
Bitcoin for Rockstars - rahim
https://medium.com/backchannel/bitcoin-for-rockstars-ca8366802f9
======
inoop
The elephant in the Bitcoin room is that it simply cannot scale up to high TPS
rates. If any kind of meaningful adoption actually happened, the network would
keel over pretty quickly trying to globally broadcast all that data, and the
blockchain would quickly balloon to unmanageable sizes.

I see a lot of these articles hailing Bitcoin as the answer to some monetary
injustice or other, or as the fundamental underpinning of some revolutionary
new product, but people totally ignore Bitcoin's technological limitations.
Instead, the blockchain is talked about as if it's some magical box that is
pretty much whatever the author needs it to be.

The amount of cognitive dissonance in the Bitcoin community regarding this
topic is baffling. The whole point of side chains was that even core devs
realized that Bitcoin can not scale. Yet side chains were hailed by the
community as some sort of fantastic innovation that is 'good for bitcoin'.

Maybe these people are just talking their book, I don't know, but next time
you read an article about Bitcoin or blockchain tech just realize that VISA
can handle 47.000 tps. Bitcoin currently is doing slightly more than 1.

Inb4 'merkle trees', 'invertible bloom filters', 'something something moore's
law', 'corporate shill', 'freedom hater', 'the market will sort it out', 'side
chains', etc.

</offtopic rant>

~~~
mrb
Firstly, Bitcoin does not _need_ to scale that much to be considered widely
successful. Heck, Western Union[1] averages only 10 tps, which is only 10x
what Bitcoin is doing today, so such a target is clearly within reach with a
2MB block size.

Secondly, Bitcoin _can_ actually scale by many orders of magnitudes, see the
math and arguments there:
[https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Scalability](https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Scalability)
You need solid counterarguments to this page to convince us it can't possibly
scale.

Thirdly, Bitcoin has done 6 years in a row what critics have always said it
cannot do ("nobody would want bitcoins", "the exchange rate will never reach
$1/$10/$100", "it will crash and be forgotten after the Jun 2011/Mar 2013/Nov
2013 bubble", "the US govt will make it illegal", "big companies will never
accept it", etc). So you need to sit back and start _thinking_ why is it that
Bitcoin keeps growing and reaching milestone after milestone, instead of
throwing one more empty statement "bitcoin can't do X" with zero reasoning
behind.

[1] WU does ~250 million consumer transaction/year.

Edit: @inoop I misremembered and meant WU, not Paypal

~~~
downandout
_> Thirdly, Bitcoin has done 6 years in a row what critics have always said it
cannot do_

The one thing that hasn't changed a great deal is accessibility to them. When
buying, you are either subject to waiting periods, or have to conduct the
transaction in cash in person. No one in their right mind will take credit
cards or PayPal for them. I believe this is the major hurdle to adoption of
crypto by the mainstream public. Writing tools to make BTC easy to work with
is the easy part. Until they can be bought at Walmart or your local check
cashing store, it's going to be a fairly rough road for new adoption.

~~~
IkmoIkmo
On the, that's probably the thing that changed the most.

Firstly, 'conduct the transaction in cash in person'. That sounds pretty
accessible to me. You have cash, you press a button on your phone which shows
the nearest person selling it, you go there and buy it from them. Can it get
any more simple than handing over money in return for an item, like buying a
coffee?

But secondly, there are various companies right now that offer quick and easy
purchase. Try Circle for example, you can instantly buy bitcoin there with a
bank transfer, even though the transfer takes a day you get your bitcoin, and
at 0% fees, too. If you compare that to just 3 years ago when your only option
was shady and risky as hell, or hell, even a year ago, it's rapidly improving.

For example here in the Netherlands I could buy bitcoin between now and one
minute from now, safely and legally and I'd receive my bitcoin right away,
using just my phone and not leaving my seat or registering for any account.
(Bitonic)

~~~
downandout
_> You have cash, you press a button on your phone which shows the nearest
person selling it, you go there and buy it from them. Can it get any more
simple than handing over money in return for an item, like buying a coffee?_

Can it be more simple? No. Will most people do it, with the shady reputation
of Bitcoin and the people involved with it? No.

~~~
IkmoIkmo
That's a different question from accessibility which I was answering.

As for will people do it? The popular ways to do this (localbitcoins,
mycelium) have actually showed record amount of transactions lately, so more
people do it than ever.

Does that mean everyone does? No, but that has more to do with the fact it's a
nascent thing rather than a shady reputation or a lack of accessibility.

