So I must really distrust banks then, eh!
I know the usefulness of state-free money. I’ve lived it. You are just trying to worship at the feet of Authority.
I know the usefulness of state-free money. I’ve lived it. You are just trying to worship at the feet of Authority.
- Cryptocurrency is not state-free money. Among other things, it requires functioning infrastructure, stable electricity and internet available at affordable prices. These things are provided by the government everywhere on earth.
- Cryptocurrency is not authority-free. Actually, you're trusting several authorities any time you interact with any blockchains.
- I'm not denying you got use out of cryptocurrency. I'm sure you did. At first glance it does appear to be some kind of functioning financial system, but it is not. A lot of other people have also lost significant amounts of money with it.
Which authorities? I signed a tx, sent it to the swarm using free and open source software, and it was included in a block. Trustless. No authority.
I’m sure lots of people gained and lost fortunes. It’s fine. The trade off is worth it.
>Trustless. No authority.
This is very, very wrong. It's another one of those marketing lines repeated by blockchain companies that is blatantly wrong if you look into it even just a little. At minimum, you need to trust the "swarm" that you just mentioned. It's effectively acting as the authority and you're trusting it to make the right decisions. And if the swarm goes away, you can't make your transactions anymore; the value of your tokens will drop to zero.
>The trade off is worth it.
To this date, no one has been able to explain to me clearly what this trade off is. "It's trustless" is not a trade off, that's not communicating what the actual benefit is. And it's also just wrong.
The swarm isn’t going away. It’s grown a lot in the last 14y.
You don’t get it because you DONT WANT to understand this. You keep talking about censoring and governments and trust. You can’t accept it because it is.
And you have to trust that the swarm will not drop your transaction or devalue your tokens through various means that they have available to them.
>The trust we have is the trust in math and physics
That makes no sense. The "math and physics" you describe are specific equations that were chosen by the swarm operators to ensure their own profits via block rewards. The swarm can change that math at any time by changing the protocol, and they have already done so several times. You don't get to decide what the math is or whether it's favorable to you, the swarm does, and you're trusting them to keep doing it that way. They are quite literally acting as the sole authority to the system; most bitcoin users are not ever going to run a full node.
>The swarm isn’t going away. It’s grown a lot in the last 14y.
I should remind you, past performance is not an indicator of future results.
>You don’t get it because you DONT WANT to understand this.
I understand it very well. What you have been told are marketing lies. If you actually inspect the system you'll see that they're not true.
The Bitcoin difficulty equation has never changed. The math has not been changed. We have newer tx formats, and a newer signature scheme. We also have complete backwards compat.
Do you really understand this?
Actually they can, they can technically just print more BTC by changing the protocol. Also I should remind you, Elon Musk (who is not even a miner) can devalue your token just by making a few tweets.
>There are always other miners that WILL take the money.
They can't do this if the other miners force a protocol change through as their blocks will start to get rejected, the only option then is to fork the chain.
>The Bitcoin difficulty equation has never changed. The math has not been changed. We have newer tx formats, and a newer signature scheme. We also have complete backwards compat.
This doesn't matter, the point is they have the ability to change all of it. Look at any of the bitcoin forks, this has already been done countless times. Saying "this will never happen to BTC" is certainly an opinion you can have, but it's not one based on any kind of objective "math and physics" reality of what they can or can't do. It's an opinion based on trust that they won't change it. You're trusting them to be the sole authority over the network.
>Do you really understand this?
Yes. Do you understand that all distributed systems have weaknesses and constraints, and are subject to change by their operators? Blockchains are not special here. Please don't trust anyone who designs these kind of systems and isn't forthcoming with a full description of the pros and cons.
I also know history, probably better than most on this board. This conversation is about trying to find the crux of your disbelief.
The thing is, you and Bruce are not being original in your arguments. Some of the things you have said are absolutely undeniable the truth. I am saying it doesn’t matter. Nothing you have proposed is existential for an internet protocol, you are throwing gotchas that we mostly disregarded years ago. Sometimes, In practise, worse is better.
I should remind you again, past performance is not an indicator of future results. The history might give you clues, but it can't point you to a guarantee of what will happen.
>This conversation is about trying to find the crux of your disbelief.
If you have an interest in being reasonable, I think you can see how this statement is total nonsense. I don't "believe" or "disbelieve" in anything, this is just the reality of the situation. If you're trying to get me to "believe" in something, that suggests you're putting trust and faith in them and you want me to do the same. A "belief" would be if I was making predictions of when BTC will collapse, or if I was saying it will never collapse. We can guess, but no one can know that for sure.
I certainly do hope it collapses, because it is actually a giant fraud based on nothing. It has no value, it has no fundamentals, it is based entirely on the "belief" that you will be able to dump the coins on someone else some day. Yes, I know that government-backed fiat dollars are also technically like this, those are at least based on the local economy remaining stable, the economy that (unlike any cryptocurrency) is absolutely required to keep your farms and food imports running if you personally want to not experience mass famine and death. If BTC collapses, you can't get your money out because it's worthless; if your local economy collapses, you will have a lot worse problems than not being able to take money out of the bank. And no, you cannot remove the need for a local economy by forcing people to transact in cryptocurrency, businesses will just not transact on markets that are too risky for them.
>you are throwing gotchas that we mostly disregarded years ago
They were not disregarded for any real reasons other than the opinions of the BTC miners and the developers of the protocol. Actually a great many people disagreed with their opinions and thought they were wrong to disregard them, hence the existence of bitcoin forks, and all the other crypto coins that aren't BTC.
I unfortunately understand the BTC maxi attitude, but it's not even consistent with its own world; the goal appears to be to dismiss all the other coins as "shitcoins" for disregarding certain issues with the network in favor of profits, despite that BTC has exactly the same fundamentals and also disregards a lot of issues with the network in favor of profits.