Topic: Why Bitcoin Core Developers won't compromise - page 11. (Read 11821 times)

This reminds me of Panama's currency: the Balboa.  Like Venezuela, Argentina, Brazil and other Latin American countries they suffered from high inflation.  So, they pegged the Balboa 1:1 with the USD.  After a while, they figured why print Balboas if they are pegged to the USD.  They now use USD and call it Balboa.

Cab: "5 Balboas"
Me: Hand them $5 USD and call it a Balboa.


How does this compare with the elasticity of the USD?  They can print more, but aside from gift cards and similar tokens - which are pegged 1:1 with the USD - you don't have much option.  I've had a difficult time getting anywhere to accept my Quetzales, except in Guatemala  They seem to like them there.
 


Spain never saw the hyperinflation coming after bringing back gold from their "conquests".  Good point.



I use it as money.  I buy clothes, musical stuff, flowers with it.  I also offer a 20% discount if people pay with BTC or LTC because I know PayPal won't take the money out of my account one day because somebody's account was hacked and they would prefer I pay the cost than they do.


Core.  I would suggest that is what Core wants and that's why we have the rise of Bitcoin Unlimited.  If you're interested watch SegWit v Bitcoin Unlimited with Roger Ver and Johnny from Blockstream on YouTube.  

 

It is for that exact reason, after much contemplation, that I finally decided to switch to a BU mining pool and run the full node BU client.  Putting some numbers on a hard drive and wanting to get rich by doing nothing is stupid and is why I am diversifying.  I want to be able to send money to my son on the other side of the world and for him to be able to use it.  I want to see it used for remittances because it is faster and more secure than walking out of a Western Union with pockets full of cash.


Agreed.  RipplePay and PayPal did exactly that - only nodes.  PayPal went the way of tying to bank accounts and RipplePay went nowhere, until copying Bitcoin and creating "Ripple" (still going nowhere, imo).


It depends.  I love that their is a BigMac Index.  

If I buy a bean burrito, in USD, in El Salvador it's priced at 99¢ at Taco Bell.  In the USA, it is priced at $1.49.  It's the same product pegged to the same currency (USD is EV currency as of 2004, so they could get a highway), but in different locations.  

Everything is relative.  When I lived in the Netherlands, the price of the Euro was so high that it made the same item 1.6x the price as the USA because I was paid in USD to a US bank account.  

Actually we were sidetracking into an economic discussion. You might want to read over it, you might learn something.

In this thread: people whining that they're unable to force third parties to compromise Bitcoin.

Bitcoin is volatile in terms of US Dollars. My point to dinofelis is: So what? Why is that a problem?

Another question for dinofelis: Why do people/businesses accept US Dollars in the first place?

Right, let's just get this straight. 

The US dollar is not volatile compared to Bitcoin.  Furthermore, the volatility in the day that it has typically varies around the same price range, while Bitcoin can swing by huge percentages in the course of a few days.

People here can imagine a life without USD, but that's just it:  imagining.  It will take time because Bitcoin's volatility is based on people's confidence, which is not as high as it will be yet.

Sure, it's not 100% accurate (the Big Mac Index is pretty close), but it's a damn good way to determine what the value and spending power of your Bitcoin is and what it has been in the few years that it's existed for.

Comparing fiat to crypto is apples to oranges. Replacing one fiat with another is not the same thing as replacing fiat with a non-government currency. I think you are arguing details and failing to see the point. When I wrote that I was referring to private money replacing fiat, not one slavery note being swapped for another.

Your emission scheme is just that - a scheme. Why would you want to peg to something you want to replace? That doesn't make sense. My guess is you're an older fellow who probably just can't wrap your head around life without the USD, and definitely not without fiat at all. How do I know? Because you are blurring the lines between fiat that derives its value from government force, and crypto which is private money that derives its value naturally, in the eyes of the consumer. Fiat and private money are totally different and you can't take circumstances from one and apply them to the other.

It takes years of brainwashing, like majoring in Economics-style-brainwashing, to think deflationary currencies are bad and elastic money supplies are good. Its the foolishness, if not downright insanity, of thinking that there is a magic algo or philosopher kings who can decide what the volume and value of money should be on any given day rather than leaving it to the market.

You've spent too much time arguing with dumbasses and marketroids which caused you to start believing in your own bullshit.

Almost from the inception people understood the importance of distributed node network, even if under centralized control:

1) ability for nearly anyone and relatively cheaply audit (in the accounting sense) the totality of the system.

2) distributed node architecture makes it easy and cheap to hide the actual expensive nodes (either due to mining or transacting/exchanging) from both attacks launched over the network.

3) not currently implemented by Core, but possible, the broadcast architecture makes it possible to use non-Internet methods of communication with super-extreme bandwidth asymmetry (high download but little upload).

