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And what is the point? Does the price prove that bitcoin has not failed? To me, bitcoin died sometime in 2013 when mining became hopelessly centralised, breaki

And what is the point? Does the price prove that bitcoin has not failed? To me, bitcoin died sometime in 2013 when mining became hopelessly centralised, breaking the economic and security models Satoshi had set forth. The bitcoin thereafter has been a soulness Frankenstein animated by a mixture of ego, greed, and hubris. I don't want to make any predictions, but when the crash comes it will be over before you knew it. As for the wider field of blockchain/DLT, it bears an uncanny parallel to the early days of nuclear physics when radioactivity was first discovered by the Curies: The science behind it was be sound, yet any benefit to mankind was overshadowed by the cottage industry selling radioactive snake oil for a long time before the mania died down. And people died when basic precautious were not taken. It may work down the road and it may not, but right now all I see is woo in every direction.

colordrops 9y ago
Do you understand the Bitcoin security model? It has not been broken. And do you understand what "woo" means? Your hand wavey proclamations about Bitcoin fit the bill.
- madshiva 9y ago
  A good model would not allow wallet attack...
  - nikcub 9y ago
    Wallets aren't part of Bitcoin - they're an implementation abstraction. The blockchain gives you unspent transaction outputs and a way to verify them and sign a script to unlock them. The key management involved in a Bitcoin wallet faces the same problems and complications as any other implementation of crypto and user key management faces. Some have implemented it well, some have implemented it poorly.
Freak_NL 9y ago
Trying to learn something about blockchain: the technology and its applications right now, means wading through masses of hype and parties anxious to 'get into it' before it's 'too late'. In healthcare IT the blockchain is hot right now. Government bureaus are pushing for adoption, care institute executives heard somewhere that this blockchain thing is the bee's knees and well suited for healthcare stuff like insurance mutations, and IT vendors are worried someone else will beat them to it. Is it a useful technology? Probably. But right now for many the blockchain is the goal, not the solution to any specific problem.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- RachelF 9y ago
  A lot of simple uses I see being put forward for blockchains could just as easily be done by a simple signing certificate. Perhaps, for a new generation, certs are too old fashioned, or many have never heard of their uses?
  - speedplane 9y ago
    Most uses of blockchain I see have been put forward by very large companies... but large companies are the least likely to benefit. Blockchain gives you a decentralized source of trust. Large companies (e.g., banks, governments, etc.) specialize in providing a centralized source of trust. I'd think that small banks/financial institutions would benefit far more than large companies. They can confidently share data with each other and enforce standards among themselves. Big companies, on the other hand, already have that trust through their reputation and detailed, legally enforceable contracts. Nice example: say you wanna send $5M from the US to another country. Traditionally, you'd call a big US bank, send them the money b/c you trust them, and they'd send it to another large foreign bank b/c the US bank trusts the foreign one. There's a chain of trust based on the stature of the companies, and they charge a nice fee for that peace of mind. Blockchain can allow smaller companies to get into that game, but not entirely sure how it helps the big ones.
    - al452 9y ago
      You miss the point about trust. The trust issue that blockchain addresses for big banks is not "I'm worried you're a scam that will disappear with all my money". It's "I'm worried that you've not got every single number exactly right and there will diaagreements". Hence it takes 2-3 days in the US to settle a simple financial trade, to allow for multiple batch reconciliations to verify that the information that each party holds about the trade matches up. Using a shared, distributed database to store all this information, instead of every party keeping their own copy, has the potential for colossal efficiency gains. That's why big institutions are interested in blockchain.
dwaltrip 9y ago
> I don't want to make any predictions, but when the crash comes it will be over before you knew it. I don't want to critique any sentences, but this one is heavy on rhetoric and low on information.
- Laforet 9y ago
  All right, I will be a bit specific for your benefit: - There is a lot of wash trading going on with several exchanges, some of which has had serious accounting issues since 2016. When they fail, the fallout will be far more spectacular than that of the late MtGOX because many traders are heavily leveraged. - Upcoming Segwit2x hard fork potentially splitting the network. - Uncertainty with China where the majority of hash power resides. The current crackdown on exchanges is pretty well reported. What I am concerned about is what will happen to the network when electricity price goes up in winter as hydro generation winds down, making mining more expensive. Historically miners were able to get favourable deals with remote thermal plants to cover the shortfall, which may be more difficult due to negative press and an ongoing effort to curb smog. The view I share with a few perssimistic pundits is that there will be one final rally to $5000 before November for people to cash out before the freefall. What we don't agree on is the timeframe and where the price will hit the bottom. Hence my reluctance to make predictions.
  - dwaltrip 9y ago
    Fair enough, those are all good points. Do you have knowledge of wash trading and accounting issues at at any of the major USD exchanges? I know bitfinex was hacked last year (and paid everyone back?), and there have recently been some strange rumors around bitfinex and Tether, but that is all I have heard. And do you believe this crash/correction will be lethal? Or will Bitcoin "die" and rise again?
    - Laforet 9y ago
