Comment by jbmorgado | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jbmorgado | Hacker News Reader

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It's quite telling that you don't want me to speak for other people but just in your answer before projected your irrational feelings about bitcoin on me and on what I feel or don't feel for bitcoin (so that we get straight, I don't "feel" anything for a technology, that doesn't make sense).

When I referred the world at large, I referred the world at large that already knows bitcoin, not the world population. And from those, most of them obviously didn't get in bitcoin (in fact the ones that did get in bitcoin are pulling out as can be clearly seen in the volume of bitcoin transactions since 2014).

And it is a clearly failed financial experiment because:

1 - It concentrated all the wealth in the hands and very few people in only a couple of years (http://www.bitcoinrichlist.com/top100)

2 - The majority of bitcoin transactions are used for ilegal purposes (http://www.coindesk.com/dark-web-markets-processed-more-bitc...)

3 - It's more inconvenient than existing payment systems to use so people don't use it (http://finance.yahoo.com/news/bitcoin-is-dead-says-prominent...)

4 - People are so uninterested and suspicious of bitcoin that you actually loose money if you present bitcoin as a payment/donation method (http://bitcoinist.net/mozilla-study-shows-bitcoin-negative-i...)

5 - Complete unregulation keeps meaning high scale theft and complete unreliability of bitcoin markets (MtGox and many others)

All in all, the world at large - in this case not only the ones that know bitcoin - clearly understands that the financial system needs more regulation not less, and yet, you put bitcoin in the table with is utter lack of regulation and try to claim its a great thing that will solve the world's financial problems but you don't give absolutely no sane argument or metrics about how it is doing that. And that was exactly my original point.

I'm absolutely fine if the world at large doesn't use Bitcoin. People who understand the value of it will continue using it. And the fact that bitcoin is used for illegal purposes marks it as a success, rather than a failure. You see value in governments, regulations and monetary systems controlled by central banks. I see value in the absence of those. I think Bitcoin is an enormous success in that it gave people who value the latter an instrument to actually exercise their beliefs. No one is forcing you to use Bitcoin and no one ever will and that is the best thing about it.

The most damning: Seven transaction a second.

You cannot have a functioning financial system that is constrained to seven transactions per second.

I think you misunderstand the purpose of Bitcoin. It's not meant to be a payment system, but rather a settlement layer.

The top ten results of "bitcoin purpose" on Google concur that in it's current implementation, in how the community and business world view and use it, Bitcoin is meant to be an electronic currency.

The FTC recognizes it as a commodity, something that can be bought and sold. In it's current incarnation, it is the equivalent of bartering with baseball cards in lieu of cash.

If your point is true, then the purpose has been abandoned for the popular and current realization of Bitcoin as a means of electronic monetary value transfer.

I personally followed development and the community from the time it was introduced. It was always pitched as an 'anonymous' electronic currency.

>The FTC recognizes it as a commodity, something that can be bought and sold. In it's current incarnation, it is the equivalent of bartering with baseball cards in lieu of cash.

The US government has a stake in the failure of non-state-controlled currencies, though, so this isn't really evidence of anything.

It's evidence that it is popularly interpreted as something that has value and can be traded. So is money. I really can't care any less than I already don't if Bitcoin is or isn't a legal currency.

The point is it isn't commonly purported to be a 'settlement layer' but something else entirely.

I don't disagree with anything you've said. It's just that the government classification doesn't support (or refute) the point because the government isn't a disinterested party.

> you misunderstand the purpose of Bitcoin

That's quite a confidently presumptuous tone for an opinion that is clearly controversial at best.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/49c7ij/so_consens_...

>It's not meant to be a payment system

That's why it makes the front page of HackerNews when some random company starts accepting Bitcoin payments?

Can't stop to notice the downvoting of outright facts in this thread when they show the problems with Bitcoin. It's quite interesting.

So when you say that for a "fact" the system is constrained to 7TPS, you are intentionally ignoring most bitcoin transactions, which are off-chain transactions at exchanges. That's not just oversight that's deceit.

Ah, the "off-chain" transaction, AKA "using a traditional centralized database because the blockchain is too slow and expensive".

You are telling us is that there is no problem with the bitcoin protocol because the problems with the bitcoin protocol can be solved by not using the bitcoin protocol.

Weird, I don't see side chains in specified in the protocol or implemented in the source. It's almost as if side chains are an ad hoc attempt at a solution to a problem inherent to Bitcoin.

Thankfully the Lightning Network is being developed to support high volumes of off-chain trustless transactions.

Too bad it only works for transactions, not users.

