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> But the blockchain’s entire purpose is political. If crypto is no longer about teh magic of decentralization, then why would anyone want to use it? Making bi

> But the blockchain’s entire purpose is political. If crypto is no longer about teh magic of decentralization, then why would anyone want to use it? Making big $$$, obviously. It's very clear that the whole decentralization tech angle failed a long time ago. I had a passing interest, but completely lost it around 2017-ish, when BTC blocks started filling up. It seemed completely clear to me that a "Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System" couldn't tolerate such dysfunction. Usage as cash wasn't working. In the end capacity had to be promptly increased, or obviously there'd be huge problems for everyone. The first nail in the coffin was that blocks weren't expanded. The second one was that while there were plenty alternatives, BTC retained dominance, and that even forks that theoretically were superior because they did what they were supposed to do far better, BTC still won out. So clearly I was wrong, BTC wasn't functioning as a "cash system", and this obviously didn't matter to the BTC users, and didn't matter to the world at large either. Thus eventually it dawned on me that there were maybe a few people out there that had some interest in a "Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System" and the "tech", but the vast majority out there were only interested in a world-wide game of hot potato, where the only point is to accumulate coins early, then sell them to some fool on the top, and cash out.

colechristensen 3y ago
> It's very clear that the whole decentralization tech angle failed a long time ago. I had a passing interest, but completely lost it around 2017-ish, when BTC blocks started filling up. Decentralization was the original tech angle. Email, HTTP, the basic Internet infrastructure is all decentralized with only the minimal necessary coordination. Decentralized money is iffy when it isn't a real thing with intrinsic value like a metal coin or trading commodities directly. Everything else though can absolutely be decentralized, somebody just needs to be happy about writing open standards and giving people the means to have systems that use them.
apantel 3y ago
There’s an important point hidden in your comment: Bitcoin won despite better forks and alternatives, and all its issues, because it managed to achieve the main thing that is required for something to become money: enough people have to think it’s money. When enough people come to think of something as money, it becomes money. If a fork or alternative to Bitcoin doesn’t get enough people to think of it as money, then it doesn’t really matter if it is ‘superior’. It won’t win against the thing that a very large number of people think is money. Edit: punctuation.
- ethanbond 3y ago
  Better explanation: people didn’t care about how shitty of a currency it was because they loved how good of a speculative instrument it was. A good speculative instrument is also definitionally a bad currency, even aside from the technical “barriers” BTC faces.
  - heresie-dabord 3y ago
    Yours is the important hidden point in the direct parent comment: As an instrument of enthusiastic speculation with rapid gains and fungibility, cryptocurrency became concentrated holdings of wealthy and unscrupulous speculators. Oh, and of some governments.
- bhaak 3y ago
  People think of it as money but mostly as unusable money. Even Bitcoin proponents now longer propose "using Bitcoin" but "holding Bitcoin" and cashing out to fiat if they have to use money.
  - apantel 3y ago
    My philosophy on holding Bitcoin is: hold it until cryptocurrency has matured to the point where you are no longer interested in converting back into government-issued money. Once cryptocurrency has the type of optionality that government-issued money has, the “speculative investment” phase will be over and you’ll just have… money.
    - bhaak 3y ago
      This argument is the Neo/Morpheus matrix meme. It's a powerful image but it doesn't change the properties of Bitcoin. You are actually holding digital gold, not digital money which also needs constant maintenance to keep functioning (gold, for all its disadvantages at least doesn't need miners that keep mining just for gold to keep existing). Like with gold the currency properties just aren't there. You would need to create the same financial constructs as with gold to add those properties. But would you want let entrust your Bitcoin to a custodian so you could use a Bitcoin backed currency? Not your keys, not your coins.
px43 3y ago
> I had a passing interest, but completely lost it around 2017-ish, when BTC blocks started filling up. Yes, this was the last straw for a ton of people actually interested in developing the technology, and it's when a lot of people moved their primary focus to Ethereum. In 2017, the Bitcoin developer community did a hard pivot away from "electronic cash" and towards this "store of value" obsession, where Bitcoin is meant to replace gold. This was an incredibly noisy and disruptive pivot that tore the community in half. These were the "Blocksize Wars", and I could rant for hours about them, but obviously not here. The thing is, Bitcoin up until that point was functioning very well as cash. Starting in 2013 I was regularly using it to buy coffee from coffee shops, and pay my bill at restaurants, and with literally a one line change it could have kept enabling the cash use case easily for another decade, and with maybe a 20 line change proposed by Jeff Garzik in 2015, it could have easily scaled forever. The focus on serving the financial industry over everyday users was a very deliberate one. It wasn't a bad move, tactically, just very disappointing.
