Topic: Stop adding features to Bitcoin that don't facilitate its use as electronic cash - page 2. (Read 736 times)

Two things: 

First, many of the fiat methods of payment currently used in the world daily are not guaranteed as settled anywhere near as quickly as people tend to assume.  Three-to-five working days for a payment to clear is a common timeframe in banking.  BTC is already faster than that.  And card payments can still be reversed via "chargeback" after they're supposedly settled.  Good luck doing that in Bitcoin.

Second, in terms of the base layer, it's not as easy as you make it sound.  There's a cause and effect thing at play.  Compromise and consequence.  If there were any low-hanging fruit here, someone would have picked it by now.  You don't just get something for nothing.  "Faster" has a cost.  But few seem to understand what that cost is or why they're inadvertently asking someone else to pay that cost without even realising.

In order for Bitcoin to be an electronic cash system it needs to be fast and the fees need to be low enough that it won't be cost prohibitive for smaller transactions.

We need to remove the incentives to pay higher fees. By adding fungible and non-fungible tokens to the network people are willing to pay more in fees then makes sense for a normal purchase where credit card fees are around 2.5%. The fees would regulate themselves properly if Bitcoin was used as a cash system.

We also will need to solve the speed problem as well.  A person needs to be able to commit the funds quickly so that merchants and people receiving funds can be guaranteed that the funds are committed and they can provide the product or service in a timely manner.

If we solve these two problems Bitcoin becomes a real option for decentralized, peer-to-peer transactions.

I understand you mate, and so are many other members on this forum, many people don't like the existence of Ordinals and runes, but there is nothing we can do to stop this, and if we look at this from a different angle, you will see that this stupid idea is benefiting some people.

How? I know people who are so into Bitcoin because of the ordinals, they are NFT fans back in the days, and they choose to stay away from Bitcoin because they thought it's too high in value, they want with NFT from other ALTs, fast forward to today, they are into ordinals and now they have some BTC too.

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Also since the existence of ordinals is giving BTC miners more gains, this just makes Bitcoin mining even better, even when the halving is complete and the reward slashed into two, with the existence of ordinals BTC mining can be more profitable than it used to be when ordinals were never here.

1. Make sure you become US president.
2. Make an announcement that you will replace USD with Bitcoin.
3. Tell Gary Gensler to shutdown every centralized exchanges and services, force people to use Bitcoin in layer 2 and sidechain, decentralized exchange and non custodial wallet.

I'm sure Bitcoin will be fully decentralized and trustless cash system, the question is when you will kick Biden.

Just out of curiosity, in what way can you imagine Bitcoin being improved?

What is wrong with the way Bitcoin is now that you'd want to be different?

Innovation is great if the innovation advances the purpose of Bitcoin which is to be “electronic cash”.  Fungible and non-fungible tokens are not new innovation. We all know that they are available on other centralized networks.

There is a lot of work to be done supporting Bitcoin as a decentralized, trustless cash system. lets get on with the work of freeing ourselves from financial servitude.

Well it can't be helped people are becoming more advanced and doing innovative things and bitcoin is not an exception, at first yes the purpose of bitcoin is for digital currency but later on people see bitcoin as more than that, they implemented bitcoin in so many different ways and use its technology which is blockchain, right now we can see how we can earn or mine bitcoin or any other crypto currency in different ways, for example in NFT or crypto games, we have so many crypto currency that can be mined using a game or either a project and bitcoin is also can be used in that, we can't avoid people innovating more ways to use bitcoij we just need to accept it, because if not then bitcoin should not be able to reach its current state, and I think its more practical that bitcoin has been created in order for more advancement innovations.

bitcoin used to be secure.. where by anyone could propose something, but it only activates if majority update their node to be ready to fully validate the new ruleset/feature.. this is called good security.. and  was the entire point of full nodes and a decentralised network

however now hardly anyone can openly/freely make a BIP due to CORES control of the BIP list and their moderation policy of the tiered system of even discussing proposals before they can even be listed in cores BIP list
and then we have core that slip in nw features without needing community agreement because.. as you say and admit.. it does not require users to upgrade to agree to the new feature

You should know that Bitcoin is an open source project which means it's open to everyone and of course development is a must and if the community agree to something for the better of the protocol, it will be reviewed as "Bitcoin improvement proposal" and and agreed date which modification will be added through soft work which means that even though you don't update your client to the latest protocol, you can still use the network efficiently.