      As long as there are two bitcoin nodes remaining to update the ledger we could call it "not dead", but the token would probably not be worth much by that point. And bitcoin probably have a hard time to recover due to the amount of cruft and technical debt it has. My best guess is that it could go through more boom/bust cycles before speculators move on; actual users have already started to move to other cryptos as we speak.
thinkMOAR 9y ago
"Does the price prove that bitcoin has not failed?" Does the price of a painting determine it is a good painting? Afaik not.
- imaginenore 9y ago
  It proves it's a desired one. Which is a very important quality for a currency.
  - thinkMOAR 9y ago
    I learned different things in economics than. I learned about, scarcity, fungibility, divisibility, durability and transferability to be the main properties of a currency, not a desired factor of any case, afaik thats just a quality of humans, called greed. Just because some people want something, doesn't make it a good currency. To stay in the same metaphor, I'd like to own the Nightwatch of rembrandt, just as many others do, still doesn't make it a currency or even gives it properties of 'currency'.
    - imaginenore 9y ago
      These properties are not mutually exclusive. But desirability is a required one for a good currency. I agree that those other properties are important too.
aedron 9y ago
So annoying to see triumphant declarations of victory of bitcoin, based solely on the price increasing. Speaking as a bitcoin owner and proponent, there is zero (actually negative) market uptake of bitcoin as a payment platform (which I happen to believe is bitcoin's primary use case). This is because no work has gone into scaling up transaction throughput, which has predictably suffered as a result of increased mainstream interest (even with practically no merchant adoption). The narrative has shifted recently that bitcoin is now a 'settlement layer', only that makes the situation even worse, because there is no 'payment layer' on top of it, only pie-in-the-sky designs. So yeah, I don't share in the exhilaration over $4000+ bitcoins.
- Udik 9y ago
  > there is zero (actually negative) market uptake of bitcoin as a payment platform ... This is because no work has gone into scaling up transaction throughput No, or only partly so. The other, more fundamental reason why bitcoin will never be a payment platform, is that it doesn't behave as a currency, but as a commodity. The hard limit on the number of bitcoin is both the guarantee of its value and what makes it an intrinsically deflationary good. Its monstrous current price proves it, and it can only go up (almost) indefinitely or go bust. With these characteristics, nobody will ever want to use it as a payment method. You don't want to pay with a bitcoin, when you know that in the future that same bitcoin will be worth n times its value today. If you have used bitcoins in the past for transactions- you might have paid 50 bitcoins for a book in 2011- I'm sure you're sorely regretting it now.
  - ckastner 9y ago
    Initially I perceived Bitcoin to be a payment platform, but I too now believe that it now behaves more like a commodity. Which is odd, because without any other utility, what's the point in choosing this commodity over others?
    - aerique 9y ago
      The only reason I can think of is entirely human: because others are using it.
tete 9y ago
While I agree on the centralization part, I don't think that this somehow makes it dead. I mean in the end many comparable systems are even more centralized. The notion of "to me, bitcoin died" sounds like "that show/band/social network/news site died to me, because...". Bitcoin seems a bit like many other economic systems, where it doesn't make sense that it survives or survives so long. I don't think predictions about such systems can be made by purely rational means by any feasible means. There is too much emotion and seeming "randomness" involved. However, I am sure that at one day be that in two weeks, decades or more it will be over and everyone will have seen it coming, as the most obvious thing. So I agree. Bitcoin will end. However, life on earth will too and even there you have speculations reaching from only decades to billions of years. ;) I think you are right, however. But I also thought Bitcoin would have been over years ago.
LeoPanthera 9y ago
167
ringaroundthetx 9y ago
> And what is the point? Does the price prove that bitcoin has not failed? The price rising is validation for services on the periphery. Established services that can add a lot of utility for bitcoin. For example, the volatility problem is completely solved by CME Group and CBOE and the CFTC pursing and allowing hedging instruments on bitcoin. This opens up the market to many market participants, some of which are much larger markets than cryptocurrency has ever touched yet, and obliterates a primary rebuttal on the bitcoin concept. The decision makers in those organizations would not have considered bitcoin as more than a toy until the market cap was larger. The CFTC has approved cryptocurrency hedging instruments only a few months ago. In 2017, 9 years into the concept. So what standard of fail would you even be using? What would ever give you validation for more than a few weeks or months? > but when the crash comes it will be over before you knew it. Bitcoin has crashed 70%, 80%, 90% several times before. Most bitcoin holders know that is a possibility. There are market participants that will use it at a lower price, that will buy it at a lower price, and continue expanding the reach of it. After hedging instruments are prevalent, many market participants won't even be notice the price fluctuations. So again, what standard?
- Laforet 9y ago
  >The price rising is validation for services on the periphery. Apart from brand recognition, which application is best conducted on the bitcoin ledger than every other alternative? Please don't say "Store of value". >Established services that can add a lot of utility for bitcoin. How would you go about doing it? Bitcoin was not designed to have side chains and tokens pegged all over it and there is a reason why the ICO fad universally chose ETH. >There are market participants that will use it at a lower price, that will buy it at a lower price, and continue expanding the reach of it. Again, which users? Bitcoin was able to recover before as there were significantly fewer competitors; now there is at least one for each use case.
  - ringaroundthetx 9y ago
