Bitcoin Forum

I've heard that phrase thousands of times, and I've thought about it enough to be sure I don't agree.
Bitcoin is necessary for the blockchain to exist, without the incentive, there are no miners and there is no network to rely on.
If you assert that the blockchain will pervade, you necessarily imply bitcoin as a currency will too.

What do you think?

That doesn't make a statement true.

Don't quite really get the gist of statement. Is it that you meant to imply the word prevail? I would say blockchain is core to everything. The public ledger is what makes bitcoin unique. However blockchain technology can be utilized by any other crytocurrency or in other words even if bitcoin fails other altcoins utilizing the blockchain will continue on.

I would say here that blockchain is necessary for bitcoin to exist but not the other way round

Yeah.. I think so too.. Bitcoin exchanges will also stay longer than bitcoin.

These ppl think they can just copy the source code and boom.... there go their "blockchain" technology.

Bitcoin is what it is today because of its network. Without it, its not useful or secure. Also in reverse, the incentive ecosystem makes todays price.
 

Post quotes. I want to know who is saying this.

This idiot wrote a book  (http://www.amazon.com/BitCon-Naked-Truth-About-Bitcoin-ebook/dp/B00NUIUQ3A)basically saying this.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GYJdOiLqSxE


I can't believe he don't understand that the blockchain can't work without the coin acting as an incentive to process and secure the network. This is the fucking basic.

Am I right to assume that mentioning other blockchains that run on code written from scratch would look out of place here and I shouldn't bother with bringing that up? )

Bitcoin is the fuel that runs the whole system.

No that would be a stupid thing to even think.

Yeah, I figured as much :)

The author thinks a blockchain is just a database sitting on a server.

Well, he's right. I would add, the more servers it sits on - the blockchainer it is :)

Perhaps he meant blockchain technology, as-in a similar kind of system that takes advantage of a blockchain as a public ledger.

Blockchain technology is a solution to trust a database without trusting anyone in particular. Cryptos ride on that system with the ledger as database. Blockchain technology is revolutionary concept, it can be used on any public data. So yes, blockchain technology will prevail and bitcoin may not, cos currency is only one of the many uses of a blockchain.

You do realize that each server has a different database, right? The part that makes that makes each block special is the process that builds the chain. So no, it's not a database, it's thousands or millions of databases. His argument is like saying the internet is a BBS.

I have a similar view.
I am pretty sure, blockchain technology will be a big part in future technologies, but I am not sure if bitcoin will survive.
Speaking of incentives to mine: There could just be some servers around the world, which get normally paid to maintain their service. Sure, that takes away the decentralization, but decentralization isn't the only pro of blockchain technology, e.g. blockchain technology is also about not being able to manipulate data, that was generated in the past.

I heard an interview about factom the other day, which shows such a possibility.

http://letstalkbitcoin.com/blog/post/the-bitcoin-game-2-factom
http://www.factom.org/

Wow.

Check out a recent video by CNNmoney:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GYJdOiLqSxE

"Author Jeffrey Robinson tells Richard Quest that virtual currency is the future, but bitcoin is a thing of the past."

He's probably right about estimating the number of bitcoin users - "250k wallets" figure is much closer to the real number of bitcoin users (by my estimates 50k-200k real people behind all bitcoin wallets) than the 500k-2m number often quoted.

It's likely he's right about "virtual currency is the future".

However, those two ideas are not much of a revelation, many people could do the same, are there more videos of him where he actually tries to predict something more specific?

It doesn't have to be a coin.
If you are thinking of a blockchain, just as part of a virtual currency, you obviously don't have much imagination.
There are already enough projects out there with a blockchain, that doesn't include coins.

Such as? I have never come across one of them? Maybe NXT (they have coins, no?)

I already linked one in my first post in this thread.
http://www.factom.org/

or check out Ehtereum
https://www.ethereum.org/

I heard about projects, where they want to make a chat on a blockchain. Lets talk Bitcoin uses Tokens to e.g. have access to a part of the forum(your account is linked to a wallet, if the wallet has that token you can use the forum).
I am not sure, if this ideas will work out(or if they are good ones), but there are people out there trying this stuff.

I am all for centralized money... for you. All of your examples use coins. By all means buy them with your money. I'll hodl bitcoins tyvm.

