So, to summarise:

• I'm basically right, Bitcoin isn't a pyramid scheme
• yadda yadda yadda
• Bitcoin's a pyramid scheme, until you decide it's "real" money, when it magically isn't a pyramid scheme instantly

I don't think you even understand the most basic aspects of monetary theory.



This is more or less verbatim from the Wikipedia article on Money:

"Money is an emergent phenomenon from the process of trading goods. One good becomes the most common denominator of trade, and in turn becomes the most valuable trading good in it's own right"

According to the very basics above, as well as the 7 properties Aristotle used to define good money tokens, Bitcoin is money. Not to everyone of course, but that's not necessary: everyone in the Bitcoin economy treats it as money, by definition (no different to how the Malaysian Riggit is not money to those who trade in the Chilean economny ). Bitcoin's market price is immature, which makes it's exchange rate volatile until it matures, but it's monetary characteristics are sound.

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So why are you trolling about pyramid schemes? This is cargo cult economics you're coming up with here. Pyramid schemes have no intrinsic value, they're definitively scams, where only either the originator (in this case, Satoshi), or a select group of lieutenants ever make a profit. You can't buy things in an economic market with your pyramid scheme tokens, whereas the Bitcoin acceptance amongst merchants has been steadily increasing for several years.

Even people that bought Bitcoin last month have more purchasing power than they did before. Unlike in a pyramid scheme. So, I'm ever so sorry, but literally every Bitcoiner in it's 8 year history, even very new Bitcoiners, aren't going to take this incredibly faulty comparison of yours seriously.

Yes, if we value Bitcoin using the quantity theory of money.

But you're forgetting something: Bitcoin is a new monetary paradigm. Money has never before been represented by pure information controlled by individuals, that's what the blockchain design made possible. For that reason, people are leveraging that new feature as much as they are speculating on Bitcoin's value, or using it in trade.




Nope, your propounding the "digital tulips" viewpoint. And you're wrong.


When money is pure information, controlled by the holder, it's very difficult to take control away from the holder. Sure, blackmail, violence and threats thereof might work. Might.

In previous monetary paradigms, it was much easier to take control of someone's money, it was always something physical, and so it existed someplace. If it was in a bank, someone with political or physical power could take it from that bank. If it was in a house, it could be taken by simple overwhelming force too. Hell, you could even hide the money somewhere smart, and it could still be found, even be accidental discovery.


But no such possibility exists with cryptocurrency. It exists both nowhere and everywhere. And so, if someone keeps their cryptocurrency sufficiently private, or if not, then if their will is strong enough, no-one can take it by force or any other means. That's never been possible before, and is much more powerful as a monetary concept than any that precedes it.

People are buying BTC because it really belongs to them, it's universal monetary sovereignty. That's valuable, and that's valuable right now, not just in the future. Because it was valuable in the past too, but was only afforded by a literal handful of super-powerful individuals. Everyone is that powerful now, if they choose to be.

Uh, hello?

How are the state going to compensate victims of Bitcoin theft, if the thief cannot be traced or coerced? The state aren't going to be collecting any significant amount of taxes from any Bitcoin holder for the exact same reason: it's very difficult to trace or coerce Bitcoin users into giving their BTC up.

All that they're connected to.


The nodes are the network. It started with Satoshi, his node was the first. Slowly, more people joined the network by connecting their node. Every new node is someone extra that can send or receive BTC, using their node.

If you're thinking "I send and receive BTC without a node of my own", then that's because you're using a service that sends and receives Bitcoin for you, using their Bitcoin network node.

Yep

It's never going to keep the IP 100% private.


Dandelion sends your transaction to only one Bitcoin node from peers connected to your node. Your transaction is then relayed again the same way, to only one peer belonging to the node where your transaction first propagated to. This pattern (called the "stem" phase) continues for a randomised number of peers, and then the final peer in the Dandelion propagation method relays your transaction in the normal way (i.e. that peer sends it to all of their connected peers, not just one, and those peers also send to all their peers etc etc).

This helps to defeat analysis techniques to determine the originating IP of a transaction, but it depends on the good nature of the peer you begin the Dandelion propagation with: that peer necessarily knows your IP, and might well be able to determine that they were the first in the stem. So it's never 100% IP privacy, although it's possibly an improvement on standard propagation.

And I mean only possibly, as someone responding to the Dandelion RFC on the bitcoin mailing list figured out a flaw in the technique that degrades the effectiveness if a peer sends multiple transactions while connected to the same set of nodes. Dandelion is still a work in progress, it may or may not make it into Bitcoin.

Well, that's exactly what I said, except I imagined the secondary consequences.

