Bitcoin Forum

http://www.trustnodes.com/2017/05/21/ethereum-now-secure-public-blockchain-overtaking-bitcoin

This is VERY relevant to the scaling debate. All the arguments of "Bitcoin doesn't need to be a payment network because it will be the digital gold of crypto with the highest security" went right out the window.

At least bitcoin is immutable and simple and no one is calling for complicated new transaction types, certainly not with kludgey soft forks...oh wait.. /S

maybe it is just me but i don't consider a centralized altcoin with a very high chance of another exploit and yet another hard fork (for the 5th or 6th time) as a safe thing!

and as the worst part is, the developers admit ethereum is not even a currency! how people keep comparing it with bitcoin is beyond me!

oh, and i forgot to mention the 70-75 million ether ICO ::)

XEM is what this individual meant to say. Secure. Highly scalable. Development ongoing. Track record of dependability. Lowish fees (though they need to lower them more at this point)

I consider ETH as just a good platform to deploy dapps and not as currency like bitcoin. We should not compare bitcoin and ETH because one was developed for financial transactions while another one to develop blockchain based apps (decentralized apps).

Has anyone ever used Ethereum to pay for anything?

So you are trying to tell us that something which isn't being used as a payment network is going to overtake Bitcoin because Bitcoin is a poor payment network.

You better stick to begging favors from your pool operator overlords, jonald.

I don't think the blockchain security matters all that much if the actual programming leaves some gaping holes. I wouldn't pretend to know the slightest thing about Ethereum's innards but the complexity must leave some openings waiting to be exploited.

It does demonstrate the benefit of GPU mining though. It's had many more nodes for quite some time.

ETH is:

-Not supposed to be a currency, just a token for app development/smart contract systems
-Heavily centralised in development
-Capable of several hard forks, each of which screws with fundamental aspects of it and could change the supply, which would mean that it's not immutable as a store of value

But darknet merchants have accepted ETH as a payment method starting this month I think.

We all remember how price of Bitcoin was skyrocketed after it started to use at Silkroad market

Ethereum is definitely a unique crypto to say the least, as in it's not used like how Bitcoin is, and is more of just a speculative vessel for things like contracts and other potential application designs. It doesn't really make sense as to why it has as high of a market cap as it does, especially considering it is on the backburner a lot of the time when it comes to merchants.
I'm interested as to the market behavior, but I'm not going to start calling BTC or ETH anything yet.

NO, that only means your sources are either wrong or lying to pump the coin some more because of hype.
darknet merchants have always been using bitcoin for the most part and when they want to make things more secure they go to Monero which offers real anonymity. there is absolutely no reason for using another altcoin that doesn't even offer that!

No, it's not

Ethereum is still not widely accepted as its market size is $13,011,056,495 while bitcoin has a market size of $33,755,081,848. The $10000 million difference itself proves how strong bitcoin is in the market and there are several brands accepting bitcoins as their payment mode. ETH is yet unknown with barely few websites converting it into fiat. It's mainly altcoins that use ETH as an investment. Only benefit for me is that transactions get confirmed very fast with a low fee.

 

Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't ETH kind of a centralized altcoin? Also, the way I see it, ETH is a good platform to build dapps and other projects on due to its nature but as a currency like bitcoin, it would somehow struggle since there aren't that much stores/establishments that accept it as a payment option to begin with.

"Darknet merchants" (of which there are many who don't all do the same thing, by the way) can accept whatever coins they want, and can accept several different currencies at once provided that they don't think any of them will compromise their privacy.

It's hard to underestimate how much of the Bitcoin and altcoin markets are actually made up of darknet markets.

In reality it's not very much, and it'll be even less for Ether when it's not even meant to be a currency in its own right.

Doesn't matter what it's intended to be. What matters is how people choose to use it.

The most secure yet hacked just after it made appearance...

Everybody's talking about eth's smart contracts and how it differs from bitcoin yet i never ever heard somebody who made use of that feature. Ethereum offers us bunch of shiny shit which won't ever find use in real life.

So, people don't use it as a currency... People don't use its smart contracts... Then what good is it? I'll tell you.

It is a pump&dump centralized scamcoin. 8)

How people choose to use it is the same way that people have (mostly) chosen to use Bitcoin so far - as a speculative investment.  This is obvious since Ether is more convenient for transactions right now but the Bitcoin market is much bigger and Bitcoin is used more.  

