Has anyone found a place where detailed arguments for bitcoin (pros and cons) are laid out? Forums seem to be meme-based (e.g. "HODL") and/or superficial.
The downside is this guarantee has some trade-offs. Mainly transaction speed is super slow (10m to confirm a transaction went through) and transaction fees are very high (especially now with the "bubble", it's something above 10$/transaction). Furthermore, all transactions are public record, which isn't desirable if you're a fan of privacy. The value is very volotile right now, making it hard to really budget out your net worth.
IMO, if you can just trust a third party (eg, credit card processing), then you get much better guarantees. (Fast payment, relative privacy, low transaction fees), with the further benefit of chargebacks. If someone steals money from your Bitcoin wallet, you're screwed, with a credit card you phone them up and they undo it.
Actually, even with Bitcoin you need to trust a third party: the exchange. Many people hold their money in the exchange, and there have been multiple cases where they've lost a bunch of user's money. IMO a real bank or credit card processor is more trust worthy than a crypto exchange.
That's all to say that currently crypto makes no sense for real transactions. That's not to say the issues are unfixable, for example Monero provides privacy guarantees.
As well, other uses may be valid, the main case is "a hold of value", like gold. IMO, crypto has no intrinsic value (not even decorative like gold) and is very volotile, so it's up to you to decide whether it's going to last.
Lastly, there are novelty uses like ethereum's trusted computation platform. That's a complicated topic in itself but pretty much each of these uses has a counterpart with much better guarantees if you can use a trusted third party.
That's a generally sane reason to trust the miners, but the truth is, the mining nodes are controlled by people, and people can be motivated by many things other than money, including fear of people with much political power.
Mining becomes even more centralized due to high cost.
Next, attackers (mean, naughty miners) simultaneously launch / initiate / pay for a DDOS attack on the others such that they can reach this 51% figure?
For sure there are some untrustworthy exchanges as there are untrustworthy ICOs, but you have two options that are far better. You can rely on US Banking regulations and pay higher fees through Coinbase and Gemini, where your deposits are insured; or you can use a decentralized exchange like etherdelta that relies on atomic swap contracts.
As you mentioned, Monero (and potentially z-cash) are there as solutions to anonymity.
With BTC you have to really, really trust the merchant, because you can't compel them to refund you. Without the chargeback ability, a lot of smaller merchants would never get business in the first place.
And that's a real problem if you're trying to run a business.
The blockchain and smart contracts provide interesting ways to tackle these problems with clever and transparent protocols. It is not difficult to imagine a credit score system (https://hellobloom.io/) that is based off a transaction history tied to an identity token (https://www.uport.me/). In that case, merchants and customers can choose who they want to engage with based off reputation and history.
That is one way of doing a transaction with a merchant. Another way would be to use a hashed time lock contract that allows you to get a refund on demand. In that event, the merchant has to trust you.
As both a consumer and a business owner, I am excited to see a highly diverse market of options for how we do transactions, as opposed to a market dominated by 3-4 players.
The fees don't have much effect on me buying coffee and reputation based systems are a libertarian panacea that honestly, look nutty to the rest of us.
As a European consumer I too am looking forward to lots more options in the near future, some of which will ditch fees entirely,and none of them cryptocurrency based.
To many Americans and world citizens with less disposable income, you might seem kind of nutty to not worry about losing 3% on your under $15 purchases. Credit score and insurance industries are ubiquitous. For most folks if they move to another country you will often be penalized by that country's insurance or credit score agencies for not having recent history. There is certainly room for improvement.
And I'm not losing 3%, the business may be but I'm not in any way that's visible.
Further, there are new products and methods entering the market that require neither Visa/Mastercard nor a hideously inefficient PoW blockchain or multiple exchange parties.
Payments (in Europe at least) are likely to change in the near future, but not to that.
Payment Services Directive 2 (PSD2)
Open Banking
Well you would need to trust the other party to get something in return, unless you're giving it away. The big part is making a transaction without trusting a 3rd party.
> Mainly transaction speed is super slow (10m to confirm a transaction went through)
It depends on how large your transactions are. If you buy a car for example you want to wait for more, maybe 6, confirmations while if you pay for coffee you can use a coin where zero-conf (basically instant) transactions can be considered okay.
Put that with the context that VISA has a settlement time of around 30 days.
> and transaction fees are very high (especially now with the "bubble", it's something above 10$/transaction)
Only for the crippled coin Bitcoin. Bitcoin Cash could for example easily handle all Bitcoin's transactions for pennies.
> (Fast payment, relative privacy, low transaction fees), with the further benefit of chargebacks. If someone steals money from your Bitcoin wallet, you're screwed, with a credit card you phone them up and they undo it.
If you're a business chargebacks are actually an anti feature. Chargeback fraud is a very real and very common occurrance.
> Actually, even with Bitcoin you need to trust a third party: the exchange.
Only if you use it to enter/exit with fiat.
> IMO a real bank or credit card processor is more trust worthy than a crypto exchange.
Absolutely. That's why it's recommended to hold your coins yourself and don't leave it on any exchange. Of course they could become more trustworthy as time goes on.
> That's all to say that currently crypto makes no sense for real transactions
Except I have used it successfully several times to buy stuff. It's also much better than any alternatives for donations (where for example PayPal cannot freeze the funds) or remittance to far away/difficult locations.
