Ah, the point is not that "there wouldn't be enough of them".  The point is that if you use a deflationary currency, you won't.  You'll obtain a collectible that will be hodled and that will rise spectacularly in price, and which mainly becomes a speculative asset.


As a first beta project it was brilliant.  And it IS still brilliant, but it is not what you think it is.  It is "gold".  Gold is not a currency.  It is kept in institutional vaults, its transactions are expensive with armored trucks and so on.  And it is mainly a speculative good.  It is not just a store of value, people see it as a speculative investment "that will rise".  Bitcoin has all the aspects of gold.  Not those of a currency.  Although of course, long ago, gold was used as a currency, until it was kept in vaults, it became expensive to handle and not very practical.  So people built fiat systems on top of it.  

Yes, some amateurs have some physical gold in their houses.  And they dare not move it.  But most gold is in vaults of central banks, and other big players.  Like bitcoin soon will be.

This is why there won't come a solution to the full blocks.  And why it is not needed either.

Then bitcoin was not well designed for this task.   No single block chain can do that ; but moreover, then there shouldn't have been a finite number of bitcoins, there shouldn't have been block reward halvings, there shouldn't have been any block size limits.  All these things lead you to a purely speculative asset.  People don't pay groceries with paintings of Picasso of which there are only a finite number ever.  And with 2-3 transactions at most per second, transactions becoming a finite resource, that's not possible either for a fluid currency.

Bitcoin has *all the right aspects* to become a very expensive reserve currency kept in vaults and only transacted in very big amounts.

No, I don't use centralized social networking things, apart from discussion forums.  I don't even use facebook or twitter. 


Sure.  Soccer too is a big business.  Who cares.
But that doesn't contradict what I aim at.  You can have "millennials-gamer-coin" if you want to.  They can exchange it for "your-town-grocery-coin" if they need groceries.


Of course, but that is a local economy.


A dinofelis was a sabertooth tiger.  Yes, he's dead now, if that's what you mean

Simple: getting intelligent comments that improve my understanding of crypto systems.    The best way of getting intelligent comments, is to explain what I understand, and see how people react.  Most are dumb.  Some comments give me some thinking.  That's why I do it.


Time of arrival doesn't mean anything.  Some learn faster than others


I was pretty clear about that: none.  I do own very very small amounts of different coins to play with.  Say, of the order of a few 10 of dollars.  I must still have a wallet with 10 primecoin somewhere. Peercoin, the same.   I mined a small amount of monero.  I bought small amounts of bitcoin to buy some services on the internet.  I bought 10 DASH long ago, and when I found out that I needed more to use their mixers, I sold them.  I had some litecoin (5 or so), which I mainly sold after playing a bit with the wallet.  It is not entirely empty, some 0.001 LTC or so must be in it.  I've "lost" several wallets (I must still have them on backups).  Many others: I once bought a few feathercoin.  Never bothered with it.  Bought some other stuff I don't even remember right now.  Ah, yes, Doge of course.  Still some others.  In very small amounts ; most wallets are off my computers (but somewhere on a back up).  I run several (empty) full node wallets, to study their block chain.

I PLAY with crypto for the cryptography.  I have used bitcoin in the past to buy stuff (that time seems to be over now).  Only a few times to sell something.  That's it.  I don't "invest" in it.  Why would I ?  I have enough money to live the life I live.  I don't want to leave much to my kids, they have to help themselves.  I'm an intellectual that doesn't need much.  But I love to study systems.  Crypto is great to study.  That's it.

Don't believe me ?  Don't care.


I support all coins that can help people escape state and law.  Because I think state and law are the evil of this world.

In fact, that question is rather easy to answer.  A coin is "legit" if it serves a purpose, that is, if it has economic value: if it allows someone to enjoy something that couldn't have happened or couldn't have happened so easily without it.  

Of course, most of the time, you don't know if this is going to happen.  So you speculate.  Bitcoin promised to allow people to buy a coffee.  That was bull shit.  Bitcoin is "digital gold" reserve currency for institutional non regulated gamblers and speculators.  Bitcoin cannot handle, and will not handle, and doesn't intend to handle, all the coffees in the world.  It is not intended to be a currency.  It is not intended for "the crowd".  It is not intended for "adoption by the masses".  It is simply a digital asset for big, unregulated players.

