Sidechains and Lightning, the New New Bitcoin
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
Instead I'd rather see people try to fix the problem of it being expensive to spend bitcoin sourced from many small inputs. This is a problem that the lightning network does not address.
So if the lightning network does get build, we'll all be able to use microtransaction channels which will slow the growth of the blockchain, but will still cost $20 in fees to send $100 worth of bitcoin sent in tiny UTXOs.
I see Lightning network as a great optimisation on top of Bitcoin.
Lighting does this. With a single blockchain transaction, you can conduct as many micropayment transactions as you desire with anyone else this network. After the first funding transaction (which is broadcast on the blockchain), there are no more blockchain transactions until you wish to settle the channel. All micropayment transactions are deferred and net settled on channel closure. Your current balance is updated off-blockchain securely with real bitcoin transactions (which current state can be broadcast at time by either party).
>So if the lightning network does get build, we'll all be able to use microtransaction channels which will slow the growth of the blockchain, but will still cost $20 in fees to send $100 worth of bitcoin sent in tiny UTXOs.
It'll probably cost a lot to set up the channel and to close it out, but you'll only do that once and it can last for years. It's equivalent to setting up a bank account. The actual day-to-day payments are off-chain (without counterparty risk).
We live in a society where everyone is stupid. People in our society will essentially give you things for free in exchange for green paper. It all works out because everybody is an idiot. You may have been ripped off for your services in exchange for green paper, but because you can always safely rip off some other idiot with your useless wads of green paper, everything is a-ok. The economy works because of mutual stupidity.
Bitcoin is not an MLM. But to get it to work people need to work on being stupid together. When I say hey, I'm going to sell you this worthless data on my computer called Bitcoin for $50, everyone else needs to say "Yes, I buy." When everyone participates in this idiocracy then bitcoin works. Which goes full circle to your original statement.
>You have to be a certain kind of stupid to think Bitcoin could possibly work.
paper was once issued by a bank clerk while taking your gold or other goods. the govt started to issue them and allowed you to exchange back to gold at any time. eventually they undid all that.
checks and credit cards also are tied very closely to existing monetary concepts to start off.
bit coin start alone. that's why most people consider it crazy. when money was being adopted, if it failed you could still use the coin metal or exchange it to metal. if bit coin fail, though luck.
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That article doesn't even mention bitcoin once.
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Colored_Coins
"Colored coins allow you to store assets on the Bitcoin blockchain."
These are very different things. You are wrong again.
I mean what other way is there online that resembles cash transactions?
Though yes, I'll grant you that Bitcoin certainly makes it easier to avoid financial regulations. So the next time I have to buy rocket launchers or chemical weapons I guess I'll keep it in mind, even if it does mean I have to be careful to avoid the next exit scam.
While most Bitcoiners are completely absurd idealists, You should consider that you are also a bit absurdly denialist on the subject. Money is a religion, it tends to bring out that behavior in people.
If we were talking about anything other than the bubble sort of online transactions it would be a different story. It is inherently less efficient than basically any other way you could think to do this, and why?
So that only the algorithm can ever change the money supply, not the spooky and scary "central bankers" somewhere. Never mind that they can't change money supply at a whim either...
But in the meantime a bunch of amateur economists get to rediscover all the problems of running an economy without regulations. Sorry For Your Loss, and all. And then all their defenders invariably go, "It's in the Wiki™" or, "It's just a beta, it'll be better in the future!!1".
And your reply about decentralized alternatives shows you simply don't understand what you're talking about here. Why did Silk Road ever get popular in the first place? Because you could trust it, something you can't do as easily with decentralized schemes. Brand names have value on a balance sheet for a reason.
If anything decentralized markets would be even more likely to involve exit scams—it's just the scale of the "Sorry For Your Loss" would be less.
But yes, let's continue to pump out $8-$10 worth of electricity for each and every single Bitcoin transaction made... having the freedom to be scammed in a deflationary economy is surely worth the climate impact, no?
Regarding decentralized markets - you clearly have no substantial background in the space. They would be decentralized by escrowing value in the blockchain, instead of in the custody of a site operator. If Silk Road were a brand name, dark markets would be dead. I have no idea what dark markets are popular right now, but clearly they are popular : http://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2015/05/daily-c...