This projects don't just use a blockchain for storing transactions. If you are to stupid to understand that, I can't help you.

Neither does bitcoin. That's why most of them use bitcoins in some fashion.

I compare it with bittorrent.
You see that popular files are being shared, but older files are not because there is no incentive to share longer term.
The decentralized system however works perfectly fine.
Bitcoin is different to bittorrent because there is money involved. People see bitcoin tokens as money (nobody forced them) so there will be incentive to share and mine bitcoins.
If there was no value involved in bitcoin the network would have died long ago.

Just my two satoshis

I think I've heard the phrase "oh thank god" about a million times, it still doesn't make me believe in an invisible sky-man.

Bitcoin isn't going anywhere in our lifetimes.

Usually the ones that say this are Keynesians...

They like the technology...but hate money with a limited supply.

They want a blockchain technology where the exchange rate can be changed by a central authority. Pretty much...they want the fancy new technology but they want to be able to use it like the dollar.

I still hope bitcoin will succeed like everyone else's hope.

Without incentive, the blockchain is useless, without any one adding hash power into the network, the network will be attacked easily and you can never trust the transaction of large amount of value with it

Blockchain is basically a distributed ledger that is maintained
in decentralized and trustless fashion. A company could potentially
save by doing their accounting on a chain.

Some of the processing power could come
from the employees machines - reward tokens mined could
be turned to company options for instance.

(Of course that would make the company finances transparent,
which might not be a desirable outcome. )

Bitcoin and it's blockchain are inseparable. You can't have one without the other.

Here's the speech:

Bitcoin itself had in the past been vulnerable to very similar things that you now see happen with altcoins these days, but fortunately THAT WINDOW IS NOW CLOSED.

Part of the definition of the bitcoin protocol includes the checking of the proof of work put into various block chains, and then choosing the one with the most work. Bitcoin has more proof-of-work in its blockchain than any other competing cryptocurrency, and so by definition it must be the one chosen, and all others ignored.

Altcoins are all very similar to Bitcoin: there is a block chain to store transactions, a consensus mechanism to build the block chain, and a cryptographic protocol to register transactions. Some prominent examples are PPCoin, Primecoin, Litecoin, and Freicoin.

Some altcoins incorporate interesting new ideas, but there is an essential feature of Bitcoin which they all lack. It is not a matter of its technology, but rather of history and community. Quite simply, a medium of exchange that is more widely accepted on the market is more useful than one which is not. This is known as the network effect. An initial imbalance between two nearly equal media of exchange will benefit whichever is more widely accepted until a single one overwhelms the rest. There is no limit to this effect: ultimately one would always expect a single currency to overcome all its competitors.

Because it was started earlier and has had a greater opportunity to grow and attract users, Bitcoin has a market larger by a wide margin than all the markets of all the altcoins put together, and this makes it vastly more useful as a currency. To defeat Bitcoin, an altcoin would require not just superior technology, but such vastly superior technology as to be an advance over Bitcoin comparable to the advance Bitcoin represents over fiat currency. Furthermore, a truly great innovation would much better serve people by being incorporated into future versions of Bitcoin rather than by requiring them to switch to something else. Indeed, the people who have proposed new ideas that are actually good, such as Zerocoin and mini-blockchain, did not develop their own currencies around them, but have simply described their usefulness as features.

The Bitcoin community is not just overwhelmingly larger but of overwhelmingly better quality as well. Bitcoin is surrounded by real entrepreneurs working hard to create new and useful services for Bitcoin. Altcoins are surrounded by loud-mouthed pretenders with irrational hopes of duplicating Nakamoto's success. This does not mean that there is anything intrinsically wrong with altcoins: the problem is simply that once Bitcoin exists, then there is no additional value, from a monetary standpoint, of creating knock-offs. Can anyone really expect to create something of value by rereleasing Bitcoin under a new name and with a few tiny changes to its source code? What makes Bitcoin great cannot easily be duplicated. Thus, while the Bitcoin community matures and grows as more and more entrepreneurs are attracted to its potential, the altcoin communities can only whine for attention.