You should also know that the phrase electronic cash is not what Bitcoin is today, it has expanded above that level, lightening network has been developed as a base layer through the native chain and everything is working perfectly, the existence of the other chain doesn't affect the main chain. There have been some NFTs on the Bitcoin which doesn't in any way affect the Bitcoin protocol but it's even favoring the miners who collect he fees to provide maximum security for the Bitcoin chain, everything you see accepted into Bitcoin doesn't in any way affect the originality of Bitcoin.

blackhat dont play dumb fool like doomad does.. he keeps learning things then unlearning things months later just to look a twit, just to cause controversy and play dumb to pretend he enver gets debunked, just to poke the bear.. stop copying him
you know full well that the tx data is rated at a different data cost to the witness data

you know about the cludgy code of the miscounting of bytes called vbytes.. so why play dumb? are you trying to win an award for being a twit?
its like you and doomad pretend to want to win a prize from the alzheimer society every few months, why?

even you know that its not 'just a little', your tribal drum beat has been to stop bitcoin scaling due to hard drive costs to store the blockchain.. yet scaling bitcoin in 5 years and storing a couple decades of data at scale only costs $50, yet strangely you think paying a $50 fee FOR ONE TRANSACTION due to the congestion caused by junk is 'just a little'
you have no logic in your explanations, you just recite your masters crap without a thought... i was hoping 2024 would be a new year for you, a fresh start.  but instead you just shadow an idiot yet again.. why do that to yourself

secondly even you know the rules of bitcoin WERE stronger whereby every byte counted and had meaning and reason and purpose to secure and validate the movement of bitcoin.. then it was softened(to allow a feature gateway for other networks that came with exploits) and miscounted and assumed valid without checking bytes, which then allowed junk via the exploit of not counting every byte properly and validating every byte for purpose.. sorry but if metadata has got nothing to do with moving bitcoin it should not be on the bitcoin network.. and definitely should not be treated as a different fee rate to the movement of btc..
if you dont want people moving bitcoin to pay for coffee/pizza via making the movement of btc more expensive, why be so happy to have a unrelated, junk monkey pic that costs a different data rate fee.. you make no logical sense.. apart from desires to annoy bitcoiners to advertise other networks as the thing they should use due to the junk you pretend to hate but dont want to have cleaned up because secret you adore its presense

"What's the point of freedom if you don't have the freedom to make mistakes?". I agree that Ordinals is trash, and we should warn everyone about it, but we shall not ever dictate to them what they are allowed to do for their own good. And let's be honest here, we don't care at all about them. We only care about ourselves paying a little more than usually in transaction fees.

What discount are you talking about? We are all allowed to select any fee rate we want. Ordinal users have priority, because they pay outrageous amounts of money. Pay more than them to have greater priority. Isn't that fair?

Well Ordinals are not features in the bitcoin network and but it is a subsidiary that is using the network. And I don't think there is any other features that has been added to the bitcoin network except that the main purpose of creating bitcoin has been forgotten by the users because of it investment benefits. The peer to peer of bitcoin is mainly for the buying of things and services online. And really foe the ordinals using the bitcoin network and making the transaction fee high is making things difficult and hard for people to freely use bitcoin and that now as we are talking that has paved the way for other altcoins to be more popular.

As it is Ethereum and Solana networks are very much congested that one can't even buy coin from them again. Bitcoin ordinals should be eliminated from the network permanently if not what will happen in the future will be more than this.

I was just pointing out that the public ledger is a constant security risk. People who are serious about privacy use Monera or some equivalent.

There's a security risk with storing your own keys as well, and I suspect most people see that as a bigger risk than using a company they trust. As I keep saying here, most people would be terrified to physically hold their life savings in their hands, where they can lose it or it can be stolen. (I'm not talking about some smaller amount of money you could lose and it not ruin your life, I'm talking about one's major holdings for the future).

Ask any serious security expert and they will tell you that security is not just some code, there's a lot to it, and many factors besides technology go in to making a more security system (and just a warning, if you use terms like "perfectly secure" around a security expert you might get something thrown at you ).

And I always have to laugh when I hear people say, "it uses blockchain so it can't be hacked".

It does when people use it correctly and don't hand control of their funds over to third parties.  But since lots of people leave their BTC in the custody of exchanges and webwallets, they can (and often do) have their funds frozen or stolen. 

Much in the same way that speculation is one of the driving forces behind Bitcoin not being used as a currency, peoples' preferred method of speculation, where they gamble on exchanges, introduces weaknesses and vulnerabilities to an otherwise robust system. 

The idea was to eliminate middlemen to increase security, but speculators seem to have it backwards and deliberately introduce middlemen to eliminate security.   

Yes, Bitcoin was meant to (but really doesn't) do that too, and blockchain can accomplish this, but again, there are easier ways of accomplishing this besides blockchain. Today, consumers trust VPN companies like NordVPN to keep their actions completely private from everybody but governments with valid subpoenas. They make it their whole business to do this, and the minute they fail at this, they lose all of their business and consumers switch to another provider.

