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The trouble with this article is that the author doesn't seem to know what Bitcoin is for. Notice the vague treatment of actual cryptocurrency applications. Th

by aazaa 7y ago

The trouble with this article is that the author doesn't seem to know what Bitcoin is for. Notice the vague treatment of actual cryptocurrency applications. There are lots of predictions about startup activity, "flippenings" and venture capital, but little about the goods and services customers will actually be buying, or what specifically startups will be building. It's this kind of thinking that leads people into the dark thicket that is "tokens": digital instruments bought and sold largely for speculative purposes. It's understandable. The ability to print money is a fantasy of many people from a young age. The last two years have seem a solid refutation of this notion. Almost every token has lost value against Bitcoin. It seems reasonable to conclude that the carnage will continue. So the money printing press ship has sailed. It's going to come as a shock for many people (some with economics degrees), but bootstrapping censorship-resistant money is a one-time deal. Any attempt to profit from the undertaking harms the credibility of the founders. Only the genuine scammers are left to continue the exercise. Here's a vision for the future of Bitcoin. Bitcoin will extend its role as a refuge from the growing foreign and domestic militarization of money. It will become an indispensable weapon against civil asset forfeiture, international sanctions, deplatforming, and mass surveillance. That's your application for Bitcoin in the '20s. And it's a doozy. It places Bitcoin on the side of personal freedom and on a collision course with some of the world's biggest governments, including the US. There will be many attempts to "ban" Bitcoin. Startups will play a marginal role at best because their ultimate aim of monopolization flies in the face of what Bitcoin was designed to do.

