Even the language designed to describe the "hack" was garbage. It wasn't a "hack", if code is law, all bugs are code and therefore part of law. There was no "thief" that "stole" anything either. Code is law. Somebody followed the contract down to the letter and made a trade to their benefited. Code is law.
If the central tenant of "code is law" cannot even be held and real meatspace-based humans can modify history at will.... what value does ethereum add at all besides pissing away an unimaginable amount of energy turning non-renewable fossil fuels into heat?
If anybody can modify history.... just use AWS. It's cheaper.
The "code is law" is just hype about how amazing and new and unprecedented this thing is, but it's a truly bad idea. The reversibility of bugs is a good thing. In human law, there are exceptions, and appeals, etc. Aiming for a completely mechanical system is the type of unnuanced thinking that leads me to be extremely skeptical of the entire cryptocurrency community, and in particular made me think that Ethereum was a total joke run by unserious people.
Computer tools must adapt to human nature, not the other way around. Ethereum's hype train ignored that. Such temporary hype trains can help get the train moving, but it's always important to separate the hype and marketing from the reality. Especially in everything from post 2000 in the Silicon Valley, hype and marketing are what drives success much more than product itself. We need to remember to not get high on our own supply, and not believe the bullshit that gets peddled in order to drive platform adoption.
I don't know if there's any alternative to that; any such system is going to have some means of enforcing truth and power, and means of gaining or losing it.
Cryptocurrencies are not a way of escaping that fundamental fact. They shift where the power is. Having that alternative to current ledger and contract systems can be valuable to people in certain situations.
Thinking that Ethereum or Bitcoin or any blockchain tech escapes these fundamental power relationships is exactly the type of inanity that makes the tech seem unserious. It's a hype train, it's not true, but there is still the potential for value.
Cool, so in reality a lot less than 51% of people can screw over every else.
Again, what is it that ETH provides society that's new and useful?
New: state-level actor(s) cannot stop an organization from receiving payment merely by forcing your third-party payment processor to freeze funds/stop payments.
Example: sci-hub. If they were receiving payments through Mastercard/Visa it would have almost certainly been frozen long ago. However, since they (apparently) get funded by receiving Bitcoin, they continue to operate. In the meantime, grad students and professors get the convenience of using sci-hub's interface to easily retrieve journal articles.
Even if sci-hub eventually gets taken down completely (or a researcher finds a catastrophic bug in all cryptocurrencies), the total time during which sci-hub served documents funded by Bitcoins was a benefit to society.
ETH allows fancier transaction scripts than Bitcoin, but the same argument holds-- a state level actor cannot just stop the contract from being executed simply by putting pressure on a third party.
Based on this article, I'd say there is value in ETH just as there is value in writing a complex, multi-threaded application in a memory-unsafe language. It's a bad idea, but for some special cases it may be better than doing nothing at all.
In most transaction, the third party also act as an insurance, a safety. If something goes wrong, the third party is supposed to be here to make sure everybody got their fair share without the need to take legal action, which can be difficult to near impossible sometime.
If I get scamed, does the smart contract allow a chargeback ? Who is going to make sure I was scam and not abusing ? etc.
What insurance would you need when sending a Bitcoin donation to a site where thousands of researchers already benefited by retrieving scientific journal articles?
I didn't write, "cryptocurrencies will replace all third party payment systems." I gave a single example of a situation where third party payment systems don't function and Bitcoin does.
They just haven't gotten around to it yet. The decentralized nature of cryptocurrencies increases the number of entities that need to be pressured, but doesn't make state-level actors completely powerless.
Since stopping cryptocurrencies is harder than freezing third party payments (evidence: see Wikileaks), this is a single, narrow example of the usefulness of cryptocurrencies. Researchers get the convenience of sci-hub's frontend for longer than they would if sci-hub had relied on a third party payment system.
