Bitcoin: Update network descriptions to be more accurate
github.com
github.com
The BTC chain is SCREAMING for more transaction capacity and the Blockstream team is popping champaign (sic) that they've introduced a fee system 100 years ahead of schedule.
Bitcoin Cash is simply the manifestation of the original vision surviving a hostile takeover attempt.
How anybody can defend a crypto scaling plan introduced by a Bilderberg Group/AXA funded team is beyond me.
Its like a storm brewing.
It is still centralized right? [1] The whole thing is still implemented in ternary [2] for some reason right? Implemented by the people who rolled their own crypto, then when they - days later - were told it was obviously and trivially broken (collisions discovered via differential cryptanalysis) claimed they left it broken as some sort of copy protection mechanism? [3] And then pretended Microsoft was involved? [4]
The one of which Schneier wrote: “In 2017, leaving your crypto algorithm vulnerable to differential cryptanalysis is a rookie mistake. It says that no one of any calibre analyzed their system, and that the odds that their fix makes the system secure is low.”
That IOTA?
[1] https://medium.com/@ercwl/iota-is-centralized-6289246e7b4d
[2] https://hackernoon.com/why-i-find-iota-deeply-alarming-934f1...
[3] https://gist.github.com/Come-from-Beyond/a84ab8615aac13a4543...
[4] https://thenextweb.com/hardfork/2017/12/12/iota-partnership-...
You can't transact in bitcoin, and nothing else has any acceptance ... That breaks cryptocurrency, so all one looks at is finding interesting toys.
So I guess I'm doing the same thing as all your posts you linked to, I'm saying "I'm excited, if 'the tangle' demonstrates that it can scale, I'd love to see that happen".
I would suggest nobody invest in any cryptocurrency. That said, having 50$ of play money in iota (and others) is both fun and interesting.
Technically
BTC and BCH share a near identical codebase, save for the recent junk BCH had to remove.
Larger BCH block size prevent transaction buildup that has caused the fees to go insane on the BTC side of the fence.
The new BCH difficulty adjustment protects it from would-be gaming/manipulation by miners.
Technical progress is actually happening with BCH.
Technical progress is currently vapourware with BTC.
Centralization
BCH has six distinct and separate development teams.
BTC has one gatekeeping development team aggressively blocking proposals that get in the way of selling second layer solutions.
Bitcoin Core trolls and bots are a common problem on reddit.
Adam Back (CEO of Blockstream) has admitted to hiring teams of people to control the narrative
Bitcoin Core has killed any practical use cases by refusing to scale and causing $50 fees.
Bitcoin Cash works today and puts the original vision back on track.
Can Bitcoin Cash really support that rate of transactions? How large would the blocks have to be?
Core propaganda will decry this as lunacy since people won't be able to run nodes on raspberry pi's anymore. The sad reality is you can buy the hardware required for the cost of a single BTC transaction.
BCH nodes/miners can increase to 32MB without a hard fork, it's just as a config setting.
GB blocks are possible today with today's hardware, though those won't be necessary for quite some time.
TB blocks are almost possible today, though a little further out in practice.
The vision (and current reality of BCH) is that every transaction should make it in to the next block for less than a penny.
Low/non-existent fees is the only way a meaningful global exchange system will emerge. Better to have everybody on the globe doing 5 transactions a day for dust than to have a few hodlers transact twice a year.
Ignoring btc's problems and calling forks"scams" won't fly for long
The nature of bitcoin makes it one that the developers should be very cautiously improving and very skeptical of proposals. The linux kernel is the same way. The high stakes requires everyone to scrutinize changes, especially corporate backed ones. There are real concerns about raising block sizes as one of the key ideas of bitcoin is preventing scenarios that can lead to centeralization. "Core" is a large open source community, not a single leader who rejected raising block sizes for political reasons.
Segwit is not implemented on Core's main client.
Lightning has been 18 months away since 2015. (It is still 18 months away)
Lightning will not work with the current block size that Blockstream is so fiercely protective of.
Please admit that if a credit card company wanted to maximally destroy the threat of Bitcoin, the last few years would serve as a pretty good blueprint...
*Edit: removed word that mangled sentence.
I feel like a broken record saying this: Demand for the currency will fluctuate. If the supply is fixed, the price will be demand-driven. Which means volatile. Fiat currency has a central bank with active control over the supply, so it is capable of keeping a stable price if the central bank does its job.
http://www.bzarg.com/p/what-bitcoin-shows-us-about-how-money...
I do think cryptocurrencies do satisfy some use cases in a superior way to fiat currency. But there are some serious economic advantages that a currency with a central bank gives you that cryptocurrencies will never have (at least, the way they're currently designed).
Otherwise it has the same volatility as a stock. It can gain or lose half its value in a few hours. Just like a stock the way to take volatility out of it is to diversify.
The volatility has nothing to do in my opinion with the lack of a central authority distributing it. It has to do with heavy speculation of this particular stock. Central banks can only correct for long term price evolutions, not for short term fluctuations.
If you know/believe that supply will generally adjust to cancel demand, then you have much less incentive to speculate.
The problem here though, is that every crypto valuation is linked directly to the value of Bitcoin. It's as if the entire S&P tracked the price of Apple.
