The Trump regime good for Bitcoin? Don't think so, and surely not from a chief of staff anyway. If having Bitcoin supporters among commissioners of the SEC itself hasn't helped them Wall Street people get into Bitcoin (and no, of course I don't believe they haven't stuck their fingers in that pie yet) then what's a pro-Bitcoin Republican going to do from Oval Office?
While I don't think this is going to result in any pro-Bitcoin regulation, I think about the opposite situation: What would happen if he appointed an anti-Bitcoin zealot as one of his closest advisors? At least we've got an influential staffer on the inside who specifically isn't interested in clamping down on the industry or over-regulating. That can't be a bad thing. |
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your using the consensus as designed 2009-2013 to explain xt, classic, unlimited... and how core didnt get the vote early on There was never a "designed" consensus. You either agree or you don't -- it's the dictionary definition of consensus. If you agree, you run a node and thus join the network. If you disagree, you don't run a node... but you again seem to want to pretend the non consensus mandated august 1st 2017 bypass (dev state buzzword bilateral split) ever occured.
kind of funny because "dev state" were and still are proud that it occured
the fact that you admit in another post that core didnt get segwit in using the 2009-2013 consensus (the november 2016-spring 2017) shows it wasnt high majority. it only had 35% vote. Segwit never violated any consensus rules. That literally means that anyone running Bitcoin already implicitly agreed to Segwit (assuming it was enforced by miners and therefore backward compatible). There's absolutely no reason why 100% of the network needed to agree to anything since there was no violation of the consensus. There are alternative implementations. People are free to run them or to code their own. The fact that the vast majority of users choose to run Core instead speaks volumes about what the market wants.
those that did run other nodes that are not compatible. were rlegated off network, diluting out the 65% objections. or relegated them as non voter 'compatible' (downstream/filtered/not full node/stripped) purely to fake a 95% loyalty Legacy nodes were and are fully compatible. That's why the chain never split. Satoshi explains: Future versions can add templates for more transaction types and nodes running that version or higher will be able to receive them. All versions of nodes in the network can verify and process any new transactions into blocks, even though they may not know how to read them. |
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I haven't seen a compelling argument as to why the security model isn't sound.
here is the devs themselves. straight from the horses mouths https://youtu.be/8lMLo-7yF5k?t=570There are obviously security trade-offs when you compare to Bitcoin. That's to be expected when you're getting nearly free and instant transactions using a trustless protocol. Not true at all. Banks and promissory notes involve trust. LN doesn't.
1. locking funds into a factory. is a smart contract involving trust that the factory didnt make a 2-of-3 smart contract with users under the pretence of it seeming as a 2-of-2 smart contract (trusting the factory doesnt hold 2 keys). This can easily be prevented at the wallet level. It's trivially easy to prevent and isn't an effective mode of attack. Users won't have to think about this and significant nodes/hubs engaging in that sort of behavior would be quickly outed and ostracized. 2. the non blockchain 'payment' a factory then gives to a users channel is then done on trust. that while the user then plays with the channel payment which as a opening channel, but unaudited tx. the channel partner has to hope the factory is not also offering the same locked funds to another channel It's not based on trust. You just keep repeating that. All parties connected to the "factory" can see its commitments on chain. Everything is "audited." See here for a simple explanation. 3. channels have to trust that users wont play around because LN is not a byzantine generals solution network. people can play around with the nodes as there is no community to orphan/reject payments. Trust is not required because 1) the Bitcoin blockchain arbitrates disputes among channel participants and 2) LN punishes dishonest participants by allowing the other party to take the offenders' coins from the channel. LN uses Bitcoin for Byzantine fault tolerance. 4. channels have to trust once closing session to get a factory to aggregate channels and eith broadcast out(unlock) or re-payment new open sessions.. that they will do. (LN operates as a need to be online and a need to sign for acceptance)
LN is not just a PUSH tx model. It's not entirely clear what you're saying. LN nodes need to be online to update channel state but failing that, channels can just be closed based on expiration of locktime. |
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The developers clearly don't have power or authority over anything.
