I've come full circle, BTC is the only worthwhile cryptocurrency

[Carlton Banks]

I'm not sure if this requires a hard fork tho

you're right, it's not

don't really understand your point though, we're talking about the "new blockchain tech usurps satoshi's model" aspect, not general "future problems"

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[100action]

If there was somehow, a far better piece of decentralised distributed ledger that is invented in the future, this can just be forked into the Bitcoin network and the existing data is retained, or the Bitcoin data is transfered to the new distributed ledger.

exactly this was suggested when "Directed Acyclic Graph" chains were newly proposed.

Proposed by who? A Core developer?

no, it was Sergio Demian Lerner's concept. Although arguably it's just an evolution of the "tree-chain" concept, which was proposed by (former?) Bitcoin dev Peter Todd

A big problem was how to mine using a chain that's really structured like a tree, how do you arrive at consensus on newly distributed money? And of course, the answer was to start with a satoshi style PoW uni-chain, mine all the coins, then fork to a DAG chain once there are no new coins left.

That proposal is a little naive, isn't it? We've already seen what kind of drama the community had with the scaling debate. That proposal would be like nuclear war if taken seriously.

that was my idea (but maybe Peter Todd suggested it as part of tree-chains? Not sure ) But it's really just a potential solution to the "2140 problem"; when the block subsidy ends, how do we incentivize mining new blocks? So it would seem like inducing armageddon for no reason if it was proposed to be rolled out any time like today, but 2140 is not today

There is no need for that:

https://i.ibb.co/L0dBWKB/2.png

Bitcoin is organically replacing block rewards with higher transaction fees - this bodes incredibly well for its future. BTC doesn't stop surprising, its almost as if the more one learn about it, and the more that unfolds, the more magic that happens.

At this point, I can only look at this piece of technology with absolute awe and I have never had this feeling about anything else in my lifetime.  Dare I say, I've become 'moved'?

[Carlton Banks]

Bitcoin is organically replacing block rewards with higher transaction fees - this bodes incredibly well for its future.

sure, but there's a limit to that....

the minimum output size (i.e. the smallest amount of possible BTC you can send) is currently 182 satoshis (and that's segwit outputs only, non-segwit outputs have a minimum size of 546 satoshis)

so that means things will change somehow before we get to 2140, otherwise the value of BTC will be in effect capped to 182 satoshis being equivalent to the smallest individual item one can buy (so maybe the price of a single nail in a hardware store? something like that)

But the idea always was that 1 BTC could continually divide into smaller denominations to reflect the increasing buying power of the currency. It seems now that 2.1 quadrillion (i.e. 21 million BTC multiplied by 100 million satoshis constituting each 1 BTC) is not going to be enough, whether BTC is a dominant currency or not. Milli-satoshis are already in use on the Lightning network, but I see Lightning as a medium term stop-gap to some other way of solving the various scaling issues. Maybe Lightning itself will evolve to becomes an all-encompassing solution with no compromises, but it doesn't quite seem like that just yet (I'd happily be proven wrong however).


So there's an unknowable scenario in store for Bitcoin; only once all innovation in efficient production of goods has ceased will we know how many decimal places we need to subdivide each satoshi into. And only then will we know what the economics of mining with only fees as a reward will be. I guess we could speculate on the range of possibilities, but that naturally includes different ways of mining and/or structuring the blockchain (innovation is innovative ).


But of course, none of this will matter for at least 100 years. There's alot to do between now and then without trying to tackle these issues seriously, maybe something that happens between now and then will make this sort of speculation entirely a moot point.

[Meowth05]

It is true that bitcoin is the only cryptocurrency that can be relied upon for now, given the condition of the altcoins market
not getting better. Investors are tired of investing in altcoins, so prefer bitcoin as a safe way to earn profit. So from that
until now it is clear why bitcoin always dominates the market, because it is the most profitable compared with altcoins.
Plus in 2019 there are many ICO projects that are scam, adding to investors' confidence to save their money only in bitcoin.
But when it comes to the future, for top altcoins like ETH, LTC, BNB, XRP and XLM there is still hope.

Indeed, Bitcoin is really profitable compared to other cryptocurrencies but there are still some altcoins that can give a profit as what Bitcoin can give such as ETH, XRP, and more. Based on the coins that you have mentioned they are more likely placed in top-ranked coins which are reasonable enough to put your investment. Always remember that go for coins that have high volume and have the highest liquidity in the market to lessen the risk of getting lost.

[adeandro]

That is why I do not spend my time on other cryptocurrencies, bitcoin is enough for me.

[Wind_FURY]

Of course anti-Bitcoin trolls will make you believe that POW is "wasteful". Bitcoin's incentive-structure proves that it's not. It's working, and it's actually what holds the network together. In POS, it costs nothing for stakers to collude, and cheat the network. It would also be cheaper for a nation-state to attack POS, and turn it into their Bitchcoin compared to Bitcoin, or some of the POW altcoins.

