To think about retirement + Bitcoin you need to have clear the fact that we are still discussing hard forks, in other words we are still in the very early stages of BTC. We have yet to find a formula and solution to make it scalable so you can star thinking about Bitcoin has something that will predictably have 100+ years of life and beyond. Once they fix this, i'll put most of my wealth on it, until then, I will treat it has something exciting but not think about it as a retirement tool.
Retirement account seldom need transaction for weeks and even years, so the scalability for that purpose is quite good even if all the earth's population is counted Fork is annoying, but those who have experienced 2013 fork will understand that it is not that dangerous like it sounds |
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Increasing the block size is the most simple change, lightning network and side chain just sounds too complicated to be easily maintained, raised level of complexity is the worst enemy for long term sustainability
You take it for granted that a change is needed now, but that's not true: https://medium.com/@allenpiscitello/there-is-no-crisis-20b58e14b09cDecentralization is much more important than microtransactions, because the former is the foundation of value for Bitcoin. Even there were almost no micro transactions, the block size would still hit its limit during next bubble. And Satoshi said to phase in the change when the time comes, so it is not a complicated issue. Of course I think 4MB block size will be enough for quite some time |
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Short the enemy fork  I really don't hope that we should go that far  I suddenly recall Satoshi's 1 million coins: Maybe that is what those coins are reserved for, Satoshi have the ability to wipe out the value on one chain overnight  |
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Increasing the block size is the most simple change, lightning network and side chain just sounds too complicated to be easily maintained, raised level of complexity is the worst enemy for long term sustainability
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Thanks for the link. I went through the list, most of those countries are small countries who does not have a sound monetary system thus rely on a larger and more established foreign currency. But anyway it seems there are different scenarios for having a currency substitution, maybe bitcoin will work as currency substitution under certain circumstances. Unfortunately so far it works best for the drug dealer and money launderer, which is not going to help to increase the positive attitude from the government |
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A worst case scenario:
Half of the merchants/miners/users still use the bitcoin-qt, work on original chain; another half of the merchants/miners/users upgraded to bitcoin-xt and work on the new xt chain
Pre-fork coins can be spent on both chain, which means the total coin supply becomes 42 million if you count both chains, then price of the coins on both chains will be cut by half
Hash rate will also be cut by half on both chains if the miners are 50/50 divided. Having a competing chain with almost the same hash power as your chain is a nightmare: It means your chain will be easily exposed to attack ( almost 51%, so the attack will succeed every once a while), double spending and transaction reverse will be daily event if the majority of the hash power on the other chain decided to do so. There will be hash wars which benefit none
So, like Jeff Garzik said, the hard fork is extinction level event, it should be carried out with fully reached consensus
This is a common misunderstanding from those who haven't seen Gavin's proposal on implementing the fork. The bigger blocks don't go live until the super-majority of nodes update their clients. Of course a 50/50 divide is the worst scenario, currently the consensus is larger blocks is the way to go. To make it more smooth, Satoshi suggested phase-in the change earlier in several releases. But still, when someone is against the change, they would refuse to upgrade to the preparing-for-the-larger-block version |
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A worst case scenario:
Half of the merchants/miners/users still use the bitcoin-qt, work on original chain; another half of the merchants/miners/users upgraded to bitcoin-xt and work on the new xt chain
Pre-fork coins can be spent on both chain, which means the total coin supply becomes 42 million if you count both chains, then price of the coins on both chains will be cut by half
Hash rate will also be cut by half on both chains if the miners are 50/50 divided. Having a competing chain with almost the same hash power as your chain is a nightmare: It means your chain will be easily exposed to attack ( almost 51%, so the attack will succeed every once a while), double spending and transaction reverse will be daily event if the majority of the hash power on the other chain decided to do so. There will be hash wars which benefit none
So, like Jeff Garzik said, the hard fork is extinction level event, it should be carried out with fully reached consensus
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Even if Satoshi did increase the total coin count, people will just find out that the coins on the new fork worth so little and they eventually fall back to the original chain In fact it is also similar in the current block size debate: If the coins on the new chain with larger block size worth so little, no matter what kind of advanced function it has, people will fall back to the old chain and tolerate that 7tps and buy and hold, thus makes its price to rally |
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For any government, bitcoin is like a type of foreign currency. Today non of the government (except Zimbabwe with a dysfunctional national monetary system) allow the circulation of foreign currency in domestic market
The reason that government don't care about bitcoin is because bitcoin's economy is still tiny, almost non-exist in the context of the national economy. But if bitcoin becomes widely spread and start to take significant part of the transaction in national economy, then there will be two currencies exist in the same economy. That will destroy all the exiting model of monetary theory and policy. I guess governments will all act like China and Russia, ban the use of it as currency
Then the payment function will become obsolete, leave it only with the function of international remittance and long term anti-inflation storage, which anyway is the main usage nowadays. Maybe that's a good thing, it means bitcoin does not need to handle several thousand transactions per second
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When you create 1 dollar worth of money using 1 dollar worth of resource/labor, then there is no robbery involved, just fair trade. However, if you write some numbers on a paper and use it as 1 dollar, then that is not fair trade. But still, many people accept this paper and regard it as something with 1 dollar's value. So it involves some trust and time related tricks