Bitcoin's tech is absolutely revolutionary and creates a new world for currency, while Ethereum's system is a great development for app technology, but this doesn't have to instantly translate into usage as this will take a long time.

To pretend that Ether is naturally better as a currency wouldn't really be true, since as long as Bitcoin's fees are low relative to fiat (which they will be when SegWit happens) people will keep Ether to its real purpose.  Ether shows a big development in decentralised applications and eventually it will be used mostly for that, in the same way that eventually Bitcoin will be used more as a currency.

A Blockchain is just as secure as the track record it had and I think Bitcoin had a much better track record than Ethereum. Bitcoin and it's future

is also based on how strong the consensus model is working and as we have seen the consensus model working with the scaling debate. Nobody

can quickly add a few changes as it suites them and I doubt if the same can be said about Ethereum.  :P

I think more people would regard that a bonus than they're willing to admit. It's cool to say you love decentralisation until it starts to impact on you, then you'll fall into the arms of the nearest smooth talker who'll slide your panties off and centralise you before you can hit your rape alarm.

Decentralisation is an inconvenience, commitment and long game that eventually pays off in spades when you sit back and think about it. Most people aren't strategic or disciplined enough to realise that.

1) This article is nonsense and written by an ETH bagholder.
2) The starter of this thread is a BU shill, constantly claiming he's in support of Bitcoin but constantly spreading fake altcoin news.

Zero relevance as the comparison is nonsensical.

More bullshit from the BU shill. ETH is a mutable and highly centralized chain. It is everything but digital gold.

As long as we get rid of the mining cartels and incompetent, high school level developers such as the BU team, Bitcoin will be fine. FYI: Segwit is only complicated if your intelligence and knowledge-subset is under that of an average human.

Baumgartner says bingo.  Plus I've always thought that vitalik said it wasn't a currency based on legal advice more than anything.  I think how well it ends up doing as a currency will depend on how smooth the transition to PoS goes.

oh so NOW you say being a payment network is important.

What happened to your digital gold theory?

OP still BUs flavor of the month pathetic shill. You must make jihan and roger so proud.

Bullshit. Bitcoin does both and was designed for both. RSK releases next month.

I think the great thing about true decentralization is that it implies immutability.  But immutability also means that the design is what it is, and no evolution can happen.  As such, if the initial design has serious flaws, the system locks them in as long as it is truly decentralized.
One could even say that as no system that cannot evolve, will remain competitive, decentralized systems are doomed to centralize or to disappear, competed away by more advanced versions.

My own opinion of a true crypto currency is that it is what it is when the white paper is laid down, and will then live its life without changing a iota to that white paper, until it gets outdated, and dies.  Anything of which the rules can be modified, is by definition centralized because a central entity could decide upon the modification, and could get the collusion of a majority over it.

But every PoS chain is gazillion times more secure than any PoW chain in any case, because they are secured by cryptographic signatures which are essentially unbreakable, while a PoW chain just needs the same amount of work as the good guys, to be broken.
Bitcoin's PoW security is of the order of 70 bits at this moment, with all the electricity and hardware wasted on it ; if you use a simple ECDS scheme with a key of 256 bits (like the private keys in bitcoin), then your smart phone can calculate it, and it has 128 bit security, in other words, the effort needed to break the bitcoin block chain is 2^58 ~ 1 000 000 000 000 000 000 times less than the effort needed to break a PoS chain.

No wonder, because that effort has been delivered (to make the chain).  While nobody has ever broken one single ECDS.

I disagree.  A decentralised system like Bitcoin is similar to a democracy in that users can signal support for any changes that they want. 

You could look at it like proportional representation except each "party" is a mining pool, and the mining pool have a naturally created threshold for being relevant which is a high enough percentage of the hashrate for people to mine there. 

Even in most major PR-based democracies, the country ends up being a collection of just a few different parties with different proposals, often claiming to have the same goals while having different ways to get there.  Eventually either a majority Parliament is formed in these democracies, or there are problems which eventually have to result in a coalition (a compromise or a chain split in Bitcoin's case).

Bitcoin is very comparable to these democracies and can therefore change while still, in theory, being decentralised.

Huh? I elaborated on your argument. I made none of my own. Are you losing it man?

My digital gold theory? I don't know what you are talking about.

My opinion is that Bitcoin excels at censorship-proof transactions and as a seize-proof store of value and it doesn't make sense to use it when censorship or seizure isn't a concern.

