Here's an observation, not sure if it is new to you or not... (by the way, as I said before, your work is much appreciated Stephen. I've been critical about aspects of it before, and this comment won't be different, but I think there's a good reason for someone to take the 'devil's advocate' role once in a while) The observation is that, if we ignore the "spikes" into a higher range of transactions, one could argue there is an overall slowing down of adoption (as measure by transaction). The Metcalfe's law based price models wouldn't necessarily pick this up initially, because transactions *are* still rising, but it is (at least to me) conceivable that rate of growth is behind earlier expectations, and this reflects in the current price stagnation (as in: the markets pick up slower than expected adoption than the models do). Here's the slow-down I have in mind, if viewed from the following point of view: Let's look at "transaction eras" only in terms of powers of 10, and only after the no. of transactions doesn't fall back into the previous order of magnitude. Arbitrary definition? Maybe. Anyway, here's the transaction graph if parsed like that:  Any opinions on this? |
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losing faith here.  october 2014: sub 400  Couldn't hodl. my cold storage stash keeps hounting me. this is alarming, it never did before. must be bottom then...? I found out that I manage to keep that feeling in check by keeping the size of my cold storage close to, but below the size of my active stash. |
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Nothing wrong with the gist of your argument, OP, but also nothing particularly insightful... Exemplified by: Wonderful! We must be close to a market bottom. How is it that such a senior member of the forum suffers from such self-blindness, myopia, and unelephantine memory that they can truly believe that this time, this terrible bear market, is the true death of Bitcoin?
That "unelephantine memory" of the market, as you like to call it, extends to 2011, 2010 with some good will, and includes a whole 3 cycles of what you now seem to treat like a fractal. Actually, the 3rd one is still underway. Point is, as you correctly remind the not-so-new newbies, a bear market doesn't mean the end of Bitcoin is near. The other point is, as I remind the ever-so-confident crypto enthusiasts, this is still one big, extremely shaky experiment. The fact that it didn't fail the last two times doesn't provide a very strong basis for a frequentist type argument that it's not likely to fail at the end of the third "cycle". |
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Thanks for the update, masterluc.
Like the way you describe overall trading strategy ("bearish actions" without shorting, and bottom hunting without support targets) a lot. Food for thought, at least for me.
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> Basically what your saying is: It works, if by chance you pick the right model out of 'n' models, with 'n' approaching infinity.
No, that's actually not what he's saying at all.
If I'd get the impression that you are at least ever so slightly inclined to at least try to learn how it might work, I'd give a slightly more formal explanation of what (I believe) it does, and what it doesn't do.
But as it stands now, judging by the style of your answer, I'd waste my breath (or rather: my time, typing out a longer reply)
> Again, if Elliott Wave theory would work you would have an algorithm to do the prediction job for you.
Got it. If it's not fully algorithmic, it doesn't work.
I made this analogy before, in a different discussion, but here it goes again: Tell that ("if it's not formal enough to be an algorithm/computable, it's worthless") to the early computer scientists programming chess engines with insufficient processing power to brute force a victory against a human GM (basically, the state of the world until IBM came along and set their goals). A lot of what a human GM does, apart from the inate intelligence and year after year of training is learning the theory of the game. If you'd ever happen to look into a book of, say, opening theory, you'd notice pretty quickly that the strategies outlined in there are decidedly "unalgorithmic". Didn't change the fact that those who learned the strategies were better than a purely algorithmic machine (until Moore's law took care of that, and the implementation of the theoretic aspects of chess *did* in fact progress far enough, more recently).
tl;dr If it's not algorithmic, it's difficult to show (in an isolated experiment) that it works, but from "difficult to show in isolation that it works" you shouldn't conclude that it doesn't work.
