BTC dev: 'Strangling' the blockchain will kill Bitcoin The destiny of Bitcoin, like that of Apollo 13, shall never be realised, at least according to one of the cryptocurrency's most well-known developers, who has announced that "the experiment has failed". Mike Hearn was a senior software engineer at Google up until 2014, when he left to focus his full-time attention on Bitcoin …
What most people are saying here about bitcoin shows they have no clue what a scam our debt-money based on privatized printing presses is.
I will quote Henry Ford: "If the population understood how our money works, there would be a revolution before tomorrow"
And he had very good reason to say that, because it is a scam that automatically, with mathematical inevitability, will eventually deliver ownership of all assets on earth to private bankers.
They are too greedy and impatient, however to wait for it, so they take measures to speed things up, creating booms and busts as they please. Sometimes they end up falling on their face with these attempts, but mostly, they succeed in taking your stuff and your government's stuff from you, and close to 100% of your income tax goes straight to banks in the form of interest.
Yes, the media worked hard on you, telling you that government officials are paid too well, are fat, lazy, inept and corrupted. You were always envious of them anyway, so you swallowed it up.
Simultaneously, they told you how much better and more efficient business men do things. "Hey, lets privatize everything that used to belong to the government - i.e. the general public and give it to a bunch of corrupt, greedy business men!"
Does it make a difference? Well, while business men operate with the singular purpose of squeezing as much cash as possible from anything, the maligned government officials actually had other purposes to fulfill, however well or poorly they did that: serving the public.
The absolutely gigantic financial fraud got invited by the same erroneous idea - that corrupt business men would do a better job at not printing too much money or otherwise acting like criminals than the supposedly even less trustworthy government.
Well, the gullible readers of media outlets controlled by those same 'business' interests are making their bed by never bothering to check how exactly the monetary system works, nor have they wondered why the subject is not taught in school at all.
The reckoning is close at hand and everybody will suffer greatly for a vast majority being completely unconcerned with who controls the world's money and just how fraudulent that system is: easily the biggest scam in the history of man kind.
Subservience to money is a degradation of human consciousness.
bitcoin is really a speculation and/or money laundering vehicle.
So is any money today. It is purely speculative, because it is no longer backed by assets. The last few remaining countries which had some form of an asset guarantee behind their money are no more.
As far as money laundering vehicle - so is any and every major currency. The distinction is purely "who is allowed to launder". Bitcoin simply happens to have a set of "who is allowed to launder" different from the usual state actors.
Yeah, thanks for all those vacuous software patents, filthy shit-burger food, Hollywood propaganda machine drowning out all other cultures, being the main driver of internet censorship in the western world (we have internet censorship primarily to stop people downloading Hollywood's latest shit-fest)
*Deep breath*
exporting hypocritical (NOT)democratic values and vicious corporatocratic trade agreements at gun point. Politically destabilizing the whole world, crashing the world economy, consuming the most resources per capita by a massive margin. Then using exceptionalism to deny any and all problems, and actually expecting people to be thankful for the imposition.
So what has 'Murica done for anyone lately?
IBAN is the cheaper and better alternative to Paypal outside USA. Many German eBay sellers won't take Paypal.
But PayPal and IBAN are NOT currencies, as bitcoin is supposed to be, they are more secure and cheaper modern alternatives to horriblely expensive Wiretransfer services like Western Union.
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Forget this technical and political crap around bitcoin. Even forget that its primary purpose is for crypto-locker type scam money-collecting. The main problem with Bitcoin is the sheer impenetrability of the whole thing.
I work in IT. I sat down with a colleague and tried to work out how to pay for something in Bitcoins. It's the most fiendishly complicated way of paying for anything that I've ever seen. It's completely obfuscated. For it to become useful, it has to become mainstream. Where's the software? Where's a definitive guide? It seems roughly as fiddly as trying to download illegal movies, and gives you the impression that you're doing something half-baked and half-legal. It left a foul taste in our mouths and I can't see how the developers of this thing ever though it could go mainstream the way it is now.
I DO see the benefits, but the implementation is complete toss
I sat down with a colleague and tried to work out how to pay for something in Bitcoins. It's the most fiendishly complicated way of paying for anything that I've ever seen
Open (or log into) wallet. Enter recipient address and amount, click send.
What's fiendishly complicated about that?
Laying your hands on BTC is only slightly more complicated than getting your hands on foreign currency (assuming you're going the exchange rather than mining routes).
There are plenty of (valid) criticisms of bitcoin, but I'm really struggling to see ease of use as one of them. Unless you count finding a merchant willing to accept them of course.
Even at the other (seller's) end, it's not particularly difficult. Generate a transaction specific address, display that and outstanding balance to user. Monitor transactions against that address, waiting for n confirmations and then mark payment as complete.
OK step 1
Open (or log into) wallet.
Right, don't have one of those.
Try
https://bitcoin.org/en/choose-your-wallet
Mmmm -- most of them say they are vulnerable. That doesn't sound good.
Right try Bitcoin Wallet as it is not vulnerable.
Description:
"Have your Bitcoins always with you, in your pocket! You pay by quickly scanning a QR-code. As a merchant, you receive payments reliably and instantly. Bitcoin Wallet is the first mobile Bitcoin app, and arguably also the most secure!"
Not convinced.
Okay, exactly what is the problem? You dislike QR Codes? I don't know if I've tried that particular app, but I've paid using a QR Code before and it works fine. If that's not your style, there's always Bitcoin Core. Note that when it says "vulnerable environment" they're talking about your desktop OS, not saying the application is any more vulnerable than usual.
