There'll come a day when price movement will be 400-500$ a day....

...and we won't even be excited with them

15 of 21m are already issued - most of the monetary base distribution is over with and the upward price movement due to scarcity more than compensates. That's what the long term trend says.

Soon we'll get half block rewards and after 4 years another 50% cut.

In any case, PoS or PoW/PoS coins are an alternative for those who don't like BTC's distribution or are too anxious to reduce inflation right now (that won't happen).

Block reward has two main purposes.

1) Securing the network
2) The necessary distribution of the monetary base during the first years.

BTCs will be issued due to (2) even if zero transactions exist. Same for altcoins sharing BTC code that have much less "traffic" and a lot of empty blocks.

Transaction volume in USD ~150-200mn USD

https://blockchain.info/charts/estimated-transaction-volume-usd?showDataPoints=false&timespan=30days&show_header=true&daysAverageString=1&scale=0&address=

Fees paid in USD ~10-18k USD. To move around 200 million.

https://blockchain.info/charts/transaction-fees-usd?timespan=30days&showDataPoints=false&daysAverageString=1&show_header=true&scale=0&address=

Yeah, fullblocalypse is round the corner

Most consider it a given that changing the parameters to increase block size is a trivial matter and it will happen sooner or later. Your rationale goes like "if the blocksize isn't increased right now it means it is 1MB forever" and nobody sees it that way, no matter how many times you repeat your doom scenarios. Practically all devs openly say that the blocksize will be increased at some point.

The full blocks is not a real consideration because they can be full even if blocksize goes x2 or x10. The key element is whether miners will start cutting off free txs to compensate for abuse. Then what will you say? That miners cutting off people from transacting for free is not the bitcoin you signed up for? Will you then be calling the core-dev "police" to "impose" some way where the miners are forced to include low-fee / no-fee txs?

Aha, thanks for the explanation

I have a theoretical question, a dev might enlighten me...

Suppose someone has gone to the effort of finding 4-5 equidistant masternodes with approximately the same latency. I mean, let's say I'm in Germany and I select (through a custom script) for broadcast hosts that are around 100-150msec away, like the US, Asia, Africa, etc.

If that guy simultaneously broadcasts an IX through these 4-5 masternodes, in order to do something weird with the IX, or confuse and fragment the network, what happens?

edit: I've pondered a variation of this for bank ATMs... say 2 people have 2 ATM cards on the same bank account that has 1000$ inside. They have both synced their clocks and agreed to press "withdraw 1000$" on 00'00GMT. One is in US east coast, the other is in US west coast. So, in theory, if they do it *simultanously*, the withdrawal can go through and the 2 ATMs will give 2000$ for a 1000$ balance. Then the balance would be negative (-1000$). It could probably be prevented by the software waiting 1-2 seconds before giving the go ahead, to see if other ATMs have an incoming order at the same time. 1-2s should be enough to sync, no matter the distance.

Then also take the current state of bitcoin fees and transact with it, instead of projecting forward to the point where it costs 3 times the coffee in tx fees.

If we are talking about the future, you will have to apply a corresponding "futuristic" reasoning for other aspects of the ecosystem, whether it is ATM presence, widespread use of plastic cards connected to BTC, etc.


Whatever you have to say about gold, the issue remains that it is indirectly spendable and a store of value despite not being directly spendable. And this is not an anachronism. It is not something that was relative a thousand years ago. It is something relevant TODAY.

You live in a developing world country with high inflation. Your bank doesn't allow you to convert your local fiat to USD. You can't wire money outside to buy BTC. But you can still get your hands on some gold or silver in various shops. You go for it and you store your wealth in this way. Now. Not in the past. Now. Today. This is happening RIGHT NOW.

Fast forward 5 years later, the local currency has gone down massively while gold preserves its value (much more local currency corresponds to 1 gram or 1oz of gold), gold owner then converts gold for local currency and gets multiple the amount he invested in it. He then proceeds to pay bills and various expenses or make new investments, buy a house, etc.

http://goldprice.org/spot-gold.html

Go in the drop down buttons below the black chart. Try it with ARS (argentian currency), BRL (brazilian), RUB (russian), INR (india) 10 years chart. Note that gold in USD peaked at 1800 and is currently at 1000, but in other countries there is an alternate reality about the relevance of gold as store of value. An american could feel "ripped off" if he bought at the spike and is now down but someone with another currency might be thanking God.

The exact same principle can be applied to BTC and weak currencies. And BTC, unlike gold under your pillow, can actually perform international payments - where in some cases local banks prevent (they don't want to drain their foreign reserves in USD).

Not in Greece (EU & Eurozone member).

If a friend of mine wants to send me 20 euro from his Alpha Bank account, to my Eurobank account, he gets charged 1E, I get charged 3E, and the process takes 1 day or more.

It literally costs cheaper to put a 20 euro note in an envelope and mail it first priority / next day delivery, for 0.72 euro.

Your paradox begins and ends by applying future problems (extremely high BTC fees, which would imply a very high volume of transactions where people are REALLLYYY taking BTC seriously and are paying a lot for being able to transact with it - which are all indications that BTC is quite big at that point) by coupling it to today's anemic infrastructure, which is a fallacy.