users do not code a node bitcoin is not an AI machine that self codes. its developers that code changes. so any changes made are done by developers. your argument is like saying house buyers control house creation.. um.. no housing developers do. you know.. the people that lay bricks and cement. homeowners dont lay the bricks and cement. Housing developers either answer to the market or they go bankrupt. The same goes for Bitcoin developers: If users don't want to run their code, they become irrelevant. (See: Bitcoin XT, Classic, Unlimited) There are alternative implementations. People are free to run them or to code their own. The fact that the vast majority of users choose to run Core instead speaks volumes about what the market wants. You're just fighting the market, Franky. |
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And you can't really get any faster than a lightning network. The question is how usable it's going to be and how many people use it.
the lightning network is about as much a "bitcoin feature" as coinbase.com is. its a separate system for multiple coin utility involving vaulting up funds with another entity to then use a payment system of 12 decimal values, in an unaudited, non blockchain, non byzantine generals solving dataset system. We get it -- LN is a different protocol. What's wrong with that? Coins are locked up with a smart contract. You're trying to imply LN involves trust when it doesn't in any way whatsoever. The whole point is to leverage Bitcoin's blockchain without bogging it down with unnecessary throughput. I haven't seen a compelling argument as to why the security model isn't sound. its not a bitcoin scaling solution, its a take user utility of the bitcoin network away from the bitcoin network and let users use another network.
much like how 19th century gold got vaulted up and people ended up playing with promissory notes that were redeemable by the co-signer that created the promissory note(know known as banks) Not true at all. Banks and promissory notes involve trust. LN doesn't. |
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What might the miners do at this junction?
Sure, they still get transaction fees. Would those escalate? Assuming the block size remains limited, fees should escalate over the same time that the subsidy drops. Hopefully, fees rise to an extent that miners continue to secure the chain without drastic drops in hash rate. If the economic design looks to be failing, I'm sure we'll see it reflected in the hash rate long before the last coin is mined. Or a reason to change the reward algorithm?
That's always a possibility, but I'm hoping the fee market created by limited block size will prevent the need for that. |
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It could be argued that gold is priced somewhat arbitrarily, based on market demand as a store of value -- exactly like BTC. However gold is a physical product and has real-world uses as an element.
With all that taken into account, will the market drive them to general parity? Like the Euro/Dollar?
Parity is impossible between Bitcoin and gold because they're not measurable against one another. We measure gold by weight (troy ounces). In raw transactions, we measure bitcoins by satoshis (0.00000001 BTC). If 1 BTC = 1 troy ounce of gold, there's no element of parity. It's just an arbitrary comparison. We also have no idea what the total supply of gold is, so we can't compare parity as a measure of purchasing power vs. total supply. This is like asking if beer and cannabis will be driven to parity because they're both consumable goods. |
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seeing as you admire the word "state" to refer to certain group of elitist authoritarians. i shall refer to certain dv team as "dev state" for your benefit
In the context of this topic. Does the "dev-state" monopolize the printing, and issuance of the currency in the network? Does it have a police system to administer their "laws"? Does it threaten our freedom? The developers clearly don't have power or authority over anything. That's why Segwit wasn't activated for so long -- they had no mandate to force anyone to upgrade. BIP148 and BIP91 were not part of the Core implementation. If users or miners chose to run them or comply with their rules, it had nothing to do with Core. Miners made a simple, calculated decision. They could have forced the question and split the chain, but they figured it was more profitable to go the path of least resistance. |
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And the one coin they do favour has just turned into two even shittier coins.
I can understand why they got annoyed with BTC. I don't think that necessitates their relentless trolling of it along with refusing Segwit and those stupid messages talking about low fees. I guess that was under Bitmain's orders. Or maybe Roger Ver's -- wasn't he an early investor in Bitpay? I wonder if he still has a stake and if so, how big it is. It's rather pitiful that the two biggest players, Bitpay and Coinbase - though Coinbase seem to largely have committed suicide in payment processing - are also two of Bitcoin's biggest detractors.
I feel like Coinbase scrapped that behavior a long time ago. Brian Armstrong made a huge fool out of Coinbase with his loud support of Bitcoin Classic in 2016. I think shareholders didn't take too kindly to that because he/they took a real backseat on development issues after that. You can't blame them for moving into altcoins -- that's just profit motive talking. |
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The name is rather unfortunate or purposely made to slander Bitcoin. The media loves ragging on Bitcoin. The headlines for the story were brutal. Coinidol just re-hashed one of them -- "Bitcoin bomb threats" was common. "Bitcoin scammers send bomb threats across US" was one that stuck out to me. A bomb threat is a bomb threat, regardless of what currency a person uses.
