uncletammy

How does one ban a blockchain? Serious question.

Would you only arrest the miners or would you also arrest non-mining full node operators?

How could you tell if regular citizens were transacting with POW coins? Would you subpoena telecom companies for records where customers have visited known sites which transact in POW coins? Or would you go the AT&T route and pipe telecom traffic through a little cabinet that uses deep packet inspection to sniff out POW transactions occurring over RPC?

What about traders? Would you outlaw trading POW coins and make exchange exclude US customers? That could make for some serious arbitrage opportunities for tech savy citizens.

I would genuinely appreciate your answer to any or all of these questions.

I build cryptocurrency software and would gain a lot from additional insight into the threat model I face in the not-so-distant future.

https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/61mxuj/block_size_limi...

Citation needed

> And the notion that it consumes gigantic amounts of energy for no net value gained should have everyone up in arms.

For what it's worth, bitcoin aims to deprecate every single brick-and-morter bank as well as all the armored trucks driving paper currency to and from them.

When you start to add up all of the energy that would be saved if bitcoin succeeds, the energy costs associated with mining start looking quite a bit smaller.

That being said, I don't BTC has any intention of scaling to that degree (or at all really). The BTC devs seem much more concerned with building second layer products like lightning network. All these products actually reduce the number of on-chain transactions and by extension, miner revenue.

Make note of the inflection point around 2016. Yeah, it's right around the time your capacity chart starts looking like a wet noodle.

Yeah, that's when a few your scumbag BTC devs removed Gavin Andresen's commit access and killed BTC's last chance of becomming a real currency.

... well except for these guys https://www.bitcoinpos.net/

It's a good idea though.

Switching to any one of them is likely to provide more revenue than just attacking the network for a little extra transaction fee money.

This is one of those times it's really useful to make a distinction between bitcoin the currency and bitcoin the protocol. If it was the authors intention to describe a future problem on the BTC network then they messed up by not addressing the rest of the sha256 mining ecosystem. However, if it was their intention to describe a problem with the protocol itself then it kind of makes sense to not touch on miner's alternatives.

I hope its not true. I really like namecheap. I would hate to have to dump them.

When you submit a transaction for the first time, it enters the client software's mempool. Miners pull transactions from the mempool if they deem the fee high enough to include. If your fee is too low, it sits in the mempool long enough that the client software purges it forever. It has to be resubmitted or it never gets mined

Citation desperately needed

> No system where every actor needs to keep a permanent record of every transaction of every other actor forever can scale to the entire planet

If the costs associated with keeping these records are negligible and all the work is done for you electronically by an app on your phone, then yes. It absolutely can scale.

> Please keep the Bitcoin-the-protocol and Bitcoin-the-currency separate.

I am. Bitcoin is the protocol. BTC is the currency.

1. Massive media hype surrounding the price in 2014 caused everyone and their mom to try and buy bitcoin. The original developer (Satoshi) had added short term limit on the number of transactions that could be processed in a given time (transactions per block) as a short term fix for a few bad actors spamming the network. So the network was left unable to process the massive increase in demand caused by the price hype. This "fix" was stated to be temporary but was left in for the reason below.

2. A handful of new BTC devs ran off the old guard who believed the network should scale up with demand. This resulted in them intentionally refusing to change the software to accommodate yet another round of increased demand due to media attention (2016).

3. Increased regulatory scrutiny made it difficult to buy/sell crypto outside of large, regulated exchanges, effectively reducing liquidity for those that aren't institutional traders and those unwilling to give Coinbase a DNA sample just so they can buy crypto. The new regulatory and institutional friction killed many of the original use cases for bitcoin leaving mostly institutional traders left. These traders are unphased by high transaction fees, especially since most of their trading takes place off-chain on an exchange website.

It doesn't have to be a bad replacement for cash. It can actually be a fantastic replacement for cash if we continue building it as one. The fact is, the current BTC devs decided bitcoin can't scale before ever even trying. They were short-sighted, took VC money to pivot to "digital gold", and started spreading the false narrative that it never could have worked.

