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I honestly don't know what use-case remains for Bitcoin. If you have large value transactions you'd probably choose something with privacy like Monero, and if

I honestly don't know what use-case remains for Bitcoin. If you have large value transactions you'd probably choose something with privacy like Monero, and if you want something cheap and fast, maybe Bitcoin Cash. In both use-cases, you have a few competing alternatives. In no circumstance is Bitcoin preferable to one of the mature alternatives. ...and if no one is using it as a transaction medium, then acting as a store of value is better placed in an actively used coin network.

avenoir 9y ago
With South Korea trying to regulate anonymous trading on Korean exchanges, makes me wonder how long we have before regulations become more widespread. And if this happens do you think privacy coins even stand a chance?
- freeone3000 9y ago
  Well, the problem with regulating anonymous transactions is you don't know who's doing them.
  - madeofpalk 9y ago
    You don't have to regulate the transactions, you just have to regulate the usage of them.
  - cookiecaper 9y ago
    With Bitcoin that problem may be somewhat short lived. The blockchain is forever. Once unmasked, your permanent, irrevocable, and cryptographically-verified transaction log is sitting in the open for all the world to analyze. Doesn't matter how many years it's been since you've done business. Doesn't matter if you knew that the random dude you bought an antique thimble from was a political dissident or not. You still sent money to that btc address, that address owned by a terrorist, and now they're gonna wanna know why you were funding terrorism...
  - JumpCrisscross 9y ago
    > the problem with regulating anonymous transactions is you don't know who's doing them Every government has departments of agents adept at tracing cash transactions. Bitcoin offers the advantage of total transactional transparency. Shady wallet? Trace back until you find a known wallet. An exchange, vendor, et cetera. Subpoena, find their counterparty, rinse and repeat. Best case: you find your guy. Consolation: money laundering charges against the schmuck who didn't keep books and records. Arrest someone who conducted a fraud, Ponzi scheme, ransomware scam or terrorist financing? If they did it with cash, the money is gone. If they did it with Bitoin, you have the option of tracing forward and seizing the funds the moment they hit a known wallet.
    - smallnamespace 9y ago
      Of course with enough effort and investment you can probably stop many things, the point is whether the increasing marginal costs of enforcement are worth it to the government and society. By that same argument, the US could round up every illegal immigrant and deport them, or every casual drug user and lock them up for life. We don't do that because it'd be ruinously expensive (not to mention immoral) and transform us into a police state. The combination of privacy coins + tumblers + crypto + VPNs + TOR will make it very hard for a government to punish motivated individuals short of extremely draconian measures, and changes the strategic calculus for the society as a whole.
      - JumpCrisscross 9y ago
        > the point is whether the increasing marginal costs of enforcement are worth it to the government and society The same applies to cash. Investigating them is expensive. We don't bust the kid who fails to report the proceeds from their lemonade stand because (a) it's too small and (b) it's too mean. > privacy coins + tumblers + crypto + VPNs + TOR will make it very hard for a government to punish motivated individuals Analogs for each of these exist for cash. None of this is new, it's just shinier. (In any case, now you're talking about willful money laundering.)
        smallnamespace 9y ago
  - wmf 9y ago
    That's not a problem at all; just ban them. For example, I would predict that Coinbase and Gemini will never support Monero or ZCash.
    - adventured 9y ago
      That's exactly what the authorities will do. In fact it'll be extraordinarily trivial for the G30 to regulate Monero et al. out of common use in larger markets if they want to. If you want to use it, you'll be a financial criminal, 99.9% of people in the G30 will avoid it accordingly.
      - koheripbal 9y ago
        It's not so simple. You only need one exchange, anywhere in the world, that will exchange Monero for non-banned cryptos, and the market will flow freely.
        tempestn 9y ago
        Except that any exchange trafficking in an illegal coin could be banned as well, and so your transactions with that exchange in other coins (in order to convert to or from Monero) would be traceable and illegal.
        giblaz 9y ago
