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Comment by kvee | Hacker News Reader

Most interesting thing I learned from this article:

Brian Armstrong, Coinbase CEO, "said he now holds more of his wealth in a Bitcoin competitor, Ether"

Ethereum has better use case than Bitcoin with it's smart contract implementation. Though the fallout of crypto kitties is proving that improvements can still be made.

Thoughts on EOS?

Short answer - I am not a fan of EOS.

Long answer - I had a chance to interact with one of the founders - Daniel Larmier back in 2013/14 during his Bitshares days. My impression is that while he has all these grand ideas, he doesn't know how to follow through. Then there seemed to be a lot of nepotism during the Bitshares build.

And then there is this:

> What features, uses or attributes do EOS Tokens have? Can the EOS Tokens be used on a blockchain adopting the EOS.IO Software?

> block.one is building the EOS.IO Software but it will not configure and/or launch any public blockchain platform adopting the open source EOS.IO Software (the “EOS Platform”). Any launch of an EOS Platform will occur by members of the community unrelated to block.one. Third parties launching the EOS Platform may delete, modify or supplement the EOS.IO Software prior to, during or after launching the EOS Platform. The EOS Tokens do not have any rights, uses, purpose, attributes, functionalities or features, express or implied, including, without limitation, any uses, purpose, attributes, functionalities or features on the EOS Platform.

Ever been sued by the government? Want to know how not to be?

It seems that you are quite hostile to the highlight in the post.

I have never been sued by the government. I don't plan to be sued so that knowledge is useless for me.

What I was trying to say is, Block.one(like every blockchain project/currency) has to be very careful in how they market themselves and their blockchain, legally. It's still the wild west in crypto, which makes it prime for government market regulators to target any projects they want to take down. Safest way to play this is to essentially not own up to or promise anything within company legal documents. This is why Block.one does not allow anyone from the USA or China(I believe) to buy into its ICO at this moment. Look into the history of E-gold. That was like a bitcoin network that worked, but was shut down because the government knew who the top 3 people that ran it were.

A theoretical system is always going to seem better than an active implementation.

As long as Block.one markets it well, makes it easy for developers to develop on, as well as normal people to use its dapps, it should come out on top. That's my opinion on it. The head engineer seems to be one of the few geniuses in the industry, as he's already built 2 very successful blockchains, and he's building EOS for him to develop on. I also think he wants to prove Vitalik(Ethereum founder) wrong on his direction for Ethereum, which might help EOS's marketing. Time will tell. I plan on soon developing/testing on EOS during its ICO to have a head start for when all the bugs are worked out and they improve the blockchains performance for the real scalability it's promising.

Not surprising; Coinbase (iirc) was one of the exchanges that traded Ether early on, and it went up by 4500% over the past year, vs 1500% for Bitcoin. (bit more if you consider the Bitcoin Cash fork). Ergo if he was able to invest a wad of cash into ETH early on, the gains would be a lot higher.

Brian Armstrong has quite the history of being on the wrong side of every argument to do with safe and scalable crypto implementation. He has been a champion of centralization and attacks on bitcoin governance. He was a vocal proponent of four out of the five failed fork attempts of bitcoin over the past couple of years. He, and coinbase investors, are very lucky they had people like Charlie Lee managing the technical parts of coinbase.

I dunno, are we happy with the status quo? Making money is nice, but I miss being able to use bitcoins to buy things.

I have a bitcoin debit card. It works just fine thanks. I can spend it anywhere that accepts a card.

You are spending fiat though with that debit card, like every debit card. Transactions are off-chain.

That makes absolutely no difference whatsoever. By your logic, people using coinbase to hold their coins aren't holding bitcoin. It is exactly the same.

Bitcoin from my wallet is being spent. It is increasing in value while i don't spend it, because it is in bitcoin. It is no different than an American using their cc in europe.

> By your logic, people using coinbase to hold their coins aren't holding bitcoin

Exactly, they aren't. Coinbase owns the private keys, thus the bitcoin.

I completely agree. That why the money on my bitcoin debit card is only a fraction of the total amount of bitcoin I own, and I put money on the card when I want to. Because I understand the risk of putting bitcoin on an exchange, and am prepared to accept that risk for that amount, for the convenience of being able to spend my bitcoin whenever I choose.