~~~
downandout
If the methods to obtain them quickly either cannot or will not be used by
most people (as is the case here), then they are inaccessible to most people.

------
Animats
Well, the music industry wanted copyright with "no formalities", and that's in
the TRIPS agreement. No more need to put a copyright notice on something, or
send a copy to the Library of Congress.

Now the industry is whining that keeping track of who owns what is too hard.
They dug their own hole. Let them deal with it. This is so typical of the
music industry, which has been shooting itself in the foot since the invention
of the tape recorder.

The article seems to be proposing some kind of a micropayment system, where
every time someone buys a track of music, all the sub-payments to the various
contributing parties get cranked out. That's not only too complicated, but the
transaction volume would be huge. Bitcoin is not web-scale. The Bitcoin block
chain is currently limited to about 7 TPS.

This idea comes back now and then. Ted Nelson's Xanadu had a micropayment
system something like this. A bunch of fanatical libertarians tried to make it
work. The free World Wide Web won out.

The amount of effort that the computer industry puts into keeping the music
industry happy is excessive. Apple or Google could buy out the entire music
industry for cash.

~~~
tzs
> Well, the music industry wanted copyright with "no formalities", and that's
> in the TRIPS agreement. No more need to put a copyright notice on something,
> or send a copy to the Library of Congress.

The US abolished the notice and deposit requirements via the Berne
Implementation Act of 1988, almost a decade before TRIPS.

~~~
Animats
True, but then it went worldwide, and nobody kept records any more.

------
chm
Bitcoin does not solve this issue, a blockchain does. That's what the guys at
Ethereum for example are trying to achieve: vanilla blockchain, build anything
on top.

~~~
programmarchy
Counterparty could solve this, on Bitcoin's blockchain [1]:

> Counterparty works by storing extra data in regular Bitcoin transactions,
> which makes every Counterparty transaction a Bitcoin transaction, albeit a
> very small one. When Counterparty transactions are broadcast to the Bitcoin
> network they are verified by Bitcoin miners and saved in the Bitcoin
> blockchain to make a secure, verifiable record.

[1] [http://counterparty.io/](http://counterparty.io/)

~~~
chm
Yes, and I should have mentioned it. The fun thing about XCP is that I can use
it now, unlike Ethereum.

------
GigabyteCoin
If your sole goal is to store information in the blockchain, why not use
Namecoin? It's almost as secure as Bitcoin, and specializes in storing small
bits of data in it's blockchain.

------
robrigo
I believe that BitShares Music project is the most tangible effort in making
this kind of platform happen.

[http://bitsharesmusicfoundation.org/](http://bitsharesmusicfoundation.org/)
[http://peertracks.com](http://peertracks.com)

~~~
Inthenameofmine
If anybody is interested, we're building the platform at Bitsapphire.com.

If you have any questions I can answer them here on HN.

~~~
robrigo
Hey itnom, cob mentioned that tracking contributors to tracks (the credit part
of this article) isn't apart of the MVP you guys are building. Would you
consider leveraging reputation / on chain graph DB (key graph) to handle
tracking this information in a future iteration?

I think this would make the blockchain much more useful for other 3rd parties
to plug into and leverage said DB.

------
return0
He's describing a network where payments are being distributed hierarchically
and recursively to all the creators behind a work. What does that have to do
with bitcoin? you could replace the payment method with another and it would
all be the same.

------
guard-of-terra
The problem here is, music gets produced at increased rates. You might have a
huge database of all the music from yesterday, which would be less useful than
you think if you'll not figure a way to make every musician put metadata for
their newest creations there.

------
briandear
This idea is revolutionary. It would piss all the right people off if it works
and also ensure that all the right people get transparently compensated for
what they do.

------
biomimic
songcoin is another interesting option where consumers get to transact and
"invest" in artists or songs... "Songcoin Wants to Be Music’s Alternative
Currency" [http://www.billboard.com/biz/articles/news/digital-and-
mobil...](http://www.billboard.com/biz/articles/news/digital-and-
mobile/5915780/songcoin-wants-to-be-musics-alternative-currency)

[http://songcoin.org](http://songcoin.org)