        What about coins forked from Monero? What about other privacy coins? Are certain cryptographic algorithms going to be banned when used in a cryptocurrency? These are all loopholes they'd have to tie up if they want to go down that rabbit hole. It will cost them millions of dollars and man hours to stop it. You're baiting the government to play a neverending and increasingly complex game of whack of a mole. It seems like a beyond awful use of tax dollars to me. We cannot let our government get sucked down the black hole of trying to regulate the unregulatable. They need to come up with solutions to co-exist with it, not outright ban it. That will be a disaster in the making on par with the war on drugs.
        9y ago
  - BatFastard 9y ago
    Very few cryptocurrencies are anonymous, Bitcoin is NOT. OMG do people really think this still? Now there are anonymous currencies like Monero.
- qwerty456127 9y ago
  Not only they will stand a chance, they will grow substantially as the only way to mitigate the governments efforts to enforce surveillance and regulations. Darknet exchanges will emerge if not there yet. People have been dreaming of real electronic cash nobody can know you have or give to somebody for so long and wont give up easily. By the way this can even happen to be the way to the new kind of economy that relies on reputation and competition rather than surveillance and prohibition.
  - Larrikin 9y ago
    How does money get in or out of such a system. If you're cut off from all sources of fiat what's the point?
    - qwerty456127 9y ago
      It can grow value of its own as the ecosystem grows and a black market can emerge for the needs of conversion.
    - lelandbatey 9y ago
      The point is that people can still use it for things, and the various dark net markets that exist prove that there's at least some kind of use for unofficial (pseudo?)-anonymous currency. Though, by no means are darknets the only way of getting some use out of unofficial currencies. There will always be desire and utility for such systems.
      - vkou 9y ago
        Those darknet markets are only used to buy illegal things, or circumvent currency controls. I understand using a darknet to buy heroin and assassinations, but why on earth would I want to use a darknet market to buy a car? To pay my rent?
        nol13 9y ago
        So all the spammers/scammers can't see what car you just bought and how much you paid for it and use it for spear phishing?
- QML 9y ago
  The real threat to privacy focused coins isn’t government — its competition from within the blockchain space. If the lightning network works, it would effectively hide transaction history and activity similar to how TOR works.
nwah1 9y ago
Your comment amounts to "I don't know why anyone would use X when they can use these other two things that are fundamentally the same."
- rwcarlsen 9y ago
  His entire comment is about the differences between BTC and Monero and Bitcoin Cash that make the latter two more desirable. Not sure how your interpretation is remotely accurate.
  - nwah1 9y ago
    Stripe is getting rid of bitcoin because it has proven to be impractical at scale. It is impractical at scale because the fundamental technology, proof-of-work, is impractical at scale. The two alternatives mentioned are the same in this respect, with only the smallest differences.
    - rwcarlsen 9y ago
      Bitcoin (BTC) chain stakeholders (miners, etc.) have chosen to make the current level of transaction throughput be expensive and relatively slow. But there is no such binary tradeoff between "does scale" and "doesn't scale". It is a spectrum. It would be (technologically) trivial for bitcoin to support its current transaction rate with cheap, fast transactions - but the community has opted not to. There are alternative coins that have decided that cheap and fast transactions are important now - not at some undefined future time as will be satisfied by a working, adopted lightning network implementation. You are free to prefer one choice over the other, but I think it would be more accurate to say that regular on-chain bitcoin doesn't scale the way you want it to.
      - tfha 9y ago
        Uh, unless you've got some way to make a decentralized blockchain function at 2.5 GiB every 10 minutes, it's effectively not a spectrum. At 8mb block size we'd still have the same problem. Except instead of happening at 5 million weekly users it happens at 40 million weekly users. And at 100mb block size we might get to 100 million daily users. Still haven't scaled the thing. We'd need to support billions of daily users for people to be happy. It's an open question right now
garmaine 9y ago
Use bitcoin with lightning.
- sydd 9y ago
  Money is serious business, why would anyone rely on a network that was released days ago? Also it defeats the main guarantee of Bitcoin - that everything can be trusted. Bitcoin would have had a great future if the big guys werent so greedy and sacrifised a little of their wealth for the benefit of the whole community. Since they refused to do so (=refusing any attempt to make BTC transfers faster and cheaper) the network is choking itself (=it takes days for a transaction to be confirmed, it costs >$30) and the community is thorn between altcoins. We will see how this will play out, but my hunch is that we will see a huge market collapse and a "restart" by one of the emerging altcoins that solves the issues that came up with Bitcoin.
