Topic: How is Bitcoin living up to Satoshi's original vision? - page 2. (Read 651 times)

Remittance Centers in my country are a commodity. They saw the opportunity to make mad bucks ok it and are now charging more than the usual charge or fee they impose. It's true that bitcoin might've strated away from what Satoshi initially wanted it to be. But this is only happening because the technology we have right now is insufficient to support bitcoin in it's utmost capabilities. It's imperative for bitcoin to stay as an asset right now, at the very least it's alive and well. Provided we have enough technology and support, bitcoin will be more than ready to take on being a bonafide currency.

And bitcoin 99.9% of the time will work just fine. This doesn't change the fact that PayPal transaction can be reversed for months after it has been sent, and can be done by literally sending one email. It is much harder to reverse a zero confirmation bitcoin transaction, and essentially impossible to reverse after an hour or two.

This betrays your entire mindset. You see decentralization and immutability as a negative, rather than the positive it is.

I never said you were waiting 6 months, but similarly, lets not pretend that what you say about waiting days for every bitcoin transaction is true either.

As soon as a bitcoin transaction is broadcast, before it has any confirmations, I will still see it show up in my wallet, and I can still send those funds on to someone else. Can it be reversed and therefore cancel my ongoing transaction? Yes, for around 10 minutes, on average. As soon as a PayPal transaction is made, I will see it show up in my account, and I can send those funds on to someone else. Can it be reversed and leave me out of pocket? Yes, for around 6 months.

Please point out where I ever said it was your fault. All I said was that your transaction were poorly configured, and if you paid 25% of your transaction value in fees as you state, then that is simply a statement of fact. I agree that there is plenty of work to be done to make bitcoin as simple as possible for everyone to use, but using it poorly is hardly an argument against its entire existence.

1) NO It bloody well does not, let's be honest here, PayPal 99.9% of the time will work just fine, be instant and without any issues. You're talking about chargebacks and suspicious payments which YES Bitcoin does not have but there's a pros and cons to having this. Sell something with Bitcoin and get screwed over, good luck on getting those funds back.

They both have pros and cons but lets not pretend here that for all payments you're waiting 6 months, that's bloody well not true and you know it. Talking about totally misleading...

2) Oh the poorly configured argument, well if you're going to go down that route that it's 'my fault' and 'poorly configured' then I'd love to hear you argue how this is going to become globally adopted and something my Granny can use and is going to take the world by storm. It's easy to pin the blame on others to hide the GLARING flaws with Bitcoin. Get a grip man!

You're wrong actually, you've taken what I've said, took it out of context, made assumptions and put words in my mouth.

I NEVER said, at any point, that ETH was a better version of BTC or that it should be used as a form of Currency, you're comparing apples to oranges here, they're two totally different things, created for different reasons and purposes.

Do I care that a project is more centralised than Bitcoin NO do I care if it is/isn't an effective currency NO! I was comparing Bitcoin to its original vision not ETH, ETH was never set up to do what Bitcoin does.

XRP for example is said to be very centralised, do I think it's a worthless investment? NO!

To bash on me because I hold ETH is the absolute pinnacle of immaturity and shows your total lack of understanding and your very CLEAR bias for Bitcoin. Ethereum whether you like it or not is #2 and is one of the most utilised blockchains in the space, it doesn't really care whether you like it or not or accept it. It will succeed regardless, it will continue to make waves.

Does EVERY project have to be all the things I was bashing on Bitcoin for not being? HELL FUCKING NO! I based on Bitcoin because it was setup to be these things and no longer does ANY of them.

If your argument is literally just "I'LL HATE ON YOU BECAUSE YOU HOLD X TOKEN OR COIN" then you're stupid, what sensible investor does that, unless you're investing in a very CLEAR scam such as Bitconnect when that was around, then yea, but for a credible project that has weathered the storms and is still here making waves, if you're going to judge me for that then you're not someone I want to have mature discussion with anyway.
What are you using for fees like that? Yea, people can still screw themselves over by using Western Union, there are always alternatives. You totally missed the point anyway, why WOULD you pay ANY fee at all when there are Crypto's out there like NANO, STEEM etc etc that are near instant and have ZERO fees.

Stellar, Ripple all alternative assets that are easy to liquidate and cost significantly less than BTC and are significantly cheaper.

