Coinbase to Suspend Trading in XRP(reuters.com)
reuters.com
Coinbase to Suspend Trading in XRP
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-coinbase-xrp/coinbase-to-suspend-trading-in-xrp-idUSKBN292222
201 comments
It might have been mostly priced in already - I was reading some articles about possible delistings last week, and I consider myself a hobbyist, not a serious investor.
Yeah if you check the price history there was a massive drop from ~0.55 USD/XRP to ~0.25 USD/XRP shortly after SEC filed lawsuit against ripple.
> The real test will be how much further XRP drops (or doesn't) from here
Do we know who holds most XRP?
Naïvely, I would guess retail investors and the company. I am not convinced either will be convinced to abandon ship by anything short of a court order.
Do we know who holds most XRP?
Naïvely, I would guess retail investors and the company. I am not convinced either will be convinced to abandon ship by anything short of a court order.
Most sources put that at Ripple and/or its two top execs. They obtained these positions by virtue of the Ripple consensus protocol, which conjured the coins into being and granted the network creator (Ripple) sole ownership.
AFAICT, that's the crux of what SEC will be going after.
AFAICT, that's the crux of what SEC will be going after.
About? On Nov 28th is was $0.61.
That's down over 50%.
That's down over 50%.
could we track circulating supply over time? they could just add more and keep the marketcap up as the price dips
But that chart's tracking the XRP/USD price, not the market cap.
Terrible news for XRP and Ripple but nobody can be surprised by this. Next up we may see the delisting of some stable coins given the SEC's advice about establishing a nexus in the US. I'm not sure how this will work for a decentralized coin like maker / dai, so perhaps this is the end for them. However, this seems consistent with other regulation since they operate like an autonomous fx swap fund.
I’m surprised, because I don’t see how it contributes to the market.
This provides clarity on what constitutes a security. The SEC have been telegraphing this move for several years, ever since the crackdowns on ICOs and STOs. Bitstamp said they would delist XRP several days ago so coinbase are hardly unique in their response to the SEC's announcement.
Bitstamp isnt delisting XRP. Just halting XRP trading for US customers.
https://www.bitstamp.net/news/
https://www.bitstamp.net/news/
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There can be no doubt that a mathematic - rather than collateralized - solution to stablecoins is the nonviolent solution.
How about both collateralized and mathematical?
If the platform supports programmatic proportional issuance and withdrawal (vs. mint and burn), vs. market-priced collateral, then negative-feedback loop controlled inflation/deflation can be implemented...
If the platform supports programmatic proportional issuance and withdrawal (vs. mint and burn), vs. market-priced collateral, then negative-feedback loop controlled inflation/deflation can be implemented...
Well, in that case, I suppose it depends on the asset being collateralized, and what oracle is the input for the programmatic issuance.
If the collateral can be seized in an act of violence (as opposed to being custodied on a smart contract), and the math is unable to protect the asset, then I think it's strictly a collateral solution and not a mathematical one.
If the collateral can be seized in an act of violence (as opposed to being custodied on a smart contract), and the math is unable to protect the asset, then I think it's strictly a collateral solution and not a mathematical one.
This is the paradox of wanting crypto to be both widespread and free of government influence. It cannot gain "market share" without interacting in some form or fashion with the regulatory structures already in place, putting it under de facto regulation of any jurisdiction of the people who want to use it.
I don't think it is a paradox at all but simply a separation of concerns. I believe government regulation is essential to a healthy economy, but it can still be useful to have methods to store and transact value outside of centralized control in case there is a failure of government.
It's kind of like how the fourth amendment makes it easier to commit crimes, but we accept it as a society anyway because it is more important to provide opportunities for individuals to defend themselves against government overreach. It is part of the checks and balances that ensure a healthy democracy.
It's kind of like how the fourth amendment makes it easier to commit crimes, but we accept it as a society anyway because it is more important to provide opportunities for individuals to defend themselves against government overreach. It is part of the checks and balances that ensure a healthy democracy.
I agree. There is nothing to suggest that something can't both behave in a regulatory environment and exist if that environment fails. Cars, for instance - They require registration so long as the body enforcing registration exists. If that changes, cars can still run.
The paradox is in both wanting the cars (well, crypto) alive & function and also not be subject to the regulatory environment, while that environment is alive & functioning. That seems to be the dream of a certain subset of crypto enthusiasts: Widespread crypto that bypasses existing regulations. I don't think it can get to that point. In order to gain widespread adoption, you need on-ramps & off-ramps for people to actually use it. Those are the regulatory choke points for crypto. Like an unregistered car you can drive on your own property, but the minute you take out on the highway you're obligated to play by the rules that govern the highway.
You can't buy crypto without the consent of banking systems that are subject to regulatory frameworks. You can't make a loan payment with crypto without converting it to the local currency, putting it in a bank, and writing a check or ACH transfer or getting the bank to convert it to local cash.
The vast majority of major transaction that require money cannot be done with crypto, and as that changes they will still only be done with crypto by interfacing with systems subject to regulatory structures. That keeps unregulated crypto in relatively small scale shadow economies. Sort of like cash, except cash is more or less dead as a means of making large transactions.
You can't buy crypto without the consent of banking systems that are subject to regulatory frameworks. You can't make a loan payment with crypto without converting it to the local currency, putting it in a bank, and writing a check or ACH transfer or getting the bank to convert it to local cash.
The vast majority of major transaction that require money cannot be done with crypto, and as that changes they will still only be done with crypto by interfacing with systems subject to regulatory structures. That keeps unregulated crypto in relatively small scale shadow economies. Sort of like cash, except cash is more or less dead as a means of making large transactions.
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What exactly makes XRP worth anything, though? Isn't it theoretically pegged to the USD?
Yes, XRP is a bad example of what makes cryptocurrencies useful/interesting for many reasons. I'm just speaking to them in general
Well, okay, what makes BTC inherently worth anything, then? Who cares that someone, somewhere, some time ago, solved some useless math problem? Why dedicate the equivalent of 7 nuclear power plants' worth of electricity[0] to it, when we could use that electricity to offset fossil fuel consumption?
I have literally have yet to have anyone explain this adequately beyond the level of "there's a market for it, so, obviously people think it's worth something."
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[0]: https://news.bitcoin.com/the-bitcoin-network-now-consumes-7-...
I have literally have yet to have anyone explain this adequately beyond the level of "there's a market for it, so, obviously people think it's worth something."
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[0]: https://news.bitcoin.com/the-bitcoin-network-now-consumes-7-...
There’s lots of things worth lots of money that don’t have much use value. So yes, in a market, the definition of price/value is generally where supply and demand meet.
As for why people currently /want/ bitcoin, I assume some people find it a good speculation instrument, some people hope that it will be a more stable store of value than fiat currencies, some people have political reasons for wanting to own some, some technical, etc
What’s to explain beyond what’s there at face value? People “want” bitcoin enough to buy it, other people are willing to sell it...
Now as we move further and further away from BTC (not including significantly different cryptocurrencies - ethereum has other advantages for example) into like dogecoin, which has held value for years, it’s clear that we are getting mostly into pure speculation territory. But from a market perspective, even that territory is fine, just don’t want to be the last one holding the bag...
As for why people currently /want/ bitcoin, I assume some people find it a good speculation instrument, some people hope that it will be a more stable store of value than fiat currencies, some people have political reasons for wanting to own some, some technical, etc
What’s to explain beyond what’s there at face value? People “want” bitcoin enough to buy it, other people are willing to sell it...
Now as we move further and further away from BTC (not including significantly different cryptocurrencies - ethereum has other advantages for example) into like dogecoin, which has held value for years, it’s clear that we are getting mostly into pure speculation territory. But from a market perspective, even that territory is fine, just don’t want to be the last one holding the bag...
This is roughly what I've been telling the HODLers among my friends and acquaintances for years: there is no intrinsic, fundamental reason why BTC has value. It has value because people say it has value. And, if that sounds awfully like the "fiat currency" they tend to heap so much derision on, well, it should.
The USD is nothing more than an "economy token" to show how much one is winning capitalism. Likewise, BTC is some sort of economy token, but I'm not sure what it means. I'm sure the bottom will fall out of BTC far sooner than the USD, and I will welcome that day, because then we can repurpose the electrical power that runs the BTC network toward productive uses, rather than propping up some financialized mirage.
The USD is nothing more than an "economy token" to show how much one is winning capitalism. Likewise, BTC is some sort of economy token, but I'm not sure what it means. I'm sure the bottom will fall out of BTC far sooner than the USD, and I will welcome that day, because then we can repurpose the electrical power that runs the BTC network toward productive uses, rather than propping up some financialized mirage.
You are right that fiat currency and bitcoins are alike in that they both have no intrinsic value. I don't think any "bitcoin evangelist" would say otherwise.
It's not about "winning capitalism". Money is simply an abstraction layer over something like direct bartering which has liquidity problems that increase with the complexity and number of goods & services on offer. I might agree that capitalism is about "winning" and money is used to keep score, but not that money is intrinsically tied to that game. And there might be a better abstraction layer you could place over people's time & effort than either money or direct bartering. Command economies are one option, but economies seem quite a bit too complex for that to be a feasible alternative at the moment. There's probably other options, but I'm certainly not smart enough to think of something new on that topic.
Demand. Just that. And no, its obviously not pegged to the USD or to anything. Price is a direct result of supply and demand. It has value because people pay for it.
XRP is centralized - it was issued by a centralized corporation, the ledger is permissioned (which is why it’s so fast) so not just anyone can join the network in a meaningful way, and the way it was distributed is highly suspect.
Cryptocurrencies like bitcoin are entirely different. Ripple is not like bitcoin and the regulations of the USA and other countries will affect bitcoin’s value but not determine bitcoin’s continuing existence unlike XRP.
Cryptocurrencies like bitcoin are entirely different. Ripple is not like bitcoin and the regulations of the USA and other countries will affect bitcoin’s value but not determine bitcoin’s continuing existence unlike XRP.
This is also why the SEC can sue Ripple but not, say, Vitalik Buterin. They specifically do not consider BTC, ETH and other currencies as securities.
Correct - they explicitly said BTC and ETH are not securities. However ETH's launch was conducted via ICO, where people sent BTC in return for ETH, and the exact same launch style was later declared de-facto illegal security sales with companies being penalized.
The SEC essentially caved to the crypto industry and said (paraphrasing) "Yes, ETH was launched as a security, but it became 'decentralized enough' where it is now a commodity". But gave no guidance on how any other coin could become "decentralized enough" to accomplish the same feat, to the detriment of the US crypto industry which has fallen way behind offshore entities.
The SEC essentially caved to the crypto industry and said (paraphrasing) "Yes, ETH was launched as a security, but it became 'decentralized enough' where it is now a commodity". But gave no guidance on how any other coin could become "decentralized enough" to accomplish the same feat, to the detriment of the US crypto industry which has fallen way behind offshore entities.
I read that more as the SEC saying "We didn't reall know what we were dealing with at the time." And their thinking and policy decisions have evolved.to fit both their understanding and evolving crypto scene.
Same should apply to XRP then because it exist way longer than ETH. But unlike ETH, XRP was never sold in return for and arbitrary amount of BTC/USD it was first given away for free and later sold at market value.
Date of origin may not matter as much as when it came to the SEC's attention. The SEC allowed BTC & ETH under a set of policies & understanding of crypto. That understanding evolved, changing policy, and then XRP got on their radar under the new policy regime. It probably helps that ETH was at least nominally tied to the USD.
Keep in mind I'm not defending the SEC's decision, just speculating on how the policy decisions might have been made & justified.
Keep in mind I'm not defending the SEC's decision, just speculating on how the policy decisions might have been made & justified.
I think they should shut them both down :)
Why? Does it hurt you? Its all just a huge tech experiment just like the internet was. We have no clue where it leads to but I want to see it in 10 or 20 years.
What I mean to say is they should both be regulated as securities which is what they both are. And yeah it's fly by night unregulated attitude hurts plenty of people. Doesn't have to hurt me to be bad.
A security of what?
Just because it does hurt people doesn't make it inherently bad. If you could avoid being hurt maybe other can too and thous who did get hurt anyway took the risk on purpose. Noting wrong with that. The SEC should prevent people from misleading or fraudulent offerings not from anything that has a known high risk. Selling a random token is like printing my own money. The SEC would not prevent me form selling worthless piece of paper if I dont mislead buyers into thinking its some kind of ownership for something. There is a difference between preventing fraud and preventing stupidity.
> “A security of what”
There’s a legal test called the Howey test you can use to find out if what you’re looking at is a security. [1] Roughly speaking a security is anything you put your money into with the expectation of it becoming worth more through no effort of your own.
> “Selling a random token is like printing my own money. The SEC would not prevent me form selling worthless piece of paper if I dont mislead buyers into thinking its some kind of ownership for something.”
You seem to misunderstand the definition of a security but even if you were right the conversation doesn’t end there.
The SEC absolutely has a mandate under the Securities Act to stop people who could be hurt by garbage offerings from buying them. They got this because permitting random unregulated securities sales in part led to the Great Depression, and they didn’t call it that because it was a pretty good depression. Sale of hot garbage on margin to folks who had no idea what they were doing destabilized the entire American financial system for a decade.
This is totally fair because if folks, especially poor folks, get wiped out they end up on public assistance. That means gains are privatized and losses are socialized. The SEC drew a totally reasonable middle ground line with the accredited investor rules. Accredited investors can buy all the hot garbage they want. Folks who can’t afford to can’t. That’s what securities registration gets us.
You may not agree with it but it is strictly their mandate.
[1] https://www.investopedia.com/terms/h/howey-test.asp
There’s a legal test called the Howey test you can use to find out if what you’re looking at is a security. [1] Roughly speaking a security is anything you put your money into with the expectation of it becoming worth more through no effort of your own.
> “Selling a random token is like printing my own money. The SEC would not prevent me form selling worthless piece of paper if I dont mislead buyers into thinking its some kind of ownership for something.”
You seem to misunderstand the definition of a security but even if you were right the conversation doesn’t end there.
The SEC absolutely has a mandate under the Securities Act to stop people who could be hurt by garbage offerings from buying them. They got this because permitting random unregulated securities sales in part led to the Great Depression, and they didn’t call it that because it was a pretty good depression. Sale of hot garbage on margin to folks who had no idea what they were doing destabilized the entire American financial system for a decade.
This is totally fair because if folks, especially poor folks, get wiped out they end up on public assistance. That means gains are privatized and losses are socialized. The SEC drew a totally reasonable middle ground line with the accredited investor rules. Accredited investors can buy all the hot garbage they want. Folks who can’t afford to can’t. That’s what securities registration gets us.
You may not agree with it but it is strictly their mandate.
[1] https://www.investopedia.com/terms/h/howey-test.asp
You dodged the question. A security of what?
And yes they do that that right IF there is a security of some sort being sold OR IF there is a contract that implies some sort of security like benefits OF IF there is fraudulent promises being made like promised RoI or voting rights or something.
If you just sell something physically created or digitally created that you legally own and the other party agreed on the price and possible other agreements then this is not in the scope of the SEC.
