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I agree with mostly everything he said, to be honest. I've stuck with Bitcoin now for the last 3+ years and interestingly, that was only -because- Bitcoin made

I agree with mostly everything he said, to be honest. I've stuck with Bitcoin now for the last 3+ years and interestingly, that was only -because- Bitcoin made it so hard to do anything useful. I would need to learn how all kinds of niche areas of cryptography worked and the fun of hopelessly trying to outsmart Bitcoin's god-awful restrictions is what kept things fresh to me. Sure, it did teach me a lot of obscure things about crypto + game theory, and some of those things actually turned out to be quite useful. But I also can't deny how much longer it takes to do the most basic things in Bitcoin and I think that now we're progressing towards using blockchains to solve problems outside of Bitcoin -- Ethereum seems more up to the task than Bitcoin. That's not to put Bitcoin down though. There has definitely been some tremendous innovations there recently: segregated witnesses and sidechains are pretty cool. But I've also seen the community change significantly since I first got involved and I'd argue most of those changes have been bad. For example: /r/Bitcoin seems to have become a toxic echo chamber for irrational hatred against former high contributing core members and almost any kind of counter-views are censored which is honestly quite disturbing. Most of Bitcoin's current media is also controlled by only a handful of individuals so its very easy to manipulate the crowd into "consensus" but I won't even go there. I'll personally always love Bitcoin but I can't see that these problems can be fixed at this point. The Bitcoin project was largely hijacked as far as I can tell and since the crowd has been won there's no going back now.

