It's a shame there's so much money, probably the difference between some people being equal to their colleagues and being paper millionaires, that there doesn't seem to be anywhere to read about this stuff any more as an interested observer. I remember a few years ago /r/bitcoin was somewhere you could read about news and stuff, today it's just people attacking BCH and going insane. I get it, this is like politics except it moves way faster and the result impacts these people immediately and directly - but I wish there was a way to understand the fascinating cryptocurrency world without all the passion. /r/btc seems to be the same on the BCH side.
/r/ethereum (and the Ethereum community in general) is a much more friendly place. More technical discussion, more collaboration, less "everyone else must lose" politics
On the other hand the technical quality of the discorse tends to be really low. Things are priased, encouraged, and even rewarded monetarily when they have gaping vulnerabilities or incentive systems that weren't even halfway thought through.
It's a big circle jerk that ends up promoting broken technology. Yes, great to be away from the politics, but no, not a good place to learn cryptocurrency design.
Honestly, I attribute this to the fact that ethereum made the decision to keep the subreddit dedicated to technical discussion and to have a separate subreddit dedicated to trading, memes, etc.
I don't know of anywhere to do that in the Bitcoin world, but some newer cryptocurrencies have communities that are a lot more like the early years of Bitcoin.
I agree. I created /r/bitcointech (https://www.reddit.com/r/bitcointech) a few years ago but never got it off the ground. If anyone wants to help me contribute and moderate it I could give it another try.
There are still a lot of great resources, but they are scattered. Just look at the bitcoin-dev mailing list with Simplicity paper, and the great talks on Lightning Network on the Scaling Bitcoin conference. I just wish the good presenters would have had more time.
I believe in both BTC and BCH in principle, and think it's good that the two factions are going separate ways because honestly speaking I've been disgusted with how the entire bitcoin community is relying on a bunch of people who do nothing more than tweeting all day spreading propaganda.
These developers really would have made much more progress if Twitter didn't exist.
That said, after the fork I thought things would cool down but I was wrong, it only intensified the propaganda and now I see so many people spreading false information and things taken out of context just for their own profit.
And these people even shit on people who think bigger and say the two should coexist. The only reason people say the two shouldn't coexist in my opinion is either because of their ego or their greed (probably because they sold all their BCH and put it into BTC, and yes I only mostly see this behavior now on BTC people side)
I think it's good for the future of cryptocurrency that two coexist because there's no saying one of the two may fail or go corrupt one day, and not having a strong enough alternative would mean we will have ended up with a compromised future.
But to be honest, I'm getting sick of many of BTC core developers attacking BCH people as well as those [NO2x] and [NOBCH] idiots who just bitch on anyone who:
1. either sees any future in BCH
2. thinks it may be a good thing if the two can coexist.
I think it is an important factor because nowadays whenever I think about building a piece of technology that will help the BTC community as a whole, the first thing that comes to my mind is, "By doing this all I'm going to do is make these assholes--who by the way do nothing but tweet around all day while I'm working on these things--richer, at a faster pace than myself". I hope other cryptocurrency developers learn from this and try to be "nice" so that the community actually thinks that these "early adopters" deserve their worth, which will help with contribution.
> That said, after the fork I thought things would cool down but I was wrong
The issue is that both chains compete directly for hash power, since their hash mechanism is identical. If every miner is "rational" (for a simplified definition of "rational"), they would all mine on the most profitable chain, and the least profitable chain would instantly stop working. That is, the continued existence of BTC is an existential threat to BCH, and the continued existence of BCH is an existential threat to BTC. Therefore, those who have a stake on either of those chains feel threatened by the other chain.
When computational hash power leaves the network, the difficulty won't readjust and transactions will slow down and clog for at least 2 weeks unless computational hash power returns.
"I've been disgusted with how the entire bitcoin community is relying on a bunch of people who do nothing more than tweeting all day spreading propaganda."
The fish rots from the head. See my posting about Brock Pierce, Director of the Bitcoin Foundation, and the film about him, "An Open Secret".