For a new currency to take bitcoins place it would have to represent a significant improvement over bitcoin, or bitcoin would have to first FAIL before this could happen. So the question is not will bitcoin become obsolete, but will (your proposed new coin) overtake bitcoin? I don’t see any reason to believe that Altcoins represents a fundamental new innovation with meaningful improved functionality.

In physics, we learn about the concept of entropy. Entropy is often described as “chaos”, “randomness”, or “disorder”. To simplify quantum mechanics as much as possible, imagine a basket with a line drawn down the middle, and throw some balls into the basket. If all the balls are on one side of the line, that is an ordered state and has low entropy. If the balls are spread across both sides then it has higher entropy.

Now, let us take the concept of entropy and apply it to cryptocurrencies. We can imagine each cryptocurrency created has a possibility that some value can be placed within it. If all possible value is placed in bitcoin, and none in litecoin or altcoin, then this is a low entropy state. The laws of thermodynamics dictate that entropy in a system should always increase. So we should expect the total cryptocurrency value to be spread among all the possible altcoins.

Going back to our example of balls in a basket, one can easily get all the balls onto one side of the line simply by tilting the basket. This represents the concept of enthalpy, or energy within the system. Just as gravity pulls the balls onto one side of the basket, enthalpy can pull things into a higher entropic state. The most proof-of-work has been put into bitcoin, and so it takes higher energy to put any value into an altcoin.

From an entropy standpoint, there will always be alternate currencies, and the value assigned to them will always be greater than zero. But from an enthalpy standpoint, bitcoin is favored over altcoins, so the total value of each altcoin will remain very low compared to bitcoins.

Note: Concerns about mining:

All being worked on now while Bitcoin is still young.....three very good recomendations being evaluated:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=281180.0

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QN2TPeQ9mnA

https://bitcoinfoundation.org/2014/07/mining-decentralisation-the-low-hanging-fruit/

Coinbase has 1.7 million accounts that were setup following KYC requirements in the US alone(1.9 with recent expansion to some European countries). Some of these may be user controlled duplicates individuals and business the same user controlled but a majority of these accounts are probably unique per user. While the US is a hotbed of investment, more transaction activity is shown outside of it and thus one should extrapolate a userbase of at least 3-4 million worldwide now.

Where are you getting your estimates ?

Well, what are all those millions of users doing then? I mean if everyone purchased just 1 bitcoin the price would shoot through the roof. One bitcoin is not that huge money, is it? Where did you get the number that Coinbase has 1.7 million accounts? Is that publicly verifiable? I don't believe in millions using Bitcoin. We also need to define 'use', before we even talk about any numbers. My 50k-200k estimation is people who make a transfer of bitcoins at least once every month, that doesn't seem like a huge requirement is it?

I don't see why both can't suceed, but because bitcoin is two things it gives it double the chance to IMO. The only thing that is hampering btc as a currency is the price instability, but it is also this instability which makes it potentially a good investment.

You were responding to an author who has a very specific and clear definition of what he calls a "user". He clearly indicates that there are ~250k users who have some bitcoins or > 1 satoshi in their wallet.  Your definition changes the goalposts.


Most people don't have 1BTC. Estimates show that ~2/3rd of users have less than 1BTC and ~1/3 of users owning less than 0.1BTC.

https://www.coinbase.com/about
1.7 million unique users and 1.9 million total wallets.

The reason why we know that a good deal of these wallets have bitcoins in them is because many of these accounts were created because of a free bitcoin giveaway or created because someone with a coinbase account sent a non bitcoin user free bitcoins as a gift where the user has to create an account or the funds get returned.

Both Circle and Coinbase have promotions to give out 10usd in free bitcoins -
http://blog.coinbase.com/post/85758038492/10-of-free-bitcoin-for-college-students  (college students)
https://www.circle.com/en/2014/05/16/10-to-spend (everyone)

Many Bitcoin supporters like myself have given out gifts to all our friends and family members of 20-50usd in BTC with services like coinbase to non-BTC users to get more widespread adoption. Most of my friends and relatives have accepted the funds (if they don't setup a coinbase account I know because the funds are returned to me in 60 days) and are simply sitting on them with intentions to spend part of them when Bitcoin goes up. This is why your definition of user is incorrect and many users are saving with intentions of spending part of their savings every time a bubble occurs as bitpay has proven with spikes in merchant processing during rapid deflation.