A bomb threat where a person demands to be paid in dollars is not a "US dollar bomb threat"! A threat where someone demands to be paid in Euro is not an "EUR bomb threat"!
How come when somebody asks BTC it suddenly becomes "a Bitcoin bomb threat"? WTF is wrong with these news sites?
I've seen this narrative with ransomware too. It's no surprise anymore. When I first got into Bitcoin, it was "only for criminals and drug dealers." At least we've expanded beyond that perception. |
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The People’s Bank of China, the country’s central bank, plans to introduce a digital currency of its own. But unlike the decentralized blockchain-based offerings, this one could give Beijing more control over its financial system. It would enhance the PBOC’s ability to root out risks and crack down on money laundering. It could also give the government an unprecedented window into individuals’ private lives. I've been hearing rumors about the PBOC's planned digital currency since 2016, if not earlier. If they really believe they can "sideline" Bitcoin this way, they're sadly mistaken. They seem to think the draw of cryptocurrencies is merely about digital payment systems, but it's about much more than that -- financial sovereignty and censorship resistance, to name a couple things. |
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What chain split? Segwit reached the 95% threshold and activation went off without a hitch. There was never any network partition -- no orphaned chains post-fork, no lost transactions, nothing.
If you're talking about Bitcoin Cash, that was a new protocol that copied Bitcoin's ledger and launched at block height 478558. It was no more a "chain split" than any of the other dozens of Bitcoin forks (like Bitcoin Diamond and Super Bitcoin) were.
you do know the "dev state" instigated the FORK/split.. bch came HOURS after, as a result of it i cant actually believe you truly said that there was no split/fork and then mentioned the split/fork by saying there was no split/fork after the split/fork. the split/fork was the the split/fork.. it got rid of the opposers so that the "dev state" would get their faked 100% loyalty count put it this way imagine you were in 2016 married.. but wanted to get involved with other people(networks). but only 35% of your family and friends thought it was a good idea to see other people(networks) and so in march 2017 you decided things are not right no one is happy so you will get a divorce and you want the divorce finalised in august 2017 because you want to declare yourself 100% single by november so you can be involved with other people(networks) so the divorce happened. you signed first and hours later your disgruntled parter went away to start their own life and now your able to declare you are 100% single and able to see other people(networks) you are now saying there was no divorce after the divorce, and also saying that you have always been 100% single (facepalm) i truly think that squatter has just made the most stupid and ignorant myth to pretend that events didnt happen Your response was hilarious but the analogy doesn't work. It's not like a divorce. I still stand by my explanation. Anyone is free to hard fork Bitcoin at will, just like Bitcoin Cash. That's why we saw so many similar spinoffs like Bitcoin Gold and Bitcoin Diamond. It's not a "chain split" because that implies a network partition, which implies a compatible protocol -- that's a mutual condition. In the case of a hard fork like Bitcoin Cash, the fork just gets ignored by Bitcoin. i am neither a friend of the ex husband or ex wife of the previously united family. i just am someone that in this analogy is facepalming that the divorce occurred instead of all those involved communicating and coming to a compromise to keep it all united and move forward. rather than resorting to a divorce (which the "dev state" loudly and proudly call a bilateral split)
Compromise is not always possible. However, since these are permissionless and open source protocols, the next best thing when developers reach an impasse is to fork the protocol. That happens in FOSS development all the time. I don't like calling it a "split" because that gives undeserved authority to those leaving the consensus. It makes it sound like a 50-50 split when in reality, all the Bitcoin forks (including Bitcoin Cash) have tiny user bases and ecosystems compared to Bitcoin. |
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Segwit's goal wasn't the blocksize increase, so it's wrong to criticize it for it. And being opt-in is the result of softfork, and softforks are great because they are much less disruptive than hardforks, so there's almost no risk of chain splits.
It's also wrong to say that SegWit was complex, all you had to do is update your wallet software and create a new SegWit-compatible wallet. Some services did this only after a few days or a week after the fork, big services like Coinbase just didn't care about their customers, which resulted in huge fees later in 2017.
no risk of chain splits...................... ........ apart from the one caused in august 2017 to actually get segwit activated What chain split? Segwit reached the 95% threshold and activation went off without a hitch. There was never any network partition -- no orphaned chains post-fork, no lost transactions, nothing. If you're talking about Bitcoin Cash, that was a new protocol that copied Bitcoin's ledger and launched at block height 478558. It was no more a "chain split" than any of the other dozens of Bitcoin forks (like Bitcoin Diamond and Super Bitcoin) were. |
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It also gave all of us the "idea" of something like "Bitcoin", a form of "money" that is not controlled by the state, is achievable.
