Gambling and waiting for a greater fool to buy them at a higher price.

The best thing that can happen to ETH is that no DAPPS of any significance ever see the daylight, because as they will be full of exploits, that would harm the dream that "one day" ETH will be the basis of smart contracts.  As long as the dream is sustained, there's hope to find greater fools.

I wonder whether I have bad writing skills, or whether you have bad reading skills.   But at no point I have asserted that controls in financial systems are not needed.  In the fiat banking system, the balance check is severely needed (and not even trustworthy).  In other systems, other checks are needed.

The specific test you are complaining about is not possible by a third party in monero is a test that makes sense for bank accounts, not for crypto, in the same way that that check is not needed for cash or gold.  That should be sufficient indication that your specific demanded checking is not universally necessary, but only adapted to a system of bank accounts which crypto is not nor gold or cash.

With gold, the checking is only on the chemical veracity of the gold.  Not about account editing.  With cash, similar: the checking is the veracity of the genuine bank note.

With crypto, the checking is on the validity of the transaction.  There too, different ways are possible.

But your "account balance checking" is not appropriate to crypto, nor on bitcoin, nor on monero.  Because it doesn't check anything.  If you erroneously accept a false transaction, your balance check will not notice (it will work always).  And if your balance check doesn't work on a crypto, it only means that the calculation of the balances on the basis of the block chain was done erroneously, but doesn't affect other people's (correct) ways of establishing balances if they need to do so.  

In other words, "account balance checking" on crypto doesn't verify what needs to be verified, namely the validity of a transaction on the block chain.  It does indicate, however, that you have a local bug in the way you calculate balances from the block chain.  But that's it.

My point was, that bitcoin is mainly bought too, with the idea of selling it at a higher price (to a greater fool), whether on short term ("trading") or on long term ("hodling and investing").  The demand for bitcoin too, is driven by "greater fool theory" mostly, and very rarely for "I need bitcoin to buy stuff on the internet", which is its real purpose.

That has nothing to do with the *nature* of bitcoin, but I'm just pointing out that the actual usage (its main demand, its main reason for transactions, and hence its main market cap support) is speculative in "greater fool theory", and not in "usage as internet money".

People want the price to rise (that's the essence of greater fool theory) to make benefit, and not to use it as a currency, which was its original goal and the reason of its existence.


But not much.




My point is that there's no such thing as "investing" in crypto.  You only *gamble* on crypto if you pretend "investing".  You gamble in a greater fool theory casino.  Which doesn't mean that you cannot win a lot of money, but that is at the expense of other gamblers.

You can USE a crypto.  For bitcoin, that means: use it as a currency, to obtain when you sell stuff, and to spend when you buy stuff.  For ethereum, that means: by running DAPPs that do something in the real world, like renting a bicycle or an appartment, using storage space or a VPS, or I don't know what application that implements an agreement in the reasl world.

This real usage is VERY SMALL as compared to all the "investing", betting and gambling.  That was my point.  And bitcoin is not exempt of this, on the contrary.


I agree with you.  That is REAL USAGE.  My point is that this use is minuscule as compared to the demand, transaction volume, and hence market cap.

This real usage is the only thing that counts.  I will agree with you that at least, bitcoin has SOME real usage ; ethereum, I have not the slightest idea of what real usage it has for the moment.

But overall, the whole crypto business is essentially a zero sum greater fool casino, and only very little real usage is happening.

Of course you know.  This is exactly the same as when you have paid cash or gold to someone.  You KNOW that he got it.  He knows it too.  He can deny it, but he knows he's lying (or has memory problems).  You can deny it too, that you paid him, but then you know that you're lying.  

What you are doing here, is requiring proof to a third party.  But the two involved parties know exactly how things went.  If I give you a $100 bill, I know you got it, and you know I gave it to you. That's the "balance check".  One of us, or both of us, can lie about it to a third party.  But that's something else.

That said, as you point out yourself, in Monero you CAN prove to the world that you did pay that person, while with cash, there's no such proof available.

