Topic: Why Bitcoin is over-ambitious (Read 2441 times)

I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul.

--The rest is history.

LOL me too. and that's where i stopped reading this thread.

about the quote: it hasn't died because it was never in danger of dying.

What about lower transaction fees, and convenient, relatively cheap international transactions? I think of these as added value.

it started when i originally joined the forum as a dumb attempt to obscure my writing style, and now it's just inertia. it seems too late to stop now!

i suspect sophisticated textual analysis would be able to discern my identity anyway, although the technology is probably not good enough yet for an undirected attempt at doing that to succeed.

i have a tendency to write like an adult, which is to say in paragraphs that mature people might read. that does not seem to be the style of this forum. perhaps not capitalising my text serves as a useful reminder for me to stop writing too much.

Is your shift key busted or what's the problem?

i'm not sure what you're asking. 'centralised' probably isn't the right way to talk about currency in the first place. it's only people on this forum who think of the united states dollar as a 'centralised' currency. it is a currency that has a governmental issuer, subject to a particular legal process for issuance. 'centralisation' is an imprecise way to think about it. by contrast, bitcoin has an algorithmic issuer, subject to an algorithmic process for issuance; similarly, 'decentralisation' is an imprecise way to think about it. it's all 'myths' - impressionistic thinking, not rigorous thinking.

bitcoin has many selling points, but 'transparency' isn't really one either. transactions are indeed transparent, but it would be hard to argue that the bitcoin 'economy' is less oligopolistic than the traditional one or that bitcoin's value is more transparent than that of other currencies. as i have pointed out many times, people are letting mt. gox's data dictate 'value' to them even though that data could be totally fraudulent. i ultimately made half a million us dollars playing that game, but most people won't.

ignorant anger at central bankers was always a poor basis for bitcoin enthusiasm, at least in many people who have no idea what they're talking about. very few people here have any knowledge about monetary or other economic principles. what they have are strong half-baked opinions which strike most knowledgeable people as misplaced anger. why people who see themselves as self-reliant would choose to make themselves so manipulable by buying into that misplaced anger is beyond me.

A handful of angry nerds for the most-part. They'll post threads in a fury of protest on this centralized forum while the cultist talking heads continue to lead them into decisions that make the people at the top richer. Isn't human nature wonderful?

have you seen that video from the london btc conference mentioning several cool applications other than microtrans, escrow, contract, decentralized exchange, etc

Actually, A and B are both hubspace topologies. They are both centralized, albeit to different degrees. Neither is a true meshspace topology, as Bitcoin is always portrayed to be (at least at the logical level.) So questions are begged here. If it is merely a question of degree, how easily can one morph into the other? Think of how airline route maps have changed in the last 50 years. A future Bitcoin wherein all block-chain management, hashing and transactions occur in a single, centralized mainframe farm is entirely in the realm of possibility, with ordinary users switching to thin-client wallets or online services from the present full-node clients. What is to prevent this from happening?

one thing worrying is, once they link you to one bitcoin address they can track all your transaction even when they were anonymous before

So basically the concept of a centralized currency is a myth? In this case the selling point should be transparency.

as it happens, i'm an expert in network theory. if you're trying to ask 'which is more decentralised, bitcoins or the united states dollar?', you would need to specify the question better.

regardless, in many respects, the answer probably isn't what you think it is. there is probably, practically speaking, less centralised control over the united states dollar than bitcoin. but that is a thick claim that depends on many propositions (including, for example, the notion that the united states government is not a single entity - something the political crazies here probably won't understand or accept). i think the following claim is true: it would take fewer people acting independently to destroy bitcoin's value than to destroy the value in the united states dollar.

which looks more like the bitcoin system? :

this analysis is correct; ignore the children who call you a 'troll'. note that your analysis doesn't imply that people shouldn't use bitcoin; it just points out that the 'decentralised' label is pure marketing, not a rational or factual statement. i have pointed this out many times before in this forum, and security expert ben laurie has done so on his blog and in an academic paper (based on some of my comments on his blog post). a more definite example of centralisation is blockchain checkpointing, written into the clients that most people use.

bitcoin gives you another option about which 'central' entities to trust. it does not eliminate trust. people who say otherwise don't understand either the protocol or the notion of centralisation.

I stopped reading right here.

+1

Yes, the hard work of people working on BTC denominated services, shops or maintaining the software. Hopefully not the "hard work" of people just hyping BTC because they hope it will raise in value

Don't waste ur time for trolls like him.

Can you explain the logic behind this? My understanding is that multiples of "world gdp" are traded on forex markets every month.

I agree on the microtransactions. That is my favorite part, there is a huge untapped source of economic activity in that. You have various other claims ("zero added value" for buying goods, etc) that seem extreme to me, but just suffice to say I think the bitcoin network should be viewed as a tool. People are still figuring out how to use it.

the recent price rises or hype as you describe it are due to the hard work of the bitcoin community especially this forum

bitcoin should be experiencing this kind of price rise due to is required replacement as an economic monetary commodity

houses for example should be going down in price because they are needed as homes for families the housing bubbles are

whats wrong not bitcoin i don't see bitcoin putting people on the streets its doing the exact opposite

dunbar your saying its neither a currency nor decentralized, its as close to both of those things as any reasonable observer could assume