Topic: Wall Observer BTC/USD - Bitcoin price movement tracking & discussion - page 25611. (Read 26708883 times)

These sort of people would never dare post in such an area, because the opposition to their tired unsophisticated "critiques" would get completely decimated and ignored by people with any kind of subject matter expertise.

well done snipping my reply out of context as I immediately followed with a statement of you using the "if it doesn't change in 20 years" excuse.
So your argument boils down to "There are potential scalability and security issues if bitcoin is not maintained for 20 years"

IPv4 will/is running out of address space. So should I say it is a failed protocol? Should I call it useless? That issue was known for a long time.
Or even more to the point. Do the address space limitations of IPv4 directly prevent you from writing witty comments in this forum? (assuming you or your provider still run on it)
The same goes for the bitcoin protocol. Absolutely essential changes will come when needed, more is bonus.

I asked you why you believe that technically bitcoin is so flawed that it simply can't last 20 years.
The issues you posted are possible problems that may or may not be relevant.
To make such a definitive claim I would have liked to hear something along the lines of "at difficulty x the nonce is too small to guarantee that a solution can be found" (btw this is a real possibility)
That would be a real issue.

[edit] just to clarify : the nonce is 4 bytes, the block hash 32. You can vary other things like the timestamp but unless you can ensure that you have at least 32 bytes to modify you may not find a solution

Btw I agree with you that bitcoin is not the greatest thing after the internet but I think it is quite significant. Some people get carried away with their enthusiasm.

New season of Boardwalk Empire looks a bit different.

If you really care about the answer to questions such as these, you should probably ask in the 'Development & Technical Discussion' forum.  The people in there can answer your questions handily, and very few of them read this thread, I think.

FUD alert! Have you ever bought anything with bitcoin? lol.

I didn't see him mention it at all. He is concerned about central banks having huge balance sheets and being over leveraged. I didn't see a convincing argument why it does matter that central banks are technically insolvent. After all they can magick new funds and buy assets onto there balance sheets at will (see 2008 - now). What is to stop them simply doubling down (again) and printing currency to make up for private credit?

Two more:
9- The average wait time for 1 confirmation is about 10 minutes; and, in a significant fraction of cases, can be 30 minutes or more.  That is too much even for internet payments, and is unacceptable for shopping at brick-and-mortar stores.  (In contrast, verification and payment with a chip-enabled credit card, which is the standard here in Brazil, takes less than 1 minute.)

10- There is no way to correct mistakes (like sending bitcoins to the wrong address) or to recover stolen coins.

There is also the question of security against theft, but I am tired of arguing the obvious there... 

Oxymoron of the year:

BUY BTC

I think communication and information is more important than any form of money. So the Internet wins that competition in my book On the subject of protocols email has survived for 20 years even though it is crap. Everyone agrees but it just won't die. The reason of course is that that it is easy to use, widespread and actually solves a problem.

Don't be ignorant, when did I say Bitcoin will fail ? I said IF these issues wont be fixed then Bitcoin wont survive 20 years, and I added that TCP/IP didn't have much changes in the protocol over a decade, all you wrote above is still theoretically right, but when you get a practical solution that can be implemented we can discuss things further.

and no, I don't think Bitcoin is the greatest thing after internet... this is an insult for all the huge innovators and innovations that took place the last 20 years.

Without watching all of that, Jim Rickards tends to be very dismissive of BTC. Has he changed his opinion now?

Explanation

I see this as the next level towards a brand new economic future. I'm not saying that BTC will be the USD descendant, such a guess may be inaccurate. I'm saying that the current global reserve currency needs an update. Maybe it's one of the hundreds altcoins out there. Who knows? One thing is for certain; the current fiat bubble is going for a huge boom and the system needs to preserve its fundamental basis.

It's not frightening. It's the future.

This actually sounds really frightening from a global fiat perspective. Even after cutting the usual US fear propaganda stuff that they usually put in.

Jim is a great figure of the system. This is HUGE indeed. Maybe we're witnessing a self fulfilling prophecy towards bitcoin incorporation. Nice times.

Goodbye USD, Hello Bitcoin

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tQBia1Mw9Vw

I was way happier when doge was dying, for some reason this memeshit + "shibe" garbage really tilts me

So you are very skeptical of its long term success? Do you have an academic interest only?

You know very well that many of these issues are generalized problems for digital services and not exclusive to bitcoin.
If the answers were trivial they'd be solved already but nevertheless I will give you my opinion on what I personally think about them.


