Topic: Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP. - page 339. (Read 2032265 times)

By what metric do you assert it has worked well so far?

I see failure on that point in every measurable facet that can portend a trend:

1. Hashrate and topology of the network is becoming more centralized.
2. Behemoths are driving most of the new wallets (or will soon).
3. Scaling now requires moving to IBLT centralization of mining.
4. Pools have demonstrated the Tradegy of the Commons leads to 50% concentration. You Whack-A-Mole it with concerted political effort while Bitcoin is small, but as the behemoths take over the economics will rule (even if hidden behind a Sybil attack).

The so called decentralization of the pools can't portend anything due to the inability to measure a Sybil attack.

The problem I see with most of those services is the same one you see with xmr.to. They're mostly using Bitcoin as a payment rail (and a marketing vehicle to target Bitcoin supporters as customers) and then they're going to dump it to pay their costs of doing business (most of it in the case of domain registration). There is no real circulatory economy there.

There's really not a whole lot of difference between using BTC to pay for a domain name and using xmr.to to pay for a domain name (via an even shorter holding period of BTC), or for that matter setting up a domain registrar that accepts XMR as payment and dumps it to pay upstream registration costs (not hard to do at all, but also not particularly profitable).

$DJI gone negative.  would be really interesting if it turns out to be a headfake over the top (to a new high).

the Dow Theory non conf is strong.

. . . that are not calculated from taking the data from a single exchange.

This has to be temporary, they cannot be so spectacularly dim.

It was agreeing. In fact I've made the same argument to Monero people. I'm the Bitcorn in the Monero world.


Exactly


Supposedly some of the Ethereum presale money did come from VC-type investors, but who really knows. Bitshares was also supposedly VC-backed, but I don't know the details of that either. Ripple (not exactly a cryptocurrency, I know) just got $30 million in VC money, and Stellar got VC money last year indirectly (via Stripe, which is VC-backed). So it isn't zero. There are at least two investor-backed Monero businesses (MyMonero and Crypto Kingdom). It's all certainly less than Bitcoin of course.

http://www.qhoster.com/clients/announcements/43/QHoster-accepts-all-cryptocurrencies-Buy-hosting-domain-names-Linux-VPS-Windows-RDP-VPS-and-dedicated-servers.html

Hmmm, I would argue that anything that is portable is tangible, and that intangible objects cannot be ported anywhere, because they are both everywhere and nowhere simulatneously   But then again, maybe I'm only saying that because it would mean I'm right  

It's possible that we're arguing about semantics, but from what I remember about good system design, proper analysis (including labelling objects and actors with the best possible description you can think of) is the unimpeachable foundation for getting good results.

Hardly a leader in tech, we already have 24/7/52 indexes.

There are some questions I want to answer in longer form than what what a forum post allows.

Right now time is the resource in most short supply for me.

How much of it should I allocate to debating economics, how much of it should I allocate to preparing for the next round of OBPP ratings, how much of it should I allocate to describing what a transition plan from the current P2P network to a market-based P2P network would look like, etc. etc. etc.

that's ok.  it's the concept that counts.  along with the built in marketing to the masses.

Not sure if this was agreeing or being sarcastic. In case it was that later then I'd respond that I'm not saying Bitcoin will win "because network effect", I'm saying "because network effect" any follower has to be significantly better, not just moderately better.

The network effects for bitcoin vs. alts are very real and already present a significant hurdle for any of them to overcome. For example, in 2014 VCs invested >$300M in Bitcoin firms vs. near zero for any alt. Currently numerous websites, VPNs, etc, that I use accept Bitcoin, none to few accept any alt. The fact is there are already network effects in place for Bitcoin vs. alts. This makes the hurdle higher for things such as Monero.

I believe it is not the size but rather the quality of the economy that drives unit-of-account dominance. When you have fixed expenses, salaries, and budgeting then unit-of-account is paramount unless you can afford the carrying cost of hedging to the various units you account in. When the economy moves towards innovation and knowledge then fixed expenses are rather irrelevant. (I spend $1000 a month on myself and personal innovation could spontaneously generate 10 - 100X that). I'm having a difficult time fathoming how we don't move to a bifurcation of the global economy where those people who are unwilling to enter the knowledge age, vest themselves in the old world paradigm and the NWO of old world capital trying to hang on to all that it knows how to do. The only way I visualize it won't happen is if we fail and end up trapped in a horrific Dark Age.

Bitcoin seems to be predicated on the Moldberg unit-of-account dominance theory "there can only be one winner". The more I dig, the more I see in every facet it is morphing into the NWO coin and the supporters here are fixated on the oxymoron of unenslaving humanity by way of global, total dominance with one ledger. Do they not even consider this defies the trend of entropy (they create a very low entropy outcome that is a vacuum that can't be stable long-term). I suppose one can argue that the network effects from this low entropy spawn a lot of high entropy, thus offsetting my objection.

