Topic: Satoshi Economic Missteps? (Read 991 times)

I read most of it. The author seems to think that POS coins are better than Bitcoin because people don't need hardware and can make money in their wallets. According to him it makes the thing less centralized.
The fact that you don't need hardware to mine POS coins doesn't make it better! You still need an investment, because you need to get some coins to make more, right? Those coins have to be bought with fiat or another cryptocurrency, so you're investing money in the process of mining, and it really doesn't matter if you put $100k into a mining farm or buy coins because whoever has the most money will end up with the most coins.

Even volume can be deceptive with wash trading.  Anyone who observed the chinese exchanges over the years knows what fake wash trading looks like.  Or go look at some random alt pumping that you never heard of.  Pretty easy to fake volume.  Liquidity on the books can also be faked, but if it's clustered near the spot price I tend to think it's not a bad indicator.  Of course, that's when the scammers use the ol' exchange-disables-wallet trick, so they know exactly how much is available on the exchange and can manipulate price how they want.

While I usually don't agree to such short and negative statements without reasoning, I tend to agree here.

It seems the author mainly wanted to promote his favourite cryptocurrency (PIVX), which - oh what a coincidence! - is one of the pumps and dumps of the moment.

There are definitively some economic problems with Satoshi's design, but the solutions the author point out don't convince me. Proof of Stake as described often leads to centralization, too, as the address owners with the most balances have the most incentive to run the client 24/7 and therefore collect most of the rewards, and Proof of Stake pools like in NXT represent the same problem like Bitcoin's mining pools.

And I don't think an automatism for developers' reward is necessary or good. It would reward only a fixed group of "founding devs". Open source projects should be able to attract enough donations to do development in the right way.

But isn't the marketcap valuation algorithm the same for bitcoin? Isn't volume included in the marketcap valuation, somehow, because what you say is true about 1 coin sold for 1 dollar creating a 5 quadrillion dollar marketcap otherwise.  Volume has to be considered or it's meaningless.

You people have no knowledge who Satoshi is ? He is not God, He is not a man like any one in this forum. He knew from his works from as early as 1994 and he completed his master plan in 2007 and Bitcoin launching were setback over a year. He knows what will happen to Bitcoin by the year 2033. Please go ahead and ask Satoshi ?

The article is entitled " Satoshi's Incomplete Economic Vision ".
I like to say my opinion on this one, first is that Satoshi is a programmer and a cryptographer of course he focused more on creating Bitcoin. He did considered the economic impact when he introduced it in the world but only in a small scale. Even he won't be able to envision about what will happen in the future.

What is he a God? Even the great fictional character Sherlock Holmes can't envisioned all. He did create a Cryptocurrency, but what will happen next is unpredictable. You won't be able to predict people's opinion, ideas, and how will people adapt to this Cryptocurrency which they've only first heard way back on 2009.

People who think smarter than Satoshi, one more time.

On-chain super-nodes are totally possible NOW (2017).
Hard disks of 10 TB are already on sale (the current blockchain fits 100 times).
There are RAID and NAS systems to concatenate all the disks that are needed.
The domestic bandwidth - at least in Spain- starts to be symmetric and hundreds of mbps.

The network can work well with relatively few super-nodes, as long as they are reliable and well distributed.
Recall that the miners decide the blockchain and the nodes are simple distributors.

When we reach the VISA level there will be a lot of money and interest to implement all this.

There is a lot of time and a long way, as long as we break the arbitrary and corrupt 1MB limit.
It only requires that the developers do not have an off-chain conflict of interest.

Our current scalability dilemma is artificial and the result of corruption (developers stealing commissions from miners).
It is a fact.

most of the time, claiming to be smarter than Satoshi is a fail.

Hmm.. it's value is about as backed up as a lot of these overvalued stocks.  So not really that different.. maybe one order of magnitude of scamminess  .  You do own a share of the network in effect so it's backed by more than just the coins wash traded on the exchange.

From the article:

They always have been fast enough in the past.  This is not an indication that Satoshi made errors, it's just an indication that Bitcoin's role has changed since then, hence why Bitcoin's code is open source and there are different solutions being debated to fix the problem.  By your logic we need a new currency every time there's a change.

People see it as both.  Nothing completely useless can just grow and grow for years and become a huge market - it takes time and legitimacy.  Plenty of places online still accept Bitcoin as currency and as it grows more will continue to do so.  Once again, you make this judgement based on a current situation rather than the nature of Bitcoin, which can change.

Download an app on your phone.  Buy Bitcoin.  Scan address and hit send.  A baby could do it.  The reason you think that it's technically challenging is because you assume that everyone needs to know.  People don't understand the inner works of the banking system, but they don't need to know to spend their inflationary currency.  Just because people who are into Bitcoin right now know a lot because of their demographic, doesn't mean that everyone else will have to.

Okay, I agree with this one, but other cryptocurrencies don't propose viable solutions, and even though ETH can still be mined by GPUs its development itself is too centralised for a free currency.

I think you lost the plot. I didn't say Bitcoin was a failure. It is not a currency used by the masses yet though. The first few paragraphs are background from the main points which you never got to. Sorry you got too hung up by them. I agree that MarketCap is not a true indicator of success either.

crazy to assume that any one person or group could unleash a new form of economy and account for everything that was gonna happen.

the economic system everyone knows and loves today is the product of thousands of years and millions of people.

I don't doubt that there would have been missteps during the creation of Bitcoin, mostly since I doubt Satoshi was planning for Bitcoin to be as big as it is today, meaning the number of transactions per block that we're running at. Now I can be entirely wrong about that, and probably am, but considering we have so many transactions in just 10 minutes it's kind of nuts.

I suppose the old saying still stands then, you cant be a master of everything and maybe economics was his weak point, time will tell.  although lets be honest he was obviously still very smart.

within the first few paragraphs... the author lost the plot

"Bitcoin is the top cryptocurrency valued at $16 Billion"
 i laughed
a. there are no $16billion sitting in bank accounts backing up bitcoin
b. bitcoins individual price is not based on 16 mill coins being sold either.
c. the exchange rate is based on only a few thousands coins loaded on an exchange and re-circulated by day traders

in short the author thinking bitcoin is valued at $16B.. is an economics failure.. thats a speculative bubble valuation based on multiplying an average of a small subset of the market..

so i didnt bother reading after that.

edit: screw it i thought id read a little more.. dang the very next line.. and he lost the plot again

"Bitcoin’s percentage value relative to other cryptocurrencies is gradually falling over time"

a. i can make an altcoin right now that has 5,000,000,000,000 coins.. and i can sell just 1 coin for $1. and instantly have it valued at $5 TRILLION, due to how the author believes bitcoin is "valued".. thus i could tank the markets just spending $1 on my alt... lol

Long, not worth the read. The author shows their own ignorance.

Great economic analysis of BTC and how Satoshi's genius in cryptography and computer science, (and so many other fields) still had some economic missteps that have lead to our current scalability dilemma. 

Long read but worth it, enjoy:

https://medium.com/@Spiralus/satoshis-incomplete-economic-vision-eb833a33bcb5#.a8cx0atxk