Topic: transition to bitcoin successor (Read 2049 times)

How could a transition from btc to decrits work? Would it involve the money in btc to be lost?

Although only a proposal at this point, Decrits addresses many of your concerns.

Bitcoin can facilitate near-perfect anonymity and sooner or later someone will write an anonymity-centric client which makes it easier for the average user to protect their financial privacy. No need for a whole new currency.

Otherwise I guess ppl will just sell their btc and btc will become worthless.

If you come up with some other idea how the conversion could technically work ( like destroying the BTC by sending them to a random address in order to receive a new kind of coins ) I think that would be even more drastic because if people are willing to destroy their BTC in order to jump to some other currency, it means that BTC has already lost its value.

If the conversion happens by selling it means that BTC still has value and everything is fine in BTCland. Just that one user has switched priorities.

If on the other hand everybody agrees that BTCv1 must go and BTCv2 is the future, then BTCv1 must become worthless so that it does not threaten BTCv2. How to guarantee BTCv1 becoming worthless is however another highly nontrivial problem. I think.

> utter nonsense

> utter nonsense

When I fired up bitcoin-qt first it took about 24h to d/l and process the block chain. I read that it's very disk intensive, so I temporarily put .bitcoin in a ram disk. Was still slow. Then I configured it to start automatically at boot. It hogged my system so much that I removed it from the autostart applications. Now I start it, when I need it and then it takes very long to catch up. If btc was as widespread as paypal, I'm pretty sure it would not catch up at all. But IMHO there are plans to address this issue, when it's getting necessary.

> utter nonsense

I haven't dealt with btc anonymity so far, but I read due the public transaction history mixing is required for anonymity. This seems to work, or ppl would not be able to buy illegal drugs on silk road, but it is still awkward, and requires a trusted mixer, or a chain of mixers.

As explained in the Bitcoin Myths FAQ, in terms of energy usage, Bitcoin is actually more efficient than any other currency or commodity.
> So: utter nonsense.

That others are worse doesn't mean btc doesn't waste energy. From https://blockchain.info/stats I figured the hashing network uses 13 MW continuously. I would have guesstimated it to be more efficient, like 2 MW, but that's really a wild guess. I believe making an anonymous digital currency is tricky, but I'm not convinced there is no more efficient way. For instance, the block reward could be much lower, then ppl wouldn't throw so much electric/computing power at it. Maybe we need a supply of btc to keep the market fluent. There could be other ways to generate them.

> Sorry sir but you seem to miss the point

But that's entirely not the point. Even if I'm wrong with some of my points, I still believe btc will be superseded by something and the topic here is if that necessarily requires all the bitcoins to lose their value and if people will suffer financial loss from this.

btc have some flaws (block chain processing is too difficult,

scales badly;

anonymity not so great;

too much energy wasted for block confirmation

While I agree that there will one day be a successor to bitcoin, I think that day is a LONG way off. The adaptable nature of bitcoin, the fact that it was the first of its kind, and the lack of any real competitors in the market mean that you do not need to worry about the transition process anytime soon.

Some cryptocurrency could provide better anonymity solution, so that the USER does not have to think about it at all. If it is left up to users to figure out and add steps to their normal lives in order to achieve sufficient level of anonymity, then that means that the solutions offered so far are not that good. All the need to create more addresses and pass coins around to hide your ass are indications that the anonymity is not 100% great.

btc have some flaws (block chain processing is too difficult, scales badly; anonymity not so great; too much energy wasted for block confirmation), so I'm wondering how the transition from btc to it's successor will be.

If it's btc related maybe there could be a conversion of btc to the new currency. Otherwise I guess ppl will just sell their btc and btc will become worthless.