Crypto only has a meaning when the law is to be avoided.  The legitimacy of bitcoin derives from the desire of big money to be free of regulation in its speculative affairs.  As such, bitcoin will probably be a reserve currency for many other unregulated crypto happenings.  But not for buying coffee, or a book with amazon.

Currencies (crypto) for "the masses" will only be useful in as much as there is a demand by the masses to avoid the law.  For instance, when privacy is concerned.  When buying VPN access.  When buying second hand computing devices of which you don't want "them" to know it is yours now.

Because when the law is respected, all fiat solutions are much better than crypto. Crypto doesn't deliver value over fiat within a legal, regulated frame.  Buying stuff on Amazon has no meaning with crypto.  Gambling in regulated casinos has no meaning with crypto.  Setting up a regular working contract has no meaning with crypto.  But working in a clandestine way for someone on the other side of the planet, does.   Obtaining clandestine products, or selling them, does.  Selling officially some stuff is better done in fiat.

Crypto has only legitimity, when the law doesn't apply, is to be avoided, or is non existing.  When the law applies, the situation is regulated, then there's no room for any legitimate crypto, because there are much more functional fiat solutions in place.

Yes, the hypothetical situation where you travel to a foreign country without any money, and you use crypto, is thinkable.  But do you really think that if you go to a foreign country, your credit card will not work ?  Don't talk about the fee.  When the fee is low, the volatility is high. 

Amen.

But this was built-in from the start.  First of all, the fact that there was a FINITE amount of coins to be mined.  I know that everybody is going to call me names, but "sound money theory" is silly if you don't have the monopoly on money.  The fact of emitting only a finite amount of coins, and hence having to *diminish* the block reward, or the sum will not converge, works against liquidity.  It promotes hodling, and hence price surges.  A good currency needs liquidity, needs to get spent, and doesn't need to "rise to the moon", on the contrary.
The second aspect that was built in, was block size limit.  3 transactions per second world wide can never become a currency.  6 or 12, neither.  

So bitcoin was not designed to be an "internet currency", but rather a speculative vehicle, of which the liquidity would be provided by a "banking layer" on top of it, that provides liquid, centralized IOU.  ETF, exchange accounts, LN, whatever.

The very fact of organizing a fee market around miners that have to waste huge amounts of value to mine induces these miners to lock in the block size (what we are witnessing right now).  There must be sufficient transactions to keep the thing alive, but one doesn't need many small transactions: a few big ones with big fees is much more lucrative, and big transactions are what keeps the price up.

The story of buying your coffee with bitcoin was a good story to kick the thing off, and get it going, but bitcoin could never cope with all the coffees bought everywhere in the world.  That was to get "innocent money and idealists" to bitcoin.  But they aren't needed any more.  Now that bitcoin is speculator's money, the coffee buyers are not interesting any more.

The other thing that bitcoin included, were the "block reward halvings".  Instead of being a smooth function, these steps incur always instabilities, perfect for speculators, disaster for money.

In other words, whether by naivety or on purpose, (I think, the former), bitcoin is not designed to be a currency, but has everything for a big money speculator vehicle.  Which is what it is becoming.  Because it was made that way.

I would more probably consider it inside trading if they shorted hard on bitcoin yesterday
That said, inside trading is what markets are for, no ?  To incorporate information in the price...

The way I understand crypto, none will win.

You are thinking from a pure Proof of Work viewpoint.  Maybe proof of work alone is not a good idea, because its security is limited by the financial power and incentive of its adversaries.  That is good enough to stop your local hacker from messing with it, but it won't stop the Chinese government, if one day it really gets pissed at bitcoin, from killing if it throws a few billion dollars at it.

On the other hand, small chains don't need big protection, because there's not much at stake ; and there are other cryptographical protections possible.  What is good with proof of work, is the initial distribution of the emitted coin, and the fact that seigniorage is burned.

My idea of many small crypto currencies in which people don't "invest" but just use to sell and buy goods and hence for which the market cap is low, and of which it is not a big drama if it dies, is exactly the fact that there's not much incentive to destroy it, because there's not much at stake.   The goal being to *pay* people, not to *store value*.   If a currency exists, I buy some coins (with another currency of course), with those coins, I buy what I want to buy, and that's it, I don't care much about the future of that coin: it did for me what it had to do.  If that coin gets destroyed by the Chinese government (why would they ?), I don't care.  Tomorrow, there's another coin, I buy some, I pay the stuff I want to obtain with it, and that's it, again.

