Poor people and remittance is huge IF the fees are seen as significantly lower and ease of use is there.
But homeless people using bitcoin? Really.
How many homeless have you actually intereacted with? Some are just down on their luck, but most are mentally disabled, drug addicts, or both. They use barter economy and don't have the ability to store long fancy passcodes or keep data. Sure some might have a smart phone but shit gets lost and stolen way to fast.
Bitcoin had a utility when people thought it was anonymous and they could get prohibited items, such as drugs with mail order. Silk road busts crushed this notion. This has left altcoin speculating as the main use for btc. And altcoin speculating is in the toilet.
Crypto needs a pissed off gov person to come on the news and say, those damned kids are using [insert name here] crypto to buy drugs and theres nothing we can do about it
Homeless using Bitcoin. http://www.wired.com/2013/12/bitcoin-homeless-redux/. Edit 1: Now if they are addicted probably not. The idea of say a heroin addict paying for his next fix online and then waiting two weeks in withdrawal for the drug to arrive by mail does not make much sense to me. Edit 2: I have worked with homeless people. I have also observed a person spend $50 to make a $20 payment online. Poverty ain’t cheap when it comes to online payments. |
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Thinking on next years and use of huge super massive blockchains could bring some problems and logically its supernodes could be a specie of centralized nodes with high capacity of storage and processing. Some
solutions could be found like to re-initialize the blockchains each year, Or is an crazy idea it? Or the unique solution to us will be use centralized light wallet the end of the privacy.
Who knows? Terrabytes? Petabytes? etc? The more interesting question is: Will it really matter? Ever wondered how many punched cards it would take to store today's blockchains? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punched_card#/media/File:IBM_card_storage.NARA.jpgWell if it´s really big then could see it http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/special-report-the-worlds-largest-data-centers/ . The point is that all it is centralized and idea of Bitcoin is be decentralized, For that reason some ideas could are coming like to re-initialize the blockchains each year or each certain period of time, So blockchains can be supported by everybody with an medium-high CPU. Storing 4 GB of data using a warehouse full of punched cards was also very centralized in 1959, Storing 4 GB of data on a USB key today is not. This is the critical point. Now extrapolate this to the future and one can stop worrying about bloat. |
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Here is a very small example of this market. New York, 11 March 2010 (IRIN) - Haiti's economy depends on the estimated US$1.5 billion a year in remittances sent home by its million-strong diaspora. Dilip Ratha, lead economist at the World Bank, said the figure could be even higher, accounting for perhaps half the national income. http://www.irinnews.org/report/88397/haiti-us-remittances-keep-the-homeland-afloat. The thing about the poor is that there are many of them, so even if they each only send and receive a little it adds up fast. I picked Haiti because it is one of the poorest countries in the world. There are many more. How crypto can help? 1) Build the payment infrastructure that allows for person to person international payments, with no middlemen. 2) Do not worry about "bloat" 3) Let Moore's, Kryder's and Nielsen's laws do the rest. Will it work? There is a good chance that it will; however there are no guarantees. |
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The bigger question behind all this in my mind is whether crypto actually solves any useful problem that anyone cares about.
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Very simple. Show me a poor, homeless person, that accepts credit or debit cards. In person cash works but over the Internet, across international borders? Crypto currencies solve this very simple problem. I was also going to answer the unbanked. No need to be homeless. In many countries bank accounts are rare. In some countries where bank accounts are more common, fees are very high and there are lots of restrictions on international transfers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-PesaM-Pesa is huge, but run by the phone company and with much higher fees than bitcoin. There is demand for crypto! M-Pesa is actualy an exception but only works in Kenya. On a bus between Kenya and Tanzania it fails. There is a different incompatible M-Pesa in Tanzania. The market is huge as most of the world's population is poor. Fees are critical here. If it costs $12 for someone in Canada to pay $70 to someone is Kenya that is fail. I witnessed this at the local post office. Crypto can solve this problem. |
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The bigger question behind all this in my mind is whether crypto actually solves any useful problem that anyone cares about.
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Very simple. Show me a poor, homeless person, that accepts credit or debit cards. In person cash works but over the Internet, across international borders? Crypto currencies solve this very simple problem. Edit: Allmost all electronic payments systems are primarially designed to transfer wealth from the middle class or wealthy individuals to large corporations and governments. They fail badly when the payer is poor. As for when the recipient is poor they fail completly. |
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My thoughts on eMunie is that when I see a technical paper that explains how it works, then I will spend the time to evaluate it.
If all I see is the benefits then I am not interested. I know that most sales persons are taught to sell benefits rather than features becasue it actually works with many people. I just happen not to be one of those persons, so I simply dismiss it as complex.
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Thinking on next years and use of huge super massive blockchains could bring some problems and logically its supernodes could be a specie of centralized nodes with high capacity of storage and processing. Some
solutions could be found like to re-initialize the blockchains each year, Or is an crazy idea it? Or the unique solution to us will be use centralized light wallet the end of the privacy.
