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The Bitcoin Apocalypse Is Coming in Mid-November

203 points by pk2200 9y ago

freedomben 9y ago
This is a good write-up. There is an insane amount of FUD surrounding Bitcoin, and not all of it is unfounded. I certainly hope that Bitcoin gets its act together, because the volatility makes driving adoption significantly harder than it would otherwise be. It has been very interesting to see how he Ethereum has handled many of these same problems. I would be interested in seeing analysis about the impact to alternative crypto currencies such as Ethereum and Litecoin, if Bitcoin ends up blowing up over this.
- iopuy 9y ago
  I may not be as technical as the author but I truly believe Litecoin is the future. Charlie Lee is about the best face of a digital currency as possible. He's and ex-googler, MIT grad, with a clear vision and an outstanding team. Like VC's bet on people and not always ideas, he is the one to take us to the next step.
  - gruez 9y ago
    to be fair, part of the reason why there's so much drama with bitcoin is because it's biggest by market cap. when there's more at stake, people show their true intentions.
    - iopuy 9y ago
      Very true, people often point out that Litecoin will suffer the same growing pains as Bitcoin as volume increases, and there is definitely an element of true to this. I trusted Gavin to help guide Bitcoin and since his departure I have not felt reassured of anyones true intentions in the Bitcoin community. With Litecoin, Charlie wanted it to be as fair as possible from the beginning. He refused to pre-mine the coin and repeatedly encourage critical thinking of coins in general and even advocated for Bitcoin above the coin he created!!! With the recent events in the Bitcoin community you can understand why people have flocked to Litecoin. His leadership is direct and highly visible.
      - Kelab 9y ago
        Kill Charlie kill litecoin
    - DennisP 9y ago
      Bitcoin was having drama like this well before it reached the market cap that Ethereum has now. So far Ethereum is remarkably drama-free. There was the DAO controversy last year, but the chain split seems to have resolved that nicely.
  - sillysaurus3 9y ago
    I'm skeptical of hero worship in general. Why does any of that matter for a commodity?
    - iopuy 9y ago
      The implementation is guided by Charlie. Litecoin had SegWit months before bitcoin because the team doesn't have competing factions. He isn't a "leader" in the tradition since, he is the worker, hands on keyboard writing the code.
      - sillysaurus3 9y ago
        Sure, but that sidesteps the question: why does that matter? The answer isn't inherently obvious. Bitcoin seems to be doing just fine without a leader and with competing factions. The November issue will probably resolve itself just like all the issues that came before. And there are a lot of advantages to Bitcoin's model. Having a face means tying the fate of the currency to that face, one way or another. Their word starts to matter much more.
        iopuy 9y ago
        I agree with your general sentiment for sure, why should any of this matter? On a personal basis I feel much more secure knowing a respected member of the community has enough faith in their product to tie their identity to it. Litecoin also has features that bitcoin doesn't. Faster block generation time, different hashing algorithms, larger supply. Charlie gives me confidence that the leadership of Bitcoin has not.
        kbaker 9y ago
        The other question is, if LTC ever becomes as relevant as BTC is in the marketplace (BTC has 30x marketcap), could Charlie still retain enough power to continue to be the guiding hand? Gavin Andresen was that force in Bitcoin for years, as lead developer and chief evangelist, but now he plays a minor role; recently with big $$ in play and the big community split, not to mention the insane personal attacks, it is much harder to maintain influence.
- mrb 9y ago
  «the volatility makes driving adoption significantly harder» Adoption increases market depths, which in turn decreases volatility. And volatility is sharply decreasing: https://mobile.twitter.com/lsukernik/status/864920873718951937 https://mobile.twitter.com/lsukernik/status/8649208737189519...
justboxing 9y ago
> I am fully cognizant of the perils of making bearish predictions about new technology. > But, to quote another well-worn and wholly unreliable aphorism, this time it's different. It really is. and >... because the only other alternative is chaos, and probably the end of the whole Bitcoin experiment. I'm very much a Bitcoin skeptic, but, I'm not sure this time is different, or that Bitcoin will die. For the last 8 years, various sources have been predicting a Bitcoin collapse over and over again. It's still here, alive and well and quite high. 3 years ago: Business Week - Bitcoin Is Collapsing => https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8893616 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8893616 4 years ago: latimes.com - Bitcoin virtual currency is on verge of collapse => https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7306035 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7306035 6 years ago: theatlantic.com - The Bitcoin Economy Is Collapsing with No Sign of Recovery (2011) => https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8431092 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8431092 6 years ago: Bitcoin & Gresham's Law - the economic inevitability of Collapse => https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3623549 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3623549
- QAPereo 9y ago
  To be fair, the SEC losing their patience with ICOs and turning on the whole sector would do it. Edit To replies: It does if the SEC decides the concept of cryptocurrency is one which fundamentally exists to bypass regulations for the purpose of fraud. I’d disagree, you’d disagree, but only their agreement matters.
  - jacquesm 9y ago
    What does that have to do with bitcoin?
    - Alex3917 9y ago
      The current price of Bitcoin is mostly driven by the fraud taking place within the Ethereum ecosystem. Let's see where the price is after a few rounds of SEC crackdowns.
