Topic: Why Bitcoin is doomed to fail, and there's nothing you can do about it. - page 2. (Read 39330 times)

And why is Bitcoin falling to $300?

How is this in any way a response to ANYTHING I have said?

Also, POW = mining. Did you perhaps mean POS?
http://majesti.co/cryptonerd/crypto-terminology-101-pospow-part-4/

mining is the process of using POW to secure the network, for a preset amount of time (as dictated by the coin protocol on creation) it will also generate new coins for those securing the coins. Decades from now the POW protocol of bitcoin will stop issuing new coins and a new term other than mining would need to be made. But that doesn't change the fact that bitcoin is POW and it is extremely susceptible to centralization

Mining is dead. POW is an efficient consensus mechanism.

You are discussing the hypothetical plan with which bitcoin was created. ASICs have proven this to be an abysmal failure. Bitcoin is not and never will be free from such centralization, as ASICs make it far too easy to centralize.
Even if you could make an asic resistant algorithm for an alt coin, giant government funded computational center can easily overcome it, especially with the use of violence to coerce any private competition into cowtowing to their demands

Yes, because for the first time in history wealth cannot be seized at gunpoint. Being that governments and their cronies legitimate their rule through force and coercion, they will be rendered impotent by the incorruptible nature of block chain technology. The 1%, whether free market entrepreneurs or political entrepreneurs, will always look for the best safe havens from government seizure. Block chain tech provides the most efficient solution for everyone.


I agree that bitcoins development is both too centralized and too conservative at this point. There are better solutions than bitcoin and I believe that the network effect is dwindling.


Thats the point of light weight clients. You don't need millions of full nodes to perform the redundant task of storing transactions. You just need a fair amount of trusted full nodes.

There are proof of stake solutions, such as Delegated Proof of Stake (DPoS), which make double spending almost impossible.


Delegated Proof of Stake allows for secure transactions of 10 seconds and under which is why BitShares X can function as an asset exchange comparable to centralized crypto exchanges.

DPoS has also been proven to work as efficiently and securely under 2 second block production.


The truth of the matter is that block chain technology is scalable, mining is not... If you put a blockchain on a central server and handled visa's level of daily transaction volume it probably wouldn't cost more then $50k a month. The more nodes you add to the server the greater the cost of processing those transactions but the greater the level of decentralization. The purpose of decentralization is to create a system than has no central point of failure or control. Once you reach the threshold at which that condition is met (obviously there is not set metric for this) the marginal cost of adding full nodes to both store and process transactions exceeds the marginal benefit. With bitcoin the cost associated with mining unnecessarily increase the cost of processing transactions to the point that the threshold at which the marginal cost of additional nodes exceeds the marginal benefits is much lower for Bitcoin and other POW systems than POS systems, and ulimately results in greater centralization and greater cost.

Given the DPoS design, blockchain solutions can easily provide a payment network that scales globally better than visa and certainly better than Bitcoin. Currently Bitcoin pays out ~$500m to miners to process less 1 tps. A DPoS system would be able handle visa 2,000 tps load at 1% of that cost.



If you understand distributed consensus this isn't really an attack. But certainly Bitcoin is more vulnerable to arbitrary control than other blockchain solutions.


This is why bitUSD is crucial. A decentralized and cryptographically secured fixed income security is what the worlds been looking for. Not to mention bitUSD provides interest with a yield of 5-10% a year. I don't think we have to worry about unstable exchange rates anymore.


Benefits of Digital Securities over Fiat

- can be transferred globally in less than 10 seconds
- fees are not a percentage of the transactions but rather a fixed amount (blockchain tech can handle visa txn volume for ~$5mil as opposed to ~$11bn - a savings of 99.95% to merchants)
- cryptographically secured - can't be counterfeited or seized
- financial system thereby becomes more secure, more transparent, more efficient and (given the design of BitShares X) more collateralized.

You stole my line!

Yea, now that the discussion has come to that, I would personally much prefer metal coins for all those reason. Although I would say that in modern times its not even trees anymore, governments now creates money electronically instead of even bothering to print it.

Of course, governments know that and come down hard on people who try to do it.
Shutting them down violently and seizing all their assets. there have been a couple of cases in the past 15 years where the US shut down such companies. they argued that people could mistake the silver and gold coins for dollars and as such they are guilty of making counterfeit money. Based on that they shut them down and confiscated everything

I didn't miss your point, I EXPLICITLY answered it
1. Fiat has nothing to do with cash (most fiat is electronic money, and cash coins and paper can be fiat or precious metal based.)
2. Your assertion that the economy MUST have Paper cash or it will collapse is false

This is a good explanation.

I would honestly rather have silver coins as opposed to the same amount (in dollars) in fiat currency. Silver can't be printed, so that's another thing that makes it more favorable than fiat coins would be. You can't just inflate the silver supply, it is pretty well set out and there's not a lot you can do to change the amount of silver that exists in the world, contrary to paper money.

Paper money is literally paper, and where does it come from? Trees. Are trees always growing and new trees being planted? Yes. As such, the supply is inflating because more "Trees" are growing, and there's not a lot you can do to stop it, unless you wipe out all the trees. Silver cannot be grown (To my knowledge) like trees. Thus, silver remains favorable in my eyes.

