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Big Trouble for Bitcoin (medium.com)
TheCoop1984 writes: A blog post by ex-Bitcoin developer Mike Hearn has highlighted dysfunctional management right at the top of Bitcoin development. He says it is clear Bitcoin is on the verge of collapse, and lays out several compelling reasons why. Quoting: "What was meant to be a new, decentralized form of money that lacked 'systemically important institutions' and 'too big to fail' has become something even worse: a system completely controlled by just a handful of people. Worse still, the network is on the brink of technical collapse. The mechanisms that should have prevented this outcome have broken down, and as a result there’s no longer much reason to think Bitcoin can actually be better than the existing financial system." Is the end of Bitcoin on the horizon?
Good thing I threw all my resources into mining Dogecoins instead, otherwise I'd look like an idiot right now! ...
--
Such currency. Very crypto. Wow
Who thinks this reads like a "Netcraft Confirms" post? Besides, Bitcoin's not going anywhere as long as folks are using it to buy drugs
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
They're at it again. Bitcoin XT/Unlimited/Classic developers are shilling emotionally charged rhetoric declaring the failure of Bitcoin. These blog posts are promoted by their connections in the (((international media))) to try to spread fear, uncertainty, and doubt around the status of Bitcoin and bully people into accepting their suicidal "solutions" to problems that don't really exist involving block size limits.
Histrionic whining on Medium and Reddit is not the proper way to present engineering solutions. Their campaign looks more like some sort of intelligence operation than a patch submission. There's a reason for this: it is.
I have a lot of skin in the game on this issue. I am a target of the United States government, and as such I have a very hard time receiving money. It doesn't matter that I have left the United States because of continuing persecution there. Their control over wire transfers between all countries with Rothschild banks is complete. The United States seizes money on lawful transactions between EU states over things as insignificant as Cuban cigars, despite none of the countries involved participating in the US embargo against Cuba. I've had my bank accounts, payment processing services, and brokerage accounts shut off. Bitcoin is the only way I can engage with any financial services. If it is centralized and subject to controls similar to SWIFT wires and credit card processing, my continued existence would no longer be feasible. Bitcoin is the the most important development in human rights in centuries.
Here's the facts: Gavin Andresen and Mike Hearn want you to switch to something called Bitcoin XT or Bitcoin Unlimited or some other fork of Bitcoin that is under unilateral control so that they can centralize Bitcoin to a dangerous degree-- enough to put it under the control of a government hostile to liberty like the United States. While they do this, they hilariously complain about "oppression" and "censorship" on forums that clean away their bullshit altcoin spam postings.
There are two likely incentives for doing this:
1) They have placed short positions against Bitcoin.
2) They are funded by people that wish to see Bitcoin less free.
Now reflect for a moment that the only major industry supporter of the Bitcoin XT proposal is Coinbase whose gigantic series C round was lead by the New York Stock Exchange. I doubt their financial interests are aligned with a free and unregulated global marketplace.
The good news is that they seem to have lost most of this battle. Consensus on the network is determined by the nodes people run on it. Bitcoin XT only has about 500 nodes. Bitcoin Core, the real Bitcoin software, has about ten times that. The majority of the mining capacity is in China, and Chinese people have little incentive to centralize Bitcoin for the convenience of US intelligence and enforcement organizations. So I must celebrate China's shrewd rejection of XT today.
If you love liberty you should call XT's shilling and spamming out for what it is. If you are invested in Bitcoin you also must do so. If XT gets their way and centralizes Bitcoin, Bitcoin will lose its primary feature of freedom from centralized authorities and thus lose its source of value. You can also support Bitcoin's continued freedom by running a full Bitcoin Core node, and buying and saving Bitcoin.
Bitcoin transaction fees going up is not the end of the world. It's good for miners, and necessary to protect a limited resource like space on the blockchain. I'm willing to pay higher fees to see Bitcoin stay free from government control (and we're literally talking transaction fees of a few extra cents here), and everyone else who loves Bitcoin should be so willing as well.
Eventually they will accept the growth and realize that the 1mb limit for blocks is simply not enough to accommodate.
has become something even worse: a system completely controlled by just a handful of people.
It was that from day 1. People who got in early have lots of bitcoins. Anyone with lots of the market in anything will be able to strongly influence that market.
The mechanisms that should have prevented this outcome have broken down, and as a result there’s no longer much reason to think Bitcoin can actually be better than the existing financial system."
There never was any reason to think Bitcoin would be better than the existing financial system. People believed in bitcoin for ideological reasons rather than pragmatic ones for the most part. It appeals to certain ideologies and people who are trying to hide their activities, often for illicit reasons.
'he who controls the trade routes....'
no longer much reason to think Bitcoin can actually be better than the existing financial system.
You mean some pie-in-the-sky technology can't do better than an analog system which has been around for centuries? Oh noes, what we will do without technology to "simplify" our lives? How will we live? The horror.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
Whew? Not yet. Anyone wanna buy my bitcoins?