The creepiest comment on that photo is "I'd love to see a pic of you shaking the Donald's hand, each wearing your respective hats. And Baron is going to need your advice and counsel. Need to make this happen."
The bitcoin foundation plays a minimal role at best in the bitcoin ecosystem. They've never been very important, and they remain unimportant to this day
I don't see why the two should co-exist, given there is just no reason for the existence of BTC looking at the present landscape and positioning of the two. Forcing all the transaction throughput into a channel with bandwidth no greater than a few Fax machines is just stupid, and no argument exists to justify this position at all. It's really amazing that the forces backing it managed to delay it coming to a head all these years, but now that it finally has the conclusion appears mind numbingly obvious.
That's because you're looking at it from transaction point of view. The BTC guys have been selling the "reserve currency" aspect for a while now, ever since it became apparent that there won't be a viable scaling solution anytime soon.
So just looking at it from pure utilitarian view BCH is superior, but BTC team has a point too, because the larger block size does mean it has higher chance of being centralized.
The thing is, nobody knows if this will actually result in centralization, nor does anyone know if being moderately centralized will be as bad as we expect. Anyone claiming to know what will happen is either ignorant or a liar.
Anyway, to make my point clear, let's imagine BCH does succeed and end up dominating and BTC dies off. There's a chance that BCH will lead to centralization and won't be so different from what the Internet ended up becoming. If you look at how the Internet works nowadays, it's extremely centralized from top layer all the way to the bottom. For example DNS companies can ban certain organizations from existing online simply because there are so few DNS companies, and your ISP can monitor all your traffic and sue you if you download something on Torrent. And Facebook and Google owns everyone's attention online, etc.
People who resist BCH are those who think BCH will end up evolving in that direction and kill off BTC in the process because obviously it's much more user friendly.
If something like this happens, it's good to have an alternative which has equivalent influence. Also having a competition plays into the game theory of how each party will behave going forward. They won't be able to make drastic decisions if they have a close competitor. I don't think Ethereum is it even though I'm super bullish on Ethereum, because Ethereum is an entirely different beast.
> the larger block size does mean it has higher chance of being centralized.
That's actually false though. It really is that indisputably simple especially at the on chain throughput levels being discussed presently. The medium of exchange use case does not compromise the store of value use case, it actually is a necessary component of it. Non mining full nodes are not an essential aspect of the security model, and were never intended to be. The core client is just bad. And the only reasonable actual excuse for the limiting of on chain scaling to the level forced by bitcoin core is because it's in the business interests of blockstream.
>the larger block size does mean it has higher chance of
being centralized.
Centralization already happened with BTC/BTC-CASH. ASICs are operated at scale in data centers with access to cheap electricity.
Hard drives are much simpler to acquire and maintain versus the already niche ASIC market and mining pools.
Also it's worth noting the BTC community used to praise microtransactions and digital cash payments for market goods, but now that the utility is clogged and combersome the goal posts have been shifted from "this software enables payments" to "this software shouldn't be used for payments except in rare cases".
> Centralization already happened with BTC/BTC-CASH.
As much as I agree with you on how it's become "more" centralized, this is not a binary thing.
So my answer to this is NO, centralization has not "already happened". Yes, it may be getting more and more centralized, but it's not some switch you can flip on and off.
This type of absolute expression was exactly what I was ranting about.
Note that I agree with most of what you said. I'm just not a fan of these statements of absolutism.
It seems there is currently more hashpower behind BCH than BTC. [1] Because of the current price surge mining bch became way more profitable, but this will change with the next adjustment.
If more hashpower sticks with BCH, I would consider it to be the winner.
Mining pool operators are in a position to manipulate the markets.
Given the extremely low liquidity of all the exchanges (large holders often move their funds off-line), the markets rates are trivially manipulated. This in turn manipulates miner incentives.
Social media is a shit show of shills and propaganda from all angles. So really only time will tell.