But this has nothing to do with the discussion about checking whether the balances are right, that is to say, whether the balances are the result of a list of transactions.  Your initial statement is that *one cannot have the same credibility in the VALUE PROPOSITION of an obfuscated block chain rather than in an "open book" block chain* because one cannot "double check" the VALIDITY of the accounts by an audit.  You compared this to "banking accounts" that are audited by an army of accountants.

I indicated to you that the validity is essentially the verification that the accounts are the results of VALID TRANSACTIONS, and valid transactions are such that they ensure that they are right/power to spend by the payer, such that there will not be/hasn't been double spending, and that there is a succession of valid transactions that leads all the way back to a valid creation.  So essentially, a valid transaction comes down to a proof of no double spend, and legitimate origin.

The way VALID TRANSACTIONS are implemented in different monetary systems are varied but as much as these different systems are correct and trustworthy, one can rest assured of their validity.

With gold, it is the laws of nature that make for valid transactions.  The origin of gold is "open" in the monetary system of gold (it doesn't matter where it comes from: dug up, from space, produced with nuclear transformation, the Stone of Wisdom...).  Everybody has confidence that the laws of nature implement a correct transaction, that you cannot "double spend" gold and that holding gold gives you the right to spend it.

With cash, this is almost the same, except that the origin has to be a printer at the central bank.  If the bill is sufficiently sophisticated, and if one has faith in law enforcement killing off enough counterfeiters so that there isn't a big source of false bills, then the laws of nature, and a check on the bill are also a system that allows for the implementation of a correct transaction, the same way as gold.

Bank accounts are another beast all together.  The central notion is "a balance" and of course, balances do not necessarily implement correct transactions.  So an army of accountants is needed to check for that.  But that is because of the nature of bank accounts which are just balances, and do not follow automatically from transactions, although they should.  The balance holder can cheat (your bank can display what it wants, your exchange can display what it wants), and so this must be checked by accountants in such a way that you can trust them somehow.  This is in fact the weakest monetary system, but it is the one of banks.  People accept it most of the time, except in the Weimar Republic, in Zimbabwe, and a few other places where the monetary system lost trust (hyperinflation).

Bitcoin goes back to transactions.  The validity comes down by checking explicitly the succession of valid transactions and the validity of creation.  Double spending is checked by explicitly verifying that the spending didn't happen twice in the list of transactions.

Monero does about the same, except that the check is cryptographic instead of explicit.

As to the anonymity, the whole IDEA is that transactions are confidential between the payer and the payee.  Just as with gold and with cash, you cannot have both that this is public, and that this is confidential.  If it is confidential, of course you cannot check it when you are a third party, without agreement of the two parties.

But, as you yourself outlined, monero has some possibilities to prove to third parties the bad faith of one of the two confidential parties, contrary to gold or cash.

However, this doesn't put into doubt the validity of the monetary implementation, which is necessary to give credibility to the value of a right to spend in the system.  Otherwise, gold wouldn't have this either.

But again, the ticket that says "your money arrived OK" is the TRANSACTION you have on the block chain.  If you were the person paying, and hence broadcasting the transaction, for sure you know what the transaction is about, right ?  You made it yourself.  You can also verify whether your transaction  is accepted on the block chain.  Well, that SAME transaction is the thing that will be used by the person receiving the money to "augment its calculated balance".

If you put on the block chain {"I use my right to spend 5 coins to give them to A"} and you see that that transaction is accepted on the block chain, then you KNOW that A has gotten 5 coins more in his balance, because his balance calculation is going to include exactly that instruction to arrive at its final value.  So "your money arrived" whenever the transaction that tells so is accepted on the chain.

This is exactly the same with bitcoin.  The transaction {"I have an unspend output of 5 coins, and I give them to A"} is what will be used by the bitcoin core wallet to augment A's content with 5.  You don't have to do the explicit calculation.  If you give the instruction "add 5", you know that the balance increased with 5, because to find the balance, you're going to execute exactly that instruction.

