As of now, almost EVERY serious alt coin is better than bitcoin to do a real payment: high fees, very slow confirmation, old block chain tech, long block periods...

There's not much in the crypto world that is used as a currency.  Bitcoin's utility is nearing the end in that respect with the full blocks.  Bitcoin as a currency is over in my opinion.  It will now become a reserve currency for big players, but paying a guy on the internet is now impossible, and no solution will appear in my opinion.

So, in as much as there is an "internet money" place to be taken, it is now.  I think the most obvious candidate to take over in the beginning will be litecoin.  But several major alt coins may see their opportunity.  DASH too.  

I'm not disputing the price of a single DASH.  BTW, there is an automatic relationship between the price of a single dash, the net block reward and the hash rate.  Miners make profits from the moment that the hash rate is lower than the profitable hash rate.

I'm disputing the "market cap" of DASH.  Most coins being locked in, this doesn't mean anything.  If I make an alt coin of which I own myself 9 million coins, and there is 1 million on the market, if the coin is traded for, say, $5, then the actual market cap is only 5 million, and not 50 million dollars.  Because the 9 million are not liquid.  In order to maintain the price, the net mined coins need to be sold to "new money" (or my pump money), but that's peanuts.  People *thinking* there is a market cap of 50 million, will not hesitate buying coins if it is on the rise, because they think that they will be able to sell a reasonable amount of stash without crashing the market.  That's where they are wrong, because the actual market is much, much smaller than what they think it is.

Nah, journalists are too stupid to even understand what that means.  They even sell bitcoin as an anonymous coin.  DASH is a centralized coin with low liquidity in the hands of a single guy, mimicking as a great distributed crypto currency, improved over bitcoin (not difficult), and know what ?  That propaganda works as hell.  People love to fall for this kind of stuff.  What is even greater, is that DASH can pose as a coin that used to be criminal, and now has seen the light and is on the side of the nice guys ; redemption.   Only a small and insignificant number of smart people know how fake it is, but they don't matter.

The BIG problem for DASH is something totally different: it is an illegal security that doesn't pass the Howey test.

If I were Evan, I would cash out before, flee to an exotic place, change name and live a rich-man's life in anonymity.
(hence, not use DASH, with its fake anonymity )

But this means that the market is not liquid, until a "crash threshold" is reached.  Small downward corrections that would normally make people sell and amplify them until new demand is reached, will not happen, because these corrections are smaller than the interest.  In the same vein, "taking profit" is also discouraged, because taking profit by selling should be bigger than keeping and reaping in the interest. 

Which means that "slow pumping" is very easily done: you only have to buy up the small part that is liquid.  Nobody is going to "take profits" because there's more to be had when getting to the interest.  And you can also dump slowly on newcomers, even a small price decrease will not trigger a sell-out because interest compensates.  So as long as you pump slowly enough, and you dump slowly enough, you keep very small market liquidity, which allows you to pump the market to unknown heights.  But the real market cap is just the small amount of liquidity times the price, and not the full stash.  The announced market cap is entirely fake.

And this is just the case with a PoS coin in general.  But if moreover, the pumper is also the owner of most of the coins, this is even worse: of course he's not going to kill of his own dump, or his own pump, with his own coins !

No.  At every instant, with a non-interest bearing token, you CAN sell it from the moment you think it will go down.  If you hold it, you think it will go up.  With an interest-bearing token, you include the interest in your calculation.  You only sell if you think that the loss will be higher than the interest it will bring when you do not sell it.

Moreover, if most of the interest-bearing accounts are in the hands of the same entity that manipulates the market, he keeps it locked in to increase his lever on the market of course.