If I have 10kg of gold in storage, as store of value, I'm not expecting to buy souvlakia and pizzas with it. I understand that I will have to sell a few grams or a few gold coins for fiat and then use fiat. That doesn't render gold useless.

The underlying equation that

gold = fiat

and fiat = anything else

makes gold spendable, for everything, indirectly, until the government says "gold transactions, selling, purchases, are all banned".

Likewise most altcoins are indirectly spendable -first through BTC- then through fiat.

Kind of. But it depends on how the miner views the situation. Say you have a crash in price but the miners don't pull the plug because they believe this is a temporary situation that will be corrected in a few weeks, instead of taking current BTC price at face value. Ok, some will shut down because they are on a tight budget and can't afford to lose money but others are braver and then you see a slash of price by 90% and the hashrate dropping just 20-40%. It will take a very long time sitting at a very low price to reach a similar equilibrium.

And it's also the outlook of the situation not in terms of securing the network but "gaining coins". That's the miner's interest. As long as the monetary base is still being distributed, some people will get the coins anyway. Whether it is 100 miners or 10.000 miners, the coins will be there for the taking. For non miners, the ideal scenario is "the more hashpower, the better". For the miners, if it makes economic sense to pursue it, they will pursue it. Earlier in the thread some people suggested the network is oversecure etc etc. But in the end of the day what matters for the miner is if he is making profit. If he pays x for setting up and electricity and gets 2x from the coins he mines => it's worth it for him => so why not. The actual question at that point is not why the network may be at 400% more security than necessary, but why isn't it at 800% when miner costs are far lower than their profits and the market isn't self-adjusting fast enough (which is reasonable to a large degree, especially after the price moving a lot and the infrastructure not being adjusted at the same pace).

The world revolves around fiat. You go to your nearest Bitcoin ATM, pull 200$ out and buy your coffees and stuff with cash. So, how is it not spendable?

A real block in spending would be if the government has cut the road from fiat <=> btc, banned btc trading, banned btc transactions and retail businesses from accepting it and is short of doing anal probes if you are even remotely related with cryptocurrencies... that's more of an issue compared to fees that can be bypassed with sidechains, altcoins, cash, etc. We'll see how it goes in terms of the scaling solution implemented.

There is nothing preventing you from spending it, so...


We have no idea on the price direction. If BTC crashes to 10$, then subsidy and fees are already too low. If BTC goes to 45.000 a subsidy of a single coin will be like 100 current coins of 450$. USD prices are very relevant if a miner wants to pay their power bill, equipment, etc.

It's extremely difficult to find a system that can have very low to no fees and that isn't simultaneously open to abuse by a script-kiddie... unless that system doesn't actually store a ledger but rather something like ...balances which shift.

Actually even then you can spam it by creating a lot of balance addresses that would require XX bytes to store, just by sending a no-fee tx of 1 satoshi / duff to a veeeery long list of random addresses. So, I really can't think of how you can make a promise of zero to very low fees and infinite scaling when you are also opening yourself to an attack vector.

But then again, I'm not the coder here.

There is also the factor of what type of value are we talking about per transaction.

If you are moving around 50 cents you can't pay 20 cents in fees.

If you are moving around 1000 dollars => you don't mind.

So if value per transaction increases, because, say, people start considering that BTC is better, faster and cheaper than SWIFT, Western Union etc, you can have a lot of transaction volume with (relative) high fees which are still very competitive compared to your "competitors".


Again, short and long are somewhat relative. From bank to bank, from paypal to bank, for western union etc, it takes days... That's eons of time compared to bitcoin.

For small txs you can go with 0-conf.

When I saw the situation where people's deposits weren't getting the ok for withdrawal (especially after knowing 2 cases of whales who experienced massive issues), I wrote this:


I'm still wondering whether they could have taken a big BTC stash from their exchange, shorted BTC in another exchange, sold coins, made a self-fullfiling prophecy / market manipulation in absence of serious buying support and then locked profits. But if they had done so, they'd still have the BTCs (and the profit). So what the hell have they done with the BTCs?
 

In theory (algorithmically) it should be possible to just increase the fee for faster processing, if, say, you made an error and sent a very low or zero fee tx and want it to process faster rather than taking hours. The coder would simply allow use of RBF *IF* all the other transaction details match the first one, except the fee.

If you have a different payment address so that you try to "steal" from a 0-conf payment processor => it won't work
If you try to make the amount smaller => it won't work
if you want to raise the fee => it'll work.

...unless there is some kind of issue I'm unaware of that prevents this kind of system.

A few months ago I posted this:


...yet got no feedback on actual use, or anyone trying it?

Sure, it's a massive workaround and one shouldn't need THAT many resources, but give it a try.

My current ram compression ratio goes like that:

zramswap-stat
compr_data_size: 220897 KiB
orig_data_size:  695748 KiB
compression-ratio: 3.14

It's quite useful if it relieves hdd swapping which makes the system crawl.

In theory zram could also be used for running dash masternodes with limited RAM.

Yeah I mean we could fit the world's data in the blockchain and it would be very useful and stuff when it reached a few zillionbytes, but guess what... it doesn't scale and it becomes unusable. When you go for too much you may end up losing even the basic functionality:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1790.msg28935#msg28935

Obviously Satoshi was a cripplecoiner for not wanting his bird to fly as high as it could... so much untapped potential wasted. Right?

He's probably on the phone asking his NSA handler