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Bitcoin's Nightmare Scenario Has Come To Pass
HughPickens.com writes: Ben Popper writes at The Verge that bitcoin's nightmare scenario has come to pass as the bitcoin network reached its capacity, causing transactions around the world to be massively delayed, and in some cases to fail completely. The average time to confirm a transaction has ballooned from 10 minutes to 43 minutes. Users are left confused and shops that once accepted Bitcoin are dropping out. For those who want the Bitcoin system to continue to grow and thrive, this is troubling. Merchants can't rely on digital transactions that can take minutes or hours to validate. A number of prominent voices in the Bitcoin community have been warning over the past year that the system needed to make fundamental changes to its core software code to avoid being overwhelmed by the continued growth of Bitcoin transactions. A schism has developed between the team in charge of the original codebase for Bitcoin, known as Core, and a rival faction pushing its own version of that open source code with a block size increase added in, known as Classic. "Many in the US Bitcoin community had hoped that hitting this crisis point — a network maxed out, transactions faltering — would result in closure, with miners quickly moving to adopt whichever chain proved more valuable to their economic interests," says Popper. "But so far the debate is dragging on without one side claiming a clear victory, leaving tens of thousands of consumer transactions stranded in limbo."
It's all a scam anyway.
This is why I don't rely on fan-currency.
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
We do not care about Bitcoin. If we ever have another Bitcoin story it will be too soon.
I don't know if there's more backstory, but perhaps users have been slow to adopt because "Classic" sounds like what you'd call an older and (in the usual context) more limited option?
If I'm developing a new technology with potentially millions of $USD riding on its availability and adoption, I'm not going to call it "Classic." "NextGen," or "Enhanced," or even "CC" for Corrected Chain? This sounds less like the free market and more like terrible marketing.
Sure but the gold standard did not prevent economic crashes, eg in the 30s, and coming off the standard at that time helped. And there's a need to change the amount in circulation up and down to match what's going on in the economy.
As an aside, I rather think that using the vast quantities of energy to keep mining is a bad use of resources. At a time we're trying to be more efficient, creating a system that deliberately inefficient seems is dumb.
That's sort of the point. QE marginally benefitted the lay, somewhat benefited those with investments, but the 1% have grown their assets to 40% with these tools.
Congrats.
Who exactly do you think would be running the gold mine?
Do you really think that somehow, getting rid of fiat currency will also somehow invalidate the old rule of "it takes money to make money?"
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
Gold is crap as money. Good money needs to be a medium of exchange, store of value, and unit of account. It fails at all three of these. No one accepts gold as payment - we've moved on to other technologies. No one uses gold as a unit of account - considering its value can literally double (or fall in half) in the space of 1 calendar year, it'd make business wildly unpredictable. (Just imagine... that mortgage you got denominated in gold? One year later you owe twice the value of the house.) The only thing it sort of works for is being a store of value - it's deficient there, due to its volatility, but the volatility is different than other asset classes' volatility, so works as a hedge against a crisis. It's more insurance than it is money.
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
Paper money only has value because enough people think it does. People will be willing to give you things of tangible value (goods and services) in exchange for paper money and tin coin because they have confidence they can turn around and trade it for more goods and services from someone else at a later date.
Gold only has value because enough people think it does. Most people, however, will NOT be willing to accept gold in exchange for goods and services. In all but a handful of special cases you'll have to first convert that gold to an agreed upon currency first, possibly via some process that certifies the quantity and purity of the gold first.
Both paper money and gold are fiat currencies in this way: They have little or no intrinsic value, but instead serve as proxy of value. It's traded based on a level of trust that the per-unit-value will remain relatively stable (or increase) in the time it takes to turn around and trade it to someone else.
All of this is true for Cryptocurrencies as well. It has value because people want it, not because it's intrinsically valuable. If nobody wants it or is willing to accept it in trade, then it's worthless. You can't even burn it for warmth like paper money or make decorations and tableware out of it like you can with gold... it is absolutely devoid of intrinsic value.
=Smidge=
I don't recall ever having a check accepted where I didn't have to show ID. Furthermore, unless it was forgery, the check itself identifies who wrote it, and who is responsble for the debt. None of that is true with bitcoin. In fact, that seems to be the main selling point of bitcoin.
Credit cards take a while to clear too - - chargebacks can be up to 6 months later. There's absolutely no guarantee that you will actually have the money until that six month period is past. Bitcoin actually improves the situation tremendously. The odds of a bitcoin double-spend are significantly lower than the odds of a credit card chargeback. Especially within wallet systems - say Mycelium to Mycelium - nobody in the peer-to-peer economy is worried at all about getting their money. It's something the established bankers make up to create fear.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
> The blockchain is around 80 GB now (including the index), and growing by ~100 MB per day. Larger blocks will only make that worse, and will almost certainly knock yet more nodes offline.
0.12.0 has pruning that drops the disk requirements back down to less than 10 gigs.
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
This problem is self-correcting.
If there's a drop in the computational power of the network such that blocks are mined less frequently, then the difficulty drops and blocks are mined more frequently.
If people are complaining (again) about not being able to fit a ton of tiny transactions into a block without paying a fee to ensure prompt delivery, then I'll say (again):
1: Pay a transaction fee
2: Stop shitting around a bunch of tiny transactions
3: Help out and be a miner yourself
4: This is all by design - the end game scenario for BTC is that mining rewards end and all incentive is from transaction fees
If this continues and people don't recognize 1-4 above, idiots will stop using Bitcoin for a bunch of tiny transactions and the problem will correct itself. You don't need to pay .000000001 BTC every time you visit a page on a BTC funded site. You need to pay 000001 BTC to get a credit of 1000 page visits. Bitcoin isn't for massive amounts of microtransactions any more than a traditional bank is. If you want it to do that, then pay the fee (which could be a significant percentage of your microtransaction).