The fundamental error you're making, is that you dissociate the transaction from the balance, as if "some banking authority" keeps the balance and that this authority might cheat.  But as there's no such authority, and balances are just the result of running over all valid transactions, the validity of the transaction implies the increase of the balance.  There is no meaning in "checking" this.

If I tell you: "whatever number you have in mind, add 5 to it", I do not have to check what number you had before, and what number you have now, to verify that it is 5 more.  I know that it is 5 more, because that's the instruction you have to execute.  If you "add 5 to a number", then it is unavoidable that that number is now 5 bigger than before.

 

If ETC and ETH, which are essentially identical products, were to have REAL USE as a DAPP platform, then near parity should occur economically, because "gas" on the cheaper chain is cheaper.   In as much as the demand for ETC/ETH would mainly have been to "pay for the gas", then parity would be inavoidable, and DAPPs would go to the cheapest chain, because the usage of the DAPP would be cheaper and hence more attractive.  This would rise the demand for the cheapest coin such, until parity is reached ; except if there is some "brand preference" effect which could explain some preference to use "more expensive" coins to burn because of a real or perceived higher quality.

But ETC nor ETH is used so much that its use has what so ever to do with the market price, which is PURE SPECULATION, and hence TOTALLY RANDOM.

The market price of ETH (or ETC) has nothing to do with its usage, which is essentially absent.  It is just a betting token in a casino.  And concerning betting, all odds are off.  

Note that we have exactly the same scenario with bitcoin, where the market cap that is sustained by the demand to use it as a *currency* is negligible compared to its real market cap, which is also nothing else but pure speculation, and hence totally random.

One has to face it: crypto is not used, or almost not.  Its market cap is essentially just tokens in a zero-sum casino.  And as such, anything goes.

The usage market cap of crypto is, totally ignorant guess, probably not even sustaining a market cap of a million dollars.

I would even say, it is unavoidable on a Turing complete instruction set such as ethereum.  There's no way to write guaranteed secure code on such a system.  If we knew how to do so, there wouldn't be any vulnerable system, because all software would be written that way.

The irony in this is that you are the one erroneously taking crypto to be equivalent to bank accounts (which it ISN'T), and then accusing it of not being able to implement the accountancy of bank accounts (which is not needed).

YOU are the one talking about "balances" as if they were the atomic concepts in crypto, while they aren't, but they ARE in the world of bank accounts.  

You fail to see that what a bank account audit tries to establish, namely that the account changes are in agreement with a hypothetical list of transactions, while in crypto, one does the opposite, and STARTS from the list of transactions, to DERIVE, if you want to, some "balances".

There's of course no point to try to apply a test to those derived balances, to make sure that they can be derived from a list of transactions, because they HAVE BEEN DERIVED from a list of transactions in the first place !  So the test doesn't test anything that we didn't know already.

You seem not to be able to integrate these two notions that are fundamental to crypto:

1) the fundamental monetary aspect of crypto is "power/right to spend" (and not the "holdings in an account")

2) the fundamental accountancy unit is the transaction (and not the account)

Both these notions have to do with a single fundamental concept: the VALID TRANSACTION.

However, FROM this concept, one can (and wallet software does this) DERIVE the equivalent of the "holdings in an address".

As I said, it is *you* who fail to understand that this is the essence of a cryptocurrency, and the ironic thing is that you accuse others to make this failure to understand.

Crypto is NOT about accounts and balances.  It is about transactions and the power to make a valid transaction.

The need to have a valid transaction implies the fact that it has to spend a previous valid transaction output, or a valid creation.  There are different ways to check this ; one is the bitcoin way, with explicit traceability, another is using cryptographic proofs (ring signatures, or zero knowledge proofs) of validity.  These are just different ways to establish the validity of a transaction, and that's ALL THAT MATTERS.