People on here are a complete joke saying I'm shilling, you can't literally point out the positive feature of any project without being called a shill, it's a form of bullying just ganging up and name calling all because someone has a different opinion than you and dares to point out the facts.

A shill would be someone telling someone else BUY NANO BUY STELLAR BUY XRP BUY STEEM, I'm not recommending anyone do any of these things, each project has its flaws and faults, Bitcoin has some benefits over each of those, I'm not shilling just simply stating a FACT.

Give me a valid rebuttal and tell me how NANO, STEEM, XRP and XLM aren't faster and cheaper than Bitcoin.

Total joke guys, at least attempt to have a mature discussion as opposed to name calling, you don't see me sat here calling you Bitcoin shills, that's just immature, I accept that my views are just an OPINION and I very well could be WRONG, to sit there and just call me a shill and deny that there may be credit/weight/merit in anything I'm saying, well that just shows who has a clear bias here.

A PayPal transaction takes 180 days to "clear". It easier to reverse a PayPal transaction than it is to reverse a zero-confirmation bitcoin transaction. It takes bitcoin 10 minutes (on average) to confirm; it takes PayPal 6 months. And if you need instant payments, such as to buy a coffee, then you use Lightning.

Credit card fees can be up to 3%. If I'm buying something expensive then that can easily turn in to hundreds of dollars. With bitcoin, I can make the same on-chain transaction with a fee of 2 cents or less.

Damn, I guess the Lightning transaction I made to Bitrefill yesterday, where my payment was confirmed on the website before my wallet even gave me the "Transaction complete" notification, was all in my imagination.

I use it to pay for stuff almost daily. It's far from useless. I'm afraid that the arguments you are making suggest that you have made one or two poorly configured transactions where you overpaid on fees, and have therefore decided that bitcoin is uniformly terrible.

Before people start claiming that Lightning Network is unusable, here is a great example how you can onboard a new user within 30 seconds (this includes downloading a wallet, installing it, creating an invoice and receiving a payment): https://twitter.com/therealjokoono/status/1218582503356805120

I work on contract in some third world countries and I can tell you from first hand experience that these remittance companies in some of these countries are definitely a lot more expensive than Bitcoin. I introduced Bitcoin to some people in these countries and subsequently put between 10% to 30% money back into their pockets by doing this.  

When last have you done any global transfers of money? Some of these transfers takes up to 3 days to be processed. Bitcoin might not be instantaneous like Credit card payments, but the affect on your balance is evident within a couple of minutes. I have done credit card payments at some retailers and the transaction only shown after 1 or 2 days in my account.

Also, have you heard of the Lightning Network? You might be surprised to see almost instantaneous transactions on the Lightning Network being done at a fraction of the fees being charged for on-chain transactions.  

I shouldn't even be bothering to reply since you're a NANO shill, but to answer your questions (while that isn't even 'Satoshi's original vision').

1. Bitcoin is by far the most decentralized and secure cryptocurrency.
2. You can send Bitcoin anywhere in the world.
3. You can send on-chain transactions with a 1 sat/b fee or you can use the Lightning Network for smaller payments.
4. Lightning payments are instant.
5. See 4. It makes no sense since Bitcoin never had 'selling points' and Satoshi never mentioned this.

Bitcoin is electronic cash. Cash doesn't meant it should simply be cheap and instant to send. Read the Cypherpunk Manifesto if you want to understand what is truely meant by 'electronic cash'. I doubt you'll read it since you've obviously here to shill shitcoins.

Well to be fair, it's the most secure and stable (in a sense where it would be the absolute last to lose people's trust) crypto out there. Sure you can keep money in LTC or BCH, but I'm not as certain they would still be around tomorrow as I am with BTC -- something which is often overlooked when talking about currencies. You do have valid concerns with the transactions, but like majority of the community I don't think it will be this way forever; if it stays like this, then you're absolutely correct that it's going to have very limited use cases, and that perhaps it shouldn't be valued as it should. Only time will really tell, but for now you can't deny that its massive ecosystem sets it apart from other crypto.

As for Satoshi's vision, it's still a peer-to-peer electronic cash system, so there's that. Beyond that, he has left development in the hands of the community, so I'm sure he would be at peace however it turns out. If he absolutely wanted things to have gone a specific way, he would have left a strict road map.

