In any event, when Bitcoin becomes more mainstream we will see regular computer nerds start firing up nodes. We're talking about a sizable group of individuals who'll spend as much as BJA spent on his "swampnode" on a keyboard.... with fancy buttons with programmable led's (Fingers crossed. Bring it to me Santa!!!).
I'd love if that were true but we've reached a considerable percentage of the nerd market in the last few years and yet for the amount of nodes count as never been lower. |
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I'm confused  First you argue... I think Bitcoin can do both, and that these different aspects of Bitcoin actually reinforce each other. I also do not think Bitcoin will become a world reserve currency without experiencing mass adoption as a currency for the people first, history also certainly supports this theory as well.
to which I reply... It doesn't.
hdbuck, always the sharp guy, understands what is being insinuated... did "teh mass" ever had gold in any meaningful way?
hmnope.
By now I'd expect your are still clueless as to what it is I'm trying to lead you to so, to be clear, the argument goes: Something does not need to be "mass adopted" for it to become a "world reserve currency". It just needs to be the predilect form of money for relevant* economic actors in the society. Case in point: gold. *masses != relevant |
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In those days some families whole possessions weren't worth one single gold coin. I have repeatedly stated that different types of precious metals where used, including silver and bronze. Which poor families could afford, often coins where also divided, this is where the term quarter comes from for example. Currency has been used by most people for the majority of our known history, it is as old as civilization itself. Great so you admit you were wrong. That took some time! (ps. you need to sharpen up on your writing style, reading you is akin to watching paint dry. have some character and don't be such a dull robot, will ya?) |
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The western world doesn't really understand the problem.
Yep, typical egocentric spoiled little brats |
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Greg, if you are reading this, let us know where we might keep tabs on your thoughts and plans. I, for one, am with you...although given the makeup of the ecosystem that might be taken as faint praise..
+1 |
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Gmaxwell's roadmap for increasing the network capacity has good consensus and is the most logical way forward. Solutions for the long-term will gradually become more apparent as it approaches but a better solution is always only 1 lightbulb moment away. Discounting human ingenuity in favour of mediocre workarounds will doom you to losing money.
They've had YEARS to get a lightbulb moment. It's like waiting for economically viable fusion reactors. It's not just a technical issue. But it's worse than that. It's philosophical and ideological. It's expecting two guys who by your own admission have incentives to not do their goddamn jobs--who both have effective veto power--to come up with a solution that will ruin their side businesses. The market had a chance to adopt an implementation that supported big blocks and it didn't so clearly there's a couple of holes in your logic. |
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How to know you're on the right side of things: spot where notorious paid troll jstolfi's allegiance lies and support the opposite.
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Gold and silver coins sometimes mixed with copper and other precious metals indeed. Wheat and grains have not been used as currencies, certainly not for the majority of human history like gold and silver coins have. I am not sure whether to ridicule you here or to go about teaching history 101, I am a history buff myself, so I am a bit shocked that you are not aware of this well known basic fact and that you are even trying to debate this with me.
I don't care that you can use Google when your absence of logical skills refrains you from adressing the original argument. "I am a history buff myself"  To be clear: Your point doesn't stand because you've provided factual evidence against it: gold was never a one-size-fits-all type of deal.
In the same way Bitcoin cannot and will never accomodate all use cases
You might want to carry on pretending that everyone was using gold coins back then but certainly that would make you the idiot worthy of being ridiculed. In those days some families whole possessions weren't worth one single gold coin. *edit wrong meme  |
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ok ... the overnight model runs are in and the news looks good.
456 was expected to be an important number and looks to have confirmed. 500 is a pressure point but not an important number as such, 600 equally weighted.
620 is an important number ... strangely there doesn't seem to be much else between ATH 1250 ish (pressure point) and then important number 1666!
