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I think the real value in Bitcoin is its immutability. I don't think there's any piece of information in the world as immutable as the first bitcoin block mined

I think the real value in Bitcoin is its immutability. I don't think there's any piece of information in the world as immutable as the first bitcoin block mined by satoshi. This property is what powers amazing projects like OpenTimeStamps (https://opentimestamps.org/ https://opentimestamps.org/), this will become an essential tool for notaries all around the world, seriously!, and this has nothing to do with number of transactions, this scales to O(1) (you only need one transaction to prove as many things as there needs to be proved). Previous to bitcoin existence I don't think there was ever a distributed way of proving a piece of information existed previous to X, and even if there was, it was probably centralized or much much MUCH weaker than bitcoin. There's just no replacement, not even a million years as effective as bitcoin is for this, if I'm wrong please tell me! I want to know! Most people here in favor of bitcoin argue about inflation, I understand the reasoning, and I'm from Venezuela, I pretty sure understand that value, but that's just missing the point, immutability >>> inflation protection. And if we go into the smart-contracts terrain, that's a whole other world of very diverse possibilities of values to be uncovered

Nursie 6y ago
If it was centralised, that's fine. Not everyone shares this decentralisaton fetish.
- madacol 6y ago
  Why is it a fetish?, if something is centralized it means you need to trust that central party. Decentralization removes that dependency In the bitcoin's case, to verify the immutability of *any block*, you only need some basic knowledge of cryptography, and all the blockchain after that block. You then need to sum all the proofs of work of every subsequent block and divide by the network's current hash power, that will give you the amount of effort (energy, cost, etc) needed today to create that amount of proof of work, and that's how you get a feeling of the mind-boggling immutability of bitcoin's block In summary, you can, independently, verify how much work a piece of information in a bitcoin block has. You don't need to trust anyone
  - Nursie 6y ago
    Decentralisation simply moves trust around the system, rather than eliminating it. It is a fetish because most people really don't care. Immutability is by consensus, not some fundamental law of the universe. Consensus can change (see the reason Eth Classic exists). Bitcoin's guarantees are not mind-boggling, and the amount of work it would take to fake is not mind-boggling either, it's very quantifiable, and it is some fraction of the available computing power that exists today, for a time period of no more than the age of bitcoin. Compare that to the stronger guarantees of things like AES encryption, if you want your mind boggled. I don't give a crap how much work a piece of information has attached to it, all that is to me, is a record of wasted cycles. Further, in most real-world situations having no central authority that can make changes coupled with immutable transactions is actively terrible.

Nursie 6y ago

If it was centralised, that's fine. Not everyone shares this decentralisaton fetish.

madacol 6y ago
Why is it a fetish?, if something is centralized it means you need to trust that central party. Decentralization removes that dependency In the bitcoin's case, to verify the immutability of *any block*, you only need some basic knowledge of cryptography, and all the blockchain after that block. You then need to sum all the proofs of work of every subsequent block and divide by the network's current hash power, that will give you the amount of effort (energy, cost, etc) needed today to create that amount of proof of work, and that's how you get a feeling of the mind-boggling immutability of bitcoin's block In summary, you can, independently, verify how much work a piece of information in a bitcoin block has. You don't need to trust anyone
- Nursie 6y ago
  Decentralisation simply moves trust around the system, rather than eliminating it. It is a fetish because most people really don't care. Immutability is by consensus, not some fundamental law of the universe. Consensus can change (see the reason Eth Classic exists). Bitcoin's guarantees are not mind-boggling, and the amount of work it would take to fake is not mind-boggling either, it's very quantifiable, and it is some fraction of the available computing power that exists today, for a time period of no more than the age of bitcoin. Compare that to the stronger guarantees of things like AES encryption, if you want your mind boggled. I don't give a crap how much work a piece of information has attached to it, all that is to me, is a record of wasted cycles. Further, in most real-world situations having no central authority that can make changes coupled with immutable transactions is actively terrible.