Topic: Wall Observer BTC/USD - Bitcoin price movement tracking & discussion - page 20817. (Read 26608261 times)

Any substantive discussion on scaling will have to wait until the Hong Kong portion of the show. https://twitter.com/jgarzik/status/642397611178217472

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Bahahahaha!

That is not "cost".  Even if bitcoins lose all their value, no resources or concrete assets will be destroyed.  The world will not become any poorer. Only, a few hundred thousand people who expected to get hold one day of mansions and Lamborghinis  will see those hopes vaporize, and those assets go to other people instead.

I don't think however that the introduction of extra inflation into bitcoin -- say, 1% per year, beyond the block rewards -- would necessarily induce all holders to dump, and the price to crash.  

In late 2013, when I first learned about bitcon, the Gospel of Antonopoulos was that bitcoins would become extremely valuable because they would replace credit cards and other traditional digital payments, and then demand for that use would drive the price up, according to the money velocity equation.  Moreover, that would happen very soon, because the price had been growing 1000% per year, and no one could look at that straight line on the log plot and doubt that it would continue.

Well, 1% of inflation per year would not destroy that argument; at most, it would delay the growth a little.  After all,  that growth of 1000% per year happened while the miners were creating an inflation of more than 10% per year.

But the Gospel has changed several times since then.  Mircea, for example, wants us to believe that the "Moon" will come just because the supply is fixed.  Even if it were true -- again, 1% of inflation per year, even extended for 20 years, could not possibly prevent the price from rising 1000% in that interval.

Blockstream, on the other hand, wants us to believe that bitcoin will go to the Moon because not only the supply will be capped by 21 million, but the transactions will be capped to 150'000--180'000 per day, and somehw that will induce some companies to pay more for bitcoins. Whatever.  Again, 1% inflation per year cannot possibly spoil such a powerful "whatever".

But, on the other hand,  I agree with one thing: it is very unlikely that those "20 businessmen" who will decide the future of bitcoin will ever agree to putting any sort of inflation or demurrage in it.  That was not a prediction that I was making.  My point was only that the 21 million cap is not "guaranteed by math", but only by people.

I still believe that bitcon's price will go to zero in a few years; but almost certainly not by that route...

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It's time to buy.
we go up from here on out.

Hoist the Colours!!!!

https://youtu.be/fINeo6sWqGI?t=57s

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Here comes 10,000,000 views! Congrats adamstgBit!

"Zero cost"... Aside from the cost of nearly every major hodler of bitcoin dumping them instantaneously if the 21 mil cap is put in serious jeopardy. "Killing the golden egg laying goose." "Mutually Assured Destruction." The miners are perhaps the most incentivized to stick to this rule in the entire ecosystem, after all, they can't dump coins today that they will be mining tomorrow.

The rest of your points seem pretty salient and generate no argument from me.

Liked that!


Actually inflation *can* be introduced into bitcoin in a number of ways, at nearly zero cost.  The supply cap or 21 million BTC is not "guaranteed by math"; it is decided by humans who choose which software to run.  Paraphrasing the old proverb, "no protocol change is prohibited if the right 20 business men decide to implement it".  

Then there are also altcoins, both original and forks of bitcoin.  Litecoin already has faster confirmation times and better antispam protection than bitcoin (thanks to a measure that Charlie Lee implemented in Litecoin, but the Core devs rejected for Bitcoin).   Viacoin aims to be a replacement of bitcoin; it is noteworthy, among dozens of other altcoins, because at least two Core developers (Peter Todd and BTC Drak) work for it.  

So it is not unconceivable that some other coin will conquer Bitcoin's user base -- and value.

Even if the supply cap of Bitcoin *were* guaranteed to never change, that would not guarantee fabulous prices: scarcity does not imply value.   There is a finite number of tickets for last month's Penssilvania State Lottery, that can decrease but never increase.  With modern micro-analytic techniques, forgery of such tickets would be impossible in practice.  Yet those tickets are now worth the price of dirty paper scraps.  


It is not inelastic at all.   The number of regular bitcoin users is probably less than 100'000.  It is possible that the network will not be able to serve 1000 times as many users in 10 years time.  However, it can certainly serve 10 times as many, even today.

There is a dozen people who think that they own the system, and want to impose an artifical 1 MB lmit on the block size.  Such a limit would prevent the traffic from growing to more than 0.750 MB/block, a level expected to be reached in 2016.  But there is no justification at all for why the block size limit should be 1 MB, rather than 0.100 MB or 10 MB.  Even those guys are now admitting, grudgingly, that the size limit should be raised "now" to 2 MB/block.  The major businesses support BIP101 (with 8 MB blocks now), while the miners support BIP100 (that gives them dynamic control of the block size).  

So, there goes the "inelastic limit in its maximum transaction volume".

That group has claimed that letting the traffic grow beyond the current 0.750 MB/block limit would have a number of harmful effects, such as fewer full nodes, increased miner concentration, increased orphan rates, etc.  But those claims are just FUD.

Miners are too concentrated today and will tend to be more concentrated. The reasons are economies of scale and of location, that are independent of traffic levels or block sizes.

The block size has more than doubled over the past 15 months, and yet the average orphan rate has remained totally flat, at ~1.5 orphaned blocks per day.

The number of full nodes will continue to decrease, no matter what.  Not just because of the increased traffic, but mainly because shutting down a node saves saves money for the node operator, while starting a new one costs increasingly more in bandwidth and time -- even if traffic were to remain constant. (The blockcchain now grows at 100 MB every day, and will soon grow at 150 MB/day even if the 1 MB limit is not raised.)

(And then there are those small-blockians kiling hundred of full nodes because they dared to express support for XT... )

Maybe HDBuck should be removed from his picture posting privileges?     

Interesting report.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2015-09-07/isle-of-man-tax-haven-with-tailless-cats-becomes-bitcoin-hub

Please don't tell me you are questioning the edicts of our favorite Romanian gypsy?

Saying that those who would prefer to see an increase in max_block_size are just consumers clamoring for VISA levels of throughput is a weak strawman argument. Obviously, jumping from 2.7 tps to 50,000 tps is completely out of the question, but if you can paint your opponent as being in favor of something ridiculous, you win... (or look like a disingenuous douche).

Adam Back's proposed doubling every two years... 2MB in 2016, 4 in 2018, 8 in 2020 seems reasonable. A somewhat more forceful can kick of Jeff's BIP102.

One thing is becoming abundantly clear: Those who want the 1MB blocks to be as sacrosanct as the 21mil emission limit... the MP toadies who brought you the lovely and productive captions generously posted here by hdbuck... are about to get unceremoniously REKT.

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I wonder what else I missed during my 1 week away.  Still I will refrain from going back and reading.

Did he actually just predict altcoins?

CH, either you go and fix yourself or STFU !!!

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