    Where would you like me to start? It was unclear whether you were criticism bitcoin as a criticism to all cryptocurrencies, or bitcoin by itself. Fortunately it looks like it is just bitcoin by itself. > which application is best conducted on the bitcoin ledger than every other alternative? Bitcoin has to compete on its own. I'm all for other cryptocurrencies unseating it. In a world where 90% drops are not uncommon or controversial, and in a world where blockchains don't die, in a world where the code is open source, I don't think it is worth entertaining the bitcoin failed idea as it will always be a political mess that can have utility added any time. > Bitcoin was not designed to have side chains and tokens pegged all over it and there is a reason why the ICO fad universally chose ETH. This comment and your next comment go hand in hand. Bitcoin had ICOs on it several years before Ethereum was ready or existed. When its network got full it lost its innovative edge as it took over two years to upgrade. In the meantime more fully featured competitors have focused on specific use cases. An upgraded bitcoin may have irreparably lost some of its network effect advantage, and thats okay. It will have robust scripting for the next wave of ICOs and other organizations, decreasing the point of most altcoins. The top 10 may have differentiating qualities and markets already. Play it by ear, it isn't controversial to notice.
zizek23 9y ago
Bitcoin can't die as it never succeeded. All the disingenuous claims made by early adopters have fallen through. Decentralization, control, anonymity, easy transactions, transactions costs, currency? How can something that has no use have value? Proponents continue to build castles and waste electricity hoping people bite so they can profit. But the game is over. Money is a social tool based on consensus, and today democracy and accountability, that has evolved with human societies however imperfect it may be. At least societies can exercise some control over governments. Why would anyone give up this hard won rule of law and accountability to private individuals operating out of self interest peddling illusions about some imaginary 'freedom'?
- dreit1 9y ago
  Because this supposed "law and accountability" led to things like the 2008 financial crisis. Didn't seem like there was much accountability then, so why should I trust that money supply? I know exactly what is going to happen to the bitcoin money supply, it's written in the code. Furthermore, hard forks prove that if you don't like the network, then you can leave and retain value. You can't leave the dollar without geographically moving to another location
  - ckastner 9y ago
    > Because this supposed "law and accountability" led to things like the 2008 financial crisis. Didn't seem like there was much accountability then, so why should I trust that money supply? As someone working in the financial industry, the amount of regulations, internal audits, external audits, reporting requirements, etc. that financial institutions have to comply with is truly staggering. Sure, they 2008 financial crisis demonstrated that all of this was no silver bullet, but I still consider that system many orders of magnitude more trustworthy than a system that allowed for the shit-show that was MTGOX, and other failed exchanges.
    - dreit1 9y ago
      I've hear a lot has changed in terms of regulation since 2008. However we shouldn't compare Mt.Gox to BTC, Gox was a centralized institution, so the failure was with it, not with bitcoin. If the people had held their bitcoin privately, which is arguably the "correct" way to hold bitcoin, they would have been fine. Bitcoin itself is completely auditable in transparent. The system will behave exactly as the code is written.
nikcub 9y ago
Mining power was shown to be overrated by the failure of multiple miner driven or supported proposals and the success of the user-activated Segwit soft fork. The idea of the UASF was that miners would be economically incentivized to follow user nodes signaling and then enforcing new rules - and that is exactly what happen. It is also not out of the question to alter how blocks are mined in Bitcoin - Ethereum is doing that in an upcoming hard fork[0]. With Bitcoin it would be possible to not only introduce a new PoW with a soft-fork, or introduce multiple proof of work methods so that each has a difficulty target and no one PoW has a geographic, technological or regulatory advantage allowing it to achieve more than 100 / number_of_proofs_of_work% hashrate [0] Ethereum is transition from proof-of-work to a combined proof-of-work/proof-of-stake with the Casper project https://github.com/ethereum/research/wiki/Casper-Version-1-Implementation-Guide https://github.com/ethereum/research/wiki/Casper-Version-1-I...
jgeerts 9y ago
You can't predict the future, when ARPANET was developed they didn't have the internet in mind as it is today, but it was a new technology which evolved and will keep to evolve. I think it will be the same with Bitcoin, it might be dead if it will stay in the form that it is today but my guess is that it won't be the case.
sametmax 9y ago
Bitcoin started as a social experiment. When we invested in it at the "5000btc/pizza" time, we did it because we wanted to try something new. Shake things up. Most of us weren't driven by gain. The last bank crisis burnt everyone. The hackers did what hackers do: trying to find a workaround to this stupid bug. Build a POC for another paradigm. In that sense, Bitcoin is a tremendous success. Yes, it didn't become the alternative currency we hoped for, turning into a speculative mess. But boy, shake things up it did. Bitcoin changed everything. The tech scene. How we perceive money and exchanging values. It opened a new door that will never close, a new paradigm that is changing the way we are living. It's so new that we see dozens of alternatives, with variation, trying to be the new big things. It's so important people can't stop talking about it to the point it triggers a bubble. It's so influential a gigantic country such as China had to take measures to coerce it. And yet, it's just a piece of code... Bitcoin was spot on. Thanks for everybody that took, with all the little guys like me, the time, risk and resources to believe in it when nobody did. When we were mocked for trying. When we were doubting but having so much fun. It was a beautiful thing. I'm glad to have now the feeling those kind of people will always be around, and that we can always try to build something. Can't wait for our next failure :)