I'd be happy to buy your bit coins even exchange for $1 dollar/coin. Cash!
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
...a greater advantage for other cryptocurrencies.
Wait, are we talking about bitcoin or just all the existing monetary systems?
How novel.
Capital and power self-accumulate, so vires in numeris, strength in numbers, become infirmitates in numeris.
*snicker*
bittards.
If you were me, you'd be good lookin'. - six string samurai
Systemd has a built in bitcoin mining facility.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Hasn't the bitcoin ecosystem always been a commendably elegant mathematical design embedded in a community that could be mistaken for a deadpanned absurdist parody of a financial system?
The blockchain concept is pretty cool, and does appear to actually work as advertised, it's just that everything not nailed down mathematically is a bit of a clusterfuck.
Clearly this is bitcoin. You'd need at least 4 handfuls of people to count the ones controlling existing monetary systems.
We are a flawed, vicious, cut-throat bunch of animals hard-wired to survive in a harsh, cold, unforgiving world. Like every other animal. We are not meant to understand or thrive in the midst of plenty; our brains are designed from each neuron up to be greedy, selfish, egotistical maniacs.
Andrew, come home. There is a nice cell waiting for you. Once you come home, we'll stop the malware attacks. The psychological attacks will have to continue as a matter of policy, of course.
But the Slashdot postings about Bitcoin will probably continue forever.
#DeleteChrome
News at 11.
How many times do these big frauds have to happen?
In all honesty, there never was much reason. Bitcoin has been paraded around as if is magic. It isn't, and it never has been.
Over time it was fairly inevitable it would develop the exact same problems it claimed to be bypassing. And the notion that it would be free from government taxation or regulation? That was always a bit of a delusion.
So, whatever ... the magical unicorns didn't spray us all with the urine of glossy perfection which was promised. Color me completely not surprised.
What's more surprising is now long people kept telling themselves this wishful thinking would hold true.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
He says it is clear Bitcoin is on the verge of collapse, and lays out several compelling reasons why.
Actually, the article is a pretty good read. The tl;dr version would go something like this: a community founded on idealism and principle found out that those things invariably end up coming in second place when competing with greed and power...and a small group of people ended up with some power, and some greed.
Quoting: "What was meant to be a new, decentralized form of money that lacked 'systemically important institutions' and 'too big to fail' has become something even worse: a system completely controlled by just a handful of people.
Someone's never played a game of Monopoly. There will always be a "one percent" when it comes to money and power. The point of those 'systemically important institutions' is that they're supposed to keep the playing field somewhat-level. They trade liberty for stability, and when it comes to money, that's a trade that most stable countries worldwide make in some form - it's amongst the reasons (or at least indicators) that they're stable.
Moreover, currency itself only works when it actually facilitates trade. A few drug sales here and a Dell server there isn't going to actually allow the currency to get into people's hands in order to then spend it. Start telling me that 2/3 of my bills can be paid in Bitcoin, and it's as simple to use as a credit card, and then we can talk. Tell me that it could fluctuate in such a way that thousands of my hard-earned dollars could disappear and reappear on a daily basis, and that Mt. Gox (amongst the largest and most well-known names in the Bitcoin business) can't even stay afloat...and suddenly the Federal Reserve starts looking pretty good - for all its warts, I'm unlikely to be homeless because of the acts of two or three people in China...
Worse still, the network is on the brink of technical collapse. The mechanisms that should have prevented this outcome have broken down, and as a result there’s no longer much reason to think Bitcoin can actually be better than the existing financial system."
Well, the data of "every single transaction ever" needed to live somewhere...and distributed amongst everyone would only work as long as the average computer could handle it. Even after reading the article, the fact of the matter is that a decentralized record of financial transactions would never scale to the level of American Express - it's not like AmEx could process every purchase off just one desktop with a residential cable modem, but in practice, that was Bitcoin's logical conclusion. Eventually, there would have been some sort of abstraction layer that limited the need for everyone to keep records of every transaction, everywhere, ever...and whoever was in charge of that system would have been the de facto federal reserve...
Is the end of Bitcoin on the horizon?
That depends on how long one can continue to believe in the idea that idealism can win over greed.
If there's on thing that will be the downfall of Western Civ, it's fucking libertarian conspiracy nuts like you.
If there's one thing that's completely unproductive, it's petty stereotyping, bullying, trolling and counterpointing everyone who doesn't support your line of reason.
Dude, you're full of shit. The Bitcoin currency is almost entirely controlled by a few elite people, most of them in china. Any idiot that knows how to monitor network communications can verify this.
YOUR BULLSHIT CURRENCY IS FUCKING UNTENABLE.
Not to mention, at its very core, it violates thermodynamics, which means it is already a fucking failure.
told ya BTCez!!!
Your thinking is too binary. Idealism and greed must work together.
It was obvious from the start that it would never last. Anyone still investing in bitcoin is a sucker.
Fuck you you Nazi scumbag piece of shit.