The reason why EW analysis is done by humans is not that an algorithm would be (at first!) strategically inefficient (as in the chess example). The reason is that the starting parameters are rather arbitrary, because the EW rule set does not define them properly. But as logic suggests, if the propositions of a statement are arbitrary then the possible conclusions are also arbitrary. So EW theory does not predict anything. It only shows arbitrary possibilities. ya.ya.yo! You're inching towards an improved understanding :) 1) It provides different parses of the trade data. More specifically, EW is used to: (a) (more or less) exhaustively show all possible parses (of the data, into trends), and (b) to allow the trader to list them non-redundantly. Which all by itself is already a huge help for the human brain, to look at the historic data and consider the different ways the data can be broken down into trends. (EDIT: "helpful", because it is now possible to do so without running into loops) 2) EW then suggests likely continuations, given a parse, and invalidation targets. These are essentially (in my opinion, at least) based on simple market insights/heuristics. Think heuristics along the line of "a series of lower lows forms a downtrend". The point of those heuristics (apart from enabling the exhaustive parsing in step 1) is to list (and maybe rank, by likelihood) what in the past (across different markets) seemed to have been commonly encountered continuations given a parse of the historic data. Which means any suggested continuation is not necessarily the "right" one, and neither is any parse of the historic data. However, as long as there is *something* correctly captured about the conditional probabilities of the market in the suggested continuations, then step 2) is useful as well. |
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It works all the same if you manage to get it right on the first try. There are a lot of factors that go into getting the right count, and because of this, some of those factors can be overlooked quite easily. In my thread I showed that it works. I also had a couple of bad counts that needed revision. This happens, and once you are on the right count, you can continue to track the movements with far greater accuracy than any amount of coin flipping or luck.
The problem with such a long term count is that there can be many paths to the same end. So getting it right, from the start, is very difficult.
Basically what your saying is: It works, if by chance you pick the right model out of 'n' models, with 'n' approaching infinity. Doing "revisions" is admitting that the model doesn't work and that the prediction was wrong. He shows different possibilities too.
That's how these experts do business: Show many possibilities, hoping that at least one of them will materialize at least to some extent. Then they say "I'm an expert, told ya so!". But such kind of "analysis" is deceptive crap. It has no value and predicts nothing. Again, if Elliott Wave theory would work you would have an algorithm to do the prediction job for you. There would be no "bad counts" or similar excuses, because everything would be clearly defined. But that's not the case. Essentially Elliott Wave theory hides its esoteric nature behind a fog of a pseudo-complex, loosely defined rule set. ya.ya.yo! > Basically what your saying is: It works, if by chance you pick the right model out of 'n' models, with 'n' approaching infinity. No, that's actually not what he's saying at all. If I'd get the impression that you are at least ever so slightly inclined to at least try to learn how it might work, I'd give a slightly more formal explanation of what (I believe) it does, and what it doesn't do. But as it stands now, judging by the style of your answer, I'd waste my breath (or rather: my time, typing out a longer reply) > Again, if Elliott Wave theory would work you would have an algorithm to do the prediction job for you. Got it. If it's not fully algorithmic, it doesn't work. I made this analogy before, in a different discussion, but here it goes again: Tell that ("if it's not formal enough to be an algorithm/computable, it's worthless") to the early computer scientists programming chess engines with insufficient processing power to brute force a victory against a human GM (basically, the state of the world until IBM came along and set their goals). A lot of what a human GM does, apart from the inate intelligence and year after year of training is learning the theory of the game. If you'd ever happen to look into a book of, say, opening theory, you'd notice pretty quickly that the strategies outlined in there are decidedly "unalgorithmic". Didn't change the fact that those who learned the strategies were better than a purely algorithmic machine (until Moore's law took care of that, and the implementation of the theoretic aspects of chess *did* in fact progress far enough, more recently). tl;dr If it's not algorithmic, it's difficult to show (in an isolated experiment) that it works, but from "difficult to show in isolation that it works" you shouldn't conclude that it doesn't work. |
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[...]
So bull/bear is 50/50 for me now.