The truth of this statement cannot be emphasized enough. I think one of the real weaknesses of the crypto world is the complete absence of a community where people whose mouths are not connected directly to their brainstems can talk and discuss issues related to crypto -- and I mean not just about investment (I'm not very interested in that) but about relevant technological and social issues. There is literally no place to have a sane discussion on any of this that I've found -- would _love_ to be corrected if someone knows better.
I think the larger problem is that most anyone talking about cryptocurrencies has a financial interest in them, and indeed, people without a financial interest are considered biased against them and not worth listening to.
>Social media is a shit show of shills and propaganda from all angles. So really only time will tell.
The r/bitcoin and r/btc sub-reddits really went to trash recently. Everyone's been bickering about their own opinions. Worst of all, constant front page vitriol about each other.
I read /r/BitcoinMarkets. It's more centred around day trading, they are very optimistic about the future (i.e. bullish, "to the moon!"), so take their opinions with salt, but it's a good, up-to-date source of information.
> Mining pool operators are in a position to manipulate the markets.
I don't know what this fixation is on hashrate. As long as it doesn't drop to low enough a level for someone who wants to attack it to be successful, it doesn't make any difference to the coin's functionality.
Anyone with the ability to buy or sell a large amount of crypt can manipulate the markets. This holds doubly true in the middle of the night on a weekend.
It makes a giant difference in the amount of time it takes to mine blocks, especially during hashrate fluctuations, where a currency without a responsive difficulty adjustment algorithm (e.g., Bitcoin) can be 'stranded' with a too-hard difficulty, which means transactions don't get processed, which means there's a giant lag in money movement and fee escalation, etc. etc.
The interplay between hashrate, difficulty, txs, fees, price, and sentiment is pretty complicated and definitely important. See http://www.fork.lol to see this illustrated.
> Social media is a shit show of shills and propaganda from all angles. So really only time will tell.
I'm curious about historic precedents - I really don't know much about the history of currency. There must have been analogues in the past - I know Isaac Newton famously went to war with counterfeiters, but that (and vague memories of hearing about bank currency in the US) about the only instance of currency competition I know of.
Anyone want to recommend a quality book on the topic?
Which is a good argument for off-chain scaling (i.e. Segwit). As it is miners have way too much power and their incentives are not aligned with the holders of the currency. Off chain scaling massively reduces their ability to hold the network hostage: value can still be transferred even if transactions slow to a crawl.
That https://fork.lol site is fascinating. Thanks for linking to it.
Right now BCH has a way higher hash rate than the difficulty, but that is going to adjust in 8hr or sooner if the trend continues. At that point, BTC will again be more profitable and you would expect everyone to switch back. Meanwhile, the fees on BTC are going way up because that chain gets used more frequently. That will also pressure miner back to the BTC chain.
That happened when BCH was new. What happened then was that everyone switched to BTC, the BCH chain stopped completely for a few hours, and then BCH's extra difficulty adjustment rule kicked in and lowered the difficulty a lot, so everyone switched to BCH again. That oscillation was leading to periods of nearly zero blocks and periods of nearly a block per minute for the BCH chain. To prevent that, some BCH supporters left enough miners in the BCH chain that the extra difficulty adjustment rule didn't kick in, even when it was less profitable.
From what I've read, this time there's a difference: in a few days, BCH (or at least some of it) will have a hardfork which changes the extra difficulty adjustment rule. I haven't seen a good explanation of the new rule so far (only complaints that it was unilaterally decided by some developers), but depending on how it works this might be the last time miners can get thousands of blocks in a few days, which would explain why this time there's so much hash power in the BCH chain. And depending on how it works, there might be no longer a need for BCH supporters to keep enough miners in the BCH chain to prevent the extra difficulty adjustment rule from kicking in, so it's even possible that every miner switches to BTC at once.
On the other hand, if the new extra difficulty adjustment rule works, jumping from one chain to the other might become less profitable, so some miners might decide to stay on the BCH chain permanently. These miners might be now selling their BTC for BCH, which would neatly explain the rise in the BCH price and the drop in the BTC price.
