Bitcoin

[Deleted User]

Bravepants said:

pioruns said:

Bravepants I think you don't get it. Bitcoin *IS* the progress. It's an experimental, new monetary system. It uses much LESS energy than current banking system and infrastructure. Spending electricity to make sure that we have 100% transaction immutability, 100% resistance to censorship and fixed supply is *NOT* a waste of energy. Christmas lights are waste of energy.

Search "bitcoin vs banking electricity usage" and see for yourself.

OK, the experiment has been running for 11 years now. When does the experiment stop? When will the results of the experiment be published? When will conclusions be drawn regarding its entry into mainstream use?

The secure transfer of $100M across nations is NOT secure when the value of the currency can crash from one instant to the next due to massive volatility. Do we have to wait until the last Bitcoin is mined (in about 20 years' time) for the volitility to cease and for it to be a stable currency?

Then what?

What will determine Bitcoin's final resting price once the last Bitcoin is mined?

Here's my prediction....once no-one is making money from mining it, or from its constant volatility it willl become worthless.

You are talking nonsense again. Bitcoin as an experiment is like a protocol. Think of Bitcoin as of TCP/IP protocol. Does the TCP/IP, or the Internet ever stop as an experiment? No. It evolves and changes every day. Protocols are being upgraded, but we still using the same fundamental communication protocol as we did 30 years ago. With Bitcoin is the same. It's functional and useful right now, today. In the future, we can only hope it will be better, easier to use and more accessible. Like with the TCP/IP, constant upgrades are changing it so it's faster, more reliable and better prepared to handle today's traffic, and so on.

"The secure transfer of $100M across nations is NOT secure when the value of the currency can crash"

You are missing the point. It's secure from third party control, seizure and spying. No one can stop a person from sending value to another person. Not with Bitcoin, that is.

"Do we have to wait until the last Bitcoin is mined (in about 20 years' time)"

Wrong again, last Bitcoins will be mined in year 2140, that's 120 years from now.

coyrls

TCP/IP is not an experiment and it doesn't evolve and change every day.  What would be the use of a protocol that changes every day?

Bravepants

pioruns said:

Bravepants said:

Inagine having to share a rather long digital message (the Bitcoin blockchain) with everyone using Bitcoin every time there is one transaction, and on each transaction the message gets longer. Has anyone worked out how many people would need to be exchanging Bitcoin at any one time to bring the Internet to a grinding halt?

Please familiarize yourself more with how Bitcoin works, because you are talking nonsense. You don't need to have "full node" verifying whole blockchain to participate in Bitcoin. In fact, all you need if a mobile phone, or, not even that, you can store your account ledger on a piece of paper and broadcast a transaction to the network when you are ready (from any internet access point). And all of that in fully secure, trustless way.

And for those who decide to run full, veryfing node, they need to store ~300 GB of data (as of today), with annual growth (assuming blocks are completely full) of about 75 GB per year. That's a whopping 1TB of storage ten years from now. 1TB hard drive costs 20 quid. In ten years, 1TB of storage will be worth pennies.

You can criticise me, and everyone else, as much as you like. "Fully secure and trustless." Hmmm, how does that work.

I'm too busy living my life to bother familiarising myself with Bitcoin as I don't care that much about it and I never will.

You say I'm talking nonsense but then explain that I DO have to exchange data, carry it around with me, store information on paper, require an Internet connection, because yes I would want fully verification - it's like the WIld West out there.

What if I lose my paper, what if my hard-drive fails?

You haven't answered my questions:

1. How much demand will be placed on the Internet if the UK population all moved over to Bitcoin?

2. When will the volatility of Bitcoin stop?

3. What will be the final price of a Bitcoin?

[Deleted User]

coyrls said:

TCP/IP is not an experiment and it doesn't evolve and change every day.  What would be the use of a protocol that changes every day?

I meant protocols and upgrades existing and being built thanks to TCP/IP, they don't need to share the name, like "TCP/IP 2.0". On top of TCP/IP protocol, we now have https (TLS) protocol, most widespread protocol without which Internet as we know if would not be able to function. Also, on top of TCP/IP (and UDP, another fundamental Internet protocol) we have NFS, NIS+, DNS, telnet, ftp, rlogin, rsh, rcp, RIP, RDISC, SNMP, and so on. It would not work without TCP. Bitcoin is similar in a way - it's a protocol for sending money without censorship, free of foreign control and seizure. It's up to us, how we are going to use it. And let me emphasize, Bitcoin works absolutely fine regardless if it's price if $100, $10000 or a million.