  - raverbashing 9y ago
    People (and service providers) just need to vote with their wallet Start accepting BCH, Dash, etc, if lightning works out great, go back to BTC, if not, the alternatives are there (Of course they can look at ETH, XRP, Monero, but accepting bitcoin forks is easier if the BTC infrastructure is already there)
    - kuschku 9y ago
      But that doesn't work. When marketing a new product, you get at most one chance to do it right. If you fuck that up, you won't get a second chance. No payment provider is going to take the same risks for BCH again that they took for BTC. No merchant, and also most consumers won't.
  - igorgue 9y ago
    It does not take days and it's not more than 30 bucks to send.
nickthemagicman 9y ago
Monero is fast as well.
- tdurden 9y ago
  Sure, for now (and maybe in the future too?) - the thing is that every crypto is fast before it hits bitcoin scale.
  - Casseres 9y ago
    Monero's block size scales automatically.
    - nickthemagicman 9y ago
      Thanks was going to post this.
bparsons 9y ago
I think Bitcoin is the AOL of blockchain technology. It was a first mover, it had huge uptake and valuation, but in a few years (or perhaps already) someone is going to build a protocol that is capable of hundreds of thousands of secure transactions a second, and it will make Bitcoin look archaic.
- eosrei 9y ago
  FWIW that is the goal of the Lightning Network on Bitcoin: https://lightning.network/ https://lightning.network/
  - Operyl 9y ago
    I keep seeing this brought up over months and months, but how close are we even to using it? Is the technology a thing yet? Or is it all white papers.
    - wyager 9y ago
      Working implementations exist and are usable, but they are being very cautious before releasing to the general public.
    - Mahn 9y ago
      It exists in its early stages, but it's terribly impractical, hence no exchange or end user is in a rush to adopt it. Its design is almost like someone took a hard look at Bitcoin and concluded "Gee, this is not cumbersome enough for people, we need to make transacting a worse and more confusing experience".
    - grubles 9y ago
      I demoed [0] receiving one tenths of a cent's worth of bitcoin (0.00000010 BTC) instantly, and on Bitcoin's mainnet (not a test network). I also demoed [1] purchasing swag from Blockstream's store [2] which is powered by their newly released Wordpress e-commerce plugin [3] that enables Lightning payments. I did not screencapture the videos because Qubes dom0 does not come OOTB with screenrecording software, and I don't want to enable networking in dom0 to install software that does. [0]https://twitter.com/notgrubles/status/955611467889422337 https://twitter.com/notgrubles/status/955611467889422337 [1]https://twitter.com/notgrubles/status/954933507863863296 https://twitter.com/notgrubles/status/954933507863863296 [2]https://store.blockstream.com/ https://store.blockstream.com/ [3]https://blockstream.com/2018/01/16/lightning-charge.html https://blockstream.com/2018/01/16/lightning-charge.html
PunchTornado 9y ago
lighting network is pretty fast now. bitcoin cash will have the same problems like bitcoin once is growing in size. not a solution.
- bigiain 9y ago
  <snark>Bitcoin was pretty fast when practically nobody was using it too...
pcarolan 9y ago
Here's a good rundown: https://a16z.com/2018/01/21/mental-models-tokens-crypto-trends/ https://a16z.com/2018/01/21/mental-models-tokens-crypto-tren...
tuna-piano 9y ago
The argument that makes sense to me is that Bitcoin is just “Digital Gold”. But I don’t really understand why gold has so much value, so maybe it’s not really a good answer. It’s kind of like saying “Maybe Bitcoins will have value for a long time just like this other non-valuable, non-transaction asset that’s had value for a long time”...
- uncletammy 9y ago
  Bitcoin's strategy is exactly that. And it would be a GREAT strategy if there was something about Bitcoin that made it the best "digital gold" available. Sadly, the only property it shares with gold is that it's hard to move. In fact, Bitcoin Cash is functionally identical to Bitcoin and it's easy to move. That's ignoring the hundreds of other digital currencies not named Bitcoin which make a better "digital gold".
  - matt4077 9y ago
    Bitcoin doesn't have a strategy. The "value store" narrative is a post-hoc rationalisation for its continued, yet less and less rational, existence. The proof that Bitcoin was intended as an alternative to cash, and to be used for small, everyday transactions is right there in the name: It's Bit"coin", not Bitgold, or even Bitbill.
- dmoy 9y ago
  Gold has value because it's shiny, doesn't oxidize, is malleable enough to easily form conspicuous jewelry, is much rarer than base mining elements, and is not cheap to extract. The not oxidizing and rarity are key. E.g. platinum is also not cheap. Aluminium is close but it's orders of magnitude more common, and still oxidizes a little.
