Comment by WorldMaker | Hacker News Reader

Comment by WorldMaker | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

My exact point is that this is a fun "semantic" game. From a technical standpoint, the entire merkle tree is bitcoin, because that is the root data structure, however you want to "brand" individual forks/branches they are always going to be inter-related. The fact that forks already exist today seems to clearly undermine the idea that there are "only ever 21 million bitcoin" because even just taking "Bitcoin Gold" and "Bitcoin Cash" into account alone represent an "additional" 42 million possible bitcoin. (That's before you take in the dozens of other bitcoin forks, and the larger picture of how generally non-scarce cryptocoins are in the general forest beyond the bitcoin tree.)

It doesn't really matter which fork is "dominant", the artificial scarcity seems extremely artificial in a most brittle way and not that scarce from a respectable technical viewpoint.

You can certainly try to build a definition of "dominant" based on mining "hashpower", but that's a social/economic/political/geopolitical minefield much more than it is a technical factor inherent to bitcoin's underlying data structure, because the underlying data structure is forks ("dominance" is a lucky/expedient edge case).

You are confused. If you try spending bitcoin cash on bitcoin network you will fail, because bitcoin cash utxos are not bitcoin utxos and bitcoin cash is not bitcoin. There are no additional 42 mil bitcoin, there are additional 42 mil of some other tokens spendable on some other networks.

I don't think I am confused. I told you I have a different viewpoint on this. You are claiming different branches of the same tree are magically distinct from each other because they have different names and magic runes sketched into them with a pencil, and all I see is a single tree in a huge forest full of trees. I don't think I'm going to convince you of my viewpoint, but my viewpoint is not confused.

You aren't likely to convince me that one branch is more scarce than the others because I can see how big the whole tree is, and especially because I can see how many other trees are in the forest already.

(ETA: To make it clearer, you especially aren't going to convince me because I think Proof of Work is a waste of processing power. The real scarcity is processing power, and again, that's a political/economic game, that only props up artificial scarcity so far. Certainly not far enough that I trust the bitcoin tree to remain scarce in the long run. Not a question of if, but a question of when.)

Your viewpoint on forks doesn't really check out. It's based on a misunderstanding of how related these forks are to Bitcoin.

Anything that forks off of bitcoin is an entirely separate network, asset and market. You can in fact fork Bitcoin today and attempt to create a market, will your new coin be valued as a Bitcoin and derive its current ~9000 USD price? So the value of a fork coin is not in its approximation to Bitcoin. It's merely tied to how much fire power you have to convince others to buy it.

Regardless of how you personally view the best use of cpu cycles, the market overwhelmingly disagrees. The network total hashrate has done nothing but go up and to the right since inception. Which is to say, that the market also disagrees with your theory that Bitcoin will lose scarcity (therefore value) over time.

Based on which signs or hypothetical scenario are you imagining that this whole systems turns back on itself and breaks?

In history, large numbers of people have committed grievous mistakes under the notion of "It's popular so it must be the right thing." Axis powers during WWII, e.g.

"You can in fact fork Bitcoin today and attempt to create a market, will your new coin be valued as a Bitcoin and derive its current ~9000 USD price?"

Yes. They're called shit coins. I'll make 21,000,000 shit coins in my currency and sell you one for $9,000. You can, make your own shit coins and just sell one of your shit coins back to me for $9,000. Money need not exchange hands.

How about this? I will sell you an arbitrary magic number for $9000. It's value is only good inside those that trade these magic numbers. The only difference between my offer and bitcoin is that many people are trading these magic numbers.

> I'll make 21,000,000 shit coins in my currency and sell you one for $9,000

What makes you think I will buy your shitcoin for $9000?

I just need one person to. And again, money need not exchange hands.

> The only difference between my offer and bitcoin is that many people are trading these magic numbers.

And that is a world of difference. If I sold a Bitcoin for half the market price, anyone rational would take that offer without thinking. Your shitcoin on the other hand has no persistent or reliable market value and you would not be able to find a buyer.

Again, your argument is that it's popular, so it must be good. Illicit drugs are also popular -- but how many people have died from overdose?

> Based on which signs or hypothetical scenario are you imagining that this whole systems turns back on itself and breaks?

This is an easy one to answer. Proof of work as implemented in bitcoin is the largest, weirdest incentivized, most highly distributed preimage attack [1] ever run against any hash algorithm that we know of in human history. The history of hash algorithms suggests that humanity has yet to invent a perfect hash algorithm (whether or not you agree that perfect hash algorithms are even mathematically theoretically possible), which makes it very clearly a matter of "when" the distributed preimage attack succeeds in breaking the hash algorithm altogether rather than "if".

> the market overwhelmingly disagrees

The "market" isn't by definition a rational actor and may just be a mob swept up into fervor. Ponzi schemes in general prey on weaknesses in a market's mentality or emotionality to follow bad long term advice for short term gains. (That example should work whether or not you also agree that bitcoin-style mining difficulty is also directly a unique modern variant of a Ponzi scheme.)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preimage_attack

Don't you think we have other problems too if Sha-2 is broken? I'm going to assume that you aren't worried about the numerous other applications where this scenario would be catastrophic?

In any case, this scenario has very well been accounted for. The Bitcoin network can fork its consensus rules when such drastic requirements require it. Such as to a different hashing algorithm, and snapshotting of its previous state.

> Ponzi scheme This goes back to square one, which is that in the absence of understanding the value of bitcoin, a scheme is the only logical explanation.

We are now sitting at 10 years and $XXB ponzi scheme. Perhaps one of greatest schemes in history? Maybe it will unravel in the next 10? Time will tell.

> Don't you think we have other problems too if Sha-2 is broken? I'm going to assume that you aren't worried about the numerous other applications where this scenario would be catastrophic?

It is exactly this reason I find bitcoin incredibly scary. The catastrophe that happens if bitcoin "succeeds" in breaking SHA-2 is directly part of why I think Proof of Work is at best a waste of processing power, and at worst a catastrophe we are watching in real time.

> In any case, this scenario has very well been accounted for. The Bitcoin network can fork its consensus rules when such drastic requirements require it. Such as to a different hashing algorithm, and snapshotting of its previous state.

Which again is my point earlier: forks are natural parts of how bitcoin operates and directly a part of the underlying data structures. It doesn't exist without forks. You couldn't build bitcoin without forks. It isn't considered likely it would continue to exist in the future past certain points (including catastrophic ones) without forks. So the distinction of which fork is the "one true fork" is a political economics game, not a technical distinction in any way.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com