That's the way I see it. I get the idea that all these blockchain bandwagon jumpers have this notion that they can create a new blockchain and that all the SHA-256 ASIC owners will joyously switch over their hash to it for free, just because it's cool.

I'll try an analogy...

It's the early 1800s and hot air balloons are getting popular, and the possibilities of air transport begin to blow minds.... annnd you get a section of the theoretically "thinking" classes go apeshit about baskets, (gondolas)  "yay, baskets, imagine what all you can put in the baskets, baskets is where it's at, corner the market in baskets!!!" and you ask if it isn't rather the portable high density liquid or gaseous fuels, the burners of same or the envelope materials that are maybe the most important, as the source of buoyancy, the means of leaving the ground, annnnd they'll be like "No, baskets! Look what you can put in them, we'll drag them around with horses..." ... and you'll be shaking your head and thinking they missed the point, things can be transported, but the medium of transport is the egg laying golden goose, not the damn egg carton.

Engines...

Did a network of railways pre-exist the steam locomotive? did a network of asphalt roads pre-exist the motor vehicle? did the internet pre-exist commercial mini-computer adoption? NO, because all those were not especially fucking useful without the engines that demanded and supported their development and use.

So to me, the vaunted blockchain applications that seem to completely ignore the incentivisation to attract hashpower to secure and enable them, make as much sense as talking about trainless railways, vehicle free roads and computer free internet.


Flash.

Coinbase is a reputable company. Although I would not personally recommend any advanced user of bitcoin to store any more then modest amount of money in coinbase, I would trust them with a large amount of money during the time it takes to purchase and withdraw funds from them as well as trust what they say.

It is likely that a lot of the coinbase users are not "active" users, and it is likely that the majority of their users only have small amounts of bitcoin. I would also that that for each of coinbase's customers to each purchase one bitcoin would be a lot of money, especially if they do not plan on spending it

The blockchain technology does not belong exclusively to bitcoin which means anybody can use it

But we can't really have one without the other unless it can be monetized in some other way. If bitcoins become worthless or worth very little then why would the miners bother? If it becomes unprofitable to mine bitcoins then they'd just stop.

Even if that has to happen bitcoin will always be the core for next foundation. Things will be working on top of it
but it has to the the thing it can't just vanish like that.

Good way of thinking about it - I never thought of it that way to be honest.

Anybody can start a new blockchain, but will it be supported by the processing power that backs bitcoin?
Why would anybody switch to a brand new blockchain. Bitcoin's blockchain is where all the action is.  :)

For the good of the world, their should and will be more then one crypto that people can rely on. If it were only Btc and that went to shit one day, that means we will have to start from square one again. Fuck that for a laugh.

Disclaimer: Bitcoiners are as dumb as dog shit.

I have a little trouble deciphering the analogy. To me Bitcoin (and by extension,
cryptocurrency, or crypto-something) is a network  comprising of nodes that both
produce and maintain a record of their communication. It could be said that they
both compose and uphold a common reality on which they all agree. The consensus
record is organized as a linked list of proven work-units (the blockchain). The consensus
record can contain any kind of data. In Bitcoin the data are the records of transference
of value. But it could be easily be any other data, and the incentive to maintain it
would not necessarily have to be private profit, but could arise from the internal
needs of some organization for instance, and so the custom blockchain would be
restricted to that organization. I'm pretty sure various companies and organizations
are experimenting with this right now.

Block chain technology was invented and used as early as the 1970's in telephone systems. So your statement is invalid as it pertains to Bitcoin.

Why would a firm bother with all this rigamarole when it could just maintain a centralised database? The point about blockchain and POW is that they allow consensus to be achieved between  people who don't have any reason to trust each other.

Okay, imagine some piddling little alt, worth satoshis, market cap of a few thousand bucks, a couple of gigahash of diehards hashing on it.... now tell me why it would not be a good idea to use that blockchain to store cryptographic proof of ownership records for, say, Tesla cars...

The incentive to do the right thing, has got to be larger than the incentive to do bad things. IDs are not supposed to have intrinsic value for example, yet they do, hence the phenom of ID theft. A blockchain ID system would face the risk that insertion of fake IDs would be lucrative, as maybe would be invalidating the ID of specific high profile persons at critical points in time.

