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That means that the key people who are guiding development of key features of Bitcoin need to think more like a finance startup and less like a space research agency - get it done yesterday and the customer is always right!
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Please no. Leave "move fast and break things" to the snapchats and instagrams of the world. You don't want to apply these principles to an immutable ledger that moves billions of dollars worth of cryptocurrency each day. Any competitive edge that is gained by accumulating technical debt will break your neck sooner or later, even moreso with technologies such as Bitcoin. It's a community effort, not an attempt to make a quick buck by burning venture capital just to get bought up by Google or Facebook further down the road. |
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No. Wrong. Block chain is the technology. Bitcoin is merely one use of the technology.
Please expand. How would you define blockchain technology and what other concrete uses cases are there besides immutable atomic transactions? |
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This does not mean block chain is wrong - block chain is a technology likely with a lot of good commercial applications, just like the internet.
A blockchain without tokens is just a distributed database. There's nothing new about that. It's like claiming that telephone lines were the innovation behind the internet. It's when piecing the various parts together that lead to cryptocurrencies that things get interesting. But similar to the dot-com bubble almost all of the current investments in "products" using block chain completely lack a fundamental sound business model, and the cryptocurrencies are foremost amongst those.
I absolutely agree with the first part of your sentence -- that blockchain "investments", specifically ICOs and such -- completely lack the fundamentals of what makes a worthwhile investment. I also agree that in this part of the crypto-ecosystem there's a lot of shady shit going on, trying to sucker people into what they believe is quick money. The point I am trying to make is that Bitcoin is not simply one of many startups -- it's the fundamental technology that lies at the heart of it. It is not the equivalent of dot-com company -- it's the equivalent of the internet. |
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for a very long time which is nearly 9 years now, bitcoin had no issues, empty mempool and low fees even as low as 0 satoshis. and you were nowhere to be seen.
Why should I bother when no-one apart from a group of people were playing around in a sandbox. I couldn't care less. But when I now see that a lot of people with absolutely no financial knowledge stand to be cheated out of their lifesavings because immoral people are convincing them to jump onboard, then I do care. Perhaps a good illustration is from one of the other discussion threads in here where people were talking about what the main advantages of Bitcoin was. In here there was the following: "bitcoin is one of the biggest potential to make us become rich in quick time" Bitcoin is indeed a get-rich-quick-scheme. If you are involved, look yourself in the mirror and ask yourself: Am I the one being cheated, or am I the immoral bastard who is cheating someone else out of his life savings ? Bitcoin is one of the greatest technological innovations of the last few years. Sure, there are people that are trying to make a quick buck out of it, but that still doesn't change the fact that cryptocurrencies have the potential to change the financial landscape for years to come. No one is forcing anyone to enter this market. Did you blame the world wide web for the dot-com bubble? Does the current arguably questionable valuation of silicon valley companies reduce the value of the internet? You can argue about whether current Bitcoin exchange rates are appropriate, but that doesn't change the value proposition that crypto-currencies bring to the table. |
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A currency where it takes days to clear payments unless you pay massive fees - fees that are hostage to whatever vagaries the miners have? And if you don't, you are left in limbo where you have no idea whether it takes minutes, hours or days to move your money?
A new symptom of an old problem -- namely Bitcoin's scalability -- that came with the increasing popularity of Bitcoin and that will be solved sooner or later. A few years back Bitcoin was both faster and cheaper than bank transactions and we'll reach that point again sooner or later. Meanwhile, even at its worst, Bitcoin is still cheaper and faster when it comes to international remittance. A currency which is heavily impacted by "civil wars" with rival crypto currencies?
I wouldn't call a weekend of a full mempool a "heavy impact". Otherwise you could also argue that banks are "heavily impacted" by weekends and banking holidays. If you're talking about the impact on price, than that's a silly argument. Price changes like these are just short term fluctuations and don't change the technical and economical fundamentals. If you're talking about other impacts, please elaborate. A "currency" even less stable than the former Zimbabwean dollar.
How so? Please elaborate. |
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No. Pettiness never helped anyone. BTC has enough problems of its own, let's focus on solving these first before waging a pointless "war".
And who knows, maybe there are lessons to be learned from BCH after all.
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It's all part of the experiment.
Either the community succeeds at self-governance, or it doesn't. Right now it seems pretty messy, but to be honest I think it used to be even worse.
Apart from that I doubt that most "outsiders" are really aware of what's going on -- "outsiders" referring to people that are aware of Bitcoin and the alt ecosystem but are not actively following it. I think watching all that drama unfolding live merely amplifies its perceived impact. Looking back it will be just one struggle of many and crypto will be stronger for it. After all we seem to learn or lessons every step along the way (eg. people learning not to trust exchanges), even if some things always stay the same (eg. people still falling for "the next big thing").
All in all I feel that crypto is still on the right track though.
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In my opinion, would be profitable if the cloud platforms are decentralized
Unlikely. Even in a p2p scenario individual miners know better than to sell their hashrate below value, ie. the expected mining rewards for a given timeframe. The majority of buyers know little about mining -- otherwise they'd just mine themselves -- and are thus more likely to overpay. Only a handful of buyers that don't know how to properly evaluate a mining contract are enough to drive the price of mining contracts beyond profitability for the individual buyer. |
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In the last one month, bitcoin have lost about $1,000 dollars in value. I understand that the fall is connected to the cancellation of Segwit2x hard fork. What I want to find answer to is how long the fall will continue and what would save it from the continuous fall. Your inputs would be appreciated.
Which fall? We're already back up to where we started 2 weeks ago? Corrections are bound to happen, some scarier than others. How long each correction will take and how deep each correction will go is anyone's guess. Don't freak out just because the price doesn't go up a couple of days. |
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If five years from now the value of Bitcoin tanks to $1,000 and Bitcoin Cash is at $50,000 does it really mean I lost $49,000 because Bitcoin devaluation?
