Topic: Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP. - page 426. (Read 2032286 times)

OMG, that really is something, Cypher!  Looks like USD is just absolute crap!

And yet...

USD price continues to rise vis-a-vis BTC
BTC is even shittier shit than USD
To fail so hard...

Well, you can use an other illustration ... 

crap, i'm getting on planes all day.  seem to get into these discussions at these times...

since you're so into images, NLC, tell me who needed an emergency transfusion?:

Bitcoin's got a bum liver, renal failure & has been bled out on top of all this.  Some additional plumbing is its only hope

i can't see how the value of the currency unit is not lost when passing thru to a SC.  the combo of unit + MC is what secures its value so w/o the original hashing power of the MC, the unit ceases to have equivalent value.  plus, all the risk of moving the unit over to the other side of a high friction 2wp that prevents seamless passage for at least 2d and is based on an spv lookback proof.

yes, that is my fear, that SC's dilute the value of the MC and thus the entire Bitcoin system.  one of the major purposes of SC's is to enable all sorts of other speculative asset trading.  i think that takes away from Bitcoin as an alternative form of money.  remember that the fiat money crisis is the major problem we have today and is what is enabling all the trickle down problems throughout the economy.  this is why all the "BC-only" crowd are working hard to get you to ignore Bitcoin "the currency".

try grafting on an additional persons circulatory system to yours.  see if your heart can handle the extra load.  it can't as it is in equilibrium and its capacity is fine tuned for your body only.

i'm making this harder?  eye of the beholder.  i'd say the Blockstream ppl are the ones making this hard.  especially when it comes to expanding the block size.  i've even heard one of them wanting to let Bitcoin bump up against the 1MB limit just to "see what happens".  a cynic would say it's b/c of their for profit bid on the SC concept altho i'll give 'em a pass on their face value arguments about "dangers" to doing so.

if anything, as a vocal Sound Money advocate, you'd think i'd be opposed to increasing the block size to steer Bitcoin towards being a gold like reserve currency which should, in theory, drive its exchange value to the Moon.  instead, i'm all for innovation and am willing to compromise with the ppl who envision Bitcoin as a payment network which can only be accomplished by lifting the 1MB limit.  that's my compromise for this project as that is how firmly i believe that innovation ought to occur on MC, not SC's.  

edit:  btw, i didn't see your comment on the exchange graphs i posted above showing that Bitcoin is, in fact, suppressing XCP, Bit-X, and MC

You boys need to go and play in the fresh air for a while.

I read that whole spiel. Totally transparent effort to create a fuss where there is none.

TL;DR: "You actually can do some sort-of-blockchain-like things that are potentially interesting without having a monetary token, if you do it centralized or basically centralized. For actual decentralized applications, well, they can be done but the onus is on YOU to make the impossible possible so I'm just going to handwave that away."

--

You can separate "Bitcoin from the blockchain" if you're flexible enough with your definition of the word "blockchain" and you use it build something completely different than Bitcoin without any of the decentralized aspects that make it so special and uniquely useful. But at that point you're more just trying to leverage a buzzword than doing anything that warrants mention alongside Bitcoin.

Deal. My result came out to be "42." Yours?

Let's take a bunch of loosely-correlated facts, without any examination of context or cause-and-effect relationships, and hope the process of extrapolating conclusions from all this returns results more accurate than a random number generator.

People look at things the wrong way. Let's use a real-world example to show it:

Gold was a form of money. Silver was its lesser counterpart.
Fiat was created, based on gold. Now fiat is the main currency, while gold/silver are investment vehicles.

All of these have value. They are all convertible between one another. Just because fiat took over doesn't mean the others were destroyed/worthless.

I think BTC is the same way. I have very little doubts that it will be taken over by other currencies. But I think it will remain a main investment vehicle and therefore still have its use/value. It just won't be what we use for day-to-day transacting.

The value of the currency unit is not lost but the value of the "system" consisting of the main chain plus the currency unit may be degraded if an alternative chain becomes dominant. The main chain would exist only for the purposes of mining distribution, and then once distribution is negligible or complete, not at all.

