Vitalik Buterin's thoughts about Blocksize increase

[mookid]

Strong words from Buterin. I guess the core devs are still full of doubts and hence, the lack of action on their behalf.
He says that bitcoin is popular because it was the first, but he is right when he implies that it's not the best. It doesn't have the best technology, only the userbase.
People need to decide soon or let Bitcoin die, simple as that.

[arloseb]

Why with 18+ millions achieved fro ico there is no a fu***** standard wallet for eth?
I'm really disappointed.

[Mickeyb]

Interesting point of view by Vitalik. During reading this, it came to my mind that he speaks about currencies that are better than Bitcoin, that are developed and being developed - doesn't he talk about Ethereum? I mean, he's saying that his horse is the best for the race in my opinion, which is to be expected since it's his horse.

Let's take a look.

He did a pretty fair distribution of the Ethereum, everybody got a chance to participate in the ICO. There will be a fair mining phase up to the 90-100 million coins, when the coin will turn to POS. With the POS, there is no expenditure of electricity and mining costs. Apparently the Nothing at Stake problem has been solved so no problems here. Ethereum is as safe as Bitcoin according to Vitalik. Much faster confirmations. Yes, Ethereum is mainly for smart contracts, but you can use it as a currency, why not? People were using salt as a currency, why not Ethereum?

Also Ethereum is cheap at the moment, so everybody that have missed a boat with Bitcoin, have another new chance.

So what am I missing? I am expecting replies to see where did I go wrong.

Thanks!

[johnyj]

Regarding the third point, for bitcoin to be an analog to gold we must keep in mind that gold is universally known and valued. If bitcoin prematurely choked off its own growth and abandoned efforts to mainstream it, I suspect it would slowly wither and die as competing altcoins rose to take its place as an everyday, mainstream cryptocurrency.

The current price of bitcoin is based largely on expectations of future growth. Choke off that growth and I suspect a large portion of its current valuation will evaporate.

As a bitcoin broker, my statistics showing that most of the people are attracted by bitcoin because it has strong anti-inflation tendency, not because of its payment function

Bitcoin does provide easy payment function, but for those people using web payment domestically and using credit card to do international shopping, bitcoin just bring more trouble than convenience (exchange at both ends and exchange rate risk). Bitcoin is just too late in the payment space. If bitcoin arrived before paypal, then it would have been used around the world by now. Unfortunately, today's payment market is almost fully occupied by credit cards. Being a little bit cheap is not enough convincing to persuade people to make the switch

Besides, there are thousands of alt-coins all providing similar payment function, but they all have little value, because value must be time tested. Once upon a time I even spent some time in litecoin mining and trading; just after one month of practice, I realized that it is a community full of scammers and speculators, almost no one is doing meaningful development. This is a good example of the importance of being time tested

Focusing on time tested anti-inflation property of bitcoin will make it into mainstream

[knight22]

The current price of bitcoin is based largely on expectations of future growth. Choke off that growth and I suspect a large portion of its current valuation will evaporate.

Doesn't that imply that the priority is maintaining bitcoin as a payment system? Or rather, that the only way towards "future growth" is with low fees/fast confirms? It seems that the digital gold crowd doesn't necessarily see things that way. I, for one, don't see the payment protocol as the primary value; it is wholly secondary to that of decentralized store of value.

I can't imagine how this would positively affect price.
primary value or not, price WILL be affected.
at this point if devs don't fix the TPS limit ( bumping the block size limit slightly is a fine solution for now), i'm stepping out, not because it would imply bitcoin will never be a payment system, but because I will no longer trust the dev team to make smart decisions, or make any hard decisions at all for that matter, and would deem bitcoin's development process borken. but i am confident they will up the TPS limit in some form or another in due time.

I guess I take the opposite approach. If the devs were to implement something so reckless as BIP101 (as an example), my confidence in bitcoin would be crushed and I would largely exit my investment position. At least, I would never transact on the XT chain -- outside of double spending -- should a valid chain coexist with it.

Many don't realize it, but the robust, secure system that we have now, the consensus on the protocol that exists now -- these are the priorities. When it comes to "the dev team mak[ing] smart decisions," I hope that whatever populist arguments and arbitrary timelines that segments of the community produce are tertiary to those concerns. Conceding to those largely arbitrary and tertiary concerns would indicate to me that the development process is broken.