- nullc 3y ago
  You're repeating a false narrative which was commercially financed in order to promote alternatives (ironically). Bitcoin absolutely is electronic cash. We've seen the alternative play out in forks that have become completely centralized as a result of ignoring the tradeoffs with the technology in use, and as a result have been undermined with "functionality" like confiscation transactions (transactions that let miners take any coins they choose). What bitcoin isn't is a paypal clone. That already exists and it's not of substantial value to the world to add another centralized high volume payments rail. It's absolutely fine that people also want to use it that way, but optimizing for that case can't come at the expense of the security properties that make Bitcoin interesting in the first place. Alternatives that make different tradeoffs do exist, and I think the results speak for themselves.
- treyd 3y ago
  > and with literally a one line change Except we know as software engineers that solutions to problems at scale are never that simple. The "just increase the block size limit bro" solution doesn't consider the externalities that increasing it would have on the network performance and decentralization. This is the same line of reasoning about this whole thread, compromising decentralization compromises the ability to use a credibly peer-to-peer (cash) system.
arealaccount 3y ago
If bitcoin does not succeed as a currency but does as a store of wealth, then eventually all of the coins will flow into a few funds and large wallets, right? So once all the coins are mined and if there are not many p2p transactions occurring, then what incentive is there to mine and support the network? Will coin owners just mine their own private blocks whenever they need to move coin? Curious if this has already been considered by the bulls or bears. Seems like bitcoin will need to increase the upper limit of coins to continue to work.
- jayd16 3y ago
  Once the automatic coins are mined, the idea is you pay miners a tip to get your transactions completed. I'm more curious how they plan to handle a drop in popularity from a security standpoint. Will the total compute always need to remain high enough to keep a bad actor from dominating? As popularity wanes that sounds expensive.
  - treyd 3y ago
    To maintain the current level of security then, all else being equal, the total fees collected will have to increase by the amount the subsidy decreases by. So each byte of block space will cost more for the person buying it. That could be an issue, but the solution to that problem is to extend the protocol to allow for more sophisticated "layer 2" systems so that the end-user experience has as small of a footprint as possible. Ideally without compromising security, which can be done with zero-knowledge proofs and such. But it's unclear if the political will is there from the community around the Bitcoin project.
    - arealaccount 3y ago
      In this case, wouldn’t institutions mine their own blocks in order to avoid high transaction fees?
      - dale_glass 3y ago
        There's no such thing as "own blocks". There's a single world-wide winner of the mining competition per 10 minutes. So if you want to have free transactions 50% of the time, the way to get there is to take the current world-wide mining capacity, and replicate it. That's obviously not a viable tactic.
kylebenzle 3y ago
You can't be serious, Bitcoin Cash has been around for 10 years and is working great just like Satoshi design.
- dale_glass 3y ago
  Yeah, except for that obviously nobody cares for it: https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/bitcoin%20cash-transactions.html#alltime https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/bitcoin%20cash-transact... BCH has plenty spare capacity, but the actual usage shows it's not taking off. The idea of buying coffee with crypto is dead.
1vuio0pswjnm7 3y ago
"Thus eventually it dawned on me that there were maybe a few people out there that had some interest in a "Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System" and the "tech", but the vast majority out there were only interested in a world-wide game of hot potato, where the only point is to accumulate coins early, then sell them to some fool on the top, and cash out." In this scenario, when do people cash out. It seems like if people starting cashing out in large numbers, some folks are going to end up losing money.^1 1. Assuming they spent any money to acquire their Bitcoin.
- dale_glass 3y ago
  Precisely. Some people will make lots of money, some will make small gains, huge amounts will be screwed.
figassis 3y ago
People liken stability. If you have a lot invested in a currency and then, due to some shortcoming, it is forked to another currency, you have to migrate your life over. Your wallet, your investments are now in bitcoin cash. Once might not be an issue, but this can easily happen every month for every perceived shortcoming. If the forks inherited the BTC name, clients needed no changes and the original were renamed, I think things would be different now. Basically, merge improvements to main.

