Hi.

From the part that you edited out...


Store of value was part of the original design.


Not relevant.  We are talking about Bitcoin as a transaction system and a store of value.  The blocksize limit is a different issue.

We already have reached that goal.  No fork required, because that was part of the original design. Seriously, newbs; read a bit before talking.  Should we increase the newbie surfing term before letting you guys out of the newbie section?

And aparerntly the post count into the thousands...

Of course you can short bitcoins.  You simply borrow bitcoins from someone, and sell them on the exchange with the intent of buying back the number to pay back your loan at a later date.  It should be obvious how dangerous this actually is, both for yourself and your lender.

Very few people beyond this forum would even have noticed the fork.  I know that I wouldn't have noticed otherwise, I didn't even notice any significant delay in transaction processing myself.  That's probably due to the fact that all of my coins were confirmed long before the blockchain fork, and thus I was able to put my transaction into either fork without delays.  Outside of the forum, the only people that would have noticed are miners and those trying to send/receive transactions based on recent transaction inputs.  I never noticed the last one back in 2010(?) either until it was already past.

Chump change?  Is that so?

The bitcoin network is currently running at 460.28 PetaFLOPS according to bitcoinwatch.com.  According to Wikipedia, the fastest supercomputer on Earth is Titan, A XK7 model by Cray and installed at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee.  It has a benchmarked sustainable rating of 17.59 PetaFLOPS and an as-installed cost of $97 million. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TOP500#Top_10_ranking) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titan_(supercomputer)

So to match wits with the Bitcoin network right now would cost at least $2.5 Billion.  And that presumes that the network doesn't grow before that monster is built!


I don't doubt that this will be possible, but full clients won't be necessary for at-home reserve miners, they just need to join a mining pool.  Pool miners don't need full clients now.


A similar argument was had about the Internet before it came to be.  One side believed that everyone would need to have a supercomputer to abstract the details of the network from the users, the other side thought that all users would have to educate themselves about computers and networkds to participate.  Turns out that they were both right, and the just right mix has been here all the time.  Bitcoin is so flexible as to permit that just right mix, but is rigid in the important aspects of the system.  You worry too much.

I don't think you have any idea how often I am sucked into these kinds of re-occuring newbie conversations.  Most of the old salts have long ago chosen to ignore such repetitive "problems".  The long and short of it is, it's not a problem, you're not the first to think it is a problem, so if you insist on resolving said problem there are numerous alt-coins that should fit your sensabilities better than Bitcoin.
And the miners don't have the final say on such things, but only miners get first access to those coins.

Yes.

You're still not getting it.  What I highlighted above is, quite literally, impossible with Bitcoin.  Bitcoin is perfectly frictionless. (So long as the Internet exists)  There is no external impediment to velocity, and it has a very high maximum possible velocity.  There can never be a systemwide liquidity problem for Bitcoiners in the absence of a concurrent solvency problem.

It's also literally impossible for the bitcoin economy as a whole to have a solvency problem.

You're not dealing with anything like what you're used to.

Do you have any evidence for this statement, or do you just feel that you're correct?

That's obvious, is it?

Where do you people come from?  Langley?

That's possible, but likely irrelevent.  MtGox doesn't mine, and if they refuse to forward an oversized block they alone are not significant enough to prevent the propagation of the block.  The only downside is to users of MtGox who might not be able to trade until they fix their stuff.

Sad.

Bitcoin does flow, and is being used for other things than speculation.  For myself, I buy stuff with it all of the time; from cell service airtime to handmade knick-knacks of Etsy to high end candies to hats for my characters on Team Fortress 2.  As of this moment, Bitcoinwatch reports that while there have been just over 20K BTC that have changed hands in the past 24 hours there have been nearly 5 and half million BTC sent across the network during that same period.  Even discounting double the volume on MtGox from the main network, in order to account for the maximum number of coins that could have been fed into and withdrawn from MtGox during that same time period to service the speculators still leaves us with over 5.4 M BTC in motion.  That's just about 270 times the nominal bitcoin volume of the single largest pool of speculators in the bitcoin economy.  During the last fast rise and crash in 2011, speculation formed the greater part of the Bitcoin economy; but this is no longer so.

That was like watching two retards on a street corner scream at one another, "You're a retard!"

It's funny, but you feel a bit ashamed that you're amused.

EDIT: Furthermore, that's 20 minutes of my life I can never get back.

What error?  That is an economicaly rational decision.  Bad money (fiat) chases good money (bitcoin) out of the market, but only sofar as the relative exchange values are artifically controlled. To some degree, the sheer difference in market sizes implies that US $ do, and will continue to, have an outsided influence on this.  People will favor saving in the sounder currency, so long as the less sound currency is still accepted without a risk premium.  But only favor.  Not all players will, or even can, continue to favor one over the other.  There will always be those cases wherein the conditions of the trade dictate the use of one or the other.  Bitcoins will continue to circulate regardless of the common price sentiment simply because it serves a niche function that US $ cannot evenly compete with bitcoins, namely distance renumeration for online transactions.  Sorry, but Paypal still has to pay their employees and shareholders from the transaction fees.

