Silver is clearly off.

1 billion oz isn't the world's above ground supply, it's closer to the annual supply

Typical production of gold is 80-90mn oz per year, silver ~800mn oz.

I was looking at these two a while ago, pretty interesting:

https://blockchain.info/charts/estimated-transaction-volume
https://blockchain.info/charts/estimated-transaction-volume-usd

And of course:

https://bitcoinwisdom.com/bitcoin/difficulty

Bitcoin Difficulty:   79,102,380,900
Estimated Next Difficulty:   93,347,075,656 (+18.01%)
Adjust time:   After 22 Blocks, About 3.1 hours

It's just bullshit really for the media "ohhh bitcoin is not very good, but hey, it may have something useful to it". Kind of discrediting it with a twist. Of course banks have zero use for a blockchain as their centralized systems work better for their intended purposes.

The blockchain (and bitcoin) is needed by the people as a DEcentralized solution, not by those that sit atop the hierarchical control structure of the centralized system.

Criticism can go both ways.

Say you have a group of whales that control 30% of the coin.

If you go with 10% as a requirement => you get "but the whales control 30% of the coins" type of criticism
if you go with 50% as a requirement => you get "but the small MN owner will always require whale support to even get their proposal rolling. If the whales don't bother, it's all irrelevant for the small guy"

The patch is there because there is a vulnerability. Removing the patch and pretending the vulnerability just isn't there is simply going to make matters worse.

There is no immediate crisis. The blockchain can get 10MB blocks tomorrow morning and a script kiddie can fill them with zero-fee txs by tomorrow evening. Will people cry "ohhh the blocks are full, we are in crisis"?

The network capacity of BTC is at least double the amount of non-dust/non spam TXs and trivial value TXs. The dust/spam TXs should, over time, be eliminated altogether through higher fees. The blockchain is a very valuable resource and it should not be treated like a dumpster.

When legitimate and non-trivial / non-spam transactions start to crowd the 1MB limit - let's say ~80-90%, that's the time of action.

The whole argument on scaling is wrong and their action is wrong too.

Satoshi accepted the 1MB patch because the system had a vulnerability. This vulnerability has not been fixed. How can you revert the patch if you haven't found a solution?

Real action = find a solution = apply a proper patch.

Reverting the patch, especially when there is no real need = idiotic.

DASH should not be in any way affiliated with the rogue BitcoinXT.

Bitcoin's scaling is bitcoin's issue. These guys were trying to fork Bitcoin in two with something like a power grab. Dash is an altcoin, so it can do whatever it likes with its own blockchain and possible strategies on how scaling can be accomplished.

Trolling 24/7/365 - Check
Printing and spreading fliers to attack DASH - Check
Threatening businesses to not adopt DASH - Check

Someone FOMO'ed

I'm not sure the rationale is entirely accurate.

Bitcoin is a new currency so the monetary base must be distributed in some way (miners getting the coins generated). Increased inflation at the start is one way to do that but it is understood the emission will be cut /2 every 4 years.

People in most of those countries already know about devaluation and inflation hence why they are ever vigilant of safer assets (gold, real estate, hard currency, mechanical equipment, btc, etc etc)

It's westerners that do not understand that, and, by extension, not realizing the consequences of BTC.

People sold at 30, 50, 100 and are still waiting to get their coins back. At some point, people selling at 100, 200, 300, 400, will have the same fate.

In other news:

Bitcoin Difficulty:   79,102,380,900
Estimated Next Difficulty:   93,295,173,091 (+17.94%)

https://bitcoinwisdom.com/bitcoin/difficulty

Shouldn't it be 32000?

I mean if we get to the point where people start transacting with other chains instead of BTC, so other chains will get the problem that BTC will be avoiding. Yes, at that point, it will be "understood" that this is so.


Yes, because that won't affect the price day to day. It will be a low price, a low marketcap, but it will be ok for transactions, or pulling money once a day or week. Just not long-term storage of wealth.


If you live in a weird country, you can buy btc out of a kid that has been mining shitcoins with his GPU. You can buy dollars from the bank - if the government allows you, and in countries with currency restrictions, this won't be possible at all. So buying BTC could be far easier than buying USD, withour reverting to the black market and paying a very high premium.