(You missed the gist of my post.) What does that matter when any- and everyone may do so? In that case, the most trusted IOU would still be the IOU issued by US government. Of course you can use airline miles and supermarket coupons to purchase certain goods, but those have limited reach and a higher risk of ruin (Companies can go insolvent anytime) In fact, for many people the biggest doubt of bitcoin is: Who is going to back its purchasing power? Although it is indirectly backed by merchants who accept bitcoin, but merchants are not responsible for its exchange rate, its value could still easily drop 30% overnight if no one is backing it with fixed amount of tangible assets. Currently the value is backed by the cost, very similar to gold, some kind of psychological support In contrary to modern monetary theory (and what those academic people believe), USD's value is not decided by supply and demand, but by the value of assets that backed USD when they were issued. FED could easily create 5X more money without affect USD's value, simply because each USD issued are backed by assets of corresponding value (Although this action is questionable "Real Bills Doctrine", it works well to sooth the confidence of merchants) That backing is psychological. That is important, because all the value is speculative, it means that someone speculate that he can get something of real value (useful) in exchange for the money, in the near or distant future. In reality, the dollar is unbacked. This is no problem for money, it is not needed, in fact it is good, else the money manager will eventually amass all the backing stuff. Still, there is no backing. The variations of value due to the erroneous belief in the backing, can go on for a long time. It is this kind of psychological backing bitcoin does not have. For fiat money, "it is backed by government bond" is very simple and easy to understand for everyone, so they never question further. But for bitcoin, most of people get panic when they heard that no one is backing it, even they know that mathematics and computer science will last much longer than any government There are people backing bitcoin with fiat money (they buy when the price drops). But unlike central banks, they are distributed all over the world and do not command large amount of fiat money reserve to stabilize the exchange rate in a reasonable range |
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Everyone, hurry up and buy the last coin before the fork happens, after the fork you have 50% chance end up buying the wrong coin |
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This has been a problem since the beginning, there is no decision making mechanism in the core developer team
During 2013 fork, core devs could convince the merchant (bitpay) and big mining pools (btcguild) and control the hashing power and majority of merchant thus decide on which chain they would like to grow
That was still in a time that a consensus could be reached quickly. But if a crisis hit and consensus can not be reached, there is no mechanism going forward except for forking into different directions
Thanks god Satoshi has said that block size can be increased use a phase-in method, so I don't think increasing the block size is a big conflict of interest right now, but a sudden increase to 20 MB is quite aggressive, even a 4x increase will have huge impact to many aspects of the network
From my point of view, huge amount of TPS is not necessary, since bitcoin anyway will not be used as a currency at mass scale: If it grows upon certain degree, it will start to affect the fiat money system, and today no sovereign government will allow foreign currency to circulate on domestic market at large scale, since that will make central bank's policy less effective. When you use bitcoin to save for the retirement, one transaction per month is quite enough
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Very risky business for miningsweden. In 6 months there will be much more efficient miner entering the market, which will immediately push existing 28nm miners into negative return. In bitcoin mining, if you can not get ROI in 6 months, you will never ROI. When the electricity cost becomes higher than the mining income, the miner will become a paper weight
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I have not flipped the fan yet, I just bought bunch of GT2150 fans from chinese online dealer and they provide better airflow than GT1850, at 50dB 1 meter away, not noisy at all when I'm sitting 7 meters away in another room
It is summer time and intake can go up to 30c degree, but the connectors are all quite cool in a pull fan configuration
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No sovereign government will allow any foreign currency (including USD/bitcoin) to circulate on domestic market in a significant scale, since that will make all the monetary policy of their central banks obsolete
US so far have succeeded in making most of the petroleum trade in dollar, but that is also accomplished by lots of wars in middle east and still there are countries trying to escape that system
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Said "paralysis" was created because this debate has not been solely technical. From a technical standpoint it's a bad idea, not necessary atm and better solutions can be explored. Nothing about this debate was academic. So this paralysis is rooted in that.
Every debate to its root is political, since that involves decision making, and the decision is affected by each participant's different view Unfortunately there is no one have the overview of the world: Gavin is good at computer and network, but he has shown lack of competence in business and economy. From merchant and miner's point of view, the stability and credibility of bitcoin is most important, that requires as little change as possible When everyone is facing the same problem, it is much easier to reach consensus, so just let those blocks fill up and see what will happen |
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The only rally I expect, is a few months before block halving in 2016. I can't see much happen this year, at least current price seems strong enough to not go below $200.
Agreed Anyone who have mined during the end of 2012 still remember that the block halving immediately cut mining income by half and the diminishing return was so obvious that many switched off their machine and buy. So that drove the first wave of bubble at spring 2013, then capital outflow from China drove the second wave at the end of that year |
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bitcoin volatile: no one is going to buy it because it is too volatile and only can be used for gambling, and serious players don't want to lose your money, and volatile is for gambling things, not for a currency. Bitcoin is only for get-rich-quick people and will die soon
bitcoin is stable: no one will buy it because they can't get rich quickly
There are many participants, each have different goal. Speculators who wanted to get rich quick always end up watching this sub forum  But there are also people using it for international remittance and long term saving purpose, the later is the main group that is absorbing the bitcoin sell pressure right now Bitcoin is stable -> More and more people will use it as a tool to fight inflation and to send money overseas -> the demand will pass supply and cause the price to rally -> more speculators will join the rally and drive a large bubble -> bitcoin will become unstable So the volatility will always be high |
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I think mouse cursor + checking the sha value of the page should be enough When minimal code inspection is wanted, you can cast dice and use this page http://www.swansontec.com/bitcoin-dice.html"The beautiful thing about this script is that it is only 150 lines of relatively straightforward code, so it is easy to audit. Trusting this code is easier than trusting a long, complicated web page filled with Javascript, which would be the alternative to using this script." |
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