JohnJamesRambo 7y ago
I find it hilarious you think Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong doesn't "know what Bitcoin is for." Maybe you don't know what it is for. People that are sane like Mr. Armstrong and Satoshi Nakamoto intended it to be used as a currency. If Satoshi is still alive I'm sure he was quite disappointed when Bitcoin decided to not scale past its blistering 7 transactions per second. "Bitcoin can already scale much larger than that with existing hardware for a fraction of the cost. It never really hits a scale ceiling." -Satoshi Nakamoto https://steemit.com/bitcoin/@cryptodailyuk/bitcoin-broke-coinbase-ceo-brian-armstrong-s-heart-so-he-s-now-focused-on-ethereum https://steemit.com/bitcoin/@cryptodailyuk/bitcoin-broke-coi...
- esotericn 7y ago
  He's the chair of a very public company with investors and whatnot. Inevitably that hamstrings permissible opinions. Not only that, the purpose of his company is to profit from cryptocurrency in a specific way, whether or not that's the 'right thing' for the space or not. Their business model basically falls apart, for example, if people stop using fiat currencies and atomic swaps allow trades to happen without a clearing house. All over this thread you can see waffle about money laundering or whatever else; which Coinbase cannot sidestep because they're forced to interface with banks that will cut them off, governments that don't like it if you don't do what they say, etc.
- entropyneur 7y ago
  I think they are being sarcastic. What they probably mean is "for political/business reasons Coinbase CEO has to tiptoe around Bitcoin's actual purpose".
  - arthurcolle 7y ago
    I mean Armstrong is calling it "economic freedom" so he's not that far off base, in any case.
- pixelperfect 7y ago
  Bitcoin is continuing to scale, but it's doing so with the Lightning Network instead of by increasing block size. I'm not super familiar with Bitcoin's tech, but that seems sensible to me. The blockchain is already 250 GB at 7 transactions per second. If you multiplied that by 100, you still have orders of magnitude less transactions per second than credit card processors, but the hardware requirements are now high enough that few individuals could afford to run full nodes.
  - dane-pgp 7y ago
    For context, I don't think anyone is suggesting that BTC's blocks would still be full if they were 100 times bigger, so it is premature to talk about competing with credit card processors. However, 250 GB is approximately 25 GB per year (since Bitcoin started in 2009), which, if you multiply it by 100, is 2.5 TB per year. That means it will take about 6.4 years to fill a 16 TB hard drive, which should cost less than $600: https://www.techradar.com/uk/news/worlds-largest-hard-disk-drive-goes-on-sale-today-for-less-than-youd-think https://www.techradar.com/uk/news/worlds-largest-hard-disk-d... It's not hard to imagine someone paying under $100 per year to run a full node, whereas on the day that TechRadar article was published, the average price of a bitcoin transaction was $4.58 as seen here: https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/bitcoin-transactionfees.html#1y https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/bitcoin-transactionfees...
arthurcolle 7y ago
Completely agree. I thought I posted on the other thread about 2020s predictions but apparently I didn't hit the reply button: Bitcoin will definitely singularly emerge as the new common 'numéraire' in the near to mid-term (5 to 10 years). I love that you specifically call out the omnipresent crypto scams, because they are what disappointed me from the whole endeavor once they emerged in the ICO craze. Once 1 bitcoin has price of 500,000 to a few million in USD per individual 'bitcoin' UXTO, it'll be obvious for governments to just start using it, and create dual money systems that are just layers on top of the (maybe single, maybe not) existing, working blockchain, despite its slowness. China is pursuing this now, even in anticipation of large price increases. IMO Bitcoin is definitely the numeraire of the future, and it is certainly not a sure thing right now but I am extremely certain of this. It then becomes so trivial to do aggregate balance of payments calculations without so much sketchy behavior by fraudulent sovereigns that want to represent their own vision of 'real trade' for various purposes, such as economic warfare. For non-finance people, numeraire is a representative abstraction of a 'unit of exchange', used to simplify things. You can then idealize situations like having riskless borrowing, which simplifies many formulae. But this is not an accurate portrayal of reality, (look up sovereign defaults, as one example. Greece, Spain, Italy, some Asian countries at different times, Argentina, Venezuela, etc.) So having a numeraire that isn't sovereign would be really impactful in making all economic participants way more honest, outside of the immediate smaller-scale effects of allowing people to get their cryptos ropped by unscrupulous people on the darknet. From Wiki: "The numéraire is a basic standard by which value is computed. In mathematical economics it is a tradable economic entity in terms of whose price the relative prices of all other tradables are expressed" Anyways, the Bitcoin protocol could definitely fail, for any number of a few different reasons, but at present barring some kind of major technological paradigm shift that breaks existing cryptography (maybe QC, maybe something different) it is uniquely positioned to become the de-facto standard for all balance of payments activity internationally. Scalability issues are definitely a factor, but hey, the mempool is working its hardest until they rewrite the underlying consensus mechanisms to work at larger scale. But as a settlement system and a darknet unit of exchange, it is extremely clear that this is the first hard asset that won't just vanish at the mercy of sovereigns. Very powerful new technology.
danans 7y ago
> It places Bitcoin on the side of personal freedom and on a collision course with some of the world's biggest governments, including the US. And until and unless you can use it to purchase the goods and services needed for daily life, and the military and police forces needed to secure the supplies lines of those, it will be at best a theoretical form of personal freedom. Even if Bitcoin doesn't rely on trust, the rest of the functions of human society do.
- thebean11 7y ago
  Not sure I understand how the military is going to stop individuals from exchanging goods within a country, are you suggesting the US/Chinese/Some other military would stop the flow of everyday goods into its own country to prevent Bitcoin transactions?
  - danans 7y ago
    If the volume of crypto currency transactions ended up becoming a threat to the functioning of the state (through loss of the power of taxation), then yes. But anyways, isn't that pretty much the anarcho-capitalist vs statist conflict that cryptocurrencies are ultimately trying to aim us towards?
    - thebean11 7y ago
      Yes meaning the military would starve a country to root out crypto users? In that scenario, you're unable to use crypto because no goods exist to buy (meaning dollars are useless as well)? Sorry if I'm completely misunderstanding your argument, but having trouble reading it in a different way.
      - danans 7y ago