You mean much else besides a 1 MB brick wall? You seriously think we could get that high without jamming up the network? I'm a firefighter. You can't put out a conflagration with a garden hose, no matter how much water you have in the tank. Capacity matters. Do you honestly believe people right now are buying coins to use them for transactions? Are you that dense? |
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If you want bitcoin network to become the world's most trustworthy money with predefined money supply schedule, responsible for money distribution to other institutions, then nothing needs to be done: The Fedwire system that handles large transactions between Federal reserve and thousands of member banks in US do 4 tps, and bitcoin can do that today If you want bitcoin to become a paypal like system that handles high frequency trading between billions of private people, then it is an e-commerce system. Its capacity is heavily limited by the CPU speed and network bandwidth (not block size limit), due to the nature of P2P network (exponentially rising data traffic and lag with more and more nodes). Of course it will be good that bitcoin can both be a secure monetary system while still be able to serve billions of users at protocol level, but if you can not get both, which one do you prioritize? I think it is a huge waste of resource to use thousands of nodes on a P2P network to make sure a coffee transaction is tamper resistant I personally believe Bitcoin's main goal is providing monetary sovereignty. But how can you make use of it, if you can't transact in a trustless way, because blockchain is only for settlements? How is that any better than fiat? Hence all this debate. Hence the Lightning Network. It is supposed to solve this problem: let you transact in Bitcoin in a trustless manner, but without the need to put every tx on the blockchain. If we just sit and do nothing, Bitcoin is going nowhere (well, I exaggerate, but it has a lot more potential). It's too early to freeze the protocol, though it must be done eventually, I believe. You cannot be serious.... For starters one of Bitcoin's central aspect is that for maybe the first time in history you can hold something that cannot be debased. Surely you'd agree that's quite a change from fiat. It is reasonable to expect that people will still be dealing with financial institutions decades from now, whether it be banks, central clearing houses or what not. The trendy "be your own bank" line is nothing but pipedream. Financial institutions are not going to disappear, they'll just be held accountable for their actions by the market and only the most competitive and innovative ones will survive. No more TBTF bailout. I'm quite serious actually, if you take my point as a whole, not pick a phrase from it. What we have now is that anyone can transact on the main chain in a trustless manner. As that might be not workable long-term, there are proposals for a level 2 payment network, e.g. LN. These proposals are meant to be trustless (up to a point) as well. There's a hell of a difference between trustful and trustless off-chain solutions, even though both eventually settle on the main chain. I did use the word trustless so many times here because it's the thing that matters. If I'm completely cut off from the blockchain's trustlessness, then Bitcoin is of no use for me. I cannot be sure I actually have coins, I cannot be sure I'm not involved in fractional reserve. If you have to trust a third-party in order to use Bitcoin, it's no better than fiat. It's just Fiat 2.0. That's what I meant in my reply to johnyj. I'm not saying financial institutions will disappear, I'm saying that I want to have a choince not to trust them. Right, but there's a difference between trustlessness in transacting and trustlessness in holding your assets. What I mean by that is provided I can run a full node and always check my balance in a trustless manner then it matters less to me if I have to use third-parties for everyday transactions. |
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did "teh mass" ever had gold in any meaningful way?
hmnope.
Yes, once upon a time when gold was money. Now gold 2.0 is money. The plebs didn't hold any significant amount of gold. They were too poor for that. Even the poor needed a currency for the exchange of goods and services, for the majority of known human history this has been in the form of gold and silver coins, my point still stands. Or copper, wheat, grains and other such commodities. Your point doesn't stand because you've provided factual evidence against it: gold was never a one-size-fits-all type of deal. In the same way Bitcoin cannot and will never accomodate all use cases |
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did "teh mass" ever had gold in any meaningful way?
hmnope.
Yes, once upon a time when gold was money. Now gold 2.0 is money. The plebs didn't hold any significant amount of gold. They were too poor for that. |
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I think Bitcoin can do both, and that these different aspects of Bitcoin actually reinforce each other. I also do not think Bitcoin will become a world reserve currency without experiencing mass adoption as a currency for the people first, history also certainly supports this theory as well.
It doesn't. Typically any form of money that is not fiat started gaining traction as a currency only because people tended to hold it as they considered it valuable. You should check your history, gold and silver coins have been used as a currency and a commodity for the majority of our known history. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_coinYou're really dense aren't ya? Gold didn't start off as a currency but as ornament, jewelry & collectibles hence the argument that people first have to find value in a commodity and hold it before it gains traction as a currency. Gold became money when it was demanded as tribute (tax). The war lords demanded it to produce weapons. http://www.tutanchamun-game.de/downloads/bilderKatalog/images/dolch.jpghttp://www.goldseiten.de/content/kolumnen/download/pcm-17.pdfRight so gold was first hoarded and collected because it made nice weapon. Thanks for supporting my point! |
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I think Bitcoin can do both, and that these different aspects of Bitcoin actually reinforce each other. I also do not think Bitcoin will become a world reserve currency without experiencing mass adoption as a currency for the people first, history also certainly supports this theory as well.
