

The State of the Blockchain in 2015 - jackgavigan
http://jackgavigan.com/2015/02/06/the-state-of-the-blockchain-in-2015/

======
gweinberg
_The fact that some miners are suspending operations instead of continuing to
mine and simply hanging on to the bitcoins mined until the price rises again
suggests that they may lack the (fiat currency) funds to keep paying for
electricity or that they’re fearful that the price won’t recover and they’ll
end up permanently in the red._

That's just stupid. No matter what your financial situation or what you think
future prices will be, it doesn't make a lot of sense to mine bitcoins when
you can buy them cheaper.

~~~
kordless
> That's just stupid.

I will point out your "don't mine if you can buy them cheaper" is nearly
logically equivalent to op's "some miners are suspending operations instead of
continuing to mine", especially when considering op said "they may lack the
fiat" to pay for electricity or coins (assumption).

Negating something you agree with, even in part, _might_ be a sign of
cognitive dissonance: [http://www.geekceo.com/entry/bitcoin-s-
polarization](http://www.geekceo.com/entry/bitcoin-s-polarization)

~~~
hencq
> especially when considering op said "they may lack the fiat" to pay for
> electricity or coins (assumption).

That's not the assumption. It is the conclusion. The wrong conclusion as
gweinberg pointed out. If I can mine 1 bitcoin for $300 worth of electricity
or buy one for $200, I should just buy instead of mine. The question of how
many dollars I have is irrelevant for that.

~~~
jackgavigan
> If I can mine 1 bitcoin for $300 worth of electricity or buy one for $200, I
> should just buy instead of mine. The question of how many dollars I have is
> irrelevant for that.

That's a fair point.

I guess the only real difference between mining and buying is that electricity
is usually paid for retrospectively, whereas buying requires you to have the
money up front.

------
Animats
The blockchain is doing fine. Bitcoin speculation, not so much. The price has
been going downhill for a full year now.

There have been two Bitcoin bubbles. The first was driven by Silk Road drug
sales, and the second by evasion of China's exchange controls on yuan. Both of
those uses have been stopped. Until someone discovers a new illegal use case
for Bitcoin, it's probably not going anywhere.

~~~
joshontheweb
Not arguing with you're overall point but drug sales have not stopped by any
stretch of the imagination. There are more dark net market places now than
ever.

------
brighton36
>I doubt Bitcoin’s first-mover advantage will translate into long-term
success. Webvan pioneered grocery delivery during the dot-com bubble but
ultimately went bankrupt.

It's worth noting that open-source platforms typically succeed due to the
first-mover advantage, whereas companies may not. Further, because blockchains
work, there is always an incentive for miners to join the longest chain (ergo
Bitcoin)

------
mcintyre1994
One of the links shown Satoshi Nakamoto saying they're not somebody who'd very
publicly been 'exposed' as him. I figured it'd be interesting to see what else
Satoshi has posted and saw this comment [0]:

> Dear Satoshi. Your dox, passwords and IP addresses are being sold on the
> darknet. Apparently you didn't configure Tor properly and your IP leaked
> when you used your email account sometime in 2010. You are not safe. You
> need to get out of where you are as soon as possible before these people
> harm you. Thank you for inventing Bitcoin.

It's the last comment posted on that account from September - is there any
more information on this?

[0] [http://p2pfoundation.ning.com/forum/topics/bitcoin-open-
sour...](http://p2pfoundation.ning.com/forum/topics/bitcoin-open-
source?commentId=2003008%3AComment%3A55276)

~~~
gwern
No. I've written it off as a blackmail* or concern-troll: the information or
claim of such a listing has never surfaced since, no one has claimed to have
the dox though the main use would be to leak to a journalist or something
(since it's unlikely he'd pay blackmail for such flimsy evidence), such dox
would be almost impossible to verify (except maybe the passwords), a Satoshi
IP arguably already has been found with minimal notice paid by anyone, and the
mechanism is odd - he did have Tor configured correctly for everything else,
and some of his mail services specifically scrub IPs from mail headers so an
incorrect configuration wouldn't matter.

* I believe there was at least 1 P2P foundation post which included addresses for payment at the time, although those seem to have been deleted now.

------
negamax
Bitcoin's 7tx/sec limit is too low for any mass adoption.

~~~
bequanna
The '7t/sec' limit isn't that relevant at this point. Currently, average
tx/second is closer to ~1. [1]

Additionally, this limit isn't static. [2]

It is pretty naive to think that the community isn't aware of this (non)
issue. [3],[4]

[1]
[https://blockchain.info/charts/n-transactions](https://blockchain.info/charts/n-transactions)

[2]
[https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Scalability](https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Scalability)

[3]
[https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=608561.0](https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=608561.0)

[4] [http://blog.bitcoinfoundation.org/a-scalability-
roadmap/](http://blog.bitcoinfoundation.org/a-scalability-roadmap/)

~~~
A_COMPUTER
I feel like most discussions of this ignore the downsides. You can increase
the blocksize which will result in a higher theoretical transaction rate, but
then you're burning more resources on orphan blocks , DDoS, etc. So while you
can increase it, there are serious downsides to doing so past a certain point
which still ends up being a lot lower than what's needed to have the
acceptance level of Paypal.