Eh, the only thing that has "authority" is the block chain.  There are no IOU on a block chain.  And, as I explained several times, the "symmetrical audit" is a technique that allows verification if the "atomic elements of accountancy" are ACCOUNTS.  But the "atomic elements of accountancy" on a block chain are NOT accounts, but TRANSACTIONS.

The symmetrical auditing on "independent accounts" checks whether the account values have only changed by the existence of transactions.

If my atomic elements of accountancy are "accounts", then I have an account A, an account B and an account C, and the "correctness" (the check of balances) of this accountancy system comes down to verifying whether the changes in these values of A, B and C correspond to a set of TRANSACTIONS.

If at moment t1, A = 100, B = 10, and C = 40

and at moment t2, A = 50, B = 30 and C = 70

then the question is: does there exist a set of transactions, such that we can go from t1 to t2 ?

Here, such a set of transactions would be: {A -> 50 -> B} and {B -> 30 -> C}.  Note that this system is not unique.  We could also have set of transactions {A -> 50 -> C } and {C -> 20 -> B}

But at least there exist possible transactions that transform t1 into t2.  So the checking of the balances proves us that it is possible that correct transactions have made the situation of t1 evolve into t2.

However, with a block chain, we ALREADY HAVE the list of transactions, and the "accounts" are only derived quantities. So the "accountancy" on this DERIVED set of balances doesn't bring in anything.


But that is not what happens on the block chain.  That is what your wallet software DISPLAYS you.  On the block chain, you don't have "an address with value on it".  On the block chain, you have unspend outputs, and your wallet is making the sum of those unspend outputs to display you what could be associated with that address.


Of course it is possible.  If the transaction is accepted, you have "killed" one or more of your "unspend outputs" and your wallet software is not going to add them anymore.

You are totally missing the point again.  Your "balance on an exchange" has nothing to do with a cryptocurrency, but is something that the guys on an exchange decide to put on their website.  They can change that balance at any moment, by just editing their web site database.  The balance on an exchange is not "holding crypto", it is holding IOU on a website.  So this has nothing to do with it.

Your local simplewallet application is a thing that takes the block chain, as I explained, and CALCULATES a balance from all the valid transactions on the chain.  If that calculation is wrong because your application doesn't work correctly, then it is just doing a wrong calculation, but that *balance* is nowhere explicitly on a block chain.  Only TRANSACTIONS are, from which software can calculate balances.

And it is in the nature of a transaction to contain BOTH an instruction of "augmenting a balance" and an instruction of "diminishing a balance".  So from the moment that there is a valid transaction, AUTOMATICALLY there will be an augmented balance somewhere, and a diminished balance somewhere.  Whether software, of websites reflecting IOU, or whatever DO THIS CALCULATION CORRECTLY, is an entirely different issue, that has nothing to do with the block chain itself.  This software can work correctly, or wrongly, as well on the bitcoin block chain, as on the monero block chain.

You can just as well send bitcoins to poloniex, and NOT see your IOU account of bitcoins there increased, as you can send monero to poloniex, and not see your IOU account of monero increase.  If poloniex's software is not running correctly (on purpose or with a bug) then that has nothing to do with the nature of the block chain.

If your bitcoin core wallet is not treating transactions on the bitcoin chain correctly, then your balances will  not be correct, just as if simplewallet is making mistakes reading the monero block chain, it will display wrong balances.  Because in both cases, these balances are calculated on the basis of the block chain transactions.

Your reference to your "scientific control" which I explained, was totally erroneous, because just testing twice the effect of a transaction, whether valid or not, is not bringing anything new.

Again: a transaction contains BOTH a "plus" for one balance, and a "minus" for another balance.  OF COURSE if you include that transaction in the calculation of the first balance, you will see an augmentation, and if you include THAT SAME TRANSACTION in the calculation of the second balance, you will see a corresponding decrease.  But that doesn't check, prove, or double check anything.
If the transaction is valid, which is the thing that must be checked, your balances will correspond AUTOMATICALLY (in monero just as well as in bitcoin) ; and if your transaction is invalid, the erroneously calculated balances on the basis of that invalid transaction will ALSO check.  So the fact of seeing an augmentation of A and a decrease of B doesn't prove ANYTHING.  It is a logical consequence of accepting as valid a transaction.

