Topic: Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP. - page 836. (Read 2032266 times)

What's embarrassing is brg444 continuing to promise that no altcoins will be considered in SC's when there is an entire section dedicated to them in the paper.

It's kind of embarrassing that certain people keep clinging to the idea of demurrage, in spite of the fact that Freicoin conclusively proved that nobody wants self-destructing money.

You said if all the bitcoin are converted.  If all the bitcoin are converted that means there are no more sellers left and the price is zero because no more trade is possible in bitcoin.  

If the price is non-zero that means there are sellers of bitcoin, which also means arb channels are open.  The only way the channels can close is if it either the price of BTC or SCBTC goes to zero.

Some altcoins are more equal than others.

If altcoins are not being considered for SC's, why do they dedicate a paragraph to Freicoin in the Economic part of the paper?

I still haven't heard a good excuse for core dev concentration in one for profit company other than "trust us".

Again,  why wouldn't we expect a SC fork of bitcoin with perfect anonymity to take over? 

One last quest on this sidechains thing, is it possible to remove the bridge between bitcoin and a sidechain at any given point in time?

p.s. sorry for the OT

Edit: fix grammar

Okay, so you have one data point from that source, which more or less agrees with my original rough estimate of 10%. I still doubt the number measured that way or any other reasonable way is increasing. Alts have not exactly been doing well the past several months, in case you haven't noticed. Further in support is that every study I've seen says that alts are highly correlated with Bitcoin but positively leveraged, and since Bitcoin is down so much the alts are likely down more. But I don't have hard data other than the one chart that was posted. Do you?

BTW, the observation that alts are positively correlated with Bitcoin raises serious questions about the argument that alts "take value" from Bitcoin. Substitute goods would have negative correlation.

Sort of. I certainly view it as one potentially right way to experiment with expanding the functionality of Bitcoin.


I agree with you there will be hate. I disagree with that reaction even though also I don't agree with the hate directed at alts.

I'm not sure about your second sentence though. What is your explanation for why the largest alt has (and a few of the top alts have) nothing to do with features?

Then I'll create clone of microtransactions sidechain ... will have same properties as original, only no fixed supply.

You don't know the future, and the trend could certainly change, so better proactive.

That's exactly the point: this is the right way to experiment new coins, and to progressively add new features to Bitcoin without the need to risk to buy some stupid scamcoin.

I think that we will see a lot of hate toward sidechains from all the altcoiners, and you will know why: sidechains take from them the opportunity to make some profit pumping new coins.

Still, as you can see of the above, eventually every BTC is converted to scBTC.

Oh. I completely agree! My sentence earlier was poorly worded, I meant that scaling is important (whether or not SC happens).


Yes, the graph is interesting, but for a month, at least, it has been hovering near 90%, where it still stands (4832M / 5342M).
http://coinmarketcap.com/#USD
Assuming the same underlying data is used by both sources.
Note: if Bitshares, Counterparty and Mastercoin are included in Bitcoin, then it is 91%

Nice to see someone standing up for the cause on that SC AMA there Cyph.  Go get 'em

I'm not sure what time frame you are using. At one point it was 0%, so certainly on that basis they are gaining, in some sense.

Ignoring the extreme peak in late 2013, for several months over the past year BTC was roughly $8 billion and LTC was $300-400m, which makes LTC almost 5% by itself.

I'd like to see those numbers though.

My intuition is that the opposite has happened, that alts are slowly losing ground, at least over the past year or so. I can't believe anything close to a doubling of share has happened in recent history.

EDIT: I see from the graph in a subsequent post that my intuition was correct. It isn't entirely up to date but shows alts at 4%. It's really quite silly for that to motivate anything at all about Bitcoin development. For sidechains to be a good idea they had better be a good idea independent of alts.

just for add a few more data points:

SC won't solve Bitcoin's scalability because they will optimize spamming Bitcoin for metadata. We'll be right back to the block size argument again. In fact, they will make it happen much faster.

That 10% was 5% for a long time, until recent months. So alts are gaining ground. Bitcoin needs the enhanced features SC promises, but importantly, scope for scalability as well.

Oh come on. Alts in the aggregate are only 10% of Bitcoin's value, and the biggest alt has no innovative features at all. It clearly exists for some completely different reason other than that addressed by side chains and therefore is unlikely to be affected.

This obsession with alts is very unhealthy and unhelpful. Focus on the value that sidechains (or anything else) could potentially add to Bitcoin by allowing faster and safer development. There is a lot more than 10% to be gained there.

And since the SC is two-way pegged, that would be great.

In fact, I hope this will be one of the first SC ever made, that would be the right way to add an anonymization layer onto bitcoin. I tried to setup something similar in the past but I could not solve all the details that the paper instead correctly addresses.

Ultimately, SC are what will completely destroy all altcoins and will give more and more value to Bitcoin, exactly because to the hard-pegging of the currency: what happens now is that for each new scamcoin that is launched every bitcoin holder must choose if part some of his bitcoin stash to buy some of the new coins because they may become more useful and hence more valuable of bitcoin in the future.

But with sidechains there is not such dilemma: since a well defined protocol to switch coins to/from every SC is in place I can wait to enter the SC only when, and if, the thing is useful for me, and not a moment before (and with the possibility to come back, too).

With sidechains we can hope that a new one will be highly successful without the fear that we have not bought his coins in time, because we already have them (of course supposing we are invested in bitcoin), and for all of them (all of the sidecoins that will ever be made).

So, people like Satoshi, Cypherdoc and other highly invested in Bitcoin should be very, very grateful for sidechains because that's the best opportunity we have to maintain the relevance of bitcoin (and hence his value) in the future.

Right, That is just the first of many criticisms I have of the current proposals.  
I don't like extrapolations used for predictive purposes.
They assume too much.
I'd prefer a method of rightsizing max block size through use of the data of the future which may be derived from the block chain through sums of fees or block size.
This can be done much in the same way that difficulty is generated.
The risks of doing it in this better way may be that it could create some perverse incentives for folks that wanted to "game" the metric.
I'd like to see a proposal that doesn't come with what amounts to a guarantee that it will be wrong because it relies on a guess made years ago.