[Wind_FURY]

If there was somehow, a far better piece of decentralised distributed ledger that is invented in the future, this can just be forked into the Bitcoin network and the existing data is retained, or the Bitcoin data is transfered to the new distributed ledger.

exactly this was suggested when "Directed Acyclic Graph" chains were newly proposed.

Proposed by who? A Core developer?

no, it was Sergio Demian Lerner's concept. Although arguably it's just an evolution of the "tree-chain" concept, which was proposed by (former?) Bitcoin dev Peter Todd

A big problem was how to mine using a chain that's really structured like a tree, how do you arrive at consensus on newly distributed money? And of course, the answer was to start with a satoshi style PoW uni-chain, mine all the coins, then fork to a DAG chain once there are no new coins left.

That proposal is a little naive, isn't it? We've already seen what kind of drama the community had with the scaling debate. That proposal would be like nuclear war if taken seriously.

that was my idea (but maybe Peter Todd suggested it as part of tree-chains? Not sure ) But it's really just a potential solution to the "2140 problem"; when the block subsidy ends, how do we incentivize mining new blocks? So it would seem like inducing armageddon for no reason if it was proposed to be rolled out any time like today, but 2140 is not today

Does this proposal look the same as the treechain concept? https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5060909.0

Can you comment on its technical viability?

[garyrowe]

To the author of this post, i must salute you for your infection knowledge in the area of cryptocurrency and blocking technology.  Nonetheless i beg to disagree to the fact that bitch remains the only reliable cryptocurrency. Whenever i view cryptocurrencies, i do not only see them from the angle of being a store of value, but i rather look at cryptocurrencies from the point of other usecases such as granting individuals access to flawless financial services, education and lots more. Nexo for example has shown how strong alts can be with its services in the financial sector.

[yulionoo]

yes all the points that op mentioned are true bitcoin will always be the main and most profitable digital currency in the cryptocurrency market. but in my opinion not all altcoin is bad. there are some altcoins that have good and very potential technology such as ethereum, litecoin and binance. if we only focus on investing and trading in bitcoin then cryptocurrency will not develop rapidly like this. we also need altcoin so that bitcoin can compete and improve its technology.

[xiboothrezi]

yes all the points that op mentioned are true bitcoin will always be the main and most profitable digital currency in the cryptocurrency market. but in my opinion not all altcoin is bad. there are some altcoins that have good and very potential technology such as ethereum, litecoin and binance. if we only focus on investing and trading in bitcoin then cryptocurrency will not develop rapidly like this. we also need altcoin so that bitcoin can compete and improve its technology.

Altcoin's presence adds to the diversity of cryptocurrency and makes the market feel more alive. Various innovations from various altcoin projects involving adoption for daily life will make this more easily understood and accepted by the community at large.

[msarro]

Nobody can deny the facts listed in OP. BTC is the only worthy cryptocurrency that is trusted by millions of people. I just wanna add one more coin to this list of trusted coins i.e. Ethereum. Smart contracts, DAPPs introduced by ethereum are some cool facts that add beauty to crypto and blockchain domain.

[lionheart78]

I think the worthiness of cryptocurrency is subjective.  Others may think Bitcoin as worthless but see another cryptocurrency worthy.  We cannot change the fact that every cryptocurrency have their functions.  Meaning they were created to address the weakness of the created cryptocurrency before them.  So I do not think that everyone will agree that BTC is the only cryptocurrency that is worth having.

[Carlton Banks]

Does this proposal look the same as the treechain concept? https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5060909.0

superficially, there are similarities, but they really are separate concepts IIUC

my advice to research this would be to find Peter Todd's original thread here on Bitcointalk (there might even be in that thread a younger version of me, probably not adding much to the conversation ), also try to look through the bitcoin-dev mailing list archives to find a corresponding thread.

Can you comment on its technical viability?

not in any detail. I know so little about tree-chains and DAGs that it's better I don't comment right now. But you can make a basic observation: no-one's developed any separate cryptocoin using either concept that has seen any notable success. The most prominent was IOTA, and it suffered the typical crpyotcurrency life-cycle; ICO flavor of the month -> slow decline in interest/relevance.

Possibly there's some interesting research in these areas too, but I'm not aware of anything that's caught fire at all.

[Dabs]

so that means things will change somehow before we get to 2140, otherwise the value of BTC will be in effect capped to 182 satoshis being equivalent to the smallest individual item one can buy (so maybe the price of a single nail in a hardware store? something like that)

No one buys a single nail, they're either sold in small packs of a bunch of them, or by weight. Any single item that is too cheap to be less than 1 sat will get bundled up in quantities that allow it to be conveniently bought, or there is some sort of other accounting system in place, (something off-chain like a credit system or account balance or something).

Rice is sold in bags. The smallest retail quantity I've seen is maybe 1 cup of rice. Liquids are sold in bottles or cartons or jars.

It's unlikely we will see anything smaller than 1 sat even if divisibility becomes an issue. Or I could be wrong, but still a hundred years to go before we find out.