Bitcoin might fail, but the idea lives on to make a better "Bitcoin".
To be fair, gold sort of already showed us that. Gold bugs have been talking about decentralized, sound money for a long time. Bitcoin improved on that foundation by adding transferability over a communications channel, predictable scarcity, portability and divisibility. bitcoin is code. so its developers you should be scrutinising
Shouldn't it be the code that's being scrutinized? |
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The problem is that if your address is "sanctioned", then you can change to a new address. It's easy to do because of the anonymity of crypto, and it's hard for others to trace it, you can even change it every transaction.
If want to solve this problem by legal means, then the premise is that you must publish your bitcoin address, but this is simply impossible. Who is so stupid?
The US government's intention was not just for coins to be blocked from the published addresses. It was to get exchange services to block coins tainted by those addresses. Basically, they want exchange services to do their work for them -- follow the money, confiscate it, then inform them after the fact. If you want to remove -- or rather, swap -- taint, you need someone else's coins. Changing to new addresses isn't good enough. |
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At this point, as masterfully as Bitcoin was created, it has some limitations of course.
My question is: Could it be done better, or is it just matter of trading one feature for another (i.e. speed for decentralization)?
If we were to build it from scratch again, confidential transactions would be ideal. While the fully transparent ledger is good for some things, it's not ideal for transactions where privacy is necessary. Speed and scalability are always going to be the weak points of decentralized systems. They're inefficient and redundant, and speeding up block times just worsens orphan rates, lowering transaction security. |
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i somewhat agree with @magneto. the problems that OP mentioned are the small and secondary things that bitcoin can solve. the main feature of bitcoin is that decentralization that it has and all the benefits that come from it.
The OP mentions "loss of value due to inflationary pressures" and I think most Bitcoin users consider that very important. I think Bitcoin's predictably scarce supply is integral to its use as sound money. While the primary objective of Bitcoin was to remove third parties from financial transactions, Satoshi made very clear that built-in scarcity was an important part of the economic design. |
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I also propose one more variable to discuss, that is "offline use" or similar. The major drawback of bitcoin is too reliant on the internet.
It's definitely an interesting subject. I know of people transacting with physical Bitcoins which requires no internet connection at all. It's basically transacting in private keys, but it seems to work very well if you are dealing with a trusted party. I have bought unfunded Denarium Bitcoins and funded them myself to use at whatever point in time may there not be an internet connection available. That only seems to work with a trusted party. Otherwise you need an internet connection to prove that a bearer instrument (like an Opendime) really contains bitcoins. The seller might know the Opendime is loaded, but the buyer doesn't. The best thing is that you can move value without anyone else noticing anything, because the funds don't move on-chain. I expect this field to bloom even more in the forthcoming years, all to make sure the trust aspect becomes less of an obstacle with usefulness intact.
I like the idea of keeping funds static as well, which is why I find Opendimes so appealing. However, I'm slightly paranoid they could be tampered with to reveal the private key without anyone knowing. |
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Changelly though, weren't they now following in footsteps of Shapeshift with KYC and freezing amounts thought to be stolen? Indeed, I would steer clear of Changelly. I don't believe they mandate KYC like Shapeshift, but they've been known to confiscate "suspicious" transfers and then require KYC. It seems like they specifically target Monero. And Binance. I'm not sure how long more they can run without bowing to KYC requirements. The 2 BTC daily limit for unverified accounts there is pretty good though.
I'm really surprised they haven't either prohibited US customers or changed their KYC thresholds. Given their size -- and what Shapeshift did -- I'm sure the US government is breathing down their neck. |
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I wonder if we can really consider fungibility to be "high" for Bitcoin. At the protocol level, yes, but surely not all outputs are treated as interchangeable by humans. Blockchain/taint analysis is a booming industry now, and the US government is now publicly identifying Bitcoin addresses that are linked to sanctioned individuals. Freshly mined coins carry a price premium due to their lack of history. I'm sure this trend will continue.
I also hesitate to call altcoin security "moderate." Many coins are highly insecure and prone to 51% attacks.
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