colordrops 9y ago

Do you understand the Bitcoin security model? It has not been broken. And do you understand what "woo" means? Your hand wavey proclamations about Bitcoin fit the bill.

madshiva 9y ago
A good model would not allow wallet attack...
- nikcub 9y ago
  Wallets aren't part of Bitcoin - they're an implementation abstraction. The blockchain gives you unspent transaction outputs and a way to verify them and sign a script to unlock them. The key management involved in a Bitcoin wallet faces the same problems and complications as any other implementation of crypto and user key management faces. Some have implemented it well, some have implemented it poorly.

Freak_NL 9y ago

Trying to learn something about blockchain: the technology and its applications right now, means wading through masses of hype and parties anxious to 'get into it' before it's 'too late'. In healthcare IT the blockchain is hot right now. Government bureaus are pushing for adoption, care institute executives heard somewhere that this blockchain thing is the bee's knees and well suited for healthcare stuff like insurance mutations, and IT vendors are worried someone else will beat them to it. Is it a useful technology? Probably. But right now for many the blockchain is the goal, not the solution to any specific problem.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
RachelF 9y ago
A lot of simple uses I see being put forward for blockchains could just as easily be done by a simple signing certificate. Perhaps, for a new generation, certs are too old fashioned, or many have never heard of their uses?
- speedplane 9y ago
  Most uses of blockchain I see have been put forward by very large companies... but large companies are the least likely to benefit. Blockchain gives you a decentralized source of trust. Large companies (e.g., banks, governments, etc.) specialize in providing a centralized source of trust. I'd think that small banks/financial institutions would benefit far more than large companies. They can confidently share data with each other and enforce standards among themselves. Big companies, on the other hand, already have that trust through their reputation and detailed, legally enforceable contracts. Nice example: say you wanna send $5M from the US to another country. Traditionally, you'd call a big US bank, send them the money b/c you trust them, and they'd send it to another large foreign bank b/c the US bank trusts the foreign one. There's a chain of trust based on the stature of the companies, and they charge a nice fee for that peace of mind. Blockchain can allow smaller companies to get into that game, but not entirely sure how it helps the big ones.
  - al452 9y ago
    You miss the point about trust. The trust issue that blockchain addresses for big banks is not "I'm worried you're a scam that will disappear with all my money". It's "I'm worried that you've not got every single number exactly right and there will diaagreements". Hence it takes 2-3 days in the US to settle a simple financial trade, to allow for multiple batch reconciliations to verify that the information that each party holds about the trade matches up. Using a shared, distributed database to store all this information, instead of every party keeping their own copy, has the potential for colossal efficiency gains. That's why big institutions are interested in blockchain.