And centralized model could do what the VPN providers do and not use blockchain. Yes, they could fail at this, but so could any public blockchain project, as Bitcoin has for example. There are no absolutes in this regard--no matter what, you need to be diligent. No computer architecture can guarantee you safety--it takes a lot more than just technology.

Blockchain's sole unique advantage is the architecture's ability to create a "government-proof" means of transferring value. If you don't need that, then blockchain is an enormous waste of time and resources.

there were less ways to spoil it 2009-2016.. the issue is what one team decided to do to loosen the rules to make it easier for them to throw in exploits whilst making it more annoying and more of a headache for everyone else. and they were warned and had years to think about closing their exploit, and done nothing..
their "feature" they added 2017 didnt actually help the majority of actual bitcoiners, it just helped create the gateway for other networks, all the promises they made in 2015-16-17 of advantages onchain it would give did not manifest..
and here we are years later still discussing the exploit they added but the lack of care of securing the network again.. but we then have the cultish religion admiring the cludge as it helps promote the need of their other network

Not just government, but commercial entities as well.  Companies like card providers and commercial banks hold tremendous power in the fiat world.  The idea is that no one is in a position to block or reverse a transaction, no one can freeze or confiscate funds.  That's what we generally refer to as 'censorship resistant'.

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I don't know where people keep getting this idea from.  That doesnt seem to be an accurate reflection on what the majority of devs have commented on the matter.

One hot-headed developer claimed there was a solution and had the gall to go to the media with his bright ideas before running it by anyone else.  Then all the other devs turned around and said it wasn't a viable solution at all.  But people just hear what they want to hear, so it doesn't surprise me that this myth continues.

I don’t really see any point with ordinals. It’s completely unnecessary and does not contribute to the development and betterment of bitcoin as a cryptocurrency. It might be attracting investors but like you said, bitcoin should be exactly what it was intended for.

However, we can not prevent bitcoin from becoming more as more people try and make bitcoin “better”. I guess we just have to accept that this is all part of innovation and will always be present as technology advances.

I think it's a bit off topic to discuss the advantages and disadvantages of OCEAN pool here especially given that someone has created a threat about that pool, which so far serves as the de-facto discussion for it here.

If it's worth talking about advantages and disadvantages of anything here, it's probably runes, ordinals, brc. Those adding these tokens and "inscriptions" on the blockchain are willing to pay a ridiculous fee on the belief that the bitcoin blockchain does a better job at immortalizing their digital items.

However, those adding data to the bitcoin blockchain do so at the detriment of everyone else. They utilize the feature of discounts for their own purposes, thereby getting a deep discount in their non-canonical transactions, while making it harder and more expensive for everyone else to complete transactions of actual monetary value on-chain due to them hogging space and raising fees.

There are many ways to implement electronic cash, and blockchain was merely one possible way of doing it. What you are saying here is like saying an A380 airplane was design for "flight". While technically true, it misses the entire point of that enormous undertaking.

Bitcoin's central purpose was the evasion of government oversight into transactions.

If you didn't care about that purpose, then blockchain would be an enormous waste of time and resources.

Like most designs, Bitcoin's design is a trade-off:

1. Bitcoin's central goal (see above) requires decentralization.

2. Decentralization requires an extremely complex and costly architecture to be viable, e.g. blockchain.

3. Blockchain precludes a currency from getting anywhere near being a mainstream currency that could be used for daily transactions.

Today, the problem Bitcoin has in the popular marketplace can be summed up by the following misalignment:

1. Millions of people now love Bitcoin because it's been a profitable investment for them.

2. Thousands of people love Bitcoin for it's original purpose of being a means of conducting numerically-delineated transactions out of the reach of government oversight.

In other words, probably 98% of Bitcoin "users" today are simply investors in a placeholder, and they gain no value whatsoever in Bitcoin's original goal thwarting government oversight into transactions. (And Bitcoin itself has been surpassed by other technologies e.g. Monera et. al. for answering Bitcoin's original goal).

As an investment in a brand name as an end in itself, the blockchain architecture works just fine since you need relatively few direct transactions to make a marketplace work. In other words, brokers gather transactions and deal in bulk. Blockchain was never meant to do any of this, but it works just fine for this purpose because transactions can be very few and very large.

If the people maintaining the core want to follow the actual marketplace, they would solve the problems of the 98% and not the 2%. In other words, make Bitcoin work better with brokers like Binance and CoinBase, and/or make it work better with the ETF, or something like that.