Theoretically, yes, if you have BTC it's easier to go to USD. However, you can't do much with the USDs in your bank account. They are presumably there, but if you go to the ATM and click withdraw, you'll get local currency at the running conversion rate.

A country will typically allow inflow of currency into USD bank accounts, allow you to hold there your incoming wires and stuff, but what you see as 1000$ in there, isn't actually there. These USD are used by the government as "foreign currency reserves". If you want them in your hand, they won't give it to you - you'll get the local currency equivalent, at the running conversion rate. What you get instead, is a digital number in your bank account (1000$) and that's it.

The obligations of countries to pay back the foreign currency to the foreign currency account holders has a history of not getting honored, as various countries spend their foreign currency reserves and then forcibly convert USD accounts to local currency. You never got to get them in your hand in the first place, but then even the digital 1000$ are converted to local fiat.

Well, there are like 200 countries in the world. It's not a disaster if people use 5-10 cryptocurrencies.


Store of value of BTC > Store of value of altcoins


No because it is understood that in the long run, the increased use means a coin with a very bloated blockchain that will become increasingly difficult to transact with, or have a properly syncing wallet.

The idea of disposable blockchains / altcoins, that serve a role for some time and then die, should not be ruled out if scaling issues with bitcoin make tx spillover into altcoins.


Most exchanges don't support turning all shitcoins to fiat, only a few. And even then their trading pairs are very thin in volume so it's preferable to go through BTC/shitcoin pair before getting fiat. If you can't even dump a few BTCs worth of shitcoins without crashing their USD price => goto BTC pair.


It depends which fiat you are talking about. USD/EUR/GBP/CAD/AUD etc, are relatively strong currencies. But what if you live in places where after 3-4-5 years, you have huge devaluations, say your local currency was 40:1 with the USD and then you go to 100:1.

For these countries, where inflation is a given tendency, money tends to move to safer assets, like gold, real estate, even BTC. Of these assets (gold, real estate, BTC), only BTC is directly spendable as money where you can actually open a browser, order things or services, pay with BTC and voila, you are ready. This gives it a tremendous advantage.

Not to mention capital controls... from where I am right now, I can't transact internationally with fiat as my government has restricted my right to do so. I can't even buy 10$ worth of stuff from some chinese eshop if I wanted to. However, with BTCs I am not restricted the same way. So when a government can flip a switch on and off on my ability to conduct international trade, that's a huge problem right there with fiat. When a government can confiscate money from my bank account, again huge problem. And the list doesn't end there.


It does.

My "no" was not in terms of dissimilarity but in terms of "the worst of both worlds". You make it sound like it's a nightmare scenario when it is not.


Bitcoin as a network protocol, blockchain technology etc, yes. Bitcoin as the BTC currency, BTC blockchain etc, no.


1) Convertibility to FIAT (BTC is the gateway to fiat)

2) Volatility reasons. Bitcoin is much more stable as a store of value than most altcoins which have very large fluctuations.

If DOGE goes down 10% without me locking it into BTC, it's like having sold 30 cups of coffee (of the 300 total) for free.


Is NXT an uber-complex cryptoccurency for developing something to that effect? http://multigateway.org/

The logic fallacy:

When someone leaves their house, don't they lock the door? The answer is yes.

If one leaves their house they have less than 0.01% of their house being broken into. YET THEY LOCK THE DOOR.

By your rationale it would be dumb to do so... "just because one left their house doesn't automatically mean that his house will be broken into, I mean look at the statistics of how few times this has happened!!!".

The security assumption you are making, stated simply, is that just because something isn't been done on a regular basis, it's ok if we leave the gap for it to get abused. If you design systems like that you will be fucked pretty swiftly. If you want to make a robust system you start by assuming the WORST POSSIBLE SCENARIOS and trying to find mitigation strategies for dealing with them. Otherwise some other guy will say "so, let's start looking for vulnerabilities here" and they will find them if you have made assumptions of "reasonable behavior".