What you're promoting is a totally centralized cryptocurrency vision for the vast majority of the world, where the very rich and large institutions alone get to use their private keys with any frequency.

It utterly contradicts the title of Bitcoin's white paper:

Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System

Nodes are peers. If you don't own one, especially if you can't run one, and you don't use it to secure your transactions on the blockchain, you aren't one.

You skipped right over the peer part, even though the word is used twice, and started talking about the cash part.

If you don't control your own private keys, you don't have any control of your own money. Satoshi certainly did not think using light clients while controlling one's own private keys contradicted the principle of "peer-to-peer electronic cash".

No matter how you try to spin it, you can't make a future where the vast majority can't control their own private keys sound consistent with Satoshi's vision, or rewrite the public statements Satoshi made about how Bitcoin should scale.

You need to learn how bitcoin works and what a node does.

I’m not sure if you’re willfully misinterpreting what happened or just unware, but the debate over how to scale bitcoin (basically, on-chain vs off-chain) is know being played out with Bitcoin vs Bitcoin Cash. And it’s looking like big blocks is actually a solution for scalability (lower fees, faster transactions), at least in the short term.

(For those not aware, Bitcoin Cash is a fork of Bitcoin that removes segwit, the initial groundwork for off-chain scaling solutions, and instead simply increased the blocksize; so far this has proven to greatly reduce network congestion.)

Maybe it was the right call for Coinbase to not support many of the forks, but they will be adding support for Bitcoin Cash in 2018 (at least withdrawals). So it’s inaccurate to characterize Brian Armstrong on the “losing” side of these debates.

Bitcoin Cash is the brute force solution to scaling. Increasing block size results in longer validation times as well as slower block propagation. Both of these things lead to centralization. The entire purpose of bitcoin is to be as decentralized as possible.

Anyways, here's a video released today of a lightning transaction happening on mainnet: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a73Gz3Tvx3k

Here's a video of Greg Maxwell explaining how slight propagation delays can lead to drastic increases in centralization: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EHIuuKCm53o

And here's rootstock, an ethereum compatible solution for smart contracts: https://www.rsk.co/

Bitcoin Cash is like trying to solve traffic congestion by adding more lanes.

> Increasing block size results in longer validation times as well as slower block propagation

Processing more transactions requires more resources. That's not a bad thing. One might note that currently Bitcoin Cash is usable as a medium of exchange, whereas Bitcoin is not.

They can reduce the bandwidth requirements by implementing e.g. compact blocks.

Feel free to implement your code changes on the alt of your choice. Bitcoin node users remain unaffected.

It's over right? The whole attempt to sideline the bitcoin development team failed, and now that uncertainty has been removed, the price of bitcoin is skyrocketing. That's because bitcoin is valuable for what it is, not for unproven use-cases that decrease bitcoin security. We will get to those use-cases through layering bitcoin, and will not have to sacrifice security to do it.

Accept it. Move on.

And guess what, businesses are moving on. Steam just dropped Bitcoin as a method of payment. And before that OpenBazaar. And Yours.

Using the blockchain for one-off payments between participants is never a viable solution. The establishment of lightning allows commits to be aligned with the long term relationship between two participants. Even after that relationship ends, a completely unrelated payment may be routed through your channel, earning you a micropayment. There was never a solution to that type of functionality with a 10 minute block creation schedule.

That went live on main chain two days ago.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a73Gz3Tvx3k

Blockchains are successfully used for one-off payments, even Bitcoin used to be. Not anymore. And Lightning doesn't solve that problem. Thus other cryptocurrencies will thrive as methods of payment, whereas Bitcoin will remain a settlement layer for recurring payments at best.

Ah lightning network, the vaporware that is always just around the corner...

FWIW OpenBazaar has not dropped Bitcoin as a method of payment, just chosen to diversify payment options.

The Bitcoin community I once knew is truly dead, if making purchases is an "unproven use-case" and the desire to do so on other chains is met with such hostility.

Fortunately among the other cryptocurrencies are communities that have not yet been compromised by greed.

You should invest in litecoin. They have had the blockspace you're looking for for years.

Why would anyone ever use rsk? They created a centralized clone of Ethereum and charge 20% fees, or something like that.

