And what is the point? Does the price prove that bitcoin has not failed?
To me, bitcoin died sometime in 2013 when mining became hopelessly centralised, breaking the economic and security models Satoshi had set forth. The bitcoin thereafter has been a soulness Frankenstein animated by a mixture of ego, greed, and hubris. I don't want to make any predictions, but when the crash comes it will be over before you knew it.
As for the wider field of blockchain/DLT, it bears an uncanny parallel to the early days of nuclear physics when radioactivity was first discovered by the Curies: The science behind it was be sound, yet any benefit to mankind was overshadowed by the cottage industry selling radioactive snake oil for a long time before the mania died down. And people died when basic precautious were not taken.
It may work down the road and it may not, but right now all I see is woo in every direction.
Trying to learn something about blockchain: the technology and its applications right now, means wading through masses of hype and parties anxious to 'get into it' before it's 'too late'.
In healthcare IT the blockchain is hot right now. Government bureaus are pushing for adoption, care institute executives heard somewhere that this blockchain thing is the bee's knees and well suited for healthcare stuff like insurance mutations, and IT vendors are worried someone else will beat them to it.
Is it a useful technology? Probably. But right now for many the blockchain is the goal, not the solution to any specific problem.
I think it is the perfect storm formed by the combination of:
- IT staff wanting to write "blockchain" on their CV (I have seen CVs driving technological choices so many times, hadoop used to store a 10MB csv file, etc)
- Some senior management reading in Newsweek that blockchain is the new hot thing and asking his CTO to give him blockchain stuff.
When such a storm forms, no objection from anyone in the organisation, no budget constraint or any form of rationality can stop it, a category 5 bullshit hurricane. A hammer looking for anything looking remotely close to a nail, even a finger.
Most uses of blockchain I see have been put forward by very large companies... but large companies are the least likely to benefit. Blockchain gives you a decentralized source of trust. Large companies (e.g., banks, governments, etc.) specialize in providing a centralized source of trust.
I'd think that small banks/financial institutions would benefit far more than large companies. They can confidently share data with each other and enforce standards among themselves. Big companies, on the other hand, already have that trust through their reputation and detailed, legally enforceable contracts.
Nice example: say you wanna send $5M from the US to another country. Traditionally, you'd call a big US bank, send them the money b/c you trust them, and they'd send it to another large foreign bank b/c the US bank trusts the foreign one. There's a chain of trust based on the stature of the companies, and they charge a nice fee for that peace of mind. Blockchain can allow smaller companies to get into that game, but not entirely sure how it helps the big ones.
You miss the point about trust. The trust issue that blockchain addresses for big banks is not "I'm worried you're a scam that will disappear with all my money". It's "I'm worried that you've not got every single number exactly right and there will diaagreements". Hence it takes 2-3 days in the US to settle a simple financial trade, to allow for multiple batch reconciliations to verify that the information that each party holds about the trade matches up. Using a shared, distributed database to store all this information, instead of every party keeping their own copy, has the potential for colossal efficiency gains. That's why big institutions are interested in blockchain.
They could, though then there would be more trust issues about who hosts and controls the database. A database of which every participant keeps a copy, and with strong guarantees about consistency between the copies, has pretty obvious attractions.
I am definitely not saying blockchain is the only or even the best way to achieve that! Just that this helps explain its appeal
Exactly. Big banks have already dealt with these trust issues through their teams of lawyers, longstanding partnerships, and reputation in the market.
I'm not saying big banks have nothing to gain, they do, but proportionally less than a smaller company that no one knows about. It allows "Bank of Mom & Pop USA" to confidentially do deals with "Little-Town Bank" Shanghai" without going through the mega-banks.
Everyone is trapped chasing growth because that is what they are told to chase.
What happens as a consequence has become almost academic these days. Root cause is the trap everyone is already in.
So annoying to see triumphant declarations of victory of bitcoin, based solely on the price increasing.
Speaking as a bitcoin owner and proponent, there is zero (actually negative) market uptake of bitcoin as a payment platform (which I happen to believe is bitcoin's primary use case). This is because no work has gone into scaling up transaction throughput, which has predictably suffered as a result of increased mainstream interest (even with practically no merchant adoption).
The narrative has shifted recently that bitcoin is now a 'settlement layer', only that makes the situation even worse, because there is no 'payment layer' on top of it, only pie-in-the-sky designs.
So yeah, I don't share in the exhilaration over $4000+ bitcoins.
>no work has gone into scaling up transaction throughput
You lost me after this. A huge amount of work is going into scaling across the entire crypto coin space. The issue among the various factions is disagreement over what approach to take and how aggressively to implement it.
That reminds me of what I read about how Warren Buffett thinks about gold [1]. His point is essentially that if you invest in gold, your return depends on the price swings until you get out, and nothing else. This is in contrast to investing in assets that actually produce something (e.g. pay dividend). I see bitcoin being very similar to gold in this respect.
It's hard to disagree. Investments that don't pay dividends are essentially pyramid schemes, as they always require someone to buy them off you in order to realise their value. Stuff that pays dividends can provide you with ROI without you having to shift them on to someone else.
However, since we live on a planet with unlimited resources capable of unlimited growth, the theoretical loss of being the "last investor" is perpetually shifted to the next generation, thereby solving the pyramid scheme problem once and for all.
"Investments that don't pay dividends are essentially pyramid schemes"
No. 'Dividends' do not matter.
The cash going into the companies bank account belongs to the shareholders, and it's reflect in the stock price.
When a company gives out $1 in dividends, it's valuation goes down by $1.
Technically, dividends don't matter.
In reality it's a little different, and dividends mean certain things, mostly about the companies ability to generate returns with that cash than you, the investor.
And FYI - there can be 'unlimited growth' - as long as there is innovation, and 'stuff keeps getting better' - we will see growth.
Exactly my point, given the option of storing their money as fiat, or storing their money in BTC. Millions are choosing BTC, everyone's rationale for it will be different, but it is happening.
However yes I agree the past couple of months at least has been filled with rabid noobs, but HODL culture does a decent job of counteracting this
I understand buying and selling BTC-backed securities that are backed by a trustworthy bank... but keeping your life savings on your laptop is just cray cray.
yes. But they also have credit card accounts, hardware wallets as well as paper wallets. If you keep your coins offline (if you're holding), they won't get hacked.