I wonder what the actual liquidity is of converting BCH in to hard currency? (which ultimately miners need to pay for operations and capital expenditures.)
It was blatantly obvious (to me) that something funny going on at MtGox meant the price was not real. The number of global exchanges, alt coins, and overall crytpocurrency appreciation in 2017 makes it almost impossible to sniff out potential problems. Despite the radical transparency of the blockchain ledger, all of the other trading and exchange activity is quite opaque.
And indeed the difficulty adjusted and the bulk of the miners returned to BTC. They have too much money invested to have an ideology. For the most part, miners will follow the money. Price discovery, you will have mining on each chain in proportion to its profits. Some might switch for other motivations, but a money motivated miner will balance him out.
I find the supposed "voting power" of the miners to be a mirage. When it comes down to it they just follow the money.
That's actually a bad situation for bch. Because of the EDA, their block reward ends up being equal in USD to the bitcoin block reward, regardless of their own price.
Basically, every 12 hours the difficulty resets and then they get 2 weeks worth of mining + inflation in just a few days (at lower prices, just a few hours).
Long-term, whichever is the winner will gain the most price and therefore the most hashpower.
Neither hashpower nor price make it the winner. In the long term, actual people wanting to hold & use it makes a winner. Price and hashpower follow that.
Inside of one coin hashpower makes the winner, because the chain with the most accumulated difficulty wins. It makes sense to transfer this to the relation of different coins. currently BTC wins, but if miners would stick to bch this might change.
I consider it a winner a long time ago, sold my bitcoins for it when the ratio was 0.15, accumalated some more at 0.055 and now its 0.25, I predict 1 BTC = 0.5 BCH before the end of the year
I was discussing the possible price crossover between Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash with a colleague just a few days ago after I found out about the 'New York Agreement' which had been signed by several major exchanges.
If you read about the New York Agreement and you understand the technical implications of it then you should have a very clear idea about what is going to happen when the exchanges start honoring that agreement.
> We agree to immediately support the following parallel upgrades to the bitcoin protocol, which will be deployed simultaneously and based on the original Segwit2Mb proposal:
- Activate Segregated Witness at an 80% threshold, signaling at bit 4
- Activate a 2 MB hard fork within six months
Where does Bitcoin Cash fit in here, and what's going to happen when the exchanges start honouring it? Was BCH the hard fork they talked about? What hasn't been honoured yet?
The hard fork the NY agreement mentions was a protocol upgrade that was scheduled for 11/16/2017. The Segwit upgrade took hold, but the second "2mb hard fork" part proved very contentious, and was later cancelled/suspended citing lack of community support. (That fork was frequently called B2X or S2X).
There is some argument about who all actually signed on to the NY agreement - whether they represented the community at large, or just a smaller non-binding group. The contentiousness was overtly regarding the "2mb" increase's long-term consequences, but IMO it may have also been because adopting it would have essentially kicked out the existing software development group, replacing with a smaller less experienced group.
If the hard fork had happened, the NY agreement asserted it would have simply upgraded the BTC protocol; rather than create a new coin. Agreeing exchanges would have had to go along with the protocol upgrade. But concensus never formed, particularly among exchanges & businesses that didn't sign the NYA.
---
Bitcoin Cash / BCH was a separate coin that forked off of BTC around the same time as the NYA, but wasn't part of the NYA. It increased the block size (the "2mb" bit), but explicitly rejects segregated witness and some related changes. It's kinda odd it happened, because those involved in BCH were leaders in the NY agreement itself; so BCH be seen as an early repudiation of the NY agreement by it's own champions.
The New York Agreement was canceled the other day.
Also, comments like "if you understand the technical implications of it then you should have a very clear idea about what is going to happen" are really unhelpful, like a no-op soaked in condescension.