But this is exactly why it will rise like crazy: most coins are not liquid, the "market cap" propaganda works, and tells now to the world that it is 3rd largest crypto, greater fools stream in, pump it even harder.  Evan is a genius.  He will become way more rich than Bill Gates (or go to prison for illegal securities...).  Moreover, being totally centrally controlled, Evan can do what he wants.  No "scaling debate", no "fighting over this or that".  DASH is Evan's coin and it will have a (virtual) market cap that may even one day outperform bitcoin's.  If he dumps slowly enough on all greater fools, he will end up making the DASH market liquid, be immensely rich, financed by all greater fools into Evan's pockets.  Simply a genius.

No, it is not a myth.  It is *economically* locked in.  Technically, you can move it, but you lose your master node, and its reward.  So you won't.

If DASH's price rises, you keep it because you get a *higher* (virtual) rise than DASH's rise (you get an extra interest).  And if DASH falls, but less than the reward, you are still on the winning side if you keep it.  This is different with a coin that has no PoS mechanism, which is hence fully liquid.

This "dispute" is nothing else but the immutability dynamics at work, that keeps the protocol as it is, and makes it impossible to find a consensus over an important modification of the rules.  In the same way as immutability dynamics doesn't allow to find a consensus over changing the 21 million coins into 42 million or something.  You see bitcoin's dynamics at work, while you think it are "disputes".  The disputes are the essence of bitcoin's distributed immutability.  This is why the "winner" will be the actual rules and nothing will change.  Learn to live with 1MB blocks and no segwit.  Because that's bitcoin, and it is immutable. 

A simple compound-interest calculation puts it close to 50%.  Start with 100% of the stash when there were 2 million coins (the premine).  Then apply the 45% interest on the mining and re-capitalize it until you reach 7 million coins or so.

How can this be, if he got all the stash at the premine ?  Didn't he invest in master nodes, getting him most of the mining rewards then ?

Hell, how can you write that ?  Arbitrary choice of units, comparing 1/16 000 000 of market cap (a "bitcoin", vs mbitcoin, satoshi...) with one ounce of gold (why not a kg, a tonne, ...), which represents grossly 1/ 10^10 of the total amount of gold.  At this moment, bitcoin is less than 1/1000 of gold, and we're counting all lost coins in.  Probably the true market cap of bitcoin is closer to half of the official 16 million coins.  There's Satoshi's lost stash, there are a lot of lost address keys (especially in the beginning of bitcoin)...

It is amazing that you contradict your own prediction, which was brilliant, now that it is being realized: the scalocalypse.  It is happening right under our nose now.  So this will delegate bitcoin to the status of reserve currency for BIG PLAYERS (which are, most of the time, conservative dudes).


Android has no scaling problem.  I would rather say that in as much as this comparison is valid, you are looking at the evolution of alt coins, which are what android is like: many different flavours of the same idea.

Your argument was just as valid when bitcoin started out, and you could compare fiat to bitcoin.  Merchants are going to drop bitcoin if payments are not sure, and need ages to confirm, if ever.  Of course, alt coins have the same problems, once they reach bitcoin's levels of transactions and adoption, but there are MANY alt coins.  The problem will be solved when bitcoin loses its first mover advantage, and becomes just a crypto amongst others, with free competition.  The "first mover" advantage is still locking up bitcoin in a kind of monopoly situation, but as bitcoin becomes essentially useless as a payment system, this will erode hopefully.   Crypto will only be "fully decentralized" if not one block chain dominates the landscape with its monopoly, and when many competing chains are running.  Now, bitcoin, having the most primitive crypto tech, is still dominating the show.  But its baked-in problems will hopefully change this.

Bitcoin's principle is trustless distributed consensus, which is supposed to lead to "immutability", that is: the rules are graved in stone FOREVER, and the block chain will never pedal backwards: what's on the chain is there for ever, and the rules are the rules for ever.

