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Watching Ethereum discover why there are lawyers is similar to watching the Bitcoin community find out why there are (central) banks. The bitcoin world now has

• hngiszmo 10y ago
  You are very much mistaken on that one. Those consensus meetings can not decide anything against the will of the users. In fact bitcoin core would hard fork bitcoin if miners agreed to mine too big blocks and nobody could dictate the users of either of the chains to switch to the other. The user is in full control which type of bitcoin he wants to use but as such forks cause insecurity in the market, consensus meetings are held, to gauge the overall potential for consensus on the available options going forward. The most recent changes like CSV are only activated if 95% of miners want them, which would not stop the other 5% from going on without that. And you can be damn sure about seriously controversial changes triggering a 5% fork if need be.
  • JumpCrisscross 10y ago
    > The user is in full control which type of bitcoin he wants to use I am in full control of which currency I use when transacting.
    • kang 10y ago
      If the govt changes monetary policy, your held dollars change definition; if bitcoin devs do anything my bitcoins remain as per the definition i agreed to. I can choose to move to that new currency or not.
      • JumpCrisscross 10y ago
        You can stipulate in a contract that it may only be settled with paper notes printer before 1974. It would be silly, since it would make transacting difficult. But no more so than holding some deprecated shard of a cryptocurrency. A better store of value are real assets.
  • empath75 10y ago
    The vast majority of people using Bitcoin are locked out of profitable Bitcoin mining because of asics and power costs. There's a small cartel of Chinese miners that have the power to decide 'what Bitcoin is'. You can use whatever Bitcoin software you want, but if you're not using theirs, it's worthless.
    • xorcist 10y ago
      That's not true. You could just as well say that there is number of exchanges in the world that trade Bitcoin against USD and other currencies. It is this trade that give Bitcoin value, and only the Bitcoin fork the exchanges use is valuable. If all the miners would fork Bitcoin today to change consensus (perhaps to earn more from mining), and all the users and exchanges stayed behind, that would only be visible as a drop in mining power. In reality it's much more complicated, and consensus changes are not to be made lightly.
      • empath75 10y ago
        The exchanges wanted to fork to increase the bandwidth cap. The miners refused. You can see who won.
        • xorcist 10y ago
          That does not mean that miners dictate which fork to use. The opposite situation, that miners wanted bigger blocks but exchanges and users refused, would be similarly impossible. It's a bit like mutually assured destruction, nobody wants to see a big drop in value.
    • im3w1l 10y ago
      At it's core, the true bitcoin is the bitcoin that "can be exchanged for goods and services" (and other currencies).
• shrugger 10y ago
  missed a couple Govt classes? The existence of central banks are opposed by people who want to restrict third-party control of their money, not let any loser who walks by have a say (like DAO) Ethereum is a bad idea and people are too embarrassed to admit it. I get it. However, turning around and shoehorning that sentiment into "They don't understand central banking" is just foolish and highlights the sort of headstrong obliviousness that has essentially springboarded DAO into the spotlight to begin with. Smart contracts aren't good for stupid users. Someone outsmarted a big group, now they're having a fit because all of their money is going to leave, and rather than walk away from the poker table with their head hung low, they've decided to just rob the dealer and try for heisting the vault while they're at it. And then they have the gall to say "Oh, you just dont understand the purpose of central banking" as they oppose a system that they put in place to benefit themselves, by themselves.
  • wslh 10y ago
    What (I think) OP is saying is that at the end power is what matters and the power is not evenly distributed like the blockchain. Looking at the long block size discussion you can see which stakeholders has power while others just watch. I am long on cryptocurrencies but the community at large needs a reality check to see where they currently fit.
• sandworm101 10y ago
  But at least with bitcoin it is possible to insert an arbitration layer over and above the currency. The execution of transfers in bitcoin is still separate from any associated contract, which makes it more flexible and therefore more viable imho. Watching this rapid evolution towards traditional legal systems reminds me of an oddball scifi story about life on the surface of a neutron star. Everything moves so quickly that, by our perspective orbiting the star, civilizations may rise and fall within days. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon%27s_Egg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon%27s_Egg
• darawk 10y ago
  It isn't true that they have no recourse. The miners can simply refuse to upgrade, or people can make new forks of their own. That is the best kind of oversight - the ability to fork the currency.
  • abritinthebay 10y ago
    Which dilutes it's utility, marketplace, and value. Not a great idea for a currency.
    • darawk 10y ago
      How does it do any of those things? Provided a fork is sufficiently rare, as it should be, because the threat of a fork is enough to mostly keep it from happening - it should have minimal impact on any of those things. You could equally say that the threat of collapse of the US government dilutes the utility, marketplace and value of the US dollar. Sure, it's true, but it's irrelevant.
      • abritinthebay 10y ago
        Well yes, if they don't actually fork it's not a problem. If people DO and do it more than once then it is. You're... kind of agreeing with me here. The reason a threat of a fork works is because it had the results I mentioned.
