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I have read this book. David Gerard & Amy Castor who has commented on this thread are both what I would I consider to be targeting the niche of Bitcoin doubters or "no-coiners".

I like to get a balanced view of crypto but I have grown to find these so-called no-coiners really insufferable.

I might get heavily downvoted but I would rather criticize Bitcoin from the perspective of how can we make this better, rather than oh this is a useless ponzi scam rhetoric, which their audience loves.

It's not nice to say but I honestly believe many of these people just dont want to see something they missed out on succeed, this is coming from someone who has lurked in their communities for a long time.

FWIW Bitcoin is not perfect. And many of it's biggest promoters are self serving scammers but I don't appreciate, or lets say grew tired of people who just like to bash something without offering a solution.

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> these people just dont want to see something they missed out on succeed

There is no missing out though. There is buying when it's lower and selling when it's higher and you can do that starting now as you always could. Or buy and hold if you think that's what you should do or whatever.

I really have no dog in the fight and don't really care one way or another. Just for the sake of the argument though: something can be complete shit with no redeeming qualities. It is not a must that it's good but imperfect and that it requires a solution to make it better. So the opinions of "no-coiners" are not inferior by default. You have to actually prove that they are with some form of argument or evidence.

> There is no missing out though. There is buying when it's lower and selling when it's higher and you can do that starting now as you always could.

And that can also be true of pyramid schemes with no redeeming qualities, Bernie Madoff style fraud, or of sheer random gambling. You have to actually prove that blockchains are not in those categories.

> There is no missing out though.

If you were aware of Bitcoin when it was worth a couple hundreds of dollars and you wrote it off as a fad or whatever and turns out you were completely wrong about it, you would definitely feel like you missed out, no? Sure, better late than never, but you still can't change that feeling.

In the same way, we could say there were people who “missed out” on buying Pets.com stock and selling it before it peaked. It doesn't invalidate the point of view of people who were Pets.com skeptics on the ride up.

Of course, the question then becomes whether Bitcoin will be more like Pets.com or whether it will climb higher. I have a guess, but I don't claim to know for sure.

Pets.com started in 1998 and was gone by 2000, it's more like the ICOs of 2017. Bitcoin has been alive for almost 12 years now and is stronger than ever before. I'm not sure that's a fair comparison.

> Bitcoin has been alive for almost 12 years now

Bernie Madoff's fraud lasted longer than that.

There's no rule that markets can be extremely irrational, but only for up to two years.

Let me give you my experience: people begged me to get into bitcoin when it was a couple of $. It just didn't sound interesting to me so I ignored it. Did I miss out? Yes, but MAYBE a few hundred $. I would have sold at 50 and I would have absolutely sold at 100$, get a nice phone and that's that. In no scenario would I have bought at 5 and hold on to it until it was 40k.

Not to mention that the entire argument is based on a get rich quick scheme which is exactly what the doubters argue crypto coins are, and the entire post which I replied to originally can be summed up to 50Cent "You just jealous cause I'm rich".

Feel that I missed out, why? If your investing strategy relies on being able to predict the future prices of individual assets it's not a very good strategy, and having been right about a particular asset doesn't mean you're smart or that you're a skilled investor. Anyone who knows anything about investing knows this.

But that's true for oodles of things. Yes, I could have mined some BTC a decade ago. Yes, I could have gone to the lunch when they gave out free XLM. But there are also an absolutely enormous number of ways I could have made megamillions. I could have bought a ton of GME last year.

This approach enables you to disregard the opinion of literally everybody who owns no BTC. That's going to cause trouble.

> If you were aware of Bitcoin when it was worth a couple hundreds of dollars and you wrote it off as a fad or whatever and turns out you were completely wrong about it, you would definitely feel like you missed out, no?

I was aware of Bitcoin when it was under a dollar. I wrote it off as a fad. I continue to write it off as a fad, albeit one that became more dangerous than I expected.

The other side of that coin is, obviously, coiners who deduce that anyone opposing Bitcoin must be angry about being poor.

