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Comment by cflynnus | Hacker News Reader

Ethereum is a foundation of sand. The protocol and the rules change at the whims of the senior insiders. It's not a stable platform and since we don't know what the rules will be in the future you can't plan for the future and build anything long term.

Bitcoin is signal, all of crypto is noise.

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Bitcoin does not have Turing-complete scripting. It's impossible to build complex applications on top of Bitcoin, and no, sidechains don't count (they don't inherit Bitcoin's security). It's great that there's 21M supply cap. Fantastic for a gold-like digital asset. But absolutely useless for software engineers to build financial primitives on top of.

> Bitcoin does not have Turing-complete scripting

Feature not a bug. Base layer that will serve as foundation for entire global economy should be as simple as possible to make it as reliable as possible. Like all complex systems, functionality is added in layers. Things like lightning network and fedimints are examples of such layers.

> It's great that there's 21M supply cap.

Fixed supply is an essential requirement for the entire system to have any merit whatsoever. If supply can change at direction of core group of insiders it's just the same thing as the existing fiat banking system and the real value of the tokens will be diluted in perpetuity.

> But absolutely useless for software engineers to build financial primitives on top of.

No. See comment above about layers.

Bitcoin is a commodity, ETH & all of crypto is just (unregistered) securities lying/pretending to be commodities.

the gold standard was abolished to due it's volitile nature, compared to stability of a fiat like the USD. Bitcoin being a volitile commodity itself, it will not be able to run the global economy on-top of it.

I honestly can’t tell if this is satire. Fiat is stable in so far as the number doesn’t change, but good luck with that purchasing power.

Bitcoin is a scarce commodity with no issuer. It cannot be counterfeited on the whim of a small group. Its volatility should decrease with adoption.

Down 66% in 1 year after the whole world knows about it. Any day now. Wasn't it supposed to be an inflation hedge? Fiat sure retained value much better this year...

zoom out

You're precisely talking about the impossible trilemma.

Gold standard was nixed because the government wanted to be able to create new money out of thin air and give it to itself. Simple as that.

This is incorrect. The gold standard was abolished in the US because it was too hard for the US to control macroeconomic policy [1] (especially import/export rates) through gold. The US already had elaborate ways to manage reserves to help in keeping the dollar steady. It was also a matter of dwindling gold reserves for the US.

Whatever your thoughts are about the gold standard, it was not instability that did it in.

[1]: https://www.wsj.com/articles/when-the-u-s-gave-up-gold-11625...

It was a lack of Turing completeness.

land also has a fixed supply and lots of people have argued that because it's a fixed supply it should be managed/regulated differently than things that have unlimited supply like say labor or produce

> Bitcoin is a commodity, ETH & all of crypto is just (unregistered) securities lying/pretending to be commodities.

Here's the problem with this:

Bitcoin doesn't exist below a society - its not independent of a functioning system made up of economic agents. Wheat and salt will continue to exist without human action.

And you've got it backwards: securities are just government and institution approved tokens existing on a consensus network. Some of us believe this consensus network is corrupt and should be rebuilt into something a bit more open source.

It doesn't matter. Governments decide what you do on the roads. It doesn't matter much if the you inspect the open source bricks making up the road, if the government can stop you from driving there.

Bitcoin is pretty much orthogonal to government control. Especially bitcoin with its completely open transaction history.

I would say the only merit to that is one plan for Ethereum mainnet’s roadmap is to introduce pruning, deleting old data for real, specifically smart contract states and held variables

This seems like it would break many smart contracts sometime later this decade, this isn't currently fleshed out

That aside, no other EVM is planning to do that, all code is compatible on all of them, and it doesn’t matter what Ethereum’s blockchain does

Having a roadmap is no merit. A roadmap means the system is centralized because a core group of people can change the rules. If it's centralized it's not censorship resistant and the supply can't be guaranteed to not increase and dilute holders therefore it's garbage.

Okay, like I wrote - its one roadmap. Its not the only one and its also not fully fleshed out

Do you have any thoughts on the points I made instead of centralization/maxi copypasta?

If it's centralized it's garbage and it doesn't matter whatever its roadmap is. Also ETH wont implement sharding because its breaks composability. It's just marketing.

This is rich. Bitcoin is literally controlled by a group called Bitcoin Core and yes they did change the rules when they refused to change the block size as Satoshi and the community intended. They neutered Bitcoin for life by making it top out at a useless 7 transactions per second forever.

That's dumb FUD.

https://endthefud.org/control

Amazing that anyone still believes this in 2022.

Here is Justin Bons on the broken security model of Bitcoin:

https://mobile.twitter.com/Justin_Bons/status/15947344601506...

Any answer ?

https://danhedl.medium.com/bitcoins-security-is-fine-93391d9...

I’ve read that from start to finish and it all seems a lot like hopes and prayers. I don’t see any convincing evidence that Bitcoin will continue to hold its position , and the overall assumption all over that essay is that Bitcoin is “prime real estate”.

It’s possible but I don’t see it. I’d say it’s an open question.

Here is Justin Bons thread on the governance model of Bitcoin, which I also consider broken

https://mobile.twitter.com/Justin_Bons/status/15994477745837...

Just leaving this here for reference for others as I don’t think I’ll sway you either way

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