I wonder for where did you extracted the so called satoshi's original vision.

https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf

Here's the original paper from satoshi himself and most of the statements made in the post are nowhere to be found in this original vision.
I haven't read everything satoshi has stated but I'm really suspicious when I see the phrase satoshi vision as satoshi have said less and his thoughts are interpreted and manipulated largely.

More junk reasoning and appeal to authority logical fallacies, Satoshi doesn't matter, this isn't about Satoshi this is about Bitcoin and making a great cryptocurrency. Satoshi is gone, he left and guess what he was just a small part of this big giant project that tons of people contribute to. He had the whitepaper great but it doesn't matter, he left it in capable hands and walked away, there is no reason to follow some stranger on the internets INTERPRETED vision (Not proven but interpreted by each poster) and saying this is the way. Satoshi is man like all of us, he has faults, he isn't always right, he changes his mind and realizes things were mistakes to pretend he was some above all mastermind if foolish quit it.

you are just redefining "satoshi's vision" with your own interpretation to match your topic otherwise what you are saying here was not it. i wanted to discuss more about your subject but you ruined it by the following:

ETH is literary the shittiest altcoin that has ever been created and if anything it is in complete contradiction of all you explained here as "satoshi's vision"
- it is centralized
- it is not immutable
- it has high fees
- it is slow
- it is not safe
- it is inflationary
- it is not even a currency
you can't even run an ethereum node since the blockchain size is around 4 TB. all people are doing is running light clients or using web wallets insecurely. saying you hold a lot of ETH only proves that you don't care about any of the things you posted here regarding bitcoin.

I agree with this statement. Bitcoin has a lot of things to do and to catch up for it to become even at par with the modern ways of sending money anywhere. However, it does not mean that Bitcoin generally is getting to be worthless. While we have to accept that as of now it has had deviated from the most original vision of its founder, we have to understand the way things are and the challenges that it has gone through. Certainly, the journey of Bitcoin has not ended here and I would say that from the world perspective it has just even started. Bitcoin has become popular maybe for just one side of it and that is for speculative purposes and I see nothing really wrong with that because this is an asset albeit in digital form and therefore can be traded just like any other commodities. The main challenge right now is on the currency side and though things are slow I am still in a big faith that ultimately Bitcoin will be a big winner on this aspect, though I don't expect for it to become the prime or the foremost global currency as being the best alternative can be enough.

NANO is not centralised, don't talk utter nonsense please. That's like saying Bitcoin was centralised when it first started out because there wasn't a diverse range of miners yet. There are multiple nodes which users can use and have voting power, just like ANY cryptocurrency, the more people that use it the more decentralised it becomes, every project is faced with this.

People in crypto really need to grow up in general, you praise or say anything slightly positive about a coin you're called a SHILLER say anything slightly negative and you're called a hater or accused of shilling for a competitor.

How can I be shilling when I said that I can't see NANO succeeding in the long run, the better technology doesn't always win, currently BCH/LTC are beating it and seeing more daily use regardless of NANO being cheaper (as it's free) and much faster (as it's near instant) yet it still can't beat these two.

I also pointed out NANO has it's flaws, such as the lack of privacy as well as a wide ranger of other issues. I'm not shilling, I'm just stating a fact, the original concept of Bitcoin that was set out in it's whitepaper, Bitcoin is doing it better, had NANO and Bitcoin been released at the same time, which do you think would be the market winner?

Am I suggesting others invest in it? Am I saying it will flip many of the other coins? Hell no! But I will give it praise where it deserves. Anything can happen in this space but if NANO has not succeeded after a couple of years of trying, it's not going to now as there's not much in terms of innovation and development, like I said it has it's issues.

Let's stop with the petty insults calling people a shill just because they have something positive to say, you're putting words into my mouth. I'm not encouraging anyone here to pickup NANO, they can do what they want, I'm making simple observations and drawn on one of many good and inspiring projects!

Also, I loved the way you used the fact the longest you've had to wait for a payment to clear is an hour, as some sort of redeeming factor! Let's see how people would feel if they had to wait 1 hour for a PayPal transaction to clear or 1 hour for their payment for coffee at Starbucks to clear etc etc.

As for the fees on cards being passed on to merchants, what's your point? We accept these across the bored, as a business owner myself I accept them, they're practically insignificant for the most part. Not to mention with crypto it's just the reverse, now the sender is paying a fee to the miners so the merchant / receiver may not get the fee but flipping roles doesn't make it any better!