" because millions of people view Bitcoin as a good place to park their money over fiat currency."
This would be very unwise.
BTC is highly volatile, and could go to 0 tomorrow.
It could could be made useless by the stroke of the pen someone in any big government.
Nobody keeps most of their assets in cash.
Stocks, Bonds, real estate, a basket of commodities, a basket of currencies - or even a decent long-term-interest savings account ... are all considerably better than BTC as stores of value if you don't like fiat.
When considering the 'risk premium' - BTC is a speculative instrument only. Not a currency, and definitely not a store of value.
Stocks and real estate are a reasonable shield against monetary policy, but baskets of currencies, bonds and long-term-interest savings are all extremely vulnerable to inflation.
> there is zero (actually negative) market uptake of bitcoin as a payment platform ... This is because no work has gone into scaling up transaction throughput
No, or only partly so. The other, more fundamental reason why bitcoin will never be a payment platform, is that it doesn't behave as a currency, but as a commodity. The hard limit on the number of bitcoin is both the guarantee of its value and what makes it an intrinsically deflationary good. Its monstrous current price proves it, and it can only go up (almost) indefinitely or go bust.
With these characteristics, nobody will ever want to use it as a payment method. You don't want to pay with a bitcoin, when you know that in the future that same bitcoin will be worth n times its value today. If you have used bitcoins in the past for transactions- you might have paid 50 bitcoins for a book in 2011- I'm sure you're sorely regretting it now.
> With these characteristics, nobody will ever want to use it as a payment method.
People have used gold as a payment method for millenia. If holding bitcoin is as attractive as you say it is, businesses will give discounts for bitcoin payment which can compensate the effect you describe.
In other words, if bitcoin is as attractive as you say it is, you would convert to fiat only when you want purchase something, and the merchant would immediately convert from fiat to bitcoin. Why would both parties in the transaction chose to transact in such an inefficient way?
I’ve seen forums posts from the early days where people have mentioned giving a tenth or so of a Bitcoin as a tip to thank them for an answer. Quite a tip now!
It clearly seems to solve a much bigger problem and hence the increase in price: a store of value in a time where the Feds balance sheet increases with the same velocity as Bitcoins price. On the other hand - it is still being used for payments. Though I am not a friend of the settlement layer idea myself. Time will tell how BCH will fare.
BCH might be Bitcoin's only hope. The upcoming Segwit2x fork (Segregated Witness + 2x block size increase) would have been fine 2 years ago. If it succeeds now I'm afraid all of Bitcoin will suffer and only Ethereum will benefit. While I love all the developments happening on Ethereum, it's not the censorship proof money that I was promised.
> [..] there is no 'payment layer' on top of it, only pie-in-the-sky designs.
That is completely false. Development of Lightning Network and other solutions by multiple teams has been steady and robust. To cite a few working on LN:
This project is a web development tool and has nothing to do with crypto.
Back to your comments on the state of LN development, I would not call it robust when the current implementation requires every client to monitor the blockchain 24/7 just in case a node attempts to cheat the system, and there is a good chance the cheater will succeed when the settlement layer becomes congested. For now they are very much pie in the sky.
Channel monitoring will be outsourced. I did not claim everything was finished, but it is far from pie-in-the-sky.
Off-chain scaling is the only way to scale bitcoin as a day-to-day payment system, and always has been. This must have been clear to everybody from the start.
Bitcoin started as a social experiment. When we invested in it at the "5000btc/pizza" time, we did it because we wanted to try something new. Shake things up.
Most of us weren't driven by gain. The last bank crisis burnt everyone. The hackers did what hackers do: trying to find a workaround to this stupid bug. Build a POC for another paradigm.
In that sense, Bitcoin is a tremendous success.
Yes, it didn't become the alternative currency we hoped for, turning into a speculative mess. But boy, shake things up it did.
Bitcoin changed everything. The tech scene. How we perceive money and exchanging values. It opened a new door that will never close, a new paradigm that is changing the way we are living.
It's so new that we see dozens of alternatives, with variation, trying to be the new big things. It's so important people can't stop talking about it to the point it triggers a bubble. It's so influential a gigantic country such as China had to take measures to coerce it. And yet, it's just a piece of code...
Bitcoin was spot on.
Thanks for everybody that took, with all the little guys like me, the time, risk and resources to believe in it when nobody did. When we were mocked for trying. When we were doubting but having so much fun. It was a beautiful thing.
I'm glad to have now the feeling those kind of people will always be around, and that we can always try to build something. Can't wait for our next failure :)
Bitcoin can't die as it never succeeded. All the disingenuous claims made by early adopters have fallen through. Decentralization, control, anonymity, easy transactions, transactions costs, currency? How can something that has no use have value?
Proponents continue to build castles and waste electricity hoping people bite so they can profit. But the game is over.
Money is a social tool based on consensus, and today democracy and accountability, that has evolved with human societies however imperfect it may be. At least societies can exercise some control over governments.
Why would anyone give up this hard won rule of law and accountability to private individuals operating out of self interest peddling illusions about some imaginary 'freedom'?
It works well enough for me. I do stuff for people. They pay me in Bitcoin. I lease servers and stuff. And pay Bitcoin. All of that can be as anonymous as I like. So yeah, it works for me.
> Proponents continue to build castles and waste electricity hoping people bite so they can profit.
Sure, some investors do. Me, I wish that they'd find something else to screw up. If it weren't for all the damn miners, we could still mine on our own devices.
> Money is a social tool based on consensus, and today democracy and accountability, that has evolved with human societies however imperfect it may be.
So you say. I don't see any obvious connection between money and democracy or accountability. Money is what people use in trade. Trade is a private matter.
> Why would anyone give up this hard won rule of law and accountability to private individuals operating out of self interest peddling illusions about some imaginary 'freedom'?