Bitcoin core needs to raise the blocksize, the transaction fees are too high and the delays are way too long. If eventually the lightning network works as good as they claim it will they can always lower it later. I don't believe a majority of the holders or users want transactions costing $5. But the core developers are holding the bitcoin's github hostage, along with many of the websites and forums.
I used to believe this too, but not anymore. High transactions fees and slow times are a problem, but increasing the blocksize is not the answer. BTC can currently process 7 tx/second with 1mb blocks. If you double the block size, you get to 14 tx/s, it scales linearly. PayPal processes ~150 tx/s, Visa processes ~5000 tx/s, and can burst up to 50k tx/s. This is orders of magnitude off, and would require scaling blocks up to 1GB. By setting the precedent that increasing blocksize is the answer to slow transactions, you open the door to a future where only a very limited number of powerful entities can afford to run a full node, which brings you right back to a centralized currency. In order to scale BTC, it basically needs to move to off-chain transactions or some other new tech. The devs know this, they want fast transactions too, but they don't want to risk centralization to get there.
> they can always lower it later
I don't think this is true. Once you have blocks on the chain greater than 1mb, those blocks must be valid forever. That means protocol must support new blocksize forever.
One problem is that the proposed offchain solutions are centralized.
Also, it's misleading to say that large blocks make bitcoin centralized. Even with large blocks, there will still be enough players that the ledger is still protected through proof of work. In any case the hashing power remains centralized regardless of block size.
You are misunderstanding the meaning of the word "decentralized" when it comes to blockchains. It doesn't mean "available to be run by the masses". It refers to the solving of the Byzantine General problem through proof of work to prevent tampering and double spend, which would still function fine even if only a few thousand nodes existed around the world.
>One problem is that the proposed offchain solutions are centralized.
Centralized off-chain solutions are much less of a problem. Consider paypal. Everyone hates it but they're the only game in town because its network is self-contained; network effects prevent any legitimate competition. With centralized transactions through bitcoin, there are no network effects to prevent an upstart from competing in this space.
If Bitcoin fees are so high that you have to use Lightning, then effectively Lightning is Bitcoin and you're potentially trapped in a centralized system.
Neither cost or ability of the everyman to use bitcoin define whether it's centralized or not. It is a decentralized algorithm by design, and will remain so no matter what changes in block size or how many people use it or who uses it or how much it costs to use it.
You are talking about concentration and consolidation at the human and social level, which does not change anything about how the blockchain is designed or functions, and is orthogonal. And nothing is going to change that. The government could shut off all electricity and the blockchain is dead.
> Once you have blocks on the chain greater than 1mb, those blocks must be valid forever. That means protocol must support new blocksize forever.
You could have the consensus rules take the block height into consideration, so blocks after a certain # must be under X MB, but previous blocks can be up to Y MB.
Can't you just increase blocksize to 2-4 megabytes for now until a more scalable long term solution comes into play (segwit)? Sounds like a "best of both worlds" solution.
The same way that a temporary solution postpones any definitive solution of any problem. Every time.
And, as the GP pointed out, the sum of practical temporary solutions will have a very bad long-term effect. Of course, that doesn't mean that anybody will change course.
> I don't believe a majority of the holders or users want transactions costing $5.
I can't speak for others, but above all I would want the costs to be predictable. There is no reasonable way to divine transaction fees at the moment.
BitPay certainly doesn't help. They handle the payments for most sites where I sometimes pay in Bitcoin. After submitting a payment they'll show a page saying "we saw your transaction, but the fees you specified seem pretty low". That's not helpful. What would be helpful would be to tell me before I pay how much they recommend as fee. If it's $5, I may be willing to pay it if I'm sure that will placate the BitPay gods.
>I don't believe a majority of the holders or users want transactions costing $5
You might be right, but keep in mind that there's also a significant chunk of people mostly sending amounts in the tens of thousands. $5 doesn't feel like very much then.
But you can't order Pizza (or drugs) with Bitcoin anymore. And I don't see much of use case of a currency that can't do that. Without adoption a fiat currency like bitcoin is not worth anything.
