novell are great examples. I had Palm Pilot (and it is still there somewhere). At first it was exciting, but then it turned out not to be that useful (as Newton before it). As time passed, i used it less and less, until i just put it in a drawer. I also remember that it IPOed at hundreds and for a brief moment had market cap at around 100 bil or so.
2. I also have ~10% of my capital in crypto, but i was initially aiming at 20%. The difference is due to stock market outperformance and BTC decline.
I also bought some monero (maybe 1% of btc). Maybe I should increase my monero allocation a bit, but monero so far underperformed bitcoin, although it seems to be in a uptrend. However, with $9 mil theoretical market cap it is just too small right now and probably is just a dev coin for now.
3. My fears re bitcoin could be formulated very simply: it is possible (at this moment) that it will simply wither away not unlike the palm pilot and there is NO way to jump ship from bitcoin into a winning crypto (because it might not even born yet).
4. I have difficulty understanding a decentralization claim for bitcoin since apparently there is one person or a very small group (six people) that are anointed to make the most important changes.

Bitcoin can't scale to future economic activity. It is impossible. It doesn't have the correct scaling attributes.

The existing financial systems can't scale either. The dying Industrial Age monetary and financial system is dying and "they" (society as a marriage of interests in collectivism) intend to apply expropriation and capital controls to any growth in the economy activity which can't be contained within this dying system which includes the End-to-end violating design of Bitcoin.



So I interpret your astute comment to mean that the actual network effects are out there in the Ends of the network and Bitcoin (in its current form) doesn't have a chance in hell of capturing them. I doubt you meant it that way though, but I am encouraging you to see my perspective. I suspect you favor complexity class arguments because they are more fundamental and compelling.

btw, when gmax claims he has vested interest in Bitcoin, this is how i believe he would have gotten his BTC.  from free mining equipment donated to him for R&D.  i've seen him lobby for it pretty shamelessly.  i'll bet not a cent out of his pocket.

:-)  ok, then you are serving him for free

I mined ~100% of the Monero I have, and then some.

Smart boy snake called RPietila used XMR to take your money (just 1% but it is enough for him)

Edit: I wrote the following before reading smooth's latest post above. He and I were apparently writing at the same time. Interesting to see how well I guessed his stance.


Such underlined overly generalized grandiose black&white perspectives can usually be assumed to be false by applying Occam's Razor without any further analysis.

You've assumed:

1. Bitcoin won't end up monopolized by the State (which is I assume what you mean by your and most everyone's imprecise use of the term 'fiat').

2. Bitcoin is the only way to scale to masses (i.e. to compete with the fiats).

3. That the "whole purpose" of crypto-currency is to scale to the masses.

I have explained in detail in this thread that Bitcoin can not scale to the masses without violating assumption #1. And I have argued that for those of us who want to protect ourselves from #1, we need to violate assumption #3 and create an anonymous coin that does scale decentralized for the "rest of us" to use. In other to achieve that goal, we need to identity a niche market for crypto-currency that is large enough to achieve monetary scale but doesn't depend on the diligence of the preoccupied masses.

I have also explained in detail in this thread that the #2 assumption only applies if someone doesn't invent a design for crypto-currency that doesn't violate the End-to-end Principle and Principle of Least Power.


It is implausible to put Monero's autonomous End-to-end Principle respecting anonymity onto the Bitcoin block chain. It would be a hard fork against numerous vested interests.

It is technically impossible to achieve that End-to-end Principle respecting anonymity off-chain.

Your conceptualization of a world of "all or nothing" flies in the face of the reason the internet scales, which is the autonomy and freedom of choice and freedom to have many different choices that is embodied in the End-to-end Principle.

There isn't one flavor of Unix nor Linux. And there isn't one operating system on the internet. The internet doesn't care which operating system the END user chooses.

Cypherdoc your simpleton myopia is going to be paradigm shifted and you'll be standing there dazed and confused and wondering what happened.



$1000 to < $50 will make it so. (I didn't place 100% odds on that potential outcome)


SOBO (statement of the blatantly obvious)


You meant stay non-private enough.

This death by a 1000 papercuts future is acceptable to most people and one of the reasons Bitcoin must be accepted as reality.


I believe smooth would like to see maximum experimentation because he recognizes the potential for the death by 1000 papercuts future and in general I think he is interested in crypto-currency but isn't convinced we've hit on the best design yet. He may have a profit motive too in Monero, but I am not knowledgeable about to what degree that motivates him.

My motivation is clear. I think Bitcoin is the death by 1000 papercuts NWO future. I accept it as reality and for the network effects it brings to crypto-currency, yet I would rather die trying than accept that 1000 papercuts NWO future. And I am certain Bitcoin does not have the scaling attributes of the internet. It violates the fundamental End-to-end principle for scaling.

This guarantees that it is a dead-end (just as Facebook is a dead-end). But dead-ends can cause a lot of pain for a while.