      - 9y ago
Alex3917 9y ago
The interesting thing is that unlike in July where the price crashed, this time the price is completely stable despite the fact that it's a much bigger clusterfuck. It seems like perhaps the "you can't bet against the apocalypse" rule is being applied.
- companyhen 9y ago
  There's still over a month to go until this one happens. I think the press about it will build up in the coming weeks like it did with the last one. I think it will be fine, personally. So many people support it now, even if it decreases a bit in value there will still be the community even if they have different opinions. The market will decide.
- partiallypro 9y ago
  Probably complacency, and people refusing to sell because they think Bitcoin always recovers. The same happens in stocks.
- tfha 9y ago
  As the deadline gets closer, more companies are reconsidering their support. It's too early to see how much wind comes out of the sails, but much like earlier attempted Bitcoin hardforks, the support appears to have been greatly overstated. These companies have definitely lost users due to their support of 2x, and that hasn't gone unnoticed.
- loceng 9y ago
  That's because there's enough people with enough money now willing to buy the crypto-assets at the higher price. They all understand the game they're playing. This batch of speculators just need to keep the value stable long enough that others will start to trust it could be a good way to profit, and then those people putting in money now maintaining the price will sell at a higher price.. This is the cycle that will have existed since inception.
- nullc 9y ago
  > fact that it's a much bigger clusterfuck Why is it that people so quickly jump to "markets be crazy" as an explanation rather than "perhaps I don't understand the situation and have been sold an exaggerated version by people who profit from clicks or chaos"?
kirbypineapple 9y ago
Bitfinex allows you to bet on the outcome of this whole situation[1]: > Bitfinex is introducing new CSTs that will allow traders to speculate on the potential activation and mining of the Segwit2x consensus protocol. We are designating these CSTs as BT1 (Incumbent Bitcoin Blockchain) and BT2 (Bitcoin Segwit2x). [1] https://www.bitfinex.com/posts/221 https://www.bitfinex.com/posts/221
- awemany 9y ago
  Anyone who wants to invest there should read the T&C very carefully. See also: https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/74mgka/why_bitfinexs_chain_split_tokens_are_completely/ https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/74mgka/why_bitfinexs_c...
AznHisoka 9y ago
the dumb money isnt even all in yet, so how can it be coming to an end? stuff like pension funds, mutual funds, there isnt even a bitcoin etc yet. Until this happens it will rise even more.
- wakeywakeywakey 9y ago
  Can you elaborate on why the price will stagnate or drop once these entities are in play?
- Lufton 9y ago
  There's Bitcion ETF's and ETN's
  - gruez 9y ago
    bitcoin ETF != institutional investors, which is what gp was talking about >stuff like pension funds, mutual funds
- canoebuilder 9y ago
  Call me old-fashioned, but I think that type of institutional money going into inflated tech stocks is a completely different ball game than that kind of money going into something like bitcoin, that weird "internet money" thing most people don't really grok, or understand how to use or indeed what exactly the use is. dot com stocks themselves may have been a lot of hype but at least they had the precedence of several hundred years of capital market infrastructure around them to lend some credence.
- betterunix2 9y ago
  Pension funds will not even consider Bitcoin until it becomes much more stable. Pensions are an obligation and therefore demand much lower risk -- if a 5% change in value in a single day is not considered newsworthy there is no way pensions will make that investment. What makes you think the end cannot come before pensions and mutual funds start investing? What if panic selling triggers a deep loss in value, which then triggers miners to shut down as the mining reward falls below the energy cost; if enough miners shut down, someone could pull off a double-spending attack, and when people see that it will further reduce their confidence in the system. The result could be that confidence in Bitcoin never recovers. Or Bitcoin could just be a fad that slows unwinds and fades away, and twenty years from now we'll all be laughing about it over drinks. I can think of a few other technologies that were "definitely going to take over" and are barely remembered today...
RyanShook 9y ago
I disagree with this logic. Plenty of people said that SegWit was going to cause issues and it didn’t. If Bitcoin fails it will be from external market pressures, not internal politics.
- AgentME 9y ago
  Segwit wasn't a hardfork, which makes it very different from this situation.
  - awemany 9y ago
    > Segwit wasn't a hardfork, which makes it very different from this situation. How so?
- kbaker 9y ago
  SegWit was an upgrade though, this is more like a coup. SegWit2x is basically the mining faction stealing the network away from the Core development group, forcing everyone in Bitcoin to switch software if they still want their transactions confirmed. Not that I really disagree with them - as _something_ needed to happen, as demand (whether real or manufactured) has led to 100% full blocks for months, resulting in long transaction delays and high fees, and the rise of competing currencies, fracturing the market. We will see if one side backs down before the HF, but due to both incredibly entrenched positions I think we are going over the edge. I think that 2X will destroy a lot of confidence in Bitcoin, as it proves that the network can be stolen away to change the rules, and would be managed by a much smaller dev group. Though, the Bitcoin network can survive as a zombie forever with just a couple miners and zero devs. So it may not 'fail' in that sense, just become very stable.
  - awemany 9y ago