And this is a perfect example of the disconnect that is behind the current problems in the Bitcoin community. Why would 5 extra dollars matter for a pizza purchase? Are you kidding?
True, but someone on the minimum wage is not the current target of businesses that accept Bitcoin. Their target market is more likely techies, probably reasonably well paid, and in particular with Bitcoin holdings that have appreciated over time. For these people, $5 may not be a big deal, and in particular it may be an even lesser deal since it's not priced in dollars but in Bitcoin. If my Bitcoins have appreciated tenfold since I bought them, that $5 fee suddenly corresponds to only $.50 that I put in in terms of dollars. Also, such people are interested in seeing Bitcoin succeed in the long term, and supporting the network with fees, even such high ones, is one way of contributing towards that. If you want, you can see Bitcoin's "value added services" as supporting real-world use, which supports a high price for the Bitcoins you bought for cheap.
So... fitting squarely into the stereotype sketched above, I don't mind that much paying a few dollars for ordering a couple of pizzas. My problem (as mentioned in a cousin comment) is the annoying unpredictability of the fees.
But if Bitcoin is competing with another crypto such as Bitcoin Cash when buying the pizza... why not just buy it for next to no fee with Bitcoin Cash? Doesn't matter who the target is - its a no brainer. People don't want to spend extra money.
Techie here. Paid well. If I have the choice to pay $15 for a pizza with a credit card and $20 for a pizza with BTC I will choose the credit card every time.
Good for you. If I have the choice to pay $15 for a pizza with a credit card and $0 for a pizza with BTC I bought a long time ago at 1/500th of their current value, I'll factor in several things.
Not at all what I said. You can spend them any time. But if you spend them, you have to realize that you lose the current value they have, not the value you got them for. So that Pizza costs you 5$ more with bitcoin.
In a certain sense, yes, sure. What I'm saying is that, due to appreciation of my Bitcoins, those $5, as well as the actual price of the pizza, were essentially a gift to me from the Bitcoin community.
I don't mind spending free food tokens that were gifted to me. Even if spending the free food tokens costs me fees (expressed in free food tokens), and I might possibly trade those free food tokens for a slightly higher amount in dollars (but incurring other fees). Especially since, if everyone stopped using their free food tokens, everyone's free food tokens would stop being usable.
I would certainly maximize my pizza buying power by minimizing the transaction fee costs. I.e. convert a larger fraction to USD and incur the overhead only once. If you convert the value of 4 pizzas, you get a 5th for "free". But maybe I just like pizza more ;)
The hard forks should have destroyed the notion that bitcoin is a deflationary currency. Anybody can double the number of coins on the market with enough support from miners. It seems like the price hasn’t taken notice of the fact that bitcoin isn’t a scarce commodity.
There is certainly an argument to be made that, for many of the uses that people have for "bitcoins", BTC and BCH are close substitutes. Conversely, a "jstanleytoken" is probably not a close substitute for either BTC or BCH, and is certainly not a close substitute for dollars.
Another way of looking at this is to observe the market cap of both currencies after a fork; in theory you'd expect the total market cap to remain unchanged, since the newly forked currency is presumably either worthless OR has worth only to the extent that it removes value from the original currency. In practice, this doesn't seem to be occurring.
Really? In my personal life I find that BCH and BTC are just as widely accepted. :)
(...which is to say, precisely 0 vendors accept either, of course. Most people are not picking a crypto currency based on their ability to conveniently buy a coffee with it just yet.)
Playing devil's advocate: it doesn't create more Bitcoin, but it creates more "currency". Before the split, you had X oldBitcoin; after the split, you have X oldBitcoin + X newBitcoin. If a newBitcoin is worth 1/Y oldBitcoin, the effect should be as if the supply of oldBitcoin had increased by 1/Y.