Ahh, so the environmental cost of mining is what's got you bugged. That cost is borne by all actors involved in the system. They have every right to burn their energy, just like you do. But more specifically to your point, how much energy do the incumbent finance systems burn? If it's a drug-market transaction - it would be way over $8-$10 per transaction in terms of incarceration costs, import costs, etc.
If lightning network scales, that same $8-10 now secures the 4,000 TPS that your credit card system processes. And probably that $8-$10 is far more economical than the energy being burned by incumbent value routing systems.
Your brand of denialism is extreme. While it's certainly not entirely uncommon it's rapidly diminishing. Yours is a dying breed.
It's literally programmable money.
Also, when the monetary policy needs to change, you need to take all the money offline for a stop-the-world updated coordinated over IRC or even Reddit.
And it's "money" only in the sense it's an artificially scarce resource/reward created for wasting electricity to find magic numbers. Not entirely stable in the long term (as we've seen with 2-5 recent proposals to "fix it" in the past few months).
Many of the arguments made against bitcoin remind me of shit I heard in 90s against the web
But yeh the parent post is correct, the vitrol against bitcoin on HN is misplaced and downright strange, bitcoin is not perfect (neither was HTTP once upon a time) but as per article its evolving and improving and it sure as hell is interesting and innovative.
Anyways I probably will be downvoted, any time i get involved in Bitcoin threads its a if there is an army of paid downvoters whose boat and job bitcoin threatens, digital Luddites if you wish.
It's not better, even if it is a nifty hack.
Permission required to participate in Bitcoin = none
Permission required to participate in any electronic-fiat-money-transfer-system™ = mucho
Then make a better system which doesn't burn all of Ireland's electrical output to handle 2 transactions a second, to let people transfer fiat to each other. Maybe you can call it "Pal Pay".
"But then I'd have to follow regulations!! :("
But you'd have to with Bitcoin as well. Just ask Coinbase or Circle.
"Ah, but Bitcoin gives me the option to evade the law, unlike those assholes as Google or PayPal who need 'identification' and keep whining about 'money laundering'".
Perhaps, but you could build a system to track IOUs on Tor if you'd wanted and as long as your OPSEC wasn't as shitty as DPR's "my_crimes.txt" you could evade the law for awhile too.
As it stands those are mostly orthogonal concerns, although I do appreciate how nice it is for the Feds to be able to publicly view every transaction ever made in Bitcoin, something that couldn't be done on an off-blockchain system.
I've actually created a service (B2B) which requires bitcoin as I need atomicity, which bitcoin delivers perfectly (as long as I wait for N confirmations, it's pretty certain that I now _own_ the bitcoins). This is where PayPal fails, people can get refunds, chargebacks from credit card providers & PayPal can limit/suspend your account without notice (which they are famous for doing). I'm not a pro/anti bitcoin evangalist but I'm just throwing out there an example of what "programmable money" actually means. Bank transfers work well for non-refundable payments as well but most banks don't offer an API so bitcoins is the best alternative for my use case.
Other advantages over PayPal are the OP codes and multisig which are a powerful thing for programmers to use. Bitcoin is great for merchants/developers but it has many disadvantages for customers.
Atomicity is not a distributed database feature unique to Bitcoin, or even to PoW-based schemes in general.
Though if Bitcoin happens to work for your use case then by all means, don't reinvent the wheel.
> (as long as I wait for N confirmations, it's pretty certain that I now _own_ the bitcoins)
That's assuming your transaction makes it into a mined block. There have been backlogs of multiple blocks worth of transactions waiting to make it into a mined block, and there's been a huge blocksize debate going on partially because of that (which brings the potential for a fork of the blockchain into competing camps no less!)
Even after getting your transaction into a mined block, it's not unheard of to have orphaned blocks https://blockchain.info/charts/n-orphaned-blocks so you need to determine what level of atomicity you need. If it's actually 100% instead of 99.99% then even Bitcoin is not safe for your use case.
You need permission to use cash with someone's online infrastructure because the world is rife with bad actors.
A payment system isn't graded by "permissions", it is graded by how well it handles disputes. That is why in it's current state, the future-of-money-Bitcoin™ won't work for many, many people and isn't competitive. (even with multi-sig escrow)
You're canvassing this thread making vapid pro-bitcoin arguments, which is probably your attempt to reconcile reality with your constructed view of Bitcoin. It's okay to admit Bitcoin isn't competitive.