        > In that scenario, you're unable to use crypto because no goods exist to buy (meaning dollars are useless as well)? The state will take over the entire supply chain to ensure that it transacts in a currency that it controls, crypto or otherwise. Without that, the shared physical and legal infrastructure that supply chain depends on would cease to exist, and with it the supply chain. Individuals, or the small communes that act financially as individuals in the crypto based trading system would have to trade in the simplest raw materials and finished products would be all have to be made hyper locally. Otherwise what entity would secure the transit of high value finished goods from supplier to customer? I understand that it's a vision of the future that many people relish for its "freedom" from the state (but not so much from the local tribe). But universal crypto based transactions are not a drop in replacement for what we have now that keeps everything else the same. They come with their own radically different future-primitive vision for the world.
nradov 7y ago
Bitcoin is for wealthy Chinese people to evade currency controls and get their wealth out to politically safer countries. Buy mining hardware and electricity with Renminbi, get Bitcoins, sell in a foreign country for hard currency.
James-primitive 7y ago
>The trouble with this article is that the author doesn't seem to know what Bitcoin is for. Does anyone? It was invented by John Romero for G_d's sake. > The ability to print money is a fantasy of many people from a young age. This is the problem Bitcoin exists to solve. > bootstrapping censorship-resistant money is a one-time deal. But what about Wei Dai, Nick Szabo and Ethereum? They all created Bitcoin-twice. >Only the genuine scammers are left to continue the exercise. Such as one "Mencius Szabo"...fisked and enumerated! >flies in the face of what Bitcoin was designed to do. Which is what, exactly? ::enumerate and fisk -- (anon) Goulding
bouncycastle 7y ago
Your comment sounds like a priest delivering a sermon. No sources to back your argument up and also you missed a large fact that Bitcoin just doesn't scale for any of the applications you've outlined.
- brighton36 7y ago
  Skepticism of crypto is immoral, and will be downvoted. Only confidence is allowed. lol
brighton36 7y ago
Indexing crypto has outperformed BTC only strategies for a long time.
nootropicat 7y ago
>censorship-resistant money It's not, the majority of hash power is in China. That means the Chinese government could start censoring bitcoin transactions in a week if they wanted to - by orphaning non-compliant blocks. Regardless of anything else, this centralization alone makes bitcoin a failed experiment. https://cointelegraph.com/news/study-chinas-btc-miners-control-66-of-global-hash-rate https://cointelegraph.com/news/study-chinas-btc-miners-contr...
- kerkeslager 7y ago
  Well, first, "censorship-resistant" doesn't imply "censorship-proof". Second, I don't think we can conclude what would happen if China tried to censor. China certainly has 51% attack capability against Bitcoin, but the only implication that of that which is clear to me is that they could potentially execute double-spends. Using 51% attack capability to orphan transactions is different. With a double spend, there's two transactions, both signed with the same key, and no way to determine which is valid (which came first). There's no source of truth for that information. With an orphaned block, there's only one transaction signed with the key, so you have a single source of truth. You know the transaction exists, and at some point (i.e. after a certain number of blocks), if the transaction isn't included in the chain, you can conclude with reasonable certainty that the transaction is being intentionally orphaned. This allows you to reject the chain that doesn't include the transaction as invalid, and choose the longest chain that does include it. We already don't blindly follow the longest chain: for example, blocks that are improperly formatted are already rejected. This would, of course, having different criteria for what is considered a valid block would cause fork in the currency. There would be the Chinese censored branch and the uncensored branch everyone else is using. But for a lot of reasons, I think people would be unwilling to trade as much traditional currency for the Chinese censored currency as they would for uncensored Bitcoin.
  - nootropicat 7y ago
    >There would be the Chinese censored branch and the uncensored branch everyone else is using Every fork is vulnerable to the same attack, which is why such a switch doesn't make sense. There's no way to prevent Chinese miners from mining on the "Western" bitcoin if it's the more profitable option. The censorship can be easily made reactive: first, all Chinese miners have to register and report their hash power. If the total hash power for any specific network is below X (eg. 65%) they don't have to censor. The moment they do, they start orphaning blocks that don't comply with the Chinese law. Note it also increases their profits! The same forces (lots of cheap electricity) that resulted in the concentration of sha256 hashing in China also work for any other PoW; switching to a GPU-based PoW would at best only prolong the inevitable. Most likely GPU PoW is also China-dominated. Proof of work has infinite economies of scale and the winner can take all property. The second property makes it profitable for the majority of hash power to cartelize and exclude others. If the cartel was smartly set by the Chinese government - allowing access to all Chinese miners and making it illegal to create smaller cartels - everyone in China would join and after a while it would be enough to mine with only ~20% of the available hash power. That's a 5x increase in revenue per watt hour! Why? Initially, Chinese miners can mine with >65% of global power, excluding competitors. They do it until everyone else goes bankrupt, giving them 100%. Then, each individual miner can start mining with only 20% of their total power. To prevent fraud, it's enough to make everyone mine with 100% for one hour every week, all at once, to prove their total individual hash power. If some foolish foreign competitor arrives with more than 20% of the Chinese hash power, every Chinese miner turns everything on. This monopoly would be almost impossible to defeat. However, even if you assume someone defeats it somehow - the only way to defeat it is to have an even bigger centralized entity! All that happened is a new monopoly, not decentralization. All of this means bitcoin can never become "refuge from the growing foreign and domestic militarization of money. [..] an indispensable weapon against civil asset forfeiture, international sanctions, deplatforming, and mass surveillance" to any noticeable degree. It's currently left alone only because it's irrelevant except as a speculative toy.
kerkeslager 7y ago
This is literally the first comment on Hacker News I've seen that seems to actually understand the implications of decentralization. It's apparent to me that many people who are trying to profit on it don't actually understand why decentralization is desirable for some people. It's a foreign concept to many that there are motivations other than financial gain. Many attempts to "innovate" with Bitcoin are constantly trying to do things that are already solved with centralized systems, and end up working around decentralization. > Startups will play a marginal role at best because their ultimate aim of monopolization flies in the face of what Bitcoin was designed to do. I'd go further with this and say that decentralization is an active impediment to startups trying to create monopolies in the crypto space. I think there's still room for development, but it will be hard for it to be motivated by profit. Particularly, a better-executed namecoin could be revolutionary if people started building infrastructure around it (i.e. as usernames, or a DNS replacement).