Hi weev.
Their control over wire transfers between all countries with Rothschild banks is complete.
So, is their control over wire transfers between all countries without Rothschild banks incomplete? Can you provide a reference that lists all countries and whether or not they have Rothschild banks? Also, can you explain what constitutes a Rothschild bank?
Posting anon because I can't be seen associating with you.
No, man. The blockchain is the innovation that will last. That's the value.
All of the banks you hate are going in big time with it. Everything will be centralized in the approval of transactions, but the approval will be cemented and publicly available. This means that people trying to manipulate those transactions will be exposed to all. Weather those are inside traders, drug traffickers, money launderers, tax cheats, they'll have more eyeballs looking at there activities.
They are unsustainable by their very nature.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
I am a target of the United States government
Sure you are, chief. Sure you are.
It's an unregulated "currency" of course it's going to have problems. Look at all of the theft and greed around it. Anyone investing in any unregulated currency is an idiot. Might as well just burn your cash or give it to the 1% who will gain from anything like this.
Go play the lotto your odds are better.
While they do this, they hilariously complain about "oppression" and "censorship"...
You mean like your own persecuted white person victim complex? Trying to preserve a future for your porcelain kids against the dirty hordes right? Just Nazi things...
https://www.eff.org/cases/us-v... This case was me. I incremented a number at the end of a public URL and did 15 months in prison, and am only out now because of a successful federal criminal appeal. The government has been harassing me for 15 years.
Perhaps for the atrocity that is the giant fucking swastika tattooed on your goddamn chest. Just Nazi things...
If it is centralized and subject to controls similar to SWIFT wires and credit card processing, my continued existence would no longer be feasible.
Forgive me for not believing that in the slightest. Government fugitives have existed for many many years before bitcoin. I think you'd find a way of surviving. Mind you given that you seem to imply your continued existence is entirely dependent on international wire transfers I'm not entirely sure if I should be cheering for you or calling a CIA hotline.
Quite frankly humans have had no problems trading cash for centuries and if you're really having that much of a problem dealing with something other than bitcoin I suggest next time you fill out some bank paperwork and there's a checkbox saying "are you a terrorist" tick no. It'll make it easier.
You poor persecuted Nazi.
1) Sell all of your bitcoins.
2) Tell everyone that the system has failed - watch confidence disintegrate and the price plummet.
3) Buy back all of your bitcoins.
4) Wait for 1e6 people to point out that you're an idiot, thereby allowing confidence (and the price) to recover.
5) Profit!
Hmmm...eh...there should be a "..." bit in there someplace. Sorry!
www.sjbaker.org
Mike Hearn has proven repeatedly that he is very selfish and is not looking out for the greater good of Bitcoin. At this point, anything he is for, I am against.
It's a bit sad to see Gavin joining him, as he always seemed more altruistic.
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
anyone able to elaborate on this? My guess would be "if we had all transactions in bitcoin, mining requirements would exceed planetary energy resources" but that's just a guess.
Hearn's XT and Lighthouse projects failed, so now he's taking his ball and going home. Bitcoin will be just fine, he just wants everyone to believe that he's the sole voice of change in the entire ecosystem, which is a complete laugh.
The ego of this man is so inflated, that he conflates failure in his personal development as a failure of the system at large. This often happens with ego-centric narcissists, where personal responsibility is avoided and put on others. You'll never see Hearn admit that anything he's done is wrong or incorrect, its the entire SYSTEM that is wrong, you see.
I wish Hearn a pleasant journey in his new role - Professional Victim and Drama-Queen. Maybe he can start his own programming language where all errors are blamed on the machine, not the programmer. Lets call it "Hearniate".
Clueless, stupid, paranoia and tinfoil hat conspiracy theories with religious overtones. This represents the average bittcoiner, and is why bittcoin has failed.
Blockchain tech is the real contribution and will live on because it's not an implementation of flawed proof-of-concept code coupled with genuinely bad economic principals.
If you can't answer the following question you can shut the fuck up, delete your wallet, and think about what you've done with your life:
How can Bittcoin become a successful currency if it can't break a pretty meager Transaction Per Second barrier? We're talking several orders of magnitude less than what traditional banking and payment systems currently achieve.
And no, brokering transactions through a 3rd party does not count. That's just called a bank, and all the bitcoin banks have failed or are currently failing because bitcoin is simply an unsecured alternate currency. And unsecured alternate currencies are a scam as old as the idea of currency itself.
I'm still waiting for Flooz to make a come back.
A currency controlled by a small, unaccountable group of people?
Sounds like the USD/Fed Reserve to me!!
But that post exceeds the USDA recommended daily dosage for Batshit Crazy.
This is one of the most mis-informed posts I've read on Slashdot.
I work in the bitcoin space and know quite a bit about it. Bitcoin has a scaling problem: we're already maxing out the 1mb block size and transactions are starting to take more and more time to confirm - the system is starting to suffer and slow. There is no chance of bitcoin scaling to support more transactions if the block size stays static. The block size was initially introduced to stop spam attacks from affecting the network, however those issues have since been mitigated.