Who knows? Terrabytes? Petabytes? etc? The more interesting question is: Will it really matter? Ever wondered how many punched cards it would take to store today's blockchains? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punched_card#/media/File:IBM_card_storage.NARA.jpg |
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I must say that this is for the most part a very balanced assessment. I do have some comments:
1) Bitcoin. The most fundamental problem I see here is how can it scale, and at the same time keep miner incentives after the emission runs out? I do not see a solution here that does not involve constant forking, centralized control etc. This only leaves Dogecoin and Monero as viable POW alternatives because of the small but non zero tail emissions.
2) Monero (Cryptonote). The one fundamental problem here is bloat / blockchain size. Pruning will not solve it in any significant fashion since it is a linear saving in space vs exponential growth. What does have a very significant chance of solving this problem is a continuation of Moore's, (processing), Kryder's (storage) and Nielsen's (bandwith) laws. This is comparable to someone betting on credit cards in 1951 when Diner's Club was launched. Credit cards also could not scale with the technology of the time (tabulating machines and punch cards). By this token Bitcoin would be Diner's Club, Monero has a chance at American Express or even possibly Master Card or Visa. Dogecoin also has a chance here to compete here as an open ledger if it steps up to the plate and fixes it blocksize limit issue. I do not see governments censoring centralized mining as an issue in Monero because with Monero it is an all or nothing proposition, since a miner would not know what transactions to censor. In any event regulators are focusing on service providers (way easier to regulate) than miners. The environmental issue can be mitigated to a large degree by using the "waste" heat for space heating since the heat only has value when compared to the electricity consumed, if the mining is performed in a in a distributed fashion.
Note: As a baby boomer, I have actually worked with punch cards and have also sent a telegram, so that does give me a strong bias towards the continuation of Moore's, Kryder's and Nielsen's laws. that a much younger person would not have.
3) POS, 4) DPOS. The biggest weakness I see here is borrowed stake. This is where those controlling the coins do not have exposure to the coins. For example: Borrowing, derivatives and hedging. We must keep in mind is that at a very fundamental this is what nearly brought down the fiat monetary system in 2008. The same problem only worse is also present in any DPOS system. In addition in DPOS the delegates would likely be subject to government regulation under existing laws unlike the miners above.
5) eMunie. I agree with the OP here. It is extremely complex. If it works it could be a player. Otherwise no. At this point I simply prefer KISS.
My bet at this point is for the most part Monero with a significant Canadian Dollar (cash) position as a hedge.
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[–]fluffyponyzaXMR Core Team[M] 6 points 22 hours ago Ok to clear up what this exactly is, for /u/VedadoAnonimato and /u/101freezer specifically, let me first explain a little bit about how Monero's components work internally. The Monero daemon is the piece of software that keeps you synced up with the Monero network. That's all it does, it doesn't know about "you" or "your funds" or "your transactions". If you want to do anything on the Monero network, and thus on the Monero blockchain, you have to talk to this daemon that will then talk to the network as a whole by rebroadcasting transactions you initiate. Similarly, if you want to get history from the blockchain, or the current memory pool of transactions, or outputs to mix with, you can ask the daemon for that information. Now currently we use the JSON RPC API to talk to the daemon, but this is a horribly inefficient way of handling requests. It means that the daemon always has to have a thread that can answer requests, even if it's busy with something else, and it means that we have to spend a lot of effort and energy maintaining what is, in essence, an HTTP server. Securing it becomes an issue, and it's simply not scalable. Imagine a future where the block size has dynamically grown to 300mb per block - JSON RPC is simply not built to efficiently and securely move that type of data between the daemon and applications interacting with it. Additionally, we have the problem of wanting to secure the communication to and from the daemon, as it might be on a different physical device to the one we're on. Resorting to things like self-signed SSL certificates or HTTP Simple Auth is...ok...but not ideal. 0MQ solves all those problems for us, and it provides bindings and libraries for most languages that client applications might be written in. Even better: it lets us get used to a new dependency now, so that when we decide to replace the network wire protocol (which currently uses Boost.Asio) we can do so easily, and alternative implementations (besides the main Monero project) can also just use a 0MQ wire protocol. The initial merge of the 0MQ IPC functionality (nearly 30 000 new lines of code) went into the development branch 5 days ago: https://github.com/monero-project/bitmonero/commit/3daece9439e034104a007a3946714ee7a5aa8e07Now this might all seem quite low-level and unimportant, but I can assure you that these are huge changes, and it will mean that we are getting closer to a point where the Monero daemon is so robust that it is just at home on a Raspberry Pi lying next to your router, or on a huge enterprise server handling thousands of queries a second. permalink The above quote from Reddit summarizes why 0MQ is very valuable for Monero and a few of the possibilities it facilitates |
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Darkcoin has been removed from Bitcoinwisdom  woah why for? Dash was delisted at Bitfinex, which was the only feed being shown on bitcoinwisdom. Why bitcoinwisdow doesn't show the cryptsy feed for it when it does show other cryptsy feeds I don't know. It is still there but hidden https://bitcoinwisdom.com/markets/cryptsy/drkbtc |
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The attack is actually a joke, just add the following to your bitcoin.conf and it won't have any effect. blockmaxsize=1000000
mintxfee=0.00005
minrelaytxfee=0.00005
limitfreerelay=5
The attacker simply increases the transaction fee at no cost to the attacker. There is a lot more to this attack than meets the eye. https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1157584.msg12277703#msg12277703. |
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That almost bears repeating.
