Bitcoin Forum

Enjoy http://www.virgin.com/entrepreneur/the-virgin-podcast-charles-hoskinson love to hear your thoughts

Listened to this today! Brilliant!

Great work. Also your course on Udemy is very good! One of my projects under development is to help everyday people to enter the Bitcoin world and become more knowledgeable in the monetary system.

i think its really nice article  8)

thx, that was a good talk.

i heard you left ethereum...(good choice)...will you ever "come back" and work directly on a bitcoin project? that would be cool  8)

Yes he will! Charles is a smart dude, and I imagine that his underwear is stained with yellow 0s and brown 1s (if the Bathroom Code were in binary).

I did not know this podcast so this was my time first today I listened to it.I really enjoyed it and I will ckeck it for coming episodes.Really good work.

 Thanks for link,many interesting podcasts to lesson,great source

Virgin (media?) is one of the most innovatite companies out there... richard branson is... he will use bitcoin someday and will elevate it to heavens.

Where is his courses located on Udemy?  I'd personally just like to brush up on my knowledge and see if I fully understand everything that is going on in the current world of bitcoin.  Also, thanks for the link charles... I can see this as a very positive movement for bitcoin.  Hopefully from here on out we will see a steady growth.

Thanks for helping to spread the word of bitcoin. Hopefully all of the top billionaires will start investing.

That was an excellent and very comprehensive listen.

One of the reasons I started working on Altcoins is that I never was welcomed into the bitcoin core developer clique. I don't even get an invitation to DevCon. I'm on the outside and my ideas and contributions are mostly ignored by the elites in the space. So I build altcoins to experiment and test them in the wild. It's a lot more fun as you have a chance to start with a blank slate and the benefit of hindsight.

Think branson already does use it on a personal level judging from him in the media over last couple years. Its likely virgin will be lining up direct acceptance in near future.

 
  
I listened to your podcast; it's obvious you are extremely intelligent and an asset to any community that has you.  I have always said of Ethereum that the technological possibilities are incredible, but perhaps are ahead of their time.  As well, the distribution of such a token cannot be marred with concepts of pre-sales (otherwise the n-person pirate games seems to predict that subsequent players will reject joining this 'flawed' game).  In my humble opinion, a successful currency must have an open and fair launch where all players had equal chances to acquire tokens in an increasingly growing playing field.  Equal distribution isn't necessarily important, but equal opportunity for distribution is.

Let's look one example of this type of "game" in action: Magic the Gathering.  I haven't played in 20 years since I was a teenager, but I have watched it grow to a global phenomenon over my lifetime.  In fact, certain cards are worth immense amounts and its possible that two people (who both value those cards) could conduct entire transactions entirely in them.  Now admittedly, the distribution of powerful and valuable cards isn't uniform, but the key concept is that since its birth decades ago, new players perceive that everyone has been playing the same 'game'.  The insiders are only insiders because they got their earlier and worked harder, not because there was some line drawn in the sand between insiders and outsiders.  This perception of fairness amongst new potential players (as well as the network effect of being first to market) has kept this particular card game growing long after its many rivals.  
  
Also, I agree with you that despite network effects it might not be Bitcoin that eventually becomes the largest cryptocurrency.  I believe bitcoin will always carry value, but I think that a superior technology may overtake it for several reasons, one of which is a public blockchain cannot offer the fungibility necessary to achieve the hallowed dream of true "digital cash".  
  
You mentioned anon-coins briefly in your speech, but I notice you didn't mention Cryptonote or Monero.  I'm first of all interested in hearing your thoughts about Monero, and my secondary objective is to find out what it would take to convince you to wholeheartedly join into active Monero development with us.  
  
When I first heard about the new batch of "anon-coins" I didn't pay them much heed - I thought they may let bad guys do bad business better but a public blockchain was good enough for most of the world.  It wasn't until I really began to consider a.) the loss of fungibility associated with a public blockchain ("Russians are banned from accepting Bitcoins mined with US IP addresses!") and b.) the entire new class of applications, data structures, and 'games' enabled by a truly private blockchain that I became a believer (pretend you and I want to place a private bet that neither of us can back out of, but that only we know about so as to prevent the existence of that bet interfering with the outcome).  
  
I am certain you have either already arrived at these same conclusions or will with some reflection.  
  
It's out of professional courtesy that I don't include a bunch of Monero links (I'm sure you're aware of it and where to find it), but I will say this: you say that the bitcoin developers never "let you in", and I heard your complaints about the current governance.  I would say that currently Bitcoin is on a dire collision course with an iceberg of fiat, while Monero is still in the formative stages of its network and leadership.  The technical knowledge and wisdom of someone like yourself would be welcomed in the community, and as many important people have said - not since the release of the original bitcoin have they seen a project like this.  
  
I think that it's becoming increasingly clear that this is the next big cryptocurrency, and potentially the successor/complement to bitcoin itself.  As a result, I think that all great developers will eventually be forced on board purely due to financial incentives.  It would be nice to have you join this early, while the inevitable financial incentives are less clear, so you can help us shape them.  
  

One of the best podcasts to come out in a long time! It's very nice to listen to your talk. I hope to hear more

A few things came to mind

1) I think you might underestimate the use case for having a non governmental currency in the 1st world. Africans sure need it too, but I think a harbor away from the terrible fiscal policy in the west will be the number one driving force for adoption.