The surviving altcoins will provide liquidity for small ticket items, but the existence of those very same altcoins will be volatile.

[Carlton Banks]

No one buys a single nail, they're either sold in small packs of a bunch of them, or by weight. Any single item that is too cheap to be less than 1 sat will get bundled up in quantities that allow it to be conveniently bought, or there is some sort of other accounting system in place, (something off-chain like a credit system or account balance or something).

Rice is sold in bags. The smallest retail quantity I've seen is maybe 1 cup of rice. Liquids are sold in bottles or cartons or jars.

Arguably, that's a function of the non-viability of microtransactions using current tech. But even today, micro-transactions is a use case. People sell e.g. single cigarettes, and people buy them. Can you today sell single cigarettes using BTC on-chain? Not really.

I'm not saying people will buy single cornflakes if they suddenly get the chance, just that if you only want 1 nail, then that's what you'd prefer to buy, even if the rate you're paying is 5% the price of 100 nails. Both parties are happy; the retailer gets that warm satisfaction of a 500% markup, and the customer doesn't have the problem of holding on to 99 nails they don't have a use for.

If a currency or payment system existed that made that economically feasible, the Bitcoin network might lose that business to it (lightning channels could handle it, but they're denominated in subdivided satoshis in order to do so, which was my original point after all)

It's unlikely we will see anything smaller than 1 sat even if divisibility becomes an issue. The surviving altcoins will provide liquidity for small ticket items, but the existence of those very same altcoins will be volatile.

You're thinking about this as if the current dynamic of small coins being "silver to Bitcoin's gold" can persist indefinitely, yet there's already a possibility of that relationship breaking down. Coin devs won't stop coming up with new ideas, so it's puzzling to me that you've become so set on the way this market worked back in 2013.

[DooMAD]

No one buys a single nail, they're either sold in small packs of a bunch of them, or by weight. Any single item that is too cheap to be less than 1 sat will get bundled up in quantities that allow it to be conveniently bought, or there is some sort of other accounting system in place, (something off-chain like a credit system or account balance or something).

Counter argument:



Damnit, now I want a gumball/jawbreaker machine that takes satoshis.   

[Dabs]

Ok. Yeah, maybe I'm one of those who wouldn't buy a single item at 500% markup because I can just get a box of it and eventually find a use for those 99 other nails. Or gumballs.

Those gumballs are expensive, I think the price is either a quarter, or a whole dollar. But yeah, kids will buy them, the parents will provide the coins.

As for the way I think of alts, I really don't know what to think of most of them. Lots of them have different properties already, such as smart contracts and other stuff. The silver or litecoin type of altcoins are basically just forks or alts and are "plain" coins so those are indeed for small value transfer, ... DOGE has found it's way not just as a tipping coin, but a way to transfer between exchanges without withdrawing and depositing BTC, if both exchanges support DOGE.

I see them as they are. But then I don't play ETH based games or collect kitties or anything like that. People are trying to do all sorts of decentralized things, like forums and discussion boards. Some, for example, work on top of EOS. So that particular forum or discussion will live and be immutable so long as EOS exists, and that's likely to remain true for a long time since they raise a billion dollars for it. Not to mention it's predecessors are Steem and Bitshares.

That's just an example. I'm not sure about all the other coins, don't really have time to look at each and every one of them. May the good ones survive.

[Twinkledoe]

No one buys a single nail, they're either sold in small packs of a bunch of them, or by weight. Any single item that is too cheap to be less than 1 sat will get bundled up in quantities that allow it to be conveniently bought, or there is some sort of other accounting system in place, (something off-chain like a credit system or account balance or something).

Counter argument:



Damnit, now I want a gumball/jawbreaker machine that takes satoshis.   

That's funny though! But I guess, it will be valued more than 1 sat and how can you pay satoshis on this machine? Need to have computer interface rather than the manual spin? A nice technology if ever it will be realized in the future.

[Carlton Banks]

Ok. Yeah, maybe I'm one of those who wouldn't buy a single item at 500% markup because I can just get a box of it and eventually find a use for those 99 other nails. Or gumballs.

right

there's a very important reason why people buy 1 cigarette: they don't have the money for a 10 pack. When you're right at the bottom of the economic ladder, spending minimum absolute amounts is far more important than multi-buy value. There's a small spending window you gotta fit all your needs into somehow.

And there's more people like that than anyone else, Bitcoin needs them as adopters as much as it needs the millionaire class. TV commercials are targeted at those people more than they are to anyone else, and that's because that same millionaire class needs the bottom decile of economic status, they're the ones buying most of the mainstream corporate products (ironic huh?), and they're the largest economic group by headcount.

[angrynerd88]

Yes right now BTC worth a lot and the coins struggling to meet the expectations of investors to overcome the BTC. It can be possible in future but nt in near future,BTC changed the mentality of people and beyond the vision that how to invest and how to get financial freedom.

BTC itself a worthy asset and coin at same time which will multiply yur income if you invest or trade it wisely.