Finally, there are a lot of good reasons why in democracy we vote per-head and not per-share. It's a big thing, but that is also being dismissed by cryptocurrencies.
They've forked before they could be forced to again.
Again, what is it that ETH provides society that's new and useful?
If you want to throw up your hands and declare this all a waste of time, feel free. You'll have lots of company, and for good reason, but setting some arbitrarily high goal such as "providing something new and useful to society" just makes it sound like you've got an axe to grind.
There's plenty of things about Ethereum (and blockchain exchanges and how they are used and hyped) to criticize legitimately, but this doesn't seem to be one of them.
Ethereum forces a global authority :)
Not only do those who designed the cryptocoin plus early adapters (the former are the latter, but not necessarily vice versa) get more rich with thin air generated by electricity, they also get more powerful. No wonder these things rise up like mushrooms from the ground.
Man, if I were into this, I'd just convince people 24/7 to get into these cryptocoins. Best way to get rich doing virtually nothing but some marketing. Right?
And if you're just going to use ETH to pay for real compute hardware in the cloud so you can run real software, at that point why not just use BTC?
Turing-completeness doesn't automatically make something useful.
By the very nature of your argument if a Turing-complete blockchain isn't inherently worth something than a stack-based language which isn't Turing complete is certainly worthless.
I feel like your arguing with me for the sake of arguing? What's your point ETH isn't perfect, so what, it's relatively new tech which is exploring an interesting problem. The fact it's valued X _may be_ a fair evaluation or even undervalued given it's impact. The upside being possibly a DAO controlled by an AI efficiently providing resources to humanity in a way human's can't given traditional power structures. Or maybe fiat isn't so bad and we don't want robot overlords so we scrap it all. At the end of the day who cares, as long as your smart about the money you've invested into to the ecosystem you won't be hurt by a Black Swan in the cryptosphere. I think anyone working on ETH up to Vitak would have the same sentiment.
If you want to build a better language for interfacing with the VM your free to do so.
You argue for purity of a principle. Very few people actually care about such a notion. The majority has more practical concerns. The fact that a theft that would have made the whole currency seem insecure has been reversed was seen as a proof of solidity by many users.
The current system at least theoretically has democratic (or otherwise) control over who the 0.1% in power are. In a system like BTC or ETH it's just 'who has the most compute?' or in proof of stake, 'who's the richest?'
The 'diminish trust in the network' threat really only discourages an existing good actor (invested in the network) from turning into a bad actor.
If I've been mining a cryptocurrency for years and I decide I want to move on to mining something else, what stops me from using 51% to destroy the currency before I move on to mining something else? If I moved my currency holdings out (or have been liquidating them regularly, as any sensible miner might), what's to lose?
It may not be for you, and it may not be for society writ large, but it is an excellent and very important idea. Removing human judgement is exactly the point. Whether this thrills or horrifies you is, I think, a personality trait.
I attach neither horror nor thrill to that idea, I find it laughable. We all have our abstract ideals, and these abstract ideals eventually meet the reality of human interaction. There is no possibility of removing human judgement, as long as humans are in control of the machines. Humans may temporarily agree to go with whatever the machines say, but that is only a temporary status, as whoever controls the machines has ultimate control.
I'm still a little lost. What value does ETH provide if we cede to human emotions and social power structures at the end of the day? We don't need to invent a cryptocracy to realize a world where people who own 51% of the power can acceptably or at least "fairly" screw over the the dissenting lot with 49%... that is just old school power. It has been around for ages.
In theory, ETH proposed a playing field where law is specified using a language that everyone agrees upon, and where applications of said law are recorded on a decentralized public ledge and even executed using the compute power of the underlying network. The system was valuable precisely because it provided a cryptographically robust way to circumvent humanity for the purpose of recording law with authority and confidence.
