At least it wasn't deleted, but I have yet to still hear a rational reason why a thread that has nothing to do with alts coming from someone who has no interest in discussing alts was moved to the alt section.



This topic has nothing to do with Altcoins and thus categorically doesn't belong here and has no use to people searching here. We all know it was moved here to die in the swamp of posts.  

Clue, if you take one pair of wheels off a car and replace them with a single wheel, it becomes a tricycle, no matter how much you want to still call it a car.

What is simple machines?

I can't believe this thread was moved to the alt section. This forum is unbelieveable.

i don't know of this, can someone explain this please?
why the need to hardfork?

I don't know if the early days are still a good model for the future.  

In the past, the surges never penalized a lot of people, it was a small club of enthousiasts (I suppose), and the surges followed quickly enough so as to make up for past losses.  Not a lot of money was involved after all.

The MtGox manipulation hurt.  People got burned.  More important sums were lost.

Tullips didn't boom twice.

Also, this year, a lot more trained traders are on the market, bigger money is circulating, and financial derivatives are being put in place.  That's usually something that stabilizes, in the sense that there are now so many speculative tools operational, that any surge is going to be professionally sucked out by fast traders.

The fact that people have seen the price fall (sometimes at their expense) for more than a year, means to me that any BIG surge is not going to be sustainable: many people are going to cash in (traders most !), and not much money is going to flow in for a long time at high prices.  Everybody would expect a drop again.  Unless something FUNDAMENTAL changes (say, the Swiss national bank guarantees the Swiss franc against bitcoin :-) ).

I suppose we should wait till I am vindicated when the scalability hardfork is implemented next year.

The facts indicate a precipitous drop in active nodes and a centralization of mining. To not acknowledge this means you are in denial. What some suggest is that nothing needs to be done as the laws of economics will eventually reverse this trend. This is a valid argument and the counterarguments have a lot of weight as well.

Do you at least acknowledge centralization of mining and drop off of active nodes?
At what point does one determine that something needs to be changed to reverse this direction?

Try to understand that repeating hollow, meaningless nonsense, no matter how convincing it seems to you, is still nothing but repeating hollow, meaningless nonsense.
You'll get a "+1!!!!1!" from other loons, but sane folks will just point fingers and laugh

The last Hardfork was in March 2013 and a new one is likely to happen in early to mid 2015. Are you not aware of these facts?

What happens when some of the first design principles conflict with some of the core values, namely decentralization? Would this motivate you to stay with the original design principle or change to fit the original core values?

Some people believe that nothing needs to be changed and economics with solve this dilemma naturally, others see this as a problem which requires changes . I believe there are good arguments to be made from both camps and thus am open to thinking , testing and developing solutions if the latter is true.

You used to have reasonable, well-informed friends.

I know it will take (A LOT OF) time !  I was just illustrating the logical consequences of any theoretical model that postulates:

- S-curve technology adoption in the "near" future
- good drives out bad (meaning: finite market share is not possible, it has to be 100%)

as has been put forward a few times to say 'with certainty' that bitcoin will "go to the moon" soon (in a few years).

Then you get plots of technology adoption of internet, mobile phones, TV and so on to illustrate the S-type adoption.

The only point is: if it is now clear that S-curve adoption in the near future to 100% is not a very viable model, and if it is, that it would be catastrophic given the still very high mining rewards, then what IS a viable model ?

Because how does something like a speculative asset do for, say, more than 20 years without "breakthrough" ?  How does confidence and trust behave if after 20 years, it is still a small thing ?

I'm trying to explore critically what are the possibilities of bitcoin.  I just showed the peculiarities of the model "to the moon soon", which make it hard to believe.  

Could it go stepwise ?  Every few years, a new conquest of a small niche market ?  To keep it slowly growing ?  To keep the flame burning ?  It started out in the black market.  It is taking on a few "geek" niches.
However, how long can this slow stepwise conquest without "the big S-curve hit" last ?