It doesn't. Typically any form of money that is not fiat started gaining traction as a currency only because people tended to hold it as they considered it valuable. You should check your history, gold and silver coins have been used as a currency and a commodity for the majority of our known history. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_coinYou're really dense aren't ya? Gold didn't start off as a currency but as ornament, jewelry & collectibles hence the argument that people first have to find value in a commodity and hold it before it gains traction as a currency. This is correct, first a commodity, then a currency and a commodity and only after these stages can it become a global reserve and or settlement system. Mass adoption is still a necessary first step in this process. The financial elites of today will not choose to use Bitcoin when they can command and control their own systems instead. Only through global adoption where we become the new financial elites while rendering the old power structures obsolete can this transformation take place. The "mass" is always the last phase of adoption. Long before Bitcoin gets anywhere close to a global, mainstream payment network it will need to be adopted as a store-of-value by several orders-of-magnitude more wealthy people looking for a safe refuge for their wealth. Maybe so but this does not change the importance of Bitcoin being a viable currency in order to attract further mass adoption. You'll need to be a little more patient because we're far away from there. That's why it's rather stupid to attempt to cater to these people right now. Let's focus on the lowest hanging fruit shall we? |
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It's possible gmaxwell has had enough abuse. Apparently he gave up commit access to the bitcoin github. I saw his last post was in this thread a few days ago.
I've found the abuse the Core devs and BlockStream to terrible. I wouldn't blame any of them for choosing to walk away. On certain (unimportant) forums there's some celebration of the idea that gmaxwell may be walking away. Reading it, I have to say that I would walk away from a community with so many evil people. Frankly, I don't want to be in a "community" with people like that either. If there were a way to boot all of them out and keep gmaxwell, I'd prefer that. If they'd just fork off and leave the rest of us with Bitcoin, things would probably be fine (after a shaking out period). Instead they seem intent on "occupying" Bitcoin.
I'm sure gmaxwell knows he has a lot of supporters in the Bitcoin community. That wouldn't change if he decided to leave. I think most people would understand.
It can be said that the other side feels this way as well. They might even say the same thing about their ideological opponents. Considering that many people did sign up for the vision of Satoshi which Core presently seems to be diverting from. If Satoshi's vision was so well represented in the XT fork then maybe you can explain why it was unanimously rejected by Bitcoin users by and large? These concepts are still very new and scary to many Bitcoiners. You played a large part in the irrational fear mongering so you can answer part of this question yourself. I am not convinced however that BIP101 has been unanimously rejected, I think it is still to early to tell. "Irrational fear mongering" heh That's a tool of XT proponents. I'd be great if you could stop pointing fingers when faced with an inconvenient truth. Last time I checked we were getting forked off by BIP101 in December by the industry derps.. What happened? Get a grip will you? Even Gavin has moved on from BIP101. It's been months already and there's yet to be any sign of traction.What gives? |
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I think Bitcoin can do both, and that these different aspects of Bitcoin actually reinforce each other. I also do not think Bitcoin will become a world reserve currency without experiencing mass adoption as a currency for the people first, history also certainly supports this theory as well.
It doesn't. Typically any form of money that is not fiat started gaining traction as a currency only because people tended to hold it as they considered it valuable. You should check your history, gold and silver coins have been used as a currency and a commodity for the majority of our known history. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_coinYou're really dense aren't ya? Gold didn't start off as a currency but as ornament, jewelry & collectibles hence the argument that people first have to find value in a commodity and hold it before it gains traction as a currency. This is correct, first a commodity, then a currency and a commodity and only after these stages can it become a global reserve and or settlement system. Mass adoption is still a necessary first step in this process. The financial elites of today will not choose to use Bitcoin when they can command and control their own systems instead. Only through global adoption where we become the new financial elites while rendering the old power structures obsolete can this transformation take place. The "mass" is always the last phase of adoption. Long before Bitcoin gets anywhere close to a global, mainstream payment network it will need to be adopted as a store-of-value by several orders-of-magnitude more wealthy people looking for a safe refuge for their wealth. |
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It's possible gmaxwell has had enough abuse. Apparently he gave up commit access to the bitcoin github. I saw his last post was in this thread a few days ago.
