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When explaining bitcoin to non technical people I compare bitcoin for the to gold. Almost all non-tech people I know think bitcoin is the new next currency, I d

When explaining bitcoin to non technical people I compare bitcoin for the to gold. Almost all non-tech people I know think bitcoin is the new next currency, I doubt it. Blockchain is currently hyped as currency, but it could solve many things related to trust, which is not only currency. An other new technology to watch is IOTA ( https://iota.org https://iota.org ) not blockchain based, no fees and scalable.

yathern 9y ago
Most non tech people I know are barely aware of it - or think of it as "that thing you use to buy black market stuff".
charlesdm 9y ago
The design of Bitcoin is inherently flawed at the moment (at least for payments), and due to its decentralised structure, a change can't easily be forced. I think Bitcoin was a great experiment since it brought us the blockchain, but with the exception of being a store of value (i.e. digital gold, and thus not having to worry too much about high transaction fees) I don't see it going anywhere. But since gold is worth about $8.2tn globally, that might be sufficient. Ethereum on the other hand.. by the looks of it that does seem to have a bright future. It improves upon and fixes many of the flaws Bitcoin has.
- tfha 9y ago
  It improves upon and fixes a few of the Bitcoin flaws while introducing a whole hoard of other flaws in itself. For example, most 'full nodes' on the Ethereum blockchain have never actually verified the whole chain, they've instead started life by downloading a trusted snapshot from a miner. The scalability properties of Ethereum are dozens of times worse from a raw resource usage perspective, with each transaction on the Ethereum network taking more space to store, more clock cycles to process + verify, and with the whole system being much harder to parallelize. Ethereum made a lot of long term sacrifices to achieve their short term advantages, and it's already falling apart around the edges. One or two more iterations of hardforks + block size increases (gas limit increases) and your average desktop computer won't be able to keep up with the chain anymore, let alone catch up if starting from scratch. And that's just one of the many ameture compromises.
  - charlesdm 9y ago
    Not saying you're wrong, but a few thoughts: 1. Do you really want the average desktop computer to sync and verify the entire Blockchain? These things have gotten so huge, even for Bitcoin it's not really reasonable anymore to store the entire chain on a desktop computer. I think the answer here is no, but I could be wrong. 2. It probably goes against the decentralized idea behind blockchain, but I believe it is good that Ethereum has a clear leader. Someone who can actually (sort of) dictate the path -- at least until the project has gotten to where it wants / needs to go. Bitcoin would be in a better place if the founder were around. 3. Bitcoin is already falling apart. Once you have to make a transaction, the pain (generally) starts.. 4. One of the downsides of Ethereum is the size of the blockchain, but see 1. I think at least for Ethereum the potential is still there for it to be good, once they fix their issues. This (to me) seems doable, but if you have things to share on why not, please do! With Bitcoin, you know what the issues are, they are massive and have been around for a while, and they're only getting worse / not getting fixed because people can't reach a consensus. I believe it would be easier to reach consensus if there was a leader. Most of these things however don't matter if we just see it as a store of value.
__s 9y ago
With LN one's able to devise mechanisms where currency is effectively backed by BTC-- think when USD was backed by gold, but where upon the US breaking from that, people were actually able to trade in all their USD for weightless gold
Buttes 9y ago
IOTA is amateur hour. The author implemented their own hashing algo, "curl", which is used all over the place in IOTA, until recently including signing transactions. Researchers were able to produce distinct transactions with colliding signatures [1]. Depending on whether you believe the author, either they did it intentionally for the implied purpose of attacking competing forks (as they claim), or unintentionally because they're incompetent. Neither situation sounds good to me. IOTA also relies on a closed-source "coordinator" for consensus. They call it "training wheels". Who knows if their "tangle" will actually work in production. Crazy to me that people are pumping so much money into it w/o any due diligence. [1] https://github.com/mit-dci/tangled-curl/blob/master/vuln-iota.md https://github.com/mit-dci/tangled-curl/blob/master/vuln-iot...
- jgh 9y ago
  Not to mention the whole ternary thing...
- wpietri 9y ago
  Wow. I'm not a crypto expert, but the one thing I'm sure of is that no individual should ever create their own crypto algorithms. Of course, we're talking about a space where somebody can repurpose their Magic The Gathering code and call themselves a currency exchange, so maybe I shouldn't be too surprised.
  - Klathmon 9y ago
    >Of course, we're talking about a space where somebody can repurpose their Magic The Gathering code and call themselves a currency exchange, so maybe I shouldn't be too surprised. Stop judging things by what they were, unless of course you think the aerospace industry is a space where 2 brothers can build a plane out of wood and push it off a cliff...
    - bitxbitxbitcoin 9y ago
      Or that the aerospace industry is the space that consists of whatever those 2 brothers were doing prior to pushing the wood off of the cliff.