> Why are you so set on digital cash?

Because until bitcoin is useful to regular everyday people, there won't be enough buy-in to offset the huge exchange rate fluctuations caused by speculators. If that doesn't happen then it will only ever be useful to speculators.

Your above example scenario makes perfect sense if you're a skilled worker from a wealthy country but it's nonsense if you're among the remaining 80% of the people on this planet. Bitcoin can help EVERYONE if we let it. Luckily other coins have picked up the slack.

It blows my mind the amount of talent being wasted building "solutions" for an intentionally crippled chain. One can only polish a turd so much.

At the time of writing this comment, if you want your BTC transaction confirmed in the next hour it would cost you ~ 10USD ( https://bitcoiner.live/ ) .

What planet do you live on where you think a non-negligible percentage of people in ANY country, let alone a developing one, can afford 10 dollars for each transaction they make? That's not even considering the price effect that global demand would have on fees. Bitcoin can't even meet the demand of the relatively small cult of people worldwide that buy it, few of which even move their "assets" off the exchange.

Parasitic investors have strangled cryptocurrency. If you think Bitcoin can currently serve any purpose other than making rich people more rich, you're a fool. Wake me when Tether is dead and people start using crypto as it was intended, peer to peer digital cash.

EDIT: I apologize for coming off so harsh. My anger is (mostly) not at you. I'm angry at seeing the enormous potential bitcoin had to do good in the world go completely to waste.

Investment centralization is bad because it makes it much more susceptible to regulatory capture by the industries crypto stands to disrupt. We're already seeing this now. The same big banks that called crypto a scam have suddenly become bullish after a few years of quietly buying coins. We need regular people on the streets advocating for crypto.

The reduced use cases is a problem because it minimizes adoption and the network effect, both of which are vital for the long term survival of the network.

It's not in your best interest to buy and never sell. Current investors are just incredibly short sighted. If bitcoin isn't usable by (and useful to) the majority of the world, it will never get enough investment to serve as a buffer against the drastic price swings caused by speculators.

Smart investors know that simply holding coins isn't enough in the long run. Finding new use cases and encouraging adoption and use is the only way crypto stands a chance.

When you start to account for other things like lost and unrecoverable coins, it becomes severely deflationary and much sooner. Things like grandpa taking his encrypted wallet to the grave or in the case of bitcoin BTC, small coins that can't be moved because the fee is higher than the coin's value.

At the time of writing this, coins worth less than ~ $6.15 (USD) aren't able to be spent*. That means if you bought a $4 coffee with BTC and paid with a tenner (a coin [input] worth $10) , you'd lose the change. It would remain unspendable until the network starts unclogging.

* By "arent able to be spent" I mean, reasonable fee estimations for getting the transaction into a block within an amount of time that you can be sure the transaction won't get dropped from the mempool. I used https://bitcoiner.live to estimate the fee which was the most generous of the three I looked at.

Yes I agree this was the public justification for it. That being said, I'm certain they wouldn't have acted in the same way if it had been Luke jr or Greg Maxwell. They pulled his access because he wanted bigger blocks and he was ruining the official narrative.

I believe your citation but the point still stands.

And for future reference, a citation isn't generally accepted when it's just a screenshot you posted in a tweet you once made where the screenshot reveals a comment to a random reddit post with no visible url in it.

Citation desperately needed. Here's a contribution from literally the day before he had his commit access stolen.

https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/commit/006cdf64dc932

Even if he did say that, it's irrelevant to this discussion. Him "no longer contributing" was not the reason his commit access was revoked. It was revoked as a power grab because he wanted to and had the power to increase the block size. Nothing more.

There are a lot of bad things you can call the BTC core devs but they sure as hell seize every opportunity to grab power.

I always thought the argument that full nodes should be inexpensive to operate made a lot of sense. But keeping blocks small would obviously lead (and clearly did) to transaction costs high enough to price out most people that actually want to use it.

Wait for the lightning network is an insulting reason to kill the p2p cash use case, which in my opinion is the only thing that makes the "store of value" use case work.

What point are you making?