Still 50/50? Weekly doesn't look good... |
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Users of this forum had no sympathy for those who suffered huge Gox loses (the general attitude was "we knew better, serves you right") and the idea that Gox may have impacted on the 'unwashed' does seem to have completely been forgotten by most here. People who lost money on Gox had no sympathy for the people who tried to warn them for years that if they didn't hold the private keys they didn't actually have any bitcoins in spite of being attacked and ridiculed by the shills of whatever service was getting ready to scam their users next. At some point maybe if the unwashed masses aren't willing to do their own research they don't deserve to hold bitcoins yet. That's not how it works... Agreed, there were plenty of signs that gox was in big trouble. Whoever saw that huge-ass thread about delayed withdrawals and still kept sending funds there was kind of asking for it. But the other point, "if you don't hold the private keys, you deserve what you get" is practically useless as a guideline. How are we supposed to get those precious coins, if not through an exchange? Not everyone's cut out to be a miner, or do semi-shady OTC deals. Point is, as long as centralized exchanges are the best option we have to get our hands on bitcoins, we will have to have a slightly more nuanced view on them, in my opinion: ideally, get your funds out of the exchange as soon as you can, but general heuristics apply as well (how trustworthy do the exchange owners appear? where is it registered? are there delayed withdrawals, fiat or btc?) Does that make any sense? |
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This (Circle) will have taken at least 12 months (two years, more?) to plan and bring to fruition, so they couldn't have expected to open in such a bearish period. Will their presence increase demand?
It's unlikely IMO, sentiment is going to take a long time to turn around from Gox (which everyone here seems to have forgotten).
So your argument is sentiment will take a long time to change for the great unwashed because of gox, and your closing statement is that we, those most affected by it, have already forgotten gox. Erm. Way to twist what he meant. Here, I'll paraphrase it the way I've been saying it myself more than once in the past: 1) Gox was, and still is, hugely bearish. Trust in crypto lost by "Bitcoin outsiders" is significant. 2) Forumites shrug off gox as "just another exchange that blew up", "should have kept your coins in a paper wallet, hur dur". They are most likely wrong about that. Where's the contradicton in those two statements? |
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I've got just over 10 BTC.
I'll be honest, I bought most of my coins at around 600 USD, I'm not happy right now, every day the price seems to go down lately.
I don't have any desperate need for the money now, I know it's a long game & I will hoard for years but it's looking pretty shit right now.
in 2011 i bought 100 coins for $ 3000 right at the top of the most epic bubble ever. prices fell for 18 months. even now, at a very desperate phase, when people say btc is dead, i still made more than 1000% profit. stay strong. it will pay out. i am strong, and i am weak too, i think it will go lower , so it is time to me accumulate more coins, sell now (about 370) and buy back later (i dont care if i will lost 5%-15% (buying back higher, if i am not here at the jump) , but i wont sit on my ass any more (i think 8 month was enough about it ) and watch btc going lower and lower without any reason despite of good news how many times i say to myself it wont go lower , it cant go lower, 5-10 times ? ) People don't want to face the facts but we are currently playing a game of Musical chairs. How many of you want to truly exit the market and how many are in it to accumulate more coins? The reality is that it is impossible for both you and the guy who shorted/sold at the top of the bubble to increase your holdings unless there is someone else who eventually loses out. It is wildly amusing to see predictions of double or single digit coins. With the current acceptance at larger retailers a market cap that comes with single digit coins makes bitcoin virtually useless. Any larger purchase would completely screw up supply and demand as a significant portion of coins would need to be involved. If that happens bitcoin HAS failed because to get there you would have to unwind a large portion of user adoption. Is it impossible to go there? not at all. But if it does happen the party is most likely over. Agreed with your main point in principle (if price would go back to single digit and stays there, pretty much every proposed usage case of Bitcoin can be considered failed), but I disagree that *hitting* single digits (which I don't expect either) would be a death sentence, or sign that crypto failed. Panic driven momentum could bring us into a range that is not motivated by the fundamentals, and the market should quite clearly and obviously to the observer reject that price region. In that sense, going even to single digits isn't a problem per se: if the market would take that a clear reversal signal (again, I don't think we will hit single digits, and double digits aren't much more likely either. Back to $200... possible, otoh.) |
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I would like get an insight into why people sell their BTC at these prices? In order for the price to go down, there needs to be somebody willing to sell. Since dumping at these prices is a REALLY, REALLY stupid thing to do, I would like to know who is so smart to sell at these prices and why? Are you people allergic to money or what?