I hope someone out there can clarify this devalation concern I have of one coin over the other and whether I need to move my Bitcoins around to combat future devaluation. Any comments will be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance.
5 years from now 1 BTC will still be 1 BTC and 1 BCH will still be 1 BCH. How much they are worth in relation to each other, or how much they will be worth in USD is anyones guess and has nothing to do with whether you keep the coins on the same address or move them around. After all you're not storing USD or EUR or JPY in your wallet, only BTC and BCH. That's it. You don't lose or gain anything in USD terms until you have either sold the coins or used them as payment. |
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It got confirmed shortly after you posted here, so it looks like miners are slowly catching up with their backlog. As of now we're at 106k unconfirmed transactions which is still bad, but already far better than the 180k+ transactions that got stuck during the weekend. |
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If you have access to the private key of a BTC address or the recovery seed of a BTC wallet that held BTC at time of the BCH fork, you can split your coins whenever you want. Your BCH won't "expire" in any way and they will remain associated with your BTC / BCH address until you decide to move your BCH to a new address -- even if you have meanwhile transferred your BTC to somewhere else.
Caveat: If you manually split your BCH from your BTC it is recommended to move your BTC to a new wallet first, to avoid a potential compromise of your BTC stash.
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So it's safe to say the 30% that left bitcoin did it's damage by clogging up the network
What damage was there? Bitcoin worked and is working as it is supposed to. It seems to me that the only damage done was to the reputation of those who moved their hash rate to an alt coin. But that too is fine as they are free to do that. The BTC network slowed extremely down during the weekend, causing the mempool to fill up like rarely seen before. So no "damage", but still a major disruption of service. I think this is still not over. They're testing the limits for sure. but it seems like someone will profit greatly out of this coordinated attack.
Yeah, I also have a feeling that this is not the last we've heard from BCH. I wouldn't go as far as calling it an attack though. It's simply what happens when multiple coins share the same PoW hash and one gets pumped. Arguably it shows a merit of BTC relying on ASICs instead of GPUs, because otherwise BTC would be forced to battle with other alts for computing resources as well. |
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Not ever  So what to do, the way to solve it please? Seriously. Which wallet did you use? Did you try to manually resend one of the transactions? Because that would explain why it looks like a double spend. Either that, or your wallet messed up which address to use for its inputs, assuming you tried to send multiple transactions within a short timeframe. That would be an odd thing to happen though. Either way, give it a couple of days. Either a) all of your transactions get dropped due to the transaction fee being too low, or b) the double spend will get resolved with one transaction being included in the block before the other, causing one transaction to get through while the others simply fail. In both cases your BTC will turn up either in the sending, or the receiving address(es) sooner or later. |
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Sorry, everyone! But i had to do it! Share if you like it  I saw this image on Facebook, but without BTX. I just couldn't resist to add BTX in the end, to end the discussion.  Oh man, thanks for the laugh!  This image is so great on so many levels. I mean yeah, it pretty much hits the nail on the head on all accounts. |
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I hate to say that but wouldn't it be a good thing right now if B2X was really coming next week?
It would push back that BCH for good, bring up the BTC quickly, and AT LEAST let people decide which one they wanna keep. B2X was less an attack than this BCH, everyone would have been given one, BCH doesn't apply to newcomers.
A B2X hardfork may still happen, albeit at a much smaller scale. What makes you think that B2X would "push back BCH for good"? Just because the B2X cancellation apparently played into the pump doesn't mean that putting B2X back on the menu would bring BCH back down again. Additionally there's no need to "push back BCH" as either a) its recent increase is just price manipulation that will quickly subside or b) the market indeed decided to replace BTC with BCH. Or as you put it, BCH "let's people decide which one they wanna keep". The BCH fork was reckless, but compared to B2X it was fairly sane in that they implemented full replay protection. BCH more or less willingly took the way of an alt, B2X strove to forcefully "upgrade" BTC, not just fork it. |
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Scary times, aren't they?  Don't worry, no need to panic. Things may look dire in the short term, but BTC has recovered from worse. BTC is still BTC, the only thing that has changed is the price. |
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What would you guys advise someone who is retired, living off pension and savings? Is it too late/risky to invest at that kind of age?
Do you guys think the elderly have a chance of jumping on the crypto train, or do you guys think it's too late for them to invest?
It depends. For bolstering ones pension fund I personally would find it too risky. But I would say the same about stocks for that matter. However if you don't mind not being able to personally profit from your investment -- ie. in case of a prolonged bear market of 5-10 years -- and plan on potentially leaving it to your descendantes -- then, but only then, I would consider it. |
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Hello guys!
I am in a bit of concern as one of my BTC transaction is stuck for two days. There are 0/3 confirmations yet. I am a bit confused as this never happened before. It usually would take few hours. But it's more than 48 hours now.
The BTC network is currently heavily congested, due to a lot of hashpower being pointed at BCH right now. This results in fewer blocks to be found, which leads to reduced transaction throughput, which further aggravates the network congestion. Unfortunately there's little you can do now but wait for one of the following to happen: a) Your BTC transaction drops out of the mempool, meaning the BTC will be back at the original address. This could take 1-2 days more. b) Hashrate moving back to BTC, starting to work through the backlog and eventually confirming your transaction. BCH difficulty adjusts in 11 hours, at which point you can expect hashpower moving back to BTC. Either way it's going to be a waiting game, but if it gives some you assurance: Your coins won't get lost, they'll either get confirmed on the address that you sent it too, or they'll "move back" to the address that you sent it from.. |
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