But you can't say it is inflation because purchasing power didn't decrease. Theoretically the value of the old coin will be (Y-1)/Y so everybodies wealth increased by 1. If it's greater than 1 good! You can even call it deflation, let's hope it's stable. If it's less than 1 something went very very wrong with multiple possible reasons: let's hope killing one restores the balance.
The entire "banks create money" argument is based around the question of whether a money-like obligation is in fact money. See the two different definitions of "money supply" in macroeconomics.
This doesn't seem to be quite the same. A Bitcoin fork is more like somehow giving everyone who holds dollars an equal number of jstanleytokens, and jstanleytokens can be passed around just like dollars and are still hard to counterfeit. My wallet with $50 in it now has $50 and 50 jstanleytokens. The corner store may not sell me a soda in exchange for jstanleytokens, so you haven't exactly increased the number of dollars in circulation, but it seems to me that you've done something that will have significant effects.
The value of a dollar only changes if some people decide they want a jstanleytoken more than they want a dollar (i.e they start to buy jstanleytokens).
Otherwise the value of a jstanleytoken will remain at 0 and the value of a dollar will be unaffected.
I don't see why you'd need jstanleytokens to be more desirable. They'd merely need to be desirable in some way.
Let's say that the corner store arbitrarily decides that they'll accept jstanleytokens at 10% the value of a dollar. I can go buy my soda for 20 jstanleytokens, or whatever it would be, instead of $2. That decreases the demand for dollars, and thus the value of a dollar.
But since everybody got both they didn't lose anything: they got some jstanleycoins too (unless you were lending dollars, then you may not get them both back). So the wealth/spending power didn't decrease, there was no inflation.
I'd say there is inflation, just as there would be if everyone got two dollars for each dollar they hold. But the idea that people wouldn't lose anything is true.
I think that "unless you were lending dollars" bit is a really important aspect of this, though. Lending happens a lot. This is true even in the Bitcoin world. We don't normally call it "lending," but that's what people do whenever they store coins on an exchange.
This has been a major problem with these forks, too. You deposit some Bitcoin with an exchange, then there's a fork... do they owe you the forked currency as well, or not? There's no obvious answer to that.
Anyone can but it still takes something significant to get traction - in this case it was a contentious difference in ideology. As long as a new token can fill a new need or niche, it can survive.
hmm.. what's happening is a bit of bitcoin weakness, a lot of hash power came in, raised difficulty and then left, 40% or so, tomorrow the difficult should adjust, the dangers of centralized mining, although these shenanigans may lead to a proof of work change.
aka the "frisbee on the roof" attack, it's been a known danger for years. The danger is that the difficulty recalibration time is measured in blocks, not in actual time - so if taken to extreme levels such that miners drop out, there is no guarantee that recalibration will ever occur. And profit is inextricably linked to block time here.
(and note that "attack" in this sense is not necessarily deliberate in the sense of an attacker, if Bitcoin Cash or another coin suddenly becomes drastically more profitable for some reason it can occur naturally. It's more of a vulnerability than an actual attack. It's a state-machine state that is potentially non-recoverable without a coordinated fix.)
Bitcoin Cash actually includes a specific fix for this attack, which is why hashrate has been seesawing so badly between the two networks - BTH becomes unprofitable, the power moves back to the BTC network, then the frisbee fixer kicks in and reduces difficulty, which spikes profitability back up.
I hope nobody feels it's inappropriate to name a sexual harasser leading the Bitcoin community, but is there any chance the recent coverage of sexual harassment and rape in Hollywood, SAG AFTRA, and other industries will open more people's eyes about Brock Pierce, the Director of the Bitcoin Foundation?
"In 2000, three young actors filed a civil lawsuit claiming Pierce sexually abused them, also naming fellow Digital Entertainment Network executives Chad Shackley and Marc Collins-Rector. He was an Executive VP at Digital Entertainment Network when he was arrested with other company executives by Interpol in Spain in May 2002."
Here's a brief South Park style documentary on the DEN scandal that Fucked Company posted contemporaneously: "Dot Com Boom & Bust - Digital Entertainment Network":
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14674632
It's like Pizzagate, but true! (But you should still ignore anything Alex Jones has to say about it.)
