Topic: Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP. - page 515. (Read 2032289 times)

Its not even that good as a payment mechanism. Its useful as an easy store as opposed to, say, gold.

No one ever pretended Bitcoin would natively scale to handle all of the world's transactions

Bitcoin "payment network" not being able to scale natively to record, validate & retain every coffee purchase does not make it flawed as a proposition for a sound form of money.

The idea of Bitcoin as "a standard on top of which further payment systems must be developed" was, afaik, envisioned by most everyone with a hint of foresight.

I am not too bullish on BTC anymore, I think BTC has yet to find its bottom. It may be better to invest in Silver now.

When you buy a house & realize you've been sold an empty lot, look at it as an opportunity--you've been sold a chance to build your own!

Not sure I fully understand.  You are happy that Bitcoin is not a practical substitute for money after six years of development, in its current state? Useful only as a peg, a standard on top of which further payment systems must be developed?

My question still stands:  This [happy accident/feature/totally not a problem] was clear at the outset, why was it not addressed until now?

Only if you pretend it is a flaw and not an opportunity for others to build onto the protocol to create solutions that meet the markets demands

One cannot change the laws of nature.  There is no 'fixing' this 'fundamental flaw', and I suspect that many many people never really considered it including most of the devs.  'Addressing it' is a different matter.  A few of the devs looked toward the mainstream (mega-corporations to provide infrastructure and the state sponsored legal protections) but happily this doesn't seem to be the first option for most of them.

For my part I don't consider this 'fundamental flaw' to be a flaw at all.  I consider it more a happy accident of fate and a a feature of reality which produces the potential to make native Bitcoin a system actually work in the real world.  By 'work', I mean to remain a genuinely autonomous and independent solution which is robust against attack by vested power interests.

As I've said before, the idea of sidechains hit me right away as a means of scaling, and I argued to call native Bitcoin 'blockchain zero' back in 2011.  As long as this chain can remain uncorrupted and supportable it really doesn't matter what happens on the infinite number of chains which derive their value from it.

Ignoring proposed scalability solutions is fun isn't it?

You have got the pricing of transaction backwards. If it is usful to transact, and the transactions are limited, it will have a price. If there is a nontrivial price, that means it is usful. What will happen when we reach the limit, is that the price of transactions will rise, and then, if the block size is increased, the price will fall again.

We obviously need to be able to serve lot of transactions, if we want bitcoin to be widely used. But costly transactions is not a definitive stop, it will only deter the least important transactions. USD10 is still cheap, and you can do a lot of mining for USD10 per transaction.

^Didn't make myself clear.  I didn't mean to imply that Bitcoin's lack of scalability has prevented anyone from making money on it.  Just assumed that such fundamental, conceptual flaws would have been addressed by now.
Guess not

You've not really correctly parsed the content of this sub-thread, but...

For my part I realized the scaling issues as I was reading the whitepaper for the first time.  I suspect that the same thing can be said for most of the core devs.  This does NOT mean that the system has no value and/or no ability to make a guy a ton of money if that's what one is into.  Making a ton of money (which I've done) is something I admit to be among my interests if not on the top of my priorities...it may or may not be...I lack the ability to judge this for certain.  Anyway...

I will say that there has been a fair amount of fairly unseemly propaganda about various aspects of the system, and it has come from people who are among the most ethical in the ecosystem.  Allowing the notion of limitless scalability to go un-corrected is one of these.  It could be legitimately argued that:

  1)  it is to much work to constantly make this correction, and
  2)  it was a necessary evil in order to bootstrap into a role where Bitcoin has some real value.

For my part since I only have some excess USD sunk in and have put no real time and effort into the system, I've felt fairly free to be guided by my ethics and call out people for being idiots on some of the marketing nonsense over the years.  Bitcoin is as much as anything an interesting experiment (in my mind.)

I've got a lot of money riding on the hope that 1 BTC will vastly exceed the price of 1 oz of gold.  I feel that the chances of this are much greater now than they were when I was buying bitcoin in the single digits.  But, that is still not to say that I judge the chances as being terribly high.  High enough to put some money on, however, if one has some money to spare and has the patience and disposition to ride the long duration waves.  This is more-or-less what I was saying in 2011.

It took six years for Bitcoin intelegencia to realize that 7TPS might be problematic for a currency ...or a minor payment provider.
I realize that rocket surgery & MENSA meetings keep you guys real busy, but six years...

I would not be at all surprised if Bitcoin were to become more in-demand if it DID start to cost something to use it.  Psychologically, if someone is given something 'for free' than it is not valued very highly.  As soon as it starts to cost something then it starts to be more highly prized.

Since most thinking persons are starting to catch on to the fact that it does not make sense to broadcast every cup of java purchase to every decentralized infrastructure provider (to hold forever) and Bitcoin's only realistic role is to be for higher importance transactions, having to pay at least to cost of network operation for transactions is, in my opinion, a positive and something we should be migrating towards.  Probably by shortly after then next coinbase notch-down (roughly 8 years from the genesis block) we should get to that point.  It's very much up-in-the-air about whether that will happen even if the block size stays at 1MB.

Markets cycle.  simple as that.  Bitcoin touched Gold once, it should touch it again.  at least.

There is no doubt that a single forever remembered blockchain cannot handle every tip or coffee bought so offchain or better sidechains are needed.  But that does not mean that BTC should not also be scaled in block size.  With the price trending down discouraging new holders we need to welcome any and all real use.  And approaching a txn limit does not help that.

"Gold collapsing.  Bitcoin UP"

I LOL everytime.

Here is a glittering article by Keith Weiner. He is obviously not an anarhist economic, and the fiat money fall he is describing is not related to bitcoin, but to gold:

http://keithweinereconomics.com/2012/03/15/when-gold-backwardation-becomes-permanent/

The idea, as I understood it, is that deflation (debt repayment/cancellation) will reduce trust in bonds, and the fall of the fiat (or hyperinflation) will ensue quickly. The deflation phase will not last too long.

Now, bitcoin might not be universal enough when that happens, and gold will be the most used money, including debt nominated in gold with gold interest.

In such a case, we will have an unstable situation with a small total bitcoin value compared to golds total value. That means bitcoin will continue to fluctuate as people change their opinion of what is the best money.

Supposing states will not disappear, but become increasingly intrusive, I think bitcoin still will win in the end.

Thanks for quoting that!  Wladimir's quietness in the public muck is as pronounced as his activity in the codebase.  I never knew where he stood on this stuff.  My natural guess would be that anyone who is bright enough to be such a prolific code contributor would immediately understand certain things like this, but...Gavin...

As someone who has worked on and designed data management systems, Wladimir's statement is so common sense to me that it shouldn't even need to be stated.  I am aghast that there is so much dispute about it.  A very strong hypothesis is that many people who have some technical skills are busying themselves with solutions which will be viable only by at least a scaling induced semi-failure of Bitcoin...and those who's technical and analytical skills are weak or non-existent are just expressing their inborn goober-ishness.

Sidechains not only soundly addresses the issue, but the two-way peg completely demolishes any economic concerns as well.