The salient quote is:

You're confusing cause and effect here. I'm involved with Monero specifically because I don't buy the Bitcoin maximalism argument, and Monero has technology that is actually interesting and actually adds something meaningful (unlikely dumb clones like Litecoin). At least, I don't buy the Bitcoin maximalism argument yet (at some point if Bitcoin continues to grow, perhaps after another 10x-100x, it will likely be correct). I consider Bitcoin to be a tiny pimple on the scale of global currencies and finances, so if anything the network effect is working very much against it, not for it. Cryptocurrencies have to succeed on the basis of compelling advantages that overcome a network effect, and if Bitcoin can do that, others can too. I see Bitcoin's lead now as being about as relevant as Novell's with Netware:


Or perhaps in line with platforms that once had a hugely dominant market share and weren't even replaced, directly, by anything (example: Palm Pilot).

But even that isn't right, because Bitcoin does't currently have a hugely dominant market share anywhere, outside of a few enthusiasts. (Don't misinterpret this as "Buy Monero instead" -- obviously Monero has even less of any kind of share.)

However, I'm also realistic that Bitcoin is a lot larger that any of others and my assets are allocated accordingly. I'm one of those guys you were just talking about who is (approximately) 90% in Bitcoin, 10% in Monero. And beyond that also 90% in non-crypto assets, which if you do the math makes Monero roughly 1% of my assets. If you want to call me a Monero shill based on that, go right ahead, but you are fooling yourself, and probably using that as an excuse to avoid objectively considering the points I raise.

BTW, I also agree with a lot of your points about sidechains and other bitcoin development issues. I don't fully support the 20 MB idea because I think 20x is just too much too fast, but if it was intended as a negotiating tactic to get something more modest through, then well done Gavin.

This is a really informative thread,  particularly page 17: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=144895.335

Really the entire thread is worth reading, so you don't miss quotes like this:

Agree that the options known today may not make Bitcoin as private as Monero, but a) how private is good enough, it is quite possible some of the working proposals today may be good enough and b) there is a very long future for development here and the one thing I think we know for sure is there will be quite a bit of effort towards improving Bitcoin's privacy.

And for Monero, what happens if a flaw is found? Monero's implementation is fixed. That is a problem. If a flaw is found in a privacy scheme layered on top of Bitcoin then you can either fix it or switch to another without touching Bitcoin. I think there is an argument for keeping the base protocol as simple and straight forward as possible and layering other user defined schemes on top.

Also since the Chinese were late entrants they got all excited about litecoin (or so I heard from a Chinese friend).  I'd imagine that there are quite a few litecoin bagholders there who would be happy to see bitcoin hobbled by limited transaction capacity.

In my opinion miners are pretty exchangeable.  It would be nice to have an overwhelming majority on the larger blocks but if not, oh well hash rate drops a bit.  I think it unlikely that there would be enough 1MB aligned hash power to BOTH continue the 1MB fork AND wreak havoc on the 20MB branch by 51%ing it with continuous 20MB spam blocks.  


The exchanges and payment processors are the most important players in this decision.

We'll find out in due course, once it's measured.

LOL, this quote just cut the legs out from Blockstream's main objection to raising the block limit; that being the large block attack  on small miners supposedly facilitated by "superior"  bandwidth connections. Well, the largest miners in the world are telling us they have "inferior"  connections! Lol! What a bunch of amateurs.

“A very large block size would be problematic for miners because the network bandwidth between China, where the majority of mining is done, and rest of the world is heavily restricted. Important proposals like these need to factor in all of the nuances of the global landscape.”

And that's from good guy Eleuthria who  saved the network  twice more  than anyone, including guys like  gmax, with his pocketbook. Notably with the 0.8 fork and when he voluntarily backed his pool away from 51% control of the network. All miners would do well to follow his lead as he had unquestionably demonstrated only good things for Bitcoin.

On the Chinese mine objections. Let them cry. Bitcoin is a force for good so if they want to allow themselves to be forked off the network through their local bandwidth problems, so be it. I say do someing about it. It will give miners round the world a chance to level the passing field. And if Wall street really does  want to get into Bitcoin, this will give them a chance to build their own mines. That would be a good thing too so as to further decentralize the process. Personally I think the Chinese gvt will allow their miners to step it up to stay competitive. Bitcoin is their chance to challenge the dollar which is why they haven't crushed it yet.

* edit you should say exchanges miners are not as powerful as you fear.  

I think they are overestimating there power. here is a quote from someone who once controlled almost 50% of the Bitcoin hash rate.
As for China I think they are net sellers, and they want to offshore profit, i suspect a lot of volume is also hot air, look at the number of nodes in China and you get a feel for how well Bitcoin has penetrated there.

If the whole of Chinese didn't fork  (all 91 nodes) I think it would have little impact.