The 'deflationary spiral' is a falsehood.  This theoretical strawman assumes that all economic actors across the entire market can indefinately choose to wait for lower consumer prices, but that is impossible.  If you are looking to buy a new refrigerator, you can shop around until your current one actually dies, but not much longer.   A deflationary environment encourages thrift, this is true; and that is exactly what has been lacking in our modern consumer driven economy for too long.  It is the thrift that accumulates the capital to make the wise investment decisions required to drive human progress.  And while money can often buy captial, money is not capital, and this distinction is important.

Probably.  The last coins that I bought, I was whining that I had to pay $14 apiece for them.  Now I'd buy 20 or more for double that rate.  I have a nephew that I told about bitcoin years ago, and for a time he was mining on his laptop in the days before the rise of GPU's.  He succeeded in finding three blocks, but because this was also before the automatic encryption of wallet.dat files and he was running windows on an insecure machine, I convinced him to copy his wallet.dat file to a thumbdrive and reinstall over his current client.  He did this and eventually got tired of it all, and stopped mining.  The other day, I asked him if he wanted to sell any of his bitcoins, as I was running low (I actually buy things with them, and have not paid for my cell service in any other way in over a year).  He said, "oh, that.  I lost that drive." 

YOU LOST IT?!

Oh, let it be true!  I don't even care that this guy is ignorant about Bitcoin, just let this be a bubble!  If it pops, it would drop back into a price range that I could buy more!

If you don't think Bitcoin is safe, don't invest anything into it.  That limit is unchangable, though, not because of the code, but because of the principle.  If there were to ever be a hard code fork on this issue, one would be the true Bitcoin, the other could not be.  It's also more than a bit rediculous to assume that future users would be running a full node, and could be tricked into supporting such a change simply by turning on an auto update feature.  First off, the vast majority of future bitcoin users, if bitcoin is ever truely succesful, will be running light clients or depending upon wallet service accounts; the full client will be the realtively rare animal.  Probably as many or more full nodes as presently exist, but still realtively rare overall.  Second, a group of end users, both stupid enough to trust their internal security with their money to a remotely controlled automated system AND wealthy enough to ignore the ongoing costs of running a full node would still amount to little, IMHO simply because there are now, and shall be, more than just the main reference client.  So whatever percentage is deceived into supporting the change will still be opposed (by default) by those nodes that do not authorize or otherwise cannot participate in an auto update.  Furthermore, the break wouldn't go unnoticed for very long, and a great many of the decieved users can and will revert.  The 21M limit is part of what makes Bitcoin what it is, if you don't like it or don't think it's going to work out, you can either support one of the alt-coins that suits your needs or start your own.  Just don't call it Bitcoin.

It's theoretically possible, yes.  It's also theoretically possible for the quantum force we call gravity to reverse itself tommorrow, and we are all 'reborn' in the result, that some scientist calls "The big fart" in another 14 trillion years.

I'd give those two about even odds.

The whole team's here.

You're not remotely the first to mention it.  The reason that there doesn't seem to be much data upon it is because it's not an issue.  Pretty much everyone figures this out on their own, but the initial ability to see the distribution of wealth so readily is often a shock.  Again, the distribution of wealth for the US $ is far worse than bitcoin, but even the claims about how uneven the distribution is for bitcoin wealth presented in these articles are just wrong.  If it's not outright FUD, it's akin to panic.  A pool of addresses that can be shown to have a close association does not mean that all of those addresses are controlled by the same entity, and even if it's a pool of some kind, it doesn't mean that all of the wealth contained belongs to a single controlling entity.  The 'bitcoin laundry' example is just one such example.  Of the list of largest groupable addresses that the article presents; I've already noted that A is a Silk Road internal mixer pool (and wallet service), but even the authors acknowledged that B was the user pool at MtGox, G is the user pool at Instawallet and L is the miners' pool at Deepbit.  They know those because those groups are open about it.  They didn't know about A being Silk Road because they are not open about it.  The point here is that, while even if they are correct the distribution isn't really that bad wehn compared to fiat currencies, it's not that bad anyway because their methodology of assuming that large pools of addresses are single entities is flawed.

EDIT: P, however, is definately a single person in control of 400K+ bitcoins who made no effort whatsoever to obscure that fact; considering that it's all one single address that does not spend them.  And H, J, M, O & Q are almost certainly single users with standard pools of addresses using a single wallet.dat. While C,D,E,I, R & S are almost certainly groups of people using shared pool addresses.  With a little more research, I'd wager that half of them would turn out to be the user pools for the traders on the other major exchanges, such as Bitfloor or BTCE.  There are at least a dozen other exchanges shown on bitcoinwatch.com that could have user pools in the ranges of I, R & S.  Many of these lesser exchanges serve non-English speaking markets, and thuse their visablility to the English reading Internet is limited.