Because this supposed "law and accountability" led to things like the 2008 financial crisis. Didn't seem like there was much accountability then, so why should I trust that money supply? I know exactly what is going to happen to the bitcoin money supply, it's written in the code. Furthermore, hard forks prove that if you don't like the network, then you can leave and retain value. You can't leave the dollar without geographically moving to another location
> Because this supposed "law and accountability" led to things like the 2008 financial crisis. Didn't seem like there was much accountability then, so why should I trust that money supply?
As someone working in the financial industry, the amount of regulations, internal audits, external audits, reporting requirements, etc. that financial institutions have to comply with is truly staggering.
Sure, they 2008 financial crisis demonstrated that all of this was no silver bullet, but I still consider that system many orders of magnitude more trustworthy than a system that allowed for the shit-show that was MTGOX, and other failed exchanges.
I've hear a lot has changed in terms of regulation since 2008. However we shouldn't compare Mt.Gox to BTC, Gox was a centralized institution, so the failure was with it, not with bitcoin. If the people had held their bitcoin privately, which is arguably the "correct" way to hold bitcoin, they would have been fine.
Bitcoin itself is completely auditable in transparent. The system will behave exactly as the code is written.
Addresses have a checksum for just that reason. It would be remarkably difficult to acccidentally mistype an address that had happened to have the correct checksum, and also be a valid address.
tl;dr: Neither Ethereum nor Bitcoin have address checksums on the protocol level (remember this HN thread here is about trust) but by now all Bitcoin clients decided to implement it. In this case, the exchange used an Ethereum client which didn't.
> And what is the point? Does the price prove that bitcoin has not failed?
The price rising is validation for services on the periphery. Established services that can add a lot of utility for bitcoin.
For example, the volatility problem is completely solved by CME Group and CBOE and the CFTC pursing and allowing hedging instruments on bitcoin.
This opens up the market to many market participants, some of which are much larger markets than cryptocurrency has ever touched yet, and obliterates a primary rebuttal on the bitcoin concept.
The decision makers in those organizations would not have considered bitcoin as more than a toy until the market cap was larger. The CFTC has approved cryptocurrency hedging instruments only a few months ago. In 2017, 9 years into the concept.
So what standard of fail would you even be using? What would ever give you validation for more than a few weeks or months?
> but when the crash comes it will be over before you knew it.
Bitcoin has crashed 70%, 80%, 90% several times before. Most bitcoin holders know that is a possibility.
There are market participants that will use it at a lower price, that will buy it at a lower price, and continue expanding the reach of it.
After hedging instruments are prevalent, many market participants won't even be notice the price fluctuations.
>The price rising is validation for services on the periphery.
Apart from brand recognition, which application is best conducted on the bitcoin ledger than every other alternative? Please don't say "Store of value".
>Established services that can add a lot of utility for bitcoin.
How would you go about doing it? Bitcoin was not designed to have side chains and tokens pegged all over it and there is a reason why the ICO fad universally chose ETH.
>There are market participants that will use it at a lower price, that will buy it at a lower price, and continue expanding the reach of it.
Again, which users? Bitcoin was able to recover before as there were significantly fewer competitors; now there is at least one for each use case.
Bitcoin provides a way for 2 individuals, anywhere in the world, to exchange money without trusting any third party and without asking permission from any third party, and without their transaction being subject to censorship by any third party.
I can send money to anyone I want to, I have no expectation of censorship or interference. The fees are low to zero depending on the exact method, and I don't have to jump through hoops to try to interact with a crypto-currency broker. I have protections, insurance and various forms of reversibility to fall back on if something screws up.
> I can send money to anyone I want to, I have no expectation of censorship or interference.
Except for donations to WikiLeaks. Or if you want to buy weed in one of the many states where it's legal. Or if the recipient's Paypal account has been frozen.
> The fees are low to zero depending on the exact method
Chase bank charged me $25 to send a wire transfer recently. Credit cards and Paypal charge me 3% to 5% when I sell something online.
> and I don't have to jump through hoops
When I sent that wire, I was required to answer slew of questions from a Chase representative including "What is this transaction for?" and "Do you plan to transact with this company again?"
> I have protections, insurance and various forms of reversibility
Perhaps as a buyer, but as a merchant, chargebacks are a nightmare.
> For most people, not really.
Huh. Most people I know detest banks and don't like the idea of handing over complete control of their money to someone else.
There just haven't been any alternatives until now.
>> Except for donations to WikiLeaks. Or if you want to buy weed in one of the many states where it's legal. Or if the recipient's Paypal account has been frozen.
These are not pressing use-cases for me.
>> When I sent that wire
It appears your banking service is a bad one, I have had none of these problems, even transferring large amounts between countries.
>> Perhaps as a buyer, but as a merchant, chargebacks are a nightmare.
Yet without them, many buyers would have given up buying online by now, chargebacks and buyer protections allow the online marketplace to function.
I think what you might have there is (yet another) criticism of how backwards the US market is.
It was unclear whether you were criticism bitcoin as a criticism to all cryptocurrencies, or bitcoin by itself.
Fortunately it looks like it is just bitcoin by itself.
> which application is best conducted on the bitcoin ledger than every other alternative?
Bitcoin has to compete on its own. I'm all for other cryptocurrencies unseating it. In a world where 90% drops are not uncommon or controversial, and in a world where blockchains don't die, in a world where the code is open source, I don't think it is worth entertaining the bitcoin failed idea as it will always be a political mess that can have utility added any time.
> Bitcoin was not designed to have side chains and tokens pegged all over it and there is a reason why the ICO fad universally chose ETH.
This comment and your next comment go hand in hand. Bitcoin had ICOs on it several years before Ethereum was ready or existed. When its network got full it lost its innovative edge as it took over two years to upgrade. In the meantime
more fully featured competitors have focused on specific use cases.
An upgraded bitcoin may have irreparably lost some of its network effect advantage, and thats okay. It will have robust scripting for the next wave of ICOs and other organizations, decreasing the point of most altcoins. The top 10 may have differentiating qualities and markets already. Play it by ear, it isn't controversial to notice.
>Fortunately it looks like it is just bitcoin by itself.
Yes, my comment is mainly about BTC, although its many flaws are hardly unique so the same criticism will inevitably apply elsewhere.
>When its network got full it lost its innovative edge as it took over two years to upgrade. In the meantime more fully featured competitors have focused on specific use cases.