by aazaa 7y ago

JohnJamesRambo 7y ago

I find it hilarious you think Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong doesn't "know what Bitcoin is for." Maybe you don't know what it is for. People that are sane like Mr. Armstrong and Satoshi Nakamoto intended it to be used as a currency. If Satoshi is still alive I'm sure he was quite disappointed when Bitcoin decided to not scale past its blistering 7 transactions per second. "Bitcoin can already scale much larger than that with existing hardware for a fraction of the cost. It never really hits a scale ceiling." -Satoshi Nakamoto https://steemit.com/bitcoin/@cryptodailyuk/bitcoin-broke-coinbase-ceo-brian-armstrong-s-heart-so-he-s-now-focused-on-ethereum https://steemit.com/bitcoin/@cryptodailyuk/bitcoin-broke-coi...

esotericn 7y ago
He's the chair of a very public company with investors and whatnot. Inevitably that hamstrings permissible opinions. Not only that, the purpose of his company is to profit from cryptocurrency in a specific way, whether or not that's the 'right thing' for the space or not. Their business model basically falls apart, for example, if people stop using fiat currencies and atomic swaps allow trades to happen without a clearing house. All over this thread you can see waffle about money laundering or whatever else; which Coinbase cannot sidestep because they're forced to interface with banks that will cut them off, governments that don't like it if you don't do what they say, etc.
entropyneur 7y ago
I think they are being sarcastic. What they probably mean is "for political/business reasons Coinbase CEO has to tiptoe around Bitcoin's actual purpose".
- arthurcolle 7y ago
  I mean Armstrong is calling it "economic freedom" so he's not that far off base, in any case.
pixelperfect 7y ago
Bitcoin is continuing to scale, but it's doing so with the Lightning Network instead of by increasing block size. I'm not super familiar with Bitcoin's tech, but that seems sensible to me. The blockchain is already 250 GB at 7 transactions per second. If you multiplied that by 100, you still have orders of magnitude less transactions per second than credit card processors, but the hardware requirements are now high enough that few individuals could afford to run full nodes.
- dane-pgp 7y ago
  For context, I don't think anyone is suggesting that BTC's blocks would still be full if they were 100 times bigger, so it is premature to talk about competing with credit card processors. However, 250 GB is approximately 25 GB per year (since Bitcoin started in 2009), which, if you multiply it by 100, is 2.5 TB per year. That means it will take about 6.4 years to fill a 16 TB hard drive, which should cost less than $600: https://www.techradar.com/uk/news/worlds-largest-hard-disk-drive-goes-on-sale-today-for-less-than-youd-think https://www.techradar.com/uk/news/worlds-largest-hard-disk-d... It's not hard to imagine someone paying under $100 per year to run a full node, whereas on the day that TechRadar article was published, the average price of a bitcoin transaction was $4.58 as seen here: https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/bitcoin-transactionfees.html#1y https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/bitcoin-transactionfees...