>> Gavin Andresen and Mike Hearn want you to switch to something called Bitcoin XT or Bitcoin Unlimited or some other fork of Bitcoin that is under unilateral control so that they can centralize Bitcoin to a dangerous degree...
Absolute rubbish. If you look at the code for BitcoinXT, which is simply BIP101 attached to bitcoin core, you will see that it allows the blocksize to increase if consensus is reached by miners. I know Gavin personally and it's his ambition to see bitcoin mature into something even bigger than it is today. With the current blocksize locked up to 1mb, this isn't possible. Gavin (and others) have introduced plans to solve this issue. Where's your plan?
>>Now reflect for a moment that the only major industry supporter of the Bitcoin XT proposal is Coinbase...
Coinbase merely ran XT on a test node to help run bitcoin simulations using larger block sizes. They also wanted to be prepared and understand its operation should XT ever go mainstream. I wouldn't say that they support it, however they are doing their own due diligence to determine if XT is the way to go. Nothing wrong with that. Many others are doing the same thing.
I'm asking myself why someone like yourself would spend so much time on a post with such an extreme (and negative) view? Do you lack the vision of a bigger picture? What's your motivation to publicly misinform others? Why are you trying so hard to spread FUD which ultimately damages the bitcoin ecosystem? Have you put in short orders on bitcoin for some kind of exit strategy for coins you're currently holding?
If you want to have an extreme and negative view of things, that's fine. My concern is that others who read this won't know that they're reading worthless FUD.
Really? More important that women's sufferage or the end of slavery?!?
Oh wait, I just read about you on Fortune
Well if harassing people like you is what our Big Brother state gets us, I can't say it's entirely evil.
The _concept_ of a Blockchain is the innovation that will last. All that it needs is the implementation of an Irrefutable Timestamp, and then it will go forward, far beyond silly little under-the-table currency transactions. The Intellectual Property implications are staggering.
And you are still a twerp.
Is it THAT Hern of R3 CEV consortium comprising of 30 world banks? :-) Well. I completely believe him. He says... expected things.
http://bravenewcoin.com/news/3...
Well, I've got to get back to work. When I stop rowing, the slave ship just goes in circles.
Their control over wire transfers between all countries with Rothschild banks is complete.
Yea, the minute someone brings up the Illuminati, I largely write them off...
The world is a bit bigger and more complex than you're suggesting. It isn't perfect, but there isn't a group of 10 people sitting around deciding it all.
If it is centralized and subject to controls similar to SWIFT wires and credit card processing, my continued existence would no longer be feasible.
People hiding from government existed long before Bitcoin came out...
You'd be just fine...
Frankly, if you think Bitcoin has any chance of replacing national banks or government control, you're kidding yourself... If it ever grew large enough, it would draw the attention of the regulators who would insist on control, or they would outlaw it.
Every time a big "bitcoin is failing" story comes out, the price drops a couple hundred. Sell a few coins, and then re-buy when it bottoms out. It always recovers, granted, to various extents.
Can someone give me a reference for the Nazi claim? Did I miss something?
http://gawker.com/ipad-hacker-and-troll-weev-is-now-a-straight-up-white-1641763761
That one's a real gem too.
hokey bucks, Bullwinkle!
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
Fuck you pothead, go to jail.
That's what we're really arguing over, whether transaction fees rise to a fucking quarter or not.
If they do "rise to a fucking quarter", then Bitcoin is unlikely to be usable as a means for pay-per-page web browsing once ad blocking becomes widespread. So to what low-transaction-fee network should people who desire a low-transaction-fee network switch?
Relevant to the conversation? Sorry but fascists don't get to only discuss their fascism when its convenient for them. And nobody gives a fuck about your livejournal. You play the troll card to to have your unapologetic hatred dismissed by the media as an exercise in 'free speech' while you exploited the social capital. So not only are you a nazi piece of shit but you're also a revisionist and a fucking coward. Go fucking kill yourself.
You forgot to blame the Jews. Drama queens like you love to do that. Just come out and say it.
http://gawker.com/ipad-hacker-and-troll-weev-is-now-a-straight-up-white-1641763761
Try reading the blog entry he links to here http://news.slashdot.org/comme...
People aren't calling him a Nazi because they don't like him, they're describing his actual, public, political views, and he's happy with that.
I am a target of the United States government, and as such I have a very hard time receiving money.
GOOD. You're a piece of shit for a human being, weev. Your suffering is justified, and your words here are useless.
How would switching to XT solve centralization? Mentioning the Chinese hashrate is a red herring. There's nothing about XT that would help that.
XT would make block sizes larger, which would encourage centralization rather than discourage it.
Hearn is being a child about this. The community rejected his patch so he's saying "Bitcoin is over guys!".
Yup, I did miss something, thanks :)
It's funny how many government guys are posting here anonymously calling weev a nazi. I'd kill myself if that were my job.