dwaltrip 9y ago

> I don't want to make any predictions, but when the crash comes it will be over before you knew it. I don't want to critique any sentences, but this one is heavy on rhetoric and low on information.

Laforet 9y ago
All right, I will be a bit specific for your benefit: - There is a lot of wash trading going on with several exchanges, some of which has had serious accounting issues since 2016. When they fail, the fallout will be far more spectacular than that of the late MtGOX because many traders are heavily leveraged. - Upcoming Segwit2x hard fork potentially splitting the network. - Uncertainty with China where the majority of hash power resides. The current crackdown on exchanges is pretty well reported. What I am concerned about is what will happen to the network when electricity price goes up in winter as hydro generation winds down, making mining more expensive. Historically miners were able to get favourable deals with remote thermal plants to cover the shortfall, which may be more difficult due to negative press and an ongoing effort to curb smog. The view I share with a few perssimistic pundits is that there will be one final rally to $5000 before November for people to cash out before the freefall. What we don't agree on is the timeframe and where the price will hit the bottom. Hence my reluctance to make predictions.
- dwaltrip 9y ago
  Fair enough, those are all good points. Do you have knowledge of wash trading and accounting issues at at any of the major USD exchanges? I know bitfinex was hacked last year (and paid everyone back?), and there have recently been some strange rumors around bitfinex and Tether, but that is all I have heard. And do you believe this crash/correction will be lethal? Or will Bitcoin "die" and rise again?
  - Laforet 9y ago
    As long as there are two bitcoin nodes remaining to update the ledger we could call it "not dead", but the token would probably not be worth much by that point. And bitcoin probably have a hard time to recover due to the amount of cruft and technical debt it has. My best guess is that it could go through more boom/bust cycles before speculators move on; actual users have already started to move to other cryptos as we speak.

thinkMOAR 9y ago

"Does the price prove that bitcoin has not failed?" Does the price of a painting determine it is a good painting? Afaik not.

imaginenore 9y ago
It proves it's a desired one. Which is a very important quality for a currency.
- thinkMOAR 9y ago
  I learned different things in economics than. I learned about, scarcity, fungibility, divisibility, durability and transferability to be the main properties of a currency, not a desired factor of any case, afaik thats just a quality of humans, called greed. Just because some people want something, doesn't make it a good currency. To stay in the same metaphor, I'd like to own the Nightwatch of rembrandt, just as many others do, still doesn't make it a currency or even gives it properties of 'currency'.
  - imaginenore 9y ago
    These properties are not mutually exclusive. But desirability is a required one for a good currency. I agree that those other properties are important too.

aedron 9y ago

So annoying to see triumphant declarations of victory of bitcoin, based solely on the price increasing. Speaking as a bitcoin owner and proponent, there is zero (actually negative) market uptake of bitcoin as a payment platform (which I happen to believe is bitcoin's primary use case). This is because no work has gone into scaling up transaction throughput, which has predictably suffered as a result of increased mainstream interest (even with practically no merchant adoption). The narrative has shifted recently that bitcoin is now a 'settlement layer', only that makes the situation even worse, because there is no 'payment layer' on top of it, only pie-in-the-sky designs. So yeah, I don't share in the exhilaration over $4000+ bitcoins.