So a bitcoin "user" subscribes to these rules and that principle, and it is working as it should: the rules are immutable.  Nobody can change them.  Only "insignificant technical details" can change.  Once a technical aspect becomes an economic aspect, it is frozen in.  Like the 21 million coins.  Bitcoin users cannot "decide" to change that number.  It is frozen in.  And now, the block size, and the scarcity of transactions, is also frozen in.  That's bitcoin.  A frozen system, with immutable rules.  As it was designed to be.  If that system is not working as you want to, as you expect to, as they told you to, that's a different story.  But bitcoin is what it is, and will never change.  Unless the immutability is broken, and a centralized authority decides to change something, and has the central power to impose it.  But then it is not a decentralized trustless consensus system any more.  Which can happen.

Such a consensus system, however, can split if the tensions between different views become so untenable, that there is more profit to be made when the community splits, rather than when it stays locked in: a hard fork like ETC/ETH.  But that would sacrifice the most valuable aspect of bitcoin, the most important thing it has going for it: its "first mover" advantage.  So as long as this is strong, I think there will not be enough "partial consensus" to fork away.

This is the only scaling method that will work.  Use other coins.  Bitcoin is not a payment system any more.  This was built in from the start, when a hard limit on block capacity was frozen into the immutable protocol (the reason why "we don't seem to find a solution yet" - the same reason of why "we don't seem to be able to make more bitcoins than 21 million yet").   This hard limit made "a transaction" - room on the block chain - a commodity with finite supply, and will hence, make its price explode, like bitcoin is a coin with finite supply, and made its price go to $1200,-.  A commodity with inelastic offer and increasing demand becomes always hugely expensive.  By putting a hard limit in the block chain size, and hence by putting a hard limit on the number of transactions per second, with increasing demand, a "transaction" will become a hugely expensive affair.

So, these are the last few months of bitcoin as a payment network.  Only *very big* transactions will still be affordable, reducing more and more "low contents" addresses to the dust bin (if you have an address with 0.5 bitcoin in it, and the fee is 0.6 bitcoin, per input UTXO, you're not going to be able to ever use that address).  Only single addresses with HUGE amounts will still make sense.  In the hands of exchanges, institutional investors, etc... And they will only move huge amounts when they need.  

In other words, bitcoin is then a reserve currency for institutional players, banks, exchanges....  Miners will love it.  They don't have any incentive to change this.

That fate is built into bitcoin since there was a hard limit on block size.

I never said anything else.  Look at earlier posts.


You are seriously confused.  Non-valid blocks don't count.  The longest chain is the longest VALID chain.

I will try to explain it in a different way.  Suppose that there are not block, but numbers.  The old protocol accepts prime numbers.  The new protocol accepts uneven numbers.  So the new protocol is a backwards compatible hard fork of the old one.

We had previously.

.... - 13 - 17 - 19 - 23

when the hard fork gets activated.

Now, the new nodes produce 25 - 27, because these are uneven numbers.

The old nodes see:

 - 13 - 17 - 19 - 23 - 25 - 27, but they see that these last two blocks are invalid.

So the longest chain, for the old nodes, is still:

  - 13 - 17 - 19 - 23 STOP.  They regularly get a 25 and a 27, but as these are not prime numbers, they reject them.  As they should.  

However, the new nodes accept:

 - 13 - 17 - 19 - 23 - 25 - 27.  That's a different chain.

My analogy breaks down at the next step, because the "29" for one chain will not be the 29 for the other, as it contains the hash of the previous one with blocks which doesn't work with numbers.

For the A nodes, "25 and 27" are not "orphaned", or whatever, they are simply INVALID blocks, and the A miners will mine upon 23, the highest block in their chain, and will build a 29a,  while the new nodes will make a 29b, built upon 27, which is the highest valid block in THEIR chain.

When old nodes receive the 29b block, they will reject it, because it is not built upon a previously valid block (it is built upon 27, which was not a previously valid block), and when new nodes receive 29a, they will think it is an orphaned block built after 23, while they are already at 27 at that point, so they orphan it and don't include it.

So each node builds its own chain correctly.

old nodes will see: - 13 - 17 - 19 - 23 - 29a  (and reject 25, 27 and 29b as invalid)
new nodes will see - 13 - 17 - 19 - 23 - 25 - 27 - 29b  (and reject 29a as orphaned)


No banning is needed.  But banning may help avoid "noise on the line".  The connections between old nodes and new nodes are useless, add some noise, but are not harmful.