We dont know the agreements ripple made but there has defensively been a price both sides agreed on and sell restrictions that prevented the buyers from crashing the market. Non of that promises returns, special right or ownership of something else than the XRPs. There is also no allegation of fraud or fraudulent behavior so no sign of misleading statements or promises that where made. The whole think boils down to that the SEC says the XRP sold with a contract where securities because of the contract alone. Something like that never happens. Its not even possible that some XRPs are securities while other are not.
With ETH its a bit different it was retroactively declared as a security at the ICO which never held up in court because it was never challenged by anyone. Its quite obvious they did this to stop the ICO scams but did not sue anyone so this statement would not be challenged.
Yet if XRP was once a security they would consequently call out the free giveaways and the XRP sold without contracts and even the XRPs that where gifted to ripple. After all gifted securities would still have to be registered. Non of that is the case because they cant make up any real reason why 100Bn worthless digital nothings gifted to a companies could ever become a security of something or even of that companies. It just makes no sense at all. So instead they attacked the contracts alone.
If you just sell something physically created or digitally created that you legally own and the other party agreed on the price and possible other agreements then this is not in the scope of the SEC.
We dont know the agreements ripple made but there has defensively been a price both sides agreed on and sell restrictions that prevented the buyers from crashing the market. Non of that promises returns, special right or ownership of something else than the XRPs. There is also no allegation of fraud or fraudulent behavior so no sign of misleading statements or promises that where made. The whole think boils down to that the SEC says the XRP sold with a contract where securities because of the contract alone. Something like that never happens. Its not even possible that some XRPs are securities while other are not.
With ETH its a bit different it was retroactively declared as a security at the ICO which never held up in court because it was never challenged by anyone. Its quite obvious they did this to stop the ICO scams but did not sue anyone so this statement would not be challenged.
Yet if XRP was once a security they would consequently call out the free giveaways and the XRP sold without contracts and even the XRPs that where gifted to ripple. After all gifted securities would still have to be registered. Non of that is the case because they cant make up any real reason why 100Bn worthless digital nothings gifted to a companies could ever become a security of something or even of that companies. It just makes no sense at all. So instead they attacked the contracts alone.
>XRP is centralized
Useless statement XRP is the token there is no definition what makes the token centralized or not. Half the tokens owned by one party? or maybe a quarter is enough already? Its a useless statement as there is no common definition. no one talks about token decentralization anyway. Its about the control over the network that should not be centralized.
>the ledger is permissioned
This is factually wrong. Anyone can transact on the ledger there is no permission required form anyone and no one has the power to exclude someone.
>so not just anyone can join the network in a meaningful way
Also factually wrong. You can "join" the network in any possible way (node/full node/validator/participant/developer/you name it). You can change the code and send in you amendment. If 80% think is worth adding its added. If not its probably because the proposal was garbage not because someone has the power to block your amendment. So far there has been 1 amendment not supported by ripple that still reached the 80% support. Ripple could do absolutely nothing against that.
XRPs existence is also not determined by the USA. XRP would exist without ripple or the USA as long some people run the software it exists. Even if all would go offline it could be restarted any time.
Useless statement XRP is the token there is no definition what makes the token centralized or not. Half the tokens owned by one party? or maybe a quarter is enough already? Its a useless statement as there is no common definition. no one talks about token decentralization anyway. Its about the control over the network that should not be centralized.
>the ledger is permissioned
This is factually wrong. Anyone can transact on the ledger there is no permission required form anyone and no one has the power to exclude someone.
>so not just anyone can join the network in a meaningful way
Also factually wrong. You can "join" the network in any possible way (node/full node/validator/participant/developer/you name it). You can change the code and send in you amendment. If 80% think is worth adding its added. If not its probably because the proposal was garbage not because someone has the power to block your amendment. So far there has been 1 amendment not supported by ripple that still reached the 80% support. Ripple could do absolutely nothing against that.
XRPs existence is also not determined by the USA. XRP would exist without ripple or the USA as long some people run the software it exists. Even if all would go offline it could be restarted any time.
The best case would be a parallel economy developing, where you can hide yourself from government. No burglar can cost you as much as government. I sadly have yet to find a client for coding who wants to pay in crypto and not report it to the state...
That would only work on a small scale. Large scale, truly massive adoption can't occur until the major financial institutions are on board. If businesses can't legally accept it, put it in a bank, make loan payments with it, all of the normal things you do with money-- or have off ramps to convert to currency to allow that-- then you won't get widespread adoption.
This is true for large business. But an independent contractor, a hair dresser, a carpenter, a plumber, or any number of other people can do business without involving the violent and coercive group known as the state
As I said, small scale. All of those people in those jobs may want to buy a car, a house, go food shopping at a store that doesn't take crypto... If they're only paid in crypto, they can't do those things unless there's on-ramps and off-ramps from crypto currencies. Those ramps are bottlenecks subject to the regulations of the jurisdictions in which they take place.
At best, even if a shadow economy built up to facilitate those transactions, tax agencies (IRS for those of us in the US) will knock on a lot of doors and say "you have lots of stuff. That means you're receiving value of some sort. You owe us a cut of that, pay up."
At best, even if a shadow economy built up to facilitate those transactions, tax agencies (IRS for those of us in the US) will knock on a lot of doors and say "you have lots of stuff. That means you're receiving value of some sort. You owe us a cut of that, pay up."
Without you giving a discount equal to their marginal tax rate, they would likely be both complicit in tax fraud and paying more after taxes.
Without tax I could provide my service at a lower rate and still make more, which I would then invest in the most efficient way I could, unlike government.
“Tax fraud” makes it sound like one breaks a contract - but I never agreed with the state who threatens me to include them in any transaction I make.
“Tax fraud” makes it sound like one breaks a contract - but I never agreed with the state who threatens me to include them in any transaction I make.
Would you consider that be unethical?
If ethics exists it must be universal - otherwise ethics is just = power.
If ethics is universal, rules apply equally to anyone.
Let’s say theft is not moral, unlike receiving a gift. Both are cases of receiving without payment - the difference being that “giver” giving voluntarily or not. The same goes for how sex is moral, but rape is the furthest from moral, or how work is moral but slavery isn’t.
Tax is money collected under threat of violence - pay, or be punished. It can thus not be moral if morality is universal.
It is also bound to be inefficient - spending “other people’s money” is easy, but when you spend it yourself, you ensure it is invested where it creates the greatest value, unless you’re an addict. This is evident as governments waste money in any way that can to buy rulers the currency they need most - votes or special interest groups goodwill.
If ethics is universal, rules apply equally to anyone.
Let’s say theft is not moral, unlike receiving a gift. Both are cases of receiving without payment - the difference being that “giver” giving voluntarily or not. The same goes for how sex is moral, but rape is the furthest from moral, or how work is moral but slavery isn’t.
Tax is money collected under threat of violence - pay, or be punished. It can thus not be moral if morality is universal.
It is also bound to be inefficient - spending “other people’s money” is easy, but when you spend it yourself, you ensure it is invested where it creates the greatest value, unless you’re an addict. This is evident as governments waste money in any way that can to buy rulers the currency they need most - votes or special interest groups goodwill.
Something I struggle with personally is how much money I give the government despite having significant ethical concerns over how my money is being spent.
I know my taxes have contributed to the death and suffering of countless people. I try to remind myself that it also helps some people, but I still struggle to justify my lack of resistance knowing that at least some amount will be used in ways I consider evil.
I think there is some pragmatism needed here though. As individuals we don't really have any incentive to pay taxes if they were optional. I think what's needed is more localised spending and the ability for local communities to withhold tax collectively when concerns are raised about how federal governments might spend it. This would give individuals far more input into how their tax money is spent and the system overall would be far more consensual and prompt people to ask if they're okay with x amount being spent developing nuclear weapons or killing civilians in distant lands. I do find it quite odd that the default assumption is that you're a bad person if you don't pay taxes. I suspect someone who avoids tax then contributes an equivalent amount to charity is almost certainly more ethnical than a tax payer like myself.
I know my taxes have contributed to the death and suffering of countless people. I try to remind myself that it also helps some people, but I still struggle to justify my lack of resistance knowing that at least some amount will be used in ways I consider evil.
I think there is some pragmatism needed here though. As individuals we don't really have any incentive to pay taxes if they were optional. I think what's needed is more localised spending and the ability for local communities to withhold tax collectively when concerns are raised about how federal governments might spend it. This would give individuals far more input into how their tax money is spent and the system overall would be far more consensual and prompt people to ask if they're okay with x amount being spent developing nuclear weapons or killing civilians in distant lands. I do find it quite odd that the default assumption is that you're a bad person if you don't pay taxes. I suspect someone who avoids tax then contributes an equivalent amount to charity is almost certainly more ethnical than a tax payer like myself.
If you are interested in universal morals, the effects of incentives, and a world without coercion, I’d recommend checking out the website of the Mises Institute or the podcast of Stefan Molyneux. Good night from a small socialist European country!
Probably illegal pretty much anywhere.
Legal != ethical
Ethics are subjective. Asking "Is it ethical?" to a large group of people is little better than asking "Is chocolate the best flavor of ice cream?"
Legality is a more concrete and easier to give a firm answer to. If you want to have a reasonable conversation on the internet with random strangers of different belief systems, questions like "is it ethical" go right out the window.
Legality is a more concrete and easier to give a firm answer to. If you want to have a reasonable conversation on the internet with random strangers of different belief systems, questions like "is it ethical" go right out the window.
Are you objectively sure it’s subjective?
Ethics must be objective/universal, although cheating it is common and alluring.
Because ethics are universal the rules make sense even for children. It is wrong to lie, steal, rape, and kill, while it is right to honestly tell stories, receive gifts, have sex, and give life. In these words definition lies whether the receiving party partakes voluntary or is forced to.
Legality on the other hand is defined by who controls most guns. If might is right, why should not the strong group genocide the weak?
Ethics must be objective/universal, although cheating it is common and alluring.
Because ethics are universal the rules make sense even for children. It is wrong to lie, steal, rape, and kill, while it is right to honestly tell stories, receive gifts, have sex, and give life. In these words definition lies whether the receiving party partakes voluntary or is forced to.
Legality on the other hand is defined by who controls most guns. If might is right, why should not the strong group genocide the weak?
Ethics must be objective/universal
That's a bold statement without accepted axioms & subsequent proofs to build off of & establish the universality of ethics. There has never been universal agreement on any set of ethics. Genocide is itself an excellent example of that: It's not hard to find examples where those participating in the genocide believed their actions to be perfectly acceptable.
If you watch children for any length of time, you'll see that "universal ethics" are not readily apparent to them either. Children have to be taught not to hit people, that they can't take another child's toy (stealing) just because they want it, that lying isn't acceptable, etc. Plenty of people never learn those lessons, and have no problem violating them when the consequences can be avoided (and even many times when they can't)
Your other examples of what is right & wrong are also not universally agreed upon. It's not hard to find examples of any of those actions where people justify their actions as acceptable.
This is without even getting into the gray areas: Is it wrong to kill in self defense? Is it right to honestly tell your neighbor the story that his wife is cheating on him if he'd previously said "I'd kill my wife if she ever cheated on me"? Is it right for puppy mills to give life to animals it will kill in a few months if someone doesn't buy them? Is it right to accept a gift from someone who stole the money to purchase it? Is it wrong to lie if the lie would save an innocent life?
If ethics are universal, then the underlying principals have yet to be discovered.
That's a bold statement without accepted axioms & subsequent proofs to build off of & establish the universality of ethics. There has never been universal agreement on any set of ethics. Genocide is itself an excellent example of that: It's not hard to find examples where those participating in the genocide believed their actions to be perfectly acceptable.
If you watch children for any length of time, you'll see that "universal ethics" are not readily apparent to them either. Children have to be taught not to hit people, that they can't take another child's toy (stealing) just because they want it, that lying isn't acceptable, etc. Plenty of people never learn those lessons, and have no problem violating them when the consequences can be avoided (and even many times when they can't)
Your other examples of what is right & wrong are also not universally agreed upon. It's not hard to find examples of any of those actions where people justify their actions as acceptable.
This is without even getting into the gray areas: Is it wrong to kill in self defense? Is it right to honestly tell your neighbor the story that his wife is cheating on him if he'd previously said "I'd kill my wife if she ever cheated on me"? Is it right for puppy mills to give life to animals it will kill in a few months if someone doesn't buy them? Is it right to accept a gift from someone who stole the money to purchase it? Is it wrong to lie if the lie would save an innocent life?
If ethics are universal, then the underlying principals have yet to be discovered.
To downvoters - I welcome your disapproval like Socrates welcomed his hemlock ;)
I claim that ethics if they exist must be universal.
If ethics are not universal, ie it is right to steal from some but not from others, you will never find a definition of ethics that can be agreed upon by more than 1 person, and their answer will change over time as they rise or sink in power position.
That definition of ethics taken to its logical conclusion is that might = right.
If might is right, then it is right for the strong race to genocide the weak, for the majority to tax the minority, for the master to keep the slave, for a man to rape a woman, and a parent to beat their child.
Opposed to that there are universal ethics - that one rule applies to many parties. For example, the difference in meaning between “receive gift” and “steal” is whether the action is universally ethical. Receiving a gift is voluntary for both parties, and a rule that allows it can thus be universally ethical.
Does this make sense? I can try to give other examples of how this principle makes sex ethical but rape not (do you dare to disagree?), self-defence ethical but assault not, and also how an insurance company collecting payment is ethical, but a government demanding tax is not.
Regarding the claim that even kids understand this: you are right that kids like adult try to get away with not acting according to universalist ethics. But if you speak to them and ask if they think it’s ok that someone takes their toy, they will say no. If you then ask them if it is ok for them to take someone else's toy, they will begrudgingly agree it isn’t. If you ask them what they would think if 5 kids voted and agreed you should give your toy away, they disagree.
Since universalist ethics are true, they intuitively make sense to us, and they also evidently produce the best societies - why comparatively universalist Christendom became the most free and developed place, why land-locked zero-resources relatively stateless Switzerland flourishes while the socialist resource-rich countries suffer in inefficiency and poverty for the masses, etc.
I claim that ethics if they exist must be universal.
If ethics are not universal, ie it is right to steal from some but not from others, you will never find a definition of ethics that can be agreed upon by more than 1 person, and their answer will change over time as they rise or sink in power position.
That definition of ethics taken to its logical conclusion is that might = right.
If might is right, then it is right for the strong race to genocide the weak, for the majority to tax the minority, for the master to keep the slave, for a man to rape a woman, and a parent to beat their child.
Opposed to that there are universal ethics - that one rule applies to many parties. For example, the difference in meaning between “receive gift” and “steal” is whether the action is universally ethical. Receiving a gift is voluntary for both parties, and a rule that allows it can thus be universally ethical.
Does this make sense? I can try to give other examples of how this principle makes sex ethical but rape not (do you dare to disagree?), self-defence ethical but assault not, and also how an insurance company collecting payment is ethical, but a government demanding tax is not.
Regarding the claim that even kids understand this: you are right that kids like adult try to get away with not acting according to universalist ethics. But if you speak to them and ask if they think it’s ok that someone takes their toy, they will say no. If you then ask them if it is ok for them to take someone else's toy, they will begrudgingly agree it isn’t. If you ask them what they would think if 5 kids voted and agreed you should give your toy away, they disagree.