Dinofelis, you clearly seem to have some academia background. But it must have been some theology school (or something equally anti-scientific) to be so unwilling to actually refer to the available references and verify your own assumptions.

Of course not.  In Europe, many currencies were replaced by the Euro, and the Euro didn't "rise" against these currencies to replace them.   The Euro got more and more participants, and replaced bigger and bigger markets, as new countries adopted the Euro, but the Euro didn't "rise" against these other currencies.  

Imagine that an imaginary bitcoin was emitted at against, say, $1 in the beginning, and that it had an emission scheme to keep it around $1.  (my proposal is to have proof of work that is about $1 worth, and can do as much proof of work as you want and emit as many coins as you want with that: if you are willing to burn about a million $ worth in proof of work, you own now a million coins ; if you want to burn a billion $ worth of PoW, you now own a billion coins).  Suppose that people like it, and start using it more and more.  Slowly, it starts to replace payments about everywhere.  The extra demand for the currency, to be able to use it (Fisher's formula) would make it rise in value, but that makes it more interesting to mine it, and it costs about the value of $1 to mine it, so people will mine a lot of it until it lowers again to near $1 value.  If it is less than $1 in value, nobody will spend PoW on it to make more of them, and none get emitted.  But if more people use them, more and more coins are in circulation.  The monetary mass, the market cap rise, and they replace soon most payments.  But nobody can get rich with it.  It is a currency.  Its value is stable (the value of about $1 of proof of work).  You can write a contract in it.  You know its value will remain stable (at least, will not deflate like crazy and become a rare collector's item).

No, Big Macs are priced in many currencies, and this is used to find relative over or under-evaluations of currencies.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Mac_Index

Big Macs expressed in, say, Yen, and calculated in Euro by their conversion rate, can be compared to Big Macs bought directly in Euros.

There are of course differences, which can also be partially accounted for by different *valuations* of the specific item of a Big Mac in different societies, but it gives a rather rough index of "true value of exchange".  They indicate differences on the 10-20% level or so.

Bitcoin went up from 10 000 BTC for one pizza, to about 200 pizza for 1 BTC in 7 years or so.   That's not a unit of account.  In Big Mac terms, that's 6 orders of magnitude.

It is a known economic experience that collectibles are never good units of account: it takes active steering (which can be automatic, as I said before) to keep the value of a currency more or less stable.

In fact, you can measure it in another way: if you can get genuinely rich with it by just hoarding it, it isn't a currency.  It is a speculative asset.

Big Macs are priced in dollars. See the difference? One is the established currency, and one is replacing an established currency. The replacer inherently CAN'T have the same pricing stability as the currency it is replacing. The former has to rise against the latter which includes against items priced in the latter.

Trying to peg a new currency to an established one is a fool's dream because it goes against non-fiat monetary fundamentals. A currency needs to grow in value organically ie. go up in price as it is adopted so that price is an indicator. Trying to rig that is no better than a fiat scheme.

No, I mean in Big Mac of course.  How many Big Macs could you buy with 1 BTC in November last year ?  And how many big macs can you buy now with 1 BTC ?

How many Big Macs could you buy with $1000, in November ?  And right now ?

Bitcoin has perfect stability - it has always maintained a value of 1BTC = 1BTC.

Oh, you meant its price in USD? Why would that be relevant to its stability? You are using a very unstable currency (USD) as a measuring stick. Any currency that replaces fiat must be volatile, because it has a lot of growing to get to that point, and its not going to chart a straight line on the way.


Are you talking to us from 2005? 1MB, 8MB, 32MB...these are all insignificant amounts in today's world. To argue otherwise just ruins any credibility you may have had.

Do you understand the importance hence of a serious logical and rational (not rhetorical) argument of why these non-mining nodes are essential ?

You are going to make a decision upon restricting the use of a system, maybe based upon an argument (we need lots of non mining nodes for "decentralization") that doesn't hold water, and of which one cannot give, visibly, a strongly argumented proof ?

Bitcoin will never go mainstream as payment system, that's obvious (*), so one shouldn't aim for something that will never happen.  Bitcoin is a speculative asset, it is not a currency.  Of course, it is a speculative asset that can be transmitted, and hence, can be used somewhat as a payment in those cases where normal payments don't work well (such as dark markets, bribing, murder on command, financing prohibited political activity, doing business away from taxes, and many other applications where fiat can only go with difficulty).  But it is not a stable currency that can be used as a general payment system so that's not necessary.

It only needs to carry the load of these niche payment applications, and of course, its main application, which is speculative trading.  Now, 1 MB is maybe a bit low for that, but I would be surprised if bitcoin needs orders of magnitude more for speculation transactions.  After all, they essentially serve to go to exchanges, and back to wallets.