Buying Monero on an exchange at the moment is cheaper than mining it (probably several times cheaper).
The opportunity is unprecedented. ...
It's entirely precedented, as well as expected. In any even remotely efficient mining market, it'll always be cheaper for a small investor to buy the coin on the open market versus mining it. Unless someone already has a bunch of viable hardware laying around (0 capital cost) and/or cheap/free power, the average cost per GH of mining for a small player will be well above the average for all players in the overall mining market, which is about where the market value of the coin should be sitting. This dynamic can break when dislocations in the market are occurring (rapidly changing underlying demand for the coin, or a tech trigger in the form of massively more efficient mining hardware, etc), but by and large buying the coin will be cheaper. This has been the case with Bitcoin at least since when I first thought about mining it in 2011 (I didn't have any GPUs lying around) and it's the case with most coins of any liquidity today. This assumes that the heat generated in the mining process has no or negative value. The economics change drastically when it is -40 (C or F no difference) outside.  |
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No. The current "stress test" attacks on Bitcoin work and can actually be profitable because the fixed 1 MB blocksize limit is a fundamental flaw in Bitcoin. Stress testing the messenger (attacker if you wish) is not going to solve the problem, quite apart from the legal ramifications of such action.
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I am suggesting to let the fee market develop especially considering the upcoming halving.
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For a proper fee market to develop one needs an adaptive blocksize limit with a cost associated with increasing the blocksize not a low fixed blocksize limit that remains fixed no matter what the demand and increase in fees. The latter is what makes the current attack feasible, and economically profitable to the attacker, as was explained earlier in this thread. |
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We've seen recently how discord between developers and also between factions in the larger community has slowed Bitcoin's development (and perhaps depressed its price), affecting the entire cryptocurrency sector. Monero's politics is more opaque. Here are some questions:
1. Do the XMR devs get along?
2. Do they share a vision for Monero's future?
3. Are there significant points of technical disagreement?
4. Does everyone agree on the development path (for example, that code review and optimization should precede "official" GUI development).
5. Does everyone agree on Monero's "governance model"?
The answers will influence Monero's probability of success and its price.
These are of course very valid questions; however there is a critical difference with Bitcoin here. Bitcoin has a fundamental flaw baked into the protocol requiring a hard fork that prevents Bitcoin from scaling regardless of any future technological change. Monero does not have this problem. This is of course the 1 MB blocksize limit. The current dispute in the Bitcoin community is directly related to this flaw. |
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Censoring Bitcoin by blocking port 8333 could put AT&T in violation of the new Net Neutrality rules in the United States since it amounts to filtering traffic. We must keep in mind that Bitcoin is a peer to peer network. Those affected could file complaints to the FCC https://consumercomplaints.fcc.gov/ It would likely fall under the Open Internet category. Edit: If enough Bitcoin users in the United States file complaints their firewall will become expensive. |
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Does anyone know if having larger maximum block sizes would make these kinds of stress tests/attacks less effective?
Yes because the attacks need a certain minimum percentage of the block to be filled with "real" transactions. Take Cryddit's example: In order for the attack to work the percentage of "real" transactions in the block has to be 50% or higher. Now, if one increases the size of the block by say a factor of eight while keeping the real transactions approximately constant then the economics of the attack will fall apart, since 50% has now become 6.25%. The way to answer this question is to run numerical simulations of this attack, for various "real" transaction block fill ratios and percentage hashrate controlled by the attacker. Hmmm, it is almost as if it might be a good idea to raise the maximum block size. Does anyone know why the core developers who work for blockstream are so opposed to raising the maximum block size? They don't want to profit from smaller blocks do they? They don't. Side chains require bigger blocks, hence the "chain" part. You can't store the information in thin air. Does anyone know why people keep repeating this untrue statement? The choice of the 20th percentile over the median in BIP 100 because of a Blockstream recommendation is a perfect example. https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1164429.0 This turns what could be a workable proposal into one that is way more vulnerable to the attack mentioned above. Edit: It also creates a situation that is much worse in that the loosing side could have well over 50% of the hashrate creating the perfect storm for a hostile fork. |
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Does anyone know if having larger maximum block sizes would make these kinds of stress tests/attacks less effective?
Yes because the attacks need a certain minimum percentage of the block to be filled with "real" transactions. Take Cryddit's example: In order for the attack to work the percentage of "real" transactions in the block has to be 50% or higher. Now, if one increases the size of the block by say a factor of eight while keeping the real transactions approximately constant then the economics of the attack will fall apart, since 50% has now become 6.25%. The way to answer this question is to run numerical simulations of this attack, for various "real" transaction block fill ratios and percentage hashrate controlled by the attacker. |
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Monero
Why? It is the most liquid POW coin that does not have a fixed blocksize issue.
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