Since universalist ethics are true, they intuitively make sense to us, and they also evidently produce the best societies - why comparatively universalist Christendom became the most free and developed place, why land-locked zero-resources relatively stateless Switzerland flourishes while the socialist resource-rich countries suffer in inefficiency and poverty for the masses, etc.
lol, how do you propose to power your mining rig and connect to the internet without a government?
Assuming free people could not create internet and electricity infrastructure is like an East German assuming free markets could not provide a Trabant alternative
So long as governments exist you will need to pass your data through government-controlled spaces. You may produce your own electricity, you may create your own wireless mesh WAN spanning a continent even, but that continent might contain the US, and the FCC will come knocking on doors and knocking down you signal towers. You cannot operate on any significant scale without touching on something under the regulatory jurisdiction of nation-states. This is not a problem of imagination, it's the current structure of power. East Germans undoubtedly both imagined and were often aware of Trabant alternatives outside of East Germany. But their dominant power structure did not easy allow for home grown competition.
We agree. Reread my comment - I said it was “just like” the similie.
Just like East Germans lived under forced government monopoly and regulations in the car market but most could dream of Benzes and BMWs, you and I can dream about a world where voluntary relationships replace government force in areas such as internet, conflict resolution, health insurance (where I live we only have government health care, and like for Trabants, there are long lines...), road management, and all other tasks government bureaucrats so selflessly have relieved us of
Just like East Germans lived under forced government monopoly and regulations in the car market but most could dream of Benzes and BMWs, you and I can dream about a world where voluntary relationships replace government force in areas such as internet, conflict resolution, health insurance (where I live we only have government health care, and like for Trabants, there are long lines...), road management, and all other tasks government bureaucrats so selflessly have relieved us of
People like that have existed and yet in 100% of cases they’ve been outcompeted by and swallowed up by people who form governments. Funny that.
The same argument was surely made by slave owners since the beginning of history, but westerners managed to abolish slavery, and after that industry was invented
Individual's could not build nor maintain the infrastructure that underpins the internet, for that you need government.
https://unherd.com/2020/12/libertarianism-never-ends-well/
given that free people can't even fend off a bunch of garbage stealing bears I have little confidence that they can get an electricity grid running.
The East Germans were wrong to assume that central planning is very good, they weren't wrong to assume that public governance and central authority is pretty good, which it is.
given that free people can't even fend off a bunch of garbage stealing bears I have little confidence that they can get an electricity grid running.
The East Germans were wrong to assume that central planning is very good, they weren't wrong to assume that public governance and central authority is pretty good, which it is.
What exactly are you proposing? Anarcho-capitalism or some variant?
If you follow to it’s end the principle that makes gifts moral but theft immoral, or sex moral but rape immoral, or work moral but slavery immoral, yes you reach “anarcho-capitalism”
Okay, I see where you're coming from then. I disagree, but I understand your premises & therefore your comments much better.
You and I have a thread above where I replied why ethics must be universal if they exist - I welcome you to prove me wrong there, or to boldly argue that might is right!
IMHO good move for the ecosystem overall.
Beyond that, the formulation is really funny (bad?) though:
> Trading will move into limit only starting December 28, 2020 at 2:30 PM PST, and will be fully suspended on Tuesday, January 19, 2021 at 10 a.m. Pacific Standard Time
Assuming limit post only orders (which sounds like it in the sentence), how do you expect the trading to work?
Beyond that, the formulation is really funny (bad?) though:
> Trading will move into limit only starting December 28, 2020 at 2:30 PM PST, and will be fully suspended on Tuesday, January 19, 2021 at 10 a.m. Pacific Standard Time
Assuming limit post only orders (which sounds like it in the sentence), how do you expect the trading to work?
arcticbull(1)
Price chart: https://www.coindesk.com/price/xrp down about 18%.
Down about 60% in a week.
[deleted]
They never should have allowed it in the first place. By testing the waters of trading custodial currencies they were really pushing the limits.
BTC has been a joke ever since the GitHub repo was hijacked by Blockstream and Adam Back. The only interesting cryptocurrencies are Ethereum, Bitcoin Cash and Monero. The rest are either obvious scams or dead ends at this point.
A lot of people were holding out hope for decentalized storage projects like FileCoin but that project now seems to be dead in the water as well.
BTC has been a joke ever since the GitHub repo was hijacked by Blockstream and Adam Back. The only interesting cryptocurrencies are Ethereum, Bitcoin Cash and Monero. The rest are either obvious scams or dead ends at this point.
A lot of people were holding out hope for decentalized storage projects like FileCoin but that project now seems to be dead in the water as well.
Just to note: the "Bitcoin was hijacked by <corp>" is a running joke at this point and not to be taken seriously. Ask anyone to provide verifiable proof of this and they will respond with hyperbole or conspiracy theory.
I'm seeing a lot of valid concerns and criticisms of Blockstream's actions and methods. I dont think they can be dismissed with ad hominems.
> I'm seeing a lot of valid concerns and criticisms of Blockstream's actions and methods
I've carefully reviewed each post in the thread and cannot find that. Instead, I see a couple vague and clearly false allegations which are unambiguously debunked.
What specifically are you referring to?
For the avoidance of confusion, the anonymous maintainer of "Bitcoin Cash" (a deceptively named Bitcoin clone) is named "Freetrader". Are you they?
I've carefully reviewed each post in the thread and cannot find that. Instead, I see a couple vague and clearly false allegations which are unambiguously debunked.
What specifically are you referring to?
For the avoidance of confusion, the anonymous maintainer of "Bitcoin Cash" (a deceptively named Bitcoin clone) is named "Freetrader". Are you they?
No, different guy.
The Blockstream hijack lie is getting really old.
And it doesn't age well either. Both gmax and pieter are not even in it anymore. Blockstream's contributions (what you consider 'hijacking') to Bitcoin are pretty slim at this point.
Which is a pity, honestly. Blockstream was a good force for bitcoin, despite the continuous stream of baseless lies coming from you people.
Gmax made a much better summary of why your statements are all baseless babbling below...
And it doesn't age well either. Both gmax and pieter are not even in it anymore. Blockstream's contributions (what you consider 'hijacking') to Bitcoin are pretty slim at this point.
Which is a pity, honestly. Blockstream was a good force for bitcoin, despite the continuous stream of baseless lies coming from you people.
Gmax made a much better summary of why your statements are all baseless babbling below...
I don't see any additional value of bcash over bitcoin.
Eth and Monero I agree though, each of them bring fundamental values additionally to btc.
I'm curious why you chose to use the term "bcash" to refer to BCH. No exchanges or mainstream projects use that term to refer to BCH. As far as I'm aware it's primarily used as a pejorative, so it seems strange that you'd use it here.
As far as BCH's additional value: I'd suggest researching the block size debate. This debate is BCH's entire reason for existing. This article [1] from 2016 by Mike Hearn contains a good primer on the block size debate itself. He ended up quitting development of Bitcoin, but others decided to raise the blocksize limit - with or without the majority, thus creating BCH. Succinctly, BCH is the continuation of big-blocker's vision of the Bitcoin experiment.
[1] https://blog.plan99.net/the-resolution-of-the-bitcoin-experi...
As far as BCH's additional value: I'd suggest researching the block size debate. This debate is BCH's entire reason for existing. This article [1] from 2016 by Mike Hearn contains a good primer on the block size debate itself. He ended up quitting development of Bitcoin, but others decided to raise the blocksize limit - with or without the majority, thus creating BCH. Succinctly, BCH is the continuation of big-blocker's vision of the Bitcoin experiment.
[1] https://blog.plan99.net/the-resolution-of-the-bitcoin-experi...
Its authors, original funders, and most exchanges originally referred to it as "BCC" which was, unfortunately, also the symbol for the Bitconnect ponzi scheme.
"Bitcoin Cash" is both a mouthful and enabler of outright fraudulent behaviour, where people are sold BCH and think they got Bitcoin at a really good price (was more common in the past but still happens now). Just about every business that accepts Bitcoin payments has continual problems with people sending BCH because they thought they had and were sending Bitcoin and BCH copied Bitcoin's address format.
In any other field a knock-off-name like "Bitcoin Cash" would be knocked flat as a trademark infringement, so the public is atypically prepared to protect itself from it.
So you can imagine that many Bitcoiners are not eager to use a purposefully deceptive name that has already created a lot of problems for actual users.
Plus in many people's view Bcash is earnestly a better name, but due to weird symmetry breaking and hateful cult like behaviour means that even though it's a perfectly fine name the BCH pumpers go all RMS-whining-about-GNU/Linux over any use of it which is just amusing.
> He ended up quitting development of Bitcoin
You've seen his side. For an uncharitable take on his contributions:
Mike's sum total contributions to the development of the bitcoin software were a half dozen commits, most of which were trivial string changes. ( https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1337008.0 )
Mike Hearn has a long history advocating for user hostile features in free software, for example he lobbied the Tor project extensively to add censorship. He pushed for adding centralizing features in Bitcoin like blocking all tor peers, phoning home, etc. He was a former employee of QinetiQ, a R&D organization for British intelligence and a system he created at google turned up in the snowden documents as one whos data was being leaked to the british government, shortly after that he parted ways with google. His long term view for Bitcoin security is that it would depend on (government backed) trusted institutions.
Hearn was always largely cultural outsider to Bitcoin-- which many Bitcoin users were wary of, not just on the tech side but in the community in general. There is nothing wrong with reading his perspective, but you should understand some of the context for it.
[I'm aware that this perspective is arguably not the most 'fair'-- e.g. pointing out he worked for British intelligence when I have no reason to think his efforts to centralized Bitcoin were due to anything but his own personal fetish for authority-- but I think it's a good example of how far apart culturally he was from most Bitcoiners. It's also a bit ironic: some of the attacks cited in this thread accuse me/blockstream/bitcoin-devs of being intelligence agents, but they happily ignore the person we know worked in signals intelligence. In any case, unlike the attacks that he and his supporters here lob at me, they're not falsehoods. I'm happy to support them with links.]
> Succinctly, BCH is the continuation of big-blocker's vision of the Bitcoin experiment
I think that's a largely correct statement. But what that experiment shows is telling. BCH's usage is insubstantial compared to Bitcoin (even though the way it was launched forced exchanges almost universally to adopt it). As predicted it is completely unable to secure itself using fees (it typically generates less than $1 per block in fees), making it dependant on continued inflation to pay for security. Not only does the usage not exist, but it has also failed economically in the market: It has lost ~90% of its value in USD terms, and ~95% of its peak value compared Bitcoin. It currently trades at 1.2% of Bitcoin's value after years of almost monotone decline after its first few months.
[It also, sadly, is not a pure realization of the Big Block experiment. Acknowledging the tradeoffs highlighted by the Bitcoin developers, they have continued to limit the blocksize in BCH (though to levels a few times higher than Bitcoin) and introduced many other questionable and controversial changes, spawning multiple additional incompatible forks. Their changes also include an "automatic checkpoints" mechanism that totally breaks the proof of work security model. Weirdly, the "big block vision" is probably most faithfully followed by "BSV", which is a system created and promoted by people that few would disagree are outright scammers, so it too is going nowhere]
I think it's fine and good that people experiment with things (even where I think that the outcome is obvious), the world is only improved by that. But fraudulently claiming the system "is" bitcoin, or spreading malicious, false, and defamatory claims about their competition and critics and engaging in outright harassment in an effort to justify and promote their tokens is really uncool and shouldn't be rewarded.
"Bitcoin Cash" is both a mouthful and enabler of outright fraudulent behaviour, where people are sold BCH and think they got Bitcoin at a really good price (was more common in the past but still happens now). Just about every business that accepts Bitcoin payments has continual problems with people sending BCH because they thought they had and were sending Bitcoin and BCH copied Bitcoin's address format.
In any other field a knock-off-name like "Bitcoin Cash" would be knocked flat as a trademark infringement, so the public is atypically prepared to protect itself from it.
So you can imagine that many Bitcoiners are not eager to use a purposefully deceptive name that has already created a lot of problems for actual users.
Plus in many people's view Bcash is earnestly a better name, but due to weird symmetry breaking and hateful cult like behaviour means that even though it's a perfectly fine name the BCH pumpers go all RMS-whining-about-GNU/Linux over any use of it which is just amusing.
> He ended up quitting development of Bitcoin
You've seen his side. For an uncharitable take on his contributions:
Mike's sum total contributions to the development of the bitcoin software were a half dozen commits, most of which were trivial string changes. ( https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1337008.0 )
Mike Hearn has a long history advocating for user hostile features in free software, for example he lobbied the Tor project extensively to add censorship. He pushed for adding centralizing features in Bitcoin like blocking all tor peers, phoning home, etc. He was a former employee of QinetiQ, a R&D organization for British intelligence and a system he created at google turned up in the snowden documents as one whos data was being leaked to the british government, shortly after that he parted ways with google. His long term view for Bitcoin security is that it would depend on (government backed) trusted institutions.
Hearn was always largely cultural outsider to Bitcoin-- which many Bitcoin users were wary of, not just on the tech side but in the community in general. There is nothing wrong with reading his perspective, but you should understand some of the context for it.
[I'm aware that this perspective is arguably not the most 'fair'-- e.g. pointing out he worked for British intelligence when I have no reason to think his efforts to centralized Bitcoin were due to anything but his own personal fetish for authority-- but I think it's a good example of how far apart culturally he was from most Bitcoiners. It's also a bit ironic: some of the attacks cited in this thread accuse me/blockstream/bitcoin-devs of being intelligence agents, but they happily ignore the person we know worked in signals intelligence. In any case, unlike the attacks that he and his supporters here lob at me, they're not falsehoods. I'm happy to support them with links.]
> Succinctly, BCH is the continuation of big-blocker's vision of the Bitcoin experiment
I think that's a largely correct statement. But what that experiment shows is telling. BCH's usage is insubstantial compared to Bitcoin (even though the way it was launched forced exchanges almost universally to adopt it). As predicted it is completely unable to secure itself using fees (it typically generates less than $1 per block in fees), making it dependant on continued inflation to pay for security. Not only does the usage not exist, but it has also failed economically in the market: It has lost ~90% of its value in USD terms, and ~95% of its peak value compared Bitcoin. It currently trades at 1.2% of Bitcoin's value after years of almost monotone decline after its first few months.
[It also, sadly, is not a pure realization of the Big Block experiment. Acknowledging the tradeoffs highlighted by the Bitcoin developers, they have continued to limit the blocksize in BCH (though to levels a few times higher than Bitcoin) and introduced many other questionable and controversial changes, spawning multiple additional incompatible forks. Their changes also include an "automatic checkpoints" mechanism that totally breaks the proof of work security model. Weirdly, the "big block vision" is probably most faithfully followed by "BSV", which is a system created and promoted by people that few would disagree are outright scammers, so it too is going nowhere]
I think it's fine and good that people experiment with things (even where I think that the outcome is obvious), the world is only improved by that. But fraudulently claiming the system "is" bitcoin, or spreading malicious, false, and defamatory claims about their competition and critics and engaging in outright harassment in an effort to justify and promote their tokens is really uncool and shouldn't be rewarded.
> a knock-off-name like "Bitcoin Cash"
"Knock-off" is a curious word choice. Are you under the impression that someone owns the term "Bitcoin"?
"Knock-off" is a curious word choice. Are you under the impression that someone owns the term "Bitcoin"?
Someone doesn't have to own it for it to be fraud to mislead someone using it.
