Topic: Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP. - page 530. (Read 2032289 times)

The interesting thing about professional trolls is that they help devs and investors think through every possible weakness and pitfall of the system, from the obvious to the far-fetched. So they too end up contributing.

For everything else there is the ignore button.   

Is there no thread safe from the troll invasion? 

4 pools controlling more than 51% of the network.

Very decentralized, much impossibility of mining cartels, many trustless currencies, wow.

^No, I mean the chart I've posted, from https://blockchain.info/pools.
Nice homebrew you got there, glad you know how to make pie charts

you mean this one?

That's because trust in fiat != trust in a chunk of code.  With Bitcoin, code is exactly what you have to put your trust in.
I'm also not buying that miners (rather: mining pools) will chose the fork that's best for Bitcoin as a whole, i.e. best for "hodlers," rather than the one which best serves their immediate interests

BTW, have you noticed the pool breakdown lately?



Remember what it used to look like ~6 months ago?

now you're talking, baby:

Bitcoin: The “Perfect Gold”

http://insidebitcoins.com/news/bitcoin-the-perfect-gold/29080?utm_content=buffere5c51&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer

Hardforks r expected atleast first 10 yrs.. Ie we had a hardfork when we got rid of gold standard but monetary policy at the time was hundreds of yrs old..

^TL;DR: Hardforks are just fine, we'll hardfork this thing like a red-headed stepchild--change 21mil max coin limit, give it 50% a year inflation because hardfork, so whateva!

Blockchain size increases are a non issue and the 'patch' (hardfork) is scalable - the blockchain only grows rapidly if the TPS of the network grows rapidly. If they become an issue then some form of blockchain pruning code can be implemented.

Bitcoin 'now' is an evolving project since 2009.

A patch increasing the (still limited) # of transactions at the expense of blockchain size.  At best a cludgy temp fix, "[f]rom a CS and engineering point of view."
Besides, we aren't talking about what Bitcoin could be if we changed the code--we're talking about Bitcoin as it is now

See proposed hard fork, which (as you know) solves the transactional bandwidth issues bitcoin would eventually have experienced going forward.

The problem with viewing Bitcoin as a database is obvious:  It's a database which can only handle 7 TPS.
This sort of throughput may be enough for your local Walmart, but world currency?

I'd consider replacing the plumbing of the financial system to be disruptive (not something that happens often and creates massive winners and losers). Creating a new asset class would not be disruptive (happens all the time, there are dozens of asset classes already, or far more, depending on how you count).

If banks and wall street strongly embrace bitcoin it will mean that bitcoin is very compatible with business-as-usual, and its effects will be limited. If they keep a close eye on it, experiment with it, create niche products around it, then it might be disruptive. For example, I'd consider an ETF in this category, as it fits with "new asset class." It does not fit within "replace the plumbing of the financial system." At least not yet.

Disruptive technologies are strongly embraced by dominant players belatedly and reluctantly, when new winners have already been established, and it is too late to retain their dominant role in the post-disruption playing field. For example, Google has more advertising revenue than the entire television business, possibly more than all of traditional media combined. That's because big media did not strong embrace the internet; it didn't fit business-as-usual. They all had web sites and so forth, but they didn't and couldn't truly embrace it -- meaning change everything about the way they do business -- the way Google could.

There's disruptive, and then there's disruptive. I make the claim often that blockchain technology will be disruptive. And I want it to be. But I want it to be disruptive in a good way, not in a bad way. That means gradual. Catastrophic USD hyperinflation, collapse of the Fed, etc all at the hands of crypto would be a very undesirable outcome, imho.

I think that's a touch overly definitive. Part of the prospect of bitcoin is that it might not matter *how* it's embraced. Once it's value is high enough and it's in enough hands, it starts to become a financial backbone, both in terms of plumbing and store-of-value asset.

It also depends on what you mean by "disruptive". Replacing the plumbing of the existing financial system, while creating a new asset class - but still using dollars on the consumer tier - would be disruptive. But perhaps you're limiting the term to the more extreme fiat-goes-away scenarios.