  - hndamien 9y ago
    Value as a currency.
    - 9y ago
csomar 9y ago
The reason is that life is not really that simple. People pick people/assets/things based on reputation and popularity and not technical or practical merit. Gold is used as a store of value despite the fact that it is 1. volatile 2. hard to store 3. hard to buy/sell and 4. hard to transport.
- Aunche 9y ago
  Gold at least has some unique purposes besides a store of value. Over half of it is used for jewelry and commercial reasons, so at worst it can be considered an over-speculated commodity. Bitcoin literally has nothing going for it besides being the current market leader.
  - zanny 9y ago
    If the International perception of gold being valuable disappeared overnight (which... yeah, won't happen unless someone discovers legit alchemy magic) the difference between losing 90% of your value or 100% if it had no use outside of the speculation shouldn't be influencing almost anyones decision in what to invest in. All the other parameters (volatility, profitability, etc) are way more important than if you are completely bankrupt or completely fucked if the market implodes.
    - Aunche 9y ago
      My point is that gold can never lose 90% of its value because the majority of it is already used in luxury items and electronics. At worst, the total value of gold can only drop by the current amount that is being held in reserve or as investments.
      - bryanlarsen 9y ago
        Price is set at the margin. If half the demand for gold evaporated the price for gold would likely drop a lot more than 50%, probably more than 90%. When demand for gasoline went up by 2%, the price doubled.
      - 9y ago
uncletammy 9y ago
> I honestly don't know what use-case remains for Bitcoin. There's a great use case in suckering honest people into holding your bags using the promise of instant wealth. EDIT: Added quote
hluch 9y ago
There are several use cases. 1. Paying merchants who don't accept any other cryptocurrency (which is the majority of the available ones; typically they accept fiat in some form, plus Bitcoin since it's been around so long, but have barely heard of others). 2. Donations, same as above. 3. As an onramp from fiat to other cryptocurrencies, where those are accepted and Bitcoin BTC transaction fees for 1 confirmation in a reasonable time are an excessively high portion of the transaction amount. 4. For cryptocurrency payments which need the very highest possible level of security against double-spends, which is provided by Bitcoin's hashrate and decentralization, arising from there being a mature community around it. As far as I can tell, none of the other currencies have equally good metrics, though they do approach it. Plus a few more. And not forgetting that Bitcoin Core could in future raise the block size, making each unit increase sharply in utility and value, beyond its natural deflationary increase.
lhl 9y ago
As a preface, I am long-term bearish on Bitcoin, and have been since it became apparent to me that the community and development process had basically been terminally broken in 2016 - everything that's happened since then has been utterly predictable, and I'm pretty sure that while it might not go away, it's basically a legacy product. That being said, Bitcoin currently has the highest market liquidity (trading volume, markets, stability, convertability) and has the most mature investment infrastructure. It has the most fiat rails and trading pairs (almost all alt markets are pegged to BTC) and for moving sufficiently large sums around internationally it can still be considered relatively fast and cheap. There's a large SoV use case for a cryptoasset that is censorship and seizure resistant, although personally, I have questions on whether something can be a long term SoV if it doesn't functional well as a MoE (maybe Gold proves the case). Also, I feel like the financial side is currently not very savvy on the actual blockchain mechanics side of things and agree that it seems like you would absolutely want to use the most private blockchain you could find for SoV, but I don't have much expertise in that part of the world (offshore assets, wealth management, etc). While it feels like we're a bit in '98 for the speculative bubble after last year, for blockchains/DLT, I think we're maybe '94 on the tech. Still, cryptoassets have seemed to make a jump to a legitimate asset class last year, one that's big enough for the financial world to pay attention to, and that has some very interesting investment properties and a lot of potential (when I sat down to total up the amount of long term economic impact, I came to the conclusion that it may be a bigger deal than the Internet.)
just_one_time_ 9y ago
Ask Greg Maxwell. He is "popping the champagne" for reaching his goal of having a always full mempool (Greg is CTO of Blockstream and GitHub repo owner for Bitcoin Core.