I've found the abuse the Core devs and BlockStream to terrible. I wouldn't blame any of them for choosing to walk away. On certain (unimportant) forums there's some celebration of the idea that gmaxwell may be walking away. Reading it, I have to say that I would walk away from a community with so many evil people. Frankly, I don't want to be in a "community" with people like that either. If there were a way to boot all of them out and keep gmaxwell, I'd prefer that. If they'd just fork off and leave the rest of us with Bitcoin, things would probably be fine (after a shaking out period). Instead they seem intent on "occupying" Bitcoin.
I'm sure gmaxwell knows he has a lot of supporters in the Bitcoin community. That wouldn't change if he decided to leave. I think most people would understand.
It can be said that the other side feels this way as well. They might even say the same thing about their ideological opponents. Considering that many people did sign up for the vision of Satoshi which Core presently seems to be diverting from. If Satoshi's vision was so well represented in the XT fork then maybe you can explain why it was unanimously rejected by Bitcoin users by and large? |
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I think Bitcoin can do both, and that these different aspects of Bitcoin actually reinforce each other. I also do not think Bitcoin will become a world reserve currency without experiencing mass adoption as a currency for the people first, history also certainly supports this theory as well.
It doesn't. Typically any form of money that is not fiat started gaining traction as a currency only because people tended to hold it as they considered it valuable. You should check your history, gold and silver coins have been used as a currency and a commodity for the majority of our known history. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_coinYou're really dense aren't ya? Gold didn't start off as a currency but as ornament, jewelry & collectibles hence the argument that people first have to find value in a commodity and hold it before it gains traction as a currency. |
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Look, i'd love to chat about economics and such, but I can't get over this scaling problem. This network can only support about half a million active users, but it has a market cap of 6.7 billion dollars. That's crazy overvalued until we get bigger blocks.
A bunch of nonsense once again. Bitcoin is not a social network, it's not Facebook. Its value is not determined by its number of users but the amount of capital that is trusted to it. The network's capacity in that regard is arguably limitless. |
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If you want bitcoin network to become the world's most trustworthy money with predefined money supply schedule, responsible for money distribution to other institutions, then nothing needs to be done: The Fedwire system that handles large transactions between Federal reserve and thousands of member banks in US do 4 tps, and bitcoin can do that today If you want bitcoin to become a paypal like system that handles high frequency trading between billions of private people, then it is an e-commerce system. Its capacity is heavily limited by the CPU speed and network bandwidth (not block size limit), due to the nature of P2P network (exponentially rising data traffic and lag with more and more nodes). Of course it will be good that bitcoin can both be a secure monetary system while still be able to serve billions of users at protocol level, but if you can not get both, which one do you prioritize? I think it is a huge waste of resource to use thousands of nodes on a P2P network to make sure a coffee transaction is tamper resistant I personally believe Bitcoin's main goal is providing monetary sovereignty. But how can you make use of it, if you can't transact in a trustless way, because blockchain is only for settlements? How is that any better than fiat? Hence all this debate. Hence the Lightning Network. It is supposed to solve this problem: let you transact in Bitcoin in a trustless manner, but without the need to put every tx on the blockchain. If we just sit and do nothing, Bitcoin is going nowhere (well, I exaggerate, but it has a lot more potential). It's too early to freeze the protocol, though it must be done eventually, I believe. You cannot be serious.... For starters one of Bitcoin's central aspect is that for maybe the first time in history you can hold something that cannot be debased. Surely you'd agree that's quite a change from fiat. It is reasonable to expect that people will still be dealing with financial institutions decades from now, whether it be banks, central clearing houses or what not. The trendy "be your own bank" line is nothing but pipedream. Financial institutions are not going to disappear, they'll just be held accountable for their actions by the market and only the most competitive and innovative ones will survive. No more TBTF bailout. |
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