Gold is poor at both of those things due to it's physical nature (which all the gold bugs are quick to claim as one of it's most important properties).

What are people buying with ETH though? I don't see it used on almost anywhere. It really needs to expand first. I assume the price increase will help people more wanting to accept it.

If bitcoin was truly decentralized, we would not have the scaling issue. 1 bitcoin should equal 1 vote not hashing power.

Ethereum has almost no real world usage, and their wallet is buggy, I myself installed it and could not use no matter what, the thing just refused to sync.
No way that Ethereum can overtake Bitcoin, even considering only the end user stuff and not the protocol itself, unless better software is developed.

For me it looks like a bubble, in the best case, in the worst a scam

Eth is in a massive bubble. A few people have gotten rich or soon to be rich, the other 99% will be devastated when it pops. Eth has nothing on Bitcoin and never will.

When that bubble pops and the losers go whining to their governments for relief, eth is done, Buterin will have the book thrown at him and will be buried under the prison as an example to everyone else who thinks they can create their own money and walk around willy-nilly bragging about. Its only a matter of time before world governments put the smackdown on shitcoins and their creators. Only Bitcoin will stand in the end.

If you can get in on a shitcoin pump at the start and can get out before the crash, more power to you. If you think these shitcoins have long term viability, good luck bagholders, you've been warned.

Exactly but currently they are choosing more ETH than BTC due to SM... Moreover the Ethereum Brand is related to Dapp and not currency but users need ETH to use the service. May be it's more easy to introduce payment with ETH than BTC.

Since bitcoin is having problem in the blockchain because of so many transaction and the increasing numbers of bitcoin users the transaction becoming slower and having a lot of errors so ethereum is an alternative coins so i guess we can use it as a currency too like what we do in bitcoin i guess it has the most potential in the market.

I think Ethereum is a successful project and becoming more valuable as a  token.

But it isn't as 'safe' as the pure monetary blockchains as a store of value IMO.

It has value because of the meta applications and tokens it carries and they are basically floating value. If a Dapp-based decentralised business model decides it wants to migrate to 'the latest and greatest smart contract chain', all it has to do is offer its holders a one-to-one exchange for the token from a new chain.

That makes these smart contract chains very volatile as stores of value compared to Bitcoin, Litecoin, Dash, XMR, Peercoin etc.

They go up fast. But they can be dropped like a hot brick when suits. Meanwhile, the monetary chains have their value and token co-incident. That gives them far more longevity and robustness as a store of value.

Well, the basic tenet of decentralized systems is that in principle, the entities never collude with majority.  For instance, if a majority of users support the change to reverse part of the block chain, on the proposition of a single entity (every proposition has always to come from a single entity), then we can say that this majority "applied a 51% attack" on the system.

Now, I perfectly well agree that this is a possible dynamics of the system, but I would think that from the moment that a majority colludes over ANYTHING else but "sticking to the rules", it is centralized in a way.  To me, decentralization means "no collusion of any significance between entities". 

That said, you are right that one could have a more sophisticated system, in which the basic rule set allows one to propose new rules (as "modules of code"), to be sent by just anybody, and "voted" over by those that make the consensus (say, miners if PoW, or whatever system), automatically.  As such, there is no "leadership by devs".  There can be an automatic code activation mechanism if X% of the last consensus decisions were positive towards this module, in the same way as the 95% rule in bitcoin for soft forks.

But if such system isn't in place, then the only way to be able to modify anything, is by obtaining a collusion of a majority, which is the same thing as a 51% attack, defining the end of decentralization, in my eyes.


Yes, but democracy is centralized, and "obtaining majority by coalition" is exactly what "majority collusion and cartel formation" is about, and which decentralization was supposed to avoid.


I agree with you that most initially decentralized systems have "economies of scale" in them that lead to centralization, and cartel formation.  Party formation is such a form of centralization of initially decentralized democracy, where each representative was supposed to NOT TO COLLUDE with others in a significant way, but ends up doing so, because it is the way to win elections: to form cartels that have economies of scale in winning votes. 


Well, in my book, that's a centralized system, because there is collusion between entities.  Decentralized means, no significant collusion between entities.  Because *if* you think that democratic systems are decentralized, then you should also conclude that all their decisions are decentralized decisions, and that, for instance, the financial system is sound too, which makes crypto ridiculous: after all, a decentralized, democratic system decided upon how payment should ideally happen.  So why start another system ?