I think we are actually in agreement here. Bitcoin was innovative and exciting for a while but has gradually become stale and boring without good leadership. And the competition is catching up fast.
>An upgraded bitcoin may have irreparably lost some of its network effect advantage, and thats okay. It will have robust scripting for the next wave of ICOs and other organizations, decreasing the point of most altcoins. The top 10 may have differentiating qualities and markets already. Play it by ear, it isn't controversial to notice.
Good point, but I don't see it happening anytime soon. For starters, malleability was identified as a problem as early as 2011 and it took six years to be fixed. Other proposed additions are either minor tweaks (Schnorr signature, MAST) or vaporware (Lightening network anyone?).
I learned different things in economics than. I learned about, scarcity, fungibility, divisibility, durability and transferability to be the main properties of a currency, not a desired factor of any case, afaik thats just a quality of humans, called greed.
Just because some people want something, doesn't make it a good currency. To stay in the same metaphor, I'd like to own the Nightwatch of rembrandt, just as many others do, still doesn't make it a currency or even gives it properties of 'currency'.
All right, I will be a bit specific for your benefit:
- There is a lot of wash trading going on with several exchanges, some of which has had serious accounting issues since 2016. When they fail, the fallout will be far more spectacular than that of the late MtGOX because many traders are heavily leveraged.
- Upcoming Segwit2x hard fork potentially splitting the network.
- Uncertainty with China where the majority of hash power resides. The current crackdown on exchanges is pretty well reported. What I am concerned about is what will happen to the network when electricity price goes up in winter as hydro generation winds down, making mining more expensive. Historically miners were able to get favourable deals with remote thermal plants to cover the shortfall, which may be more difficult due to negative press and an ongoing effort to curb smog.
The view I share with a few perssimistic pundits is that there will be one final rally to $5000 before November for people to cash out before the freefall. What we don't agree on is the timeframe and where the price will hit the bottom. Hence my reluctance to make predictions.
> - There is a lot of wash trading going on with several exchanges, some of which has had serious accounting issues since 2016. When they fail, the fallout will be far more spectacular than that of the late MtGOX because many traders are heavily leveraged.
Hand wavy nonsense. Exchanges have failed before and bitcoin is still going strong.
> - Upcoming Segwit2x hard fork potentially splitting the network.
There already was a hard fork, and the network did split, yet bitcoin is still going strong.
> - Uncertainty with China where the majority of hash power resides. The current crackdown on exchanges is pretty well reported. What I am concerned about is what will happen to the network when electricity price goes up in winter as hydro generation winds down, making mining more expensive. Historically miners were able to get favourable deals with remote thermal plants to cover the shortfall, which may be more difficult due to negative press and an ongoing effort to curb smog.
The bitcoin difficulty rises and falls with the ability to mine it. If the number of miners go down, the network remains unaffected. What's your point here?
>Hand wavy nonsense. Exchanges have failed before and bitcoin is still going strong.
The stakes are different this time.
>There already was a hard fork, and the network did split, yet bitcoin is still going strong.
The previous party line is "Hard fork bad, soft fork good". Anyway, we can agree that now everyone is free to start their own fork and it's a good thing for bitcoin^TM.
>The bitcoin difficulty rises and falls with the ability to mine it. If the number of miners go down, the network remains unaffected. What's your point here?
The network recalculates difficulty every 2016 blocks. Assuming regular 10 minute intervals it is updated approximately every 14 days. If the BTC network was to split evenly in the 2X hard fork, then in the worst case it will take 28 days before an adjustment is due. If the split is not 50/50, then the minority chain will need proportionally more time.
In the meantime both chains will be congested due to longer average block interval. That said, both chains will need several months to stabilise as miners move between forks to maximise their profit, as we have already seen with the BCC/BCH split, and that was initiated by a <5% pool.
tl;dr A chain split will make the network unusable for weeks if not months.
Fair enough, those are all good points. Do you have knowledge of wash trading and accounting issues at at any of the major USD exchanges? I know bitfinex was hacked last year (and paid everyone back?), and there have recently been some strange rumors around bitfinex and Tether, but that is all I have heard.
And do you believe this crash/correction will be lethal? Or will Bitcoin "die" and rise again?
Bitfinex & Tether seem to be the two major suspects here (or is that just one? their ownership links are murky, to say the least)
https://twitter.com/bitfinexed single-mindedly covers the dodgy company. If there was some way of filtering their tweets to show just the linked articles and not all the comments/retweeting noise, you could find some good coverage of the issue.
As long as there are two bitcoin nodes remaining to update the ledger we could call it "not dead", but the token would probably not be worth much by that point. And bitcoin probably have a hard time to recover due to the amount of cruft and technical debt it has.
My best guess is that it could go through more boom/bust cycles before speculators move on; actual users have already started to move to other cryptos as we speak.
Mining power was shown to be overrated by the failure of multiple miner driven or supported proposals and the success of the user-activated Segwit soft fork.
The idea of the UASF was that miners would be economically incentivized to follow user nodes signaling and then enforcing new rules - and that is exactly what happen.
It is also not out of the question to alter how blocks are mined in Bitcoin - Ethereum is doing that in an upcoming hard fork[0].
With Bitcoin it would be possible to not only introduce a new PoW with a soft-fork, or introduce multiple proof of work methods so that each has a difficulty target and no one PoW has a geographic, technological or regulatory advantage allowing it to achieve more than 100 / number_of_proofs_of_work% hashrate
You can't predict the future, when ARPANET was developed they didn't have the internet in mind as it is today, but it was a new technology which evolved and will keep to evolve.
I think it will be the same with Bitcoin, it might be dead if it will stay in the form that it is today but my guess is that it won't be the case.
While I agree on the centralization part, I don't think that this somehow makes it dead. I mean in the end many comparable systems are even more centralized.
The notion of "to me, bitcoin died" sounds like "that show/band/social network/news site died to me, because...".
Bitcoin seems a bit like many other economic systems, where it doesn't make sense that it survives or survives so long. I don't think predictions about such systems can be made by purely rational means by any feasible means. There is too much emotion and seeming "randomness" involved.