    > SegWit2x is basically the mining faction stealing the network away from the Core development group That language is very revealing: It never belonged to 'the Core development group' in the first place.
deleted 9y ago
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altoz 9y ago
Opt-in replay protection was merged in a few days ago. https://github.com/btc1/bitcoin/commit/a3c41256984bf11d95a560ae89c0fcbadfbe73dc https://github.com/btc1/bitcoin/commit/a3c41256984bf11d95a56... In any case, if you believe Bitcoin's main value proposition is as a great store of value, then replay protection simply doesn't matter that much. You wouldn't be transacting enough to matter.
- tfha 9y ago
  You are right, I suppose because we don't trade gold much, it doesn't make sense to ensure that it's secure when we transfer it. We transfer it so infrequently, there's nothing to worry about... For the opt-in replay protection, that is a proposal which requires people to update their software to protect themselves. That's unacceptable, many people are unlikely to even know that a fork happened. Replay protection needs to be automatic for un-upgraded nodes.
  - altoz 9y ago
    If you're transacting with an exchange or a merchant and accidentally send both coins (as a result of a replay attack) instead of one, they're going to give it back. It's not nearly the disaster this article makes it out to be. The only case where this is a problem are business to consumer transactions and p2p txs both of which you rarely do, if ever if you use BTC as a store of value.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
    - tfha 9y ago
      It's not that simple. Once a transaction gets confirmed on one chain, it's permanently able to be spent on the other. If, due to fees or other reasons, that transaction is not confirmed quickly, the merchant may not be able to return the funds. Also, automated system may have no way of handling it if those automated systems are not upgraded. Which means a merchant could end up with thousands of payments that they have to manually fix. And, those merchants will be forced into adopting the new software to correct the issue, they will have no choice to o ignore it. It FORCES every deployed system in the entire ecosystem to upgrade, even systems that don't consent to the change. That's absolutely unacceptable.
AgentME 9y ago
As a Bitcoin fan (and someone who owns a little), I think it's a pretty good article. Some more tidbits of information from my perspective: >The anti-2Xers argue that the NYA should not be binding because it was negotiated behind closed doors, and that a change of this magnitude needs to be more carefully considered before it is adopted. No active developers were part of the NYA. Some in the NYA have said that they agreed because they believed Core was party to the NYA. >But there is another school of thought, which is that Bitcoin is (or should be) a currency rather than a commodity, primarily a medium of exchange rather than a store of value. These are the folks who want you to be able to buy a cup of coffee at Starbucks with Bitcoins. I don't think anyone, including Core, is against that (higher transaction throughput). But on-chain scaling alone can't get you very far, and it has large costs that need to be carefully considered. The (backward-compatible) Segwit capacity upgrade just happened, and it takes time for people to update their software to make the newer more-efficient transactions. (... If the consensus was that Bitcoin really was urgently hurting for transaction capacity, you'd expect people to be updating to Segwit transactions faster than they are now.) The idea that another capacity upgrade should be rushed so soon immediately after Segwit is kind of silly. The idea that it should be decided so soon behind closed doors by a few CEOs is sillier. >The 2X advocates have refused, citing the NYA, and secure (at least apparently) in their belief that enough people will update their code that there will be no doubt that 2X is the One True Chain. Let's be clear about the word "update": it means to switch their software to a fork that none of the active community Bitcoin developers contribute to and that none plan on contributing to. Many have said that if Bitcoin "fails" after the fork, they have no interest in contributing to the Segwit2x fork's software. (The big-blocker anti-segwit movement stalled work for years, politicized the Bitcoin space, and contributed to making many of the core devs be the target of harassment; imagining that unpaid volunteers are going to switch to working on a project made by the latest iteration of that is ... to call it wishful thinking seems too kind.)
- kbaker 9y ago
  Just for some balance, the Hong Kong Agreement (which is absent from the article) is really important in this timeline - in Feb 2016, an agreement was reached with miners and signed by a few Core devs (however, possibly under duress?) to work on Segwit _and_ a safe hard fork. The NYA happening with a few CEOs "behind closed doors", was pretty much a result of the year and a half of no progress on the safe hard fork part. Also remember the miners aren't really a fan of cheap transactions, which eats into their profits, and does fundamentally alter their ROI. Segwit2X was originally sold as a compromise. Activate SegWit for the future since it requires software updates as you noted for the additional transaction formats, and schedule a 2X HF to help the network grow immediately. > The big-blocker anti-segwit movement stalled work for years, politicized the Bitcoin space, and contributed to making many of the core devs be the target of harassment I agree sadly, but unfortunately it was the same story on the reverse side. Look at the ridicule and scorn Mike Hearn and Gavin got for their big block proposals in 2015.
blunte 9y ago
With estimates of a majority of hash power being from Chinese miners, I wonder how the recent change in attitude by the Chinese government will affect the outcome of this battle. I haven't been keeping up lately, but I would guess that whichever camp the Chinese miners were in is going to lose, since Chinese mining itself may be headed for rapid decline.
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rphlx 9y ago