yathern 9y ago

Most non tech people I know are barely aware of it - or think of it as "that thing you use to buy black market stuff".

charlesdm 9y ago

The design of Bitcoin is inherently flawed at the moment (at least for payments), and due to its decentralised structure, a change can't easily be forced. I think Bitcoin was a great experiment since it brought us the blockchain, but with the exception of being a store of value (i.e. digital gold, and thus not having to worry too much about high transaction fees) I don't see it going anywhere. But since gold is worth about $8.2tn globally, that might be sufficient. Ethereum on the other hand.. by the looks of it that does seem to have a bright future. It improves upon and fixes many of the flaws Bitcoin has.

tfha 9y ago
It improves upon and fixes a few of the Bitcoin flaws while introducing a whole hoard of other flaws in itself. For example, most 'full nodes' on the Ethereum blockchain have never actually verified the whole chain, they've instead started life by downloading a trusted snapshot from a miner. The scalability properties of Ethereum are dozens of times worse from a raw resource usage perspective, with each transaction on the Ethereum network taking more space to store, more clock cycles to process + verify, and with the whole system being much harder to parallelize. Ethereum made a lot of long term sacrifices to achieve their short term advantages, and it's already falling apart around the edges. One or two more iterations of hardforks + block size increases (gas limit increases) and your average desktop computer won't be able to keep up with the chain anymore, let alone catch up if starting from scratch. And that's just one of the many ameture compromises.
- charlesdm 9y ago
  Not saying you're wrong, but a few thoughts: 1. Do you really want the average desktop computer to sync and verify the entire Blockchain? These things have gotten so huge, even for Bitcoin it's not really reasonable anymore to store the entire chain on a desktop computer. I think the answer here is no, but I could be wrong. 2. It probably goes against the decentralized idea behind blockchain, but I believe it is good that Ethereum has a clear leader. Someone who can actually (sort of) dictate the path -- at least until the project has gotten to where it wants / needs to go. Bitcoin would be in a better place if the founder were around. 3. Bitcoin is already falling apart. Once you have to make a transaction, the pain (generally) starts.. 4. One of the downsides of Ethereum is the size of the blockchain, but see 1. I think at least for Ethereum the potential is still there for it to be good, once they fix their issues. This (to me) seems doable, but if you have things to share on why not, please do! With Bitcoin, you know what the issues are, they are massive and have been around for a while, and they're only getting worse / not getting fixed because people can't reach a consensus. I believe it would be easier to reach consensus if there was a leader. Most of these things however don't matter if we just see it as a store of value.

__s 9y ago

With LN one's able to devise mechanisms where currency is effectively backed by BTC-- think when USD was backed by gold, but where upon the US breaking from that, people were actually able to trade in all their USD for weightless gold

Buttes 9y ago

IOTA is amateur hour. The author implemented their own hashing algo, "curl", which is used all over the place in IOTA, until recently including signing transactions. Researchers were able to produce distinct transactions with colliding signatures [1]. Depending on whether you believe the author, either they did it intentionally for the implied purpose of attacking competing forks (as they claim), or unintentionally because they're incompetent. Neither situation sounds good to me. IOTA also relies on a closed-source "coordinator" for consensus. They call it "training wheels". Who knows if their "tangle" will actually work in production. Crazy to me that people are pumping so much money into it w/o any due diligence. [1] https://github.com/mit-dci/tangled-curl/blob/master/vuln-iota.md https://github.com/mit-dci/tangled-curl/blob/master/vuln-iot...

jgh 9y ago
Not to mention the whole ternary thing...
wpietri 9y ago
Wow. I'm not a crypto expert, but the one thing I'm sure of is that no individual should ever create their own crypto algorithms. Of course, we're talking about a space where somebody can repurpose their Magic The Gathering code and call themselves a currency exchange, so maybe I shouldn't be too surprised.
- Klathmon 9y ago
  >Of course, we're talking about a space where somebody can repurpose their Magic The Gathering code and call themselves a currency exchange, so maybe I shouldn't be too surprised. Stop judging things by what they were, unless of course you think the aerospace industry is a space where 2 brothers can build a plane out of wood and push it off a cliff...
  - bitxbitxbitcoin 9y ago
    Or that the aerospace industry is the space that consists of whatever those 2 brothers were doing prior to pushing the wood off of the cliff.