However, I am sure that at one day be that in two weeks, decades or more it will be over and everyone will have seen it coming, as the most obvious thing. So I agree. Bitcoin will end. However, life on earth will too and even there you have speculations reaching from only decades to billions of years. ;)
I think you are right, however. But I also thought Bitcoin would have been over years ago.
Do you understand the Bitcoin security model? It has not been broken. And do you understand what "woo" means? Your hand wavey proclamations about Bitcoin fit the bill.
Wallets aren't part of Bitcoin - they're an implementation abstraction. The blockchain gives you unspent transaction outputs and a way to verify them and sign a script to unlock them.
The key management involved in a Bitcoin wallet faces the same problems and complications as any other implementation of crypto and user key management faces. Some have implemented it well, some have implemented it poorly.
Why does it seem like more and more sites are requesting permissions to send notifications...makes it hard to consider this a "trustworthy" site when the first thing you're trying to do is ask for permissions to send notifications.
It was nice when it was used sparingly by things like chat apps, but it's become too annoying; maybe the webmasters just don't understand they aren't the centre of their users' lives.
At least the latest version of Safari supports blocking all these requests.
It's a poor design where a site is allowed to throw up a dialog like that (also goes for the "this site wants to know your location! yes/no").
It should work like the popup blocker, just show a red cross somewhere, that some action was blocked, and if the user wants to, he can go and unblock it. The onus should be on the site owner to tell his user "if you want this additional functionality, please go and enable <this or that>".
Depends on your OS. For Chrome on macOS, it'll show a chrome-styled square box with an icon and a piece of text in the upper right hand corner, kinda like macOS notifications (but they look nothing like it). In general, web notifications (can) work the same way they do on your smart phone. They can arrive from an active tab as well as from a background service.
Safari (on macOS) will use the native macOS notification system to display notifications AFAIR. I have no idea what IE on Windows does.
JS service workers allow a JavaScript thread to run in the background while the browser chrome (the window) is closed. So, in theory, the browser doesn't need to be open. Also, notifications can be useful with an open browser too (or, multiple tabs with a tab in the background for example)
I've noticed this trend as well, and it's accelerating fast. It's an unsolicited popup asking premission to send more popups. Thus I decided to completely turn off the notifications feature in my Chrome.
No, it didn't die and it won't die anytime soon. But dollars, Euro's and all other physical currencies are about to die(soon). Why? Because just like the change from gold and silver coins to almost worthless nickel, this type of currency creates a whole new universe of possibilities.
With nickel and paper money, banks can create as much cash as they like, it's virtual value, not real. Crypto currency is just like that, but more secure and not (yet) controlled by the banks. And again you see the allegations that crypto would be a pyramid scheme etc.. Do people notice that our actual economy/financial-system is a very proven pyramid scheme? All money flows to the rich. And especially those people in power now, are getting a little nervous seeing they might lose some control.
Crypto currencies can be a boon for humanity, unless governments are going to criminalize it and only allow banks to use the technology.
> But dollars, Euro's and all other physical currencies are about to die(soon).
Are you seriously suggesting that in 10 years there will no longer any physical currencies? Or is soon 50 years? Or 100 years? Can you give a concrete vision for how that would work?
> banks can create as much cash as they like, it's virtual value, not real.
No they can't? The government can, but not arbitrary banks.
> And again you see the allegations that crypto would be a pyramid scheme etc
As I understand it, it's more that it's incredibly unstable, and can be taken over by whomever has the most cpus at any given moment.
I'm sure crypto currencies have lots of uses, especially for more cases around the edge (people in countries with dodgy governments etc), but I can't understand what value it provides outside of that.
I am no expert. At the moment though, if I want to buy a widget online, and I have visa or bitcoin as my options, my choices are either to trust visa, the company that is bound by at least some regulation, has a physical office and PR that can be damaged, or trust a random bitcoin conversion service which is not bound by any regulation, could literally just disappear with my money, could record an internal log of every single transaction and tell it to third parties etc… and then disappear into the night if something went wrong.
Maybe this is all incorrect. But this is the perception that I and others have. So it's either an actual issue, or an issue of bad marketing.
>Are you seriously suggesting that in 10 years there will no longer any physical currencies? Or is soon 50 years? Or 100 years? Can you give a concrete vision for how that would work?
Physical currency is already less than 10% of currency.
>As I understand it, it's more that it's incredibly unstable, and can be taken over by whomever has the most cpus at any given moment.
Stability decreases as value stored in it increases. You can't bootstrap a global decentralised currency without some growing pains. The thing about bitcoin is that is constantly crashes upwards.
>I'm sure crypto currencies have lots of uses, especially for more cases around the edge (people in countries with dodgy governments etc), but I can't understand what value it provides outside of that.
It prevents fraud from Governments. Instead of allowing them to print money when they want, they can't. It allows for global transactions in minutes, 24 hours a day (every day) for far lower transaction fees. It allows an internet of money.
>or trust a random bitcoin conversion service which is not bound by any regulation
You are mixing up a currency with a payment merchant. There's no reason that Visa wouldn't be able to use Bitcoin and charge you like it currently does.
> Physical currency is already less than 10% of currency.
I got my terminology wrong here. I didn't mean physical currency like notes or whatever, I really just meant currencies backed by a government, £/USD etc.
> It prevents fraud from Governments
Doesn't it just replace it with another form of fraud, but this one without any ability to democratically replace it? Specifically, consensus algorithms that fall over if you manage to own enough computing power?
> You are mixing up a currency with a payment merchant.
Sorry, you're right. As someone who has tried to learn about bitcoin et al and never seen the point, the fact that I have to trust another payment provider for no obvious benefit is where I lose interest.
History has recorded hundreds of currencies that now are worth nothing, the only difference with the US dollar its that is going to be a worldwide event
No it probably won't (I mean, it might result from a worldwide event, but it won't likely cause one.)
Most likely, other than being caused by a global catastrophe, is that the center of global finance gradually shifts elsewhere long before the US dollar becomes worthless, and if that ever happens, barely anyone (outside of the US, especially) notices much.