colechristensen 3y ago

> It's very clear that the whole decentralization tech angle failed a long time ago. I had a passing interest, but completely lost it around 2017-ish, when BTC blocks started filling up. Decentralization was the original tech angle. Email, HTTP, the basic Internet infrastructure is all decentralized with only the minimal necessary coordination. Decentralized money is iffy when it isn't a real thing with intrinsic value like a metal coin or trading commodities directly. Everything else though can absolutely be decentralized, somebody just needs to be happy about writing open standards and giving people the means to have systems that use them.

apantel 3y ago

There’s an important point hidden in your comment: Bitcoin won despite better forks and alternatives, and all its issues, because it managed to achieve the main thing that is required for something to become money: enough people have to think it’s money. When enough people come to think of something as money, it becomes money. If a fork or alternative to Bitcoin doesn’t get enough people to think of it as money, then it doesn’t really matter if it is ‘superior’. It won’t win against the thing that a very large number of people think is money. Edit: punctuation.

ethanbond 3y ago
Better explanation: people didn’t care about how shitty of a currency it was because they loved how good of a speculative instrument it was. A good speculative instrument is also definitionally a bad currency, even aside from the technical “barriers” BTC faces.
- heresie-dabord 3y ago
  Yours is the important hidden point in the direct parent comment: As an instrument of enthusiastic speculation with rapid gains and fungibility, cryptocurrency became concentrated holdings of wealthy and unscrupulous speculators. Oh, and of some governments.
bhaak 3y ago
People think of it as money but mostly as unusable money. Even Bitcoin proponents now longer propose "using Bitcoin" but "holding Bitcoin" and cashing out to fiat if they have to use money.
- apantel 3y ago
  My philosophy on holding Bitcoin is: hold it until cryptocurrency has matured to the point where you are no longer interested in converting back into government-issued money. Once cryptocurrency has the type of optionality that government-issued money has, the “speculative investment” phase will be over and you’ll just have… money.
  - bhaak 3y ago
    This argument is the Neo/Morpheus matrix meme. It's a powerful image but it doesn't change the properties of Bitcoin. You are actually holding digital gold, not digital money which also needs constant maintenance to keep functioning (gold, for all its disadvantages at least doesn't need miners that keep mining just for gold to keep existing). Like with gold the currency properties just aren't there. You would need to create the same financial constructs as with gold to add those properties. But would you want let entrust your Bitcoin to a custodian so you could use a Bitcoin backed currency? Not your keys, not your coins.

px43 3y ago

> I had a passing interest, but completely lost it around 2017-ish, when BTC blocks started filling up. Yes, this was the last straw for a ton of people actually interested in developing the technology, and it's when a lot of people moved their primary focus to Ethereum. In 2017, the Bitcoin developer community did a hard pivot away from "electronic cash" and towards this "store of value" obsession, where Bitcoin is meant to replace gold. This was an incredibly noisy and disruptive pivot that tore the community in half. These were the "Blocksize Wars", and I could rant for hours about them, but obviously not here. The thing is, Bitcoin up until that point was functioning very well as cash. Starting in 2013 I was regularly using it to buy coffee from coffee shops, and pay my bill at restaurants, and with literally a one line change it could have kept enabling the cash use case easily for another decade, and with maybe a 20 line change proposed by Jeff Garzik in 2015, it could have easily scaled forever. The focus on serving the financial industry over everyday users was a very deliberate one. It wasn't a bad move, tactically, just very disappointing.