Bitcoin is a system with rules just as much as any other financial system, so the point that was made about "not needing permission" is factually wrong.
If you're trying to say that you'll simply break the law, you are also able to do so with fiat cash flows (just ask the cartels).
I'll grant you that Bitcoin requires more "permission" than "none", in the form of licenses and tax reporting in many usecases, as well as technical things like nobody having guaranteed permission to have their transaction processed (even if it follows all published rules.)
The rules are published in open-source code, and you don't have to "sign up" to submit transactions or follow the blockchain, or contract with any entity exclusively in control of the network. Maybe we're not adequately describing the unique quality, but it seems obvious to me that there's a big qualitative difference between e.g., Bitcoin and ACH. You can say it's not worth-it, useful, or interesting in your opinion, but what other financial system publishes all nominal rules and is governed by a self-regulating network that is 99% likely to let anyone do anything permitted by said rules?
I may also be overly optimistic about how long consensus will last, or how "fair" the system is in practice. Still, over the last few years, I'd say Bitcoin has been a uniquely open financial system.
I suppose the decentralization comes with efficiency and simplicity costs in both cases. Maybe they are worth it if your values align with it.
Maybe entrepreneurial HN'ers would tend to not like decentralized systems, because there's less control and profitability.
All in all, it is the perfect fuel for speculation and hoarding. Neither is something you want with a day to day main street trading currency.
Its proponents push it as a currency without a government to rule it, and that's fair, but it does have its economic assumptions baked into the code itself. And if it became widespread, there'd be no way for people to vote on making changes to those economic assumptions. They're baked into the code, and into the network.
Something that could potentially govern people's lives (i.e. a new kind of currency) that they have no say at all in operating? I'm not comfortable with that; the general arc of history has been to give people more power in the political and economic realms, and this is definitely a step back from that.
Aren't you talking about the USD here? How do you have any say at all in what the Federal Reserve decides?
Bitcoin, on the other hand, is open source. If it doesn't work for you, at least you can fork it and change it, or use another cryptocurrency just as easily (and many people have).
Do you think Venezuelans like that their currency inflation will be more than 200% this year? But hey, their currency is democratic so by definition it must be good and everybody should use it, right?
And yes, it is indeed possible to directly vote on Bitcoin policy changes (not that it's necessarily a good idea). Just take a look at some of the proposals about the on-going block size increase discussion.
Do you, personally, get to say who's in and who's out? No, of course not, your vote gets weighed up against all the millions of other voters in picking these people.
People often say "oh you have no power" and then, I guess, abstain from voting in order to make it absolutely true. But that's not it at all--we have lots of power, we have the power to persuade, talk amongst our friends and relations, convert others to our ideas, and voting's just the final test of how successful we were.
Politics doesn't start at the voting booth--nor does it end there. That's just one milestone along the democratic highway.
But compared to bitcoin? Where the average person could never plausibly voice an opinion at all? That's not democracy, and the only reason you like it at all, I'm guessing, is because you fancy yourself one of the people that could submit patches.
As for your last remark, let me know when bitcoin policy decisions show up in the voter's pamphlet. Then we'll have a democratic currency with it.
As for changing out your government's currency, of course you're not stuck with it--propose something better and do the leg-work to persuade everyone that Wizemanbucks are the right way to go. In time, with enough of a national coalition supporting you, you'll be able to build the political organizations to encourage people to vote for Wizemanbucks. Keep at it, and if people really do like your ideas, you'll have a new currency, just to your liking.
Trying to sneak it in, or tell people they're not fit for self-rule? Man, that fell out of style a long, long time ago.
I could be on the wrong side of history, but I don't care that much about it anyway, I'd rather think about the future than the past :)
Maybe I'm not understanding your thought process, but are you saying that if you were born several centuries ago, you'd never even want to have democracy because it went out of style after ancient Greece and the tendency was for rulers to be Kings (i.e. you'd be on the wrong side of history if you wanted democracy instead of a monarchy)? How is being on the wrong side of history a good argument?
