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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! ...
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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.
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.
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.
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.
Actually not. Bitcoin's losing perceived legitimacy just brings down the whole concept with it.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
But the Slashdot postings about Bitcoin will probably continue forever.
#DeleteChrome
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.
That seems to be BTC's biggest weakness. Want to make sure you are not going to be a victim of double-spending? The entire BTC blockchain must be downloaded, and as of earlier this month, that is 40.8 gigs. Taking shortcuts here, or trusting a third party to just vet a subset, might just cause another Mt. Gox.
No, the grandparent is right ... when you make an assumption that everybody will behave according to the rules because it's the Right Thing to Do, you are fundamentally denying reality, human nature, and the fact that if even only a tiny amount of people decide they have no interest in Doing The Right Thing then the entire thing can (and will) fall apart.
That's why we have police, prisons, armies, and all sorts of things.
Because the simple reality is, if you are telling yourself that everything will be OK because people will Do the Right Thing ... then things are not going to be OK.
Society is a thin veneer trying to keep us all on the same track. But pretending there isn't an underlying element of greedy, vicious, selfish bastards is just self delusion.
Stop pretending like human nature is some truly enlightened thing, and that we're past our baser instincts. We never will be that. And if we ever were that, we'd fall prey to the first person born who still was.
I have great optimism and hope for humanity. But at the level of individual humans, I have no such illusions.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
It was obvious from the start that it would never last. Anyone still investing in bitcoin is a sucker.
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.
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.
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.
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
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".
And aspirational goals are fine ... but they will never fix human nature.
Hoping to make a better world is fine. Stupidly believing your system will be adhered to despite human nature is delusional.
The only way to do this kind of thing is to find a system which works without hoping human nature suddenly changes to adhere to your idea. Because that won't work.
If any system ever says "and all the humans will act thusly", it's full of shit -- in their extreme forms, Capitalism and Communism both make stupid assumptions about human nature which are utterly unfounded in reality. Which means neither can ever work as promised in all cases.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
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.
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.
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.
And aspirational goals are fine ... but they will never fix human nature.
I don't think you know what the word "aspire" means. Otherwise you wouldn't have written, "and all the humans will act thusly".
The point of Churches, patriotic songs and "the Protestant Work Ethic" was to try to change behavior, and set goals that people should attempt to attain. And why Church is every week, instead of foolishness like a one-off D.A.R.E. campaign.
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
Sign. As much of an atheist anti-religious person that I am I have to say one thing about the church: It gives society some kind of anchor. Morally and, in the case of the catholic church in Latin America, it acts as a social safety net.
I can't shake the feeling that the secularisation of society has left a large hole somewhere.
The dangers of excessive individualism are nothing compared to the oppressiveness of excessive collectivism
It's primary market is people that don't want government influence over their transactions.
How much influence does the PRC government have over the two Chinese groups that control the majority of mining power?
If it has been shown that Bitcoin does not scale, and a fork would scale, then why is Bitcoin superior to said fork?
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.
>> 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?
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.
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.
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