madeofpalk 10y ago
> /r/Bitcoin seems to have become a toxic echo chamber for irrational hatred against former high contributing core members and almost any kind of counter-views are censored which is honestly quite disturbing. This is the main reason why I can't ever take bitcoin seriously - their community just seems to have so much unconstructive hatred towards anyone who ever says anything negative about bitcoin.
- vertex-four 10y ago
  I can't take Bitcoin seriously because its community, at the same time, holds strong anarcho-capitalist ideals, and supports various companies which are trying to monopolise various forms of Bitcoin transaction. For example, a physical "Bitcoin payment card" which can only be used with terminals sold by one vendor with bitcoins stored on the same vendor's servers. If that had taken off, it would quickly become nearly impossible to replace - and yet Bitcoiners thought this was the best thing ever, instead of applying critical thinking and realising it'd be possible to create a similar system but open to any vendor you'd like. As long as it's not the Government restricting your choice, it's not bad, right?
  - Uptrenda 10y ago
    Almost every company in the Bitcoin space at the moment is doing something that's diametrically opposed to the core innovations behind Bitcoin. A good follow-up to your payment card example: its long since been possible to do peer-to-peer, decentralized cryptocurrency exchange without a third-party with more than one kind of smart contract to allow this, yet because centralized exchanges are easier to build and more profitable to run – they have become the norm -- and the exchange just ends up "iterating" on security ;) The Bitcoin eco-system is full of double-speak and immense cognitive dissonance. It's a weird community where people purport to be about decentralization, freedom, and security, when in reality the people support almost the exact opposite by preferring centralized services with almost no individual control or security. Most people don't even seem to notice that the FinTech services that are run in the Bitcoin space have essentially become as bad as the banks that Bitcoin sought to replace, and I don't mean bank as in "your own bank, Bitcoin (tm)" – more the kind that opportunistically exploits you for a profit because you have no better options. Worst still: at least actual banks tend to have some amount of oversight in how they're run, with some level of recoverability if something goes wrong. With centralized, cryptocurrency FinTech the operator is essentially saying to a crowd of hackers how much semi-untraceable, pseudo-anonymous assets they have to irrevocably steal and since anyone can start a FinTech company based on blockchains -- we've even had some companies that were run by people barely out of high school. Truly, the fact that no one even questions this as a security model for FinTech in the Bitcoin space is absurd. But they don't: which is why its easy for me to predict at least 5 major FinTech hacks in the Bitcoin space for 2017. I'll update this post when they happen.
    - awt 10y ago
      That a decentralized currency is a good idea does not necessarily imply that a decentralized market of any kind is also a good idea. Also, there are sane people in Bitcoin. Check out the bitcoin category of Trilema.
  - current_call 10y ago
    I can't take Bitcoin seriously because its community, at the same time, holds strong anarcho-capitalist ideals, and supports various companies which are trying to monopolise various forms of Bitcoin transaction. The community isn't one person.
- aedron 10y ago
  > their community just seems to have so much unconstructive hatred towards anyone who ever says anything negative about bitcoin As the parent stated, they have intense hatred for anyone with a different opinion, even the very people who developed bitcoin. A dysfunctional community indeed, and this extends to the leadership. This is my main reason for having divested a lot of money out of bitcoin. I still believe it will succeed in becoming an important part of the international payments infrastructure, but it will be in spite of its own community and it will likely take a lot longer because of it. I do believe that for cryptocurrencies, it is bitcoin or bust, though. If bitcoin burns you won't be able to sell the world on another one. Also, I don't believe that the thing other cryptocurrencies are 'fixing' are improvements, but rather detriments. Bitcoin is attractive because of the fixed supply and the decentralized structure, Satoshi brilliantly got those right, even though they are at the same time some of the hurdles to its success.
  - Anonobread 10y ago
    > they have intense hatred for anyone with a different opinion, even the very people who developed bitcoin. Hal Finney, the very first recipient of a Bitcoin transaction claimed, quote: "Bitcoin itself cannot scale to have every single financial transaction in the world be broadcast to everyone and included in the block chain. There needs to be a secondary level of payment systems which is lighter weight and more efficient." [1] And Satoshi Nakamoto stated: "Piling every proof-of-work quorum system in the world into one dataset doesn't scale." [...] "Bitcoin users might get increasingly tyrannical about limiting the size of the chain so it's easy for lots of users and small devices." [2] Did you have anyone else in mind? Perhaps Mike Hearn and Gavin Andresen? It's a matter of historical record that these two believe gigablocks will assuredly cause Bitcoin P2P nodes to become confined to datacenters. Their gigablocker quotes follow: Gavin Andresen: "there will be big companies spending lots of engineering dollars on their own highly optimized versions of bitcoin. I bet there will be