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> Or, it was a good first try that needs iteration now that we understand that hyper-deflation is a bad thing for a currency in what sense is bitcoin "hyper-de

> Or, it was a good first try that needs iteration now that we understand that hyper-deflation is a bad thing for a currency in what sense is bitcoin "hyper-deflation"ary? i think you are thinking of the word "deflation" but i know that doesn't sound as smart >The weird, religious loyalty people have to reinterpreting Bitcoin's flaws as strengths is setting the entire crypto ecosystem back. If you want to appeal to 'stability', then banks have been around for centuries. But if you're trying to build something new, you're going to have occasionally innovate and iterate on the thing you're building. there is nothing stopping anybody from making something better, so go on

danShumway 6y ago
> there is nothing stopping anybody from making something better They already did. Half the crypto ecosystem is already better than Bitcoin if you're trying to build a functional currency. We're talking about a coin that doesn't have any privacy guarantees, it's not exactly hard to improve on that. When I talk about religious loyalty, what I'm getting at is that it turns out the Bitcoin ecosystem doesn't seem to care that much about stuff like privacy, and whenever anyone brings up Bitcoin's flaws, or the fact that it has been outclassed by other coins, suddenly the conversation is all about "stability" and the trust of having an old coin that hasn't fixed its problems in 10 years. It turns out that having a fixed number of coins that fluctuate wildly in price is very bad for building a currency, but we have people on here arguing that it's a good thing. It turns out that PoW is unscalable and prohibitively expensive, which is a barrier to real decentralization, but we have people on here arguing that's a good thing. It's understandable that Satoshi didn't know in advance every problem, but it's not understandable that in all of the years since then, the Bitcoin community has largely failed to evolve or learn anything about the initial flaws that the coin had. And this is honestly a tricky conversation to have because we have to keep dancing around the fact that Bitcoin is a speculative asset and that very little of the community cares about making a currency at all. But the community won't acknowledge that, so instead we get a lot of weird deflection around "stability" and we all have to pretend that the community is in good faith actually trying to create an alternative to cash, and that people genuinely believe that Bitcoin's tech is the best way to do that. But obviously that's not what's happening. Nobody would really look at the state of Bitcoin and argue that it's best-positioned to replace traditional currency. It's worse than cash for privacy, it has higher transaction fees than almost any other payment method, it doesn't scale environmentally, and it takes 10 minutes to add a new block. But... it is for the moment an excellent speculative investment because the speculative market is irrational and doesn't care about technology. And the speculative market benefits from pretending that it exists for some kind of grand purpose rather than just as an end to itself, even if doing so makes it harder to accomplish any of the original goals behind the coin.
- nyolfen 6y ago
  > It turns out that having a fixed number of coins that fluctuate wildly in price is very bad for building a currency, but we have people on here arguing that it's a good thing. sorry, is that just because you say so? the success of bitcoin is the only thing i need to point to contra every point you make. if it's so bad, why does it work? maybe that won't always be the case, but so far the market has deemed it sufficient. nobody is making anyone use bitcoin, it's just the best schelling point. btw, wrt privacy -- chaumian coinjoin has made great strides in popularity in the last year. it may not be zcash but it is still quite possible to use bitcoin in a private manner.
  - ryan93 6y ago
    The "market" sometimes drops incredibly cancerous waste chemicals in the water supply.
  - danShumway 6y ago
    > if it's so bad, why does it work? As a currency? It doesn't. Do people actually think that Bitcoin is succeeding as a currency right now? If you want to talk about the market deeming something sufficient, the market has broadly, almost universally decided that credit cards are preferable to cryptocurrency. As a speculative investment? Because of what I said in my last paragraph. > chaumian coinjoin I've seen multiple vulnerabilities pop up with coinjoin wallets, plus the process costs extra money to do, plus it's not network-wide so the coins involved can still be blocked from future transactions. I don't understand why a community would go down that route when solutions like zero-knowledge proofs already exist and have a better track record. I mean, that's supposedly the whole thing with Bitcoin, right? Stability and security? The single advantage that coinjoins have is that they don't require iterating on Bitcoin itself, which the community seems to be desperate to avoid. This is something that pops up a lot with Bitcoin-centered "solutions". We have coinjoin, because having a coin with real privacy guarantees would require iterating on Bitcoin and we can't have that. We have the lightning network (which also has serious privacy problems) because building a completely separate layer that operates off of the blockchain is preferable to the community over fixing the problems with transaction delays and fees in the coin itself.