No bank can't create cash like they want. There's regulation, authority. Do you know how bank work? Bitcoin and all crypto currency are not secure, a lot of people lose money stole by hacker then why arguing that is secure? because there's some math behind it?
There's no conspiracy with bank or governments, only people that want to be richer and richer, because of this stupid economy. The great democraty, this is the reason, because we failed to put priority about life quality, but about making money = success
Also if people stop looking for conspiracy but start to elect, vote for a more better world where everyone can own the same amount of land (that mean I have right to go to amercia without your passeport because you are not a real amercian, just a Citizen of the World), can have the same access to medecine or wathever, there's no need of money.
Many people on HN are so negative in bitcoin that it seems that they are focused on the tree instead of the forest. This technology can solve the main problem human society faces and this is corruption. Human greed is what keeps bitcoin alive but this is not a bug, it is a feature.
To be honest, Bitcoin in no way does solve corruption. Actually, Bitcoin in current state can only increase corruption in society by giving a sense of anonymity. Political corruption on other hand, might be solved through it, but thats the case we are left to see.
Bitcoin is not completely anonymous.
The discussion is not only about Bitcoin or PoW.
We found a way to do transactions that nobody can tamper with. We managed to solve a really serious problem and this is that when money is involved people get greedy and corrupt. No human being should be in a high enough position to steal money or tamper the transactions or commit fraud. It is so obvious that distributed ledgers are a solution to this and it disappoints me that the HN community cannot see it.
How is bitcoin a good model for humanity? If anything, it strives to do away with the little trust there is left in society and replace it with an antagonistic system where everyone is out to sabotage their peers, only being held back by a (intentionally wasteful) proof-of-work mechanism that enforces compliance with the protocol. That's a dystopic vision for humanity if I've ever seen one. Unnecessary too, since trust-based systems have more or less worked so far.
Not to mention that proof-of-work isn't ecologically sustainable on a larger scale anyway.
>Not to mention that proof-of-work isn't ecologically sustainable on a larger scale anyway.
Anyone who says this hasn't been to massive datacentres to see what infrastructure it takes to share your cat videos and avocado toast images. If Crypto wipes out a few banks the costs will be completely negated anyway.
The reality is that bitcoin has the first mover advantage. Any other virtual currency has a big mountain to climb to catch up to it.
100 years from now bitcoin will be around since there is no one entity that defines it and control it. What the community has shown is that they are willing to adapt to the situation. Right now bitcoin has problems but as time moves the code will be modified. What's happening now is that bitcoin is being locked into people's mind as a currency with real value. Whether one can justify it or not is irrelevant. As long as one person is willing to trade goods and services for it will survive. No one throws away a stack of money if they can help it. The community will not let bitcoin die.
The mistake people make is that all the current bitcoin constraints are locked forever. I had the same idea but I finally realized that it is not true. The currency is defined by code and code can be changed. It's very hard to change since the majority of the community has to agree but its possible and people will find a way to keep it going.
One way to think about bitcoin's future is to look at what software was like 40 years ago and then look at what it looks like today. There's a big difference. Bitcoin still has a long way to go before it can be defined as a mature technology. I have no doubt that what we call bitcoin now will not be what we call bit coin 40 years from now. It will evolve in to the currency and store of value people are hoping it should be.
> What's happening now is that bitcoin is being locked into people's mind as a currency with real value.
I'm not certain that's true. Most of the trading in bitcoin is based on speculation that it'll rise in value, and secondly, that'll become more commonplace. Currently, it's not a useful (or usable) form of currency for the vast majority of the planet. So there's no value backing it (yet).
The true test is in X many years, whether BitCoin will be used as actual currency, in which case the value will keep climbing, or whether it'll remain a speculative investment, in which case it'll crash.
I learned about bitcoin when it was less than a dollar, and I'd love to invest, but it's just gambling.
Keep in mind that there people growing up now that will think of bitcoin as having true value. Bitcoin will not be a thing that suddenly appeared in the world as it did for us. So they will be more comfortable using it. They will just think of it as another monetary asset. The boom and bust aspect will slowly disappear. One of the problems with it is the lack of things you can buy with it. As more people get used to it as a currency the more goods that will be available for purchase. Then we'll know what the true exchange value of it will be. Right now the value is basically guessing and it's driven by greed and fear. That will change. Chase's CEO might be right that it's a bubble but that does not mean it does not have value. The reality is that we don't know its value as a monetary unit. It might go to a million or crash to 1. No one knows. As the problems with it get ironed out we'll find out.
People forget that the only reason fiat currency has value is because you can always find someone that will exchange it for goods or services. It has no value on its own. It's a believe in people's mind. Bitcoin will have that same trust in time. One big advantage over fiat is that the community is world wide and it's not locked to one country. I can see a country disappearing from the world but by definition bitcoin is a world monetary unit that's slowly embedding itself into the world psychic.
I truthfully believe that in less than 40 years it will as common as the dollar is now. My only fear is that the world's countries will fear it and outlaw it. That doesn't mean it will go away but might slow it down.
BTW, I was a anti bitcoin guy but after a little analysis I've come around.
Both the Chinese miners as well as the Bitcoin Client developers have near absolute control over Bitcoin. They decide how the code is getting changed. At least for the miners the motivation is clear: monetary profit (bitcoin is not money). And the only way to keep up the profit is through speculation.
I am running a , what would you call, reform micro school for the first four graders. Our biggest challenge as educators is that we really have no idea how the world at large will look like in 20-30 years and yet we need to prepare our kids for that (our answer is they need to love learning, the rest will follow). But assuming anything a hundred years out... may I borrow your crystal ball for a few minutes please? I have a few things I need to check.
I assume my question will be lost in comments, but I'll ask it anyway here, because it seems to be very interesting side of cryptocoins. My boss is somewhat educated in economy and routinely tries to model the bitcoin economics. He came to the conclusion that the amount of bitcoin turnover is supported not by regular players, but by country-sized economies like China and probably few other states. Most of capitalization comes from really, really huge amount of money, because there is not so much many money even in criminal activities like drugs, trafficking, arms, etc. Bitcoin is alive not because of blockchain mining and not because of human's freedom, but because it enables to move capitals and gray industry volumes across the borders with no usually defined penalty.