Except you're suggesting the information will never reach newbies that when buying BTC at Coinbase, one actually receives B2X or whatever it's called. People will learn, and react as they see fit. There's nothing we can do to stop Coinbase behaving like this, but we can control our response. Spread the word: certain exchanges are planning to change what BTC means on their platform.

Very different things



Dandelion is a transaction propagation technique to make analytical identification of the originating IP of a given Bitcoin transaction more difficult.

MAST adds recursion (only 1 level) to the Bitcoin scripting language (so a script can call itself within itself, but only once, not indefinitely). I didn't fully understand the purpose of this when I read about it, so bring on the professionals. Clearly, more expressive scripts are possible with MAST, but what can be newly expressed, I'm not sure about.

That doesn't really explain proposed plans to change BTC to BC1 on one exchange (Coinbase i believe)


And my comment stands really: if any exchange changes what the BTC or XBT currency symbols represent, the precedent is set. No-one wants to re-read FAQs on a regular basis to see what Bitcoin is listed as this week/month, and those exchanges will get terrible customer feedback as a result. And then their customers will leave.

I'll be happier if I'm wrong in this case (and even happier if we double up again, even once)

Indeed.

Diamonds are only perceived as valuable in rap lyrics, Hollywood fiction and advertisements for diamonds (and the 3 are all essentially advertisements for diamonds, whether the lyric/screenplay authors know it or not). Years of Hollywood crime movies have somehow convinced all sorts of fools that diamonds are a useful asset, they're not

Explain why.

(exchanges where there is any ambiguity as to which symbol means which coin will see their business suffer, the problem solves itself really)

Ok then Seeking Alpha (which I understand to be part of the FT media umbrella), but if you buy COIN, you're not buying any form of currency at all, let alone an independent reserve currency. COIN is the ticker symbol for DCG's investment fund, and you're receiving dollar denominated dividends from something like that.

No.

Supporters of Segwit BIP142 (aka Bitcoin Core's original version) weren't involved in any deal. The NYA deal was unilaterally agreed by it's miner/service company signatories, and these companies, especially the miners, were split on whether to activate Segwit BIP 142 beforehand.

And BIP91 (which was a simple block orphaning mechanism used to activate Segwit's BIP142) was written by 1 programmer, representing no-one except himself, and with the intention of resolving incompatibilities between the NYA Segwit deployment and the BIP142 Segwit deployment.

Well, there's little more than 1 programmer working on Segwit2x, and that's a serious contrast to the Bitcoin Core team (30 or 40 programmers) when you look at the Github account for the S2x (confusing named "BTC1") software client.

So claims of industry-wide consensus, a professional team or decentralised development are looking a little different in reality. At least 1 of the NYA signatories made comments to that effect.

"Unstoppable"?



Step 1:

Go to Vitalik Buterin's house and "persuade" him to stop developing Ethereum


Step 2:

there is no step 2, Ethereum will die either slowly or quickly as a consequence of step 1. Centralised cryptocurrency is destined to fail

Ok, so you really want to convince us how powerful Bitcoin corporations are


Except they're not

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Let me give you some advice:

Powerful people don't talk about how powerful they are. They just use their power.


People pretending to be powerful, that's who likes to talk.


So, if Bitcoin companies really could force users onto a hard fork they don't want, they'd just shut up and do it.

Which doesn't explain why there's always people hanging around these forums, talking about how the latest-greatest hard fork is gonna be unstoppable. Until it dies like all the others. Again.

I would question the methodology Meyer is using to extrapolate the price trend. I'm not an expert in market technical analysis, but even I know that moving averages are not an indicator of future prices at all. Maybe everyone is feeling confident about the $5000 mark being definitively crossed, but the volumes taking us there have not been exactly confidence inspiring to me.

And it would not suprise me if these (very optimistic) price outlooks we've been receiving are either notably interrupted or outright reversed instead. Don't get me wrong, I'm bullish long-term about Bitcoin, but the short-term isn't necessarily as obstacle free as the recent consensus suggests. Quite often, carefully doing the opposite of a widespread sentiment is the best investment decision (i.e. be greedy when all are afraid, and afraid when all are greedy).

Just for the record




There is nothing technical binding any miners to Segwit2x, at all.


The signalling is just that: signalling. There is no evidence that signalling miners are using the S2x software to mine with, which is all that could actually cause the Bitcoin hashrate to drop.

The posters above in this thread are well known and consistent scaremongers for Segwit2x, as well as many previous alt-dev hard forks. Their output is always contrived to scare Bitcoin users into accepting Segwit2x (or the latest alt-dev hard fork attempt), when the fact is that Bitcoin users always have the choice to reject alt-dev hard forks

Apparently so. MeshCollider and achow101 are both technically well informed in general, and I also checked their explanations made sense to me, which they did.