> ... no obvious way to tell which is the One True Chain. One obvious way - whether you agree with it or not - is to use hashrate. It's quite unlikely that both chains will have a nearly-equal hashrate for a sustained period of time.
- TD-Linux 9y ago
  That's probably a bad idea - miners target profits. There was a lot of oscillation in hashrate when BCH split - and it had a lot less support. It briefly exceeded Bitcoin's hashrate. http://fork.lol/pow/hashrate http://fork.lol/pow/hashrate
kccqzy 9y ago
Personally I’m of the opinion that Bitcoin is already “too big to fail”: there are so many interested parties and stakeholders who want it to succeed that it will be kept alive through sheer will, despite internal politics.
- Kelab 9y ago
  So you think Chinese government cant afford to corner the mining hashes?
- lsseckman 9y ago
  if you're taking 2009 as a reference point, you have to wonder whether Bitcoin is the CDO market, or the banks investing in those markets. Both failed, only one was bailed out.
xorcist 9y ago
The article correctly notices that the market was more worried around the time of the BCH fork, but misses some of the reasons why. The BCH was a more credible threat to the value proposition of Bitcoin because the market could be convinced it was like a dividend to the BTC chain, the market cap of the latter was clearly at risk. The design of B2X is based on getting every user of Bitcoin to switch software before November. If commerce continues on the legacy chain, the value proposition falls in its entirety. B2X has no replay protection to speak of and no emergency difficulty adjustment is possible. The market correctly reflects the probability that B2X will replace BTC. Feel free to bet on it should you disagree, Bitfinex offers futures trading on BTC/B2X.
toomim 9y ago
This author confuses a hard fork for a github fork: > The bitcoin chain has been hard-forked at least five times, [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_bitcoin_forks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_bitcoin_forks Ouch! Those aren't hard forks— they are forks of the github repo! In reality Bitcoin has only been hard-forked twice. Once, to fix the bug as described in BIP 50, and once for Bitcoin Cash. Here's a better resource: http://homepages.cs.ncl.ac.uk/patrick.mc-corry/atomically-trading-roger.pdf http://homepages.cs.ncl.ac.uk/patrick.mc-corry/atomically-tr...
- zby 9y ago
  My mistake - I would delete this comment - but now I cannot. Your source is also not quite on the spot - it is about hard forks - but there were also soft forks.
  - Flowdalic 9y ago
    BCC was a hard fork
- Flowdalic 9y ago
  A common mistake made by "self-appointed" bitcoin experts and IMHO a good indicator for more red flags. > On one side are those who believe that Bitcoin is … money, currency, …. On the other side are those who believe that it is a commodity, …. That is the other red flag: Trying to construct two different exclusive camps. This goes along with not mentioning the Lightning Network (LN). Some people still don't see that LN could enable bitcoin to be both: A currency and a commodity.
  - olegkikin 9y ago
    LN has been vaporware for a long time, and it's always 18 months before it's ready. Recently the developers openly admitted they don't know how to scale it beyond 10000+ channels, because they don't know how to solve distributed routing. https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/719vis/lightning_dev_there_are_protocol_scaling_issues/ https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/719vis/lightning_dev_t... https://medium.com/@jonaldfyookball/mathematical-proof-that-the-lightning-network-cannot-be-a-decentralized-bitcoin-scaling-solution-1b8147650800 https://medium.com/@jonaldfyookball/mathematical-proof-that-...
yuvadam 9y ago
Interesting article, but doesn't explain why the situation is anything close to an apocalypse. My only piece of advice is that while it's fine to take money off the table before such events, pay very close attention to what is going on and NEVER PANIC SELL. Anyone who has done so before (myself included) has regreted it. Bitcoin has been pronounced dead many times before and yet is very well alive.
zby 9y ago
The main thesis of the article is outdated and now wrong - as someone pointed in its comments: https://github.com/btc1/bitcoin/commit/a3c41256984bf11d95a560ae89c0fcbadfbe73dc https://github.com/btc1/bitcoin/commit/a3c41256984bf11d95a56... All the rest might be interesting to someone completely new to the subject - but it also contains many mistakes. One is confusing git forks of the source code with the blockchain forks. Another is his claim that "everyone agrees that the capacity of the Blockchain needs to be increased" - bitcoin needs capacity increases - but it does not need to be on-chain - there are proposals like Lightning Network that would do that off-chain.
Kelab 9y ago
Bitcoin doesn't have a real world use case, the fees is too high and it's too slow 10 mins I just went to steemit blog network, now my grandma can use a blockchain
dmitriid 9y ago
Folks, I give you the disruptive infinitely scalable technology the likes of which the world has never seen. It will bring down the entrenched losers like Visa and cash-based economy. Just hold on tight, let's see if it can survive protocol upgrades and get more than 4 transactions a second.
Vadoff 9y ago
There are Segwit2x and Core futures, as well as shorts with high leverage. If the author is so confident of the coming apocalypse, he stands to make an absurd amount of money if he's right (or lose if wrong). He should put his money where his mouth is (but of course he probably won't).
shanusmagnus 9y ago
Despite all the histrionics about 2X -- just read r/bitcoin -- nobody in the 2X movement is a bad actor, they're people who've come to some different conclusions about what needs to be done. It's funny to think what an _actual_ bad actor could do to the platform. Every time I hear the cryptocurrency people crowing about the amazing un-censorable power of the technology I just smile.
wildchild 9y ago
Retard.
pttrn 9y ago
“Disclaimer: I am not an expert in Bitcoin” -> close tab.