Not to mention the fees (if you want a fast payment) can be extortionate and much more expensive than any CC processor.


What's your point? OK, let's re-envision what Bitcoin is, it's now a store of value, great, but what's the value in, it's based in pure speculation, when it hits a ceiling and fails to make the % gains people want then what? What direction is it destined to go in?

Your right, it is a people powered project, that's the point of decentralisation. That doesn't mean people always make the right decisions, in fact, you only have to look through history and see where democracy has often got it wrong or disastrous events occur, Hitler wasn't a dictator you know, he got to where he was through a democratic process.

It's obvious from all the changes made to Bitcoin over the years that profit and ensuring it's success as a store of value is prioritised over everything else, which is fine, the people decide that and it's clear people will put their personal profits and gains before anything else.

The issue is, that can't last forever, the analogy I gave previously about the stock market still stands and I've not heard one single valid rebuttal. You can have something infinitely increase in value, companies that stop providing innovation, that stop bringing new things to the table, that stop offering a service, they crash and burn. Bitcoin can't just be a 'hold it forever and it will keep increasing in value infinitely' asset, there will be a ceiling and without adaption and change it will eventually crash and burn.

We will see who ends up being right, history will tell.

Do I ever think Bitcoin will go to 0? No, very unlikely, do I ever think it will still be as valuable as it is now? Not a chance.


This is my point though, even IF people wanted to actually USE it as a form of PAYMENT it's incredibly ENEFICENT, if people were actually trying to use it to pay for stuff they'd wake up and realise that they're holding onto something that's basically useless, the only use it has is it's VALUE which is incredibly volatile, you may be able to make a good % profit from it but that's about it and how long does that really last. Nothing is infinitely scaleable when it comes to price, no stock or commodity is infinately scaling, when it levels out or when gains become the same or less than what you get from average stocks and it stays like that for a number of years, watch the price decrease and then once that starts it will plummet.

There's just no actual USE for it, when you try and USE Bitcoin you realise it's incredibly ineffective. I don't want to wait silly amount of times for a purchase to go through, look at digital purchases now in the market section, got and purchase an instant delivery, digital product and pay with Bitcoin. You will be waiting forever and a day unless you pay extremely high fees to have near instant confirmation, why would anyone use that when you can pay with PayPal or an alt and have it basically instantly.

Maybe Bitcoin can hold it's value just being a digital version of gold, possibly, but I just feel when it gets to the levels of regular stocks / commodities or drops below them levels, people will start to leave in favour of safer and more tangible assets.

I admit, I could be wrong about everything, who knows, time and history will tell guys. Like others have said, Bitcoin is powered by the people so maybe the community that maintain it wont let it come to that and maybe in the future changes will come into play that make it like it originally was in the early days and maybe that will revive it.

If I was a gambling man though, I'd put Bitcoin on the same road as MySpace was on, far too confident that nothing could come along and defeat it and while MySpace still exists it's nothing compared to it's former glory days, I feel Bitcoin faces the same fate.

At the moment and on a scale of 10 i would rate it as 4/10 because bitcoin is being used by most people as a store of value other than spending it in their daily transactions. Also, there are some factors that are also hindering the fulfillment of Satoshi's vision. Some Governments have made strict rules concerning the use of bitcoin and this is really making global usage of bitcoin very delayed. Let's not give up hope yet!

Bitcoin is still going through lots of phases of doubt. With only a decade of experience, any circumstance brings in a mixture of FUD and FOMO. Halving, war, pandemic, recession, elections, gold price soaring etc. Be it whatever event you wish, people still do not know what to do about Bitcoin during certain events. That shows how young this market is. Look a minute through the Bitcoin Discussion and Speculation boards and see for yourself how many are in doubt. Questions like "What happens after the third halving?", "Does BTC price follow gold's?", "Would Bitcoin rise during a pandemic?" etc are exactly what I mean. Doubt.

I think the focus is spreading out too many ways at the moment in the market. We're switching focus from Bitcoin to scams like X10, then when Bitcoin soars we're switching back to where we were before. Too many markets, too many coins, too many scams. We need a cleanup and a start-over. There's absolutely 0 utility in having a total of 3k coins & tokens with different features if they're all on different exchanges, some with close to 0 volume. These need to go away, too many have learned that cryptocurrency means joining bounties and supporting shitcoins to get rich.