arthurcolle 7y ago

Completely agree. I thought I posted on the other thread about 2020s predictions but apparently I didn't hit the reply button: Bitcoin will definitely singularly emerge as the new common 'numéraire' in the near to mid-term (5 to 10 years). I love that you specifically call out the omnipresent crypto scams, because they are what disappointed me from the whole endeavor once they emerged in the ICO craze. Once 1 bitcoin has price of 500,000 to a few million in USD per individual 'bitcoin' UXTO, it'll be obvious for governments to just start using it, and create dual money systems that are just layers on top of the (maybe single, maybe not) existing, working blockchain, despite its slowness. China is pursuing this now, even in anticipation of large price increases. IMO Bitcoin is definitely the numeraire of the future, and it is certainly not a sure thing right now but I am extremely certain of this. It then becomes so trivial to do aggregate balance of payments calculations without so much sketchy behavior by fraudulent sovereigns that want to represent their own vision of 'real trade' for various purposes, such as economic warfare. For non-finance people, numeraire is a representative abstraction of a 'unit of exchange', used to simplify things. You can then idealize situations like having riskless borrowing, which simplifies many formulae. But this is not an accurate portrayal of reality, (look up sovereign defaults, as one example. Greece, Spain, Italy, some Asian countries at different times, Argentina, Venezuela, etc.) So having a numeraire that isn't sovereign would be really impactful in making all economic participants way more honest, outside of the immediate smaller-scale effects of allowing people to get their cryptos ropped by unscrupulous people on the darknet. From Wiki: "The numéraire is a basic standard by which value is computed. In mathematical economics it is a tradable economic entity in terms of whose price the relative prices of all other tradables are expressed" Anyways, the Bitcoin protocol could definitely fail, for any number of a few different reasons, but at present barring some kind of major technological paradigm shift that breaks existing cryptography (maybe QC, maybe something different) it is uniquely positioned to become the de-facto standard for all balance of payments activity internationally. Scalability issues are definitely a factor, but hey, the mempool is working its hardest until they rewrite the underlying consensus mechanisms to work at larger scale. But as a settlement system and a darknet unit of exchange, it is extremely clear that this is the first hard asset that won't just vanish at the mercy of sovereigns. Very powerful new technology.

danans 7y ago

> It places Bitcoin on the side of personal freedom and on a collision course with some of the world's biggest governments, including the US. And until and unless you can use it to purchase the goods and services needed for daily life, and the military and police forces needed to secure the supplies lines of those, it will be at best a theoretical form of personal freedom. Even if Bitcoin doesn't rely on trust, the rest of the functions of human society do.

thebean11 7y ago
Not sure I understand how the military is going to stop individuals from exchanging goods within a country, are you suggesting the US/Chinese/Some other military would stop the flow of everyday goods into its own country to prevent Bitcoin transactions?
- danans 7y ago
  If the volume of crypto currency transactions ended up becoming a threat to the functioning of the state (through loss of the power of taxation), then yes. But anyways, isn't that pretty much the anarcho-capitalist vs statist conflict that cryptocurrencies are ultimately trying to aim us towards?
  - thebean11 7y ago
    Yes meaning the military would starve a country to root out crypto users? In that scenario, you're unable to use crypto because no goods exist to buy (meaning dollars are useless as well)? Sorry if I'm completely misunderstanding your argument, but having trouble reading it in a different way.
    - danans 7y ago
      > In that scenario, you're unable to use crypto because no goods exist to buy (meaning dollars are useless as well)? The state will take over the entire supply chain to ensure that it transacts in a currency that it controls, crypto or otherwise. Without that, the shared physical and legal infrastructure that supply chain depends on would cease to exist, and with it the supply chain. Individuals, or the small communes that act financially as individuals in the crypto based trading system would have to trade in the simplest raw materials and finished products would be all have to be made hyper locally. Otherwise what entity would secure the transit of high value finished goods from supplier to customer? I understand that it's a vision of the future that many people relish for its "freedom" from the state (but not so much from the local tribe). But universal crypto based transactions are not a drop in replacement for what we have now that keeps everything else the same. They come with their own radically different future-primitive vision for the world.

nradov 7y ago

Bitcoin is for wealthy Chinese people to evade currency controls and get their wealth out to politically safer countries. Buy mining hardware and electricity with Renminbi, get Bitcoins, sell in a foreign country for hard currency.

James-primitive 7y ago

>The trouble with this article is that the author doesn't seem to know what Bitcoin is for. Does anyone? It was invented by John Romero for G_d's sake. > The ability to print money is a fantasy of many people from a young age. This is the problem Bitcoin exists to solve. > bootstrapping censorship-resistant money is a one-time deal. But what about Wei Dai, Nick Szabo and Ethereum? They all created Bitcoin-twice. >Only the genuine scammers are left to continue the exercise. Such as one "Mencius Szabo"...fisked and enumerated! >flies in the face of what Bitcoin was designed to do. Which is what, exactly? ::enumerate and fisk -- (anon) Goulding

bouncycastle 7y ago

Your comment sounds like a priest delivering a sermon. No sources to back your argument up and also you missed a large fact that Bitcoin just doesn't scale for any of the applications you've outlined.