But all we've learned from this experiment is that when someone messes up, or not, and it impacts a lot of people (in these cases negatively), they will appeal to the people who own the power and request execution of an "authorized" (not by the original rules but by virtue of ownership of power) out-of-band attack against the system. In other words, they'll collude to perform an illegal move in order to counter the undersireable outcome. In essence, it's a network coup.
Don't get me wrong, I think this is kinda cool too. And if ETH or blockchains or whatever is the zeitgeist what inspires people to continue to imagine and build transparent societies where we have better and better distribution of power, perhaps it has artistic value.
But these events jade people, and the reason they lose trust in the system is because they learn just how easily it is not to be trusted.. how human it is. You put your faith in a system only to see the network owners use their power to operate outside of it.
Of course this is great when you are the beneficiary of a network reset. But by condoning rewriting history, you've chosen to sacrifice the system and pander to your emotions above those of the people who shared trust with you when everyone agreed to play by the rules. So maybe you don't live in an ivory tower: there may appear to be few victimes (namely the bad actor) but finally don't forget the contracts that become void when the network is reset. To those who bought in ideologically to ETH, these events effectively invalidate the entire system. And ETH becomes a failed experiment.
We both appear to agree that ETH is still human. You claim this is a boon. I am skeptical. I am still curious why being human innately makes ETH more valuable. Perhaps you mean the fact that the participants evoked "human mode" over "machine mode" is an indication that people value this system dearly. I do not disagree. But I'd argue this value comes from a different place. This value comes from a desire for, well, value itself. This is a different, darker, value. It's no longer simply valued for its merit: the vision for a mechanically infungable system isolated from human emotional responses. But it's just another victim of human irrationality, greed, ignorance, and laziness. And that is a little sad in my opinion.
Just to be clear I'm not bitter I've never owned any ether.
What a completely idiotic notion that is. Language can be used to deceive, and if the neverending freakshow of "smart contract" bugs shows anything it is that computer languages are not exempt.
Removing human judgement is exactly the point.
The Underhanded C Contest is not about human judgement.
We have processes that deal with human reality. We build political parties to extend power, we have judges and parliaments, where laws are written, people enter contracts every day - the system works mostly well. Ethereum is an improvement on exactly what?
And even if it were, why roll back the block chain to rectify the situation? In traditional accounting, wouldn't you need a ledger record of both the mistake and its correction?
This is exactly what happened. The blockchain wasn't rolled back. New transactions crediting the victims were injected into it.
So can I make a purchase, receive the goods and then claim a bug?
Reversibility of platform bugs is a good thing, reversibility of contract bugs is basically reversibility of plain transactions, which makes the whole idea of cryptocurrency useless.
(the fact that the creator of Ethereum was heavily invested in the DAO doubtless played a role as well... it's different when it's your money that got stolen, and he had the power to do something about it.)
Still though, people don't understand that the legal system is a feature, not a bug. A neutral arbiter that can judge the spirit of the contract and come to a decision that resolves the matter fairly for everybody... that way you don't need to guarantee bug-free code forever.
There was a post here a while back that made the interesting point that essentially everything cryptocurrency attempts to do is anti-user and the problems they claim to solve would actually be viewed as features by most people. For example, no chargebacks! But chargebacks are a good thing, if the good turns out to be significantly not as described then you can get your money back. Or - immutable history! But it's actually quite nice when the bank can remove fraudulent charges when my wallet gets stolen, I quite like having that recourse.
3% merchant fees for Visa don't seem so bad compared to the DAO hack and Solidity and all that other shit.
Laws are, after all, code. Programmers are the new lawyers.
The problem with the "hack" was that our laws/code are still incredibly primitive.
I don't have an issue with the rollback - because that's part of the design, and I really doubt they'll be able to do that again if the ownership of ETH spreads out more.
These problems will work themselves out.
Think of Ethereum as a very slow decentralized computer. People make mistakes building applications all the time, but this doesn't necessarily mean the underlying language, or for a better comparison, the compiler is at fault. Problems with the underlying language can cause problems with applications, obviously. Programmer error =/= language/compiler error, while both can occur.
