I wouldn't put Tim Draper anywhere near the same league as the great VCs like Fred Wilson or Vinod Khosla.

But the only complete retard here is you. Why the hell are you here speculating on bitcoin, if you think bitcoin is such a bad investment?

Not so much a successor, but a compliment. Although I think you may be right that DASH/Monero etc have not differentiated themselves enough and also have some problems of their own; so they might not be the ones that succeed.


But I would not be surprised in the scenario that bitcoin does "go to the moon", is used widely, possibly replacing fiat in certain places/situations (no way it's going to kill all fiat LOL), that there are still other crypto-like currency that are a significant fraction of the crypto market, or even as big as bitcoin, because of its unique applications.

no, the governments back fiat.

In fact, I'm willing to bet you that there are WAAAAAAYYYYY more people who would trust government backed currencies than none-government backed currencies.

you guys are totally overestimating the affect of the halving.

Even if the price goes up to say $800 during the summer or whatever, it could be because of hundreds of other factors.

Probably. Plus there are so many factors affecting the price, that the halving really is probably an insignificant factor in the grand scheme of things. People on this forum are waaaaaaay overestimating the affect the halving will have on the price.

If you think about it, gold is pretty worthless. It really doesn't have many uses, beyond jewelry. Much less than silver, for sure. I really can't understand the people who think gold has some "intrinsic value".


But while I agree that if bitcoin fails spectacularly, other crypto will fail too. But they do have different purposes.

There's ethereum, which tries to function as a kind of programming platform for future DACs, instead of being a pure currency.

There's also DASH/Monero, which I personally am very optimistic about, because of its absolute anonymity. Just think about how many rich people there are in the world, who needs a way to store their money completely anonymously. Lottery winners who want to remain anonymous, for example. People who do "sketchy" businesses, or want to pay less taxes, etc. It's literally a multi-multi-trillion dollar market. Compared to creating mutliple fake identities, then storing the assets offshore, a secure, totally anonymous crytocurrency which you can transfer and use pretty much any time any where is much more convenient.

You're kidding.... right?

There's no way people would "rush to buy" bitcoins just to pay taxes... they can do so much more conveniently by using their "real money".

There may be a few early adopters who would pay in bitcoins, but that's it. there's absolutely no reason for someone who doesn't have bitcoins to go through ALL THAT TROUBLE just so they can do something they could've done much more simply with the money they already have.

And the problem is, so many bitcoiners are so delusional they don't realize this.

"diversifying" into altcoins isn't really diversifying.

Although there are some altcoins with potential for a huge upside, like Monero/DASH. But they are HIGHLY RISKY as well. I don't particularly believe in any of the others, although I think Ethereum and litecoin has the highest chances for survival.

shouldn't this be in the altcoin forums?

I couldn't find ballcoin on coinmarketcap... are there even exchanges that trades this coin?

ethereum is a token, it's not meant to be a currency. So I doubt its value will ever be all that high.

OK, since we're in agreement, my concern is that in the future, the fees will be too high for people to use, especially for micro-transactions and stuff.

I mean I personally don't care for microtransactions, but they are a big value proposition. I only care for bitcoins because I think it has the potential to go up by 100x or even more. But there are some long term worries, IMO, when the block rewards run out.

I don't see the benefit of having a hard cap vs keeping the number of active bitcoins at around 21,000,000 (as in, the inflation rate at the end will be equal to the rate coins are lost through accidents, death, etc)

Let's say they need $50k/day of rewards like you said.

The Price of bitcoin will not change that. If bitcoin goes up 100x, miners won't suddenly require less fees per day. If anything, they will require more fees.

So whether the price per bitcoin in USD is $1 or $100 or $100000, the burden of fees in USD value will not change, for users of bitcoin. They will still need to pay that $50,000's worth of fees.

I don't know why you can't understand what I'm saying.

If miners need $500 dollars worth of fees per transaction, then that's what they will get.

If bitcoins are worth $500 each, then each transaction will cost 1 bitcoin.

If bitcoins are worth $50000 each, then each transaction will cost 0.01 bitcoin.

The amount of bitcoins needed for fees changes as the value of bitcoin changes.

BUT THE REAL VALUE OF THE FEES DO NOT CHANGE.

In the end, whether bitcoin costs a lot or costs very little, miners will ask for an amount of fee such that it can feed their family, and cover their operating expenses.

So the value of a bitcoin is not important, in the context of fees for miners. Please don't confuse the REAL value (i.e purchasing power) vs the value of bitcoins.

When a user decides whether the fees are too high or not, they don't look at a number of bitcoins and go "hey, the fees are 0.0001 BTC, I'm willing to pay that" or "hmmm the fees are 0.0005 BTC, it's too much, I won't pay that".