Here's a truly revolutionary scaling solution by the inventor of Bitcoin's Lightning network and Vitalik Buterin: https://plasma.io/

Also here is an Ethereum's equivalent of the Lightning network, which was deployed on main net recently: https://raiden.network/

I don't mind eth. I hope they can solve their problems. But they have problems, and they are running out of time to work them out. Their blockchain is out of control size. Nodes are dropping and they aren't coming back up. I've heard about sharding and pos, but i haven't seen anything approaching a solution yet. It's an issue.

Edit: > Why would anyone ever use rsk?

ICO. Share offer.

Nothing wrong with my memory

http://bitcoinist.com/coinbase-ceo-brian-armstrong-announces...

Not to mention being a signatory to the nya, being the attempted hostile takeover of bitcoin via 2x that crashed one block before the fork. And let's not forget :

http://www.coinfox.info/news/persons/5012-brian-armstrong-ca...

Losing side. Every time.

And no one is interested in a centralized alt like bch, which is why it has virtually no traffic. If people were interested in that use case, they'd be using litecoin, having double the capacity of bch, as well as having segwit, and atomic swaps with bitcoin.

I dislike it when people like you try to paint segwit2x as a "hostile" attempt to take over Bitcoin. It was not. A few confrontational segwit2x supporters made it look this way, but in reality the people at the center of the movement genuinely cared about simply making Bitcoin scale.

See also a longer explanation I wrote at: https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/7508mh/comment/do7umhy

Is Armstrong involved in it? It's an attack. I have nothing against the business of coinbase. They provide a service and are compensated for it. He needs to just butt his head out of technology governance.

Segwit2x attempted to replace the existing Bitcoin software and network with something the entire current development team thought was a terrible idea. It relied on the premise that the reason almost every person who had experience deploying changes to Bitcoin opposed it was because they were part of a secret conspiracy to cripple Bitcoin. The software was developed by a single guy, was to be deployed on a ludicrously tight schedule with no real code review, and had bugs that would've caused chaos if t wasn't cancelled at the last minute due to opposition. Hostile takeover seems accurate.

Oh, and BitPay (the payment provider Steam used) tried to trick users into switching to it via a blog post telling them they needed to upgrade to it because of Segwit and their money was at risk if they didn't. Every user who followed their advice will now have a client that doesn't work.

"Everybody should sign this paper and promise to use btc1 instead of bitcoind. We have a guy on payroll who is both project maintainer and lead developer of said software."

Yes, I can see how some people might see that as a bit hostile. It's as if IBM went around all the Fortune 500 soliciting signatures to swap out all Libreoffice for Openoffice.

Except perhaps Openoffice is a healthy project in comparison.

Coinbase is only supporting Bitcoin Cash because there was a large and very legitimate class action lawsuit headed their way if they didn't.

Just out of curiosity, why only BCash and not the other "big" forks of BTC (like Gold)?

> so far this has proven to greatly reduce network congestion.

their main stroke of genius was not having any transactions on their chain

Bitcoin Cash has a much lower blocksize, not larger. It is the maximum limit that is larger. They regularly have < 100 kB blocks. Of course there is no congestion. Nobody uses it.

Armstrong was right about Bitcoin's 1 MB limit leading to massive fee increases and retail unusability, and he was right about Ethereum becoming massively adopted.

Your characterization of Armstrong's position as being pro-centralization is typical of the total disconnect between the 1-MB-Bitcoin crowd and reality.

According to your logic, Satoshi Nakamoto was pro centralization when he described a future with GB blocks and thousands of transactions on-chain per second.

For people who want to understand more about the context of this, this is a great read: https://www.reddit.com/r/BitcoinMarkets/comments/6rxw7k/info...

One would think that his company would be first in line to implement the new 2 MB limit then. But no, they're last, and they still don't batch their transactions or implement a proper fee estimator. Their customers still overpay for transactions, often by several hundred percent.

The reality is that they don't care much about fees, they just pass them on to their customers.

"He was a vocal proponent of four out of the five failed fork attempts of bitcoin over the past couple of years."

Maybe he boasted what was best for the currency, but propaganda won in the end. So he switched knowing a manipulated currency is not an investment he is interested in?

It's important to realize that bitcoin's message is being manipulated by blockstream. It's not a conspiracy theory, it's conspiracy reality. Subreddits like /r/bitcoin had moderation schemes that buried support for the change, and boosted opposition.

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