The market must be ripe for altcoin or altcoins that fulfill the knowledge age requirements for meritocracy, fungibility, decentralization, permissionless, adaptability, resilience, etc.. But perhaps if we wait too long, the network efforts of Bitcoin will be too great to overcome.

Well, I agree with your observation about it all being terribly premature but I disagree with your conclusion. In fact my conclusion is exactly the opposite. It is precisely because that focus is premature that Bitcoin has zero legitimacy to claim to be the global ledger of anything other than Bitcoin. You can't be the global ledger of money until and unless you are established -- in reality not just in some supporters' imaginations -- as money.

Except the NYSE BTC "index", at least as initially set up, is a joke:

https://www.nyse.com/publicdocs/nyse/indices/NYSE_Bitcoin_Index_Methodology.pdf

Doesn't this just go back to portability though? One way to phase that is bitcoin is more portable than physical based money (gold) because it is just a bunch of random numbers. You can easily transport random numbers anywhere you can send information. This includes the ability to send money across the world in seconds, or even transport money into your head (brain wallet). Being intangible means something is more portable, including the ability to transport money into your mind, which is impossible with anything tangible.

This is one reason I've been wary of the "Bitcoin is shopper's paradise" idea of the past few years where merchant adoption was overemphasized or emphasized before its time, and the premature reference to Bitcoin as "the currency of the Internet" (/r/Bitcoin's sidebar) when it only "has currency," as it were, in a few niche markets so far. This marketing brought in so many people who didn't understand that everything is founded on SoV, and who didn't understand the ledger but rather thought of BTC as "digital coins you can send through the Internet" (the famous WeUseCoins video with 6M views), with all the second-thoughts and objections that that distorted understanding results in.

This is the first time I've noticed that these three misunderstandings are all interconnected and feed on one another. Roughly:

1) "Bitcoin is (already) a currency," rather than an investment based in part on its future promise of becoming a currency,* and where store of value is an afterthought, if that.

2) "Bitcoins are digital tokens" where the ledger and Money as Memory concept is completely missed.

3) "Switching protocols means switching ledgers," a.k.a. the Fundamental Theory of Altcoin Investing, and the cries of "Bitcoin maximalism."

*My favorite refutation of this misunderstanding is the gilded comment here in response to Rick Falvinge.



Representative snapshots from the subreddit sidebar, the WeUseCoins "What is Bitcoin?" video, and an Ethereum blog post:

Yeah, you have a very small bunch of people you owe answers to  

Even I have a few less messages in BCT than you, and bought my coins a few months later a few dollars higher.

Whether you only refuse to answer or also close yourself to new information from others, is certainly up to you.

I am nevertheless grateful for your contributions so far.

Private keys are the authority to spend your money. And because they're just random numbers, the ability to store your money safely is intangible to both the owner and everyone else. The actual storage itself depends on something tangible (mining & computer hardware), but we're working under an assumption that all the self interest mechanisms built into the satoshi design will protect and preserve the current blockchain from being destroyed or overpowered (and that's worked well so far).


Exactly, it's not the fact that it's golden, but that some critical mass of people chose to use it (and a majority of that critical mass must have understood why). Money is an abstraction, plain and simple. The trouble always was that the original form of recording/processing abstract values or concepts (the animal brain) was not necessarily reliable. Cryptocurrency isn't 100% intangible, but it does get right that money should be represented as an abstraction only (fiat was essentially a hybrid commodity/abstraction money, whereby you could choose to observe the commodity value while the coins were still high purity, or the face value when they were 98% copper)

I'm pretty sure I said the same thing on rpteilla's altcoin thread a year ago. It was clear to me then and is now that the advantages of a single unit-of-account are far lower in the information age with the ability to do near-frictionless conversions and automated accounting than they have ever been in history. Whether the advantage is now low enough for unit-of-account to fall away as an essential role of money is unclear. There are factors pushing in the other direction, such as globalization (a larger economy benefits more from a common unit-of-account than a smaller one).

Note I predicated my assumption against a negative wealth effect on Bitcoin at this time with the assumption that TPTB are not stupid enough to cause a stampede into an anonymous coin too soon. I expect they won't ramp up the draconian shit until after the masses are already into Bitcoin. After 2017, the negative wealth effect can occur with the masses (majority) taking the losses. That is why I say you can gloat for a while then be left standing there arms-in-arms with the greater fools.

By that time it might be too late for those who might want an anonymous solution to gain critical mass and reach network effects. The TPTB would have won and can drag the world into a Dark Age global Technocracy. I am not asserting that is the only possible scenario.