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.
- 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.
Perhaps, for a new generation, certs are too old fashioned, or many have never heard of their uses?
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.
I am definitely not saying blockchain is the only or even the best way to achieve that! Just that this helps explain its appeal
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.
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.
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.
Unfortunately no one runs news stories on the growth of unique addresses in the bitcoin network
[1] http://business.time.com/2012/02/27/warren-buffett-on-succes...
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.
Once and for all, I said!
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.
How's that work, bud?
The entire medical industry's growth is based on innovation.
Do you think the medical industry is growing because it's 'digging more resources' out of the ground?
'Cutting more trees'?
The entire financial industry, basically all of high tech.
Education.
Very few sectors depend on 'natural resources' for growth.
And even for some that do, it's minimal.
Most materials are abundant anyhow.
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
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.
BTC on the other hand, is deflationary by design.
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.
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?
Which is odd, because without any other utility, what's the point in choosing this commodity over others?
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:
* https://github.com/ElementsProject/lightning
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.
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 :)
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'?
So authoritarian jerks can't mess with them?
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.
Bitcoin itself is completely auditable in transparent. The system will behave exactly as the code is written.
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.
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.
So again, what standard?
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.
That's huge.
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.
For me it's not huge, or even really relevant.
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.
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.
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?).
Does the price of a painting determine it is a good painting? Afaik not.
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'.
I agree that those other properties are important too.
I don't want to critique any sentences, but this one is heavy on rhetoric and low on information.
- 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.
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?
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.
And do you believe this crash/correction will be lethal? Or will Bitcoin "die" and rise again?
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.
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.
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
[0] Ethereum is transition from proof-of-work to a combined proof-of-work/proof-of-stake with the Casper project https://github.com/ethereum/research/wiki/Casper-Version-1-I...
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.
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.
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.
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.