With a correct calculation of balances from a block chain, and valid transactions, your scenario "A is diminished, but B didn't increase" CAN NEVER HAPPEN.  Because it is one and the same element (the valid transaction) that causes BOTH.  If the transaction is valid, then the correct calculation of A will be diminished, and that same transaction will cause the correct calculation of B to be augmented.  It is simply not possible that one and the same block chain, with the same set of transactions, would ever result in A diminishing, and B not augmenting, because it is one and the same instruction (the transaction).  At least if the transaction is correctly structured, which is part of its cryptographic validation.

Your scenario is only possible if people are having DIFFERENT BLOCK CHAINS with different sets of transactions, but that is also true for bitcoin.

The trivial other cases can be when your wallet software makes a wrong calculation of balances (that doesn't affect anybody, because that doesn't modify the block chain), or when other software writes wrong calculations in a web site database.  But that can just as well happen with bitcoin, as with monero, and has nothing to do with the currency principles itself.

It did happen on ETC.  Exchanges didn't accept (well, did accept and then froze) the coins that came from the "Robin hood group" that emptied the DAO to "protect it from evil hackers", when they tried to trade them.

So these etc coins didn't have the same value or got the same treatment as other ETC coins.

You entirely missed the point.  Nor in bitcoin, nor in monero, there is such a thing as a balance in itself.  The balance is DERIVED from a set of valid transactions.  The + and the - of the two derived balances come BOTH from the SAME valid (or invalid !) transaction.  As such, your argument is totally false.  In as much as there is a + and a - in bitcoin, it is there also in monero (as a derived quantity in both), and the + AND the - are derived from one and the same thing, namely a valid transaction.

It is simply not true that in bitcoin there are two balances, and in monero there is one.  There is NONE, nor in bitcoin, nor in monero. There are only valid transactions.  If a transaction is valid, it contains BOTH a + and a - for a to be derived balance.  So verifying the - against the + is not a double check at all.

The differences reside in two aspects.  The first aspect is that the DERIVED balance in bitcoin can be done by anybody, for any address.  Again, the instruction to {ADD 10 to B and to SUBTRACT 10 to A} which is the transaction, OBVIOUSLY will give an agreement in augmenting B and decreasing A, but that is not a double check ; only, everybody can do that calculation if he wants to.  But he's checking nothing that is not already stated when we say that {ADD 10 to B and to SUBTRACT 10 to A} is a valid transaction.  The "double check" follows mathematically from the acceptance of this transaction as valid, so it doesn't check anything.  But, in bitcoin everybody can do that calculation if he wants to.  In monero, only the owner of the secret key of A can do the calculation for A, and the owner of the secret key of B can do the calculation of B.  But B KNOWS that, given the validity of the transaction, some A must see a minus, and A KNOWS that, given the validity of the transaction, there is a balance of some B that must go up with the same amount.
The second aspect is that in bitcoin, the checking of the double spending of an output is done by checking simply whether that output appears DIRECTLY already as an input (then it is spend and cannot be spend twice) while in monero, it is checked by cryptographically verifying that the same SIGNATURE CHECK doesn't appear already somewhere.  

But these are just two different methods to make sure that the output that makes the transaction valid, is indeed unspend.

So in the end, whether we have a transaction that says:
{ADD 10 to B and SUBTRACT 10 from A} like in bitcoin ; or whether we have:

{ADD 10 to B and SUBTRACT 10 from one of A X or Z, such that this is the only time this can be done},

in both cases we know that there is a + and a corresponding - IF WE MAKE THE BALANCES, which are not explicit, nor in bitcoin, nor in monero.

