Topic: What are the most convincing arguments against Bitcoin? - page 2. (Read 9236 times)

You really have to dig around to find the technical details of how he solved it, its buried in the bottom of some obscure thread. And the code is still closed source so it is possible that he made a convincing facade rather than actually implement the elegant solution that he did conceive. However it doesnt seem all that likely since it would only be marginally more work to actually implement the solution than the convincing facade. Check out an article i wrote on it for a basic explanation of how it works, and the conversation i had with come-from-beyond for a technical explanation of how it works. Even if NXT is a total scam coin BCNext did solve this problem atleast conceptually in a really elegant way so its pretty exciting.

https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.4063478

NXT makes a lot of claims, last time I checked it was a closed source project (that claims it will go open source "soon" TM) and doesn't explain the technical details behind HOW they supposedly solved it.

However, if it does I will dance a jig for joy.

The arguments that worry me most, in order from most to least worry:  

1.  Scalability.  Right now we're configured to do a maximum of 7 and a half transactions a second.  In practice, most miners refuse to build blocks bigger than 250K because the slower propagation time of larger blocks means they risk losing the 25BTC block reward if another block spreads faster.  So in most blocks we can get less than 3 transactions per second.  Occasionally a miner willing to build a 1M block wins the race and we get up to 7 and a half -- for that block.  So far it's been enough to clear backlogs.  

Assuming they figure out how to handle more transactions, there is still a scalability problem with the data.  As the number of transactions per second grows, the rate at which the blockchain gets larger also grows.  The blockchain can already take more than a week to download and more than 15GB to store.  Multiply the current transaction rate by 100 (which is still nowhere near visa scale) and it will become literally impossible for ordinary people (read: in a P2P network that isn't centralized by being limited to a few servers with massive bandwidth) to download the blockchain faster than it grows.  At the same time, the space required to store 2 years worth of transactions would be growing to about 1TByte.  In the future faster hardware and bigger bandwidth may help -- but it may not happen in time, and by the time it happens the need may be even greater than we suppose now.

Finally, the size of the stored blockchain affects the startup time of a full client.  Not badly unless your machine is very slow, but in the very long run, it's hard to imagine going through 20, 50, or 100 years of transaction history every time you start up.

2.  Security.  People who keep gold or large amounts of cash in a safe in their homes don't live inside the safes. People who use secure computers to send and receive Bitcoin should not do their email and web browsing and GUI crap and insecure OS and gaming and automatic software updates and cell phone syncing and passwordless logins and file sharing and etc, on the secure computer.  Yes, that limits a secure computer a lot -- just like the living space inside of a safe is very limited.  

I despair of explaining this to Homer Husband and Harriet Housewife, but using Bitcoin requires having some kind of digital device that you treat just like a safe.  You don't live your day-to-day life inside of a safe. Also, OS support for being used as a 'safe' is increasingly hard to come by.

3. Transaction fee roulette.  It is flatly impossible to anticipate what you will need to spend on fees in a given bitcoin transaction.  Not only are the fees different depending on features of your own txout set that most people have no clue about, but they are also different depending on the semi-randomized selection of *which* txouts you'll be spending and how busy the network is.  With no way to anticipate fees, merchants can't set prices accurately.  And the fees are still too small to motivate miners (by comparison with the block award) while already too high to permit small (vending machine size) transactions.

Maybe there will be a big fab plant in china, the us, Russia and somewhere in Africa and so there would be a bit of a prisoners dilemma problem for each government. Maybe by that time bitcoin will be so big that it will be like the internet in that it will be bad for governments in certain ways but so ubiquitous that its not in their interst on net to crack down on it.

Really though i think the ultimate solution is going to have to come from an altcoin. This may lead you to think that bitcoin will have all of its market cap sucked up by an altcoin at some point in the future but that is not necessarily what it means. The mere existence of an altcoin that solves this problem could be enough to convince governments not to crack down on bitcoin because they would know that if they did all the capital would just flow into the altcoin and they would have spent a large amount of money to fundamentally change nothing. Meaning that even an amazing altcoin that solved this very real problem wouldn't ever be successful on bitcoins level and maybe bitcoin would continue to rise in value capitalizing on its network effects despite this flaw.