Udik 9y ago
> there is zero (actually negative) market uptake of bitcoin as a payment platform ... This is because no work has gone into scaling up transaction throughput No, or only partly so. The other, more fundamental reason why bitcoin will never be a payment platform, is that it doesn't behave as a currency, but as a commodity. The hard limit on the number of bitcoin is both the guarantee of its value and what makes it an intrinsically deflationary good. Its monstrous current price proves it, and it can only go up (almost) indefinitely or go bust. With these characteristics, nobody will ever want to use it as a payment method. You don't want to pay with a bitcoin, when you know that in the future that same bitcoin will be worth n times its value today. If you have used bitcoins in the past for transactions- you might have paid 50 bitcoins for a book in 2011- I'm sure you're sorely regretting it now.
- ckastner 9y ago
  Initially I perceived Bitcoin to be a payment platform, but I too now believe that it now behaves more like a commodity. Which is odd, because without any other utility, what's the point in choosing this commodity over others?
  - aerique 9y ago
    The only reason I can think of is entirely human: because others are using it.

tete 9y ago

While I agree on the centralization part, I don't think that this somehow makes it dead. I mean in the end many comparable systems are even more centralized. The notion of "to me, bitcoin died" sounds like "that show/band/social network/news site died to me, because...". Bitcoin seems a bit like many other economic systems, where it doesn't make sense that it survives or survives so long. I don't think predictions about such systems can be made by purely rational means by any feasible means. There is too much emotion and seeming "randomness" involved. However, I am sure that at one day be that in two weeks, decades or more it will be over and everyone will have seen it coming, as the most obvious thing. So I agree. Bitcoin will end. However, life on earth will too and even there you have speculations reaching from only decades to billions of years. ;) I think you are right, however. But I also thought Bitcoin would have been over years ago.

LeoPanthera 9y ago

167

ringaroundthetx 9y ago

> And what is the point? Does the price prove that bitcoin has not failed? The price rising is validation for services on the periphery. Established services that can add a lot of utility for bitcoin. For example, the volatility problem is completely solved by CME Group and CBOE and the CFTC pursing and allowing hedging instruments on bitcoin. This opens up the market to many market participants, some of which are much larger markets than cryptocurrency has ever touched yet, and obliterates a primary rebuttal on the bitcoin concept. The decision makers in those organizations would not have considered bitcoin as more than a toy until the market cap was larger. The CFTC has approved cryptocurrency hedging instruments only a few months ago. In 2017, 9 years into the concept. So what standard of fail would you even be using? What would ever give you validation for more than a few weeks or months? > but when the crash comes it will be over before you knew it. Bitcoin has crashed 70%, 80%, 90% several times before. Most bitcoin holders know that is a possibility. There are market participants that will use it at a lower price, that will buy it at a lower price, and continue expanding the reach of it. After hedging instruments are prevalent, many market participants won't even be notice the price fluctuations. So again, what standard?

Laforet 9y ago
>The price rising is validation for services on the periphery. Apart from brand recognition, which application is best conducted on the bitcoin ledger than every other alternative? Please don't say "Store of value". >Established services that can add a lot of utility for bitcoin. How would you go about doing it? Bitcoin was not designed to have side chains and tokens pegged all over it and there is a reason why the ICO fad universally chose ETH. >There are market participants that will use it at a lower price, that will buy it at a lower price, and continue expanding the reach of it. Again, which users? Bitcoin was able to recover before as there were significantly fewer competitors; now there is at least one for each use case.
- ringaroundthetx 9y ago
  Where would you like me to start? It was unclear whether you were criticism bitcoin as a criticism to all cryptocurrencies, or bitcoin by itself. Fortunately it looks like it is just bitcoin by itself. > which application is best conducted on the bitcoin ledger than every other alternative? Bitcoin has to compete on its own. I'm all for other cryptocurrencies unseating it. In a world where 90% drops are not uncommon or controversial, and in a world where blockchains don't die, in a world where the code is open source, I don't think it is worth entertaining the bitcoin failed idea as it will always be a political mess that can have utility added any time. > Bitcoin was not designed to have side chains and tokens pegged all over it and there is a reason why the ICO fad universally chose ETH. This comment and your next comment go hand in hand. Bitcoin had ICOs on it several years before Ethereum was ready or existed. When its network got full it lost its innovative edge as it took over two years to upgrade. In the meantime more fully featured competitors have focused on specific use cases. An upgraded bitcoin may have irreparably lost some of its network effect advantage, and thats okay. It will have robust scripting for the next wave of ICOs and other organizations, decreasing the point of most altcoins. The top 10 may have differentiating qualities and markets already. Play it by ear, it isn't controversial to notice.