That's how I use bitcoin.  Well, how I used bitcoin.  I bought some bitcoin when I wanted to buy stuff on the internet with it.  What happens with bitcoin after that, doesn't really matter.  If the merchants would accept monero, I'd pay in monero.  Or in Litecoin.  Or whatever.  The day they destroy bitcoin, I wouldn't care.  There are other coins.  And if those get destroyed too, no problem.  There are still other coins, and we can make new ones.

That's my idea of decentralized.  Not a single monopoly.

I don't think they are a waste of time and effort.  Like in all innovative tech, most of what you do, fails.  But without all the failures, the good ideas wouldn't emerge either.  Thinking that a monopoly works better than a free market, is somewhat strange for people that think "distributed, decentralized, trustless".  As of now, bitcoin is more or less holding a monopoly on crypto.  Its tech is getting old now.  There are many more sophisticated crypto ideas around, like ring signatures, zero knowledge proofs, smart contracts, proof of stake versions, directed graphs instead of chains, .... There are also experimentations with flexible block sizes...
Bitcoin starts looking like the state telephone company holding the monopoly over telephony, while mobile phones are being invented.

I fully agree that commercially-knit-together communities do not need necessarily to be *geographically* close (even though for most of commerce, that is still the case: the plumber, the groceries, the bread, the car repair, the doctor, the dentist, the leisure.... much commerce remains local).  But usually these communities are not very big even if spread out.  Maybe I trade international post stamps, but the exchanging of post stamps is not related to the community of violins trading internationally.

I very rarely buy stuff abroad directly.  It happens.  Most of the time, I use products that have of course partly foreign origin, and most of the time when I buy "foreign made" stuff, I use a local retailer.  I very rarely buy my oranges directly in South Africa.  I buy oranges in a local grocery shop, who got them there from Morocco or South Africa.  But that's not my problem.  I pay the grocery shop holder in the local currency.   He probably needs to exchange money to buy the oranges.  It is his business.

Don't over estimate the importance of full node wallets that are not related to mining.  In as much as they may be an indicator of the preferences of the user that runs it, and hence, the choices he might make in the market if there was a hard fork, full nodes that are not related to mining have very little technical importance, and have almost no influence on the block chain, which is built by miners and their nodes.  Yes, nodes help somewhat in improving the traffic over the P2P network, but this is not a necessity.  At its bare minimum, the bitcoin network would almost be the same if all users connected with light wallets to the full nodes of their preferred miners ; exchanges will of course run all kinds of nodes because they want to have people trade all possible kinds of forks.  So exchanges will not "impose" any fork.
The only real reason to run a full node, is that you want to verify *for yourself* that the block chain one is selling to you, is the "right" one according to the rule set that you've decided to implement in the software you're running.  And as such, you're also helping to transmit this chain to other full nodes.  But they don't need you, they can connect directly to the miner node of their preferences.  You don't need other full nodes: you can also connect to the miner of your preferences.  The P2P aspect of the bitcoin network is nice, but not needed: the "servers" are the miners and a node is in fact nothing more than a client, reading its stuff from the server.  The P2P network helps to get the traffic to your place, but that's it.  The producer/server of block chains are the miners, and they all have a full copy of course on their nodes.  That's all you need.  And if you want to send a transaction, you can also send it directly to one of the nodes of a miner of your preferences.  Miners of same preferences have also all reasons to get direct node connections, to get their blocks as soon as possible amongst themselves, and not waste time on orphaned blocks.

So "nodes voting" doesn't mean more than firefox "voting" over the contents of a web server.  It won't influence the contents on the web server.  But of course, it gives an idea of what the user wants, and that's important... in the market, if there is a hard fork.
But that's all.  The importance of full nodes is very much over estimated.