It's possible to dislike Bitcoin for its waste of its energy, centralization one step removed or economic policy without being "the guy who bought at the top".

waste is subjective

Waste is not subjective. If the minimum cost to achieve a goal is X, and it costs you Y (where Y > X) to achieve it, you're wasting Y - X.

sure, but it is subjective what is the goal and what is it's value.

What the goal is is not subjective either, and its value is irrelevant for the purposes of this calculation.

how is goal not subjective? do you know what my goal is without me telling you? demonstrate please.

Somebody's goal is not a matter of taste or personal opinion, but a fact. If my goal is X, then this what my goal is, and that is independent of opinions and perceptions.

> Somebody's goal is not a matter of taste or personal opinion

citation needed

> If my goal is X, then this what my goal is

does this not strike you as circular? :)

It seems that you're just trying to waste my time without providing a counterargument, so I'll leave it here.

lol, you're the one claiming a very non intuitive thing - that one's goals don't depend on tastes and preferences, if you can't back up that claim by anything then just say so. no need to weasel out with "don't waste my time".

one of my goals is to visit nepal. tell me how is that objective?

If you want to believe that "whether your goal is to visit Nepal or not" is an opinion, go ahead. Nobody cares.

Using 0.1% of all the energy produced on the entire planet to do seven transactions per second, something a single desktop computer from 2004 could handle just fine on its own, is not a waste that is "subjective".

It is the most outlandishly, ridiculously wasteful that humanity has ever produced. There is nothing in the history of mankind that comes even close to this level of utterly deranged waste.

Most of that energy would not have been produced and it’s orders of mignutude more tps.

It literally is seven transactions per second, that is all that Bitcoin can do.

Actually it's even less than that in practice. It really is that shit.

Nope, it’s probably in millions per second already, read about lightning network.

I am very familiar with the lightning network. It only exists in toy form. What currently exists can not scale, and nobody know how to make it scale.

As it exists, it does not work beyond the toy levels of usage it is seeing today.

a toy form with 1800BTC ($54mil) only in public channels. i don't think you're familiar with it at all, it scales very well because payments are actual peer to peer, don't need to be globally broadcast and checkpointed. millions tps.

It does not scale. At all. The only reason it works at all at the moment is strong centralisation.

Routing in the Lightning network is an open problem in computer science, one that nobody know how to solve. Payments aren't peer to peer, they have to be routed through intermediaries. And how to do that is basically impossible to figure out, except if you just have a handful of giant hubs you can route through.

> Routing in the Lightning network is an open problem in computer science

if you're trying to say that routing in lightning is an instance of traveling salesman, you're not only wrong - routing is actually shortest path problem, but even if you were right, your statement that TSP somehow makes the system unworkable is simply false in light of the fact that businesses like USPS and DHL and countless more delivery companies exist and are profitable.

> Payments aren't peer to peer, they have to be routed through intermediaries

by this metric nothing on the internet is peer to peer, because packets are routed through intermediaries.

> how to do that is basically impossible to figure out, except if you just have a handful of giant hubs you can route through

yes, there will be hubs, large and small and there will be clusters of interconnected local meshes and there will be users routing however they wish through the system instead of taking the cheapest most connected path.

if you say something is impossible to figure out - you need to back up that claim with something, anything.

what if i told you, you were lied to by skeptics and scammers, trying to sell their shitcoins, and you need to put away your biases for just a minute and invest a little time to see, if what they were saying is actually true?

> if you're trying to say that routing in lightning is an instance of traveling salesman, you're not only wrong - routing is actually shortest path problem

I am not. I am saying we don't have the map that we need to solved the shortest path problem, and we have no way to get that map.

> by this metric nothing on the internet is peer to peer, because packets are routed through intermediaries

And we have routing protocols to do so for the internet. We do not have one for the Lightning network that works at scale.

> yes, there will be hubs, large and small and there will be clusters of interconnected local meshes and there will be users routing however they wish through the system instead of taking the cheapest most connected path.

No, there will only be a small number of very large hubs. Nothing else actually works in practice.

> I am saying we don't have the map that we need to solved the shortest path problem, and we have no way to get that map.

of course we do, connectivity graph and updates to it are gossiped all the time and each node has imperfect representation of it.