alternative, secure-and-trusted, very-high-speed network connections between major bitcoin transaction processors. Maybe it will just be bitcoin transactions flying across the existing Visa/MasterCard/etc networks" [3] Mike Hearn: "probably 2 or 3 racks of machines" [4] Gavin Andresen: "No, it's completely distributed at the moment. That will begin to change as we scale up. I don't want to oversell BitCoin. As we scale up there will be bumps along the way. I'm confident of it. Why? For example, as the volume of transactions come up--right now, I can run BitCoin on my personal computer and communicate over my DSL line; and I get every single transaction that's happening everywhere in the world. As we scale up, that won't be possible any more. If there are millions of bitcoin transactions happening every second, that will be a great problem for BitCoin to have--means it is very popular, very trusted--but obviously I won't be able to run it on my own personal computer. It will take dedicated fleets of computers with high-speed network interfaces, and that kind of big iron to actually do all that transaction processing. I'm confident that will happen and that will evolve. But right now all the people trying to generate bitcoins on their own computers and who like the fact that they can be a self-contained unit, I think they may not be so happy if BitCoin gets really big and they can no longer do that." Amir Taaki, author of libbitcoin and one of the most ardent early adopters of Bitcoin is further in strong disagreement with Gavin and Mike, and always has been! So this notion that the "original people" are being hated on, is just false. Read the libbitcoin manifesto [5], or the "Political Neutrality is a Myth" interview [6]. After Gavin and Mike's push for radically reshaping Bitcoin from a P2P currency into a DatacenterCoin failed (multiple times), this whole issue culminated in Gavin exclaiming that Craig Wright must be Satoshi Nakamoto, "beyond a reasonable doubt"! Which may have had at least something to do with the fact that Craig claimed to be running Bitcoin with 340GB blocks on his (also confirmed fake) "supercomputer". But of course the Craig and Gavin show had been meticulously timed to coincide with a major industry conference. Had it not been for astute cybersleuths cracking the case within minutes of it making the media rounds, we could've seen Gavin reclaim the throne with the help of an utter conman. Yes, some people are ticked at these guys, as they should be. It's a remarkably (!!!) hostile environment that we've been dealing with for over 18 months, as the current lead developer Wlad so aptly puts it: "Day in, day out, there is trolling, targeted attacks, shilling on social media targeted toward us. I don’t know of any other project like this. I’ve seen developer teams in MMOs under similar pressure from users; but possibly this is even worse. There, there are avid disagreements about how the game rules should be changed, here people get worked up about changes affecting a whole economic system. And the people attacking are, in many cases, not even users of the software." [7] [1] https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2500.msg34211#msg34211 https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2500.msg34211#msg342... [2] https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1790.msg28917#msg28917 https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1790.msg28917#msg289... [3] https://bitcointalk.org/?topic=3118.0 https://bitcointalk.org/?topic=3118.0 [4] https://en.bitcoin.it/w/index.php?title=Scalability&oldid=3555 https://en.bitcoin.it/w/index.php?title=Scalability&oldid=35... [5] http://nakamotoinstitute.org/libbitcoin-manifesto/ http://nakamotoinstitute.org/libbitcoin-manifesto/ [6] http://cointelegraph.com/news/bitcoins-political-neutrality-is-a-myth-amir-taaki-interview http://cointelegraph.com/news/bitcoins-political-neutrality-... [7] https://laanwj.github.io/2016/05/06/hostility-scams-and-moving-forward.html https://laanwj.github.io/2016/05/06/hostility-scams-and-movi...
- Cthulhu_ 10y ago
  It's in the community's best interest to defend and glorify bitcoin - they're the ones that invested in it and want its price to go up, so they can go and sell it for real money again.
pjc50 10y ago
What stops the Ethereum community from disintegrating for the same reasons after the promised rapture is not forthcoming?
- drcode 10y ago
  Mainly because it has a benevolent dictator, which creates very different dynamics (for good or ill)
  - pjc50 10y ago
    Ah, decentralisation! :)
  - zeven7 10y ago
    Blockstream / Greg Maxwell is Bitcoin's dictator. If you ask whether I'd rather follow Vitalik Buterin or Greg Maxwell, the choice is Vitalik all the way.
    - drcode 10y ago
      They only have enough power though to enforce default behavior (i.e. "do nothing") whereas vitalik probably has enough power to enforce active behavior.
Nutomic 10y ago
> /r/Bitcoin seems to have become a toxic echo chamber for irrational hatred against former high contributing core members and almost any kind of counter-views are censored which is honestly quite disturbing. You should go to /r/btc instead. It has a much better culture, and no censorship.
- bhaak 10y ago
  Have you been to /r/btc recently? It's mostly a bash-the-other-subreddit thing now.
- poelzi 10y ago
  many subs are irrational towards objects of any sort. I'm quite proud of my shadowban on /r/physics for poking on obvious wrong assumptions :)
smaps 10y ago
You're definitely right about the consolidation of influence... as someone who was a mod on bitcointalk.org and /r/bitcoin for years I hate it and it drove me to leave both of those behind.
kingrunner 10y ago
What was your experience with game theory and bitcoin? Do you recommend any readings or links?