Things I hate about bitcoin:

1. Unsustainable hash rate growth, mining is fun but buying any hardware is a waste of money, I resent people that mine because I cannot
2. Confirmations take tooo damn long, I hate it really, I feel like Bitcoin is in the dark ages already!
3. My Wallets scare the shit out of me. I am going to lose all of my coins I know it.
4. My Snowden side of me hates that every purchase I make is logged forever in the blockchain, leave me the F alone NSA and FBI

I would put every cent i have into an alt-coin except that an alt-coin to make it to where bitcoin is today is soooo impossibly difficult.

All of the initial adopters and devs become millionaires when the price hits 100 million, they all sell and leave a barren waste land.

There are sooo many great features in the sea of alt coins, I simply cannot choose one to jump behind and sell every coin I have. It would take a year of research on developers, features and strategy, and in the end it will still be a crap shoot.

Damn it....

Just out of curiosity: We often find that people slamming bitcoin on this forum often have become partial to some other altcoin that appears to have "fixed" some of the problems you point out. So, are you a believer in any decentralized blockchain technology (altcoin?) or are you implying all of the faulty attributes in your OP apply to any decentralized currency? ---I mean, you made the point that the 99% will never be able to stop the 1% from getting what they want essentially, but what if the 1% decide that a blockchain is the best way (or most powerful tool) to wield that control? That would neutralize points 1 and 2 (as you could classify the Bitcoin Foundation as a 1% entity-in-the-making), and ostensibly, the remaining points could be solved through innovation to the original technology right? Therefore you should start to consider the idea that some current or future altcoin could, in theory, supplant bitcoin and be the best instrument in the hands of the 1%.

We see seismic shifts in 1% power all the time.  Mark Zuckerberg was not a 1% kinda guy before 2004. Now he is, and it's because technology gave him that power. We could see an organization dramatically shift financial power through cryptocurrency. I actually do not believe that bitcoin will be the best instrument for the job, frankly due to agreement with some of your points in regard to the rudimentary design of the technology, but there are innovations surfacing that will be damn near impossible to stop. I see a big player (1%er) capitalizing on blockchain technology and taking it mainstream.

You missed my point, how can the US or most countries do away with fiat..BECAUSE and this is fact, they MUST have a cash business society/blackmarket etc in order to have an economy at all.

If tomorrow a law was passed and only digital money tracked and supplied by the gov was issued it would destroy the economy. We must still have literal CASH or the world she no turn round.

Another shitty prediction proven wrong by history.

who are you talking to?

also, does anyone remember 10 years ago when it was the 10% vs the 90%?

Also, 1% is a staggering amount of people. Take a look a the USA. 300 million people 1% is 3 million people. There is no 1% vs 99% conflict. The issue is the 0.001% aka a few thousand people in government and their cronies misappropriating funds, stealing from the taxpayer, or buying the law

according to your words ... because the 1 % always wins against the 99% .... i will buy more bitcoins to be from the 1 % 

Yes silver coins have an actual value, and yes this value is what people give them. The value of anything is what people give it. Food has value because people want it. The value people give silver is based on how much people all over the world are willing to pay for it.

Also, fiat is NOT backed by the issuing government and their military. Under ideal conditions it would be, but in reality they just print more and more and more money.

Silver isn't perfect, the value will fluctuate as demand and supply changes. But because a government cannot just print as much silver as they want (or create it electronically out of thin air as they do via central banking) it ends up being stabler (it shouldn't, it takes extreme idiocy to make fiat behave as poorly as it actually does)

Also, please note that I wasn't even advocating silver (although I do view it as a more solid form of currency then fiat), I was answering the hypothetical question of what people would use for cash if fiat paper money didn't exist. My answer was paper money that isn't fiat, or metal money

Well, do even silver coins have an actual value? They have the value people give them. They're more backed by the issuing government, it's economy and also their military(!!! - which is remarkable and dangerous) Silver itself has a value, like Gold, but it doesn't come anywhere near the value we give it.

Notes can be 100% backed by a hard currency instead of by government fiat.
Fiat literally means "because I said so"
Furthermore, you could just have coins worth actual money (aka, silver coins).
And the ubiquity of credit cards in modern society means that it is actually possible to completely replace a cash business with a credit card business. you even have a credit card based vending machines

Bitcoin is an alpha product, it is unfinished.
At its current incarnation it is limited to about 3.5 transactions per second and requires a hard fork to change that. There is no way it can be suitably used as a nation's currency in its current state

@JohnyBigs

I actually agree with most all you have to write in your op, it is full of common sense and history. It is a shame that peoples investments blind them from truth.

Now I am not saying bitcoin cannot find a way to survive or over come those things mentioned. I do believe we will have a digital currency in some form or fashion eventually.

One thing I have always struggled to understand is how a government like the US does away with fiat. The black market, cash business and day to day buy/sell makes up for a HUGE amount of the market. Do away with cash all at once and you would destroy the economy quickly. Do away with it slowly over decades and get everyone to digital taxable traceable coin and we will live in a dark time.

Sad stuff tbh, bitcoin advancement is not really advancement for mankind imo when viewed that way. Not that bitcoin survives but encourages the government to development of it's own digital currency.