I'm seriously puzzled by this way of thinking. Not trying to be a dick here, but how can you (with a straight face) say "don't you *like* money? why would you sell now?"... The answer is in the charts: Downtrend for more than half a year now. Getting pretty close to one full year in fact. Latest attempt to break that cycle (the June rally) completely and utterly failed. Making new local lows in fact, and getting damn close to the previous capitulation bottom. So, that doesn't mean it's the recommended or "rational" thing to do, to sell now. If you believe there's going to be another price surge, sit tight, and don't sell. But it certainly doesn't appear to me that it's irrational either to sell now - if you think Bitcoin is going nowhere but down, or even if you just think we're going to see another 6 months of bear market, it makes perfect sense to sell. |
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Hey Same remark that I made initially in the moderated speculation thread: I'm skeptical of moderated threads, but I do understand the need for them in the hostile environment that can be the alt section (or, any section of this forum actually). Hope the current mod is going easy on the moderation (i.e. if in doubt, don't delete), and that critical posts and questions aren't deleted without good reason. That said, obvious FUD, or just plain uninformative troll posts: nuke 'em  |
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The institutional traders using HFT bots are indeed dictating the direction of the exchanges.
Some observations:
#1 Most large bitcoin block transactions are occurring outside of the exchanges through brokers. This is a way for large investors to accumulate bitcoins without spiking the price of bitcoin. They are like market makers insuring that the volatility in bitcoin remains steady as possible for the interest of their clients. Secondly, this insures that the miners will always have a large buyer. With a lower exchange spot price, brokers can negotiate even better prices. One interpretation is that a low price indicates heavy accumulation off the block transactions by large investors.
#2 Many of the major exchanges are unregulated. There is no way to prove or disprove any price collusion, but the lack of regulation leaves the door to suggest it is possible. The bitcoin ecosystem is dominated by only a few major players creating an almost self-interlocking monopoly on all sides from production, investment and distribution of bitcoin. This isn't a conspiracy theory or a shill post. News at this point - either favorable or unfavorable for bitcoin is just noise for amateurs. The big boys aren't reacting to the news because they're creating it and the market.
#3 Bitcoin is going to stay around, and this isn't a bullish pump and dump signal. In the short term, bitcoin's price may bounce around more, but there are a number of factors that suggest bitcoin will have a very significant place in global finance for the long term.
*Skype. It is probably the most comparable parallel to bitcoin. Skype uses Voice of Internet Protocol (VoIP) and its global growth has accelerated like a classic model of Metcalfe's law. Bitcoin as a cryptographic protocol presents similar features as VoIP.
*PayPal. Bitcoin needs a major global payment system to educate, promote and legitimize bitcoin. PayPal is the company that can do that. They publicly endorsed and will experiment with it. At this point, incorporating bitcoin in their payment model is probably the best corporate strategy in order to remain the #1 payment systems in the world and keep possible competitors like Apple at bay. Whether Google or Amazon joins is another matter as they may go the way of tokenization. Bitcoin though has much greater implications beyond centralized produced tokens. If you look at a window horizon of 30 years rather than 3 years, bitcoin as a protocol will have a very strong chance of surviving. Open source, peer to peer, decentralized and built atop of the internet.
*Merchants. They will have a choice. Pay the credit cards fees around 2% or the significantly lower bitcoin fees. Perhaps attract a younger demographic as well as one that has grown up on tablets and smartphones. The world is becoming far more digitalized, and bitcoin presents a fit for it.
*Consumers. Bitcoin has obviously placed the cart before the horse. It has only reached a fringed group of buyers who have speculated on its price. The target users will not be in developed countries initially, but in underdeveloped countries and emerging markets. A younger market in developed countries are likely to experiment with it. The tipping point will be when more companies begin paying salaries in bitcoin. It will create a fully integrated bitcoin economy. When that happens, people will use it not hoard it. That will be years in the making.