If, say, the split is 75% - 25% then if each node connects randomly to 8 other nodes, he'll have on average 6 B nodes and 2 A nodes.  An A node receives only noise from B nodes, and a B node receives only noise from A nodes.  So the only links that bring useful information, is between equally minded nodes.  But the other nodes are just seen as "confused" or "behind", sending only orphaned blocks, or sending only invalid blocks.

Well, if "miners have an intelligent well thought plan", why didn't it happen then already ?  Because the "evil people at core" are not allowing them to collude and activate BU ?  Of course not.  Simply because they cannot agree. And happily, that they cannot agree.  Because if they did, it would mean that there is a >51% collusion between miners, and bitcoin's immutability is gone.

Also, "users" cannot activate segwit.  ONLY miners can.  segwit being a soft fork, it is something users have no say about, and if it gets activated, something users cannot "downvote".

So users cannot impose segwit at all.  

Users cannot decide to activate BU either.  But at least, when miners (with their cunning plan, remember) activate it, if they do not collude for >90%, there will be two coins, and users can then *vote with their money* on how the market cap of bitcoin will be divided between the new coin and the old coin.

Again, nobody is imposing anything on anybody. The evil core people do not have the magic power to hold BU back.  BU not happening, is simply because there's no consensus over it.  Segwit not happening, is simply because there's no consensus over it.  As it should be in a distributed trustless consensus system that provides for immutability.

Also, it is not because they are running BU software to "vote", that they are willing to actually activate the genuine hard fork, meaning, making really blocks > 1 MB.   You don't know how many of the BU voters only do this to avoid segwit, but have no intention to really do the fork.  Because you still have to mine your first block > 1MB and not have it orphaned...

Of course, because the A chain is NOT ANY LONGER.  So A "being stuck at 460001" is perfectly normal, it is the longest chain that is in agreement with A's protocol.


Of course.


Because that was the longest A chain up to that point.

But now, an A-miner has released a second A block, built upon 460001 (because that miner, too, has an A node that has as a longest chain, the one with 460001, and has mined a block on top of it).

That A-miner now broadcasts his block 460002A2.  This is relayed by all A-type nodes.  When your "stuck" A-type node receives this block, he accepts it, and is now at 460002A2, *like he should* because that's now the longest A-compatible chain.  B nodes consider this an orphaned block, and don't include it (and most probably don't propagate it either).


Well, of course, he will do the last thing, and take block 460002A2 when it becomes available.  Nothing difficult.
That the A-node, with its longest chain up to 460001A1 was "wasting its time checking B blocks" is not a problem, it HAD the longest possible chain for him at that point.  When it receives the next A block, it adds it.  As it should.

No "orphan drama". 

A nodes build the A chain.  BU nodes build the B chain.

Of course I don't think that.  My favorite scenario is where bitcoin successively hard forks into several different coins.  It is not a good thing that essentially all crypto is centralized into one single chain.   A single crypto, and a single chain, is also a form of centralization that should be broken.

But what I *prefer* is independent of how I think that the dynamics works.  And you are entirely confused about how hard forks work, because you still talk about "common chain height", orphaning, and so on.

So although my preferred scenario is where bitcoin hardforks into many different coins, I think this will not happen as long as bitcoin carries with it its first mover advantage: this has to erode away first.   And it might very well be that bitcoin will not be used as a transaction medium before this happens: as mainly a vault-reserve currency, where the meager transaction volumes are used to settle between institutional players ; or as an immutable ledger with limited space, that is sold for a lot of money by miners (and the coin is just an app coin that doesn't matter any more, as it is more expensive to move it than the coin's value).

I don't know what will be the outcome for bitcoin.  

Often, the change that happens then, is not one of the alternatives you thought it was going to be...