brighton36 7y ago
Skepticism of crypto is immoral, and will be downvoted. Only confidence is allowed. lol

brighton36 7y ago

Indexing crypto has outperformed BTC only strategies for a long time.

nootropicat 7y ago

>censorship-resistant money It's not, the majority of hash power is in China. That means the Chinese government could start censoring bitcoin transactions in a week if they wanted to - by orphaning non-compliant blocks. Regardless of anything else, this centralization alone makes bitcoin a failed experiment. https://cointelegraph.com/news/study-chinas-btc-miners-control-66-of-global-hash-rate https://cointelegraph.com/news/study-chinas-btc-miners-contr...

kerkeslager 7y ago
Well, first, "censorship-resistant" doesn't imply "censorship-proof". Second, I don't think we can conclude what would happen if China tried to censor. China certainly has 51% attack capability against Bitcoin, but the only implication that of that which is clear to me is that they could potentially execute double-spends. Using 51% attack capability to orphan transactions is different. With a double spend, there's two transactions, both signed with the same key, and no way to determine which is valid (which came first). There's no source of truth for that information. With an orphaned block, there's only one transaction signed with the key, so you have a single source of truth. You know the transaction exists, and at some point (i.e. after a certain number of blocks), if the transaction isn't included in the chain, you can conclude with reasonable certainty that the transaction is being intentionally orphaned. This allows you to reject the chain that doesn't include the transaction as invalid, and choose the longest chain that does include it. We already don't blindly follow the longest chain: for example, blocks that are improperly formatted are already rejected. This would, of course, having different criteria for what is considered a valid block would cause fork in the currency. There would be the Chinese censored branch and the uncensored branch everyone else is using. But for a lot of reasons, I think people would be unwilling to trade as much traditional currency for the Chinese censored currency as they would for uncensored Bitcoin.
- nootropicat 7y ago
  >There would be the Chinese censored branch and the uncensored branch everyone else is using Every fork is vulnerable to the same attack, which is why such a switch doesn't make sense. There's no way to prevent Chinese miners from mining on the "Western" bitcoin if it's the more profitable option. The censorship can be easily made reactive: first, all Chinese miners have to register and report their hash power. If the total hash power for any specific network is below X (eg. 65%) they don't have to censor. The moment they do, they start orphaning blocks that don't comply with the Chinese law. Note it also increases their profits! The same forces (lots of cheap electricity) that resulted in the concentration of sha256 hashing in China also work for any other PoW; switching to a GPU-based PoW would at best only prolong the inevitable. Most likely GPU PoW is also China-dominated. Proof of work has infinite economies of scale and the winner can take all property. The second property makes it profitable for the majority of hash power to cartelize and exclude others. If the cartel was smartly set by the Chinese government - allowing access to all Chinese miners and making it illegal to create smaller cartels - everyone in China would join and after a while it would be enough to mine with only ~20% of the available hash power. That's a 5x increase in revenue per watt hour! Why? Initially, Chinese miners can mine with >65% of global power, excluding competitors. They do it until everyone else goes bankrupt, giving them 100%. Then, each individual miner can start mining with only 20% of their total power. To prevent fraud, it's enough to make everyone mine with 100% for one hour every week, all at once, to prove their total individual hash power. If some foolish foreign competitor arrives with more than 20% of the Chinese hash power, every Chinese miner turns everything on. This monopoly would be almost impossible to defeat. However, even if you assume someone defeats it somehow - the only way to defeat it is to have an even bigger centralized entity! All that happened is a new monopoly, not decentralization. All of this means bitcoin can never become "refuge from the growing foreign and domestic militarization of money. [..] an indispensable weapon against civil asset forfeiture, international sanctions, deplatforming, and mass surveillance" to any noticeable degree. It's currently left alone only because it's irrelevant except as a speculative toy.

kerkeslager 7y ago

This is literally the first comment on Hacker News I've seen that seems to actually understand the implications of decentralization. It's apparent to me that many people who are trying to profit on it don't actually understand why decentralization is desirable for some people. It's a foreign concept to many that there are motivations other than financial gain. Many attempts to "innovate" with Bitcoin are constantly trying to do things that are already solved with centralized systems, and end up working around decentralization. > Startups will play a marginal role at best because their ultimate aim of monopolization flies in the face of what Bitcoin was designed to do. I'd go further with this and say that decentralization is an active impediment to startups trying to create monopolies in the crypto space. I think there's still room for development, but it will be hard for it to be motivated by profit. Particularly, a better-executed namecoin could be revolutionary if people started building infrastructure around it (i.e. as usernames, or a DNS replacement).