203 points by pk2200 9y ago

This is a good write-up. There is an insane amount of FUD surrounding Bitcoin, and not all of it is unfounded. I certainly hope that Bitcoin gets its act together, because the volatility makes driving adoption significantly harder than it would otherwise be. It has been very interesting to see how he Ethereum has handled many of these same problems. I would be interested in seeing analysis about the impact to alternative crypto currencies such as Ethereum and Litecoin, if Bitcoin ends up blowing up over this.

iopuy 9y ago
I may not be as technical as the author but I truly believe Litecoin is the future. Charlie Lee is about the best face of a digital currency as possible. He's and ex-googler, MIT grad, with a clear vision and an outstanding team. Like VC's bet on people and not always ideas, he is the one to take us to the next step.
- gruez 9y ago
  to be fair, part of the reason why there's so much drama with bitcoin is because it's biggest by market cap. when there's more at stake, people show their true intentions.
  - iopuy 9y ago
    Very true, people often point out that Litecoin will suffer the same growing pains as Bitcoin as volume increases, and there is definitely an element of true to this. I trusted Gavin to help guide Bitcoin and since his departure I have not felt reassured of anyones true intentions in the Bitcoin community. With Litecoin, Charlie wanted it to be as fair as possible from the beginning. He refused to pre-mine the coin and repeatedly encourage critical thinking of coins in general and even advocated for Bitcoin above the coin he created!!! With the recent events in the Bitcoin community you can understand why people have flocked to Litecoin. His leadership is direct and highly visible.
    - Kelab 9y ago
      Kill Charlie kill litecoin
  - DennisP 9y ago
    Bitcoin was having drama like this well before it reached the market cap that Ethereum has now. So far Ethereum is remarkably drama-free. There was the DAO controversy last year, but the chain split seems to have resolved that nicely.
- sillysaurus3 9y ago
  I'm skeptical of hero worship in general. Why does any of that matter for a commodity?
  - iopuy 9y ago
    The implementation is guided by Charlie. Litecoin had SegWit months before bitcoin because the team doesn't have competing factions. He isn't a "leader" in the tradition since, he is the worker, hands on keyboard writing the code.
    - sillysaurus3 9y ago
      Sure, but that sidesteps the question: why does that matter? The answer isn't inherently obvious. Bitcoin seems to be doing just fine without a leader and with competing factions. The November issue will probably resolve itself just like all the issues that came before. And there are a lot of advantages to Bitcoin's model. Having a face means tying the fate of the currency to that face, one way or another. Their word starts to matter much more.
      - iopuy 9y ago
        I agree with your general sentiment for sure, why should any of this matter? On a personal basis I feel much more secure knowing a respected member of the community has enough faith in their product to tie their identity to it. Litecoin also has features that bitcoin doesn't. Faster block generation time, different hashing algorithms, larger supply. Charlie gives me confidence that the leadership of Bitcoin has not.
        kbaker 9y ago
        The other question is, if LTC ever becomes as relevant as BTC is in the marketplace (BTC has 30x marketcap), could Charlie still retain enough power to continue to be the guiding hand? Gavin Andresen was that force in Bitcoin for years, as lead developer and chief evangelist, but now he plays a minor role; recently with big $$ in play and the big community split, not to mention the insane personal attacks, it is much harder to maintain influence.
mrb 9y ago
«the volatility makes driving adoption significantly harder» Adoption increases market depths, which in turn decreases volatility. And volatility is sharply decreasing: https://mobile.twitter.com/lsukernik/status/864920873718951937 https://mobile.twitter.com/lsukernik/status/8649208737189519...

justboxing 9y ago

> I am fully cognizant of the perils of making bearish predictions about new technology. > But, to quote another well-worn and wholly unreliable aphorism, this time it's different. It really is. and >... because the only other alternative is chaos, and probably the end of the whole Bitcoin experiment. I'm very much a Bitcoin skeptic, but, I'm not sure this time is different, or that Bitcoin will die. For the last 8 years, various sources have been predicting a Bitcoin collapse over and over again. It's still here, alive and well and quite high. 3 years ago: Business Week - Bitcoin Is Collapsing => https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8893616 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8893616 4 years ago: latimes.com - Bitcoin virtual currency is on verge of collapse => https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7306035 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7306035 6 years ago: theatlantic.com - The Bitcoin Economy Is Collapsing with No Sign of Recovery (2011) => https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8431092 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8431092 6 years ago: Bitcoin & Gresham's Law - the economic inevitability of Collapse => https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3623549 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3623549

QAPereo 9y ago
To be fair, the SEC losing their patience with ICOs and turning on the whole sector would do it. Edit To replies: It does if the SEC decides the concept of cryptocurrency is one which fundamentally exists to bypass regulations for the purpose of fraud. I’d disagree, you’d disagree, but only their agreement matters.
- jacquesm 9y ago
  What does that have to do with bitcoin?
  - Alex3917 9y ago
    The current price of Bitcoin is mostly driven by the fraud taking place within the Ethereum ecosystem. Let's see where the price is after a few rounds of SEC crackdowns.
    - 9y ago