Could you argue with text please ?  I'm sure you can give a logically constructed argument on which we can reason, instead of some or other video.  I can't reason with videos.  I watched the beginning of it, and it sounded like some rhetoric about the analogy with the internet, but rhetoric doesn't cut it.

I think my argument is quite watertight concerning the non-power of full nodes, and I've never seen a LOGICALLY ARGUMENTED rebuttal to it, that doesn't confuse full nodes with users, or doesn't confuse it with the power game of a hard fork.

(*) it is obvious because bitcoin is not a good unit of account, there's no mechanism in it that adapts the emission of bitcoin with its value with the aim to stabilize it, and bitcoiners are even proud of that.  Something that is not a good unit of account (volatile value) cannot be generally used as a currency in a payment system.

History seems to indicate the opposite. I remember when the pie chart was mainly 3-4 pools, and there were a few times a pool DID achieve 50%+. There are more pools today than ever, and it will keep growing.

Of course you can, it is called proof of stake (for instance).  Some call it "check points" (which is signature of the dev).  Proof of stake has a known problem which is "nothing at stake", but ONLY because one combines proof of stake also with block rewards.  Proof of stake as a non-rewarded consensus mechanism doesn't suffer from that.  

Bitcoin could not really start with *rewarded* PoS, because then Satoshi was the only one who could "stake" in the beginning, so he would be the only one receiving new coins, and the only people obtaining bitcoin would be people getting them directly from Satoshi, which would look too much like Satoshi printing an infinite amount of money that he would then sell.
However, Satoshi could have had the idea of using PoW for coin CREATION, but keeping the consensus mechanism with PoS, non-rewarded.  At that time, it probably seemed a good idea to reward people doing the consensus signature thing ; but it turned bitcoin in a "mining industry" where the users are now "external customers".  If the consensus mechanism had been based upon staking signatures (with no reward) then "miners" would only be people making new coins, but would have had nothing to say about the protocol, the block size, or whatever, which would have remained in the hands of the bitcoin owners (the stakers).
It seemed a good idea to do everything in one go, but it turns out it probably wasn't.

I understand PoW used for both insuance and consensus... still, i think its kind of pointless to say "PoW not as good as DSA".  You can't solve the double spend problem simply with digital signatures.  That's why they invented Bitcoin

Sure, it is another option.  That said, when government wants to take assets from people, they will always find a way, especially when the assets become "publicly accepted" (and hence also "declared"). 

But there's a difference between "freedom money" (of which I'm fond), and "sound money doctrine" (finite set of assets).   Nothing stops freedom money from having an issuing mechanism that more or less regulates its value to a constant, and hence can become a much better unit of account than an inelastic amount of assets which will always turn into speculative items, because of their volatility (and especially, if "growing", by their greater-fool potential).

In as much as bitcoin was a great idea to have a decentralized monetary token, its economic policy is very naive and bound to failure (as an ideal monetary asset), especially because it has no elasticity.


But gold never was a great money, and gold is special, because of its historical ground.  Rare stuff just becomes speculative, and when it is speculative, it has not stable value, and when it has no stable value, it is not a good unit of account, and when it is not a good unit of account, it is not a fluid currency.

Also, gold "always existed" in a certain way, and the only thing that new gold sources did, was a "gold rush" which was always an economic disaster, from the demise of the native American civilisations to the disasters elsewhere ; but gold never faced the problem of extremely severe seigniorage, making huge fortunes of a few. 


My take on it is that bitcoin will stay, of course.  But I think bitcoin has so many flaws, is based upon so many misconceptions, that it will never be what it was said it was going to be ; and bitcoin has been withholding serious crypto competition until recently, by its de facto monopoly of the market. 

That said, my idea is that most of crypto, as of this day, is heavily speculative, and that this will only get worse, not better, because almost no token has self-regulating systems, and if they are, nobody is interested in it.  Bitcoin has killed the dream of free money by being a get-amazingly-rich-quickly scheme like rarely has been seen before, and by having many imitators of that same scheme.  DASH, for instance, even amplified the deflationary spiral with its master node scheme. 

It is very easy to make a speculation-capped crypto asset, that will never fall into a deflationary spiral, but nobody would use it, because, exactly, the get-rich-quickly dream would not be included, and all the deflationary bullshit of bitcoin's monetary theory would be baffled: the simple thing to do would be to have PoW without automatic adaptation, but with a slowly rising curve.  As such, a coin would never be worth more than the economic cost of the PoW of its creation, and the monetary mass would adapt to its market value to keep it essentially constant (the rising curve would compensate for the improving technology) ; exactly like central banks do.  But nobody actually wants "internet money" - except dark markets.  People want "digital gold on steroids" to become rich quickly in a greater fool game.  My idea is that this is what kills crypto's soul, and that we're just seeing the crypto version of a huge "complex derivatives" market on which people speculate.