A hard fork can change as much or as little as it is designed to change and miners have just as much control of this as other full nodes.

Where have I suggested removing 100% proof of work is the best option? I have clearly and explicitly stated that PoW could be the best option but we should be open to testing competing mechanisms and open to the possibility of changing Bitcoin with a hardfork if and only if a better mechanism exists after years of testing.

This doesn't involve decreasing a lack of options because if changes are created as they have been in the past with multiple soft and hardforks it would be different than what currently exists in the marketplace.

What is so controversial about this? Why wouldn't you pragmatically do whats best for bitcoin? Do you have faith that PoW is simply the best because of some reverence to Satoshi's original design?

S-curve adoption, good money (bitcoin) drives bad (fiat) out of the market, and the total market cap of fiat in the world today (55 trillion or so).  This means that if bitcoin takes over all M2 fiat in the world (it will be driven out, and adoption will be fast, according to S-curve theory, and good/bad money theory), with similar velocity, that it will have a similar market cap.

If we have a market cap of, say 17-18 million coins, and it has to have the value of 55 trillion which is the M2 cap today, then we arrive at $ 3 million for a coin.

It is "bitcoin full moon".

Hypothetical, but the basis for the reasoning.

With S-curve adoption hypothesis and good drives out bad, there is no other option but "full market cap".

So your option is: "S curve adoption will occur far in the future".  Then the question is: what happens in the mean time with bitcoin ? 

Full nodes have the ultimate control as they can fork the blockchain at whim and leave all the miners behind buring electricity in the service of no one besides themselves.

Why do you insinuate PoW is he only possible method of competition?
PoW doesn't have a monopoly of competition and it is trivial to design an algo which allows for more decentralized competition than PoW.

FTFY  Thanks for explaining how everything in the world works.

Price is not influenced by mining.  But mining is of course influenced by price: you will put into mining the amount of value minus a profit margin, equal to the mined coins.

If mining 3600 coins at $3 million each per day, mining will be rewarded $10 billion.  Any investment with a cost seriously less than $10 billion A DAY will be profitable.  I estimated that half of the mining cost goes to electricity, the other half goes to new hardware.

So you can easily spend 4 billion $ A DAY on electricity, 4 billion $ A DAY on new hardware, and still put 2 billion $ in your pocket.
A 20% ROI.  Who does better ?

Wouldn't you invest like crazy to get part of those $10 billion a day ?

Within Bitcoin, full nodes, not miners have ultimate control. Miners have no ability to take or destroy Satoshi's 1 million Bitcoins. An attack can freeze Satoshi from spending his coins temporarily at the cost of destroying the trust of Bitcoin altogether and forcing a fork.

Additionally, you keep on focusing on comparing Bitcoins PoW with simple PoS implementations like Nxt which is outside this conversation. I am not advocating PoS, as a viable alternative.

Perhaps you should read Vitalik's paper to get a better understanding of what this conversation is about.

You win, I finally see the untenability of my position.
Bitcoin--a system where your money could vanish because nefarious miner cabal.  Much freedom, such better than fiat.

Enjoy the gifs.

Non Sequitor. PoS can easily be designed where the largest stakeholders don't maintain a permanent share of control through Demurrage or a PoSV scheme. Otherwise, PoW within Bitcoin has the exact same problem. Satoshi doesn't need to buy an ASIC to maintain control of his 1 million coins.

The obvious relation both I and dinofelis pointed to is this:  the cost of mining can not substantially exceed the price of BTC mined--according to satoshi, math, logic, and common sense. 
The market cap is (price per BTC) * (total number of BTC created).
Enjoy the gifs.

So, counter-intuitively, there is a possibility for gas guzzling cars to make world energy greener, by rapidly exhausting the world's oil supply and creating a HUGE mass market for solar and wind-powered vehicles

And this is why I post gifs