> we have routing protocols to do so for the internet. We do not have one for the Lightning network that works at scale.

we do, lightning nodes do that all the time right now.

> there will only be a small number of very large hubs. Nothing else actually works in practice.

again, you're making a statement without backing it up by anything.

your entire argument boils down to: if a node can't have perfect information about connectivity graph, then it can't perfectly route payments.

and you're right, that statement is true, but it is irrelevant because imperfect routing through imperfect connectivity graph is fine and works great.

> of course we do, connectivity graph and updates to it are gossiped all the time and each node has imperfect representation of it.

Yes, that is exactly the part that does not scale beyond a toy network, and for which there is no solution.

maintaining a perfect and complete connectivity graph - hard.

maintaining imperfect and incomplete connectivity graph - much less hard.

be careful, maybe you're invested into something that becomes irrelevant if LN works, in which case you might want to be less rigid in your thinking and follow the developments more closely to pull out or risk losing your investment. because LN already works: tens of thousands of nodes and channels, millions of dollars in the network and growing at healthy rates.

And the bigger the network are and the more transactions there are, the more important a complete connectivity graph is, and the more failed transfers you will get if you have an inaccurate graph. However, the bigger the network is, the harder it is to actually gather an accurate graph.

Thus, it doesn't scale.

> Thus, it doesn't scale

you're wrong for two reasons:

- hubs do exist (big and small) and can exchange connectivity information more efficiently (and take fees for that service), so the network isn't growing like a full mesh (that is indeed very hard to maintain connectivity graph of) but rather as a collection of interconnected smaller meshes

- payments can be split up into smaller chunks that follow different paths and are executed atomically (either all or none), and if some chunks fail you can retry them within the same payment context

So in the first case, as I said, it can work with a few giant hubs. In the second case, it just progressively works worse and worse. Doing multiple routes atomically just gives you more reasons a single payment can fail.

> as I said, it can work with a few giant hubs

right, there will definitely be huge hubs. what you didn't even try to demonstrate is why can't there be smaller hubs?

> it just progressively works worse and worse. Doing multiple routes atomically just gives you more reasons a single payment can fail.

no, exactly the opposite is true. in case with single payment for X satoshi you need to re-try it multiple times until you find a route that has X capacity on every hop. with atomic multipath payments you need to find N routes that support X/N capacity (much easier) and if any number of those fail you can retry only those failed parts, so after 2-3 iterations your entire payment succeeds.

But again, at actual scale, there is no guarantee that the transactions that worked on your previous attempt will work on the next one, because lots of other people will also be attempting to use them.

when you run multipath payment, each chunk that succeeds locks that capacity for some time until you figure out rest of the chunks. and since each chunk is tiny, the chance that all of them succeed on first try is actually quite large.

So you can DoS the network by spamming it with transactions that are set up to fail and lock up large sums of money?

Maybe you are right that I do not know enough about the Lightning network, because I was not aware there was a vulnerability that big and easy to exploit built into it.

well i'm glad you've conceded all the ground from "it's unsolvable comp sci problem" up until "but one can DoS the tiny payments by spamming". i've covered a mile, you're still fighting for inches, i think that's enough for me. cheers, i'm glad you learned a lot about lightning today!

p.s. i'm sure you can google about DoS attacks on lightning and how to deal with them yourself

No, it's still an unsolvable problem. But it seems a kludge has been added that makes the damage a tiny bit smaller, and also introduces a massive vulnerability, so I wouldn't exactly call that a win.

The problem is that any utility that cryptocurrency may have is obscured by the incredible amount of fraud and grift used to keep the bubble intact.

My issue is I fail to see how the public-permissionless paradigm will ever work with our social expectations, compliance with laws, and the UX expectations of users. The constant insistence that this is going to "change the world" is tiresome. Humans will keep being humans as the cryptosphere demonstrates quite nicely.

> I fail to see how the public-permissionless paradigm will ever work

But it is working! Bitcoin has hundreds of thousands of transactions per day on the main chain alone where it settles 2B+$ in value, eth has tons of really useful defi projects that people actually use (maker, compound, aave, uniswap, etc).

Use for _what_, though? As far as I can see, largely speculation.