So, what if you like the properties of pseudo-anonymity of BitCoin? I know it isn't truly anonymous as you know what wallet moved money to what other wallet but not necessarily the owner of said wallet. However, how do you get money into the system in order to maintain that anonymity? Mining isn't practical and any card or deposit is observed.
Mmmm -- most of them say they are vulnerable. That doesn't sound good.
All software is "vulnerable". So is your physical wallet (or whatever you use to hold cash, credit cards, and the like). Without context, this is a meaningless criterion.
I've never used Bitcoin and have no interest in doing so (though I've looked into how it works, as a technical curiosity), but if I were going to consider using it, I'd find a much better rubric to evaluate implementations with.
You dislike QR codes?
Now that would be a reasonable objection, since there's an obvious gaping security flaw with QR codes: they're not human-readable, so you have to either assume that 1) the code is valid and 2) the library decoded it correctly and 3) the library isn't compromised, or verify the destination after the fact, in which case you might as well have typed in a URL.
QR codes are phishing waiting to happen.
So yeah, I'd avoid implementations that use QR codes.
Sorry, but if you consider downloading illegal movies "fiendishly complicated" you're not in the right profession. Perhaps I'm missing a subtle distinction between "complicated" and "fiddly"... but in my estimation bitcoin and bittorrent (no relation) are indeed about equally difficult. That is to say, not what you'd call user friendly, but perfectly doable by an ordinary guy with a little patience.
And that's ignoring the mobile-oriented clients and web services which give you pretty darn easy access to bitcoin if you're willing trust a third party with your money to one degree or another.
That's one of the biggest issues with it. The other being that it's highly deflationary - and both issues are caused by the same design decision.
As I understand it, Bitcoin 'mining' performs the "payment processing" function, where the proof-of-work confirms that some transactions occurred. They get paid by new Bitcoins that spontaneously come into existence.
However, as time passes, more work is needed to produce each new Bitcoin.
Eventually this curve of ever-reducing results means that it costs more hardware and electricity to to mine a Bitcoin than the Bitcoin is worth. This means that all miners must leave the game - either as they see their costs exceed reward, or later when they have lost enough (or everything).
As the miners are the payment processors, the endgame of Bitcoin is that no payment processing occurs and no Bitcoin transfers can take place. At that point Bitcoin is worth nothing at all.
The steady-state of Bitcoin is therefore zero value.
Of course, anyone who gets in at the beginning and leaves at the right moment can get a very large return.
Okay, you're conflating some things and otherwise spreading some half-truths. Not that I'm saying your criticisms are necessarily invalid, Bitcoin's long-term future is uncertain. But a few important points:
1. "Pyramid scheme" really doesn't apply, except in the loosest sense that people who got in early of clearly benefited the most. But that's just a natural result of how things worked out. Suddenly people started considering it valuable, obviously the risk-takers who spent effort or money to get some while it was still unknown are now in a fortunate position. You're more correct about the deflationary aspect, that's intended, and I do have some doubts about that being a good idea.
2. There are two factors which make mining less efficient as time goes on, and I think it's important to note the difference. Every four years the reward drops be half. That's pretty steep I agree. But the other thing, which is by far the bigger factor, is that the difficulty automatically adjusts based on how fast people are mining, calibrated to keep blocks being added at relatively steady six-per-hour rate. This shouldn't be a problem because if people start to lose interest in mining it will automatically get easier again.
3. As above the mining reward is cut in half every four years, but miners also collect transaction fees. Currently it looks like they're taking in about 0.25 BTC (roughly a hundred bucks) per block that way. That's only 1% of the current mining reward, but as long as people are using bitcoin it will never drop to zero.
In short, it's imperfect and who knows what will happen in the future, but it's not as horribly broken as you make it out. It's also not set in stone. If the bitcoin community can be convinced that it would be in their best interest to change something, it would be possible (though disruptive) to do that.
I can't comment on the validity of your statements as they sound reasonable. The bigger stumbling block down the road is the finite limit on the specie. I've been reading where some rather large institutions are attempting to gather as many as they can. If the coins are, in essense, locked up and not circulating, then they become nothing more than a version of grandpa's money hidden in his mattress. Unusable, basically. Given the limit on the number, we're back where the world was a couple centuries ago with money in circulation being finitely limited.
I'm not saying "unlimited" currency is an answer either. I have no answers, just observations and questions.
I like the idea of "almost infinite".
"OK, it's not infinity. Infinity minus a few, maybe."
In practice, the number of (proper) fractions of a Bitcoin will be limited by the range and precision of the representation used by most processors for Bitcoin fractions. I hope it's not floating-point, for reasons that should be obvious.
Whatever it is, though, it will be countable and finite.
Banks (as well as individuals) will only hold bitcoins if they think those bitcoins are valuable, and are likely to be even more valuable in the future.
Bitcoins exist only as entries on a globally distributed ledger (the blockchain), backed only by the willingness of the network to maintain the integrity of said ledger. They have no "intrinsic" value. The only reason the network is willing to spend resources to maintain the blockchain is because bitcoin users accept bitcoin in exchange for goods and services. These users do so because they have confidence in the decentralized, peer-to-peer, permissionless, uncounterfeitable, irreversible, near-instant, nearly free transactions that the blockchain enables.
So, if bitcoin were ever to become unusable, it will lose value by that very fact. Even if we were to accept your premise that hoarding makes bitcoin unusable (it doesn't), then the hoarders will sell as bitcoin loses value, and there will be more in circulation again, and it will be valuable again.
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