People have been talking about the Parity hack like it's Ethereum's fault. Imo that's as absurd as blaming C for your program crashing to your coding error.
Your post, while you are confusing two types of errors, isn't completely off. Solidity does need improving. Any language has to pick tradeoffs, and evolves over time as it becomes apparent what the system's needs are. But Ethereum and Solidity aren't to blame for most of the ETH-based apps that rushed to market without an appropriate level of QA and review, cut corners, made mistakes, and caused catastrophic problems for their users like the Parity bug... this should be ringing bells, folks.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14810008
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14691212
It turns out that having a language designed by a 17-year-old who knows some Javascript might not be the best idea in the world, who would have thought?
The language needs to be thrown away and a more proper one implemented, plain and simple. Solidity is unfit for purpose.
But I definitely assign some guilt and responsibility for all the money lost in solidity contracts to creators of ethereum.
At the end of the day of course, the biggest error was on the part of the app developer, #1 because they used a bad platform, #2 because they didn't QA enough to compensate for the platform being bad.
But it still comes down to the fact that Ethereum and Solidity are low quality and the low quality results in more bugs and lost money than we'd see otherwise. It's just like the bad old days of Windows XP (and the modern days of Cryptolockers) except now money is directly vanishing into the ether because bad software is controlling it.
The point is that the designers of Ethereum shouldn't have been so short-sighted as to choose the hipster JS offshoot of the week to build their massive multi-million dollar distributed computing system on top of.
Most of the largest headlines involving loss of funds in the Ethereum network have been due to programmer or user error. Keep in mind that Ethereum is still in its "experimental" phase - it isn't "supposed" to have billions of dollars put into it just yet, but the market doesn't care about this as long as the prices are going up. Ethereum could be much worse than it is, but that wouldn't mean its value would go to zero, or even do down. Plenty of top coins by market capitalization have been orders of magnitude worse, or just outright scams. Remember "The market can stay irrational for longer than you can remain solvent".
It's still a very new area of technology despite the amount of money that pours into it. There's innovation, but it can be difficult to see it in the midst of the hype.
On something so absolute as Ethereum, I would expect them to use a very dumb language with as few complications and complexities as possible, and then to formally verify the crap out of it, and quickly make it the most consistent, predictable, and stable language on the planet (again, possible only with a very barebones language that does not have complex features). The fact that Ethereum has been around for so many years and this has not happened indicates that it's not a serious platform.
What other classes of errors are there that Ethereum is successfully avoiding?
Well, that's reassuring. Should we expect that there will be no more programmer errors in the future on the Ethereum network then? Isn't Ethereum's job to minimize those errors?
Network effect and name recognition, the same reasons that Bitcoin hasn't been supplanted by Monero or Zcash or any of the other dozens of coins that do virtually everything better than Bitcoin.
The really interesting thing is that the original plan for Bitcoin included many of the same programmable-money features as Ethereum. The instructions are still in the bytecode but I believe they were disabled in one of the patches, except for a handful of instructions that implement the basic "send money from A to B" type functionality.
My impression is these were supposed to be enabled/used at some future date, but this is just one more thing that's gotten bogged down by the infighting and politics of the project. Much like blocksize - 1 MB was just a number picked to avoid transaction spamming blowing things up in the early days, not a divinely inspired number intended to be used for all time. But the project is so stagnant and calified that they can't handle even the smallest day-to-day tasks like this. God forbid we change one of Satoshi's sacred constants.
That doesn't explain the lack of guarantee on "constant". What is the technical detail which prevents such a guarantee?
So I'd say yeah, technically not but practically it is.
"Pyramid Scheme is implemented using the appropriately-named Racket."
There are a couple of other languages in development that might improve the ecosystem:
* Vyper https://github.com/ethereum/vyper
* Serpent https://github.com/ethereum/serpent
There are a couple projects working on it (eg Viper), though many seems to prefer starting a new blockchain.