Alex3917 9y ago

The interesting thing is that unlike in July where the price crashed, this time the price is completely stable despite the fact that it's a much bigger clusterfuck. It seems like perhaps the "you can't bet against the apocalypse" rule is being applied.

companyhen 9y ago
There's still over a month to go until this one happens. I think the press about it will build up in the coming weeks like it did with the last one. I think it will be fine, personally. So many people support it now, even if it decreases a bit in value there will still be the community even if they have different opinions. The market will decide.
partiallypro 9y ago
Probably complacency, and people refusing to sell because they think Bitcoin always recovers. The same happens in stocks.
tfha 9y ago
As the deadline gets closer, more companies are reconsidering their support. It's too early to see how much wind comes out of the sails, but much like earlier attempted Bitcoin hardforks, the support appears to have been greatly overstated. These companies have definitely lost users due to their support of 2x, and that hasn't gone unnoticed.
loceng 9y ago
That's because there's enough people with enough money now willing to buy the crypto-assets at the higher price. They all understand the game they're playing. This batch of speculators just need to keep the value stable long enough that others will start to trust it could be a good way to profit, and then those people putting in money now maintaining the price will sell at a higher price.. This is the cycle that will have existed since inception.
nullc 9y ago
> fact that it's a much bigger clusterfuck Why is it that people so quickly jump to "markets be crazy" as an explanation rather than "perhaps I don't understand the situation and have been sold an exaggerated version by people who profit from clicks or chaos"?

kirbypineapple 9y ago

Bitfinex allows you to bet on the outcome of this whole situation[1]: > Bitfinex is introducing new CSTs that will allow traders to speculate on the potential activation and mining of the Segwit2x consensus protocol. We are designating these CSTs as BT1 (Incumbent Bitcoin Blockchain) and BT2 (Bitcoin Segwit2x). [1] https://www.bitfinex.com/posts/221 https://www.bitfinex.com/posts/221

awemany 9y ago
Anyone who wants to invest there should read the T&C very carefully. See also: https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/74mgka/why_bitfinexs_chain_split_tokens_are_completely/ https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/74mgka/why_bitfinexs_c...

AznHisoka 9y ago

the dumb money isnt even all in yet, so how can it be coming to an end? stuff like pension funds, mutual funds, there isnt even a bitcoin etc yet. Until this happens it will rise even more.

wakeywakeywakey 9y ago
Can you elaborate on why the price will stagnate or drop once these entities are in play?
Lufton 9y ago
There's Bitcion ETF's and ETN's
- gruez 9y ago
  bitcoin ETF != institutional investors, which is what gp was talking about >stuff like pension funds, mutual funds
canoebuilder 9y ago
Call me old-fashioned, but I think that type of institutional money going into inflated tech stocks is a completely different ball game than that kind of money going into something like bitcoin, that weird "internet money" thing most people don't really grok, or understand how to use or indeed what exactly the use is. dot com stocks themselves may have been a lot of hype but at least they had the precedence of several hundred years of capital market infrastructure around them to lend some credence.
betterunix2 9y ago
Pension funds will not even consider Bitcoin until it becomes much more stable. Pensions are an obligation and therefore demand much lower risk -- if a 5% change in value in a single day is not considered newsworthy there is no way pensions will make that investment. What makes you think the end cannot come before pensions and mutual funds start investing? What if panic selling triggers a deep loss in value, which then triggers miners to shut down as the mining reward falls below the energy cost; if enough miners shut down, someone could pull off a double-spending attack, and when people see that it will further reduce their confidence in the system. The result could be that confidence in Bitcoin never recovers. Or Bitcoin could just be a fad that slows unwinds and fades away, and twenty years from now we'll all be laughing about it over drinks. I can think of a few other technologies that were "definitely going to take over" and are barely remembered today...

RyanShook 9y ago

I disagree with this logic. Plenty of people said that SegWit was going to cause issues and it didn’t. If Bitcoin fails it will be from external market pressures, not internal politics.

AgentME 9y ago
Segwit wasn't a hardfork, which makes it very different from this situation.
- awemany 9y ago
  > Segwit wasn't a hardfork, which makes it very different from this situation. How so?
kbaker 9y ago
SegWit was an upgrade though, this is more like a coup. SegWit2x is basically the mining faction stealing the network away from the Core development group, forcing everyone in Bitcoin to switch software if they still want their transactions confirmed. Not that I really disagree with them - as _something_ needed to happen, as demand (whether real or manufactured) has led to 100% full blocks for months, resulting in long transaction delays and high fees, and the rise of competing currencies, fracturing the market. We will see if one side backs down before the HF, but due to both incredibly entrenched positions I think we are going over the edge. I think that 2X will destroy a lot of confidence in Bitcoin, as it proves that the network can be stolen away to change the rules, and would be managed by a much smaller dev group. Though, the Bitcoin network can survive as a zombie forever with just a couple miners and zero devs. So it may not 'fail' in that sense, just become very stable.
- awemany 9y ago
  > SegWit2x is basically the mining faction stealing the network away from the Core development group That language is very revealing: It never belonged to 'the Core development group' in the first place.