What was meant to be a new, decentralized form of money that lacked 'systemically important institutions' and 'too big to fail' has become something even worse: a system completely controlled by just a handful of people.
So, in other words, it's just like the World economy, which is in reality controlled by a tiny fraction of the World population?
Even better: so-called 'virtual currency' isn't backed by anything physically real, just like most all paper money today. Even our coins aren't worth the metals they're made of.
..and even better than all that: We literally kill ourselves to acquire it.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
http://gawker.com/ipad-hacker-...
Let's all switch to using Slashdot postings about Bitcoin as a new e-currency!
Sadly, somebody here would probably take that seriously. Let's think about this a bit: people have become wary about government-issued fiat currencies which have no inherent value and are backed-up only by the promises of dishonest governments...... so the solution was to go to a completely virtual fiat currency setup by an anonymous person and backed-up by nobody...... and this is progress? ......and we are surprised that this might have some quirky issues?
I always find it funny that people have fault with the fact that early adopters own most of the Bitcoin. The Microsoft founders also hold most of the Microsoft stock. So do the Apple founders, etc. What does that have to do with anything?
The Microsoft founders took actual risk. Same with Apple's founders. They could have easily gone bankrupt if things had gone badly. Whoever created bitcoin didn't take any actual risk other than whatever time they spent making it. They merely created it and then convinced others to use it but at no time did they have any of their own capital at risk.
With the crash of the petroleum market, ransomware is now the only industry holding up the Russian economy. How is it going to function without Bitcoin? Ransomware sales in the US will have to fall back on older commercial money laundering systems, like GreenDot [https://www.greendot.com/greendot/getacardnow?utm_source=Google_Search_Brand]
I think everyone is a target of the United State government now, given their proven history of spying on absolutely everyone they possibly can.
The human project has been on the verge for close on to sixty million years now.
The entire Africa phase was a close-run affair, and we've been witnessing the longest, slowest improvement in recorded history ever since. Of course, the fatal wings of Armageddon flit past faster now than they once did, almost to where they have blended into a smooth hum.
In modern times, spotting "the" verge is a lot like trying to read posters affixed onto telephone poles while you're zooming past on the highway, except when you're not paying enough attention to the steering wheel causing you to subconsciously veer into the object that fixates your attention—at which point the fine print on the poster becomes momentarily all too clear.
Moral of the story: rubberneck verge spotting is not a good long term survival strategy.
Bitcoin will either survive and thrive, or it will not.
I can't predict which way it will go in the future. But it's success, or failure, will be big in a few years. It's a binary outcome I think.
What I do know, however, is that the time to buy something is when investors are scared, because it's at a discount!
Fuck you, German Nazi scumbag. You had your anus pumped in prison and you deserved every thrust. I blame the Allied powers. We should have nuked your little ghetto into obviation after your boy Hitler cowardly did himself in. A world without Germans would have been a truly wonderful thing.
>> And the miners have flatly rejected it, out of concerns for Bitcoin XT's path of overcentralizing Bitcoin.
Take a look at this open letter from Sam Cole (CEO of KNC Miner) that came out today.
https://forum.bitcoin.com/bitc...
Bram Cohen might be smart about distributed systems (bittorrent), but he's no expert on financial markets. The post you linked to was half a year ago, and it's painful to see just how wrong he was. The proof is all around us; take a look at the most recent blocks in the chain if you don't believe me. I work for a company that's a leader in bitcoin and blockchain technology. The transaction demand is getting too large, and the result isn't an uptick in the fee market, it will become too slow to be viable for businesses (and consumers) to transact. I deal with the fallout of small blocks everyday. The issue is real.
Thanks for pointing out Coinbase's position on BIP101. I didn't read that article previously. Realize that they're saying that it's the best proposal so far, not that they think it's the right way to go.
The major problem is that devs and experts see two different futures for bitcoin: the first camp wants to see it grow and possibly become more mainstream, and the other wants it to stay the fun little project that it has been. Are you in the latter camp?
Bitcoin has a scaling problem: we're already maxing out the 1mb block size and transactions are starting to take more and more time to confirm
This is only a problem if you believe you should never have to pay a transaction fee to reward miners doing the work of making Bitcoin possible.
No, I'm talking about having issues pushing transactions through that have had their fee rates already adjusted for load, currently around 22 satoshis per byte.
>> And the miners have flatly rejected it, out of concerns for Bitcoin XT's path of overcentralizing Bitcoin.
Take a look at this open letter from Sam Cole (CEO of KNC Miner) that came out today.
https://forum.bitcoin.com/bitc...
Bram Cohen might be smart about distributed systems (bittorrent), but he's no expert on financial markets. The post you linked to was half a year ago, and it's painful to see just how wrong he was. The proof is all around us; take a look at the most recent blocks in the chain if you don't believe me. I work for a company that's a leader in bitcoin and blockchain technology. The transaction demand is getting too large, and the result isn't an uptick in the fee market, it will become too slow to be viable for businesses (and consumers) to transact. I deal with the fallout of small blocks everyday. The issue is real.