Edit: s/Serpent/Viper/
[1] https://github.com/LeastAuthority/ethereum-analyses/blob/mas...
Are you acquainted with Javascript or windows?
Bitcoin proved that global cryptocurrency is absolutely sustainable, it just can’t be cheap.
It has not.
* Transactions don't scale: they're are expensive, and not instant.
* There are practically no ways to spend Bitcoins in the physical world.
* The electricity costs of mining are not sustainable by mankind. Although some people in China want you to believe otherwise.
blockchain has limited scalability, second layer doesn't. also blockchain transactions were never supposed to be instant. in fact nothing is instant, check this thing called physics.
> practically no ways to spend Bitcoins in the physical world
there are plenty
> electricity costs of mining are not sustainable by mankind
bitcoin is not even a blip in total world energy spending and less than that in total world energy production.
also if you check the dictionary for word sustainable:
> able to be maintained at a certain rate or level.
miners are profitable at current difficulty at current price of bitcoin. if price goes down - less efficient miners will go out of business and difficulty will decrease until balance is achieved.
bitcoin is sustainable by design.
> blockchain has limited scalability, second layer doesn't. also blockchain transactions were never supposed to be instant.
Of course it wasn't supposed to be instant. That's why its a shit system to use as currency just like gold bars are a shit currency cause one has to drag them from the mine to the bank to the store. This Bitcoin thing was meant to be a currency, right?
I guess you're talking about Lightning Network though which Bitcoin evangelists appear to market as the Second Coming of Christ. Well, it isn't active yet, and it isn't part of Bitcoin ie. it isn't "Bitcoin". So... I was right.
> there are plenty
Not really. Many have been removed lately. There were Bitcoin debit cards. Well, they got revoked. Steam? Doesn't accept Bitcoins anymore due to high transaction costs. And those are just a few examples.
> in fact nothing is instant, check this thing called physics.
That's odd. I just put money on my debit card from my bank and it took like a minute. And I consider that slow! If I buy something from a store, which I did today, its instant enough that I can put my bank card in my wallet and move on. That's why I call it instant. The fact it isn't instant, is true, but it is nowhere near the latency of Bitcoin. And Bitcoin's latency is nowhere near my bank to debit card transaction. My statements regarding slow (and expensive) transactions were true.
> bitcoin is not even a blip in total world energy spending and less than that in total world energy production.
Yes, when it consumes more energy than my entire country, it is. Plus, when it is thin air we're discussing, it is.
> also if you check the dictionary for word sustainable:
How about you look up the word in your dictionary, called environment?
> bitcoin is sustainable by design.
Circulus in probando.
Wake me up when I can pay BTC at the same places where I can pay with EUR. I'll even do a concession! Wake me up when a United States resident can pay BTC at the same places they can pay with USD.
Transaction speed is a function of timestamping mechanism of the consensus protocol. If that’s the only measure you decide whether the currency is shit - fair, don’t use it.
FWIW cross-bank transfers aren’t instant too, shall I give you my credentials so you could promptly dispense of all the worthless shit money you have?
Lightning network is active on mainnet, not sure what exactly batted that information from reaching you.
Revokation of debit cards had nothing to do with bitcoin and there are plenty of companies that still offer them.
That some merchants choose to drop support because low value transactions aren’t economical is unfortunate but also temporary.
> when it consumes more energy than my entire country, it is
Nope, still not a blip. So yourself a favor and spend more than 5 seconds to inform yourself on the topic.
> How about you look up the word in your dictionary, called environment?
You’re conflating energy use with energy source, nobody is burning oil to mine bitcoins - those guys are out of business.
> wake me up when
That explains everything - instead of informing yourself on the topic you just went to sleep. Bitcoin debit cards mostly cover those requirements btw.
Reductio ad absurdum. I mentioned several reasons.