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altoz 9y ago

Opt-in replay protection was merged in a few days ago. https://github.com/btc1/bitcoin/commit/a3c41256984bf11d95a560ae89c0fcbadfbe73dc https://github.com/btc1/bitcoin/commit/a3c41256984bf11d95a56... In any case, if you believe Bitcoin's main value proposition is as a great store of value, then replay protection simply doesn't matter that much. You wouldn't be transacting enough to matter.

tfha 9y ago
You are right, I suppose because we don't trade gold much, it doesn't make sense to ensure that it's secure when we transfer it. We transfer it so infrequently, there's nothing to worry about... For the opt-in replay protection, that is a proposal which requires people to update their software to protect themselves. That's unacceptable, many people are unlikely to even know that a fork happened. Replay protection needs to be automatic for un-upgraded nodes.
- altoz 9y ago
  If you're transacting with an exchange or a merchant and accidentally send both coins (as a result of a replay attack) instead of one, they're going to give it back. It's not nearly the disaster this article makes it out to be. The only case where this is a problem are business to consumer transactions and p2p txs both of which you rarely do, if ever if you use BTC as a store of value.
  - deleted 9y ago
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  - tfha 9y ago
    It's not that simple. Once a transaction gets confirmed on one chain, it's permanently able to be spent on the other. If, due to fees or other reasons, that transaction is not confirmed quickly, the merchant may not be able to return the funds. Also, automated system may have no way of handling it if those automated systems are not upgraded. Which means a merchant could end up with thousands of payments that they have to manually fix. And, those merchants will be forced into adopting the new software to correct the issue, they will have no choice to o ignore it. It FORCES every deployed system in the entire ecosystem to upgrade, even systems that don't consent to the change. That's absolutely unacceptable.

AgentME 9y ago

As a Bitcoin fan (and someone who owns a little), I think it's a pretty good article. Some more tidbits of information from my perspective: >The anti-2Xers argue that the NYA should not be binding because it was negotiated behind closed doors, and that a change of this magnitude needs to be more carefully considered before it is adopted. No active developers were part of the NYA. Some in the NYA have said that they agreed because they believed Core was party to the NYA. >But there is another school of thought, which is that Bitcoin is (or should be) a currency rather than a commodity, primarily a medium of exchange rather than a store of value. These are the folks who want you to be able to buy a cup of coffee at Starbucks with Bitcoins. I don't think anyone, including Core, is against that (higher transaction throughput). But on-chain scaling alone can't get you very far, and it has large costs that need to be carefully considered. The (backward-compatible) Segwit capacity upgrade just happened, and it takes time for people to update their software to make the newer more-efficient transactions. (... If the consensus was that Bitcoin really was urgently hurting for transaction capacity, you'd expect people to be updating to Segwit transactions faster than they are now.) The idea that another capacity upgrade should be rushed so soon immediately after Segwit is kind of silly. The idea that it should be decided so soon behind closed doors by a few CEOs is sillier. >The 2X advocates have refused, citing the NYA, and secure (at least apparently) in their belief that enough people will update their code that there will be no doubt that 2X is the One True Chain. Let's be clear about the word "update": it means to switch their software to a fork that none of the active community Bitcoin developers contribute to and that none plan on contributing to. Many have said that if Bitcoin "fails" after the fork, they have no interest in contributing to the Segwit2x fork's software. (The big-blocker anti-segwit movement stalled work for years, politicized the Bitcoin space, and contributed to making many of the core devs be the target of harassment; imagining that unpaid volunteers are going to switch to working on a project made by the latest iteration of that is ... to call it wishful thinking seems too kind.)

kbaker 9y ago
Just for some balance, the Hong Kong Agreement (which is absent from the article) is really important in this timeline - in Feb 2016, an agreement was reached with miners and signed by a few Core devs (however, possibly under duress?) to work on Segwit _and_ a safe hard fork. The NYA happening with a few CEOs "behind closed doors", was pretty much a result of the year and a half of no progress on the safe hard fork part. Also remember the miners aren't really a fan of cheap transactions, which eats into their profits, and does fundamentally alter their ROI. Segwit2X was originally sold as a compromise. Activate SegWit for the future since it requires software updates as you noted for the additional transaction formats, and schedule a 2X HF to help the network grow immediately. > The big-blocker anti-segwit movement stalled work for years, politicized the Bitcoin space, and contributed to making many of the core devs be the target of harassment I agree sadly, but unfortunately it was the same story on the reverse side. Look at the ridicule and scorn Mike Hearn and Gavin got for their big block proposals in 2015.

blunte 9y ago

With estimates of a majority of hash power being from Chinese miners, I wonder how the recent change in attitude by the Chinese government will affect the outcome of this battle. I haven't been keeping up lately, but I would guess that whichever camp the Chinese miners were in is going to lose, since Chinese mining itself may be headed for rapid decline.

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rphlx 9y ago

> ... no obvious way to tell which is the One True Chain. One obvious way - whether you agree with it or not - is to use hashrate. It's quite unlikely that both chains will have a nearly-equal hashrate for a sustained period of time.