> As well, other uses may be valid, the main case is "a hold of value", like gold.
I find that stupid though.
> IMO, crypto has no intrinsic value (not even decorative like gold) and is very volotile, so it's up to you to decide whether it's going to last.
The value is transactions without a 3rd party and it's very hard to reverse already made transactions. There's no need to have any physical value.
For example, Vitalik Buterin (Ethereum's creator), is always thoughtful, wary of the bubble hype, and posts interesting technical items on his blog, Twitter, and on Reddit. He obviously focuses on Ethereum, not Bitcoin, but some of his insights on blockchain are generally applicable.
It takes weeks for a really beefy machine to fully sync a full node. "Smart" contracts remain really difficulty to be written safely. Ethereum was unusualable when it reached its scaling limits just by one silly app of cat breeding. They are on the verge of doing another hard-fork to effectively revert some transactions and move some stuck ETH. It's really a clownfest that keeps on pushing badly written software just so they can sell it to greater fools and enterprise "smart"-dump money. Can't have respect for this kind of behavior.
Some specific responses:
1.) All blockchains are having issues with scaling, including Bitcoin. Vitalik is working hard on scaling (see, e.g., his recent work on sharding and Plasma). I am not saying he will necessarily be successful. It's possible a newer competitor (like EOS, Cardano, Ripple, Stellar Lumens, IOTA, etc.) may have a better approach to scaling, although a lot of those competitors are overhyped, do not have a working mainnet yet, or have used other tradeoffs (e.g, security or centralization) in order to provide scalability. I'm not saying Ethereum is the best project, I'm saying that Vitalik seems like an honest, hardworking, direct, technical guy who avoids hype/FUD more than most in this space.
2.) "They are on the verge of doing another hard-fork to effectively revert some transactions and move some stuck ETH." What is this referencing? The Parity folks proposed something along these lines, but the community was not in favor and I believe it's been dropped. I have not seen Vitalik or the other Eth devs push this.
3.) Vitalik has urged people to be cautious of these overhyped valuations and ICOs. He has advised projects that are technically interesting, without endorsing the ICO raise itself or their valuations. I don't personally see a problem with that, although perhaps people differ.
You make some good points, like Solidity being a horrible language. The community needs to discover better metaphors for blockchain-aware programming.
As for the rest, I'm not sure if you really want to discuss what you say, or just to cry aloud. Any serious read into the Parity multisig bug would lead you into protocol upgrade discussions, not into bailout discussions. It turns out that some ether previously thought lost could be mathematically proved to belong to a certain address, so giving an option to retrieve the money would be a net gain. The multisig bug made people look into this. If it can be done, rejecting the change "to make them learn from their mistakes" would be petty.
The arguments for digital cash have been laid out since the cypherpunk days of the early '90s. Go read True Names: and the Opening of the Cyberspace Frontier for the philosophical underpinnings.
Try posting a serious question there and see what happens!
pros: decentralized, judgement resistant store of value cons: unconnected to any economic fundamentals, therefore without any analytical way to determine price.
This is what I would call "direct utility". There is also "indirect utility" - mindset of bystanders who are willing to transact BC because they know that others will provide liquidity.
The case of H. Beatty Chadwick is also worth keeping in mind (spent 14 years in jail in contempt of court because he claimed that he had lost all his money right before a divorce and the court didn't believe him.)
If you're storing coins on an exchange, they're not your coins. The point of BTC is you don't need to do that.
The case of H. Beatty Chadwick is also worth keeping in mind (spent 14 years in jail in contempt of court because he claimed that he had lost all his money right before a divorce and the court didn't believe him.)
A solid point, but two counterarguments: There's safety in numbers – if everyone were to do this, courts probably wouldn't jail more than a dozen or so – and at the end of your jail term, you'd still have your wealth.
As I mentioned, there's nothing specific to bitcoin about this strategy. You can do it with buried gold coins or with cash as HBC did. Or a dozen other ways. If "everyone" wanted to do it, they would have already.
But ...
> and at the end of your jail term, you'd still have your wealth.
How much is 14 years of your life worth?
https://think.ing.com/uploads/reports/171218_Why_Bitcoin_to_...
2. Crypto Investor: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCTKyJALgd09WxZBuWVbZzXQ 1. DataDash: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCCatR7nWbYrkVXdxXb4cGXw
Pros: as long as you are able to keep your private key a secret, no one can take your bitcoins from you; doesn’t require trust in party knowing what it’s doing
Cons: no one there to bail you out; poor throughput (currently around 10 transactions per second)
Most other pros/cons I can come up with depend on ones convictions regarding economic theory, so I only included the objectively true ones.
In other words: 10 TPS is possible, but this assumes 1) taking advantage of SegWit and 2) a simple transfer from one account (input) to two accounts (destination+change output).
https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf
It's not a pro or con article, but it's the most cogent description of Bitcoin you'll find.
http://nakamotoinstitute.org/mempool/
Some highlights:
The Bitcoin Central Bank's Perfect Monetary Policy
Hyperbitcoinization
Speculative Attack
https://www.yours.org/user/riversandmountains/
I think that was the intention of bcash. They did everything to brand it as being the true bitcoin.
Litecoin at least changed the damn name.