LN is one of the better side-chain ideas to date, but it's still a bunch of I.O.U.s that have the bitcoin bottleneck. With LN, two people can reasonably send hundreds of thousands of transactions to each other, but hundreds of thousands of people cannot reasonably send two transactions.

And then there's centralization, off-network volatility, etc. issues as well. Side-chains are still not a viable fix for the blocksize issue.

7 transactions per second is just a tuning parameter though, it's not a fundamental flaw in Bitcoin. The problem is being attacked from two angles right now: The release of segregated witness and increasing the block size.

The real question is, what is the maximum real throughput of the system if we could adjust the tuning parameters to be as high as possible? It's well north of 7 but I bet also well south of, say, 1,000.

>just a tuning parameter though, not a fundamental flaw

Lol, that's the best "it's a feature, not a bug" spin I've seen on the blocksize issue to date.

You aren't contributing anything to this conversation. You're misrepresenting what I said and you're even responding with a flippant "Lol".

You're demonstrating confirmation bias by trying to redefine a payment network flaw as a "tuning parameter", so if you want to actually discuss something, make a case rather than spinning it as something else.

I find your comment funny because it reminds me of this: https://youtu.be/whnms4CLJys?t=44s

A clip from The Simpsons is not a very compelling argument.

Setting the number of blocks at 2,016 per two weeks is completely arbitrary, as is setting the block size at 1 MB. None of these are "fundamental flaws" because they can be changed. They're hard-coded constants that can be changed in code in a trivial amount of time. The hardest part about changing them is getting consensus on the change and the time it takes the change to roll out to most of the clients on the network before cutting over. The existence of altcoins that have changed these parameters is proof that it's not a technological flaw.

A technological flaw would be some kind of vulnerability in ECDSA or SHA256 that would allow people to spend other's Bitcoins. Now that would be a fundamental flaw that would destroy Bitcoin over night. But coding constants that can be changed, and as time goes on, most likely will be? You are seriously over-dramatizing things.

All I'm getting from you is flippancy, Simpsons references, and strawman arguments. You have failed to make your case at all. If what we are talking about is a fundamental flaw, then every program you have ever written is fundamentally flawed, because I'm sure they've all initially had bugs in them that were much worse than what could be changed by adjusting the values of constants.

The simpson clip is an explanation why I find your comments hilarious, not a claim or basis for an argument. Serious question: is English your first language?

The block size can't be changed because a small number of miners control it, and they stand to profit from the increased transactions fees resulting from the increased competition on smaller blocks. It's tragedy of the commons.

This is a fundamental flaw with Bitcoin- that the people who control the software can also benefit from inhibiting transactions per second. For a payments network, it's not going to get more than 7 tx/s, until someone else is in control. Other enthusiasts have reconciled this by looking to bitcoin as smart contracts, or to side-chains.

But you can continue to spin this as good for bitcoin or as "payments tuning parameter" propaganda if you like, just understand that I'm going to laugh at you for it, cydeweys.

It took you three comments to finally say something coherent. Bduerst, you need to work on your communication skills. There is much room for improvement. HN is not reddit. Do not make low value comments here.

You argument that miners will always want small block sizes is flawed. Miners stand to benefit a lot more from a widely-used functioning currency than one that fails because it is incapable of scaling. They want Bitcoin to succeed in the long run, because a lot of them hold a lot of Bitcoin. Particularly, there is little reason to keep block sizes small for this reason because while the average transaction fee might go down, the total number of transactions in a block will go up, with an overall neutral effect on total transaction fee. Additionally, the vast majority of a miner's reward still comes from the block reward, so miners don't care too much about transaction fees yet.

Segwit is already close to rolling out and block size increases could happen in the medium term. Or, if all else fails, there's always side-chains and altcoins. The fundamental technology (blockchain) is fine, even if a particular implementation of it with a specific set of tuning parameter values happens to stagnate. I don't foresee that happening though, as the incentives for everyone in the ecosystem are aligned for Bitcoin not to fail, and if limited transaction volume truly starts changing that, then changes (beyond what's already on the current roadmap) will be made.

You still didn't answer the question. If English isn't your first language, then it would explain why what I wrote isn't coherent to you.

You're making the same fallacious assumptions about miners that people do about individuals in tragedy of the commons. You think that the individual cares more about the system rather than their own rational goals, but they don't.

The same resource economics that apply to international fishing also apply to bitcoin - both the fisherman and the miners care more about personal gains than they do about the system as a whole. They don't restrain their profit because you project your idealism onto them.

And it doesn't matter who promises what - there needs to be a consensus for the change to happen, and that's why bitcoin is flawed. The previous four forks to fix this block size failed, four times, which is evidence to back this up.

You can keep spinning the flaw as a speed hole though, it's pretty entertaining :)

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