What's the point of having a ULTRA secure useless thing? There is NONE.

Expect a good portion of the market to leave out if the value proposition is not keeping up. Myself included. Another system will prevail.  
Bitcoin's value is derived from its use cases and every speculator with half of a brain understand that.  There is no point of speculating on a coin that have no use case prospect unless you are shorting it to death.

[Mickeyb]

The current price of bitcoin is based largely on expectations of future growth. Choke off that growth and I suspect a large portion of its current valuation will evaporate.

Doesn't that imply that the priority is maintaining bitcoin as a payment system? Or rather, that the only way towards "future growth" is with low fees/fast confirms? It seems that the digital gold crowd doesn't necessarily see things that way. I, for one, don't see the payment protocol as the primary value; it is wholly secondary to that of decentralized store of value.

I can't imagine how this would positively affect price.
primary value or not, price WILL be affected.
at this point if devs don't fix the TPS limit ( bumping the block size limit slightly is a fine solution for now), i'm stepping out, not because it would imply bitcoin will never be a payment system, but because I will no longer trust the dev team to make smart decisions, or make any hard decisions at all for that matter, and would deem bitcoin's development process borken. but i am confident they will up the TPS limit in some form or another in due time.

I guess I take the opposite approach. If the devs were to implement something so reckless as BIP101 (as an example), my confidence in bitcoin would be crushed and I would largely exit my investment position. At least, I would never transact on the XT chain -- outside of double spending -- should a valid chain coexist with it.

Many don't realize it, but the robust, secure system that we have now, the consensus on the protocol that exists now -- these are the priorities. When it comes to "the dev team mak[ing] smart decisions," I hope that whatever populist arguments and arbitrary timelines that segments of the community produce are tertiary to those concerns. Conceding to those largely arbitrary and tertiary concerns would indicate to me that the development process is broken.

What's the point of having a ULTRA secure useless thing? There is NONE.

Expect a good portion of the market to leave out if the value proposition is not keeping up. Myself included. Another system will prevail.  
Bitcoin's value is derived from its use cases and every speculator with half of a brain understand that.  There is no point of speculating on a coin that have no use case prospect unless you are shorting it to death.

Well I guess some kind of compromise will have to be found then. No payment system or any financial tool is not perfect in today's world, so Bitcoin will not be either. Each system has its drawbacks and strong points.

Finding a balance between centralization on one and max size of the blocks on the other side is the only solution that comes to my mind.

[coalitionfor8mb]

Bitcoin was created as a "single PoW-secured transparent unified ledger runnable by users at home".
For as long as it's allowed to grow in order to keep filling its niche, while maintaining the definition above, it will be fine.

[mookid]

Why with 18+ millions achieved fro ico there is no a fu***** standard wallet for eth?
I'm really disappointed.

Why people keep saying that? just download the C++ client and you have your wallet. Or use one of the new web ones.
They have a nice design and are secure.

[johnyj]

What's the point of having a ULTRA secure useless thing? There is NONE.

Expect a good portion of the market to leave out if the value proposition is not keeping up. Myself included. Another system will prevail.  
Bitcoin's value is derived from its use cases and every speculator with half of a brain understand that.  There is no point of speculating on a coin that have no use case prospect unless you are shorting it to death.

Being useful does not necessary give something value, there are lots of useful air around you but they worth nothing

Same, being valuable does not necessary mean useful, there are many financial instruments that do not have any practical use, their only use is to make the owner richer over time

How could bitcoin make its owner richer? Because it has constantly shrinking supply and the fiat money have constantly expanding supply, so it will always appreciate against fiat money long term wise (in fact it will appreciate against anything, because they all have constantly expanding supply), if it is being used as a currency

Why not xxxcoin? Because the deflative effect will be strongest when all of the people who understand the power of monetary deflation concentrate their effort and resource on a single most mature and popular cryptocurrency. Sure you can use a dozen of cryptocurrencies, but then the effect of monetary deflation will be magnitudes lower, thus any investment on other cryptocurrencies will have a high risk of ruin