Internal blockchains in large orgs could be useful, but still, you've got a couple of hundred machines securing it maybe, is it doing something that is of high value to a competitor to steal or mess up? 'coz a few hundred machines ain't nothing if it can be got to.

You might think that it would be incentive to the people who have a crypto ID to secure the blockchain, but even though their ID might be worth $1000 to a criminal, you can bet they are not gonna spend $1000 worth of resources regularly to maintain an ID and nobody is going to do it for them gratis.

Now if you had a blockchain of blockchains with a large mining incentive then anybody who wanted something stored/validated in it, could use it for whatever purpose, and there would be enough participants, even though they had their own uses, to keep the whole thing secure. It's a strength in numbers thing.

It would work fine if the mining was licensed (with public key crypto) by the Tesla manufacturer. Such distributed database could then outlive the Tesla manufacturer itself and be invulnerable to legal attacks in various localities jurisdictions.

Issuing licenses for mining has been discussed on this forum many, many times. For Bitcoin it is unacceptable because of its anarchist origins. But for any non-anarchist endeavor it is a viable choice. Each Tesla car could do a little mining while being charged, with the certificate of ownership stored somewhere in its management computer.

I'm not very familiar with Tesla cars, but I presume that they already have some sort of public key infrastructure installed in them to verify signatures on their software upgrades.

Characterizing Bitcoin developers as anarchists is a red herring. They don't make those sorts of irrational arguments. Besides, you are talking about Smart Contracts and that concept was pioneered years ago by fellowtraveler (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=846).

So stepping into the persona of a Russian mafia hacker, I'd rent a Tesla, dump the ROM to steal the ID, and knowing that the crappy low power SOC they are using manages a kilohash at best, and there's only a few hundred online at any one time, I'd gin up something with a few GPUs and probably be able to not just 50%, more like 300% the network for minimal cost. Using other avenues, I can probably deduce which cars are fully charged by length of time on the net, and direct the ops guys as to the best ones to steal, who knows, even where they are by IP location, and owners address is probably no trouble for me....

Bitcoin works because of its assumption of anarchy, it's trustless, because nobody can be trusted, you start adding trust back into it, "oh that node must be okay, it has the right token", then you add points of failure. Then too, who is the fountain of trust? Something central.

The innovation is the whole thing, and how it interlocks and supports itself. You want a tank but don't want tracks in it, it's a sitting duck, okay, lose the turret, put in a convertible top instead, it's no longer a tank, it doesn't do what a tank can do, it's too heavy? Make it out of cardboard instead of steel? sorry, not a tank again. As a tank, it takes another multimillion dollar tank to take it on, with any substantial variations, you can take it on with a kitchen knife.

The ROM dump will give you a single Tesla Motors mining license. By sending a sudden flood of TM-blocks with your TM-license ID you'll identify yourself as a thief and fraud. Your GPU scheme will collapse and all Tesla owners will be made aware of that.

In your original example Tesla Motors is a good central point for issuance of the licenses to mine on the Tesla Motors blockchain and is a way to distinguish true Tesla Motors cars from counterfeit ones. There's no point for providing "incentive to mine" because the cars are "mined" only in the factory and "mining" is just a way of distributed tracking of the ownership and detection of counterfeits.

The rest of your message where you switch back to talking about Bitcoin and anarchy can simply serve as an entertainment when contrasted with a nearby message:

Again: licensed mining was extensively discussed here and on other forums years ago. It was rejected for Bitcoin as inconsistent with the goals of the project. But it is still a viable solution where the existence of a centralized or distributed authority is not questioned.

give me one example of how anyone is incentivized in a decentralized manner to support the blockchain with no bitcoin reward.

It is just above: Flashman's example of a blockchain specific to cars made by Tesla Motors. The incentive would be tracking of ownership and detecting counterfeits. I just don't know much about those cars besides that they are electric, expensive and a status symbol.

thats not decentralized. sure tesla may be incentivized to keep a blockchain ledger going in that instance but i am not nor is some random dude in africa. and if the incentives aren't entirely democratic, corruption etc will be pervasive.

i dont think the quote means that blockchain tech will live on but with out currency/tokens residing on/in the blockchain.. i think it means that the blockchain technology will live on but it will be a different platform that goes full blown mainstream and not the bitcoin blockchain. which is very possible. it is only early days after all.