No one owns the word "gold" but if I sell you a bunch of gold plated tungsten as "gold" I'm still defrauding you.
No one owns the word "gold" but if I sell you a bunch of gold plated tungsten as "gold" I'm still defrauding you.
Gold has had a widely agreed upon definition for thousands of years. Bitcoin is a ~decade old open source project with a clearly established philosophical divide between small-blockers and big-blockers. In other open source project variants, small name changes like adding/changing a suffix or prefix are common, why would Bitcoin be the exception?
Given that you accepted that BCH is the continuation of big-blocker's vision of the Bitcoin experiment, your comparison of it to gold-plated tungsten is flawed. BCH has a legitimate reason to exist. Your comparison might be more apt if BCH weren't born out of the block-size debate, but that's simply not the reality.
Ultimately, the market has spoken on this issue. The Bitcoin Cash name has been accepted as valid. It's not a trademark violation and it's not fraud akin to gold-plated tungsten. It's a legitimate continuation of big-blocker's vision of the Bitcoin experiment.
The term "bcash" on the other hand is quite clearly a pejorative and a transparent attempt to manipulation language. I'd expect better on a forum like this, but of course there will be some low-brow argumentation style anywhere you go. I'm frankly surprised you're still defending its use at this point.
Given that you accepted that BCH is the continuation of big-blocker's vision of the Bitcoin experiment, your comparison of it to gold-plated tungsten is flawed. BCH has a legitimate reason to exist. Your comparison might be more apt if BCH weren't born out of the block-size debate, but that's simply not the reality.
Ultimately, the market has spoken on this issue. The Bitcoin Cash name has been accepted as valid. It's not a trademark violation and it's not fraud akin to gold-plated tungsten. It's a legitimate continuation of big-blocker's vision of the Bitcoin experiment.
The term "bcash" on the other hand is quite clearly a pejorative and a transparent attempt to manipulation language. I'd expect better on a forum like this, but of course there will be some low-brow argumentation style anywhere you go. I'm frankly surprised you're still defending its use at this point.
I disagree with your statement that bcash is manipulative language.
I now understand where you are coming from after reading your posts but there is a community out there referring to bitcoin cash as bcash since its short and succinct and easy to speak.
Also might I suggest to reflect on your posts? The tone sounds quite angry and seems to stem from frustration which can lead to reading bad intent where is none.
Also might I suggest to reflect on your posts? The tone sounds quite angry and seems to stem from frustration which can lead to reading bad intent where is none.
Open source projects often fork. To take one such example, years ago X.org forked from XFree86. Both projects considered themselves implementations of the X Window System. Can you imagine if XFree86 supporters insisted that X.org not be allowed to use "X" in their name? If these supporters invented their own name for X.org, say "Zorg", made outlandish claims that "X.org" sounded offensive to them, and that they earnestly believed that "Zorg" was a better name for the project, even though no one in the project itself referred to it by that name. Would you not agree that those using the term "Zorg" in this example are using manipulative language?
Another way to look at this: the difference between small-blockers and big-blockers is a deep philosophical divide, much like what often occurs in politics. Imagine trying to have a civil political discussion with someone that has different political beliefs than you, and that person keeps using loaded terminology, rather than neutral terminology. You can imagine that under these circumstances, it would be increasingly difficult to keep the conversation civil, and you'd be well within your rights to ask your interlocutor to use neutral terminology. If they refused, it would be a reflection on their lack of civility, not yours.
Another way to look at this: the difference between small-blockers and big-blockers is a deep philosophical divide, much like what often occurs in politics. Imagine trying to have a civil political discussion with someone that has different political beliefs than you, and that person keeps using loaded terminology, rather than neutral terminology. You can imagine that under these circumstances, it would be increasingly difficult to keep the conversation civil, and you'd be well within your rights to ask your interlocutor to use neutral terminology. If they refused, it would be a reflection on their lack of civility, not yours.
How is it even possibly pejorative? BCH has the problem that it's read by many people as "bitch", and is even used that way by by developers (the nodes software gets called BCHN 'bitching'), and more than a few people find that offensive.
> market has spoken on this issue
I just checked a half dozen exchanges-- none call it "Bitcoin Cash" in their interfaces, BCH yes. Calling it "Bitcoin Cash" has a well understood problem of tricking people so serious businesses avoid it.
Of course, the fraud goes further than having a confusingly similar name. https://twitter.com/rogerkver/status/981908565307764736
> market has spoken on this issue
I just checked a half dozen exchanges-- none call it "Bitcoin Cash" in their interfaces, BCH yes. Calling it "Bitcoin Cash" has a well understood problem of tricking people so serious businesses avoid it.
Of course, the fraud goes further than having a confusingly similar name. https://twitter.com/rogerkver/status/981908565307764736
> I just checked a half dozen exchanges-- none call it "Bitcoin Cash" in their interfaces
Which exchanges did you check? I just checked some myself, and Coinbase, Kraken, Binance, and Gemini all use the full name "Bitcoin Cash".
Which exchanges did you check? I just checked some myself, and Coinbase, Kraken, Binance, and Gemini all use the full name "Bitcoin Cash".
The argument as far as I'm aware is that it's like Bitcoin, except with transaction fees low enough to make it actually usable as a currency as opposed to being a pure store of value.
It's not only that. There is also the "replace by fee" stuff that allows BCH to make instant payments with 0 confirmations for small values. This was hinted by Satoshi as well, but was made impossible by the current BTC.
Wow that's super-confused!
The original Bitcoin software supported transaction replacement. You could mark a transaction as non-final and then it could be replaced until it got confirmed (potentially gated by its locktime) or until a replacement was made that was marked final. As is necessary in a distributed system, the replacement and non-replacement was best-effort and an older version could be confirmed (or a version made later than a final version). Replacement was intended for use with payment channels, like incrementally updating an open account paying someone.
Unfortunately, the functionality had a flaw: It enabled a DOS attack. You could make a transaction then replace it 2^32 times and only pay one fee. So we disabled it. Without the explicit functionality you could still replace transactions by spamming nodes (and esp miners) with the new transaction and hoping they accepted it, but it wasn't very reliable but also no longer DOS-attackable.
Later, people pointed out that the DOS attack could be avoided if it was also required that each replacement increase the tx fee by at least the minimum transaction fee that would have been accepted. And the functionality was re-enabled: you could again mark transactions as non-final.
When BCH was created they ripped out the functionality and falsely claimed that this made 'instant payments with 0 confirmations for small values' possible. This makes literally zero sense: First, in BCH you can still replace unconfirmed transactions, it's just less reliable. Secondly, replacement is functionality intended to enable faster transactions! Thirdly, you can disable it in Bitcoin (or replace a non-final one with a final version) and get the same behaviour as BCH if that's what your use case requires.
Finally, its alleged that this was some dastardly move by Bitcoin devs to "break" "0-conf" transactions, fuled by people who can't understand that Bitcoin devs saying 0-conf transactions are not very secure doesn't mean that they don't like your ability to make them if you want to, and it ignores the fact that the basic replacement functionality was there in the very first version ( https://github.com/trottier/original-bitcoin/blob/92ee8d9a99... ) and had been disabled by the self-same people being attacked for adding it.
It's basically 5G CAUSES COVID level of inanity, and it breaks my heart to see people duped by telephone-game polished versions of it.
The original Bitcoin software supported transaction replacement. You could mark a transaction as non-final and then it could be replaced until it got confirmed (potentially gated by its locktime) or until a replacement was made that was marked final. As is necessary in a distributed system, the replacement and non-replacement was best-effort and an older version could be confirmed (or a version made later than a final version). Replacement was intended for use with payment channels, like incrementally updating an open account paying someone.
Unfortunately, the functionality had a flaw: It enabled a DOS attack. You could make a transaction then replace it 2^32 times and only pay one fee. So we disabled it. Without the explicit functionality you could still replace transactions by spamming nodes (and esp miners) with the new transaction and hoping they accepted it, but it wasn't very reliable but also no longer DOS-attackable.
Later, people pointed out that the DOS attack could be avoided if it was also required that each replacement increase the tx fee by at least the minimum transaction fee that would have been accepted. And the functionality was re-enabled: you could again mark transactions as non-final.
When BCH was created they ripped out the functionality and falsely claimed that this made 'instant payments with 0 confirmations for small values' possible. This makes literally zero sense: First, in BCH you can still replace unconfirmed transactions, it's just less reliable. Secondly, replacement is functionality intended to enable faster transactions! Thirdly, you can disable it in Bitcoin (or replace a non-final one with a final version) and get the same behaviour as BCH if that's what your use case requires.
Finally, its alleged that this was some dastardly move by Bitcoin devs to "break" "0-conf" transactions, fuled by people who can't understand that Bitcoin devs saying 0-conf transactions are not very secure doesn't mean that they don't like your ability to make them if you want to, and it ignores the fact that the basic replacement functionality was there in the very first version ( https://github.com/trottier/original-bitcoin/blob/92ee8d9a99... ) and had been disabled by the self-same people being attacked for adding it.
It's basically 5G CAUSES COVID level of inanity, and it breaks my heart to see people duped by telephone-game polished versions of it.
Thanks for the thoughtful response. According to it, 0-conf transactions are possible in BTC as well. Why isn't more people using this? It seems safe enough, since attacking such a transaction is probably more expensive than the gains from the scam.
It's only safe in the sense that most people aren't trying to rip you off.
A moderately technically sophisticated attacker will concurrently broadcast one txn version near miners, and another to as many other nodes as they can reach. Their success rate on double spends can easily be >90% and the marginal cost of the attack is approximately zero.
Other than the technical know-how to setup the transaction broadcasting and the risk that you might just pay for what you were buying, there is no cost to the scam.
Same story on Bitcoin and BCH (here is a tweet about making 2511 successful double spends on BCH: https://twitter.com/peterrizun/status/1051088866743017473?la...).
The situation is somewhat worse on BCH in the sense that they only have ~1.2% of Bitcoin's hashrate, so there are many single Bitcoin miners that can reorg bch, so even single confirmations aren't particularly safe.
There are, of course, plenty of cases where 0-conf could be accepted-- e.g. you could credit someone assets but not allow withdraw until they clear, or if goods will ship the next day you need only check that they've confirmed before shipment. Some places do this now.
A moderately technically sophisticated attacker will concurrently broadcast one txn version near miners, and another to as many other nodes as they can reach. Their success rate on double spends can easily be >90% and the marginal cost of the attack is approximately zero.
Other than the technical know-how to setup the transaction broadcasting and the risk that you might just pay for what you were buying, there is no cost to the scam.
Same story on Bitcoin and BCH (here is a tweet about making 2511 successful double spends on BCH: https://twitter.com/peterrizun/status/1051088866743017473?la...).
The situation is somewhat worse on BCH in the sense that they only have ~1.2% of Bitcoin's hashrate, so there are many single Bitcoin miners that can reorg bch, so even single confirmations aren't particularly safe.
There are, of course, plenty of cases where 0-conf could be accepted-- e.g. you could credit someone assets but not allow withdraw until they clear, or if goods will ship the next day you need only check that they've confirmed before shipment. Some places do this now.
Can't this attack be made impractical with some heuristic? For example, only accept 0-conf transactions if a given number of nodes have this transaction in their mempool. (I'm thinking of both BTC and BCH)
No, because only a single node really matters: the next node to mine a block-- which may not even be reachable to you. Even if the attack worked just 10% of the time, that's like a free 10% rebate credit card for the attacker.
(and more generally, only a couple nodes matter at all for this purpose-- the set of nodes that could mine the next block)
Plus bch hashrate is so low the attacker can mine the next block themselves with rented hashrate, because the mining pays next to break even, renting the hashrate isn't a significant loss in the expectation.
(and more generally, only a couple nodes matter at all for this purpose-- the set of nodes that could mine the next block)
Plus bch hashrate is so low the attacker can mine the next block themselves with rented hashrate, because the mining pays next to break even, renting the hashrate isn't a significant loss in the expectation.
>It's not only that. There is also the "replace by fee" stuff that allows BCH to make instant payments with 0 confirmations for small values.
Can you elaborate on this? I did a quick search and the gist of it seems to be that BCH doesn't support replace by fee and bitcoin does, so therefore it's possible to "safely" accept 0 confirmation transactions on BCH because you can reasonably believe that it won't be double-spent before it gets its first confirmation. The only problem I can think of is that there's nothing preventing the attacker (the person making the purchase) from bribing a miner to mine his double spend transaction. Indeed, even without RPF there are "transaction accelerators"[1] that allow you make out of band payments to miners to increase your transaction's priority. It's not too hard to imagine a service where you can pay $$$ for a miner to mine your double-spend transaction.
[1] https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Transaction_accelerator
Can you elaborate on this? I did a quick search and the gist of it seems to be that BCH doesn't support replace by fee and bitcoin does, so therefore it's possible to "safely" accept 0 confirmation transactions on BCH because you can reasonably believe that it won't be double-spent before it gets its first confirmation. The only problem I can think of is that there's nothing preventing the attacker (the person making the purchase) from bribing a miner to mine his double spend transaction. Indeed, even without RPF there are "transaction accelerators"[1] that allow you make out of band payments to miners to increase your transaction's priority. It's not too hard to imagine a service where you can pay $$$ for a miner to mine your double-spend transaction.
[1] https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Transaction_accelerator
He's extremely confused.
The bcash people argued that replace-by-fee (RBF) functionality made unconfirmed transactions unsafe to accept.
Except as you can tell from the name, unconfirmed transactions are not safe to accept RBF or not.
The bcash people argued that replace-by-fee (RBF) functionality made unconfirmed transactions unsafe to accept.
Except as you can tell from the name, unconfirmed transactions are not safe to accept RBF or not.
Bitcoin cash is the only cryptocurrency I have regularly used in the past 3-4 years. Almost all the crypto payment options support bch seamlessly (because they aim to integrate bitcoin which results in no-effort integration of bitcoin cash).
I just can never get myself to pay the tx fees of bitcoin or ether. I recently discover that USDT exists on bch (but BitPay doesn't accept bch usdt) so I keep USDT on BCH and do JIT swaps to BCH and make almost zero fee payments.
Just to be clear, BCH will never dethrone BTC, but BCH is becoming a defacto layer 2 solution for Bitcoin. Now there are tokens and NFT tokens on BCH too.
I just can never get myself to pay the tx fees of bitcoin or ether. I recently discover that USDT exists on bch (but BitPay doesn't accept bch usdt) so I keep USDT on BCH and do JIT swaps to BCH and make almost zero fee payments.
Just to be clear, BCH will never dethrone BTC, but BCH is becoming a defacto layer 2 solution for Bitcoin. Now there are tokens and NFT tokens on BCH too.
> “BTC has been a joke ever since the GitHub repo was hijacked by Blockstream and Adam Back”
Could you spell out the implications of this?
Could you spell out the implications of this?
Blockstream bought out most of the the btc devs who had commit ability. Their end goal is to cripple btc to where it is today. The goal of this is to build an unnecessary product they can charge for on a second level. Think skimming money like charge cards do, but offering no real advantage or service beyond that. So far they have found building a new network neigh impossible. Hence the memes: Lightning only 18 months away, after 3 years of "development." You can find hilarious round table interviews with Adam Back where one asks how they can use btc for transactions like at bars with the fees dwarfing the regular transaction. Adam Back suggested using an IOU network out of paper or maybe build an IOU app for that. Can you believe that? Hilarious!