Bravepants

pioruns said:

 - it's a protocol for sending money without censorship, free of foreign control and seizure. It's up to us, how we are going to use it. And let me emphasize, Bitcoin works absolutely fine regardless if it's price if $100, $10000 or a million.

It doesn't really though does it? It was a curiosity for years, sitting at a low value, then people reliased that they could make money by trading it and hyping it up. It doesn't work fine if its value is all over the place. If I have £1000 of bitcoin in my wallet and I come to spend it and it's only worth £10 how is that any different to having the government sieze it?

Bravepants

Also, how do you convince the 99.9999999% of the general public that don't have a computing degree to adopt it? What about people on benefits? How do I give change to homeless people in Bitcoin?

[Deleted User]

Bravepants said:

pioruns said:

Bravepants said:

Inagine having to share a rather long digital message (the Bitcoin blockchain) with everyone using Bitcoin every time there is one transaction, and on each transaction the message gets longer. Has anyone worked out how many people would need to be exchanging Bitcoin at any one time to bring the Internet to a grinding halt?

Please familiarize yourself more with how Bitcoin works, because you are talking nonsense. You don't need to have "full node" verifying whole blockchain to participate in Bitcoin. In fact, all you need if a mobile phone, or, not even that, you can store your account ledger on a piece of paper and broadcast a transaction to the network when you are ready (from any internet access point). And all of that in fully secure, trustless way.

And for those who decide to run full, veryfing node, they need to store ~300 GB of data (as of today), with annual growth (assuming blocks are completely full) of about 75 GB per year. That's a whopping 1TB of storage ten years from now. 1TB hard drive costs 20 quid. In ten years, 1TB of storage will be worth pennies.

You can criticise me, and everyone else, as much as you like. "Fully secure and trustless." Hmmm, how does that work.

I'm too busy living my life to bother familiarising myself with Bitcoin as I don't care that much about it and I never will.

You say I'm talking nonsense but then explain that I DO have to exchange data, carry it around with me, store information on paper, require an Internet connection, because yes I would want fully verification - it's like the WIld West out there.

What if I lose my paper, what if my hard-drive fails?

You haven't answered my questions:

1. How much demand will be placed on the Internet if the UK population all moved over to Bitcoin?

2. When will the volatility of Bitcoin stop?

3. What will be the final price of a Bitcoin?

Not criticising you, just correcting the facts. If you are too busy to understand something then you should not participate in a discussion about it. But your approch seems to be arrogant like: "I don't know much about it, but I will state incorrect facts anyway, if challenged I will say that I don't care and never will". lol

Let me try to answer your questions anyway:

"What if I lose my paper, what if my hard-drive fails?"

you restore from a backup. Backup can be stored in your brain (passphrase is your wallet), on another piece of paper, in QR code, on your e-mail account (password protected), on another hard drive, and so on. You can have multiple copies of your wallets, you can even give copies to your family or solicitor. No one can access money stored there without your permission ( you can set for example, a wallet protected by three keys - yours, your family and your solicitor, money can be spent only when two keys are present, in case of your death).

"1. How much demand will be placed on the Internet if the UK population all moved over to Bitcoin?"

Experiments like this have been made already, some cryptocurrencies claim to operate at tens of thousands of transactions per second. Bitcoin can achieve that scale easily with secondary layer solutions like Lightning Network. Be real, Netflix uses more bandwidth than all global Visa & Mastercard & Bitcoin transactions combined

"2. When will the volatility of Bitcoin stop?"

I don't know, maybe you tell me? Some national currencies are more volatile than Bitcoin, are you aware of that? Heck, Bitcoin capitalisation is bigger than many countries GDP

"3. What will be the final price of a Bitcoin?"

What kind of question is that? What is the final price of pound? When will pound stabilize? 

coyrls

pioruns said:

coyrls said:

TCP/IP is not an experiment and it doesn't evolve and change every day.  What would be the use of a protocol that changes every day?