> Lightning network is active on mainnet, not sure what exactly batted that information from reaching you.
Why are Bitcoin transactions still slow?
> Revokation of debit cards had nothing to do with bitcoin and there are plenty of companies that still offer them.
Of course it is related to Bitcoin. Please link 5 of these currently valid Bitcoin debit card products. If they're so rampantly available, surely you can link 5 easily?
> That some merchants choose to drop support because low value transactions aren’t economical is unfortunate but also temporary.
Yeah, life is temporary as well rolleyes. This is a non-argument. You cannot tell when the problem is solved, and its a severe issue for adoption of Bitcoin.
> Nope, still not a blip. So yourself a favor and spend more than 5 seconds to inform yourself on the topic.
Yet, it is, and I can't be bothered to spend time to reply to the rest of your ad hominem.
> You’re conflating energy use with energy source, nobody is burning oil to mine bitcoins - those guys are out of business.
I didn't mention oil (ever heard of Co2?). I mentioned that power source has impact on the environment because that is reality 101. If I have 100 buckets of sustainable water, and I piss in 90 of them, then the rest of the world only got 10 buckets of sustainable water left for general consumption. Which is a loss of sustainable energy. So using unnecessarily vast amounts of energy is a loss for the environment. Of course this isn't in the interest of miners or Bitcoin evangelist like yourself.
> That explains everything
That explains nothing, its just one of your ad hominem fallacies which tells the reader something about you, not me.
Instead, this explains everything: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-level_marketing
Dear reader, please don't fall for the Bitcoin scam. Read the above link instead, and notice the parallels with the Bitcoin/cryptocurrency mania. Specifically, the parallel with ICO and early adopters of cryptocurrencies.
"Of course it wasn't supposed to be instant. That's why its a shit system to use as currency"
no you didn't.
> Why are Bitcoin transactions still slow?
that blanket statement is false and again illustrates how little you know about bitcoin. bitcoin transactions confirm within 10 minutes provided adequate fees. the lower fee you choose to pay the more you will have to wait until confirmation. speed is function of fees.
if you intended to ask "why aren't all transactions on lightning and therefore instant?" then it's because lightning is still in very early stages and is only starting to get adoption.
> Of course it is related to Bitcoin
it was related to one visa card issuer (wavecrest) that decided to discontinue support without any explanation. debit card providers that didn't rely on wavecrest are doing fine (and those that did - are moving to new issuers).
quick google shows a whole bunch: cryptopay.me, bitpay, spectrocoin, xapo, www.shiftpayments.com. there's 5 for you.
> Yeah, life is temporary as well rolleyes. This is a non-argument. You cannot tell when the problem is solved, and its a severe issue for adoption of Bitcoin.
this is possibly a non argument for you as a person who knows very little about the space.
everybody is aware that issue exists and makes a lot of low value transactions on chain economically not viable, that is exactly why lightning was developed.
> I can't be bothered to spend time to reply to the rest of your ad hominem.
you sure can't be bothered to educate yourself on the topic. as it seems you're from netherlands, your country's total energy consumption in 2012 was 82 Mtoe, total world energy consumption was 9000 Mtoe and world energy production was 13300 Mtoe. as i said - not even a blip, just find some courage to admit you were wrong. alternatively you could of course start arguing that 0.9% is totally a blip, in which case i'm at least happy to leave you better informed.
> If I have 100 buckets of sustainable water, and I piss in 90 of them, then the rest of the world only got 10 buckets of sustainable water left for general consumption
it's called a free market. if it is economically viable for mining companies to spend energy at their location for the price at that location - not much you can do about it.
> So using unnecessarily vast amounts of energy is a loss for the environment
it's only unnecessary by your definition and understanding of bitcoin.
> Dear reader, please don't fall for the Bitcoin scam. Read the above link instead, and notice the parallels with the Bitcoin/cryptocurrency mania. Specifically, the parallel with ICO and early adopters of cryptocurrencies.
yeah, i totally agree about most altcoins and ICOs. the rest is just you being angry and extrapolating more than you should.