I don't see necessarily a problem with 5000 coins.  It depends on how they are linked together (through distributed exchanges).  The lightning network can abstractly be seen as "as many coins as there are payment channels" in a certain way, where the "coins" are virtual block chains you build with the successive instructions on the payment channel.  Coins that "start out" when the channel is set up, and "die" when the channel is settled.  They get their value by using a collateral (the bitcoins engaged).  They die when they release the collateral. 
In the LN, all the "new coins" are of the same type, defined in the same way with a uniform (centralized ?) protocol.  But you can see "small coins" as totally anarchistic versions of this, where every other coin has other principles, engages another collateral (another coin, maybe bitcoin, maybe something else) on some distributed exchanges, and can release to *other* coins on these exchanges.

To pay for something "far away in coin space", you'd have to hop over several exchanges, like in the LN, you hop over several payment channels to reach destination.  But at least, contrary to the LN, things wouldn't be frozen in, uniform, ... Yes, there would be a need for some "standards" linking them.  But like in the technology world, the standards serve to interface different systems, but at least, systems of different types, with different technology and features, and innovation is possible.  The internet has standards, but the things connected to internet are of different nature, and evolve.  Bitcoin's tech is getting old now.  It can still serve as a kind of backbone, reserve currency in a way.  But it will never be able to handle all commerce all over the world.  Its monetary model is also problematic and it will end up being totally centralized because of economies of scale. 

If we want a distributed system, we need constantly new tech, new coins, and competing systems.  Not a monopoly.

Now, really think deep about this.  Suppose that most adoption of bitcoin comes from people thinking like that (which is probably the case).  That means that Joe is only to go and buy bitcoin, if he expects it to rise in price.  By doing so, he made it rise in price: someone who bought it at a lower price is going to sell it to him, right ?  So Joe is counting, essentially, on finding Bill, who will also buy it from him at a higher price, right ?   (that's what it means "increasing in value": finding people willing to buy it at a higher price than the one you bought it at").  Etc....

In this game, people come to bitcoin, because they think they will end up finding someone who will buy it at a higher price.  It is called "a greater-fool game".  You are a greater fool than the one you're buying from, and you do this because you think you will find a still greater fool.

Now, this has a fundamental problem to it: there's only a finite number of fools on the planet.  What is going to happen when the last layer of fools sees that there's not a "layer after them" ?

If the main motive of acquiring an asset is that you think you will be able to sell it at a higher price than you buy it, and if there is no other value-generating mechanism, this is the very definition of a greater-fool game, a bubble.  These are the mechanisms behind speculative bubbles, pyramid games and Ponzi schemes.   Which doesn't mean that you cannot make a lot of money from it when you're in and especially out in time.  All gain in such a system is financed by the "last layer of fools".  So simply don't be part of the last layer.


At least, with lettucecoin, you will get groceries

In any case, a single block chain cannot scale to the level of all transactions for all vegetables in the world.  The idea that Sven, in Sweden, must acquire, and process, the buying of a salad by Joe in Australia 7 years ago in order for Sven to be able to process his monetary asset to be able to buy some petrol for his car, is simply crazy.

I think that if there's an issue, you can write an e-mail to Evan, who will put the right transaction on the block chain 

Instant X is nothing else but a certification that the transaction is on the mempool. 

DASH is a copy of bitcoin, with build-in mixers, and some other fancy stuff like mem-pool confirmation.  However, DASH will not run into bitcoin's consensus problems, given that it is centralized, with the devs owning a very large portion of the voting system that determines everything that happens in DASH.

That said, as of now, until the DASH devs decide otherwise, DASH has 4 times more block room than bitcoin, as it runs 4 times faster.

I agree perfectly with that.  But for the moment, bitcoin is dominant because its first mover advantage is still very high ; its first mover advantage also gives it the biggest network, the strongest chain and so on.  When you look at the major alt coins, they are only 2 - 4 years old.  That was when bitcoin was in 2011 - 2013 to compare - although it would be incorrect to think that they will "repeat bitcoin".

If 2-3 transactions are too low for "currency on the internet", I don't know if this is not sufficient for settlements between institutional players. 

This is a very good analysis.   That said, block chains can take on the role of "small community currencies" where they also perform the function of a payment system.  Using them as a store of value/speculative asset (which is most of crypto these days) is a totally different role.  But you can have many block chains that perform many different functions - what is still not present sufficiently, because of bitcoin's domination, are distributed exchanges that can connect different chains, and as such, form a larger payment system.