I see nothing particularly wrong with this, as it is an "upgrade path" but I think cypherdoc sees it as dilutive of the original Bitcoin system (which he would rather see improved-in-place rather than replaced).

In a SC the value cannot be permanently lost since it is still in the same circulatory system and the pressure (value) can be efficiently transferred around.

Comparing a diode to a copper wire is not controversial; one allows current in one direction only, the other both. Or a non-return valve to a tap. I'm not here to convince you btw, but you do seem to be making it harder than it needs to be.

Excellent succinct post.

Yes you're right implementing lightning network paper requires a softfork, but the related changes  are less controversial than the one needed for e.g. sidechains, imho (I could be wrong obviously).

That said if you're interested in exploring the concept of lightning net look at the Rusty Russel's series about it, you can start from the first one of the four pieces here: http://rusty.ozlabs.org/?p=450.
 
I'm going to quote a quite telling part of the last ep (http://rusty.ozlabs.org/?p=477):


... me too :-)

Im sure airmiles will come once they see customers flocking to it..

1- I don't see anything unexpected (or directly related to crypto) in the FOMC minutes released today:
http://www.federalreserve.gov/monetarypolicy/files/fomcminutes20150318.pdf


2- Microsoft becoming a licensed money transmitter in all US states sounds rather interesting.

On the one hand, obtaining these licenses is a prohibitive barrier to entry for new competitors in the financial sector (e.g., it is presently a big challenge for Coinbase, probably plain unfeasible for smaller US exchanges like Coinsetter, while AFAIK BitPay is only licensed in Georgia). Meanwhile a MS taskforce can get it done, no problem.

On the other hand, it seems clear we are not going to end up with ApplePay, GooglePay, SamsungPay and MicrosoftPay, each working piecemeal across jurisdictions, platforms, and participating merchants. Money just does not work that way. Surely Microsoft understands this and, for once, is not going to get burned in a pointless deployment (Bing, Zune, Windows Mobile ...). Instead, they have the opportunity to skip the failure their competitors are already facing (cf. https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.11026372), and instead build their payments system from the get go around bitcoin (which they already accept and grok), towards achieving a solution that works across the board.

Since such a solution requires for payments to be denominated in USD (and eventually other national currencies), acquiring BitPay, which has worked out the merchant side of the mechanism, would indeed give them a huge headway in that direction. The solution is trivial:

a. Customer deposits USD with MS Finance, a licensed money transmitter everywhere, via check, credit card, bank xfer, BTC.

b. Customer pays for stuff online or IRL in USD from her MS Finance balance using streamlined, universal, Redmond-coded interface.

c. MS Finance settles with merchant in USD and moves money around in BTC, à la BitPay.  

If MS Finance can do this and make a profit while charging merchants ~1.5% of the cost of each transaction, the model is viable (it provides significant savings to merchants, an amount of which will be competitively passed on to customers, sufficient to offset incentives like frequent credit card flyer miles). The model does not serve all existing customers (those buying on credit), but can bring in new ones (those who can't engage in commerce online because they don't have credit).
 

it sure is.

so we have supposedly all these one way 2.0's siphoning value out of the MC, so i have an even better idea:  we'll make a change to the protocol to make it even easier to facilitate a thousand more at least.  but it'll be better b/c the value can come back if it wants to!

Somewhat related to my post above, on this blockchain-without-bitcoin business:

There are several things going on here:

1) Bitcoin's blockchain data-structure with POW-voting was created to allow a completely permissionless network.

2) We think that the permissionless quality is desirable for money (and more general global record-of-authority use), in that it makes the money unconfiscatable and uncensorable.

3) We tolerate the practical inelegances of blockchain systems because of #2.

4) One *can* create a blockchain in a permissioned environment and therefore eliminate the native unit of account, since the native unit is only technically necessary to create the incentive for the permissionless aspect to be credible. But then by definition ("permissioned env"), you don't have #2, so we're talking about something *completely* different than bitcoin.

5) #4 is essentially a linear advance in database tech. Cool, but totally without any of the ramifications of bitcoin (global currency, open platform for innovation, etc). Hyperledger, Eris, and Ripple all pretty much fall into this category, and it's totally different than bitcoin. We shouldn't even consider it all that related.