Topic: Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP. - page 33. (Read 2032247 times)

"Yikes"

You still don't get it.

Stop thinking in terms of users. Think in terms of capital. This is not Facebook.


On the contrary, when it comes to money (or networks for that matter) it seemingly works this way.

Let me borrow from the Facebook example again : create a huge network of people and they will come.

Create a huge network of money and you will attract wealth.

Look I'm not neglecting the positive added effect of these other feedback loops you are referring too. Merely downplaying their importance for the time being as some people have seemingly lost their eyes from the prize.

"When the wise man points at the moon, the fool looks at the finger."

Of course I'm being silly and hyperbolic, but only to illustrate that market cap isn't some "build it and they will come" metric.

There is a feedback loop between price and user growth, but it can only be sustained with growing utility.

market cap isn't some "build it and they will come" metric.

Is AAPL competing with fiat as money?

Sorry but that's such a stupid thing to say. I'm sure you can do better than this...

Let me ask you. Did the current 1B$ ecosystem investment, equivalent billion dollar mining infrastructure, incremental userbase and increasing transactions come before or after the price increase?

I did not say anything about your characterization of market cap but of growth. Or more precisely, the driver of growth.

No I don't see a scenario where that happens. What I am observing though is market cap going up and users, transactions and merchants following.

You say I mischaracterize the importance of market cap growth, I say I simply try to describe some of the forces behind market cap. Do you see a scenario where market cap goes up while the number of users, transactions, applications, and merchants... goes down?

Yes. And much like the others your mischaracterize the only growth we are really concerned about : market cap, or how much of the fiat economy we have absorbed. As I've said previously I couldn't care less if it comes from the pockets of the 1% or the 99%. More fiat capital trusting Bitcoin as money is exactly how it grows until it consumes all of wealth in the world.

Users, transactions are secondary. They will follow the money because like any thing worth a lot in this world people will want a piece of it. Velocity of transactions will pickup once an actual Bitcoin economy develops. Meanwhile people will hoard Bitcoin and get rid of fiat. Some might not agree but this is pretty much Gresham's law in action.

While you may not consider them "panacea to be pursued at all costs", others have outright stated this is the ONLY goal to be pursuing and that it should be done as quickly as possible. They would like to run Bitcoin like a startup. This is IMO the wrong way to go about it.

Capital flowing into Bitcoin is absolutely about expected future growth, in users, transactions, market cap, and in usefulness. Hard for me to comprehend how you can even divorce these metrics.

Remaining the domain of 10,000 geeks sitting on hordes of coins in paper wallets, occasionally trading some back and forth with each other... means failure to me. Not that it would fail to work, but that it would fail to reach its potential.  

This is not to say that user/transaction growth is some kind of panacea to be pursued at all costs, just that it shouldn't be ignored.  

Not at all. It's not hard to understand really..

The thing holding other crypto back is the amount of capital people are willing to trust to them. Not necessarily the amount of users. The increasing ecosystem size is a result of capital, speculative or not, being stored into Bitcoin. As far as the nature of the speculation this is beside the point which is that Bitcoin is not used, as we speak, as a medium of exchange to purchase goods or services.

People are not buying Bitcoin because the number of transactions or users is seemingly increasing. They are buying because it attracts wealth unlike what most other coins can claim.

I've stated this repeatedly but I honestly believe it to be true: we are talking about a money protocol, a money network effect. the unit concerned is not number of users but amount of capital.

Think of it like this : if the 1% of the world's population who apparently controls around 40% of the world's wealth moved that money into Bitcoin it would do more to strengthen & grow the ecosystem than if 25% of the other people on earth invested all of their savings.

ZB had brought up this point before and while it does sort of makes sense from an "antifragile" standpoint, I have a problem accepting it as a viable or desirable outcome.

On that point I believe this post from Alex Morcos is relevant:

http://sourceforge.net/p/bitcoin/mailman/message/34092527/

While I do understand your point about improving on the ability of the users to come to consensus, it seems a stretch to me to suggest that regular changes to the way Bitcoin operate can strengthen the trust people have in it. Rather we should strive to come to a point where the consensus critical code in Bitcoin is set in stone for eternity as it becomes harder and harder for an ever-growing ecosystem to come to consensus on a proposed change.

For that reason, I am wary and quite frankly curious of recent attempts by Hearn in particular to lessen the impact and the dangers of hard forks.

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you do know that real ppl actually hurt themselves from severe myopia?  i can fix that for you.

I think you mean to suggest no, but the answer might be yes. Satoshi proposed viewing Bitcoin as a new and unusual kind of metal with the property that it can be sent instantly over long distances. Monero is similar except that it has the ability to be sent over long distances without leaving a public record of having done so. Bitcoin and Monero are different in kind, but both new and usual kinds of "metals"

I think you mean to suggest no, but the answer might be yes. Satoshi proposed viewing Bitcoin as a new and unusual kind of metal with the property that it can be sent instantly over long distances. Monero is similar except that it has the ability to be sent over long distances without leaving a public record of having done so. Bitcoin and Monero are different in kind, but both new and usual kinds of "metals"

What gives Bitcoin value aren't its technical merits but the fact that people believe in it.   The biggest risk here isn't that 20MB blocks will
be bad or that 1MB blocks will be bad, but that by forcing a hard fork that isn't nearly universally agreed upon, we will be damaging that belief.   If I strongly believed some hard fork would be better for Bitcoin, say permanent inflation of 1% a year to fund mining, and I managed to convince 80% of users, miners, businesses and developers to go along with me, I would still vote against doing it.  Because that's not nearly universal agreement, and it changes what people chose to believe in without their consent. Forks should be hard, very hard.  And both sides should recognize that belief in the value of Bitcoin might be a fragile thing.

So, is a monero a unique collectible unlike anything the world has seen since gold? Yes or No!

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At this point I'd say just find a way to put the forks on the market and let's arbitrage it out. I will submit if a fork cannot gain the market cap advantage, and I suspect the small-blockers will likewise if Core loses it. Money talks.

Yes. Since anyone can run any software they want to interact with the Bitcoin network, this idea does seem like a logical development.

It also seems like one of those counter-intuitive anti-fragility things, where the seeming chaos and instability at a micro level will actually lead to a more predictable and stable behaviour at the macro level.

If it became more common for individual nodes to be able to tweak consensus parameters, then I think that would actually lead to more predictable and stable consensus behaviour in the long run. The worst thing that can happen to a node operator is to fall out of consensus with the rest of the network, so individual node operators would be strongly incentivised to develop methods to ensure they can track the status of the network, and deal with any potential consensus forks.

As it stands now, consensus behaviour is based on the specific implementation details of Bitcoin Core. The software is not designed with the assumption that hard consensus forks are a likely event, and when they do happen nodes are not designed to handle it gracefully. The accidental hard form of March 2013 happened because of an obscure implementation detail in the Core software, and was only possible because the software monoculture created a "single point of failure". A more diverse implementation of consensus rules might result in more frequent consensus divergences and orphaned blocks, but each one would be non-catastrophic, and would lead toward a more stable and resilient network in the long run.