Bitcoin "is a fucking toy" when compared to VISA and yet in it's realm it has done quite well at being better than cash for many things. I know a guy who purchased land by taking it across international borders. I've used it multiple times for things VISA was not useful for.
By my measure bitcoin was a success and now it's outlived it's prime.
And I never said otherwise.
Since when did "it is centralized" and "it has been 51% attacked" constitute a statement that Bitcoin had no utility
You put words in my mouth that I never spoke, because you are trying to rationalize your investments in Monero and Ethereum. Thus you have lost your objectivity, not me.
I view Monero and Ethereum in the same light. I'm sure you would have pointed out bitcoins flaws when it was $10 per coin and said "This will never work." out of some of the same principles you are using now.
I did point out in 2013 exactly how Bitcoin would end up failing, which I said would be game theory of centralization around mining. And I was correct.
I never wrote that Bitcoin would have no utility and in fact I wrote that the utility of Bitcoin was very inspiring. Why do you reckon I am still here in crypto if I didn't think so!
Problem Monero has is that there is very little demand for an anonymity for which the reliability is unprovable. It is a marketing utility problem, which Bitcoin doesn't suffer. Even if we did implement provable anonymity (e.g. Zerocash not Zerocoin), it still not clear if markets for anonymity would be great, especially if the decentralized, permissionless attribute isn't assured, because the government can simply take control over centralized mining and force the anonymity to be stripped off. OTOH, companies are saying that privacy is very important to them and perhaps they do not mean hiding from the NSA. And public block chains using encryption are superior conceptually to private block chains using perimeters defenses because even sneakernets fail (e.g. Stuxnet). But the things corporations want privacy on are the block chain 2.0 features that Ethereum is working on. The corporations aren't interested just in crypto currency alone as that doesn't have much utility to them. Cryptonote (especially combined with Confidential Transactions that hide values) is a very technologically interesting concept, but without any significant utility in the markets.
Problem Ethereum has is that programmable block chains are an overly ambitious clusterfuck. And it isn't clear that the major markets for block chain utility require a fully programmable block chain. And the developers of Ethereum are basically clueless and have been making it up as they go along. You are basically investing in research. That guy Vlad has changed designs numerous times and has come up with some of the most stupid ideas, as even he admits. They haven't been able to think it through from start to finish as to what design they should use. And their current direction on scaling looks to me to be another clusterfuck.
However I am also curious about smart contracts, block chain applications, and programmable block chains. And maybe I will come to different conclusions after I have more time to analyze all the issues of those extended ideas. At the moment, my research is more focused on scaling crypto currency.
You are one of those who peruse perfection and I wholeheartedly respect that.
You mistake sobering analysis for being some form of demanding perfection. I demand only that I understand the issues of a technology.
But I'm not hearing any alternatives from you. And as you so graciously pointed out - I'm a n00b. I can't fix all the problems you point out. So my two choices are opt out of the market. Or pick the least bad losers. When I perceive them to no longer be the least bad - I will move on to whatever else is the least bad. I know it's not your strategy - but it's mine.
Then you haven't read about the design I proposed in the decentralization thread I started this week in this Altcoin Discussion forum.
And as you so graciously pointed out - I'm a n00b. I can't fix all the problems you point out. So my two choices are opt out of the market. Or pick the least bad losers. When I perceive them to no longer be the least bad - I will move on to whatever else is the least bad. I know it's not your strategy - but it's mine.
You are not forced to invest in cryptocurrency. An investor needs to be unbiased and flexible. For the moment, I am investing in the US dollar, until some clarity is obtained in the crypto scene.
By your standards bitcoin was fundamentally broken years ago. But it paid off for those who picked "the least bad option."
I told rpietila back at the start of 2013 when Bitcoin was < $10, that I approved of his decision to sell $100,000 of silver and buy 10,000 Bitcoins. Unfortunately I couldn't follow him into the investment because I had been so ill since May, 2012 and had lost $75,000 in the markets during June through August. This was caused by some craziness in my life (something about my ex yanking my kids from the Philippines and my endocrine system going bezerk). So unfortunately I had to stay on the sidelines, but never did I argue against investing in Bitcoin when it was at such a low price. When Bitcoin hit $1000, I began to argue that the direction would be downwards and lately the clarity on the bottom should be < $150 in Q1 or Q2 2016.
At this point I am trying to contemplate what is going to happen to Bitcoin given these issues revolving around scaling. I don't see any technical solutions for Bitcoin other than to centralize and then raise the block size. Maybe that is what will happen. At this time, I need to be focused on coding and not trying to analyze the complex possibilities of what might happen with Bitcoin from here forward.
BTW I wasn't the one who posted your stuff on the reddit ethereum forum.
No problem I am happy we were able to discuss some of the details about Ethereum over there.
I told rpietila back at the start of 2013 when Bitcoin was < $10, that I approved of his decision to sell $100,000 of silver and buy 10,000 Bitcoins.
Would you approve such decision for Ethereum today? rpietila would only have to sell $10,000 of silver for ~10,000 ETH.
Bitcoin clearly had momentum at the start of 2013, and it was a technological concept that was so revolutionary that it was clearly going to take the world by storm.
Ethereum not. The conceptual technology isn't even threshed out yet, and they are adding more and more complexity on top.
If I am somehow wrong about some killer app that requires a programmable block chain and some way that Ethereum's complex design process is able to solidify (and for all that to occur this year), then I will be quite shocked.
We tend to get so excited about a programmable block chain because we think that implies that there are unbounded cases of apps that can be written, but as Ethereum is discovering as they go through the research process, is that so many limitations have to placed on the scripts in order to achieve scalability that I argue much of the generality is also lost. For example, scripts can't be allowed to read/write from any state that any other script could, because then commutativity of block chain ordering is lost. There is the Tragedy of Commons issue around fees (gas) that I raised. Etc..
It is difficult to access how the 51% attack the Chinese miners did on Bitcoin is going to play out.
Btw, to follow my logic, then follow my posts in the Altcoin Discussion forum.
Any one interested in analyzing Ethereum, then start here:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1219023.msg13583753#msg13583753https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1329136.msg13577121#msg13577121I believe Armstrong's timing for a gold low is roughly March, if that has not changed since his earlier gold reports. We will have to see if Bitcoin follows gold down in a liquidity crisis event or not. Right now everything sure seems to be quiet in the global markets, but maybe the quiet precedes the storm.
So yes Armstrong could end up being wrong about gold and I could even be further wrong about Bitcoin following gold down. So shorting is risky.
Note I have revealed that the Chinese miners are lying. See the discussion between smooth and myself. As this revelation spreads out, what happens if the Chinese miners are caught in a huge corruption and decide to liquidate their mining equipment? Or some other rash action in our community.
It is really difficult to access how this clusterfuck of block scaling economics is going to play out for Bitcoin. I haven't expended enough time doing the 3D chess analysis on it.