*Other factors. Lawsky's NY reg, the Bitcoin ETF are other factors which can accelerate adoption. However, that does not mean the price of bitcoin will automatically rise.
Independent of all the factors contributing to bitcoin's adoption rate, bitcoin cannot function or fulfill its promise as digital currency until its reach a higher market cap. If the exchanges or bitcoin market economy is somehow manipulated, the price will need to rise much higher than it currently is.
Great post. Solid high-level summary of the current state of crypto (with only mild speculation interspersed). Bookmarked. |
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Anybody else experiencing issues with moneropool.com? Miner is hashing away, yet the pool dash shows no shares or hashrate. Edit: Also I think pool hash fell considerably.. Not fudding, just raising awareness with what's been going on recently  We're looking into it meanwhile everyone please move your miners off moneropool.com. The pool is clearly having trouble and its has rate is down to a tiny fraction of normal. Anyone who is prepared to fire up AWS instances or GPU rigs or anything else to help support the network while moneropool.com is impaired, please do so. I'm at max instances already, unfortunately (30). I'll check if I can raise it. |
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Guys, nobody is making any decisions on anything right now. Thus far, there have been a few scattered suggestions, but there hasn't been even one formal, well-defined, thoroughly analysed, well documented proposal. Calls for us (the Core Team) to make a decision or a statement just leave us scratching our heads and saying "turn down for what?"
This frenzied back-and-forth in posts littered with veiled threats and promises are posts driven by emotion. Of course I personally have extremely strong feelings in this matter, but is this the time and place to be discussing it? It is not.
Nothing is on the table or off the table, because there is no table just yet. The constant attacks, both actual and threatened, have left us running around chasing our tails for a month. Now is not the time or create disarray and suck up time in circuitous debates. There will be a time and place for that in the not too distant future.
I would respectfully request that if you insist on discussing this, that any and all comments or posts discussing ideas around "dev blocks", miner tax, adjusting the emission curve, threats to sell your stash if X happens, calls for the core team to wade through walls of posts and make some comment, and anything of that nature be taken to the MEW thread or anywhere else.
Let's, please, solidify ourselves and retain some degree of unity as we restart our activities and reevaluate our priorities, and we can have these in-depth and controversial discussions once the smoke has cleared.
Thanks, and 100% agreement from me. There wasn't even a proposal to vote, and still some in here reacted as if Monero was about to be hijacked by special interest groups. In fact, the careful reader will have noticed that a number of posters (including me) said that a more structured discussion on those topic should take place another time, not in the current turmoil.I do want to point out one asymmetry in this discussion: as I said above, the (rather cautious) proponents of e.g. emission change, said "discussion on this topic another time". To which the opponents answered in absolute terms ("out of the question"), and emotional threats to sell their stash right now, unless the devs sign a declaration of code immutability. If I were cynical I'd respond "I don't see price crashing? Guess your stash wasn't that big after all." I also want, for the record, state very clearly what *was* and what was *not* actually discussed so far: 1) the 'emission' discussion and the 'dev funding' discussion have been, but should not to be conflated. There was at least one proposal that entered into both areas, but the majority of funding proposals had nothing to do with emission. Keep the two topics separate, please.2) the "pro" arguments for emission change have been grossly misrepresented. Nobody ever argued to change emission so that the exchange rate would go higher. The *actual* argument in favor of slowing emission, in a nutshell: a big share of Monero will be mined rather soon (compared to, say, how Bitcoin does it), and some of us are worried that this could hamper the long-term potential of Monero. The argument "You want to change emission to pump & dump, or fill your pockets" is a complete strawman.I'm going to let this topic rest now (unless there is a response that misrepresents my position). I will however say, as I said before, that this is in a sense a community project, and statements by some in here "that topic X isn't even up for discussion" are naive in the context of such a project (not addressed at you, fluffypony) .... There will be several difficult decisions the dev team (and the community) will have to make in the future, completely unrelated to emission or dev funding, and we will have to come up with methods to gauge what the consensus (or at least: majority opinion) is on those topics. Shouting "If you do X, I will leave!" is perhaps the least helpful response in developing such methods. |
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Question for those more knowledgeable on mining / EC2 matters:
I don't have the exact numbers to support this claim, but by my estimations of the last few days, EC2 mining via GPU/g2.2xlarge instances seems to be more cost-efficient than EC2 mining via c3.8xlarge. Is that at all possible?