"out of paper"
Sure but it would have to be special paper, hard to duplicate with security measures, probably special ink, weird watermarks, a whole bunch of things. Should probably name it something other than IOU to distinguish it from normal IOUs. I've always liked Johny Cash's music, maybe we could derive a name from him.
Sure but it would have to be special paper, hard to duplicate with security measures, probably special ink, weird watermarks, a whole bunch of things. Should probably name it something other than IOU to distinguish it from normal IOUs. I've always liked Johny Cash's music, maybe we could derive a name from him.
This is incredible tinfoil-y nonsense that I find hard to believe is even posted on a website of HN's caliber.
This is all true and anyone who payed attention to more than the heavily censored propaganda soaked /r/bitcoin saw it happen in real time. Years of saying that a throughput of more than a few kilobytes was impossible while one of the devs repeatedly - and this is not a joke - stated the sun revolved around the earth.
> Years of saying that a throughput of more than a few kilobytes was impossible
I don't think anyone thought that was impossible from a technical standpoint, just from a decentralization standpoint.
>while one of the devs repeatedly - and this is not a joke - stated the sun revolved around the earth.
source?
I don't think anyone thought that was impossible from a technical standpoint, just from a decentralization standpoint.
>while one of the devs repeatedly - and this is not a joke - stated the sun revolved around the earth.
source?
> I don't think anyone thought that was impossible from a technical standpoint, just from a decentralization standpoint.
That's the same thing and it makes zero sense. Most people never sync with the chain and those that want to only need bandwidth far less than watching a low res youtube video. Validating blocks is at least 600x faster than real time on a computer from last decade. I would love to hear how you can rationalize a statement like that. I watched people repeat this for years and when asked for explanations never saw anyone come close to something coherent.
> source?
Here he is denying evolution and claiming the sun revolves around the earth:
https://forums3.armagetronad.net/viewtopic.php?p=203752&sid=...
Here he is claiming that slavery is only "discouraged".
https://np.reddit.com/r/DebateAChristian/comments/4q2cej/why...
That's the same thing and it makes zero sense. Most people never sync with the chain and those that want to only need bandwidth far less than watching a low res youtube video. Validating blocks is at least 600x faster than real time on a computer from last decade. I would love to hear how you can rationalize a statement like that. I watched people repeat this for years and when asked for explanations never saw anyone come close to something coherent.
> source?
Here he is denying evolution and claiming the sun revolves around the earth:
https://forums3.armagetronad.net/viewtopic.php?p=203752&sid=...
Here he is claiming that slavery is only "discouraged".
https://np.reddit.com/r/DebateAChristian/comments/4q2cej/why...
> Most people never sync with the chain and those that want to only need bandwidth far less than watching a low res youtube video. [...] I would love to hear how you can rationalize a statement like that.
Except you know, the storage costs: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25570915
Except you know, the storage costs: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25570915
Over 11 years, bitcoin's full blockchain has grown to 1/25th of a $150 hard drive.
When people say that you can't have more than a few kilobytes per second of throughput because VISA does 150M transactions per day, it doesn't make them sound like they have thought this through, it makes them sound like they are grasping at straws to try to rationalize nonsense that they want for reasons they won't say.
There are lots of cryptocurrencies now, no chain is going to suddenly have 150 million transactions per day while all the others die off. Even then, it would cost a single person far less in disk space than the electricity to run their refrigerator and again, few people even sync with the chain.
These are the same nonsense recycled bizarre statements that get made over and over. Why do the people in charge of bitcoin push propaganda that has no connection to reality? That's the real question.
When people say that you can't have more than a few kilobytes per second of throughput because VISA does 150M transactions per day, it doesn't make them sound like they have thought this through, it makes them sound like they are grasping at straws to try to rationalize nonsense that they want for reasons they won't say.
There are lots of cryptocurrencies now, no chain is going to suddenly have 150 million transactions per day while all the others die off. Even then, it would cost a single person far less in disk space than the electricity to run their refrigerator and again, few people even sync with the chain.
These are the same nonsense recycled bizarre statements that get made over and over. Why do the people in charge of bitcoin push propaganda that has no connection to reality? That's the real question.
> Over 11 years, bitcoin's full blockchain has grown to 1/25th of a $150 hard drive.
No doubt due to the 1MB/block limit that's in place.
>There are lots of cryptocurrencies now, no chain is going to suddenly have 150 million transactions per day while all the others die off
So large transaction volumes aren't going to be an issue because there's also going to be multiple blockchains to spread the transaction volume across? I'm not sure that's any better, because you'd either be heavily dependent on intermediary exchange services and be exposed to exchange rate fluctuations, or having to keep multiple crypto wallets synced and having to juggle disk space between them.
>Even then, it would cost a single person far less in disk space than the electricity to run their refrigerator
The problem is that the cost compounds, so comparing the cost to running a refrigerator isn't exactly fair. A refrigerator costs around $90/year to run today, 5 years ago, and 5 years from now. On the other hand, running a full node might cost $90/year today, but 5 years from now would cost $450 upfront + $90/year.
>and again, few people even sync with the chain.
This goes back to the decentralization debate. Needing a huge upfront investment to fully participate in the network is very much anti-decentralization.
No doubt due to the 1MB/block limit that's in place.
>There are lots of cryptocurrencies now, no chain is going to suddenly have 150 million transactions per day while all the others die off
So large transaction volumes aren't going to be an issue because there's also going to be multiple blockchains to spread the transaction volume across? I'm not sure that's any better, because you'd either be heavily dependent on intermediary exchange services and be exposed to exchange rate fluctuations, or having to keep multiple crypto wallets synced and having to juggle disk space between them.
>Even then, it would cost a single person far less in disk space than the electricity to run their refrigerator
The problem is that the cost compounds, so comparing the cost to running a refrigerator isn't exactly fair. A refrigerator costs around $90/year to run today, 5 years ago, and 5 years from now. On the other hand, running a full node might cost $90/year today, but 5 years from now would cost $450 upfront + $90/year.
>and again, few people even sync with the chain.
This goes back to the decentralization debate. Needing a huge upfront investment to fully participate in the network is very much anti-decentralization.
> So large transaction volumes aren't going to be an issue because there's also going to be multiple blockchains to spread the transaction volume across?
No, large transaction volumes aren't going to be an issue either way. However there already are multiple blockchains and anyone that can watch youtube can sync with all of them if they want to.
> I'm not sure that's any better, because you'd either be heavily dependent on intermediary exchange services and be exposed to exchange rate fluctuations
This makes zero sense. Anyone can choose whatever combination of whatever they want and most people never touch the normal chain. This is the reality right now, there are lots of choices, people can use any or all of them. Why would transaction volumes change any of this? This isn't a prediction of the future, this something that has already happened years ago.
> The problem is that the cost compounds, so comparing the cost to running a refrigerator isn't exactly fair.
No it doesn't.
> On the other hand, running a full node might cost $90/year today, but 5 years from now would cost $450 upfront + $90/year.
That makes absolutely no sense at all. A full node for every crypto currency can be run on a $35 raspberry pi with a hard drive hooked up by anyone that can watch a youtube video. Your numbers are just a lie, the entire bitcoin chain is 1/25th of an 8TB hard drive which can be bought new for $150 USD.
> This goes back to the decentralization debate. Needing a huge upfront investment to fully participate in the network is very much anti-decentralization.
Then it's a good thing that isn't true, since most people never touch it and those that do probably don't have to spend anything at all.
These are lies, there is no truth to what you are saying and you know it. If there was any validity you would have a better explanation than made up numbers and nothing else. You are predicting something as if it hasn't already been passed by. No amount of circular logic warps reality to what you want it to be. The bigger question is why you are so desperate to convince people that cryptocurrencies can't scale.
https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/transactions-btc-eth.ht...
No, large transaction volumes aren't going to be an issue either way. However there already are multiple blockchains and anyone that can watch youtube can sync with all of them if they want to.
> I'm not sure that's any better, because you'd either be heavily dependent on intermediary exchange services and be exposed to exchange rate fluctuations
This makes zero sense. Anyone can choose whatever combination of whatever they want and most people never touch the normal chain. This is the reality right now, there are lots of choices, people can use any or all of them. Why would transaction volumes change any of this? This isn't a prediction of the future, this something that has already happened years ago.
> The problem is that the cost compounds, so comparing the cost to running a refrigerator isn't exactly fair.
No it doesn't.
> On the other hand, running a full node might cost $90/year today, but 5 years from now would cost $450 upfront + $90/year.
That makes absolutely no sense at all. A full node for every crypto currency can be run on a $35 raspberry pi with a hard drive hooked up by anyone that can watch a youtube video. Your numbers are just a lie, the entire bitcoin chain is 1/25th of an 8TB hard drive which can be bought new for $150 USD.
> This goes back to the decentralization debate. Needing a huge upfront investment to fully participate in the network is very much anti-decentralization.
Then it's a good thing that isn't true, since most people never touch it and those that do probably don't have to spend anything at all.
These are lies, there is no truth to what you are saying and you know it. If there was any validity you would have a better explanation than made up numbers and nothing else. You are predicting something as if it hasn't already been passed by. No amount of circular logic warps reality to what you want it to be. The bigger question is why you are so desperate to convince people that cryptocurrencies can't scale.
https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/transactions-btc-eth.ht...
>No, large transaction volumes aren't going to be an issue either way.
elaborate?
>This makes zero sense. Anyone can choose whatever combination of whatever they want and most people never touch the normal chain. This is the reality right now, there are lots of choices, people can use any or all of them. Why would transaction volumes change any of this?
It makes zero sense because I was trying to infer your argument. Let's try again then: what does having multiple chains have to do with scalability?
>That makes absolutely no sense at all. A full node for every crypto currency can be run on a $35 raspberry pi with a hard drive hooked up by anyone that can watch a youtube video. Your numbers are just a lie, the entire bitcoin chain is 1/25th of an 8TB hard drive which can be bought new for $150 USD.
Those are with present numbers which have the 1MB limit in place. Clearly those assumptions won't hold if we have much larger blocks.
>Then it's a good thing that isn't true, since most people never touch it and those that do probably don't have to spend anything at all.
Sounds like you're not denying the anti-decentralization aspect at all, but rather arguing that it doesn't matter.
>These are lies, there is no truth to what you are saying and you know it.
Please follow the HN guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. Specifically "Assume good faith".
> If there was any validity you would have a better explanation than made up numbers and nothing else.
I don't get it which numbers are made up? The $90/year figure came from a sibling comment that was discussing the hypothetical storage requirement for bitcoin if it processed half of visa's transaction volume. That was surprisingly close to the annual electricity cost for the best selling refrigerator on bestbuy.com[1], so that's what I assumed you were talking about when it comes to costs. If you don't agree with these numbers, feel free to present your calculations.
[1] https://www.bestbuy.com/site/samsung-26-5-cu-ft-large-capaci...
elaborate?
>This makes zero sense. Anyone can choose whatever combination of whatever they want and most people never touch the normal chain. This is the reality right now, there are lots of choices, people can use any or all of them. Why would transaction volumes change any of this?
It makes zero sense because I was trying to infer your argument. Let's try again then: what does having multiple chains have to do with scalability?
>That makes absolutely no sense at all. A full node for every crypto currency can be run on a $35 raspberry pi with a hard drive hooked up by anyone that can watch a youtube video. Your numbers are just a lie, the entire bitcoin chain is 1/25th of an 8TB hard drive which can be bought new for $150 USD.
Those are with present numbers which have the 1MB limit in place. Clearly those assumptions won't hold if we have much larger blocks.
>Then it's a good thing that isn't true, since most people never touch it and those that do probably don't have to spend anything at all.
Sounds like you're not denying the anti-decentralization aspect at all, but rather arguing that it doesn't matter.
>These are lies, there is no truth to what you are saying and you know it.
Please follow the HN guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. Specifically "Assume good faith".
> If there was any validity you would have a better explanation than made up numbers and nothing else.
I don't get it which numbers are made up? The $90/year figure came from a sibling comment that was discussing the hypothetical storage requirement for bitcoin if it processed half of visa's transaction volume. That was surprisingly close to the annual electricity cost for the best selling refrigerator on bestbuy.com[1], so that's what I assumed you were talking about when it comes to costs. If you don't agree with these numbers, feel free to present your calculations.
[1] https://www.bestbuy.com/site/samsung-26-5-cu-ft-large-capaci...
> elaborate?
That's all I've been doing.
> Those are with present numbers which have the 1MB limit in place. Clearly those assumptions won't hold if we have much larger blocks.
There is a lot of head room. Anyone can see this. Ten years of transactions has taken up $6 of hard drive space TOTAL while the average fee PER TRANSACTION is almost $9 right now.
> Sounds like you're not denying the anti-decentralization aspect at all, but rather arguing that it doesn't matter.
That's ridiculous. Decentralization is important and none of this has much effect on decentralization at all. You haven't actually explained why there would be any problem with decentralization because you can't. There is no barrier to entry for anyone who wants to sync with any chain so they can mine it or accept it.
> Specifically "Assume good faith".
Say something reasonable that isn't contradicted by grade school math. You haven't backed up anything you have said with anything that makes sense.
> I don't get it which numbers are made up?
Correct, you don't get it. Your idea that someone has to spend $450 on what would be 24TB is nonsense.
Why don't you explain to me what exactly you think will happen if throughput is more than a few transactions per second? Ethereum already exceeds bitcoin's volume. Bitcoin Cash tested huge blocks years ago, what exactly do you think will happen and why? Maybe you just don't want people to realize that there is no systemic reason for bitcoin being capped, because if they do it will become a relic.
That's all I've been doing.
> Those are with present numbers which have the 1MB limit in place. Clearly those assumptions won't hold if we have much larger blocks.
There is a lot of head room. Anyone can see this. Ten years of transactions has taken up $6 of hard drive space TOTAL while the average fee PER TRANSACTION is almost $9 right now.
> Sounds like you're not denying the anti-decentralization aspect at all, but rather arguing that it doesn't matter.
That's ridiculous. Decentralization is important and none of this has much effect on decentralization at all. You haven't actually explained why there would be any problem with decentralization because you can't. There is no barrier to entry for anyone who wants to sync with any chain so they can mine it or accept it.
> Specifically "Assume good faith".
Say something reasonable that isn't contradicted by grade school math. You haven't backed up anything you have said with anything that makes sense.
> I don't get it which numbers are made up?
Correct, you don't get it. Your idea that someone has to spend $450 on what would be 24TB is nonsense.
Why don't you explain to me what exactly you think will happen if throughput is more than a few transactions per second? Ethereum already exceeds bitcoin's volume. Bitcoin Cash tested huge blocks years ago, what exactly do you think will happen and why? Maybe you just don't want people to realize that there is no systemic reason for bitcoin being capped, because if they do it will become a relic.
>The goal of this is to build an unnecessary product they can charge for on a second level. [...] Hence the memes: Lightning only 18 months away, after 3 years of "development."
Can you elaborate on this? Isn't lightning free and open source? I'm not sure how that's going to be monetized.
Can you elaborate on this? Isn't lightning free and open source? I'm not sure how that's going to be monetized.
Yes it is FOSS and multiple different implementations from different development groups / companies are available including c-lightning, LND, and eclair (I'm probably missing one or two).