madeofpalk 10y ago

> /r/Bitcoin seems to have become a toxic echo chamber for irrational hatred against former high contributing core members and almost any kind of counter-views are censored which is honestly quite disturbing. This is the main reason why I can't ever take bitcoin seriously - their community just seems to have so much unconstructive hatred towards anyone who ever says anything negative about bitcoin.

vertex-four 10y ago
I can't take Bitcoin seriously because its community, at the same time, holds strong anarcho-capitalist ideals, and supports various companies which are trying to monopolise various forms of Bitcoin transaction. For example, a physical "Bitcoin payment card" which can only be used with terminals sold by one vendor with bitcoins stored on the same vendor's servers. If that had taken off, it would quickly become nearly impossible to replace - and yet Bitcoiners thought this was the best thing ever, instead of applying critical thinking and realising it'd be possible to create a similar system but open to any vendor you'd like. As long as it's not the Government restricting your choice, it's not bad, right?
- Uptrenda 10y ago
  Almost every company in the Bitcoin space at the moment is doing something that's diametrically opposed to the core innovations behind Bitcoin. A good follow-up to your payment card example: its long since been possible to do peer-to-peer, decentralized cryptocurrency exchange without a third-party with more than one kind of smart contract to allow this, yet because centralized exchanges are easier to build and more profitable to run – they have become the norm -- and the exchange just ends up "iterating" on security ;) The Bitcoin eco-system is full of double-speak and immense cognitive dissonance. It's a weird community where people purport to be about decentralization, freedom, and security, when in reality the people support almost the exact opposite by preferring centralized services with almost no individual control or security. Most people don't even seem to notice that the FinTech services that are run in the Bitcoin space have essentially become as bad as the banks that Bitcoin sought to replace, and I don't mean bank as in "your own bank, Bitcoin (tm)" – more the kind that opportunistically exploits you for a profit because you have no better options. Worst still: at least actual banks tend to have some amount of oversight in how they're run, with some level of recoverability if something goes wrong. With centralized, cryptocurrency FinTech the operator is essentially saying to a crowd of hackers how much semi-untraceable, pseudo-anonymous assets they have to irrevocably steal and since anyone can start a FinTech company based on blockchains -- we've even had some companies that were run by people barely out of high school. Truly, the fact that no one even questions this as a security model for FinTech in the Bitcoin space is absurd. But they don't: which is why its easy for me to predict at least 5 major FinTech hacks in the Bitcoin space for 2017. I'll update this post when they happen.
  - awt 10y ago
    That a decentralized currency is a good idea does not necessarily imply that a decentralized market of any kind is also a good idea. Also, there are sane people in Bitcoin. Check out the bitcoin category of Trilema.
- current_call 10y ago
  I can't take Bitcoin seriously because its community, at the same time, holds strong anarcho-capitalist ideals, and supports various companies which are trying to monopolise various forms of Bitcoin transaction. The community isn't one person.
aedron 10y ago
> their community just seems to have so much unconstructive hatred towards anyone who ever says anything negative about bitcoin As the parent stated, they have intense hatred for anyone with a different opinion, even the very people who developed bitcoin. A dysfunctional community indeed, and this extends to the leadership. This is my main reason for having divested a lot of money out of bitcoin. I still believe it will succeed in becoming an important part of the international payments infrastructure, but it will be in spite of its own community and it will likely take a lot longer because of it. I do believe that for cryptocurrencies, it is bitcoin or bust, though. If bitcoin burns you won't be able to sell the world on another one. Also, I don't believe that the thing other cryptocurrencies are 'fixing' are improvements, but rather detriments. Bitcoin is attractive because of the fixed supply and the decentralized structure, Satoshi brilliantly got those right, even though they are at the same time some of the hurdles to its success.
- Anonobread 10y ago
  > they have intense hatred for anyone with a different opinion, even the very people who developed bitcoin. Hal Finney, the very first recipient of a Bitcoin transaction claimed, quote: "Bitcoin itself cannot scale to have every single financial transaction in the world be broadcast to everyone and included in the block chain. There needs to be a secondary level of payment systems which is lighter weight and more efficient." [1] And Satoshi Nakamoto stated: "Piling every proof-of-work quorum system in the world into one dataset doesn't scale." [...] "Bitcoin users might get increasingly tyrannical about limiting the size of the chain so it's easy for lots of users and small devices." [2] Did you have anyone else in mind? Perhaps Mike Hearn and Gavin Andresen? It's a matter of historical record that these two believe gigablocks will assuredly cause Bitcoin P2P nodes to become confined to datacenters. Their gigablocker quotes follow: Gavin Andresen: "there will be big companies spending lots of engineering dollars on their own highly optimized versions of bitcoin. I bet there will be alternative, secure-and-trusted, very-high-speed network connections between major bitcoin transaction processors. Maybe it will just be bitcoin transactions flying across the existing Visa/MasterCard/etc networks" [3] Mike Hearn: "probably 2 or 3 racks of machines" [4] Gavin Andresen: "No, it's completely distributed at the moment. That will begin to change as we scale up. I don't want to oversell BitCoin. As we scale up there will be bumps along the way. I'm confident of it. Why? For example, as the volume of transactions come up--right now, I can run BitCoin on my personal computer and communicate over my DSL line; and I get every single transaction that's happening everywhere in the world. As we scale up, that won't be possible any more. If there are millions of bitcoin transactions happening every second, that will be a great problem for BitCoin to have--means it is very popular, very trusted--but obviously I won't be able to run it on my own personal computer. It will take dedicated fleets of computers with high-speed network interfaces, and that kind of big iron to actually do all that transaction processing. I'm confident that will happen and that will evolve. But right now all the people trying to generate bitcoins on their own computers and who like the fact that they can be a self-contained unit, I think they may not be so happy if BitCoin gets really big and they can no longer do that." Amir Taaki, author of libbitcoin and one of the most ardent early adopters of Bitcoin is further in strong disagreement with Gavin and Mike, and always has been! So this notion that the "original people" are being hated on, is just false. Read the libbitcoin manifesto [5], or the "Political Neutrality is a Myth" interview [6]. After Gavin and Mike's push for radically reshaping Bitcoin from a P2P currency into a DatacenterCoin failed (multiple times), this whole issue culminated in Gavin exclaiming that Craig Wright must be Satoshi Nakamoto, "beyond a reasonable doubt"! Which may have had at least something to do with the fact that Craig claimed to be running Bitcoin with 340GB blocks on his (also confirmed fake) "supercomputer". But of course the Craig and Gavin show had been meticulously timed to coincide with a major industry conference. Had it not been for astute cybersleuths cracking the case within minutes of it making the media rounds, we could've seen Gavin reclaim the throne with the help of an utter conman. Yes, some people are ticked at these guys, as they should be. It's a remarkably (!!!) hostile environment that we've been dealing with for over 18 months, as the current lead developer Wlad so aptly puts it: "Day in, day out, there is trolling, targeted attacks, shilling on social media targeted toward us. I don’t know of any other project like this. I’ve seen developer teams in MMOs under similar pressure from users; but possibly this is even worse. There, there are avid disagreements about how the game rules should be changed, here people get worked up about changes affecting a whole economic system. And the people attacking are, in many cases, not even users of the software." [7] [1] https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2500.msg34211#msg34211 https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2500.msg34211#msg342... [2] https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1790.msg28917#msg28917 https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1790.msg28917#msg289... [3] https://bitcointalk.org/?topic=3118.0 https://bitcointalk.org/?topic=3118.0 [4] https://en.bitcoin.it/w/index.php?title=Scalability&oldid=3555 https://en.bitcoin.it/w/index.php?title=Scalability&oldid=35... [5] http://nakamotoinstitute.org/libbitcoin-manifesto/ http://nakamotoinstitute.org/libbitcoin-manifesto/ [6] http://cointelegraph.com/news/bitcoins-political-neutrality-is-a-myth-amir-taaki-interview http://cointelegraph.com/news/bitcoins-political-neutrality-... [7] https://laanwj.github.io/2016/05/06/hostility-scams-and-moving-forward.html https://laanwj.github.io/2016/05/06/hostility-scams-and-movi...
Cthulhu_ 10y ago
It's in the community's best interest to defend and glorify bitcoin - they're the ones that invested in it and want its price to go up, so they can go and sell it for real money again.