zizek23 9y ago

Bitcoin can't die as it never succeeded. All the disingenuous claims made by early adopters have fallen through. Decentralization, control, anonymity, easy transactions, transactions costs, currency? How can something that has no use have value? Proponents continue to build castles and waste electricity hoping people bite so they can profit. But the game is over. Money is a social tool based on consensus, and today democracy and accountability, that has evolved with human societies however imperfect it may be. At least societies can exercise some control over governments. Why would anyone give up this hard won rule of law and accountability to private individuals operating out of self interest peddling illusions about some imaginary 'freedom'?

dreit1 9y ago
Because this supposed "law and accountability" led to things like the 2008 financial crisis. Didn't seem like there was much accountability then, so why should I trust that money supply? I know exactly what is going to happen to the bitcoin money supply, it's written in the code. Furthermore, hard forks prove that if you don't like the network, then you can leave and retain value. You can't leave the dollar without geographically moving to another location
- ckastner 9y ago
  > Because this supposed "law and accountability" led to things like the 2008 financial crisis. Didn't seem like there was much accountability then, so why should I trust that money supply? As someone working in the financial industry, the amount of regulations, internal audits, external audits, reporting requirements, etc. that financial institutions have to comply with is truly staggering. Sure, they 2008 financial crisis demonstrated that all of this was no silver bullet, but I still consider that system many orders of magnitude more trustworthy than a system that allowed for the shit-show that was MTGOX, and other failed exchanges.
  - dreit1 9y ago
    I've hear a lot has changed in terms of regulation since 2008. However we shouldn't compare Mt.Gox to BTC, Gox was a centralized institution, so the failure was with it, not with bitcoin. If the people had held their bitcoin privately, which is arguably the "correct" way to hold bitcoin, they would have been fine. Bitcoin itself is completely auditable in transparent. The system will behave exactly as the code is written.

nikcub 9y ago

Mining power was shown to be overrated by the failure of multiple miner driven or supported proposals and the success of the user-activated Segwit soft fork. The idea of the UASF was that miners would be economically incentivized to follow user nodes signaling and then enforcing new rules - and that is exactly what happen. It is also not out of the question to alter how blocks are mined in Bitcoin - Ethereum is doing that in an upcoming hard fork[0]. With Bitcoin it would be possible to not only introduce a new PoW with a soft-fork, or introduce multiple proof of work methods so that each has a difficulty target and no one PoW has a geographic, technological or regulatory advantage allowing it to achieve more than 100 / number_of_proofs_of_work% hashrate [0] Ethereum is transition from proof-of-work to a combined proof-of-work/proof-of-stake with the Casper project https://github.com/ethereum/research/wiki/Casper-Version-1-Implementation-Guide https://github.com/ethereum/research/wiki/Casper-Version-1-I...

jgeerts 9y ago

You can't predict the future, when ARPANET was developed they didn't have the internet in mind as it is today, but it was a new technology which evolved and will keep to evolve. I think it will be the same with Bitcoin, it might be dead if it will stay in the form that it is today but my guess is that it won't be the case.

sametmax 9y ago

Bitcoin started as a social experiment. When we invested in it at the "5000btc/pizza" time, we did it because we wanted to try something new. Shake things up. Most of us weren't driven by gain. The last bank crisis burnt everyone. The hackers did what hackers do: trying to find a workaround to this stupid bug. Build a POC for another paradigm. In that sense, Bitcoin is a tremendous success. Yes, it didn't become the alternative currency we hoped for, turning into a speculative mess. But boy, shake things up it did. Bitcoin changed everything. The tech scene. How we perceive money and exchanging values. It opened a new door that will never close, a new paradigm that is changing the way we are living. It's so new that we see dozens of alternatives, with variation, trying to be the new big things. It's so important people can't stop talking about it to the point it triggers a bubble. It's so influential a gigantic country such as China had to take measures to coerce it. And yet, it's just a piece of code... Bitcoin was spot on. Thanks for everybody that took, with all the little guys like me, the time, risk and resources to believe in it when nobody did. When we were mocked for trying. When we were doubting but having so much fun. It was a beautiful thing. I'm glad to have now the feeling those kind of people will always be around, and that we can always try to build something. Can't wait for our next failure :)