avenoir 9y ago

With South Korea trying to regulate anonymous trading on Korean exchanges, makes me wonder how long we have before regulations become more widespread. And if this happens do you think privacy coins even stand a chance?

freeone3000 9y ago
Well, the problem with regulating anonymous transactions is you don't know who's doing them.
- madeofpalk 9y ago
  You don't have to regulate the transactions, you just have to regulate the usage of them.
- cookiecaper 9y ago
  With Bitcoin that problem may be somewhat short lived. The blockchain is forever. Once unmasked, your permanent, irrevocable, and cryptographically-verified transaction log is sitting in the open for all the world to analyze. Doesn't matter how many years it's been since you've done business. Doesn't matter if you knew that the random dude you bought an antique thimble from was a political dissident or not. You still sent money to that btc address, that address owned by a terrorist, and now they're gonna wanna know why you were funding terrorism...
- JumpCrisscross 9y ago
  > the problem with regulating anonymous transactions is you don't know who's doing them Every government has departments of agents adept at tracing cash transactions. Bitcoin offers the advantage of total transactional transparency. Shady wallet? Trace back until you find a known wallet. An exchange, vendor, et cetera. Subpoena, find their counterparty, rinse and repeat. Best case: you find your guy. Consolation: money laundering charges against the schmuck who didn't keep books and records. Arrest someone who conducted a fraud, Ponzi scheme, ransomware scam or terrorist financing? If they did it with cash, the money is gone. If they did it with Bitoin, you have the option of tracing forward and seizing the funds the moment they hit a known wallet.
  - smallnamespace 9y ago
    Of course with enough effort and investment you can probably stop many things, the point is whether the increasing marginal costs of enforcement are worth it to the government and society. By that same argument, the US could round up every illegal immigrant and deport them, or every casual drug user and lock them up for life. We don't do that because it'd be ruinously expensive (not to mention immoral) and transform us into a police state. The combination of privacy coins + tumblers + crypto + VPNs + TOR will make it very hard for a government to punish motivated individuals short of extremely draconian measures, and changes the strategic calculus for the society as a whole.
    - JumpCrisscross 9y ago
      > the point is whether the increasing marginal costs of enforcement are worth it to the government and society The same applies to cash. Investigating them is expensive. We don't bust the kid who fails to report the proceeds from their lemonade stand because (a) it's too small and (b) it's too mean. > privacy coins + tumblers + crypto + VPNs + TOR will make it very hard for a government to punish motivated individuals Analogs for each of these exist for cash. None of this is new, it's just shinier. (In any case, now you're talking about willful money laundering.)
      - smallnamespace 9y ago
- wmf 9y ago
  That's not a problem at all; just ban them. For example, I would predict that Coinbase and Gemini will never support Monero or ZCash.
  - adventured 9y ago
    That's exactly what the authorities will do. In fact it'll be extraordinarily trivial for the G30 to regulate Monero et al. out of common use in larger markets if they want to. If you want to use it, you'll be a financial criminal, 99.9% of people in the G30 will avoid it accordingly.
    - koheripbal 9y ago
      It's not so simple. You only need one exchange, anywhere in the world, that will exchange Monero for non-banned cryptos, and the market will flow freely.
      - tempestn 9y ago
        Except that any exchange trafficking in an illegal coin could be banned as well, and so your transactions with that exchange in other coins (in order to convert to or from Monero) would be traceable and illegal.
        giblaz 9y ago
        What about coins forked from Monero? What about other privacy coins? Are certain cryptographic algorithms going to be banned when used in a cryptocurrency? These are all loopholes they'd have to tie up if they want to go down that rabbit hole. It will cost them millions of dollars and man hours to stop it. You're baiting the government to play a neverending and increasingly complex game of whack of a mole. It seems like a beyond awful use of tax dollars to me. We cannot let our government get sucked down the black hole of trying to regulate the unregulatable. They need to come up with solutions to co-exist with it, not outright ban it. That will be a disaster in the making on par with the war on drugs.
      - 9y ago
- BatFastard 9y ago
  Very few cryptocurrencies are anonymous, Bitcoin is NOT. OMG do people really think this still? Now there are anonymous currencies like Monero.
qwerty456127 9y ago
Not only they will stand a chance, they will grow substantially as the only way to mitigate the governments efforts to enforce surveillance and regulations. Darknet exchanges will emerge if not there yet. People have been dreaming of real electronic cash nobody can know you have or give to somebody for so long and wont give up easily. By the way this can even happen to be the way to the new kind of economy that relies on reputation and competition rather than surveillance and prohibition.
- Larrikin 9y ago
  How does money get in or out of such a system. If you're cut off from all sources of fiat what's the point?
  - qwerty456127 9y ago
    It can grow value of its own as the ecosystem grows and a black market can emerge for the needs of conversion.
  - lelandbatey 9y ago
    The point is that people can still use it for things, and the various dark net markets that exist prove that there's at least some kind of use for unofficial (pseudo?)-anonymous currency. Though, by no means are darknets the only way of getting some use out of unofficial currencies. There will always be desire and utility for such systems.
    - vkou 9y ago
      Those darknet markets are only used to buy illegal things, or circumvent currency controls. I understand using a darknet to buy heroin and assassinations, but why on earth would I want to use a darknet market to buy a car? To pay my rent?
      - nol13 9y ago
        So all the spammers/scammers can't see what car you just bought and how much you paid for it and use it for spear phishing?
QML 9y ago
The real threat to privacy focused coins isn’t government — its competition from within the blockchain space. If the lightning network works, it would effectively hide transaction history and activity similar to how TOR works.