The claim is truly a meme -- one that can only be laughed at when faced with the reality that I mentioned above.
The claim is truly a meme -- one that can only be laughed at when faced with the reality that I mentioned above.
Bitcoin adoption was growing and working well for monetary transfer but its capacity was throttled to encourage use of an unproven technology, the lightning network.
The claim, as far as understand it, is that Blockstream supported this plan, anticipating its failure, while working on its own replacement technology, Liquid.
Ironically, both liquid and lightning appear to be failing. Nb, both grubles and nullc have some close relationship with Blockstream.
The claim, as far as understand it, is that Blockstream supported this plan, anticipating its failure, while working on its own replacement technology, Liquid.
Ironically, both liquid and lightning appear to be failing. Nb, both grubles and nullc have some close relationship with Blockstream.
> Bitcoin adoption was growing and working well for monetary transfer but its capacity was throttled to encourage use of an unproven technology, the lightning network.
What? Bitcoin's capacity has been limited its entire life, the limits were coded in by Bitcoin's creator. The limits are integral to protecting Bitcoin's decentralization, and have nothing in particular to do with lightning. Alternative blockchains without functional limits such as "BSV" are so bloated that it is practically unreasonable to run nodes, leaving participants blinding trusting third parties.
These trade-offs were well understood long long ago (e.g. https://en.bitcoin.it/w/index.php?title=Scalability&action=h... or https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=3118.msg44789#msg447... or https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2500.msg34211#msg342...).
Liquid isn't some replacement technology for Bitcoin, it's something it's a distributed-centeralized (federated) system that can do things Bitcoin and other completely decenteralized systems cannot do like offer instantaneous settlement. It trades off decentralization to for latency. When users have funds in exchange they've already substantially lost their decentralization benefits, for for e.g. rapid arb between exchanges this tradeoff is probably a good one.
Bitcoin gives people the freedom to use their money in a bunch of different ways.
> nullc have some close relationship with Blockstream.
I haven't have any relationship at all with blockstream for over three years now.
What? Bitcoin's capacity has been limited its entire life, the limits were coded in by Bitcoin's creator. The limits are integral to protecting Bitcoin's decentralization, and have nothing in particular to do with lightning. Alternative blockchains without functional limits such as "BSV" are so bloated that it is practically unreasonable to run nodes, leaving participants blinding trusting third parties.
These trade-offs were well understood long long ago (e.g. https://en.bitcoin.it/w/index.php?title=Scalability&action=h... or https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=3118.msg44789#msg447... or https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2500.msg34211#msg342...).
Liquid isn't some replacement technology for Bitcoin, it's something it's a distributed-centeralized (federated) system that can do things Bitcoin and other completely decenteralized systems cannot do like offer instantaneous settlement. It trades off decentralization to for latency. When users have funds in exchange they've already substantially lost their decentralization benefits, for for e.g. rapid arb between exchanges this tradeoff is probably a good one.
Bitcoin gives people the freedom to use their money in a bunch of different ways.
> nullc have some close relationship with Blockstream.
I haven't have any relationship at all with blockstream for over three years now.
>Bitcoin's capacity has been limited its entire life, the limits were coded in by Bitcoin's creator.
I researched this and found that Bitcoin had no initial capacity limit and that one was added as a temporary spam measure, not as a design choice.
When I see misrepresentations like that, I'm more suspicious of everything you've written.
I researched this and found that Bitcoin had no initial capacity limit and that one was added as a temporary spam measure, not as a design choice.
When I see misrepresentations like that, I'm more suspicious of everything you've written.
> I researched this and found that Bitcoin had no initial capacity limit
That is simply untrue. From the very first version it had two capacity limits, an explicit one (https://github.com/trottier/original-bitcoin/blob/master/src...), and a smaller implicit and unintentional one (of about 500k) owing to the maximum locks that could be grabbed in a single BDB transaction.
Satoshi later reduced the explicit limit further and provided no explanation for doing so ( https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/commit/a30b56ebe76ffff9f9... ). However, there was no issue with spam at the time or previously, nor mention of spam, and the network already had a separate and highly functional spam limiting mechanism. Had he intended to make the limit simply temporary he could have trivially programmed it that way-- e.g. as we did when we discovered the ~500kb limit, we wrote a rule that limited blocks to 500kb and then expired a few months later.
The claim that it was a "temporary anti-spam limit" is a novel construction that I don't believe I saw ever claimed until many years after that change.
At least by the time Satoshi went inactive he was well aware of the trade-offs: "Bitcoin users might get increasingly tyrannical about limiting the size of the chain so it's easy for lots of users and small devices." ( https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1790.msg28917#msg289... )
Perhaps you should consider conducting "research" by having an open discussion with an actual expert rather than just reading manipulative tracts designed to sucker people into buying alternatives? :)
I'm happy to direct you to primary reference material even though you continue to treat me rudely and disrespectfully.
That is simply untrue. From the very first version it had two capacity limits, an explicit one (https://github.com/trottier/original-bitcoin/blob/master/src...), and a smaller implicit and unintentional one (of about 500k) owing to the maximum locks that could be grabbed in a single BDB transaction.
Satoshi later reduced the explicit limit further and provided no explanation for doing so ( https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/commit/a30b56ebe76ffff9f9... ). However, there was no issue with spam at the time or previously, nor mention of spam, and the network already had a separate and highly functional spam limiting mechanism. Had he intended to make the limit simply temporary he could have trivially programmed it that way-- e.g. as we did when we discovered the ~500kb limit, we wrote a rule that limited blocks to 500kb and then expired a few months later.
The claim that it was a "temporary anti-spam limit" is a novel construction that I don't believe I saw ever claimed until many years after that change.
At least by the time Satoshi went inactive he was well aware of the trade-offs: "Bitcoin users might get increasingly tyrannical about limiting the size of the chain so it's easy for lots of users and small devices." ( https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1790.msg28917#msg289... )
Perhaps you should consider conducting "research" by having an open discussion with an actual expert rather than just reading manipulative tracts designed to sucker people into buying alternatives? :)
I'm happy to direct you to primary reference material even though you continue to treat me rudely and disrespectfully.
It looks to me like Satoshi clearly intended for this to be a temporary limit that would be raised over time -
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1347.msg15366#msg153...
>It can be phased in, like:
>if (blocknumber > 115000) > maxblocksize = largerlimit
I did try to have an open discussion on r/Bitcoin, but what I found was that answers to my questions were removed, and even my questions were removed. My conclusion was that that forum existed to push a narrative rather than have an open discussion.
I did see that Adam Back was challenged to a public debate on these issues, which I was very interested to see, and might have found very enlightening. Adam Back refused to defend his positions in debate though.
I've read a lot of your responses in various forums too, and while you're obviously very clever, I do find whenever I dig a little deeper into what you're saying, that you've misrepresented facts to support a narrative.
>It can be phased in, like:
>if (blocknumber > 115000) > maxblocksize = largerlimit
I did try to have an open discussion on r/Bitcoin, but what I found was that answers to my questions were removed, and even my questions were removed. My conclusion was that that forum existed to push a narrative rather than have an open discussion.
I did see that Adam Back was challenged to a public debate on these issues, which I was very interested to see, and might have found very enlightening. Adam Back refused to defend his positions in debate though.
I've read a lot of your responses in various forums too, and while you're obviously very clever, I do find whenever I dig a little deeper into what you're saying, that you've misrepresented facts to support a narrative.
I feel like you're not engaging in a good faith discussion here. Above you falsely accused me of dishonestly misrepresenting the initial capacity limit. I believe I demonstrated in an objective and indisputably way that you were mistaken. Rather than acknowledging your error about Bitcoin and the inappropriate insult, you've simply changed the subject.
What purpose is there to continuing the discussion if you're going to do that?
> clearly intended for this to be a temporary limit
This is in a thread with him loudly urging people to NOT change it, in a message responding to someone saying that it could never be changed. Saying that it isn't impossible to change something does not mean that it is merely temporary. A concrete retaining wall is permanent yet can still be torn down if people choose to do so.
What do you think of his much later statement that "Bitcoin users might get increasingly tyrannical about limiting the size of the chain so it's easy for lots of users and small devices."?
> I did try to have an open discussion on r/Bitcoin, but what I found was that answers to my questions were removed, and even my questions were removed.
Where? If you demonstrated the kind of apparent bad faith approach you've done so here-- perhaps you should consider that you might have earned it?
If not, you might have just been made roadkill by an overactive immune system-- that subreddit was utterly mobbed by an endless stream of shill sockpuppet accounts arguing a particular agenda. :(
> I did see that Adam Back was challenged to a public debate on these issues
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sealioning But also... who cares what he thinks?
If you wanted to see debate there are literally hundreds of kilobytes on the subject written by people who have been actually involved with developing the Bitcoin system.
What purpose is there to continuing the discussion if you're going to do that?
> clearly intended for this to be a temporary limit
This is in a thread with him loudly urging people to NOT change it, in a message responding to someone saying that it could never be changed. Saying that it isn't impossible to change something does not mean that it is merely temporary. A concrete retaining wall is permanent yet can still be torn down if people choose to do so.
What do you think of his much later statement that "Bitcoin users might get increasingly tyrannical about limiting the size of the chain so it's easy for lots of users and small devices."?
> I did try to have an open discussion on r/Bitcoin, but what I found was that answers to my questions were removed, and even my questions were removed.
Where? If you demonstrated the kind of apparent bad faith approach you've done so here-- perhaps you should consider that you might have earned it?
If not, you might have just been made roadkill by an overactive immune system-- that subreddit was utterly mobbed by an endless stream of shill sockpuppet accounts arguing a particular agenda. :(
> I did see that Adam Back was challenged to a public debate on these issues
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sealioning But also... who cares what he thinks?
If you wanted to see debate there are literally hundreds of kilobytes on the subject written by people who have been actually involved with developing the Bitcoin system.
That doesn't answer my initial question, how is blockstream supposed to monetize lightning, or anything for that matter?
>The claim, as far as understand it, is that Blockstream supported this plan, anticipating its failure, while working on its own replacement technology, Liquid.
I took a quick skim of blockstream's materials on liquid, and it sounds like it's something totally different to lightning? They describe it as some sort of ripple-like network for transacting in tokens? eg.
>Liquid uses an approach to consensus called Strong Federations. A Strong Federation removes the need for costly Proof of Work mechanisms and replaces it with the collective actions of a group of mutually distrusting participants called functionaries.
>The claim, as far as understand it, is that Blockstream supported this plan, anticipating its failure, while working on its own replacement technology, Liquid.
I took a quick skim of blockstream's materials on liquid, and it sounds like it's something totally different to lightning? They describe it as some sort of ripple-like network for transacting in tokens? eg.
>Liquid uses an approach to consensus called Strong Federations. A Strong Federation removes the need for costly Proof of Work mechanisms and replaces it with the collective actions of a group of mutually distrusting participants called functionaries.
The claim is not that Blockstream intended to profit from Lightning. Rather they used the promise of Lightning to throttle Bitcoin, in order to profit from Liquid.
Nonsense. Liquid is directly dependent on Bitcoin's success.
And as has been stated before, Blockstream employees got a chunk of their pay check in bitcoin. Do you really think they'd try to "throttle" their own livelihood?
And as has been stated before, Blockstream employees got a chunk of their pay check in bitcoin. Do you really think they'd try to "throttle" their own livelihood?
Okay, how are they profiting from liquid? Moreover, what's liquid's "moat"? What's stopping me from copying liquid's software (seems to be open source) and making a clone that charges 0% fees?
This is just an outright lie and malicious defamation from top to f*king bottom. Hateful nonsense by scam promoters like you turns HN into a toxic enviroment.
Could you expand on why you think that? I very much agree with the substantive arguments made by chemmail, and would like to hear yours.
Because it's just pure nonsense, untrue, and totally unsubstantiated (and thoroughly off-topic for the thread). Falsehood flies, and the Truth comes limping after it.
Rather than any substantive argument, it merely lists a set of wild allegations.
But since you asked nicely I'll break it down sentence by sentence.
> Blockstream bought out most of the the btc devs who had commit ability
Blockstream hired myself and Pieter, two of six people at the time that had commit access to the Bitcoin software project at a time when none of the many "bitcoin companies" of the day were willing to fund developers. Though I was independently wealthy at that point, supporting my own work on Bitcoin meant spending down my Bitcoin or not working on it most of the time, so being able to get funded to work on Bitcoin and well aligned technology was appealing. Two people is not most of by any measure.
The Bitcoin software has no particular control over the Bitcoin system, but none the less we took measures to reduce any potential conflict of interest: We were substantially paid denominated in Bitcoin (pre-purchased when the company was founded), so our compensation was directly tied to Bitcoin's value. The company took no copyright interest in our work on Bitcoin, and released all our patents for public use (both under defensive licensing and the IPA). Pieter and I both had employment agreements that allowed us to quit at and continue to get paid for a year as additional insurance against any unethical conduct by the company. I also dropped my commit access.
Neither of us continue to work for blockstream, I haven't for three years now.
> Their end goal is to cripple btc to where it is today.
Blockstream hasn't done anything to "cripple" bitcoin, nor would it have made any financial sense for its employees (100% of whom were (and I believe still are) substantially compensated in Bitcoin). Quite the opposite: Blockstream's purpose was to build on-ramps to Bitcoin to help the impedance mismatch with traditional finance systems, and to monetize Bitcoin unrelated applications of the same technology (e.g. private systems) and use that to fund development work in the public interest (particularly at a time when no one else was doing so).
> The goal of this is to build an unnecessary product they can charge for on a second level. Think skimming money like charge cards do, but offering no real advantage or service beyond that. So far they have found building a new network neigh impossible.
I can't even figure out what this is attempting to talk about.
> Lightning only 18 months away, after 3 years of "development."
Lightning is a large Bitcoin industry effort involving dozens of independent developers and a half dozen companies. It isn't blockstream specific. It's just the logical progression of the payment channel idea initially described by Satoshi and baked into Bitcoin since day one. (And for a weird on-topic tangent: It's a secure implementation of the "Ripple" concept which Ripple labs bought the name of and stuck on an entirely unrelated system.)
It's not "18 months away" it exists now, it's widely used, and it works pretty well.
However, cryptocurrency for small retail payments remains a pretty uncompelling use case: It is extremely tax disadvantaged in many jurisdiction's, including the US: mandatory per transaction gains tax reporting. And retail transactions are extremely well addressed by existing solutions-- would you prefer to pay with the hardest money available, or would you prefer to pay with a credit card that is already accepted virtually everywhere, provides substantial anti-fraud protection, and extends you 28 days of credit with several percent negative fees for debt in constantly debased fiat? It's important that people have the option-- and they do-- but expecting widespread use in this application over night is fantasy.
(And not a particular problem for Blockstream, which doesn't make any fees off transactions using lightning, contrary to the parent posters allegations)
> You can find hilarious round table interviews with Adam Back where one asks how they can use btc for transactions like at bars with the fees dwarfing the regular transaction. Adam Back suggested using an IOU network out of paper or maybe build an IOU app for that.