* Single trusted feed
* Take the median of the exchange rates from a set of feeds, with that set chosen by vote of holders of the coin (I can personally see this having some conflict-of-interest issues)
* Use what they call a "Decentralized Schelling point scheme" - have coinholders vote on what they think the exchange rate was in a recent time interval, use the median vote, then reward voters who were in the 25th to 75th percentile.
The authors seem to view the third option, with some engineering of the incentives, to be ideal; but I'm skeptical of a system that gives holders of an asset the ability to change the value of that asset. I would honestly prefer the use of a trusted authority - at least that way you have a very clear delineation of what the central authority is supposed to do and can easily audit whether it is doing its job.
The crypto money supply is predetermined, but demand is not, often driven by events outside of the blockchain. Supply needs to actively balance demand if the price is to stay stable.
For a stable price you'd need a crypto that adjusts mining difficulty in response to changes in the amount of demand (or something like that? My understanding of crypto currencies is only surface level).
However, the USD-to-Crypto price is something outside of the blockchain, so as far as my understanding goes you can't really use that as an input because you can't get undisputable information on the price, because the entirety of undisputable information should exist in the blockchain.
I guess you could try to use transaction volume as an input but that seems like a bad metric because it's a) gameable and 2) does not necessarily correlate with external demand for the crypto currency.
It should be possible to have one with reasonably stable value compared to any identifiable external commodity or basket of commodities that is not itself highly volstile, though it would be more complex than existing crpytocurrencies, and may not be completely decentralized.
Stability, decentralization, and trustlessness together...well, you are pretty much asking can you replace an active central bank with an preset, runs-forever algorithm without a trusted source for real world economic data. I'd say probably not.
No, it isn't. People just have trouble imagining non-crackpot cryptocurrency because they've never seen one.
For a stable price you'd need a crypto that adjusts mining difficulty in response to changes in the amount of demand (or something like that?)
Right, you can adjust the block reward so that the rate of issuance of money tracks the rate of change of demand.
However, the USD-to-Crypto price is something outside of the blockchain, so as far as my understanding goes you can't really use that as an input
There are some projects that use "oracles" to publish price information on the blockchain, but then you get into a bunch of complexity about electing oracles and taking the median price of multiple oracles.
I guess you could try to use transaction volume as an input but that seems like a bad metric because it's a) gameable and 2) does not necessarily correlate with external demand for the crypto currency.
Right. You can also use difficulty as a metric (based on the theory that higher price makes mining more profitable which causes more miners to mine which causes difficulty to increase). https://blog.ethereum.org/2014/11/11/search-stable-cryptocur... Note that some of these techniques don't guarantee stable value, just less volatile value.
Stable with respect to what? Fiat? Which one?
In the limit you will have a cryptocurrency backed by a fiat currency (and I don't consider Tether to be one. Bitfinex will allow you to exchange $1 for 1 tether, but nobody will guarantee you can go the other direction).
As long as there are finite-ish supply, I don't think any crypto would be stable.
It wouldn't be too hard to make a inflationary coin, just mint coins proportional to the estimated GH of the network. That would give the coin a price ceiling.
I am not.
Apple pay has all the encryption mechanism that makes it much safer than sending your credit card number over the Internet, which the parent was asking for.
Personally Apple pay is the primary appeal of Apple's ecosystem for me. No other intermediary's incentives are aligned to prioritize the customer in the transaction ahead of data mining opportunities.
Just wait anywhere between 0.5-5 years once enough people get burned and stop acting out of FOMO and you'll get it.
You tell me.
Blockchain:
* Separates your transactions into blocks and hashes the blocks together.
* Uses proof-of-work to add new blocks.
* Is slow (a block has to be filled).
* Is unreliable (your transaction may be rejected).
* Locks transactions at the block level.
* Easy for user to lose unique tokens (coins).
My SQL design for blockchain replacement:
* Take a database table.
* Allow INSERT permission only.
* Hash each record and insert the hash into next record, which chains them together like blockchain.
* Replicate the database.
This is like blockchain, because it hashes the records together, can't be modified, and has backups to ensure it can't be modified.
Unlike blockchain, it:
* Is centralized but still has backups.
* Is cheap (does not require proof of work).
* Is fast (one transaction at a time).
* Is reliable (ACID transactions).
* Locks transactions at the record level.
* User not required to keep track of coins.
So what's so great about blockchain compared to this design? The only thing blockchain does better is that there is no central server, so it's hard to shut down. But for industry use, no one is going to shut down their intranet servers. Only criminals need to worry about being shut down.
More to the wider philosophical point, having a single centralised server means putting trust in a single authority - I'm not talking so much about the possibility of being shut down (although that ought to be a worry for more than just criminals) but about the power, implicitly granted to whoever maintains the central database, to act as gatekeeper.
Essentially, if you're happy having a single central authority (if you're willing to trust that they'll always play fair, never try to interfere with transactions, never exploit their position for profit, never deny service to particular customers) then all the hashing and chaining is a meaningless veneer and you might as well just use Paypal. If you're _not_ happy with a single central authority then "Just use a database" misses the point entirely.