Well yah, once any kind of crack is public people smarten up, but there's a window of opportunity there, in mere hours they could be selling "legit" cars to Tesla dealerships or something, it will take some time for message to get through.


I said the assumption of anarchy, meaning that it has to function in an anarchic environment. No external rules to protect it. When you have to start adding "Thou shalt nots" to protect something, some awkward bugger shall. (i.e. it would be  about as effective as writing "Private, keep out" on the side of your cardboard tank)

I have ask this question Patrick Murck from bitcoin foundation in AMA reddit and the asnwer was this

Well, Tesla Motors is very new, and I don't know much about it. But two other well known car brands: BMW & Mercedes already have the incentive for decentralized ownership tracking and counterfeit detection. In fact they are desperately researching all available technologies, because the theft, counterfeiting and reassembling of partially totaled cars are so prevalent. E.g. I know that they (and the car insurers) paid for a pilot program of DNA-marking the genuine products with killed harmless genetically engineered bacteria mixed into paints. They (BMW & Mercedes) operate in so many jurisdictions that none of the centralized solutions have been working out for them. In particular counterfeiting and reassembly of wrecks is of interest to buyers and resellers because of how they affect collision safety of those expensive cars. For sellers being able to include uninterrupted record of periodic maintenance greatly increases the price.

Outside of the automotive business I know that Cisco is one of the globally recognized names that is also desperately researching ownership tracking and counterfeit detection technologies.

Edit: I forgot to add one thing: even before I joined this forum in 2011 I spoke with an IT executive in insurance who was interested to use Bitcoin/Namecoin/altcoin variant for tracking relevant non-financial transactional information to facilitate truly global market for health, ship & plane insurance. This Tesla and cars discussion distracted me from the original thought I meant to write.

It seems to me that the Tesla itself is the coin in this blockchain. It's just not a currency because it's not divisible. I don't see the point of developing and maintaining a network when you could just use bitcoin.

Tesla was used because it was a high ticket product, and a tech oriented company that might conceivably be more nimble in adopting innovation.

I guess you could say that any asset that is validated on a blockchain "becomes" the coin in the absence of a coin or token. This is what I'm saying the problem is, that you don't want a highly valuable thing on a low hash, low participation network, whether it is public or behind some fence with no trespassing signs. In cryptocurrrency, the value of the currency is not tightly coupled to hashrate, but it has a large effect on the perceived "trustworthiness" of the currency as a unit of value and a unit of exchange. Ergo, low hash coins aren't worth much much in general, because they are not trusted to be worth much, whereas as hash rises, confidence increases in their ability to secure the store of value.


Anyway, in the case of BMW and Mercedes mentioned above, which vehicles have relatively huge real world adoption in comparison to Tesla, I can see that there might be enough interested market participants to make a go of some kind of part and service record tracking blockchain. Particularly if it is inclusive, not just factory and authorised dealers, but independent dealers and reputable vehicle recyclers and body shops. However, until it reaches some critical mass, it's gonna be untrustworthy for anything much more than lug nuts.

Think of miners as thumbtacks, think of value as weight. With one thumbtack you can hang a piece of paper on the wall by a corner, but it might be vulnerable to strong breezes, 4 hold it there quite securely. 8 miiight hold a paperback novel tacked up by it's covers, but could very well be knocked off by someone brushing past. For maximum retention of whole thing, least risk you'd want to tack it up page by page. Lot of thumbtacks. A kilogram of gold? yes you'd need a large number of thumbtacks to keep it on the wall, spread out thin. You can get a gold bar to balance there, strung up with wires, with maybe as few as 12 thumbtacks, pushed in just so, and proclaim yourself a smarter fellah than these thumbtack squandering know nothings... but all it needs is a slight push and it will strain the tack at one end or another, and they'll pop out dumping it on the floor. So, moral of story, if you really really want something to stay where you put it, you need overkill on the number of tacks. Someone leaves open the window, no problem, can have a force 9 gale blowing through and it's still nailed to that wall.