I have no idea the context there but I can only imagine that someone asked about buying single drinks with Bitcoin and he mentioned that it's customary for people at a bar to open a tab and settle up at the end of the night. Kind of ironic that Adam, who's a teetotaler, is more aware of how bars commonly work than his critics. :)
In any case, Bitcoin is a global broadcast network whos long term decentralized security is utterly and totally dependant on getting large amounts paid in transaction fees. That has always been part of the trade-off: Centralized systems can offer extremely low fees. The only arguments about avoiding market rate fees in Bitcoin have also been argument to unlimit the supply of coins and pay for security through debasement, which is an obvious non-starter.
To the extent that there was ever even any debate over that, it long pre-dated blockstream's existence (e.g. https://en.bitcoin.it/w/index.php?title=Scalability&action=h... ).
Rather than any substantive argument, it merely lists a set of wild allegations.
But since you asked nicely I'll break it down sentence by sentence.
> Blockstream bought out most of the the btc devs who had commit ability
Blockstream hired myself and Pieter, two of six people at the time that had commit access to the Bitcoin software project at a time when none of the many "bitcoin companies" of the day were willing to fund developers. Though I was independently wealthy at that point, supporting my own work on Bitcoin meant spending down my Bitcoin or not working on it most of the time, so being able to get funded to work on Bitcoin and well aligned technology was appealing. Two people is not most of by any measure.
The Bitcoin software has no particular control over the Bitcoin system, but none the less we took measures to reduce any potential conflict of interest: We were substantially paid denominated in Bitcoin (pre-purchased when the company was founded), so our compensation was directly tied to Bitcoin's value. The company took no copyright interest in our work on Bitcoin, and released all our patents for public use (both under defensive licensing and the IPA). Pieter and I both had employment agreements that allowed us to quit at and continue to get paid for a year as additional insurance against any unethical conduct by the company. I also dropped my commit access.
Neither of us continue to work for blockstream, I haven't for three years now.
> Their end goal is to cripple btc to where it is today.
Blockstream hasn't done anything to "cripple" bitcoin, nor would it have made any financial sense for its employees (100% of whom were (and I believe still are) substantially compensated in Bitcoin). Quite the opposite: Blockstream's purpose was to build on-ramps to Bitcoin to help the impedance mismatch with traditional finance systems, and to monetize Bitcoin unrelated applications of the same technology (e.g. private systems) and use that to fund development work in the public interest (particularly at a time when no one else was doing so).
> The goal of this is to build an unnecessary product they can charge for on a second level. Think skimming money like charge cards do, but offering no real advantage or service beyond that. So far they have found building a new network neigh impossible.
I can't even figure out what this is attempting to talk about.
> Lightning only 18 months away, after 3 years of "development."
Lightning is a large Bitcoin industry effort involving dozens of independent developers and a half dozen companies. It isn't blockstream specific. It's just the logical progression of the payment channel idea initially described by Satoshi and baked into Bitcoin since day one. (And for a weird on-topic tangent: It's a secure implementation of the "Ripple" concept which Ripple labs bought the name of and stuck on an entirely unrelated system.)
It's not "18 months away" it exists now, it's widely used, and it works pretty well.
However, cryptocurrency for small retail payments remains a pretty uncompelling use case: It is extremely tax disadvantaged in many jurisdiction's, including the US: mandatory per transaction gains tax reporting. And retail transactions are extremely well addressed by existing solutions-- would you prefer to pay with the hardest money available, or would you prefer to pay with a credit card that is already accepted virtually everywhere, provides substantial anti-fraud protection, and extends you 28 days of credit with several percent negative fees for debt in constantly debased fiat? It's important that people have the option-- and they do-- but expecting widespread use in this application over night is fantasy.
(And not a particular problem for Blockstream, which doesn't make any fees off transactions using lightning, contrary to the parent posters allegations)
> You can find hilarious round table interviews with Adam Back where one asks how they can use btc for transactions like at bars with the fees dwarfing the regular transaction. Adam Back suggested using an IOU network out of paper or maybe build an IOU app for that.
I have no idea the context there but I can only imagine that someone asked about buying single drinks with Bitcoin and he mentioned that it's customary for people at a bar to open a tab and settle up at the end of the night. Kind of ironic that Adam, who's a teetotaler, is more aware of how bars commonly work than his critics. :)
In any case, Bitcoin is a global broadcast network whos long term decentralized security is utterly and totally dependant on getting large amounts paid in transaction fees. That has always been part of the trade-off: Centralized systems can offer extremely low fees. The only arguments about avoiding market rate fees in Bitcoin have also been argument to unlimit the supply of coins and pay for security through debasement, which is an obvious non-starter.
To the extent that there was ever even any debate over that, it long pre-dated blockstream's existence (e.g. https://en.bitcoin.it/w/index.php?title=Scalability&action=h... ).
Great response. Thank you for taking the time to write it. I'm curious why did you get interested in Bitcoin to begin with? If credit cards and fiat currencies are just fine, gold is still a pretty good store of value, why work on crypto at all?
Being just fine for a vast majority of transactions isn't "just fine": Being able to transact privately and without unaccountable private companies randomly censoring your transactions is critical to human rights. The capriciousness of institutional choke points deprives people of due process and makes it impossible or unreasonably complex to make automated systems that transact autonomously without constant human supervision and intervention.
But these are all issues of exceptional cases, where additional complexity, costs, or risks (e.g. from fraud due to irreversibility, key management liability, or loss due to exchange rate volatility) are acceptable costs of doing business. The vast majority of payments -- even by some hypothetical outlaw-freedom-fighter-bandit -- are extremely boring, low risk, and not likely to be subject to censorship. The value of being able to pay in Bitcoin primarily is that it exists if and when you need it. But on a daily basis for most boring non-international payments it isn't a big win.
I don't agree that gold is a good store of value at all. It's most commonly used form is a totally unauditable fractional-reserve (rehypothicated) censorship prone IOU. In physical form it is extremely expensive to secure, transport and transact with. It is easily seized both by state authorities and bandits. It's essentially unusable for international payments due to transport risks, which Bitcoin is extremely useful for international payments. It is easily forged in ways that are difficult and costly to detect (gold coated tungsten requires special instruments and potentially destructive tests to detect). There have been single incidents involving well over 2 billion dollars of fake gold at a time ( https://asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/Caixin/Mystery-of-2bn-of-l... ). And if we ever figure out how to mine asteroids Gold will be no more valuable than the cost of dropping rocks from the sky. And as icing on top: Gold has even more disadvantageous tax treatment in the US than Bitcoin does!
Even if you use Bitcoin in a custodial way-- which essentially gives it all the positive properties of a centralized system, along with many of the negative one-- it still retains extremely powerful audit abilities, custodial Bitcoin can cheaply prove it isn't fractional reserve in an unforgable way, and it's still immune to central bank monetary policy whims. [Not that I advocate that-- I think custodial Bitcoin misses the point, but for applications that don't need Bitcoin's other properties it can be a reasonable alternative.]
If you're interested in my history with Bitcoin I did an interview on Bitcointalk a month ago: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5262967.msg55722022#...
But these are all issues of exceptional cases, where additional complexity, costs, or risks (e.g. from fraud due to irreversibility, key management liability, or loss due to exchange rate volatility) are acceptable costs of doing business. The vast majority of payments -- even by some hypothetical outlaw-freedom-fighter-bandit -- are extremely boring, low risk, and not likely to be subject to censorship. The value of being able to pay in Bitcoin primarily is that it exists if and when you need it. But on a daily basis for most boring non-international payments it isn't a big win.
I don't agree that gold is a good store of value at all. It's most commonly used form is a totally unauditable fractional-reserve (rehypothicated) censorship prone IOU. In physical form it is extremely expensive to secure, transport and transact with. It is easily seized both by state authorities and bandits. It's essentially unusable for international payments due to transport risks, which Bitcoin is extremely useful for international payments. It is easily forged in ways that are difficult and costly to detect (gold coated tungsten requires special instruments and potentially destructive tests to detect). There have been single incidents involving well over 2 billion dollars of fake gold at a time ( https://asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/Caixin/Mystery-of-2bn-of-l... ). And if we ever figure out how to mine asteroids Gold will be no more valuable than the cost of dropping rocks from the sky. And as icing on top: Gold has even more disadvantageous tax treatment in the US than Bitcoin does!
Even if you use Bitcoin in a custodial way-- which essentially gives it all the positive properties of a centralized system, along with many of the negative one-- it still retains extremely powerful audit abilities, custodial Bitcoin can cheaply prove it isn't fractional reserve in an unforgable way, and it's still immune to central bank monetary policy whims. [Not that I advocate that-- I think custodial Bitcoin misses the point, but for applications that don't need Bitcoin's other properties it can be a reasonable alternative.]
If you're interested in my history with Bitcoin I did an interview on Bitcointalk a month ago: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5262967.msg55722022#...
It isn't defamation if it's true. You can get as upset as you want, but you can't delete what people say here like you can on /r/bitcoin.
flarex(3)
Wall Street doesn't want Bitcoin to serve its intended purpose of removing their control over the money supply. They did this by co-opting the software project with venture capital money and making technical decisions that make Bitcoin ecommerce economically infeasible due to high fees. Initially they intended to replace Bitcoin with an alt-coin whose issuance was controlled by the Blockstream corporate entity. That project failed, and wall street investors pivoted to another alt-coin called Lightning that has failed to produce a reliable payment network after 7 years of investment, all the while the BTC fork remains unusable, which they are just fine with.
EDIT: The Lightning network markets itself as an improvement to Bitcoin, but it is a completely alternative settlement network that just happens to denominate in BTC. I don't think debating the use of the term "alt-coin" is material.
EDIT: The Lightning network markets itself as an improvement to Bitcoin, but it is a completely alternative settlement network that just happens to denominate in BTC. I don't think debating the use of the term "alt-coin" is material.
Man, your post is just full of malicious disinformation, most of it addressed elsewhere in this off-topic subthread.
> EDIT: The Lightning network markets itself as an improvement to Bitcoin, but it is a completely alternative settlement network that just happens to denominate in BTC. I don't think debating the use of the term "alt-coin" is material.
That is just entirely untrue. :( Whoever fed you that idea was confused or outright lying to you.
Lightning is a technique for using Bitcoin's smart contracting ability to pay bitcoin without bringing each and every transaction to the network.
The basic idea is that you take some Bitcoin and set a script on it that says that if there is a disagreement over who owns it, the involved parties will post to the ledger the last record in an external ownership transcript which is signed by the involved parties, and if anyone cheats and posts an outdated record, anyone else can post proof that a later entry existed and all the coins go to the non-cheating party.
With this in place, the parties can then transact back and forth securely as fast as they can sign and send Bitcoin transactions to each other without any global broadcast taking place. Taking it a step further, collections of these transactions can be made mutually atomic so that they're all successful or all fail (essentially by making them conditional on a common secret). This is how lightning makes it possible to pay people you've never transacted with before, by routing on a graph of these pairwise payments (that's what the 'network' in lightning network refers to).
All the transactions exchanged between participants are Bitcoin transactions-- which could be posted at any time to the network at the participant's whim, they refrain from doing so to save fees--, the system is built from the novel programmatic ability of Bitcoin, and it is completely ununsable without Bitcoin (or some clone that copies the required functionality, of course).
This kind of channelized usage of Bitcoin was foreseen by Bitcoin's creator and enabled by the consensus rules of the protocol from day one (particularly: nlocktime and sequence numbers which were explicitly added to support channels).
> EDIT: The Lightning network markets itself as an improvement to Bitcoin, but it is a completely alternative settlement network that just happens to denominate in BTC. I don't think debating the use of the term "alt-coin" is material.
That is just entirely untrue. :( Whoever fed you that idea was confused or outright lying to you.
Lightning is a technique for using Bitcoin's smart contracting ability to pay bitcoin without bringing each and every transaction to the network.
The basic idea is that you take some Bitcoin and set a script on it that says that if there is a disagreement over who owns it, the involved parties will post to the ledger the last record in an external ownership transcript which is signed by the involved parties, and if anyone cheats and posts an outdated record, anyone else can post proof that a later entry existed and all the coins go to the non-cheating party.
With this in place, the parties can then transact back and forth securely as fast as they can sign and send Bitcoin transactions to each other without any global broadcast taking place. Taking it a step further, collections of these transactions can be made mutually atomic so that they're all successful or all fail (essentially by making them conditional on a common secret). This is how lightning makes it possible to pay people you've never transacted with before, by routing on a graph of these pairwise payments (that's what the 'network' in lightning network refers to).
All the transactions exchanged between participants are Bitcoin transactions-- which could be posted at any time to the network at the participant's whim, they refrain from doing so to save fees--, the system is built from the novel programmatic ability of Bitcoin, and it is completely ununsable without Bitcoin (or some clone that copies the required functionality, of course).
This kind of channelized usage of Bitcoin was foreseen by Bitcoin's creator and enabled by the consensus rules of the protocol from day one (particularly: nlocktime and sequence numbers which were explicitly added to support channels).
Preach!
Lightning is not an “alt coin”. This whole comment is so absurd I don’t even know what to say other than it’s entirely conspiratorial and misinformed nonsense.
I don't think there are any major implications. The point of blockchain currencies is to be decentralized so hacking a random github repo shouldn't have major implications. It's not even the only bitcoin node implementation out there at this point.
Before wall street involvement there was a single fork of Bitcoin that was a viable currency with low transaction fees. After Wall Street involvement there are at least 3 forks, the biggest of which had fees spiking at 60 USD per transaction making it nonviable for anything but speculators, and the others having very low adoption. The protocol was decentralized but enough of the community that controlled it was bought out to bring it down.
EDIT: calling something a lie does not make it so. also, what on earth is hateful here
EDIT: calling something a lie does not make it so. also, what on earth is hateful here
Or:
Bitcoin has an incentive model based on transaction fees. This is currently being "boot-strapped" by a mechanism called subsidy, where miners get "extra" bitcoin aside from the transaction fees.
That subsidy shrinks every 4 years and will eventually be zero.
As we move towards that point, the transaction fees need to be high enough that the miners are incentivized to continue protecting bitcoin.
For regular coffee-style orders, this becomes infeasible; that's why you can use layer-2 (or higher) tech to pay really low fees for each transaction.
As Bitcoin usage increases, we hit new speed bumps -- transaction fees spiking was one of them. While this is the inevitable (for a successful bitcoin) future, there need to be ways to make cheaper payments, but everyone (who's given it some thought, and who doesn't have an agenda of some kind) agrees that permanently storing coffee sales in the blockchain directly is not the way to go, if we can avoid it, and we can.
Bitcoin has an incentive model based on transaction fees. This is currently being "boot-strapped" by a mechanism called subsidy, where miners get "extra" bitcoin aside from the transaction fees.
That subsidy shrinks every 4 years and will eventually be zero.
As we move towards that point, the transaction fees need to be high enough that the miners are incentivized to continue protecting bitcoin.
For regular coffee-style orders, this becomes infeasible; that's why you can use layer-2 (or higher) tech to pay really low fees for each transaction.
As Bitcoin usage increases, we hit new speed bumps -- transaction fees spiking was one of them. While this is the inevitable (for a successful bitcoin) future, there need to be ways to make cheaper payments, but everyone (who's given it some thought, and who doesn't have an agenda of some kind) agrees that permanently storing coffee sales in the blockchain directly is not the way to go, if we can avoid it, and we can.
Unused blockchains have no / low transaction fees.