If you want to convince me, give me a good argument about why the majority of people in my city/state/country knows what's best for me, better than me... :)
(By analogy, if we were living a few centuries ago, I'd be asking you why you think a King or their blood family would know what's best for me, better than me).
You want everyone to self-govern, and not impose rules on anyone else? Does that go all the way down to, which side of the road do you drive on? Do you have to obey stop signs?
What I'm saying is, since we do live together in communities, the whole "let everyone vote periodically as a decision-making process" is the best we've come up with, and Bitcoin is a step away from that--a currency that does have economic decisions built into it, but changing those is never subject to a vote by the citizenry.
You know what's interesting? Whenever I bring up this whole "Bitcoin is undemocratic" idea, no bitcoin defender ever says, yeah, we should work to include more people in how it's run. Not one.
You'd think, if it were money for the people (i.e. not controlled by a government), that they'd want it to be responsive to the people, too.
Also, by "on the wrong side of history," I mean to say that you're pushing for ideas that have already been discarded as not as good as their successors--when future generations look back on those who oppose things like "society" (which I gather from your declaration that you don't want anyone governing or imposing rules on anyone else), they'll say, "yes, that was wrong, too."
But other than ensuring freedom and basic human rights (and perhaps some other minimal rules), why should you have the right to decide how other people live? Do you really think you (or rather, the majority of people) are really that wise? Isn't that being pretentious?
I will give you a challenge if you want. Give me one law or rule that exists now (in this society that you like so much) but wouldn't exist in my view of society that I explained above, and I will tell you how that law is ethically wrong in at least one (admittedly, possibly slightly contrived) situation.
> You know what's interesting? Whenever I bring up this whole "Bitcoin is undemocratic" idea, no bitcoin defender ever says, yeah, we should work to include more people in how it's run. Not one.
Well, the point of my comments in this whole thread was to explain to you why a democratic vote is not a particularly good decision-making process at all (by the way, I find it amazing how when people see the word "democratic" they automatically shutdown their brains and assume it's good... it must sound like "bacon" in some accents or something :-).
So do you also want decisions at companies to be done by a democratic vote? Should all the people in the country (or in the world) decide how Microsoft or Apple is run?
The point of Bitcoin being open source is that if you don't like it, YOU can create your own Bitcoin alternative literally with the click of a button! (And again, many people have!).
So why are you imposing your economic policy on Bitcoin when you can have your own economic policy along with all the people that agree with you, call it Frondocoin, click on a button and have it created 5 minutes later?
Now compare with your way of doing things, that you said yourself:
> propose something better and do the leg-work to persuade everyone that Wizemanbucks are the right way to go. In time, with enough of a national coalition supporting you, you'll be able to build the political organizations to encourage people to vote for Wizemanbucks. Keep at it, and if people really do like your ideas, you'll have a new currency, just to your liking.
Does this really sound easier, cheaper, or better in any way than what I described? Do you even think that what you said is even possible or realistic in any way?
You think that if I don't agree with the way the USD is managed, then with some effort I would be able to do what you proposed and change the national currency of the USA?
I think you are being deluded if you think that's even remotely possible. It doesn't even matter which economic policy I wanted (not even if I think that the interest rates should be only 0.05% higher than what they are now).
People don't vote Republicans or Democrats because they think some interest rate should be 0.05% higher. They vote because charismatic politicians go on television and say what people want to hear...
Perhaps it's because a forum full of software programmers who aren't mesmerized by the technical merits of the insanely overhyped bitcoin software are exhausted from being told that they just don't understand why this software is the future of money that will disrupt finance and liberate the masses from the tyranny of banking. I think every programmer can agree that bitcoin is a unique and interesting technical feat and even a pretty impressive demonstration of what software can achieve, but any concessions to bitcoin's technical merit seems to invite absurd levels of over-the-top evangelism that grates against any patience for bitcoin is a technical topic.
With all that stated, I still think the GP's comment is unnecessarily condescending and doesn't add anything constructive to the conversation.
> Wag.com, introduced Wednesday, sells 10,000 pet items like food, litter, toys, clothing and grooming supplies. Quidsi, which was acquired by Amazon.com for $500 million last year, also runs Diapers.com for baby supplies, Soap.com for drugstore items and BeautyBar.com for cosmetics.
I think she might hate me, but I don't think Amazon is going out of business.