The number of bitcoins in the transaction fee is meaningless. What matters is the REAL VALUE of those bitcoins.

The actual "problem" of the blocksize is, I think, is not a big deal. What is a problem, is the thinking behind the people on either side. Extremely toxic.


So many bitcoiners are delusional. Some are delusional, dreaming that it'll take over the world and kill fiat. Others are ignorant, thinking that an increase of 2x the current price is the best bitcoin can hope for, because there's no way you can get rich just by holding something, right?

Then there are the delusional libertarians who think that their ideals are the way, and that everyone will eventually come to realize how right they are. HA!

They think that normal people will care about "decentralization", "not backed by government", etc.

They think that there's no way a government/bank coin can compete against bitcoin, because it's centralized. They are not aware, or they don't admit to there being many threats to bitcoin's survival, because they're so delusional to their ideals.

I used to think that kwukduck is a troll, because everyone said so.

But more and more, I'm beginning to understand how he came to be. The amount of stupidity in this forum really is absolutely toxic. If all bitcoiners were like that, there is no hope for bitcoin to succeed.


Fortunately, there are intelligent people who don't bother to waste their time in this toxic environment and actually get real work done (I'm not one of them ).

All I can say is, I hope that those people can eventually fix most of the problems and allow bitcoin to succeed. Certainly I don't have the knowledge/power to do so. And fortunately, neither do any of the idiots writing on this forum.

A lot of arguments I'm reading against the block size increase is that it will make running a full node too expensive for a lot of people, reducing the number of full nodes and making bitcoin more centralized.

So how much decentralization is "enough"? Why not reduce the blocksize to half, for more decentralization, if it was so important?

Did we really somehow reach the optimal amount of decentralization with 1 MB blocks, just like that?



I'm genuinely curious to what people think, I don't really have a stance on this either way.

I'm guessing in less than 50 years. But it'll be replaced by a better innovation, not because it has failed.

How I see it is like this. People were all government-currency users. Then there comes bitcoin, and then some people start talking about how bitcoin is revolutionary, how it has low fees, can do microtransactions, etc. Then some people are "converted" to bitcoin.

But then the government steps up to create their own govcoin that has those benefits as well, so the people are converted back to the government issued currency.


The actual number of people who care about libertarian ideals is not that high. Not enough to make bitcoin into a huge success, certainly.

Not true.

No one knows what the hell "blockchain technology is". Don't nitpick, I obviously just meant that the vast majority of "normal" people don't know what it is.

They may have heard of a "digital currency" called bitcoin. They don't know how it's different from WoW gold or whatever other virtual currencies there are.

So obviously even if a lot of propaganda about how digital currencies are safe, fast and more convenient, they'll stick to a government issued digital currency, rather than some obscure thing like bitcoin.

No, you're not understanding what I'm saying. I'm saying the value of bitcoin DOES NOT MATTER. I only used an example to show that.

There are many many factors, I won't pretend I can think of all of them, but I'll try my best to explain what I can think of.

The thing is, there's the current mining cost, and there's a minimum viable mining cost. The current mining cost is what it obviously means. What do I mean by minimum viable mining cost?

It means the minimum amount of mining needed to be done to keep the network secure. For example, if the market cap of bitcoin was $1000, then hardly anyone would bother to try to attack the system, so not much mining power is needed. In fact, Satoshi ran some CPUs to mine bitcoin for a year, and it wasn't successfully attacked.

But if the market cap of all bitcoins was in the trillions or even tens of trillions, then obviously the amount of mining needed to be done to keep the network safe is much, much higher. There is a minimum viable block reward, for which miners will still have the incentive to keep the network secure enough that no one can attack it.


This minimum reward isn't some number of bitcoins. It doesn't mean anything if the reward is 10 bitcoins, 100 bitcoins, or 0.00001 bitcoins. What matters is the real value of the rewards. How many eggs the miner can buy for his family, for example. Or houses. Whatever.

And this real value the miners must make, will be completely the burden of people who use the system.

For example, if it takes $50,000 worth of fees per block to keep the system secure, and there can only be 100 transactions per block, then each transaction must have a fee of at least $500 dollar's worth. Again, it doesn't matter if this number is 1 bitcoin, 100 bitcoins, or 0.00001 bitcoins. That's completely irrelevant. Miners don't care about how many bitcoins they're getting, they care about the REAL VALUE of the bitcoins they're getting.

And who's going to pay $500 for a bitcoin transaction? Or even $50 per transaction? Or even $5 per transaction? I wouldn't, except for possibly very special circumstances. A huge part of bitcoin's value proposition is on how low the fees are. But when the mining rewards are gone, the fees will not be low. It isn't possible for it to be low, unless either the # of transactions is significantly higher, or the minimum viable block reward is very low. But that would mean that bitcoin's market cap is very low, i.e it's pretty much dead.