This is one of the very good reasons why the world will not, and should not, convert from the legacy system into a crypto-centric one instantaneously. We are not going to jump from here to there all at once or overnight. We are going to do it cautiously, taking a million baby steps in the process. There are scenarios for catastrophic failure that you have thought of, some that I have thought of, and I am sure some that neither of us have thought of. What if some crazy obscure bug causes the chain to fork into a thousand directions all of a sudden? But the thing is, we can play what-if for any technology. What if every computer on the planet gets knocked out by a gigantic EMP or series of EMPs, man-made or otherwise? All of our financial information would be lost! OOMMMGGGG!!! So, what do we do? Just abandon technology, because it might fail us? No, we are going to have to have backup plans in cases of catastrophic technical failure of the blockchain, just like we do for any new technology. I suppose I have more faith in our ability to do so than you. (Or not. I do not want to be presumptuous.)

Yes, and the government could shut down the internet, and the government could turn off your cell phone and cut off your electricity. And the government could shoot you in the head. All of these being arguments that make crypto more appealing, not less.


Are you talking about the way things stand now, or the way things are envisioned to be in 2, 5, 10 years? Right now a lot of money is spent per transaction [1]; but that is basically because the infrastructure is still being built and people are investing lots of money. If you were an airline and were spending a zillion dollars to build a fleet of new airplanes, and only one airplane was in service so far, would you calculate the cost per passenger as the number of passengers flying right now in the one airplane, divided by all the money being spent building the entire fleet? No, you would not, because it would be a disingenuous argument to make.

[1] https://blockchain.info/charts/cost-per-transaction?timespan=all&showDataPoints=false&daysAverageString=1&show_header=true&scale=0&address=

It is entirely normal that disruptive technologies are most useful, initially, on the edge cases where the dominant system doesn't work well, and not at the core use case where dominant system is highly optimized, and large value chains are built around it. Indeed disruptive technologies often cause a dominant system to further specialize on a core market -- ceding fringe markets altogether instead of expending resources to serve them -- where it then becomes even more optimized and successful, for a while (often quite a while).

So yes if bitcoin is disruptive then you would expect to take hold in places like Zimbabwe, remittences to Somalia, online gambling, underground markets, etc.

If the threatened embrace of big banks and wall street goes anywhere beyond the toe-in-the-water stage then you can be sure it means bitcoin won't be disruptive after all (but as tvbcof points out may still be very profitable for early adopters).

We shall see.

I agree that the governmental approach (at least in the west) will probably be to embrace bitcoin, regulate it, tax it. I don't think bitcoin is the existential threat to the legacy system that some people imagine it to be. Bitcoin will not cause the central banks to fail. So, for the foreseeable future, I think bitcoin (or crypto) will coexist peacefully with the legacy system. Indeed, bitcoin will probably even be nurtured by it, in its own way.

But .... if and when a central bank fails, like in Zimbabwe for instance ... not because bitcoin caused it, but because the system failed all by itself ....

That's when bitcoin will (I think) step in and take over the function of the central bank. This will make it harder to RE-establish the legacy banking system in an area where it has failed. But, bitcoin won't cause the downfall of the institutions that are already in existence.

If my analysis is correct, then everybody wins when the legacy banking system's current institutions adopt bitcoin, including the current powers that be. If/when there is a collapse of the currency/banking system in a given country or society, then (hopefully) the society's subsequent descent into chaos will be less traumatic since people will be able to use a ready-made, out of the box crypto-based financial infrastructure.  And a well fed, economically-empowered mob is less likely to take revenge on the ruling class than a hungry, economically-disempowered one.

Basically, you are stating that database normalization has a downside. I will grant that there is a time and a place for database normalization and denormalization. But there is a difference between selective denormalization, done on purpose because it conveys advantages when done properly (an option opened up with the advent of trustless decentralized ledger), versus being fully-denormalized, all the time, because you have no choice in the matter (because trustless ledgers do not exist). IOW, bitcoin provides a degree of database design flexibility that did not exist prior to the advent of blockchain technology.