Thanks for pointing out Coinbase's position on BIP101. I didn't read that article previously. Realize that they're saying that it's the best proposal so far, not that they think it's the right way to go.
The major problem is that devs and experts see two different futures for bitcoin: the first camp wants to see it grow and possibly become more mainstream, and the other wants it to stay the fun little project that it has been. Are you in the latter camp?
What does "a leader in bitcoin and blockchain technology" mean?
What does it mean to be "a leader in bitcoin" (or possibly "a leader in bitcoin technology")?
What does it mean to be "a leader in blockchain technology"?
Hint - it means fucking nothing.
Everything else you're whining about is simply horseshit. If businesses want to use Bitcoin and want their shit processed quickly they can pay a (very small) fee to do so. Bitcoin isn't a free lunch, and it's not supposed to be. Actual USERS of Bitcoin are perfectly fine waiting minutes to hours for a transaction because traditional payment processors can take days or weeks before things are truly settled and confirmed.
His prosecution was bullshit, and was absolutely not justified.
I don't know if he's still being harassed, but if he is, that's also bullshit. I don't doubt that the government would harass him.
I don't know if he's a piece of shit, but he has a right to be a piece of shit.
No -- hottest women _you'll_ ever see.
I work for BitGo.
Let me ask you, how many transactions do you think can fit in a single 1mb block? While the number of inputs per transaction is important, about how large do you think the average multisig transaction is compared to singlesig?
As I said before, transactions (with dynamic fees of course) are already seeing slow confirmations. You are correct that I can attach a rediculous fee amount of 100+ satoshis per byte and the chances of it being propagated faster is true. However, this is just today.
So, next week 200 satoshis/byte? Next month 500 satoshis per byte? Where do you draw the line? And if you don't know what the hell I'm talking about, then I suppose I wasted my time trying to explain it to you.
Your opinion is different, but you haven't said anything factually contrary to Mike Hearn. Does it really take 6-14 hours for the blockchain to clear? (I don't know, I'm not in the game.) My understanding is that Bitcoin is getting too popular for its size limits. My understanding is that under the libertarian free-market philosophy, this is simply a case of demand outstripping supply, and not a problem, since the price will increase until demand levels out. The other idea which Hearn et al are pursuing is to increase the supply. The drawback is that it will be incompatible with the old system. It sounds like, objectively, the new system is better, but the old guards will prefer the old system because they already have very significant assets invested in it.
Decentralization has always been a critical feature for Bitcoin, and it's really hard to do. The primary purpose for it is to create trust and eliminate control, though there's a secondary purpose which is that the math is designed in a way that if a cabal can control a large enough fraction of the mining capacity, they can rip off everybody else, which appears to have happened.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
At $380+ USD per BTC I'm sure I can grab enough of it low to just about pay off my car when the knuckleheads delude themselves that this sinking ship is in recovery. For all of you clowns who said that it's too late to make any money on Bitcoin, pay attention to the next few months. This is why you're wrong.
Bitcoins weren't designed to protect you from other people mishandling coins you've handed to them. They're a bearer instrument, not an ownership certificate, so if you're trusting somebody else to store more than transactional quantities of them for you, quasi-anonymously, well, good luck with that. The Federal Reserve and the banks that interact with it can decide to rip you off, but there's a lot of regulation designed to make that really hard (except at the public policy level, e.g. inflation ripping you off a bit, but that's different from your bank deciding to transfer all your money to themselves, or your gold/silver certificates suddenly becoming redeemable only for paper, or other things that lead to mass hysteria, dogs and cats living together, etc.)
Unregulated banks like Mt. Gox and its competition only had reputation to go on, so it was totally shocking to find that many of them got "robbed by hackers, oh, noes!" or otherwise absconded with the money. That's an ok risk to take if you're only trusting them with enough bitcoins to be the dollar-to-BTC changer or escrow on a small Silk-Road drug purchase; you were already taking a risk that your dope would never arrive anyway. But a transaction-handling business, if it's successful, is making enough money on fees that it's worth more to the proprietors to keep running it than to run away with the money; a money-storage business has a much higher potential for moral hazard.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
The parent post talks about "Rothschild banks". That's nutty conspiracy theory stuff.
Democracy Now! - your daily, uncensored, corporate-free
Ahhh.. Now I remember you. Thank you for revealing yourself. While the government likely went after you a bit hard, I find it hard to have sympathy for someone who's made a career out of trolling people.
Since you don't bother to register, you don't get to vote it down either.
Therefore, by the (faulty) logic you're using, you're just a cow with a keyboard - osu-neko (2604)
I don't understand. What is it about BitcoinXT that makes it more centralized. It sounds less centralized, with all miners being given a voice about future blockchain size limitations. Where is the centralization?
Another few bricks are placed on the wall..