>When people started using Bitcoin, fees went up!
That's how it is supposed to work.
>When people started using Bitcoin, fees went up!
That's how it is supposed to work.
“The threshold should probably be lower than it currently is. I don't think the threshold should ever be 0. We should always allow at least some free transactions.” -Satoshi Nakamoto
The p2p electronic cash system I signed up for in June 2010 is not working “how it is supposed to work”. $7.77 average transaction fee? Why not try raising the block size to even 2MB? That would do nothing to hurt decentralization. And do you really think an asset currently worth $500B needs to incentivize people to keep it working?!
“I would never spend $100/yr to validate/store transactions and keep my Bitcoin investment working unless I can make a profit on that $100/yr on fees!”
The p2p electronic cash system I signed up for in June 2010 is not working “how it is supposed to work”. $7.77 average transaction fee? Why not try raising the block size to even 2MB? That would do nothing to hurt decentralization. And do you really think an asset currently worth $500B needs to incentivize people to keep it working?!
“I would never spend $100/yr to validate/store transactions and keep my Bitcoin investment working unless I can make a profit on that $100/yr on fees!”
This is a hateful lie.
Not it isn't, it's just information you don't want people to see.
misinformed take
Blockstream has almost no say at this point
some of the top contributors are either independent or work with Chaincode labs
over the last 10 years, Bitcoin is the most resilient to protocol changes and centralization
Ethereum, Bitcoin cash and Monero are all either centralized or bad implementations
Blockstream has almost no say at this point
some of the top contributors are either independent or work with Chaincode labs
over the last 10 years, Bitcoin is the most resilient to protocol changes and centralization
Ethereum, Bitcoin cash and Monero are all either centralized or bad implementations
It’s also the most resistant to any and all improvements that might mitigate the environmental calamity it actively contributes to.
The above shouldn't be downvoted. It's an interesting statement
What do you think of the Lightning Network?
Lightning Network channels specify a blockchain hash, so Bitcoin is supported but other cryptocurrencies could be used (if the HTLC scripts, etc., were ported)
The Lightning Network web of payment channels looks good to me. You can see how it can form an efficient "overlay" on any cryptocurrency that provides sufficient scripting power:
https://lightning.network/lightning-network-paper.pdf
What do you think of the Lightning Network?
Lightning Network channels specify a blockchain hash, so Bitcoin is supported but other cryptocurrencies could be used (if the HTLC scripts, etc., were ported)
The Lightning Network web of payment channels looks good to me. You can see how it can form an efficient "overlay" on any cryptocurrency that provides sufficient scripting power:
https://lightning.network/lightning-network-paper.pdf
Lightning is not reliable the way Bitcoin is, and correspondingly has not seen any real-world adoption. It is effectively dead.
>and correspondingly has not seen any real-world adoption. It is effectively dead.
but
https://blog.kraken.com/post/7225/a-need-for-speed-kraken-to...
and
https://coingate.com/lightning-network
but
https://blog.kraken.com/post/7225/a-need-for-speed-kraken-to...
and
https://coingate.com/lightning-network
> In 2021
So they are still putting money into the project and promising things in the future. Years ago, before venture capital took over BTC, I could buy games on Steam with Bitcoin. Can I buy video games with Lightning?
https://blog.kraken.com/post/7225/a-need-for-speed-kraken-to...
> https://coingate.com/lightning-network
Ok. What can I actually buy with it? There's tons of venture capital going into this project and no commerce happening. Bitcoin had more real commerce 5 years ago than BTC and Lightning combined do today.
So they are still putting money into the project and promising things in the future. Years ago, before venture capital took over BTC, I could buy games on Steam with Bitcoin. Can I buy video games with Lightning?
https://blog.kraken.com/post/7225/a-need-for-speed-kraken-to...
> https://coingate.com/lightning-network
Ok. What can I actually buy with it? There's tons of venture capital going into this project and no commerce happening. Bitcoin had more real commerce 5 years ago than BTC and Lightning combined do today.
>So they are still putting money into the project and promising things in the future.
I don't get it. A major cryptocurrency exchange says they're planning to adopt it, and that doesn't count as "real-world adoption"? I guess that's true if your original statement read as "not seen any real-world adoption ...[today]" but it certainly doesn't follow that it's dead.
>Ok. What can I actually buy with it?
One of the merchants I've made multiple purchases on uses coingate for payments so that's something for me, at least. That said I'll admit that I haven't used lightning yet because I'm quite happy with the status quo of waiting for a lull in transaction volume so I can pay pennies per transaction (my payments aren't usually urgent). Going through the hassle setting up a lightning node isn't worth saving a few pennies each month in my opinion.
>Years ago, before venture capital took over BTC, I could buy games on Steam with Bitcoin. Can I buy video games with Lightning?
To be fair, bitcoin was launched in 2009 and it took until 2016 for steam to accept it. How many years has lightning been around? Also, while looking up when steam first accepted bitcoin I also found https://twitter.com/udiWertheimer/status/952206482715660289, which answers your second question.
I don't get it. A major cryptocurrency exchange says they're planning to adopt it, and that doesn't count as "real-world adoption"? I guess that's true if your original statement read as "not seen any real-world adoption ...[today]" but it certainly doesn't follow that it's dead.
>Ok. What can I actually buy with it?
One of the merchants I've made multiple purchases on uses coingate for payments so that's something for me, at least. That said I'll admit that I haven't used lightning yet because I'm quite happy with the status quo of waiting for a lull in transaction volume so I can pay pennies per transaction (my payments aren't usually urgent). Going through the hassle setting up a lightning node isn't worth saving a few pennies each month in my opinion.
>Years ago, before venture capital took over BTC, I could buy games on Steam with Bitcoin. Can I buy video games with Lightning?
To be fair, bitcoin was launched in 2009 and it took until 2016 for steam to accept it. How many years has lightning been around? Also, while looking up when steam first accepted bitcoin I also found https://twitter.com/udiWertheimer/status/952206482715660289, which answers your second question.
You could buy Steam games years ago because Bitcoin volume was low.
Just try some math: How large would blocks need to be to handle just 50% of Visa's current US transaction rate?
Just try some math: How large would blocks need to be to handle just 50% of Visa's current US transaction rate?
VISA says they do 150M transactions per day. I’m not sure how many are US, but let’s say half. Avg BTC transaction is 250 bytes, so you’d need about 10GB a day (about 70MB) blocks to do what you propose.
A 3TB drive is $39 on Amazon right now. So maybe 13c a day in storage costs to run half of visa’s US transactions.
Not raising Bitcoin’s block size has got to be THE most insane technical decision in modern history.
A 3TB drive is $39 on Amazon right now. So maybe 13c a day in storage costs to run half of visa’s US transactions.
Not raising Bitcoin’s block size has got to be THE most insane technical decision in modern history.
>VISA says they do 150M transactions per day. I’m not sure how many are US, but let’s say half. Avg BTC transaction is 250 bytes, so you’d need about 10GB a day (about 70MB) blocks to do what you propose.
Your calculations are off. It's closer to 20GB per day: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=150%2C000%2C000+*+0.5+...
>A 3TB drive is $39 on Amazon right now. So maybe 13c a day in storage costs to run half of visa’s US transactions.
Redoing the calculations with the correct figures comes to 24.4 cents per day. That might not seem a lot, but that's also $89/year, which makes it a non-negligible expense for anyone wanting to run a full node. Not to mention, the data would have to be stored for eternity, so someone wanting to start a full node 5 years from now will need to invest almost $500 just to get started. That would put someone wanting to run a full bitcoin node into /r/datahoarder territory.
Your calculations are off. It's closer to 20GB per day: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=150%2C000%2C000+*+0.5+...
>A 3TB drive is $39 on Amazon right now. So maybe 13c a day in storage costs to run half of visa’s US transactions.
Redoing the calculations with the correct figures comes to 24.4 cents per day. That might not seem a lot, but that's also $89/year, which makes it a non-negligible expense for anyone wanting to run a full node. Not to mention, the data would have to be stored for eternity, so someone wanting to start a full node 5 years from now will need to invest almost $500 just to get started. That would put someone wanting to run a full bitcoin node into /r/datahoarder territory.
>$89/year, which makes it a non-negligible expense for anyone wanting to run a full node.
Why on earth would a non-miner run a full node just to observe other people's transactions? Satoshi addressed this all the way back in 2009 in the whitepaper itself. Consumers (non-miners) would just download transactions they care about and run truncated observer nodes, and $89/yr isn't even that much money for a "full" observer (non-miner) node if you care about being a datahoarder. Killing bitcoin as a functioning currency because some people think Satoshi was wrong is mind-numbing. Of course, when your paycheck depends on not understanding something...
Why on earth would a non-miner run a full node just to observe other people's transactions? Satoshi addressed this all the way back in 2009 in the whitepaper itself. Consumers (non-miners) would just download transactions they care about and run truncated observer nodes, and $89/yr isn't even that much money for a "full" observer (non-miner) node if you care about being a datahoarder. Killing bitcoin as a functioning currency because some people think Satoshi was wrong is mind-numbing. Of course, when your paycheck depends on not understanding something...
I find LN's UX really painful. Ethereum's layer 2 solutions are far ahead in terms of user experience. The other day I had to settle an election bet, and either I settle it in stablecoin on high tx fees of ETH/BTC or try explaining one of the layer-2 solutions.
And no, I can't pay them in USDT on bch because that requires them to get a new wallet.
Raiden network which is Ethereum's LN like solution, faces the same problem. Whatever bitcoin folks envision, they will never get LN bitcoins to have the same network effect as bitcoin itself.
And no, I can't pay them in USDT on bch because that requires them to get a new wallet.
Raiden network which is Ethereum's LN like solution, faces the same problem. Whatever bitcoin folks envision, they will never get LN bitcoins to have the same network effect as bitcoin itself.
> I find LN's UX really painful.
What did you find painful, and which wallet(s)?
What did you find painful, and which wallet(s)?
I thought filecoin had a successful launch?
Yeah but they successfully ICO'd since then and the market cap has held its value
It says more about bcash than bitcoin that it’s supporters feel the need to push a (false) narrative anywhere they can.
This is clearly FUD pushed by bitcoin cash supporters. I’m coin-agnostic and don’t get into these fights but bitcoin is 100% doing exactly what it was designed to do.
Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System - “The cost of mediation increases transaction costs, limiting the minimum practical transaction size and cutting off the possibility for small casual transactions, and there is a broader cost in the loss of ability to make non-reversible payments for non-reversible services.” https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf
Average transaction fees are frequently $5-10 these days, which completely invalidates the original proposed use case for a system that would enable “small casual transactions.” https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/bitcoin-transactionfees...
Since transactions will only increase in price as demand grows (and the tx limit has been effectively capped for years), I don’t see Bitcoin ever improving in this regard. Bitcoin may be successful as a speculative asset and for other purposes, but as “peer-to-peer electronic cash” it’s a failure.
Average transaction fees are frequently $5-10 these days, which completely invalidates the original proposed use case for a system that would enable “small casual transactions.” https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/bitcoin-transactionfees...
Since transactions will only increase in price as demand grows (and the tx limit has been effectively capped for years), I don’t see Bitcoin ever improving in this regard. Bitcoin may be successful as a speculative asset and for other purposes, but as “peer-to-peer electronic cash” it’s a failure.
>bitcoin is 100% doing exactly what it was designed to do
Bitcoin was designed to allow low-fee small amount internet commerce. From the first paragraph of Satoshi's white paper:
>The cost of mediation increases transaction costs, limiting the minimum practical transaction size and cutting off the possibility for small casual transactions [emphasis added]
This is clearly no longer the case with the BTC fork of Bitcoin:
https://privacypros.io/tools/bitcoin-fee-estimator/
Therefore BTC is not doing what it was designed to do.
Bitcoin was designed to allow low-fee small amount internet commerce. From the first paragraph of Satoshi's white paper:
>The cost of mediation increases transaction costs, limiting the minimum practical transaction size and cutting off the possibility for small casual transactions [emphasis added]
This is clearly no longer the case with the BTC fork of Bitcoin:
https://privacypros.io/tools/bitcoin-fee-estimator/
Therefore BTC is not doing what it was designed to do.
As soon as Bitcoin market cap starts shooting up, the SEC starts banning coins and increasing regulation. It’s a correlation as clear as day. The US government is actively trying to suppress Bitcoin/crypto growth. This is no coincidence
Take your tinfoil hat off, the SEC might time their interventions but a scam is a scam.
On the contrary, one could argue that the drop in XRP prices (and corresponding outflow of capital) has been one key drivers of the successive ATHs BTC has hit this week.
Longer term, there are many other tokens/protocols that can fulfill XRP’s functions without its obvious weaknesses.
Longer term, there are many other tokens/protocols that can fulfill XRP’s functions without its obvious weaknesses.
But they aren't banning bitcoin though :\ Wouldn't that be the way to suppress it?
They don't have great legal grounds to attack bitcoin imo, only threat to national security or treason or some bs
Well, rather than attacking alt-coins wouldn't lobbying for laws to allow them to block bitcoin exchanges (or tightly regulate them) as other countries have done be stronger evidence they were trying to undermine crypto?
The GP has drawn a strange correlation in my opinion that doesn't follow logic. But I admit I could be missing the logic.
The GP has drawn a strange correlation in my opinion that doesn't follow logic. But I admit I could be missing the logic.
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Legit Bitcoin creates tax revenue so there is that too.
>The US government is actively trying to suppress Bitcoin/crypto growth
It's complicated. US regulators would absolutely ban all crypto if it started threatening the dollar and they had no other choice. However right now that isn't happening, and they are actually only going after pretty clear cases of fraud, which it seems like XRP was doing.
It's complicated. US regulators would absolutely ban all crypto if it started threatening the dollar and they had no other choice. However right now that isn't happening, and they are actually only going after pretty clear cases of fraud, which it seems like XRP was doing.
Wow. Does Coinbase plan to launch their coin and feel threatened? Seems like a anti-competitive move if so and weird timing with the IPO.
> Cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase Inc said on Monday it would suspend trading in cryptocurrency XRP after U.S. regulators last week charged associated blockchain firm Ripple with conducting a $1.3 billion unregistered securities offering.
It reads to be a good reason to suspend XRP trading
It reads to be a good reason to suspend XRP trading
Sorry, missed that somehow. Still seems oddly suspicious that it coincides with Coinbase's IPO.
I don't follow the logic here. Cryptos biggest battle (and thus Coinabse's battle by proxy) has been legitimacy. A listed coin coming under SEC ire and Coinbase banning said coin actively harms their IPO, not assists it.
That they stopped trading a literal scam? The only suspicious part is they started trading it in the first place.
They are protecting themselves to Not being complicit, or better not to look complicit to the SEC.
Oh okay. That makes more sense. Still a bit weird that it's out of a sense of self preservation instead of caring that it was potentially immoral in the first place.
This is the kind of thing a company does when something becomes a financial and legal liability.
Maybe do a bit more research then.
Ripple/XRP is under SEC investigation for selling an unregistered security, Coinbase has to stop trading or they'll be an accessory to the crime as well.
https://www.tradingview.com/symbols/XRPUSD/?exchange=BITFINE...
Yes, there was a big run-up, but that was largely drafting off the increase in the bitcoin exchange rate. The real test will be how much further XRP drops (or doesn't) from here.