Risto made a 10 post per day limit just for you. Now you write whole pages in one post. Just start your own thread and share all your thoughts please. No one comes here to read you.
I am merely answering all the relevant posts that occurred while I was sleeping. What is the crime in that?
The great thing is that when you put me on ignore, all those replies combined into one post thus collapse into one line on your browser, so it is much more respectful of me than putting them in separate posts.
And once you put me on ignore, then you won't be bothered by greater opportunities, which is I think a perfect outcome that would please me very very very very very much.
SlipperySlope why did you delete your post saying that you put me on ignore? Please don't realize you were wrong.
The investors continue to invest in the middlemen because at the moment they see the ability expressed by Anonymint above to build the centralized offchain "banks" or clearing houses that will enable the transaction levels and the instantaneous "risk free" transactions necessary for widespread adoption.
Coinbase/bitpay/circle will become offchain repositories which offer instantaneous btc transfer between their members and their members fiat accounts. They will make bitcoin easy to buy and easy to use...
[snip]
What you are saying *may* happen, I'm not saying it won't. I'm saying it doesn't need to happen, and that there's a much better alternative outcome.
It is too late because mining is already centralized and becoming more so every day.
Thus the protocol changes we need on the block chain can't be implemented. Gavin spends his time at the CIA and CFR coordinating the fiat future for Bitcoin. No major changes in the protocol have ever happened, only small fixes. Even other important fixes haven't been done. Adam Back (the creator of Hashcash which Satoshi based Bitcoin on) enumerated many of these unfixed bugs.
[snip]
It may take decades for people to realize that trusting their money to third parties is no longer necessary and ill advised. The implosions and thefts by third parties may not continue at the scale of mtgox, but they will continue. If that's what we end up with, then bitcoin is just paypal reloaded. It doesn't have to be that way.
I hope that bitcoin millionaires will start investing in things like Open Transactions, hardware wallets, autonomous services, etc so that people don't *have* to trust their money and business to third parties who ultimately have no direct interest in them. That's the problem I thought we were trying to solve here.
Silicon Valley I'm sure will continue to do what they do, they can't do anything else. What I'm talking about is a competitor to SV (at least in trust models).
Agreed! It is going to happen, but not on Bitcoin. Those who realize this early and get on the right bandwagon will be insanely wealthy.
4. Altcoins will proliferate the # of coins in the ecosystem.
Anonymint, is there a thread in which you discuss this aspect?
I don't want to disrupt the flow of conversation here but I am very curious about this.
(note self-moderator closed the thread when he didn't like our refutations)
"Failure to Understand Bitcoin Could Cost Investors Billions" (Bitcoin's flaws)
On the subject of why $500 millionaires should not buy Bitcoin and why I disagree with Risto's claim that the only thing that matters is how many BTC you own...
1. A bitcoin is not an heirloom. The chances that it will hold its value long-term are very slim. Gold is a much better heirloom.
2. The 21 million supply limit is a lie. This WILL be violated and there are numerous ways it can happen. The most likely way is Bitcoin is obviously moving towards offchain storage and services. In fact, Bitcoin can't have instant transactions without offchain fractional reserves (technically the exchange has to be fractional for it to happen instantly). Also the government could today regulate the few pools who have 51% and the few ASIC miners who have large datacenters, and produce as many coins per coinbase as they wanted. Later when the masses are all using government regulated offchain Coinbase.com and Bitpay.com, etc, then government can do what ever it wants to the mining and the masses won't care.
So the debasement of bitcoins in the future is an interesting idea. My question is, how do you see this playing out? What kind of timeframe are we looking at in your opinion?
On that note, how would a cpu only coin like you suggest is needed prevent a fractional system from emerging?
Debasement by altcoins has already begun. This is another reason that Bitcoin's adoption curve is likely log-logistic and not linear (in log10) as Risto's famous chart assumed.
So the debasement of bitcoins in the future is an interesting idea. My question is, how do you see this playing out? What kind of timeframe are we looking at in your opinion?
On that note, how would a cpu only coin like you suggest is needed prevent a fractional system from emerging?
Can someone explain why we can't safely discount this?
Whether people are using bitcoin notes or dollar notes doesn't seem (at first blush) to make much difference in the demand for actual bitcoin. They are the same category - people who haven't adopted bitcoin. Yes, there is a small amount of bitcoin backing the notes, but seems like we can safely discount the vast majority of the "adoption" because it didn't actually happen.
People who only accept bitcoin (and not the notes), will just go on as if the notes don't exist. I would hope that the community that exists today would not be so stupid as to see the value in bitcoin to begin with, and then start accepting promises to pay.
I guess you didn't read the upthread debate between Animorex and myself which stemmed from an assertion I made that once all your merchants take fiat (with a BTC facade) then they have no incentive to take BTC and not convert instantly to fiat.
Peter Thiel's Bitpay is a reverse takeover of Bitcoin and it is growing exponentially and at a much faster rate than Bitcoin adoption so it will soon engulf Bitcoin.
I believe it is because off chain transactions are going to have to become a reality if bitcoin is ever going to reach the speed/scaling required by mass adoption. And off chain transactions, by nature, open up the possibility of fractional reserves.
Selectively choosing to only accept bitcoin does nothing to prevent this as no one would would know which coins were being fractionally traded off of. Only "real" bitcoins could ever be broadcast over the actual bitcoin network, but this does nothing to the supply of bitcoins being moved around the market (off chain) in general.
And even if they had a list of addresses associated with off chain systems to "blacklist", that would lead us right back to the original problem. That the blockchain itself can not handle the scaling required for mass adoption and must allow some sort of off chain system to exist.
That's years off and we haven't nearly exhausted all the possible optimizations to reduce the required bandwidth for a full node, much less an SPV node. Not to mention the improvements in hardware between now and then.
Which requires more trust, running an SPV node or accepting off-chain transactions? Hint: off-chain.
Full node resource requirements are not the crux of the issue. Rather it is the fact that there is no decentralized way to limit pool sizes. I solved this algorithmic problem.
This shows you are not technically astute. You may know a little bit about programming, but you don't even have all the relevant design issues properly organized in your head. So that should indicate to you that you should stop being obnoxiously boastful and condescending. Because ignorance is not impressive.
I speak because I know what I am talking about. Otherwise I ask, or say "this is my opinion".
I think it's silly that people are fully expecting fractional reserve. If that happens, bitcoin has completely failed, IMO.
Exactly. So when are you going to wake up?
The whole reason we started issuing notes for gold centuries ago does not make any sense with bitcoin. Bitcoin is already easy to carry and divisible.
Since you called me a "nutcase" upthread, I can speak frankly to you now...
Another example of your inadequate logic skills. I am estimating that I would never hire you as a programmer, because it appears I would spend more time correcting your logic errors than I would gain from your efforts.
The reason people prefer fractional reserves is primary because loans can't exist on a finite money supply.
The others reasons are safety. And Bitcoin has that in spades as many lose their wallets.
And other reasons for Bitcoin are only way to get fast transactions and micro payments. Etc..
This scalability issue is mostly bullshit FUD.
You are talking about the Block chain bloat scalability. Yes I agree it is not the big doom. However, there are other issues which are unresolvable in Bitcoin without offchain as mentioned above.
[snip]
That's not to say off-chain transactions don't have their place. I'd be fine with, for example, an OpenTransactions issuer who proves his reserves and uses voting pools.
Edit: just because the possibility of fractional reserve exists, doesn't mean we should accept it.
It is irrelevant to the final outcome as what you personally (or the idealist Bitcoiners) think should be accepted. It is the weaknesses in the protocol and what the masses want that matters.