I had about 30 c3.8xlarge instances running yesterday, and replaced them with about 30 g2.2xlarge instances. The total hashrate seems to be lower (hard for me to add it up, but maybe about half of the CPU instances), but cost is closer to 1/3 of the CPU instances.
Just asking, hoping someone with more experience in this can maybe confirm this intuition, or tell me if I'm most likely wrong.
What are the has rates on the c3.8xlarge and g2.2xlarge, what are the costs? Rates is easy: c3.8xlarge is around 0.3 USD/hour, g2.2xlarge around 0.1 USD/hour. Slightly lower in fact, but let's compare them by max rate. You sure? its 1.6 linux and 3.008 windows right now for the c3.8xlarge Also depends on region, right? In the regions I used, when I had a number of instances open, and wanted them to be persistent and stay up without being outbid, ~0.3 was the max I had to put for CPU. |
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@windjc
Your recent shilling in here is as transparent as it is pathetic.
If feigned outrage ("Oh my! You guys have manipulating whales!", or: "How dare you discussing the emission of a coin I do not even hold!") is really the best you can do, it's probably better if you head back to your amateur hour coin Boolberry.
Oda. We've chatted on multiple forums/chat rooms. I've never BSed you. I've been honest with you always. In fact, today we exchanged PMs about where you and I stood as speculators vs. true advocates. I think we were very honest with each other. I honestly don't agree with what Risto is purposing here. If you do, that's cool. But I don't. I am not making any misdirections about where my long term interests are, hell, I openly tell whoever ask what my book looks like (how many people in the "anon" world do that??). These decisions would hurt XMR and BBR (short term), imo. But I guess, since Im obviously misdirecting, then I must believe these are great ideas and would help XMR tremendously. As I am so transparent in my dishonesty and all. Fair enough. If you don't trust the way this coin is run, divest (you did so already, as I understood). Zero objection to that. If you feel the need to criticize how this coin is run, go ahead and make an argument. No objection to that either. What is transparent (and, frankly, unnecessary) are your latest rhetorics in here: rpietila is known to be a large holder, no revelation there. Also, the dev team has stated multiple times that their decisions are guided by their own compass, plus community input. Finally, there is zero precedence of "the whales" pushing through decisions, it's complete conjecture. But you barge in here anway pretending this coin is about to be taken over by some sinister whale cabal. Same for the emission discussion: the state of the actual discussion so far is "some are for it, some are against, it's probably better to not seriously consider it now anyway". Yet you pretend we're one moment away from changing it on a whim, complete with strawmen arguments why some of us supposedly want to change it ("greedy coin holder and their short sightedness"). There are honest, sometimes blunt discussions. I've seen some of that on the last pages, and I enjoyed it, even if I didn't agree with everything that was said. And then there's inflammatory derailing of a discussions - that's what you've been doing in your last 5 or 6 posts in here. Together with the knowledge that you are a "whale" in a competing coin (oh, the irony), I'm going to assume that's more than just an issue of posting style, but most likely a calculated effort to stir up emotions. I'm up for a serious discussion about whatever you care about at any time. But I'm not going to respond to complete non-issues (whales that might or might not do something at some point) as if it were a relevant topic of debate. |
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@windjc
Your recent shilling in here is as transparent as it is pathetic.
If feigned outrage ("Oh my! You guys have manipulating whales!", or: "How dare you discussing the emission of a coin I do not even hold!") is really the best you can do, it's probably better if you head back to your amateur hour coin Boolberry.
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It's not so much an inflation, but an expense as result of PoW mining, everyday $1.5M is transferred from the Bitcoin eco-system, into the pockets of ASIC hardware vendors and electricity companies.