With the help of this great Bitcoin community, our bitcoin will stand against all odds. F**K Blockchain, Bitcoin rules.

im just not convinced. there may be very narrow uses of the blockchain w/o bitcoin but bitcoin is the driving force of incentive. one simply just can't run w/o the other.

the most likely not bitcoin scenario to me is just a superior coin coming out that gains wide spread adoption and eventually overtakes bitcoin. myspace/facebook style. this thread otherwise seems worthless.

What do you mean by fuck blockchain? Bitcoin can't exist without the blockchain.

I guess he meant other blockchains.
If not he is missing the point - blockchain can't be separated from bitcoin.

When Does it expire?

At last we somewhat converge in our opinion. Even to the anarchist issuing licenses is acceptable so long as those licenses are issued by a private concern with recognizable brand name and status symbol cachet (Tesla,BMW,Mercedes,...) and not by some governmental authority.

The main resultant difference is in the hashrate required. A general-purpose monetary blockchain that is supposed to serve all comers needs high hashrate and high participation to have reasonable safety. In a special-purpose blockchain that serves only licensed users high hash rate is not required because hashing serves mostly as an error-detecting and fraud-detecting mechanism.

I think bitcoin the currency will have its niche for sure. But the rest of the world doesn't want to wake up and see that their bank account is down 40%. The technology is solid, the volatility and large wallets are a turn off. If bitcoin hit $100,000 a coin and someone had 100,000 then the whole world or at least entire countries would basically be at that persons mercy.

That's only 10 Billion, you make it sound like Obama has to call Bill Gates for permission to wipe his arse.

What is stopping the dollar from dropping 40% that Bitcoin can't have? Also your 100 billion example is peanuts. There are nearly trillionaires now.

Mining isn't the long term incentive, though - fees are. 

Satoshi himself allowed that other cryptocurrencies might replace Bitcoin in the future.  The first iteration of any technology isn't always the one which prevails.  Bitcoin may survive as a currency but not as the dominant payment protocol (the primary function for which it was developed).  It may become to ingrained as a commodity to function effectively a currency.  There are many different Bitcoin agendas and who knows which will prevail in the future.

Cryptocurrencies are here to stay.  Blockchain technology is here to stay for the foreseeable future (although it may well be replaced by something we can't even conceive of right now before 21 million BTC have been mined).  Whether Bitcoin itself will still be around in 10 or 20 years, much less 50 or 100 is pure speculation.  We'll have usable quantum computing before then and that's a game changer.

Until I see an acceptable answer to this question (and I believe none exists), then the whole discussion ends here.

I hear this phrase a lot but it makes no sense to me
The network and the tokens needed to operate it are inextricably intertwined

That's such a stupid statement. Its just like Apple would do great but its share will fail/fall.

That's right, and there is no logical a priori reason why that token/network
would have to be bitcoin when we are talking about blockchain.

The statement means a different blockchain, any other blockchain, not the Bitcoin one. Blockchain technology means any other ledger which is publicly available and everyone has a copy.

Coming back to that statement, I think it can go either way. In favor of statement the examples given are usually in parallel to how internet businesses evolved. However, Bitcoin has a huge network effect due to being the first, and thats something which may keep it at the top.

it can go either way. In favor of statement the examples given are usually in parallel to how internet businesses evolved. However, Bitcoin has a huge network effect due to being the first, and thats something which may keep it at the top.
[/quote]

This. Since we're in the first iteration of Bitcoin, the next 5 years will show all of its strengths and weaknesses. Even if you discount the other (non-currency) services that could be developed using blockchain tech, bitcoin itself will undergo some transformation (bitcoin 2,3,4???), whilst the underlying technology will remain the enabler.

Its sort of saying a few years back that Yahoo > Internet. Time showed that the individual byproducts of the technology evolve, whilst the enabling tech (internet, or in our case blockchain) more or less stays the same.

Please note, im not trying to say the internet hasnt evolved, but rather that the concept of internet has remained pretty much unchanged from day one

This vid "Where can blockchain technology take us" provides an inspiring answer
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wczMKASQk6s&list=UUhtICzF0ZEhhgoMA8YWhULw

I suggest starting at 6mins in.

although blockchain technology is a really good invention I think that bitcoin and blockchain technology will survive together
blockchain technology is focused on many other fields where bitcoin is not,but bitcoin purposes are payments