What counts, is whether the transaction is valid.  If we ERRONEOUSLY accept a transaction as valid, while it isn't, then JUST AS WELL IN BITCOIN AS IN MONERO, you will find the "correct" check of B increasing with 10 and A decreasing with 10, because in both cases, a transaction contains as well a + as a - instruction.  As such, this + vs - check, is not a check at all.  It ALWAYS works out, in bitcoin, as well as in monero, and doesn't check the validity of the transaction itself, at all.

Do you know the most common error in scientific controls ?  The false sense of security, when the scientific control you think is "independent" is in fact totally correlated with your original.

And this is an example of it.

After all, what are we looking at ?

We are looking at the VALIDITY OF A SINGLE TRANSACTION.

Now, that transaction will essentially be something like:

{input: transaction X with address A ; output address B (10 bitcoin)}

Now you THINK that you have TWO INDEPENDENT ways of verifying that transaction:
namely that address A has now 10 bitcoin less, and address B has now 10 bitcoin more.

You think that the verification of the diminishing of 10 coins in A is a kind of INDEPENDENT verification of the increase of 10 coins in address B, which would bring "credibility to the validity of the above transaction".  You THINK that you do a scientific control.

There's nothing about it.

What happens when a wallet calculates the CONTENT OF address A ?

It looks at all transactions that have an UNSPEND OUTPUT at address A.  How does the wallet do that ?  It looks at all the transactions that have address A as output, and LEAVES OUT THOSE THAT HAVE THEM SOMEWHERE AS AN INPUT.  (to keep only the unspend)

So what happens when your wallet calculates the content of B, before and after the transaction ?

Well, before the transaction it makes the sum of all unspend outputs containing address B.  After the transaction, it finds ONE MORE such output, namely 10 bitcoin.  Why ?  Because of the above transaction !

What happens now when your wallet calculates the content of A, before and after the transaction ?

Well, before the transaction it makes the sum of all unspend outputs containing address A.  After the transaction, it has to leave out one output, of 10 bitcoin (plus fee).  Why ? *** because of the above transaction ***

So your "scientific control" involves TWICE the same transaction of which you want to verify the veracity.  You thought that by verifying that the balance of A diminishes while the one of B increases, you have a kind of double check on the validity of the transaction.  But this is not true: the increase of B and the diminishing of A are BOTH calculated using one and the same transaction: the one you wanted to verify !  So checking that A diminished, didn't ADD any "independent control" at all !  You checked twice the same thing !

This is a common mistake in "scientific control": depending on the same element, and thinking one has done an independent verification.

And now we come to the essence that kills all your arguments: the BALANCE of addresses FOLLOWS from the VALIDITY of transactions, and not the other way around.  The whole idea of crypto currencies is NOT to have "bank accounts", but is to have VALID TRANSACTIONS.  The atomic component of a crypto currency is not a balance, but is a transaction.  And the essence of a monetary asset is the "right/power to spend", that is, the CAPABILITY OF PROVIDING A VALID TRANSACTION, not of 'changing balances'.  That is a consequence of it, it is not the cause.

Your "double check" in bitcoin balances was nothing else but using twice the same valid transaction.  If the transaction is invalid and you didn't see it, your "double check" would work just as well, and you would be wrong.  Your whole check stands or falls with the validity or not of that transaction, and nothing else.   And as I pointed out, checking the validity of a transaction in bitcoin (which is the essential function of the whole bitcoin thing !) is complex, uses a lot of cryptography, and can only be done with software.

IF the transaction is deemed valid, your balances will check, but the balance of A will not check anything more than the balance of B, because it uses exactly the same information you validated.

The validity of a transaction in bitcoin is checked by verifying that:
1) the block chain is all right
2) that the inputs of the transaction exist as former outputs of other transactions and are unspend
3) that the transaction is correctly cryptographically signed

the inclusion of the transaction in the block chain will make the former outputs now "spend".

In Monero, it is not much different.  The only thing that changes is the WAY 2) is verified.  In bitcoin, there is an explicit indication of which transaction had which output.  In monero too, but there are OTHER transaction outputs in the list which have nothing to do with this transaction.  However, the cryptographic signature used CAN ONLY BE USED ONCE for a given output.  When that signature is used, we know that this output is "spent", because nobody will be able to produce a SECOND signature on the block chain using the same output, without it being seen.  So directly checking, or using this signature, comes down to the same effect: the impossibility of spending an output twice.