Yes, I did, see the various posts I made. Posts you supposedly read, and responded to. You even addressed the multiple premises yourself! You're even addressing various of them in this very post!
> if you intended to ask
That wasn't my intention to ask, it is precisely what I asked. Read it back. Your answer to slow transaction premise was: "this is the solution to the problem" so I say "but it isn't available" to which you say "well it isn't widely available yet" rolleyes. How about you start being practical for a change?
> quick google shows a whole bunch: cryptopay.me, bitpay, spectrocoin, xapo, www.shiftpayments.com. there's 5 for you.
BitPay was on hold, doesn't inspire confidence. Plus:
"Sorry about that! The BitPay Card is not available for order in your area yet. We're working to bring it to more countries soon. If you’d like, we can notify you when it becomes available in your area."
"Why We're Updating the Minimum BitPay Payment Amount to $100 22 DECEMBER 2017 PRODUCT UPDATE, 12/23/17: We continue to monitor bitcoin network conditions, but we have re-enabled BitPay merchant invoices and BitPay card bitcoin-to-dollar loads for $5 or above. BitPay Card orders are also once again available."
Sounds like "working as intended"..
I checked Xapo as well, seems like its a virtual card only.
> everybody is aware that issue exists [...]
Ah, that one. Well, that's odd, I just asked my 5 year old about it and she had no idea what I was talking about.
Wake me up when you can do small transactions. It is kinda important being able to perform small transactions with a currency. You know, I can go to the store right now and auth with a PIN and here's what that costs me: 0,00 EUR. I can even auth with a NFC card, if I enabled that and am OK with that and all.
> it's called a free market
Red herring.
> if it is economically viable for mining companies to spend energy at their location for the price at that location - not much you can do about it.
Yeah, there is: not supporting cryptocurrency where mining is lucrative or not supporting cryptocurrency. You can opt to not support cryptocurrency by simply not joining the MLM/pyramid scheme. Actually, if you got savings, you're probably better off investing in safe stocks such as AAPL (~48% profit last year) or GOOGL (~36% profit last year). The likelihood of these two companies going belly up is very low. You can also spread further, or in multiple markets.
> it's only unnecessary by your definition and understanding of bitcoin.
My definition of the irrelevance of Bitcoin as well as.
TIL a solution that doesn't yet have enough adoption is totally not a solution. go FUD somewhere else dude.
> more debit card FUD
you asked for 5 examples, i gave you 5 examples. go FUD somewhere else.
> I just asked my 5 year old about it and she had no idea what I was talking about.
yep, sounds like you're out of arguments. as i said - you should educate and stop embarrassing yourself.
> Wake me up when you can do small transactions
you should have woke up a while ago and started informing yourself on the subject before pretending to be an expert
https://twitter.com/alexbosworth/status/946175898029395968
> Yeah, there is: not supporting cryptocurrency where mining is lucrative or not supporting cryptocurrency
you're totally free to do that. but seriously, it's definitely useful to inform yourself on the subject before engaging in conversation about it.
I haven't seen any place in Amsterdam Area (where I live, throughout Europe considered a tech hub) accepting Bitcoin. When I was in Berlin, saw zero Bitcoin as well. C-Base didn't accept it either. They did accept this currency called EUR, though.
Bitcoin's slow transaction speed wouldn't be an issue for something like dentist/doctor. Those have your PII including your SSN (or well, the Dutch equiv here), and you got physical contact with them. The payment here even goes via insurance company. Have never heard of any Dutch insurance company accepting Bitcoin though.
You haven't looked very hard, than. This is a "black swan" thing, by the way. So here's why you are entirely wrong:
* thuisbezorgd.nl accepts Bitcoin. Has done that for years. You can order from any snackbar, febo, pizza-joint, sushi-bar and pay with Bitcoin. Literally thousands of places in Amsterdam.