It is aslo, i think, worth noting that 2 altcoins have solved this problem. one at the cost of introducing new problems (peercoin) and one with a brilliant solution that does not involve new problems (NXT). It is also worth noting that perhaps governments would use this method to crack down on bitcoin and capital would flow into an altcoin that solved this problem. after all governments are less than notorious for their wisdom and foresight. I have a reasonable amount of resources invested in NXT for this very reason.

First, it would be much appreciated if you keep your offensive labeling remarks (Cry babies)to your self. No one attacked you personally.

Second, the block chain now is a true issue. It takes over 3 days to download and install the client - as of a couple of weeks ago- and that is NOT because of HDD space, inet speed or computing power or RAM. (syncing also takes considerable time if you skip a couple of days) Try this for Grandpa, Grandma, Dad, Mom and so on. 5-6 wallets in a household, it is a bit discouraging, as I said it is a concern at least for now.

If that is fixed in the future than it’s ok. But now it is a drawback for the average person trying to get into it, using the most secure client/wallet. Also as I noted above some confirms take over an hour for the first, and that is another drawback.

Let’s keep the discussions civil.

There will be no more currency without electricity. All nuclear plants will blow its inventories into the atmosphere and people wouldn't be in survival mode, but in death mode.

We watched the tragedy unfold
We did as we were told
We bought and sold
It was the greatest show on earth
But then it was over
We ohhed and aahed
We drove our racing cars
We ate our last few jars of caviar
And somewhere out there in the stars
A keen-eyed look-out
Spied a flickering light
Our last hurrah
And when they found our shadows
Grouped around the TV sets
They ran down every lead
They repeated every test
They checked out all the data on their lists
And then the alien anthropologists
Admitted they were still perplexed
But on eliminating every other reason
For our sad demise
They logged the only explanation left
This species has amused itself to death
No tears to cry no feelings left
This species has amused itself to death

http://www.lyricsdepot.com/roger-waters/amused-to-death.html

Total blackout, is a rather extreme case, yes it could happen, (EMP, CME X class, circa 1859 etc). Then, does it really matter? Any and all fiat currencies will collapse. Will the ATMs be operational?
Will the banks have access to people’s accounts? The most likely currency in such a case, would be water, food, fuel, guns, ammo, other resources, and maybe gold, silver. People would be in survival mode and instinct response.

In the mean time, a concern would be the block chain size (for most of the people who want the original most secure client/wallet), and of course the time to get confirms, some take hours!
Time will tell.

This isn't true as of yet, since most blocks are not full as of yet.  The greater limiting factor seems to be Gavin's Cost; a theoretical risk of loss from including each additional transaction that Gavin Andreson estimated to be around .00033 BTC per KB of transaction size.  This number will naturally change over time, due to many variables, but efforts are underway to significantly reduce this cost per transaction in order to encentivize miners to include more transactions into the block.  The same effort will also improve the average transaction rate.

He attempted to convince the users to hold off on GPU mining.  He didn't get his way.

I don't understand you completely; by issue, do you mean the kinks or CPU? And what did Satoshi try to decide?

Well said economic reason are with fees I guess. When the size limit is reached on a block, transactions with higher fees are prioritized over those with lower or no fee. Or so, at least that is from what I understand with how bitcoin works.

I don't think it's a problem that some blocks might reach the limit during peak usage times. I would think it's a problem if a transaction could be delayed for more than a hour due to this though. Currently though, a lot of BTC... especially those traded for speculation on exchanges are all traded offchain and does not affect the blockchain at all. So this might be more of a problem the more people actually use BTC as a currency. Then again payment processors might cover this as well, but... inputs.io is probably still in recent memory amongst many of us.