... and when it is not an option.  Because otherwise, there will be a difference between "confidential" coins and "clear coins".  It might for instance well be that some exchanges or I don't know what, only allow transactions of clear coins, which have no confidential stuff in their past.

Depends on what you want the currency for.  You have to know that apart from playing in a casino that is a zero-sum game based upon "greater fool theory", crypto currencies are not so much used.

What people around here call "crypto investors" are nothing else but scammers that try to find other would-be scammers that they can rip off.  This is why they look for "crypto currency adoption", because that is, to them, an influx of more sheeple to scam, that is, to sell them crypto tokens at a higher price than they bought it themselves.

For instance, someone who spend $10 on the possession of 100 bitcoin in 2011 or so, and sells it to a newcomer who will pay him 60 000 $ for those same 100 coins, has been playing "greater fool theory" with success and scammed the newcomer.  That newcomer will not complain, because that newcomer is hoping to re-sell these same 100 coins in a few years for, say $200 000, to a still greater fool.  The last layer of fools will have coughed up the whole benefit of his predecessors: that's grossly what "market cap" measures.  At this moment, for bitcoin, it is around $ 10 billion, which means that the current bitcoin buyers grossly have coughed up $ 10 billion to make early adopters rich (this is not true, market cap overestimates that amount, because of dormant accounts and the lack of circulation of bitcoin).
So if tomorrow, bitcoin collapsed, the last row of bitcoin holders are the guys and girls who where the victims of all those making profit on "bitcoin investing".

Altcoins are the same.

This is the biggest usage of bitcoin and altcoins: gambling in greater fool theory.  Most of this doesn't happen on the block chain, but on the web sites of exchanges, and the block chain doesn't even have to exist in a certain way, to play this game.  It is sufficient to have virtual tokens on exchanges, and gamble with them between peer gamblers (sorry, investors).

But there are other usages.   They are very minor.

The most important secondary usage, is as a currency.  To buy stuff over the internet with, on official sites, or on dark markets.  This was the original purpose of bitcoin, but I think it is only a minor part of the transactions.

Another usage is smart contracts.  Ethereum is the best known coin here.  But there also, the use of ethereum for smart contracts is essentially negligible as compared to the gambling of ethereum tokens in exchange-casinos.

Several other coins exist.  Monero is a currency, similar to bitcoin, but making the successive transactions cryptographically difficult to track.   Steem is a currency with which you can vote on blog articles.  Litecoin has about the same currency function as bitcoin.

But most coins are not used much, apart from betting tokens in the greater fool casino game.

So to answer your question, one should know what you want to do with it.  Buy stuff on the internet ?  Make deals with other people ?  Hide your expenses ?

You are somewhat over simplifying.  The devs are supposed not to have a master key ; the whole problem is how to generate the public parameters without someone holding the masterkey.  It is problematic, but it is not as blunt as you put it ; I agree however that what I understood of the way they generate it, that it is sufficient that the whole set of celebrities supposed to generate the key, collude over keeping the key (or that there's a back door in the system they use that can bring together all the shards of the golden key), to have the golden key that can generate an unlimited number of coins.  It cannot de anonymise however.

I think more work is needed on this "trusted setup" before it can be trusted, but it is not as blunt as you put it.

Ok, so let us assume you have a broken wallet application.  We will assume this on the bitcoin, and on the monero/zcash/other anon side.

What happens ?  Your broken bitcoin wallet doesn't do the right verifications, and shows you a wrong balance.  Your broken monero wallet does the same.  So why is your broken bitcoin wallet now more to be trusted than your broken monero wallet ?

After all, and this is what I wanted to indicate to you earlier on, the bitcoin block chain is ALSO WAY TOO COMPLEX to "see visually that the transaction is right".