• empath75 10y ago
  I think ethereum will mostly be useful for people who don't have access to a real court system. Which is to say 'criminal enterprises'.
  • deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  • prodigal_erik 10y ago
    There are some contracts that courts refuse to enforce on public policy grounds, yet the contracting parties are not criminals.
  • Klinky 10y ago
    I think Bitcoin will mostly be useful for people who don't have access to a real banking system. Which is to say 'criminal enterprises'. Basically what is the point you're trying to make?
    • Fej 10y ago
      That is actually relatively accurate.
      • Klinky 10y ago
        Yes, accurate for all cryptocurrencies. Pointing to one and suggesting it'll be used mainly by criminals is silly.
  • tamana 10y ago
    Or people who live in different countries without a common court system
• meowface 10y ago
  Despite Bitcoin's downsides, they've never actually had an issue nearly as bad as what Ethereum's experiencing now. With Bitcoin, most issues were a result of private organizations misappropriating money or security. But the entire foundation of Ethereum is now considered completely unreliable.
  • nawitus 10y ago
    "But the entire foundation of Ethereum is now considered completely unreliable." Considered by who? The bugs are in the smart contract, not Ethereum itself.
    • Cyph0n 10y ago
      But wasn't the smart contract system the selling point for the novelty of Ethereum? If it doesn't work reliably, why should we use it over the more mature and stable Bitcoin?
      • anonymousab 10y ago
        It works reliably, insofar as you are fully able to write and execute a desired contract, but also able to write a contract that shoots you in the foot. Like a certain programming language's features, it may happen to be easier than not.
        • Cyph0n 10y ago
          That's a strange way to design a financial contract system. I mean, just like Rust checks for memory safety at compile time, can't the contract language make similar checks? Or perhaps the contracts can run in a simulator first?
          • nawitus 10y ago
            Yes, you can write a contract language (or improve an existing one) which contains static checks. That hasn't been implemented yet probably because of lack of resources. The higher level contract language is compiled down to byte code. You can in addition implement these safety checks to be executed during runtime, but that costs money.
• mrb 10y ago
  No, Bitcoin was never supposed to be "against Davos meetings". These consensus meetings are all and only about increasing network capacity, that is all. You seem to conflate different concepts without understanding them. I suggest you read the Introduction of Satoshi's famous whitepaper¹. In short Bitcoin is about: (1) providing non-reversible electronic transactions, (2) reducing transaction costs, and (3) enabling micro-transactions: "Commerce on the Internet has come to rely almost exclusively on financial institutions serving as trusted third parties to process electronic payments. While the system works well enough for most transactions, it still suffers from the inherent weaknesses of the trust based model. Completely non-reversible transactions are not really possible, since financial institutions cannot avoid mediating disputes. The cost of mediation increases transaction costs, limiting the minimum practical transaction size and cutting off the possibility for small casual transactions, and there is a broader cost in the loss of ability to make non-reversible payments for nonreversible services. With the possibility of reversal, the need for trust spreads. Merchants must be wary of their customers, hassling them for more information than they would otherwise need. A certain percentage of fraud is accepted as unavoidable. These costs and payment uncertainties can be avoided in person by using physical currency, but no mechanism exists to make payments over a communications channel without a trusted party." ¹ https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf
  • argonaut 10y ago
    Commerce on the Internet has come to rely almost exclusively on financial institutions serving as trusted third parties to process electronic payments. While the system works well enough for most transactions, it still suffers from the inherent weaknesses of the trust based model The problem with [a trusted central authority] is that the fate of the entire money system depends on the company running the mint, with every transaction having to go through them, just like a bank. Sure, it's hard to say exactly what Bitcoin is for or against, given that it's a multi-faceted community with many different goals. But to deny that decentralization and lack of central planning is a huge motivation / driver / goal of both the original inception of Bitcoin, and also the community that developed around Bitcoin, is pretty hard to believe.
• narrator 10y ago
  The interesting thing to me about bitcoin's oligopoly of miners is that it is based on a real thing: "Hashing Power". This corresponds to real electricity usage and real chip design. In most systems there is something holy, sacred and arbitrary in it that maintains the structure. Bitcoin suffers from this the least compared to other systems.
  • TazeTSchnitzel 10y ago
    Yes, Bitcoin is based on destroying the planet through causing climate change, a novel source of political power.
    • Fej 10y ago
      I've been trying to tell people this for a while now. Bitcoin has to be the most wasteful software project ever made; I'm sure it has indirectly pumped millions of tons of CO2 into the atmosphere at this point. And for what? The blockchain is a neat academic piece for which we have yet to find a good use. Bitcoin is not usable as a currency (except for illicit trade) and it never will be. The only thing Bitcoin has ever been good for is as a pump & dump scheme, and the "dump" part already happened anyway. If we're going to blow so much computer power on raw calculations, we could use it for Folding@home, SETI@home, or any number of other great causes. But this is just a waste.
      • emiliobumachar 10y ago
        Without having crunched the numbers, I assume bitcoin mining is less harmful than gold and silver mining. So, beware of status quo bias.