nwah1 9y ago

Your comment amounts to "I don't know why anyone would use X when they can use these other two things that are fundamentally the same."

rwcarlsen 9y ago
His entire comment is about the differences between BTC and Monero and Bitcoin Cash that make the latter two more desirable. Not sure how your interpretation is remotely accurate.
- nwah1 9y ago
  Stripe is getting rid of bitcoin because it has proven to be impractical at scale. It is impractical at scale because the fundamental technology, proof-of-work, is impractical at scale. The two alternatives mentioned are the same in this respect, with only the smallest differences.
  - rwcarlsen 9y ago
    Bitcoin (BTC) chain stakeholders (miners, etc.) have chosen to make the current level of transaction throughput be expensive and relatively slow. But there is no such binary tradeoff between "does scale" and "doesn't scale". It is a spectrum. It would be (technologically) trivial for bitcoin to support its current transaction rate with cheap, fast transactions - but the community has opted not to. There are alternative coins that have decided that cheap and fast transactions are important now - not at some undefined future time as will be satisfied by a working, adopted lightning network implementation. You are free to prefer one choice over the other, but I think it would be more accurate to say that regular on-chain bitcoin doesn't scale the way you want it to.
    - tfha 9y ago
      Uh, unless you've got some way to make a decentralized blockchain function at 2.5 GiB every 10 minutes, it's effectively not a spectrum. At 8mb block size we'd still have the same problem. Except instead of happening at 5 million weekly users it happens at 40 million weekly users. And at 100mb block size we might get to 100 million daily users. Still haven't scaled the thing. We'd need to support billions of daily users for people to be happy. It's an open question right now

garmaine 9y ago

Use bitcoin with lightning.

sydd 9y ago
Money is serious business, why would anyone rely on a network that was released days ago? Also it defeats the main guarantee of Bitcoin - that everything can be trusted. Bitcoin would have had a great future if the big guys werent so greedy and sacrifised a little of their wealth for the benefit of the whole community. Since they refused to do so (=refusing any attempt to make BTC transfers faster and cheaper) the network is choking itself (=it takes days for a transaction to be confirmed, it costs >$30) and the community is thorn between altcoins. We will see how this will play out, but my hunch is that we will see a huge market collapse and a "restart" by one of the emerging altcoins that solves the issues that came up with Bitcoin.
- raverbashing 9y ago
  People (and service providers) just need to vote with their wallet Start accepting BCH, Dash, etc, if lightning works out great, go back to BTC, if not, the alternatives are there (Of course they can look at ETH, XRP, Monero, but accepting bitcoin forks is easier if the BTC infrastructure is already there)
  - kuschku 9y ago
    But that doesn't work. When marketing a new product, you get at most one chance to do it right. If you fuck that up, you won't get a second chance. No payment provider is going to take the same risks for BCH again that they took for BTC. No merchant, and also most consumers won't.
- igorgue 9y ago
  It does not take days and it's not more than 30 bucks to send.