I send and receive money all the time and do not have any of those problems. You must have been singled out for some reason.
The poster "weev" is a notorious internet troll that was imprisoned for hacking Apple a few years ago. Basically, he's a famous internet d-bag, and it's no surprise that he's now turned to trolling slashdot and spreading miss-information.
Their control over wire transfers between all countries with Rothschild banks is complete.
Yea, the minute someone brings up the Illuminati, I largely write them off...
The world is a bit bigger and more complex than you're suggesting. It isn't perfect, but there isn't a group of 10 people sitting around deciding it all.
Ooh, have they added another member to the group?
Do you have ESP?
Probably not related, but the current cost of electricity does not warrant the amount of energy needed to generate a bit coin.
When I followed the links in the referenced blog post, I've seen plenty of "emotionally charged rhetoric", but it was all coming from the anti-XT guys.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitco...
https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitco...
https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitco...
https://github.com/bitcoin-dot...
I am a complete outsider. Until today, I only had very vague knowledge of XT, and no understanding of the underlying problems. Having heard what either side had to say, I don't know who's right in a sense of what's better, but the XT guys are much more professional and level-headed about pitching their arguments.
Heck, even your post itself is a prime example of it. You keep repeating words like "shilling" and "spamming" over and over, in contexts that make them clear personal attacks on your opponents.
A currency that charges transaction fees is unattractive for general use, and completely unsuited to some functions. I can pull out my physical wallet and give somebody a twenty and there's no transaction fee. There's no transaction fee when I write a check (I do pay a fixed fee monthly to ensure that). Our fixed monthly bills are on a bank transfer system, and what's deducted from our accounts does make it to the recipient. Credit card transactions do have transaction fees, but we get extra benefits in addition to the money transfer.
One problem with Bitcoin is that it requires a good deal of computational power to carry out a transaction, whereas the checks and bank transfers above are fundamentally changing values in a database. A centralized money system will always be able to undercut it.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
A crash of bitcoin value would not affect merchants, open or black market. They don't really hold bitcoins, many never see nor touch a bitcoin. Their bitcoin payment processor automatically converts bitcoins to fiat for the merchant. Whether the fiat based price of a product or service is ten bitcoins one day and one hundred bitcoins the next does not matter, the payment processor is converting the fiat price to bitcoin in real time for each customer.
The drama is about to die down since a majority of the mining power has now agreed on a fork to 2MB blocks. Specifically see https://bitcoinclassic.com/ for details and maybe hop on the Slack if you want way too much detail.
You'd just buy a block of 1000 views at once, for some fraction of a Bitcoin.
But who would operate the network that sells blocks of 1000 views and pays sites? There used to be a network like that over ten years ago called Adult Check. But as far as I can gather from those articles about Adult Check that I could find, it got shut down when it couldn't afford to defend vicarious infringement lawsuits from the publisher of Perfect 10 magazine claiming that it aided and abetted the use of infringing copies of Perfect 10 photographs on sites that take Adult Check.
Or did you mean that each end user would have to buy a block of 1000 views from each individual site? Then it would become impractical for a user to view one page through a search result or shared link, as the user would have to pay for 999 views on each site that end up going to waste.
SJWs have always hated Bitcoin, because Bitcoin is inherently free market. e.g. Wikipedia kept deleting the Bitcoin article for years. So I am not surprised that this new Slashdot spreads FUD against it.
Running an XT node does not count towards network consensus. In fact, running a node doesn't count for shit. Only the miners have a voting share for scaling bitcoin.
The miners have no incentive to increase the block size because they want fees to increase, thereby increasing their reward per block.
Chinese miners have zero incentive to increase capacity on the network. Ultimately, this will devalue the blockchain until the miners give-up and let the nodes decide the fork.
I hope I said this without as much emotional baggage as you.
I agree that coinbase is a corporate stink-hole but scaling the network does not count in favor of the government spy cabal.
Ooh, have they added another member to the group?
Crap that was funny, you made me laugh out loud! :)
A year or two ago I was interested in finding out how these crypto-coin things worked, so I used one of my lab machines to mine Dogecoins. Mining real Bitcoins not only didn't make sense (ASICs had already taken over, and the machine I was using didn't have even a GPU that was good enough for mining), but also might have been considered to be a financial conflict of interest. Dogecoin didn't have that risk - I forget if I mined $.02 or $.20 worth in six months. It also meant that when I had to rebuild the machine and the Dogecoin wallet didn't restore successfully, I didn't feel too bad about losing all that money (though some Redditors didn't get tips in their tip jars after that.)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Early adopters took tremendous risk, there is millions of hours of effort and billions of dollars of investments supporting the bitcoin ecosystem.
Bullshit. They put some time in but the creators of bitcoin had no capital at risk at any time. The only thing they had was opportunity cost which in this case was pretty minimal. They wrote some software in their spare time and put it out there. There hasn't been "billions of dollars of investments" or anything close to it. They made a fictional currency piggybacking on existing internet infrastructure and computers and then convinced others it had value. It was a brilliant scheme in part because they managed it without putting any of their own capital at risk.