I disagree: mining difficulty follows the price, not the other way around. If miners start to find it unprofitable, the hash-rate will drop. Less efficient miners drop first. POW is important because it requires an attacker to expend scarce resources: something POS based currencies do not. The problem with POW is that we still do not know for certain it will work in the long-term. Bitcoin is still very much an experiment. Wrong, it's extremely easy and cheap to attack PoW network, tons of PoW altcoin has been attacked to death. Zero successful 51% attack on any PoS altcoin so far. Because: 1. it's extremely expensive to acquire 51% stake 2. once you acquire 51% stake, why would you attack anymore? YOU are the majority stake holder, you want to attack yourself? and destroy the reputation and value of the coin you hold 51% stake in? why would you destroy your own wealth? it won't make any sense. Quite a bit of twisting of facts. It's as "easy and cheap" to attack a PoW network as the cost of specialized hardware and electricity that goes into securing it. For alts, that's a real problem, agreed. For Bitcoin, this risk is becoming more and more hypothetical. There are numerous reasons to prefer PoW over PoS, but I'm going to guess it'll be pointless to have this argument now. Preferring one or the other is a major point of divergent opinions, as far as I can tell. The cost to 51% attack Bitcoin is roughly 10% of Bitcoin marketcap, or around $500-$600 million, this is enough to buy more than enough hardware to vastly outnumber the current miners, agreed? Now if Bitcoin is proof of stake, you need to buy 51% of all Bitcoin available. It's not going to cost you 10%, nor 100%, but more like 1000% or more of Bitcoin marketcap to purchase 51% of all Bitcoin available. So how can you argue that compared to PoS, PoW is not cheap and easy to attack? There's no real difference between Bitcoin and PoW altcoins, other than Bitcoin is far bigger. But still, if the attacker has large enough resources, he could attack Bitcoin. Just like current miners find it real cheap and easy to attack a smaller PoW altcoin. It's at least 100X more difficult to attack Bitcoin if Bitcoin was PoS, just like no one could attack even a tiny PoS altcoin, due to cost. Alright, since you're not giving up, here's the rebuttal, in shorthand: 1) 51% attack against Bitcoin is infeasible, both by prohibitively high cost for any but the largest entities, lack of economic incentive (cost of attack > profit resulting from attack, because market value would drop as an effect of the attack), and the near-impossibility to secure and put online, in complete secrecy, the specialized hardware (regardless of the USD cost of the hardware). Don't care about PoW vs. PoS in alts. 2) PoS is inferior to PoW in three key regards: New coin distribution according to work is vastly preferred over distribution according to stake. Can't argue with human nature. Consensus forming in the case of competing chains is trivial for PoW, and bordering on impossible for PoS. The economic backing of PoW in the form of energy exerted provides a useful base valuation, because it provides the network with a well-grounded "bootstrap" value. Questions? |
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It's not so much an inflation, but an expense as result of PoW mining, everyday $1.5M is transferred from the Bitcoin eco-system, into the pockets of ASIC hardware vendors and electricity companies.
I disagree: mining difficulty follows the price, not the other way around. If miners start to find it unprofitable, the hash-rate will drop. Less efficient miners drop first. POW is important because it requires an attacker to expend scarce resources: something POS based currencies do not. The problem with POW is that we still do not know for certain it will work in the long-term. Bitcoin is still very much an experiment. Wrong, it's extremely easy and cheap to attack PoW network, tons of PoW altcoin has been attacked to death. Zero successful 51% attack on any PoS altcoin so far. Because: 1. it's extremely expensive to acquire 51% stake 2. once you acquire 51% stake, why would you attack anymore? YOU are the majority stake holder, you want to attack yourself? and destroy the reputation and value of the coin you hold 51% stake in? why would you destroy your own wealth? it won't make any sense. Quite a bit of twisting of facts. It's as "easy and cheap" to attack a PoW network as the cost of specialized hardware and electricity that goes into securing it. For alts, that's a real problem, agreed. For Bitcoin, this risk is becoming more and more hypothetical. There are numerous reasons to prefer PoW over PoS, but I'm going to guess it'll be pointless to have this argument now. Preferring one or the other is a major point of divergent opinions, as far as I can tell. |
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