Amusing that you say bitcoin will fail yet assume the transaction volume goes up 100 times.... anyways
The block size limit is more or less arbitrarily fixed and very very trivial to increase in the protocol.
Now you will say "oh, but I argued it will have to change in 20 years..." to which I can reply:
If internet bandwidth and hard disk capacity do not magically stop to grow at all even 100 times more transactions should be manageable.
The block size limit is directly linked to blockchain size and that’s why it is there (it provides more or less an upper bound on the size increase of the blockchain for a given time)



upon massive growth of bitcoin this can start to become an issue. You have to discern between full nodes and those that only have parts or none of the chain.
The interesting question is how to go about distributing the blockchain. We can implement an altcoin that uses a proof of work function on the data of the blockchain to encourage its decentralized storage.
It is not necessary for each and every node to actually store the entire chain as long as we can guarantee that it, as a whole, is well enough distributed to be secure.
There is a lot of potential data culling you could do and still verify transactions. Ultimately it will be up to the individual to decide if it wants the entire chain or not.
Either way at current hard disk price points it is still quite some time before it becomes unaffordable for the individual to store the entire blockchain.



The "normal" user won't want to run a full node. As long as enough individuals do so this is okay. There is still some room upwards before it becomes infeasible for regular people to no longer be able to run a full node without having to spend excessive amounts of money on it. Again it would be nice to see some incentives for actually running a full node without being a miner. Maybe a PoS/PoW hybrid solution as a side chain? (Personally I trust more in the hybrid approach as PoW introduces randomization into the system). I could see how an alt aimed at securing the network might somehow create a mutually profitable situation where bitcoin users more readily embrace the altcoin.




I don't like the argumentations you sometimes read on PoW requiring energy while PoS doesn't (which is not really true imho).
Nevertheless there is one point you can't deny. To launch a >50% attack you need at least 62.5 hourly Megawatts over quite some time.
This energy is not wasted, it is securing the network. Look at some other forms of energy being wasted. Every bomb launched not only harms or potentially harms lives, it also wastes incredible amounts of resources.
It may sound cheesy but go fight against war before you fight against the energy consumption of bitcoin.


DDOS is an issue you face in the internet in general. You can try to optimize with filters and also trusted relaying, though generally that opens other cans of worms as you are now moving towards centralization.
Maybe something like a distributed decentralized whitelist for transaction requests? (btw this is something that worries me about Mike Hearn. He has done a lot for bitcoin but his proposition of flagging coins
basically introduces the same problem. If you apply a filter to bitcoin that filter also needs to conform to the consensus properties of bitcoin, namely being decentralized and to some degree anonymous)


No, it is not an issue unless you are mark karpeles or code like him




In the type of consensus bitcoin uses it is impossible to guarantee no double spending. It becomes less probable with every new block that a tx is double spent.
The solution: wait for more blocks.
Ok, here is a more productive answer: Multi-signature addresses where the second signature instils some more trust on transactions by not signing double spends.
How it would work: You request a new multisig address from FastTrustPay® network with your public part of the address. They respond with a multisig address as well as an n-lock transaction for the amount of coins you want them to provide fastpay services for to an address you specified. The n-lock tx guarantees to you that you will get the coins back if something goes wrong. It is well advanced in the future but not too far so you will have to wait years for your coins to come back to you again (this is to prevent you from double spending using the n-lock security). You then transfer the exact amount to the multisig address. Every time you want to send a transaction you send a request for n amounts to x.
Fastpay responds with a new n-lock transaction for the remaining coins, and the half-signed transaction with n to x. you add your sig and post it to the network.

Basically the service checks your available funds and only allows you to spend what you have once. If the receiver also trusts the service it will accept your transaction with fewer confirmations as it knows FastTrustPay will not issue double spends



"What if the government takes over BoA or Citigroup?" That argument can be applied to anything. The bottom line is that you can't avoid it in any system.
Consensus can only be reached if you actually have a majority (or eventually have a majority)
If that majority happens to be the other party well bad luck. formally in such a system it is impossible to circumvent.



The same problem applies to all netbanking at the moment. this is an issue of network security and not bitcoin per se.


These are just quick responses. You very well know that there are potential approaches to deal with these issues.
If you stick to your rigid thinking and argumentation it will get you nowhere.

Like p2p filesharing this is a genie you can't send back into the bottle