But the bitcoin whitepaper does cover how to trim the blockchain down to a more manageable level (tl;dr, involves pruning old data after verification), and personally for everyday usage I tend to use a client like multibit to go around the space problem in general (though as a enthusiast I have bitcoin-qt installed as well).

It's to do with the blocksize limit - currently all blocks can only hold a maximum of 1MB of data. I'm told by smarter people that it would require a hard fork to remove or otherwise change this limit. Given average time to generate a block as 10 min, and a minimum transaction size of ... whatever-it-is bytes, that works out to 7 transactions per second.

If the blocksize limit were increased, or removed altogether, we'd get the blockchain increasing at an even faster rate than it already is, but that may or may not be a problem depending on how storage hardware develops, and how drastically we implement 'pruning' solutions or lightweight clients. I'm told there are also economic reasons why a limited block size might be a good idea but I don't know what those are.

Where did you get that one? I never heard of such limitation.

it can only handle 7 transactions a second :/ 

+1

Also Spricht Zarathustra!

Onwards to the grandiose being that stands above all irrationality.

Yes, because the 'free market' is an oxymoron. Free humans are self-sufficient. They live (lived) in self-sufficient communities beyond the state, beyond the market, beyond labor division, beyond collectivistic communism/capitalism, which essentially is the same: working with and against everybody, against human nature and against the nature in general. They are growing rampant until they collapse. For the first time in the history of the citizen (a cartoon of the former human) the collapse will be global.

Actually, he was eventually.  McCarthy's core premise was that the Soviet Union had sleeper cells inside the United States, and he believed that spies held very high profile lifestyles, most likely in media.  It took until after the fall of the Soviet Union to prove it, but McCarthy's paranoid premise was correct even though a great number of innocent people were included into the project as well.

This.

And that it is not safe, or rather that it is too complicated a task to safeguard your Bitcoins.

I just got my first offline wallet after getting 10 LTC stolen from me. 

McCarthy was never proven right, the fascist post-war US was no heaven for ordinary people if not for their domination of other peoples making the ordinary American rich.


Too much wealth disparity is a problem. Firstly, it means protecting the wealthy will rely on using force against the poor to fend them off; secondly, it means people who are less well off don't have the same opportunities as the more well off and hence society is less meritocratic; thirdly, crime will increase.

I don't subscribe to the fallacy of "if the rich get richer in the relation to the poor, then the poor get richer in absolute terms". It is not an absolute truth, but merely something that happens sometimes.

To me, a true capitalist or anarchist society is one where no matter what amount of wealth you have, you have good (if not equal) opportunities to make your skills valuable and useful to their full and real extent. If inequality is too great this will not be possible.

I agree that if you separate wealth and political power by getting rid of the state, one could make room for larger "wealth disparities" than otherwise without sacrificing too much lost opportunity. But we have many problems, ie proto-governmental multinational companies, so jut getting rid of the state is not enough. As we see with Bitcoin, most things work better decentralized. And one of the biggest threats to Bitcoin is the centralization of mining. I think that a decentralized state of affairs would be in the long-term make less problems, better culture and as a result of that less wealth disparity.

In essence, gross wealth disparity is a hindrance to free competition, makes people estranged towards each other and encourages nepotism. I don't want to use force (taxes) to prevent this (as I think that will just make things worse), but I do think that it is important to assume the role of leadership when one is put in that position and hence one has responsibility for a lot of people. This is what I mean by wealth disparity. One cannot ignore it because if you have the faculty to help people out of a bad situation by teaching them how, you are morally obliged as a fellow human, that quite possibly have happened to end up in your comfortable position more by happenstance than by merit, to help out.

This is merely how I think it is necessary for a culture to be in order to avoid revolution (and in the end possibly shootings of early adopters of Bitcoin, just like the Russian imperial family where executed).

+1 for good argument against Bitcoin. Is there anything we can do about it? As far as I understand distributed manufacturing of high quality chips is far behind the most advanced chipfabs.