In order for the "transaction to be right", you have:

1) to verify the entire chaining of all block chain headers since the genesis block of Satoshi to verify that you have *A* right block chain.
2) to "hop backwards" from the transaction to be verified, to the whole TREE OF BACKWARD INPUTS, all up to their individual coinbases, and find ALL those transactions.
3) to verify the Merkle tree hash of each of the blocks where at least one such transaction occurs.

==> at this point you know that the transaction is transmitting you legit coins that have been created in a coinbase.

4) to verify all OTHER Merkle tree hashes of ALL other blocks.  (now we know that you have the full list of reliable transactions on this chain)
5) to see if NO OTHER transaction ever had one of the outputs used in your backward chain as an input

==> now we know that along the path, there has not been any double spending.

6) listen on the bitcoin network, to find out if there are no chains propagated with more PoW then the one you just analysed.

This is NOT something you can "visually inspect".  And if you leave one step out, you might:
A) not have the consensus block chain, where double spends have been left out
B) not have a valid block chain at all, where simply transactions have been left out (Merkle trees wouldn't fit, but this, you only know if you verify).
C) have double spend coins
D) have non-legit coins that don't go back to a coinbase transaction (bitcoin creation).

So ALL THIS HAS TO BE DONE before you can know that a transaction in bitcoin is legit.  This is NOT something that is simple and "visual".  Leave one step out, and you have a visual "check" that is wrong.

If you don't trust crypto, then you cannot trust this whole procedure ; if you can't trust your wallet having done this correctly, then you don't know anything about the legitimity of any transaction.

And no, you cannot do it with pen and paper.  You have to trust software doing this, or write it yourself.

In other words, you have no clue about the right balance or the legitimity of any bitcoin transaction without trusting software and crypto in any case.  So your argument that it would be simple to verify is not true.  Once you have to trust software and crypto, you can trust software and crypto in a slightly more sophisticated edition too.

You cannot simply "verify the balance of the other guy" without going through the same steps as I have indicated here.  If you have a block chain where a former spending of that balance was left out, or missed by your crappy wallet software (your hypothesis), you are as vulnerable as in any other case, believing a transaction.  And to verify that this is not the case, you have to check the whole validity of the entire chain, AND make sure you have the right chain (highest PoW).  That's a lot of crypto you have to believe.

Why do they trust addition, then ?
Maybe addition isn't trustworthy either.
Maybe the Abelian group of addition over the integers isn't correct either, and can be cracked by a sufficiently smart hacker.

You cannot "see" the addition of two numbers that are larger than, say, about 10.

This is actually not true.  The only way for a limited supply of a currency to limit inflation, is that not only that currency is in limited supply, but also that it has the monopoly on the currency market ; in other words, that it is the only allowed form of currency.

If not, the competition by other currencies, and the creation of new currencies, is just as inflationary as making more of the same.
Even though bitcoin may be in limited supply, there is no limited supply of alt coins.  You can invent a new altcoin every day.  In as much as these altcoins will take a share in the "currency market", their creation is just as inflationary as if there was a tail emission in bitcoin.
And given that for the moment, bitcoin as well as altcoin market shares in the "currency market" are infinitesimal, this discussion has not much meaning.

The value of a collectible is in any case totally random, because the result of an infinitely recursive belief system.  As long as that collectible has an infinitesimal market share in the "store of value" market, shared with stock, fiat, gold, real estate, old cars, famous wine, famous art works, .... and hence doesn't undergo any limits by the market itself, its value is *totally arbitrary*.  As such, its emission scheme doesn't even matter much, except in the belief system it is upholding.

Blockchain.info is not the block chain, it is a web site.  They can visually display what they want.  If you see it on the web site, what makes you think that this corresponds to something on the block chain ?  The only way to "visually look at the block chain" is with a hex editor on the downloaded files.


The endorsement is in the cryptography.  If you don't trust cryptography, you shouldn't use crypto at all.  I have more trust in cryptography than in accountants, honestly.