danShumway 6y ago

> there is nothing stopping anybody from making something better They already did. Half the crypto ecosystem is already better than Bitcoin if you're trying to build a functional currency. We're talking about a coin that doesn't have any privacy guarantees, it's not exactly hard to improve on that. When I talk about religious loyalty, what I'm getting at is that it turns out the Bitcoin ecosystem doesn't seem to care that much about stuff like privacy, and whenever anyone brings up Bitcoin's flaws, or the fact that it has been outclassed by other coins, suddenly the conversation is all about "stability" and the trust of having an old coin that hasn't fixed its problems in 10 years. It turns out that having a fixed number of coins that fluctuate wildly in price is very bad for building a currency, but we have people on here arguing that it's a good thing. It turns out that PoW is unscalable and prohibitively expensive, which is a barrier to real decentralization, but we have people on here arguing that's a good thing. It's understandable that Satoshi didn't know in advance every problem, but it's not understandable that in all of the years since then, the Bitcoin community has largely failed to evolve or learn anything about the initial flaws that the coin had. And this is honestly a tricky conversation to have because we have to keep dancing around the fact that Bitcoin is a speculative asset and that very little of the community cares about making a currency at all. But the community won't acknowledge that, so instead we get a lot of weird deflection around "stability" and we all have to pretend that the community is in good faith actually trying to create an alternative to cash, and that people genuinely believe that Bitcoin's tech is the best way to do that. But obviously that's not what's happening. Nobody would really look at the state of Bitcoin and argue that it's best-positioned to replace traditional currency. It's worse than cash for privacy, it has higher transaction fees than almost any other payment method, it doesn't scale environmentally, and it takes 10 minutes to add a new block. But... it is for the moment an excellent speculative investment because the speculative market is irrational and doesn't care about technology. And the speculative market benefits from pretending that it exists for some kind of grand purpose rather than just as an end to itself, even if doing so makes it harder to accomplish any of the original goals behind the coin.

nyolfen 6y ago
> It turns out that having a fixed number of coins that fluctuate wildly in price is very bad for building a currency, but we have people on here arguing that it's a good thing. sorry, is that just because you say so? the success of bitcoin is the only thing i need to point to contra every point you make. if it's so bad, why does it work? maybe that won't always be the case, but so far the market has deemed it sufficient. nobody is making anyone use bitcoin, it's just the best schelling point. btw, wrt privacy -- chaumian coinjoin has made great strides in popularity in the last year. it may not be zcash but it is still quite possible to use bitcoin in a private manner.
- ryan93 6y ago
  The "market" sometimes drops incredibly cancerous waste chemicals in the water supply.
- danShumway 6y ago
  > if it's so bad, why does it work? As a currency? It doesn't. Do people actually think that Bitcoin is succeeding as a currency right now? If you want to talk about the market deeming something sufficient, the market has broadly, almost universally decided that credit cards are preferable to cryptocurrency. As a speculative investment? Because of what I said in my last paragraph. > chaumian coinjoin I've seen multiple vulnerabilities pop up with coinjoin wallets, plus the process costs extra money to do, plus it's not network-wide so the coins involved can still be blocked from future transactions. I don't understand why a community would go down that route when solutions like zero-knowledge proofs already exist and have a better track record. I mean, that's supposedly the whole thing with Bitcoin, right? Stability and security? The single advantage that coinjoins have is that they don't require iterating on Bitcoin itself, which the community seems to be desperate to avoid. This is something that pops up a lot with Bitcoin-centered "solutions". We have coinjoin, because having a coin with real privacy guarantees would require iterating on Bitcoin and we can't have that. We have the lightning network (which also has serious privacy problems) because building a completely separate layer that operates off of the blockchain is preferable to the community over fixing the problems with transaction delays and fees in the coin itself.