BTC might be open-source and all, but that does not equal continuous revolutionary updates. I think just the fact that you can cross borders with a billion dollar in your pocket sitting inside the code written with your own hands on a piece of paper is mindblowing and revolutionary enough. Then we have the entire Blockchain structure and all. It was revolutionary enough to bring big names in the game. But it's still too early to know if BTC actually has the future Satoshi envisioned or not. We need to go through a few phases, like @gentlemand said.

I do get your point OP, and the more the price soars, the higher the fees will probably be, right? If we had a $100k price per BTC like many speculate, that turns the fees you've mentioned in the OP into +$2. That's 200% fees for a $1 transaction and remember, the higher the price is, the less a dollar is worth in BTC. So we're looking at a price of 1000sats for $1. Think about $1M/BTC and that turns your fee into a whopping $20. This is where my suggestion comes in, one that I have mentioned in a post from a few days ago: adding more digits to BTC (like ETH) so the fees would be pushed back by a few digits. I might say nonsense right now but wouldn't this be possible through a BTC update or second layer? Nobody's answered me on the other thread so I'm reviving the same idea now.

You know I am from India. Our constitution makers way back in 1950 made our constitution to make India Republic they dreamt of a visionary India with low corruption and no caste system due to reservations but here India is standing in front of you after 70 years facing much bigger issues of caste system and in altogether different way that our makers thought but does this mean we aren't justified?

What I want to Convey is that it hardly matters that how the creator visioned things the vision needs to be updated with time due to circumstances not prevalant at the time. No one thought that btc could become so valuable one day even if it gains so much popularity. I think it's really interesting to see that how will Crypto evolve over the upcoming years. So you could really forget about what satoshi thought of bitcoin. Satoshi might be the creator but after all he is not the owner.

Your two main arguments seem to be that fees are high, and people are only here because of speculation.

First of all, if you paid 25% fee, then you overpaid A 1-input-2-output transaction can be made for 140 sats, which would work out at less than 1p in GBP. I make 1 sat/byte transactions pretty much daily. The longest I've waited over the last 2 weeks is an hour. Most of the time I'm waiting only a couple of blocks. Bitcoin is faster and cheaper than fiat methods. You've mentioned contactless cards - these have a huge fee associated with them, its just that the merchant eats the fee rather than the consumer, so you never see it.

I can't disagree with the point that there are plenty of people in the space who are only here to try to make some easy money. They frequently only use bitcoin as a stepping stone to buy alts, though, and often leave the space after losing out on alts as they frequently do. The people who are here long-term are still passionate about the future of bitcoin, and bitcoin's development is still going strong, with plenty of new features in development and on the horizon: https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/a-look-at-innovation-in-bitcoins-technology-stack-complete-with-references-5207455.

You also seem to be big on shilling NANO. NANO isn't anything at all like Satoshi's original vision given that it is centralized.

People have the whole progression of this badly mixed up in my opinion.

You have to become a store of value first. Then you become a currency. You don't put your day to day financial needs into something as weedy and volatile as Bitcoin currently is. And layer two stuff may well solve the cash aspect. We'll have to see .

And once it becomes 'boring' and those returns stop exploding there's one other rather handy feature - deflation vs fiat currencies. That is eternal and what most of the world is looking for. Most people do not speculate. They want to preserve and grow their wealth, not bet it.

This is still the wildest and earliest phase. There's a lot more ground to cover. 'Cash' is the final progression, not the first.

That's actually a very VALID argument, what you have said is mostly correct.

Yes, the community are the ones that decide what happens now but it doesn't mean that is a positive thing....

Bitcoin is just a store of value now, once it's hit a ceiling and investors don't get the returns they were hoping for, what then?

Once it's ceased to be a store of value and valid investment, what happens then? What does Bitcoin then become? Because it's broken as a form of peer to peer digital cash.

The stock markets work a very simple way, stocks rise and give dividends because a company continues to innovate and be profitable, those that don't die a hard death, what innovation is Bitcoin offering? What's it bringing to the table that is new or market leading now?

Like I said, it may not be in my lifetime but Bitcoin will undoubtedly die if it does not drastically adapt, right now it wont adapt in the way it needs to because the financial incentive is to keep Bitcoin expensive and as a digital asset and store of value. That can't and wont last forever.