nullc 3y ago
You're repeating a false narrative which was commercially financed in order to promote alternatives (ironically). Bitcoin absolutely is electronic cash. We've seen the alternative play out in forks that have become completely centralized as a result of ignoring the tradeoffs with the technology in use, and as a result have been undermined with "functionality" like confiscation transactions (transactions that let miners take any coins they choose). What bitcoin isn't is a paypal clone. That already exists and it's not of substantial value to the world to add another centralized high volume payments rail. It's absolutely fine that people also want to use it that way, but optimizing for that case can't come at the expense of the security properties that make Bitcoin interesting in the first place. Alternatives that make different tradeoffs do exist, and I think the results speak for themselves.
treyd 3y ago
> and with literally a one line change Except we know as software engineers that solutions to problems at scale are never that simple. The "just increase the block size limit bro" solution doesn't consider the externalities that increasing it would have on the network performance and decentralization. This is the same line of reasoning about this whole thread, compromising decentralization compromises the ability to use a credibly peer-to-peer (cash) system.

arealaccount 3y ago

If bitcoin does not succeed as a currency but does as a store of wealth, then eventually all of the coins will flow into a few funds and large wallets, right? So once all the coins are mined and if there are not many p2p transactions occurring, then what incentive is there to mine and support the network? Will coin owners just mine their own private blocks whenever they need to move coin? Curious if this has already been considered by the bulls or bears. Seems like bitcoin will need to increase the upper limit of coins to continue to work.

jayd16 3y ago
Once the automatic coins are mined, the idea is you pay miners a tip to get your transactions completed. I'm more curious how they plan to handle a drop in popularity from a security standpoint. Will the total compute always need to remain high enough to keep a bad actor from dominating? As popularity wanes that sounds expensive.
- treyd 3y ago
  To maintain the current level of security then, all else being equal, the total fees collected will have to increase by the amount the subsidy decreases by. So each byte of block space will cost more for the person buying it. That could be an issue, but the solution to that problem is to extend the protocol to allow for more sophisticated "layer 2" systems so that the end-user experience has as small of a footprint as possible. Ideally without compromising security, which can be done with zero-knowledge proofs and such. But it's unclear if the political will is there from the community around the Bitcoin project.
  - arealaccount 3y ago
    In this case, wouldn’t institutions mine their own blocks in order to avoid high transaction fees?
    - dale_glass 3y ago
      There's no such thing as "own blocks". There's a single world-wide winner of the mining competition per 10 minutes. So if you want to have free transactions 50% of the time, the way to get there is to take the current world-wide mining capacity, and replicate it. That's obviously not a viable tactic.

kylebenzle 3y ago

You can't be serious, Bitcoin Cash has been around for 10 years and is working great just like Satoshi design.

dale_glass 3y ago
Yeah, except for that obviously nobody cares for it: https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/bitcoin%20cash-transactions.html#alltime https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/bitcoin%20cash-transact... BCH has plenty spare capacity, but the actual usage shows it's not taking off. The idea of buying coffee with crypto is dead.

1vuio0pswjnm7 3y ago

"Thus eventually it dawned on me that there were maybe a few people out there that had some interest in a "Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System" and the "tech", but the vast majority out there were only interested in a world-wide game of hot potato, where the only point is to accumulate coins early, then sell them to some fool on the top, and cash out." In this scenario, when do people cash out. It seems like if people starting cashing out in large numbers, some folks are going to end up losing money.^1 1. Assuming they spent any money to acquire their Bitcoin.

dale_glass 3y ago
Precisely. Some people will make lots of money, some will make small gains, huge amounts will be screwed.

figassis 3y ago

People liken stability. If you have a lot invested in a currency and then, due to some shortcoming, it is forked to another currency, you have to migrate your life over. Your wallet, your investments are now in bitcoin cash. Once might not be an issue, but this can easily happen every month for every perceived shortcoming. If the forks inherited the BTC name, clients needed no changes and the original were renamed, I think things would be different now. Basically, merge improvements to main.