If BTC was made for reasonable behavior assumptions it would be a joke-coin that would not be worth billions - it would have been violated plenty of times already, in every possible way that isn't "sealed off".


That's true even with a 1MB block yet many miners are filling it with dust and near zero fee txs. This is not rational behavior.

Can the network be based on the security assumption that miners will always be rational regarding what transactions they process? I believe the answer is no, especially since they have a track record where they obviously do not behave rationally and have assisted in the bloating of the blockchain for zero cost and increased risk for the miner who might get orphaned. So you have to circumvent human stupidity at the protocol level.


Even if the fees are raised significantly it'll still be way lower than many current fees that are charged for a whole range of transactions. Besides, you are making the assumption that most people already have at their disposal paypal, banks, cards, etc and that Bitcoin is just another means of payment that they can choose from. If you already have access to paypal, banks, cards, etc, Bitcoin might be near useless to you as it offers nothing new compared to what you did yesterday. Perhaps a bit less fees or something, at the expense of market volatility where you could lose way more money from currency fluctuations compared to a predictable set-fee charge.

However, in many cases, Bitcoin is the most people will get in terms of online transactions. This applies for BILLIONS OF PEOPLE who are possible candidates to use it. Whether they are kids playing a MMORPG and wanting to buy/sell virtual stuff (and aren't of legal age to use banks/cards etc, thus using Bitcoins), or being in a country where sending $$$ internationally through the banks is problematic due to currency restrictions, etc etc.

Bitcoin is more revolutionary for countries of the non-western world than it is for the western world. Even for its property as money (and not money-transfer service) which can be considered hard currency compared to local inflationary currency.

Eh, no. Because the issue is pretty much solvable.


First, most cryptocurrencies are based on the bitcoin protocol. So bitcoin is still in use, as a protocol, even if it isn't as a currency for a particular transaction.

If I use LTC, I still use the bitcoin protocol. The elements are pretty much the same.

Second, in some of the options, like having an exchange account, you can either use BTC, or not. For example you can accept 100 different altcoins and have it set to be converted to BTC on arrival and then make 1 fat BTC withdrawal in the end of the day (if you are a merchant). So you might have gotten paid for 300 coffees with DOGE, these money go to the payment processor or exchange, and in the end of the day you get, say, 2 BTC.


Code-wise it shouldn't be that difficult. It might be a lot of work but in essence it is a decentralized asset exchange, specifically for cryptocurrencies/altcoins, merging functionalities of different wallets in order to transact in multiple blockchains.

It can fit because it has a 1mb limit in place, and not, say, 20mb. It would require just 50 blocks to fill 1 gb if someone made a script to do just that.

You cannot have a multibillion dollar currency that has such an issue looming over its head.

If you have a currency where someone can throw 1 btc in fees to fill a 20mb block, then with 144btc spent you get around 3gb of bloat per day.

In a month you will need 4320 BTCs to fill 86.4gb, and in a year you'll have exceeded 1 TB for a cost of 51840 BTCs (21mn USD at current prices, much less in terms of USD if the government has hacked them or confiscated them).

Even if one is paying the fees, and is not basing his approach on waiting to confirm a lot of low fee or no fee transactions, the price is way too low for destroying a multibillion dollar currency / making it unusable / rendering it centralized.

If I were threatened by BTC and had the resources, I'd go for it. It's pretty cheap compared to what you get in return (a bloated system and the perception that "ah crap, crypto is done, it can't scale because it's way too bloated). What more could I say?

What we *really* need is to fit way more transactions in the same amount of space. And we also need a much higher fee structure, implemented ...yesterday if possible.

Let's say I accept DASH but you only have LTC or DOGE. At that point there are several solutions:

1) I use an exchange account for deposits of coins that I do not regularly receive, so you do nothing but send your LTC or DOGE. I then convert those to DASH which I accept and withdraw them to my wallet.
2) You first convert your LTC or DOGE to DASH which I accept, in some exchange, and send them to my wallet.
3) We use a payment processor

(in the future)
4) We use some kind of decentralized currency exchange and this process of alternating between blockchains becomes seamless, with minimal risk compared to current exchanges.