The same things that normal financial systems enable you, but without a central authority. It's trustless, permissionless, completely transparent, uncensorable, borderless open financial system. If you think that all of that is just pure speculation, I don't know what to say.

Just go through github, whitepapers and technical discussions to see the serious side of the industry, rather than being stuck to the surface level of fraudsters/speculators promising 100x money returns on social media.

DeFi is crippled by design. It can't really do anything useful, because it doesn't support property rights. Any serious discussion about DeFi should start by acknowledging this basic fact.

"uncensorable" is a euphemism for "enables fraud, black markets, money laundering, and extortion".

Although there are some cases under oppressive regimes where black markets may be a moral good, on the whole enabling financial crimes is, in my value system, bad.

Furthermore I think regulatory systems will eventually move against this - in fact you see it starting. See https://doomberg.substack.com/p/a-stablecoin-applies-to-beco...

Child pornographers everyday use encrypted messaging and Tor to get away with their crimes. Meanwhile, normal users have no practical benefit from either.

Why is this different?

That's a really question that I have considered before, and that deserves a long answer.

One part of it is:

As both a matter of norms and law, we expect and desire more public scrutiny of financial transactions than of speech. In particular, various taxes mean that a large fraction of financial transactions cannot and should not be private. Conversely the great majority of 1 on 1 conversations raise no legal or regulatory issues.

Not true. I've used bitcoin for purchases before (not illegal drugs). From sellers who were dropped from payment processors for CYA-type reasons.

Yes, a big part is speculation but how could it not be? Any bet on the future is speculation. Apologies if your argument is actually more subtle, in which case I'd like to hear it.

> Any bet on the future is speculation

This is not true. Speculation is specifically referring to the situation where you are betting specifically because you think the bet you made will result in positive financial return.

Have you bought anything with Bitcoin in the past couple of years despite the high transaction fees? What did you buy?

It's easy to make such a claim when you ignore the second and more important part of my statement. Typical...

As someone who also tries to form a balanced view of crypto, the detractors are right about one thing: Bitcoin uses an awful lot of energy. It’s also pretty fundamental to Bitcoin, to the point that I think it is at odds with the world’s goals to decarbonize electricity generation.

The fact that Ethereum is tackling the energy use problem head on with proof of stake and and doing so within the next year makes it incredibly appealing.

Buterin's just put ETH2 back to the end of 2022, keeping PoS perpetually 18 months in the future, where it's been since 2014. So I would recommend counting this chicken when it's hatched, and not a moment before.

https://tokenist.com/buterin-explains-why-ethereum-2-0-upgra...

Conclusion: Fusion energy will be available a fixed number of years after ETH PoS.

Ethereum actually pushed the sharding portion of ETH2 back to end of 2022, not proof-of-stake:

> Originally, the plan was to work on shard chains before the merge – to address scalability. However, with the boom of layer 2 scaling solutions, the priority has shifted to swapping proof-of-work to proof-of-stake via the merge.

My ETH is already staked as ETH2, and it looks like the plan is still to do the merge in “2021/2022”.

https://ethereum.org/en/eth2/merge/

As sibling points out, this is not correct. Unfortunately there are a number of sections in your book where you engage in a similar kind of misdirection as this.

This is an example of the crypto advocate style of attempted nitpicking that isn't actually of substance and makes no difference to the point.

You don't get to claim PoS is happening until it happens, given Ethereum's consistent track record of failure to make any such thing happen.

If the ETH token readily tradeable for money on crypto exchanges is not at all based on PoW before the last quarter of 2022, I for one will be tremendously surprised.

> these people just dont want to see something they missed out on succeed

Missed out on what profit? I've just started reading about Ethrereum and its still a baby. No one really knows what its going to grow into. But it reads much bugger than coins / NFTs when you start peeling back the layers. But people love blood and theres a lot of it in the coin / NFT space.

for those wondering who that is, everyone should read Amy Castor's blog:

https://amycastor.com/

she's been in crypto journalism for years, and knows her stuff thoroughly, and where the bodies are buried.

Try my podcast. It’s as balanced as I could make it. Start from the bottom. Thanks!

https://pointbite.podbean.com/

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