pjc50 10y ago

What stops the Ethereum community from disintegrating for the same reasons after the promised rapture is not forthcoming?

drcode 10y ago
Mainly because it has a benevolent dictator, which creates very different dynamics (for good or ill)
- pjc50 10y ago
  Ah, decentralisation! :)
- zeven7 10y ago
  Blockstream / Greg Maxwell is Bitcoin's dictator. If you ask whether I'd rather follow Vitalik Buterin or Greg Maxwell, the choice is Vitalik all the way.
  - drcode 10y ago
    They only have enough power though to enforce default behavior (i.e. "do nothing") whereas vitalik probably has enough power to enforce active behavior.

Nutomic 10y ago

> /r/Bitcoin seems to have become a toxic echo chamber for irrational hatred against former high contributing core members and almost any kind of counter-views are censored which is honestly quite disturbing. You should go to /r/btc instead. It has a much better culture, and no censorship.

bhaak 10y ago
Have you been to /r/btc recently? It's mostly a bash-the-other-subreddit thing now.
poelzi 10y ago
many subs are irrational towards objects of any sort. I'm quite proud of my shadowban on /r/physics for poking on obvious wrong assumptions :)

smaps 10y ago

You're definitely right about the consolidation of influence... as someone who was a mod on bitcointalk.org and /r/bitcoin for years I hate it and it drove me to leave both of those behind.

kingrunner 10y ago

What was your experience with game theory and bitcoin? Do you recommend any readings or links?