I meant protocols and upgrades existing and being built thanks to TCP/IP, they don't need to share the name, like "TCP/IP 2.0". On top of TCP/IP protocol, we now have https (TLS) protocol, most widespread protocol without which Internet as we know if would not be able to function. Also, on top of TCP/IP (and UDP, another fundamental Internet protocol) we have NFS, NIS+, DNS, telnet, ftp, rlogin, rsh, rcp, RIP, RDISC, SNMP, and so on. It would not work without TCP. Bitcoin is similar in a way - it's a protocol for sending money without censorship, free of foreign control and seizure. It's up to us, how we are going to use it. And let me emphasize, Bitcoin works absolutely fine regardless if it's price if $100, $10000 or a million.

That fails as an analogy because there are no "protocols" built on top of the bitcoin "protocol" (I think you are misusing the term protocol).  Incidentally, none of the protocols you list are “upgrades” to the TCP/IP protocol and they certainly couldn’t share the name TCP/IP.

[Deleted User]

Bravepants said:

Also, how do you convince the 99.9999999% of the general public that don't have a computing degree to adopt it? What about people on benefits? How do I give change to homeless people in Bitcoin?

Why would I want to convince anyone? I am basically explaining how this system works, because I see weird assumptions and incorrect facts being said here over and over. If someone needs it or wants it, they will learn how to use it. There is more and more easy solutions now. If you have a smartphone, you can be Bitcoin user, you don't need to know anything about it. You don't need to be a banker to use banking system, or mechanic to drive your car. You don't need to have IT degree to use computers, right? Same here.

"What about people on benefits? How do I give change to homeless people in Bitcoin?"

I don't understand. What about people on benefits? Don't they have smartphones, or are completely illiterate? If they do, then they can't use electronic money like online banking anyway.

And with homeless person example is the same, first why would you want to give him/her Bitcoin and not food to hand? Or cash? Bitcoin is not here to enforce itself on everyone, it's here to give people a choice, especially when they need it.

[Deleted User]

coyrls said:

pioruns said:

coyrls said:

TCP/IP is not an experiment and it doesn't evolve and change every day.  What would be the use of a protocol that changes every day?

I meant protocols and upgrades existing and being built thanks to TCP/IP, they don't need to share the name, like "TCP/IP 2.0". On top of TCP/IP protocol, we now have https (TLS) protocol, most widespread protocol without which Internet as we know if would not be able to function. Also, on top of TCP/IP (and UDP, another fundamental Internet protocol) we have NFS, NIS+, DNS, telnet, ftp, rlogin, rsh, rcp, RIP, RDISC, SNMP, and so on. It would not work without TCP. Bitcoin is similar in a way - it's a protocol for sending money without censorship, free of foreign control and seizure. It's up to us, how we are going to use it. And let me emphasize, Bitcoin works absolutely fine regardless if it's price if $100, $10000 or a million.

That fails as an analogy because there are no "protocols" built on top of the bitcoin "protocol" (I think you are misusing the term protocol).  Incidentally, none of the protocols you list are “upgrades” to the TCP/IP protocol and they certainly couldn’t share the name TCP/IP.

Wrong. Yes there are "protocols" (or upgrades, however you name them) built on top of Bitcoin. They are cross-compatible with older Bitcoin network clients and Bitcoin as a whole works just fine without them, same like Internet (face of which has been changed and upgraded hundred times over the years) works on top of TCP/IP without actually forcing any major "upgrade" to fundamental protocol itself, to the way how we send data packets back and forth on the cable.

Bitcoin new "protocols/upgrades" are: Segregated Witness (activated nearly 3 years ago) and now Lightning Network (works as a secondary payment layer, and it's built on top of Segregated Witness which is on top of bare Bitcoin). There is dozens of smaller "upgrades" and cryptographic innovations, like CoinJoin, Taproot, Schnorr Signatures, Graftroot, etc. all serving different purposes and all at different state of progression.

Wording doesn't matter, I used "protocol", "upgrade" words to bring some familiarity for those who don't understand it at all. With more technical community I would use word softforks, but I decided to use something more human, so there.