If you think it's just a joke or conspiracy theory, then watch the film "An Open Secret" which goes into much more lurid detail with lots of first person testimony and evidence, that shows what's been uncovered in the time since Fucked Company's much shorter, less serious but largely accurate documentary. Not surprisingly they've had a lot of trouble distributing that film.
"According to Gabe Hoffman who financed the film: "We got zero Hollywood offers to distribute the film. Not even one. Literally no offers for any price whatsoever." On 12 October 2017, Hoffman and Valentinas released the film for nine days on Vimeo "to commemorate serial predator Harvey Weinstein finally being exposed." It went viral, and free viewing was then extended for a longer period due to the interest shown in the film, with over 3 million viewings garnered on various social media platforms in the first two weeks."
"Leaders of SAG-AFTRA tried to sanitize director Amy Berg’s explosive documentary about the sexual abuse of child actors in Hollywood, threatening to sue her if she didn’t remove all references to the union from An Open Secret, which opens in a platform release in three cities beginning today. It may be the first time a Hollywood union has ever threatened to take legal action against a filmmaker over the content of a film."
Here's the money shot where they show the pills, the gun safe, the receipts and emails from Brock Pierce to Chad Shackley and Marc Collins Rector, in which Brock Pierce is sending Chad Shackley email with photos of scantily dressed young boys for him cherry pick for recruiting and grooming.
"It's an email from Brock to Chad. And it says 'What do you think?' and then there's a picture of a young boy. This one says from Brock to Chad, 'another interesting one from MI'. Chad's response on that one was 'That's a yummy one :)' And Brock writes to him 'Would you like me to contact either of them?' Chad writes 'They both look cute, but what's their deal?'"
There was some discussion of these facts with more links to evidence in the thread about "Silicon Valley Women, in Cultural Shift, Frankly Describe Sexual Harassment (nytimes.com)".
Why invest in something that is clearly being driving up and down by bots? Virtual currency will never work so long as there is speculation. Fools gold.
Right, but stocks weren't invented and sold to the digital community as a currency.
Is that no longer a thing? Does the cryptocurrency community acknowledge that their product is just a big gambling machine requiring the energy a medium country?
I recently was listening to a podcast (Sam Harris maybe?) where they were talking about the possibility of super intelligent AI being set to a complex task... but then finds itself spending some huge amount of resources churning out paperclips because of some erroneous assumptions about their value to solution.
If we're the super intelligent AI designed by some other "real" intelligence for a purpose, I'd say cryptocurrency is our paperclip moment.
The paperclip story is usually about an AI whose purpose is in fact to make paperclips, but it realizes that it can only create maximum paperclips if it prevents anyone from ever shutting it off. Then it solves the problem of subjugating humanity as an auxiliary task for the much more important goal of creating more paperclips.
To stay with the analogy, cryptocurrency may be such an auxiliary task for the actual goal (whatever that is, I'm not really convinced that Coherent Extrapolated Volition can be made to work).
The speculation driven movement of the BTC cannot be compared to the speculation on the USD or any other currency. 0.01% and 50000% are all percentages, but the number is so different as to completely change what we are talking about.
> Speculation is unquestionably a good thing.
Maybe, but usual only if the resulting volatility results in lower price for the consumer, or makes a market.
But then again, BTC has no market for goods nor services compared to the currency it is bought and sold with (its legitimate non-fictional market is so low as to be non-existent).
> The speculation driven movement of the BTC cannot be compared to the speculation on the USD or any other currency.
Care to explain this a little more? At face value I'm not sure I agree with that statement, but I get the feeling I'm not understanding what you're trying to say.
I think the people are underestimating the power of what RPOW does. The tech/math behind the blockchain.
If interested, I have a shameless plug for an article that might give added context to this crypto world, but I'm willing to pay you (in BCH) for it. If you have a twitter account mention me and ask for it.
