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Lots of words, not a lot of concrete use cases. If you scroll way down this is what you get: - "a reserve/settlement currency" - Why?? certainly not for stabi

Lots of words, not a lot of concrete use cases. If you scroll way down this is what you get: - "a reserve/settlement currency" - Why?? certainly not for stability. - "replacements for huge swathes of today’s financial industry" - Still not concrete! - "namespaces (such as domain names)" - Also vague what it would improve. - "implementations of distributed storage systems" - To which he adds "the centralized solution works just fine". So... still waiting to hear a concrete, specific, cogent use case.

dwaltrip 9y ago
> a reserve/settlement currency" - Why?? certainly not for stability Bitcoin volatility year over year shows a very strong downtrend. I would not be surprised at all if this trend continues. Here's a nice graph: https://www.lombardiletter.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/bitcoin-volatility-index.png https://www.lombardiletter.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/bi...
- theseatoms 9y ago
  I never understood the "volatility criticism" of the value of Bitcoin. It'd be remarkable if Bitcoin attained a very high value without short-to-medium term volatility. Realized volatility is not an intrinsic property to the technology or design itself, but rather a reflection of current aspects of the marketplace which can improve over time. (i.e. robust and trusted exchanges, well-capitalized market-makers, more diverse attempts at valuation, less emotional market participants, etc.)
  - sooheon 9y ago
    You are correct, and I think the volatility criticism was not directed to the tech or design, but to lack of trust in exchanges, unclear valuation, and emotional market participation.
Taek 9y ago
Blockchains in their original design were special because they could resist contentious changes in the event of political turmoil. Bitcoin protects users against hyperinflation chosen by a ruling elite trying to fund a war, for example. Bitcoin is a money that doesn't grant massive economic power to a controlling authority. The US has massive global influence derived from its status as the global reserve currency. Using bitcoin does not grant that power to anyone, and therefore could be argued as a better base for a global currency. Namespace stuff is exciting for the same reason. Today there are powers and squatters and authorities that can decide if you get the right to a domain. This is inherently political for contentious names and sites. Decentralization isolates you from these risks. Blockchain 2.0 has spoiled this quite a bit by running things like a startup and essentially giving full control to the founding team. I think most people who are newer to the blockchain space completely miss the advantages of a system that is extremely difficult to change.
- shandor 9y ago
  I keep hearing about an inherent problem in this capability to "resist contentious changes". In dark corners it keeps whispered that if any one entity gets control over 50% of the mining capacity, they can essentially decide the "immutable truth" in the blockchain. Is there any merit to that scenario, or is it complete bogus? And if it's true, how come it's not more openly discussed? I guess what I'm asking is if things like the hard fork of The DAO Ethereum blockchain are actually a fundamentally solved problem. Stuff like that happening when our banking infrastructure has moved to a blockchain sounds like a disaster.
  - doomrobo 9y ago
    You listed two forms of control: social and computational. The latter is baked into Bitcoin and we rely on the assumption that no single entity will control >50% of the computing power of the network. This situation being "bad" is purely a consequence of the construction of the blockchain. On the other hand, the DAO fork was a result of centralized control due to social factors. As with bitcoin, a >50% consensus is necessary to fork a blockchain. But because there is a single overwhelmingly popular ethereum client, the developers had the ability to make the software obey the fork by default. A referendum was conducted in good faith, and the devs flipped the switch. But again, this was only possible because everyone was using the same client to begin with, and few people bother to change the default behavior.

dwaltrip 9y ago

> a reserve/settlement currency" - Why?? certainly not for stability Bitcoin volatility year over year shows a very strong downtrend. I would not be surprised at all if this trend continues. Here's a nice graph: https://www.lombardiletter.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/bitcoin-volatility-index.png https://www.lombardiletter.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/bi...

theseatoms 9y ago
I never understood the "volatility criticism" of the value of Bitcoin. It'd be remarkable if Bitcoin attained a very high value without short-to-medium term volatility. Realized volatility is not an intrinsic property to the technology or design itself, but rather a reflection of current aspects of the marketplace which can improve over time. (i.e. robust and trusted exchanges, well-capitalized market-makers, more diverse attempts at valuation, less emotional market participants, etc.)
- sooheon 9y ago
  You are correct, and I think the volatility criticism was not directed to the tech or design, but to lack of trust in exchanges, unclear valuation, and emotional market participation.

Taek 9y ago

Blockchains in their original design were special because they could resist contentious changes in the event of political turmoil. Bitcoin protects users against hyperinflation chosen by a ruling elite trying to fund a war, for example. Bitcoin is a money that doesn't grant massive economic power to a controlling authority. The US has massive global influence derived from its status as the global reserve currency. Using bitcoin does not grant that power to anyone, and therefore could be argued as a better base for a global currency. Namespace stuff is exciting for the same reason. Today there are powers and squatters and authorities that can decide if you get the right to a domain. This is inherently political for contentious names and sites. Decentralization isolates you from these risks. Blockchain 2.0 has spoiled this quite a bit by running things like a startup and essentially giving full control to the founding team. I think most people who are newer to the blockchain space completely miss the advantages of a system that is extremely difficult to change.

shandor 9y ago
I keep hearing about an inherent problem in this capability to "resist contentious changes". In dark corners it keeps whispered that if any one entity gets control over 50% of the mining capacity, they can essentially decide the "immutable truth" in the blockchain. Is there any merit to that scenario, or is it complete bogus? And if it's true, how come it's not more openly discussed? I guess what I'm asking is if things like the hard fork of The DAO Ethereum blockchain are actually a fundamentally solved problem. Stuff like that happening when our banking infrastructure has moved to a blockchain sounds like a disaster.
- doomrobo 9y ago
  You listed two forms of control: social and computational. The latter is baked into Bitcoin and we rely on the assumption that no single entity will control >50% of the computing power of the network. This situation being "bad" is purely a consequence of the construction of the blockchain. On the other hand, the DAO fork was a result of centralized control due to social factors. As with bitcoin, a >50% consensus is necessary to fork a blockchain. But because there is a single overwhelmingly popular ethereum client, the developers had the ability to make the software obey the fork by default. A referendum was conducted in good faith, and the devs flipped the switch. But again, this was only possible because everyone was using the same client to begin with, and few people bother to change the default behavior.