nickthemagicman 9y ago

Monero is fast as well.

tdurden 9y ago
Sure, for now (and maybe in the future too?) - the thing is that every crypto is fast before it hits bitcoin scale.
- Casseres 9y ago
  Monero's block size scales automatically.
  - nickthemagicman 9y ago
    Thanks was going to post this.

bparsons 9y ago

I think Bitcoin is the AOL of blockchain technology. It was a first mover, it had huge uptake and valuation, but in a few years (or perhaps already) someone is going to build a protocol that is capable of hundreds of thousands of secure transactions a second, and it will make Bitcoin look archaic.

eosrei 9y ago
FWIW that is the goal of the Lightning Network on Bitcoin: https://lightning.network/ https://lightning.network/
- Operyl 9y ago
  I keep seeing this brought up over months and months, but how close are we even to using it? Is the technology a thing yet? Or is it all white papers.
  - wyager 9y ago
    Working implementations exist and are usable, but they are being very cautious before releasing to the general public.
  - Mahn 9y ago
    It exists in its early stages, but it's terribly impractical, hence no exchange or end user is in a rush to adopt it. Its design is almost like someone took a hard look at Bitcoin and concluded "Gee, this is not cumbersome enough for people, we need to make transacting a worse and more confusing experience".
  - grubles 9y ago
    I demoed [0] receiving one tenths of a cent's worth of bitcoin (0.00000010 BTC) instantly, and on Bitcoin's mainnet (not a test network). I also demoed [1] purchasing swag from Blockstream's store [2] which is powered by their newly released Wordpress e-commerce plugin [3] that enables Lightning payments. I did not screencapture the videos because Qubes dom0 does not come OOTB with screenrecording software, and I don't want to enable networking in dom0 to install software that does. [0]https://twitter.com/notgrubles/status/955611467889422337 https://twitter.com/notgrubles/status/955611467889422337 [1]https://twitter.com/notgrubles/status/954933507863863296 https://twitter.com/notgrubles/status/954933507863863296 [2]https://store.blockstream.com/ https://store.blockstream.com/ [3]https://blockstream.com/2018/01/16/lightning-charge.html https://blockstream.com/2018/01/16/lightning-charge.html

PunchTornado 9y ago

lighting network is pretty fast now. bitcoin cash will have the same problems like bitcoin once is growing in size. not a solution.

bigiain 9y ago
<snark>Bitcoin was pretty fast when practically nobody was using it too...

pcarolan 9y ago

Here's a good rundown: https://a16z.com/2018/01/21/mental-models-tokens-crypto-trends/ https://a16z.com/2018/01/21/mental-models-tokens-crypto-tren...

tuna-piano 9y ago

The argument that makes sense to me is that Bitcoin is just “Digital Gold”. But I don’t really understand why gold has so much value, so maybe it’s not really a good answer. It’s kind of like saying “Maybe Bitcoins will have value for a long time just like this other non-valuable, non-transaction asset that’s had value for a long time”...

uncletammy 9y ago
Bitcoin's strategy is exactly that. And it would be a GREAT strategy if there was something about Bitcoin that made it the best "digital gold" available. Sadly, the only property it shares with gold is that it's hard to move. In fact, Bitcoin Cash is functionally identical to Bitcoin and it's easy to move. That's ignoring the hundreds of other digital currencies not named Bitcoin which make a better "digital gold".
- matt4077 9y ago
  Bitcoin doesn't have a strategy. The "value store" narrative is a post-hoc rationalisation for its continued, yet less and less rational, existence. The proof that Bitcoin was intended as an alternative to cash, and to be used for small, everyday transactions is right there in the name: It's Bit"coin", not Bitgold, or even Bitbill.
dmoy 9y ago
Gold has value because it's shiny, doesn't oxidize, is malleable enough to easily form conspicuous jewelry, is much rarer than base mining elements, and is not cheap to extract. The not oxidizing and rarity are key. E.g. platinum is also not cheap. Aluminium is close but it's orders of magnitude more common, and still oxidizes a little.
- hndamien 9y ago
  Value as a currency.
  - 9y ago

csomar 9y ago

The reason is that life is not really that simple. People pick people/assets/things based on reputation and popularity and not technical or practical merit. Gold is used as a store of value despite the fact that it is 1. volatile 2. hard to store 3. hard to buy/sell and 4. hard to transport.

