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Re:Did Bitcoin just prove it can't scale? by eterm on Saturday December 09, 2017 @10:43AM (#15886247)
"Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System"

Peer to peer cash.

Not "Gold", not "asset", but "Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash".

Re:Did Bitcoin just prove it can't scale? by thatcat on Saturday December 09, 2017 @01:34PM (#15887220)
The IRS classifies and taxes it as an asset because functionally it is an asset. The design is speculated to be based off of hashcash and maybe it was suppose to be used as cash and in a way it is still useful as "electronic cash" for online orders since wait times are less relevant.

http://www.hashcash.org/papers/hashcash.pdf

Re:Did Bitcoin just prove it can't scale? by Beejeepa on Saturday December 09, 2017 @02:23PM (#15887531)
The IRS is wrong.
Re:Did Bitcoin just prove it can't scale? by mtremsal on Saturday December 09, 2017 @03:03PM (#15887772)
How so?

And obviously it doesn't matter if the law is wrong, it's still the law. But in this instance, why do you believe it to be wrong?

Re:Did Bitcoin just prove it can't scale? by thatcat on Saturday December 09, 2017 @01:24PM (#15887163)
The IRS classifies and taxes it as an asset because functionally it is an asset. Satoshi was doing a bit of marketing with the title of his paper.
Re:Did Bitcoin just prove it can't scale? by etherael on Saturday December 09, 2017 @11:08AM (#15886373)
Bitcoin cash is still that.
Re:Did Bitcoin just prove it can't scale? by makomk on Saturday December 09, 2017 @12:03PM (#15886676)
Bitcoin Cash does indeed have very low fees... and about a tenth the transaction volume of Bitcoin proper, with few places using it, mainly just a handful of people involved in creating it.

It's certainly not as ridiculous an option as it was back before the difficulty adjustment fix when its supporters were promoting it as the fast option despite it usually taking days for transactions to confirm (supporters responding that block times were as low as a minute sometimes, and they were right... except it was a entirely bimodal distribution, with most of the time spent in the "hours per block" part).

However, the increased transaction capacity people are promoting is still about 100x its current transaction rate, and it's entirely unclear how well it'd handle scaling up by that much in practice. Especially since I'm pretty sure it lacks some of the scaling work that the original Bitcoin has. Also, the rampant dishonesty and all the attempts by sites and services owned by a guy with a major investment in it to trick people into thinking it is Bitcoin don't inspire confidence.

Re:Did Bitcoin just prove it can't scale? by pmorici on Saturday December 09, 2017 @01:41PM (#15887259)
Bitcoin Cash has been around for 3 months. 1 tenth the volume in that time is extremely impressive given than popular services like Coinbase and Bitpay don't even support it yet.
Re:Did Bitcoin just prove it can't scale? by wildsatchmo on Saturday December 09, 2017 @03:58PM (#15888109)
Exactly. Price aside, the growth is insane. Things are being built. Merchants are coming back online. Within a few months the sentiment will start to change for BCH.
Re:Did Bitcoin just prove it can't scale? by goialoq on Saturday December 09, 2017 @11:54AM (#15886632)
For those who don't know, Bitcoin forked into 1 "new" Bitcoin (kept the name, changed the model from currency to speculative asset), and 2 Bitcoin Cash, that continued development along the original crypto-currency design.

https://www.investopedia.com/tech/bitcoin-vs-bitcoin-cash-wh...