2) I also don't think that adopters from a random third world country will have any problems with the value going in to the chain where most of the early adopters are from a developed country. Well, the might mind on a pure intellectual level, but each user will pick the chain that gives them the most economic value and it's quite obvious that it will be the biggest chain.

Paul Sztorc, the inventor of truthcoin makes a good case for it in this blog post http://www.truthcoin.info/blog/basics/ and aslo Daniel Krawisz in his post http://nakamotoinstitute.org/mempool/the-coming-demise-of-altcoins/#selection-13.7-13.21 and the conclusions are:



Just because someone doesn't want people in already privileged positions (when compared to the rest of the world) to make money isn't an argument enough to overcome the economic incentives of placing your value in the largest blockchain

3) I could't find "deconstructing currencies" by Michael Mainelli(?). Please point me in the right direction if that is possible!


4) Regarding the paper of energy consumption of BTC vs Ireland. https://karlodwyer.github.io/publications/pdf/bitcoin_KJOD_2014.pdf



I think it's probably much closer to the lower end here. They include regular FPGA/block erupters/ at the high end and state of the art hardware at the low end and given the hash power distribution of the network it's not reasonable to assume that the absolute majority of the network hashrate come from the state of the art hardware that is the most energy efficient. So the figure of total power used will probably be in the very low end of their assumption and much lower than the total usage of power in Ireland.

Bitcoin's "competitive edge" is decentralization.  EG, even if BillGates made NeuCoin's market cap $50 billion, it still wouldn't offer Bitcoin's USP(s).

Altcoins do not need to reproduce BTC's market cap in its entirety to begin absorbing marginal cases driven off the Holy Blockchain by fee increases.  That's not how the substitution effect (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Substitution_effect) works.

Yep listened to it again today! I will be forwarding this on for a few people I know to listen to.

I wonder how feasible it would be to have Bitcoin as the primary currency, and have Alt coins for different functions ... Example : Use X-coin for Smart contracts and Y-Coin for remmittance etc. etc.. and then have

these coins be interchangeable with Bitcoin, like side-chains. Why do we need to have one Blockchain doing all these functions and getting bloated? I think that is more or less what he meant in the part where he

discussed side-chains, right? If a specific Alt coin is better suited and geared towards a specific application, rather use that... Why does Bitcoin need to do all of it? Break it up into smaller pieces with specialized

functions, and have developers for each function.  ???

Great read.

I really believe the future of cryptos will be tied to the fact that we wiil always have one coin to rule them all, while the big market of hundreds of other altcoins will work as fine tunning for the ruling coin. Other than that, the blockchain technology will be used in a lot of applications in the future.

Here's your link http://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-events/taking-modern-money-apart

As for energy consumption, there are two more things to mention. First, it will always increase with the increase of market cap as there is excess value to capture. Second, no one is accounting for the embedded energy costs incumbent to the manufacturing and shipping of ASICs, which is non-trivial.

As for bitcoin maximalism, I do no agree with Paul's arguments. If they were valid then all countries would use the same currency. Altcoins do not leak value from a mainchain, they add new robustness to the ecosystem and thus bring in more people. Value comes from people. It's not a magical intrinsic property.

Thank you for the link!

Regarding every country having the same currency. Well, that would probably by optimal for the free market, would it not? And it would also be the likely outcome if you were free to use any currency you wanted in your region? The only reason to have your own state currency is to be able to centrally control it. That's why you are legally forced to pay taxes in your local currency and also forced to accept it as payment for debts.

I'm hard pressed to find an argument why any individual citizen would benefit from having a specialazied currency that is only bound to a certain geographical region.

This is a classic case of the resiliency benefits of diversity versus the efficiency gains of standardization. When one adopts a single paradigm, you can optimize around it and usually have a lot more speed in building things on top of the standard; however, mistakes, edge cases, black swains and other such things cause cascading failure. I would highly recommend reading this essay: https://idcubed.org/chapter-7-complementary-currencies-necessary-financial-stability-scientific-evidence/ I do enjoy systems theory and feel its heavily underused in economics.

I think for the sake of stability and robustness the focus should be on digitizing all notions of value as tokens and then making the flow between them easy. Then we can talk about having a universal wallet that has allocations of tokens representing various stores of value and you get to decide the composition. This effort would result in basically total monetary freedom and a free market of paradigms. The best system ought to experience the highest level of adoption and use. The point is that we can now choose where before it was impossible to even consider.

look how many different car types / mfg's there are.

"Machines will be arbitrating in court"

I've always said that the blockchain has opened the doors to the second machine age. Complete machine autonomy is now not only possible, but a reality

Great read ;)

Almost all cryptocurrencies are becoming pretty in contact with each other. They're really becoming in competition but Bitcoin has always been on top.

yes that's true,no doubt,i just wonder how can cryptocurrencies defend from bankrupt and always have member or people who love their crypto,this is what bitcoin dont do,bitcoin dont need it i think.

The digitization of identity will get revved up over the next two to five years. As per the article Charles was a founder of two of the most important companies in the bitcoin space – Ethereum and Bitshares. He is now CEO of fintech start-up Input-Output, as well as being one of the most articulate people in the world on the subject of bitcoin and bitcoin tech.

You may have to listen to his interview twice to take it all in.