Aunche 9y ago
Gold at least has some unique purposes besides a store of value. Over half of it is used for jewelry and commercial reasons, so at worst it can be considered an over-speculated commodity. Bitcoin literally has nothing going for it besides being the current market leader.
- zanny 9y ago
  If the International perception of gold being valuable disappeared overnight (which... yeah, won't happen unless someone discovers legit alchemy magic) the difference between losing 90% of your value or 100% if it had no use outside of the speculation shouldn't be influencing almost anyones decision in what to invest in. All the other parameters (volatility, profitability, etc) are way more important than if you are completely bankrupt or completely fucked if the market implodes.
  - Aunche 9y ago
    My point is that gold can never lose 90% of its value because the majority of it is already used in luxury items and electronics. At worst, the total value of gold can only drop by the current amount that is being held in reserve or as investments.
    - bryanlarsen 9y ago
      Price is set at the margin. If half the demand for gold evaporated the price for gold would likely drop a lot more than 50%, probably more than 90%. When demand for gasoline went up by 2%, the price doubled.
    - 9y ago

uncletammy 9y ago

> I honestly don't know what use-case remains for Bitcoin. There's a great use case in suckering honest people into holding your bags using the promise of instant wealth. EDIT: Added quote

hluch 9y ago

There are several use cases. 1. Paying merchants who don't accept any other cryptocurrency (which is the majority of the available ones; typically they accept fiat in some form, plus Bitcoin since it's been around so long, but have barely heard of others). 2. Donations, same as above. 3. As an onramp from fiat to other cryptocurrencies, where those are accepted and Bitcoin BTC transaction fees for 1 confirmation in a reasonable time are an excessively high portion of the transaction amount. 4. For cryptocurrency payments which need the very highest possible level of security against double-spends, which is provided by Bitcoin's hashrate and decentralization, arising from there being a mature community around it. As far as I can tell, none of the other currencies have equally good metrics, though they do approach it. Plus a few more. And not forgetting that Bitcoin Core could in future raise the block size, making each unit increase sharply in utility and value, beyond its natural deflationary increase.

lhl 9y ago

As a preface, I am long-term bearish on Bitcoin, and have been since it became apparent to me that the community and development process had basically been terminally broken in 2016 - everything that's happened since then has been utterly predictable, and I'm pretty sure that while it might not go away, it's basically a legacy product. That being said, Bitcoin currently has the highest market liquidity (trading volume, markets, stability, convertability) and has the most mature investment infrastructure. It has the most fiat rails and trading pairs (almost all alt markets are pegged to BTC) and for moving sufficiently large sums around internationally it can still be considered relatively fast and cheap. There's a large SoV use case for a cryptoasset that is censorship and seizure resistant, although personally, I have questions on whether something can be a long term SoV if it doesn't functional well as a MoE (maybe Gold proves the case). Also, I feel like the financial side is currently not very savvy on the actual blockchain mechanics side of things and agree that it seems like you would absolutely want to use the most private blockchain you could find for SoV, but I don't have much expertise in that part of the world (offshore assets, wealth management, etc). While it feels like we're a bit in '98 for the speculative bubble after last year, for blockchains/DLT, I think we're maybe '94 on the tech. Still, cryptoassets have seemed to make a jump to a legitimate asset class last year, one that's big enough for the financial world to pay attention to, and that has some very interesting investment properties and a lot of potential (when I sat down to total up the amount of long term economic impact, I came to the conclusion that it may be a bigger deal than the Internet.)

just_one_time_ 9y ago

Ask Greg Maxwell. He is "popping the champagne" for reaching his goal of having a always full mempool (Greg is CTO of Blockstream and GitHub repo owner for Bitcoin Core.