Hacker News Reader

Comment by dane-pgp | Hacker News Reader

And living up to Satoshi's original vision of a "purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash".

Not really. I think Monero has that mantle. Mining was supposed to be decentralised and the cash was supposed to be fungible.

Is Bitcoin Cash mining not decentralised?

https://cash.coin.dance/blocks/thisweek

Also I'm not sure what definition of fungible you are using that doesn't include Bitcoin Cash, but here's another spurious definition for you: A cryptocurrency isn't fungible if most wallets have balances that can't be spent because of fees.

https://www.newsbtc.com/2017/11/17/bitpay-ceo-claims-current...

It isn't as decentralised as Monero. 5 pools control 60% hashrate for BCH, the top 5 XMR pools control 13% (Yuge difference). Also, Monero has a dynamic block size, so it is somewhat future proofed while BCH has another hardfork if it is successful. And fungible means that each unit of the currency is indistinguishable from another unit. BCH and Bitcoin both leave trails, therefore, are not fungible.

The usual definition of fungible is that one coin (more precisely, one spend output) is as good as another (e.g., the same amount coming from a different UTXO) and they are not distinguishable from each other due to their provenance.

Put more simply, if the coins can be 'tainted' because they were transferred to you from a ransomware hoard then they're not fungible because a merchant could say: "I'm not taking those coins, I don't want to be associated with ransomware. You have to pay me with other coins."

Neither BTC nor BCH has this kind of fungibility, though Monero does.

I could see (some) merchants applying a blacklist to wallets that are known to be "evil" (as decided by some third party, somehow), but it's hard to imagine a non-negligible proportion of the bitcoin marketplace ever blacklisting all coins which have at any time in history been held by a ransomeware writer. The possibility of denying business to innocent customers is too great, and the benefits too small.

If some bizarre counter-productive legislation does come in requiring such a system for bitcoin, then yes, Monero might suddenly become more fungible in practice.

There is no "more fungible". It is either fungible or it isn't. Provenance can either be determined, or it can't. Sure there may be a degree of difficulty to determine provenance for some things, but if you cannot determine provenance at all, there is no degree.

"Fungible: being something (such as money or a commodity) of such a nature that one part or quantity may be replaced by another equal part or quantity in paying a debt or settling an account"

That definition doesn't mention provenance, even if I concede that something can't be "more (easily) determined" or "less (easily) determined".

My point is that if 99% of debts can, in practice, be paid (or transactions made) without either party paying any attention to the provenance of the coins, then the coins are fungible.

If there were reports of a significant number of a people being unable to transact because their bitcoins were blacklisted, then I would believe that bitcoin is significantly less fungible.

Whether that lack of fungibility is more significant than Monero's differing level of merchant adoption (for which I also don't have statistics) is then another question that a user has to weigh up.

It would be very unfortunate to be in that 1%, particularly if the implications were dire economically or for liberty. 1% is an enormous percentage. I personally wouldn’t even settle for 0.1%.

This is a really bad catchphrase by the bcash crowd because it sets up bcash as “electronic cash” vs btc “store of value”, when bcash is actually both, as in Satoshi’s vision. Shame bcash is spearheaded by such an untrustworthy team. Their argument is in the right but held back by poor tactics.

And support by the original developers of Bitcoin, for scaling by blocksize and exponential growth of computing, bandwidth, and storage.

and here i thought that scaling distributed systems is very hard problem. it turns out you just bump a number in configuration. quick, patent it and sell to google for billions!

We managed to scale the internet from dial-up to broadband without needing any hardcoded bitrate parameters imposed across the whole network. Bitcoin Cash seems to be doing just fine with its 8 megabyte blocks.

by "we managed" you mean the network of centralized gateways? because that's how internet works, just in case you didn't know.

we grew past the global scale fully connected topologies somewhere in late 80s if not earlier (i was in ussr kindergarden at that time, so please somebody correct me).

> Bitcoin Cash seems to be doing just fine with its 8 megabyte blocks

is it maybe because nobody is using it? :) blocks are 15 times smaller, tps is 10 times lower, USD transferred per day is 50 times lower.

gee, no wonder bitcoin cash is doing just fine, it's a copy of bitcoin and that kind of load is where bitcoin was couple years ago.

Having a two-tier system (if that's how you want to picture the internet) is still a valid way of scaling, as Satoshi said:

"At that stage, most users should start running client-only software and only the specialist server farms keep running full network nodes, kind of like how the usenet network has consolidated."

You're right that Bitcoin Cash usually has fewer transactions than Bitcoin Core, though, which alleviates scaling pressure. Similarly, now that people are switching to Bitcoin Cash and altcoins, that same scaling solution is working for Bitcoin Core too.

https://i.redd.it/wbpq99paw74z.png

> Having a two-tier system is still a valid way of scaling

you've basically described the motivation behind LN.

> Bitcoin Cash usually has fewer transactions than Bitcoin Core, though, which alleviates scaling pressure.

very nice spin ;)

> https://i.redd.it/wbpq99paw74z.png

correlation does not imply causation.

numbers are clear: 15 times more data, 10 times more transactions, 50 times more USD transferred. no altcoin is even close to that level of economic activity, even those with inflated tps numbers.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com