If that is true, there is strict confidence that it's not going away in near future. But that also means that it is surely regulated or at least heavily monitored. Or it leads all of us to such economical crashes that world never seen (and can't just deal with). Idk where it goes and how one evaluates it, do you have any ideas on that hypothesis?
The basic idea that regular people use it for freedom and security is parallel to this one, and is of no interest since the volume of it in ordinary currencies is too low to consider.
Isn't the greater problem that the total market cap of bitcoin is always going to be 22 million? In other words, the single bitcoin I own will always be worth 1/22M of the entire market cap, regardless of how much it's used.
And I only own one. There are lost of people out there who owns thousands of bitcoins. 1000 bitcoins is 1/22k of the entire market cap.
I think the comment is saying that in other currencies, if your currency's total value increases, usually more money is printed to keep the value reasonable. Even with other cryptocurrencies, Ripple for instance has a large unallocated holding of coins that they're meant to siphon out into the market to keep the value per coin under control. Whereas with bitcoin you can hold onto the same amount of money and if more and more people buy in, it becomes more and more valuable.
I'd add that I almost feel like there could be a bit of a paradox there in regards to Bitcoin's actual usefulness for real purchases.
Let’s say Bitcoin takes off and various merchants start accepting it.
Since Bitcoin is useful now, more people buy in. But since more people are always buying in and the total pool is limited, the value continues to go up. The more merchants support Bitcoin, the more people adopt Bitcoin, and the more valuable it becomes.
The more the value continues to increase, the better it seems as an investment, and the more people lean towards holding instead of spending. The more useful it becomes, the better it is to not spend it.
> The more the value continues to increase, the better it seems as an investment, and the more people lean towards holding instead of spending.
This is called currency "deflation" (the opposite of inflation), and it's one of the key things that central banks try to control. If a currency is gaining value rapidly, then it makes more sense for people to hold onto it, no one buys anything, and the economy drives to a halt. In these cases, central banks may print money to lower the value of the currency.
The effects of how it would play out with Bitcoin are probably different, as it isn't close to being universal, it travels across political borders, no single economy relies on it, and it's under no control. Sounds like an Econ PhD thesis.
You actually can’t compare bitcoin to gold and silver. The stock of gold and silver may appear constant,but th supply does actually grow. The supply grows in relation to their demand and current market factors. Bitco8n does have a hard limit. They’re not alike.
In the global economy, resources are not constant. Every time you do some work, you add value to the system.
The problem is that with bitcoin, the total amount of currency is fixed, which means that when value is added to the system, you the value of the bitcoin has to increase.
You might think that not having inflation sounds like a great idea, but the problem is that unless the total amount of currency increases to match the value of the system you will not end up with zero inflation, you'll end up with deflation.
Deflation is really bad, because it encourages people to sit on their cash instead of spending it, and an economy without spending means that more value is not added to the system.
Of course, I am arguing against people who I have heard who suggests that bitcoin is all we need and it can take over all currencies in the world. That seems more or less impossible based on what I just said.
Perhaps cryptocurrency is the future of finance, I have no opinion on that, but if it is, I don't see that it would be bitcoin.
If you had 1000 coins in 2010 that cost you 100 dollars, you don't think you're already going to sell out? People can only sell their coins once, and then they are distributed to many, many people.
As another commenter said, the problem is that bitcoin can't devalue. Inflation is what drives people to spend their money rather than sitting on it, waiting for it to increase in value.
I certainly have no intention of spending my bitcoin. Not because I don't have anything to spend it on, but because if it becomes more popular, then by definition it will have to increase in value by a huge number. Unless of course it collapses before then.
I was an early miner, got a few, started when it was less than a dollar, and cashed in when it was low hundreds. I don't think anyone knew it was gonna explode 5000X or more. Every early miner or bitcoin developer regrets they didn't buy more, mine more, or hold on to it for longer.
But the truth is that at this point, it's still mostly gambling. The use-cases for BitCoin are numerous, but I don't see many in place just yet. Right now, the value is based solely on speculation.
I am mostly commenting on a big amount of comments deeming Bitcoin a failure or similar.
The Bitcoin of ~a month ago is not the same as today, that's a big power, to have upgradable decentralized money. Certainly Bitcoin is not perfect, but the good thing is that there are a lot of talented engineers working on the issues and new features, the majority of them even before Bitcoin really was worth much. But having it being valuable at the moment also acts a huge security/bug bounty and an incentive for more people work on it and make it better.
= All about the price
Even if the price crashes horribly, unless there's a unrecoverable catastrophe, it will keep on going because there's an ecosystem around it and clear price-independent advantages. Using Bitwage to be paid in Bitcoins and avoid crazy cross-border/currency fees of banks will be still an advantage no matter the price of bitcoin. Same goes for prepaid/debit cards backed with bitcoin. Doing commerce painlessly without crazy procedures with Africa & Latin America or wherever. Being immune to capital controls and asset seizures.
= Hype
I hate the hype everywhere, but it's not the tech's fault so many cluessless & irrelevant gold-diggers try to ride the wave, just with a lot of things you can just ignore. If you follow the devs, they are pragmatic and don't try to pump-up things like most altcoins do, that's something I greatly respect.
Anyway, there's a long way to go, but just because there are flaws at the moment, it doesn't mean it's dead, it's a live technology. Being pragmatic is key, Bitcoin is not some Utopian perfect invention, but it's good enough for a lot of things at the moment and I see it getting better every year.
Bitcoin offers true permissionless commerce and ownership of wealth and it now might not make any difference in a lot of democratic countries until it begins to do.
I've followed digital currencies for many years. As I recall, there were two libertarian threads that culminated in Bitcoin. One focused on evils of fiat currencies and central banking. The other focused on rights to private commerce, without state interference. And the potential to starve states, by making taxation impossible.
Bitcoin handles both pretty well, in my experience. Except for the transaction-scaling problems, anyway. Price fluctuations just reflect its miniscule capitalization, and movements of capricious investors. When Bitcoin, or more likely, one of its descendants, reaches fiat-currency scale, that won't be so problematic.