TD-Linux 9y ago
That's probably a bad idea - miners target profits. There was a lot of oscillation in hashrate when BCH split - and it had a lot less support. It briefly exceeded Bitcoin's hashrate. http://fork.lol/pow/hashrate http://fork.lol/pow/hashrate

kccqzy 9y ago

Personally I’m of the opinion that Bitcoin is already “too big to fail”: there are so many interested parties and stakeholders who want it to succeed that it will be kept alive through sheer will, despite internal politics.

Kelab 9y ago
So you think Chinese government cant afford to corner the mining hashes?
lsseckman 9y ago
if you're taking 2009 as a reference point, you have to wonder whether Bitcoin is the CDO market, or the banks investing in those markets. Both failed, only one was bailed out.

xorcist 9y ago

The article correctly notices that the market was more worried around the time of the BCH fork, but misses some of the reasons why. The BCH was a more credible threat to the value proposition of Bitcoin because the market could be convinced it was like a dividend to the BTC chain, the market cap of the latter was clearly at risk. The design of B2X is based on getting every user of Bitcoin to switch software before November. If commerce continues on the legacy chain, the value proposition falls in its entirety. B2X has no replay protection to speak of and no emergency difficulty adjustment is possible. The market correctly reflects the probability that B2X will replace BTC. Feel free to bet on it should you disagree, Bitfinex offers futures trading on BTC/B2X.

toomim 9y ago

This author confuses a hard fork for a github fork: > The bitcoin chain has been hard-forked at least five times, [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_bitcoin_forks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_bitcoin_forks Ouch! Those aren't hard forks— they are forks of the github repo! In reality Bitcoin has only been hard-forked twice. Once, to fix the bug as described in BIP 50, and once for Bitcoin Cash. Here's a better resource: http://homepages.cs.ncl.ac.uk/patrick.mc-corry/atomically-trading-roger.pdf http://homepages.cs.ncl.ac.uk/patrick.mc-corry/atomically-tr...

zby 9y ago
My mistake - I would delete this comment - but now I cannot. Your source is also not quite on the spot - it is about hard forks - but there were also soft forks.
- Flowdalic 9y ago
  BCC was a hard fork
Flowdalic 9y ago
A common mistake made by "self-appointed" bitcoin experts and IMHO a good indicator for more red flags. > On one side are those who believe that Bitcoin is … money, currency, …. On the other side are those who believe that it is a commodity, …. That is the other red flag: Trying to construct two different exclusive camps. This goes along with not mentioning the Lightning Network (LN). Some people still don't see that LN could enable bitcoin to be both: A currency and a commodity.
- olegkikin 9y ago
  LN has been vaporware for a long time, and it's always 18 months before it's ready. Recently the developers openly admitted they don't know how to scale it beyond 10000+ channels, because they don't know how to solve distributed routing. https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/719vis/lightning_dev_there_are_protocol_scaling_issues/ https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/719vis/lightning_dev_t... https://medium.com/@jonaldfyookball/mathematical-proof-that-the-lightning-network-cannot-be-a-decentralized-bitcoin-scaling-solution-1b8147650800 https://medium.com/@jonaldfyookball/mathematical-proof-that-...

yuvadam 9y ago

Interesting article, but doesn't explain why the situation is anything close to an apocalypse. My only piece of advice is that while it's fine to take money off the table before such events, pay very close attention to what is going on and NEVER PANIC SELL. Anyone who has done so before (myself included) has regreted it. Bitcoin has been pronounced dead many times before and yet is very well alive.

zby 9y ago

The main thesis of the article is outdated and now wrong - as someone pointed in its comments: https://github.com/btc1/bitcoin/commit/a3c41256984bf11d95a560ae89c0fcbadfbe73dc https://github.com/btc1/bitcoin/commit/a3c41256984bf11d95a56... All the rest might be interesting to someone completely new to the subject - but it also contains many mistakes. One is confusing git forks of the source code with the blockchain forks. Another is his claim that "everyone agrees that the capacity of the Blockchain needs to be increased" - bitcoin needs capacity increases - but it does not need to be on-chain - there are proposals like Lightning Network that would do that off-chain.

Kelab 9y ago

Bitcoin doesn't have a real world use case, the fees is too high and it's too slow 10 mins I just went to steemit blog network, now my grandma can use a blockchain

dmitriid 9y ago

Folks, I give you the disruptive infinitely scalable technology the likes of which the world has never seen. It will bring down the entrenched losers like Visa and cash-based economy. Just hold on tight, let's see if it can survive protocol upgrades and get more than 4 transactions a second.

Vadoff 9y ago

There are Segwit2x and Core futures, as well as shorts with high leverage. If the author is so confident of the coming apocalypse, he stands to make an absurd amount of money if he's right (or lose if wrong). He should put his money where his mouth is (but of course he probably won't).

shanusmagnus 9y ago

Despite all the histrionics about 2X -- just read r/bitcoin -- nobody in the 2X movement is a bad actor, they're people who've come to some different conclusions about what needs to be done. It's funny to think what an _actual_ bad actor could do to the platform. Every time I hear the cryptocurrency people crowing about the amazing un-censorable power of the technology I just smile.

wildchild 9y ago

Retard.

pttrn 9y ago

“Disclaimer: I am not an expert in Bitcoin” -> close tab.