Now USERS of bitcoin have taken on considerable risk. Exchange rate risk, counterparty risk, volatility risk, technology risk, etc. But the founders took as close to no risk as is possible in the real world.
How can Bittcoin become a successful currency if it can't break a pretty meager Transaction Per Second barrier?
5 transactions per second should be enough for anybody....
http://harridanic.com
Bitcoin has the advantage of bypassing blockades by the mainstream payment methods (credit cards and PayPal). It also avoids the many restrictions the banking system imposes on anything. I've had my credit card blocked yet again by my bank for trying to but things online IBM places it doesn't expect me to. I'm talking about buying something innocuous like a Target gift card. OK, Target don't take Bitcoin, yet. I also note the value of Bitcoins has increased by over 50% this year. It's around US$410 / 1 BTC. Five years ago it was $16.
Only boring people are ever bored.
Bitcoin is useful for black markets because there's enough transaction volume to obscure the details of individual transactions, and buyers and sellers are willing to hold bitcoins long enough to aggregate or disaggregate them or at least hide them in the rest of the market, and there's enough volume that bitcoin buyers can get coins when they want them to buy commodities and commodity sellers can sell the coins they receive. If bitcoin's too chaotic to maintain a white/grey market, the black market can't piggyback on it.
If Bitcoin values change a few percent a day, that's ok for a recreational pharmaceutical market where the profit margin's high and the extra convenience drives more sales and the buyer and seller aren't nickel-and-diming tightly enough to have the bitcoin purchase followed by a bitcoin sale of the same amount a second later. If you're trying to use Bitcoin to replace Visa and Western Union by having lower transaction costs, that may not be good enough. If you're an online black-market merchant, you might want to aggregate bitcoins from a bunch of different transactions before selling them (or swapping them for different bitcoins.) If the market's not moving too fast, the financial risk of waiting is lower than the getting-caught risk of not waiting, and it reduces the visible patterns of always selling a bitcoin just after somebody bought one.
(Bitcoin, of course, is less anonymous than many people would like, and has other problems for a black market, because the coins are too big for many transactions; it's much more convenient to use integral-sized coins if you can, so wow, much dope, many Dogecoin!)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
The convenience of bitcoin vs. fiat currencies really was special, because it was a way to eliminate the risks of physically transferring money or transmitting it through heavily-tracked systems like banks and credit card companies. There's still some risk in shipment (much more for bulky smelly products than for small odorless ones), and of course it shifts much of the risk of defaulting on transactions to the buyer, but escrow services and markets like Silk Road reduced that risk to an acceptable level for many people.
Liquid detergent seemed like a really silly commodity to use for buying drugs, and I've always been skeptical about whether either the news articles about it were hoaxes or whether the reporters themselves got hoaxed. It's much harder to hide a transaction where you're handing somebody a case of detergent than one where you're shaking hands or giving somebody a cigarette and hiding some cash and dope in the process, and the transaction of trading the detergent for actual cash has got to be inconvenient, obvious, and hard to hide unless you've got an Amway distributorship or a friendly convenience store clerk who'll buy back the bottles to sell to the next customer. About the only advantage I can see to it is that cops really have no desire to rob dealers or customers by stealing detergent.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
World is much smaller than you'd think when it comes to powers that be. Politicians come and go, those influencing don't.
No, transactions in bitcoin are in no way obscured. The fundamental underpinning of bitcoin is the blockchain which is a public ledger of each and every transaction. The blockchain is the very sort of graph of relationships that the NSA sought to create with access to all phone company metadata. Its not the coin that is important, its the connection that was made from one account to another. (Dis)Aggregation does not change this.
Hot (looks)!= hot (temperature)
As a Canadian, I never hear about the constitutional right to be a piece of shit, but I believe you.
If nobody wants to buy bitcoins, how can the bitcoin payment processor convert bitcoins to fiat currency?
All I want is a secure system where it's easy to do anything I want. Is that too much to ask ~~ Randall Munroe
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If nobody wants to buy bitcoins, how can the bitcoin payment processor convert bitcoins to fiat currency?
Because demand going to zero and price going to $0 is a bit unlikely. Somebody will be willing to buy bitcoins at some price. They have a proven useful beyond speculation.
I can pull out my physical wallet and give somebody a twenty and there's no transaction fee.
Provided you're willing to pay a transaction fee to an airline to put yourself within arm's reach of the recipient.
There's no transaction fee when I write a check (I do pay a fixed fee monthly to ensure that).
Of course there is: the cost of printing the paper check, the cost of the envelope in which it is mailed, and the cost of the postage to deliver it to the recipient.
The poster "weev" is a notorious internet troll that was imprisoned for hacking Apple a few years ago.
How ought someone to report an accidentally discovered serious security vulnerability in a responsible manner if the owner of the vulnerable system refuses to listen to him?