My humble analysis why blockchains (and bitcoins on the blockchain) are like tulips. Like tulips you can always grow more and with blockchains you can always build / start your own blockchains. Building your own blockchain lets say in Ruby is about 20 lines of code. See the point? It's easy (not rocket sience ;-). See the [Awesome Blockchains](https://github.com/openblockchains/awesome-blockchains) for more (about building your own blockchains in Python, JavaScript, Ruby, etc.) in minutes.
My humble analysis why paper currencies are like tulips. Like tulips you can always grow more, and with paper currencies you can always print/start your own. Creating a paper currency on say, paper, takes only 1 minute. See the point? It's easy (not rocket science ;).
My humble analysis of why startups are like tulips. Like tulips you can grow more, and with startups you can always build/start your own. Building your own startup is easy, just think of an idea, say Uber for toilet paper, and it takes only 1 minute. See the point? It's easy (not rocket science ;-).
Sorry but I had too, the easiness to create something has no barring on how hard it is to make it a globally used system. Whether you can create a new blockchain in minutes is completely irrelevant and offers nothing to the discussion.
One of the early obituaries on that list mentions that the finite supply of bitcoins, combined with lost crypto keys and hoarding will eventually lead to a situation where there aren't enough coins for it to be a viable currency.
Clearly, in that situation you can subdivide coins as far as required, so it isn't a risk to bitcoin as such. However, I have often wondered if there is any estimate of the "effective supply", that is to say ("minted coins" - "coins where the private key is lost")?
Pragmatically, that is probably true, and bitcoin won't last for millenia either (e.g. if sha-256 has a weakness, or quantum computers render ecdsa useless).
Nevertherless, there is >0 probability of multiple harddrive failure, or much greater probability of incompetence, so there must be some rate of loss of bitcoins over time, and i'd be interested to know what that is.
I think it is interesting because once the speculation dies down, the market will set the fiat price of bitcoins according to the actual supply and demand, so this attrition has a real affect. For example, imagine if the coins believed to belong to Satoshi (1 million coins out of the current 16.5 million) were to move. The mere knowledge that they can be moved would increase the effective supply by 6-7% overnight, the effect could be dramatic.
Well, if you lost the private key at the beginning, when they weren't worth much, you wouldn't have been that careful. So I'd wager that there is a fair amount of lost coins around.
Well for a start half those dead currencies were replaced with new currencies issued by a different authority and their holders compensated, often at parity.
As for the ones that collapsed, they tended to involve dictators and wars rather than people simply deciding they weren't worth wasting time on because nobody was interested in exchanging them.
> Well for a start half those dead currencies were replaced with new currencies issued by a different authority and their holders compensated, often at parity.
Indeed, I see on that list the several Brazilian Cruzeiro/Cruzado currencies. The only difference between each of these and their predecessor is that three zeros were cut: if you had 1000 of the old currency, you had 1 of the new currency. The last of these was replaced by the current currency (Real) at a slightly different rate (2750 instead of 1000). That is, it was more like a renaming than the currency actually dying and being replaced. And there was no different authority in these cases, they were all issued by the same central bank.
Bitcoin, as it was originally envisioned, IS dead. It's not a replacement for cash. It's prohibitively expensive to use for regular transactions. It's also a colossal waste of energy. It's become similar to stocks/ETFs...something people trade/speculate on/gamble with to try and get rich.
When I had bitcoin first explained to me in ~2011 I was told that it would save us all from the evil that are banks, transaction fees, and the government. Six years later, bitcoin has made a few people very, very wealthy, but us laymen still can't use it as a cash replacement and the people with decision making power in the Bitcoin community are not interested in ever letting that happen.
It was a fun experiment, but it failed its primary goal.
There's way too much for me to know it all about Bitcoin but say I want to learn more about building a blockchain, is there a spec for just that from the Bitcoin spec, or is the spec all inclusive? I have to admit I never read the original paper(s) I just mined BTC back in 2009 when I (somehow) heard about it, and have left it alone since. Funnily enough I was ignoring it all, till I realized my mining pool had all my BTC so I transfered it out (nothing significant enough, but just enough to allow me to peek curiosity again). I'm curious if anyone has designed their own Blockchain based tech that is focused on that aspect that has several industries interested in Blockchain technology. Minus any Bitcoin specifics that is.
These line of thinking is toxic. What have you done in the meantime? Will you be back in 4 years when bitcoin is in the 6 figures region moaning how you should have bought at 4000?
Yeah, I recently saw anti-adblock script trying to look like a browser error and I totally fell for it. Only i didn't read the message and after few F5 i just closed the tab.
Most analysts from traditional mindset making the mistake of analyzing bitcoin like they do stocks or fiat currency which can rely on a country's economy or political scenarios or a company's decisions to make profits. But, Bitcoin is like anything they have seen before or learnt in their college. Most volatility corresponds to news of it's survival at the moment and due to the reason the market is failing to agree with a fair value as no one knows it's future but is aware of the nobility of the technology and how it skipped the hands of any one controlling it by being decentralized. As the world keeps adopting to it the demand is getting increased. And there is still a lot of geographical terrain to cover.
When a traditional wall-street analyst sees a peak, he was trained to freak out and sense it as an extreme point of the crowd's greed. And shows off his training by telling the world that it's a bubble and it's going to burst, as the peak is occupied mostly by greedy investors who panic on losing their money and sells off double the speed they entered the trade. But this stands true when the value of the instrument surpasses the intrinsic value of the asset way too high. But with bitcoin no one knows hence majority investors still think it cheap and keep piling up.
To me, bitcoin died sometime in 2013 when mining became hopelessly centralised, breaking the economic and security models Satoshi had set forth. The bitcoin thereafter has been a soulness Frankenstein animated by a mixture of ego, greed, and hubris. I don't want to make any predictions, but when the crash comes it will be over before you knew it.
As for the wider field of blockchain/DLT, it bears an uncanny parallel to the early days of nuclear physics when radioactivity was first discovered by the Curies: The science behind it was be sound, yet any benefit to mankind was overshadowed by the cottage industry selling radioactive snake oil for a long time before the mania died down. And people died when basic precautious were not taken.
It may work down the road and it may not, but right now all I see is woo in every direction.