Topic: Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP. - page 672. (Read 2032265 times)

I agree with you on this issue cypher but my problem is... If you don't want these side chains to exist, why is it that you are also so against alt coins that enable features that you do not wish Bitcoin to support?

Great read:
https://blog.ethereum.org/2014/11/20/bitcoin-maximalism-currency-platform-network-effects/

How would you like to see such innovation occur?

I am wary of sidechains because of the mining incentive issue. Moving transactions off-chain leaves miners underfunded in the far future, or else results in very high tx fees, leaving Bitcoin more open to competition from a more inflationary coin that pays miners through block rewards more and tx fees less.

However, on that note I have to admit there is little substantive difference between sufficiently high tx fees and slightly breaking the 21M coin limit (no halving, or slower halving), since you can't actually benefit from your Bitcoin wealth unless you spend it eventually, at which time if you incur a big tx fee as a tax it is no different to you than an inflation tax. OK, maybe certain people will gain/lose more from high tx fees vs. inflation. Nevertheless, one way or another the miners have to get paid, and if Bitcoin is severely under-mined due to SC then one of those two things will eventually happen, or else Bitcoin (the platform) will die.

If by mechanism you mean mining I can see the possibility of harm and I've generally been on board with the trepidation on that front. But simply having stocks or whatever denominated in Bitcoin ledger units (whether actual bitcoins or perfect you-can-never-lose-the-2wp sidechain coins) seems fine since that's part of what money/ledger is supposed to do. I don't know that it's necessary for people to understand sound money in order to benefit from it, as long as it does take over. Anyway, if the pile on the right in the pic you've been posting (money, store of value, Forex) is way bigger than speculative assets, how can such distraction really happen?

i'm glad everyone's been talking about Satoshi recently.  that stimulated me to go back thru his whitepaper to see if there were any references to any of the speculative SC's functions that are being proposed by the SC proponents in this thread and elsewhere.  those being listed below.  they claim that SC's are a "natural and logical extension" to Bitcoin and that if Satoshi was able to be asked, he would love SC's.  well, i see no indication that this wild claim is valid.  see that none of these speculative assets were ever mentioned:

0 asset
0 stocks
0 bonds
0 insurance
0 smart
0 contracts
0 sidechain
0 offchain
0 separate
2 gold
5 money

it's clear to me that Satoshi intended for Bitcoin to be a new form of digital money, or currency if you will, that mimicked gold in all respects and improved upon it.  i'm only aware of one isolated forum post where he mentioned the addition of smart contracts, etc but that was in the context of adding them to the MC protocol.  never was there any mention of SC's nor the quack idea of separating the BTC units from the blockchain.  and understandably so.  by breaking the inextricable link btwn the two, you break security and therefore break Bitcoin as Money.  this is so obvious.  the last 200 pages have clearly demonstrated a myriad of ways things can go wrong with the SC proponents morphing their vision of how SC's will play out to satisfy any specific concern while promising us the moon.

Bitcoin should continue to focus on what got us to where we are:  the Money function.  that is where the problem lies today in the world of fiat and central banks.  this is what i saw back in January of 2011, Bitcoin as a poison dart aimed at the heart of central banks.  the problem is not stocks, bonds, insurance, contracts.  those all function reasonably well.  the problems we've had with them in the past, such as in 2001 and 2008, were fiat printing enabled and backed by central banks.  w/o the ability to print at will to bail out bad actors, Bitcoin as Money seeks to clamp down and eliminate this moral hazard.  and the network of money is ripe to be disrupted.  and rightfully so.  THAT is where the money is.  the Forex is the biggest in the world as i've shown.  the gold market is huge as well.  if Bitcoin can crack those markets we will go to the Moon.  Bitcoin should stay simple and non complex.  it has evolved to that of a public good.  no one should be allowed to corrupt its primary function of money.  let alone profit off it.  

leave the source code alone.

...
In the meantime, there's already the potential for enormous growth ahead of us with bitcoin as it is.

Everyone here "gets" it.

This is absolutely not the argument we are having.

When they say "you can't separate" the two, that's absolutely not in reference to sidechains or other similar schemes.

In fact, you can bet these guys are pretty excited about sidechains.

I was referring to the meme the guys in the video were addressing. 

When are you going to address the fact that any centralized off-chain solution is considerably more dangerous to Bitcoin as Money than sidechains are?

One supposed "weakness" of colored coins (I use the quotes because I personally see it as a strength), is that the bitcoin protocol doesn't verify the "amount" of colored coins transferred.  I can inspect any bitcoin output, look at its "value" field," and, provided that that TX has been mined into a block, I know that the output really contains the stated number of bitcoins.  With colored coins, this property does not exist; instead I must follow the chain of colored transactions back to the original issuance of the colored asset to determine if the (e.g.) 1,000,000 stock certificates I'm about to buy is actually valid.  This means that SPV nodes cannot verify transactions and that the whole transaction chain cannot be pruned.  
  

Re-check the axis on that graph.

sorry, but i don't agree with his assessment.  precisely b/c it leaves out an understanding that the money function will get deprecated in deference to the speculative assets riding on the SC's which distract from the mechanism which has brought us to where we are today.  the BTC price will drop if SC's are implemented, imo.

I define "another layer of trust" as trusting anything else but the Bitcoin network.

In that regard colored coins are less decentralized than sidechains.

The bitcoin chart looks exactly the same...

Well, then we have to get pedantic. Bitcoin was *never* peer-to-peer. A miner technically always sits in the middle, even if the hashing/nodes were perfectly uniformly distributed.

Absolutely wrong once again. Remember that Bitcoin miners will NOT mine speculative SCs as they can only command marginal use in the market and therefore not obtain the necessary adoption for miners to validate them with their work.

Can you even provide an example of these speculative SCs ?

In that sense, you are right that SPVP is crucial to their success because it is the only way they can create these ambitious extensions of Bitcoin I'm sure they have in mind.

I totally believe that BlockStream's business as it standards will depend on that fact.

There is a risk of destroying Bitcoin as we know it if BlockStream's goal is achieved.

SC's carrying speculative asset will be different and separate ledgers to Bitcoin.  attaching these less secure ledgers to Bitcoin will devalue the entire system.  remember that the Bitcoin miners will probably only be able to MM a couple of the thousands of speculative SC's that will be bolted onto Bitcoin.

i don't know.  looks like NXT is fading fast:

But this is why I believe your statement, "the blockchain may only be applicable to bitcoin as money" is incorrect. We are already seeing very useful applications of the blockchain outside of money (which aren't possible with bitcoins current parameters) and I cannot see these slowing down or going away.