* mollie.com has offered a bitcoin-payment option for all their merchants to enable for years. Many webshops in the netherlands have enabled this (I use at least three on a monthly basis) who will then accept bitcoin.
* At least two lodging/guesthouses in Amsterdam accept BTC to sleep there.
* At least 8 coffee-shops (the ones selling actual coffee) and restaurants accept it.
* A cinema (Filmhuis Cavia), a barber, a grocery-shop, a vegan restaurant, a lawyer (Plasman) and probaly many more.
So, there you are: you were wrong: You can spend your BTC just fine in the fysical world. Even in the city you live in.
Mollie, OTOH, is just a niche.
Now, let us discuss the amount of Thuisbezorgd transactions paid by means of Bitcoin. Paraphrasing their own words: "far less than 1%, and it hasn't increased over time" [1] (Nov 2017). They also convert the Bitcoin to EUR right away. That tells us something about the adoption of Bitcoin in the general public when your best example is this one. The elephant in the room is that paying with Bitcoin isn't feasible in this example due to the high transaction costs, and slow transaction speed.
Apart from Thuisbezorgd all of these examples are just that, exceptions and niches. They don't paint a Bitcoin paradise where one can spend their Bitcoins. If I take public transport, I gotta pay with EUR. If I pay for my OV Chipkaart (NFC) then I gotta put the money on the card via... EUR. There's no alternative to that. If I then go to IKEA and buy a bank, I gotta pay with EUR. If I then ask PostNL to deliver it, I gotta pay with, you guessed it, EUR. And if we'd go for a quickie at my fav fast food restaurant, Maoz, well they don't accept Bitcoins either.
Thuisbezorgd supports it (though I have no idea on the effect on delivery time, and transaction costs must be very high relative to the food. For one pizza that wouldn't be feasible) the rest is practically irrelevant.
Take this for example:
> At least two lodging/guesthouses in Amsterdam accept BTC to sleep there.
Two, woah! Blimey the free market provides us two options! Which ones? Wake me up when its market penetration is above 50%. Same can be said about your 8 (!!!) coffee-shops/restaurants. Look, it is a given that with so many stores (thousands) in such a small area, a few shops are going to adopt it. There were also shops who committed to the tulip mania back in the days, there are people in Amsterdam who work in MLM scheme, there are criminals as well, there's illegal prostitution, and there's Scientologists as well. That doesn't mean its a tech hub who adopted Bitcoin, doesn't mean the entire city is criminal, doesn't mean the entire city is full with illegal prostitution, nor that the entire city believes in Xenu.
A Bitcoin techhub or paradise would be a place where you can live your daily life by means of merely Bitcoins. We're not even remotely close to that in Amsterdam. I don't think it will ever happen. Although its in the interest of the Bitcoin facade to believe that, yes, Bitcoin can be easily used in the real world right now because you want to be able to cash out when the bubble busts (or right before that) your options are in practice severely limited. You cannot even remotely compare it to a strong currency like USD or EUR. Fuck me man, 8 cafetaria/restaurants to pick from in Amsterdam is seen as a techhub? A Pyrrhic victory, that's what that is.
> You can spend your BTC just fine in the fysical world.
Only at a very miniscule amount of stores. I wouldn't call this Amsterdam place "a techhub who adopted Bitcoin."
[1] https://www.ad.nl/economie/thuisbezorgd-nl-is-voorzichtig-me...
You said there were "no options to pay in the phisical world".
I proved you wrong, because there are. Just one option would have proved you wrong, yet in reality there are far more than one. In Amsterdam alone.
And so your arguments start to move. Now it suddenly needs "a large adoption" and not a "niche" (mollie, btw is one of the largest, if not the largest PSP in the netherlands). And they shift from "no-where where I can pay" to "you can pay, but very few people actually do so".
You could also just admit that you were wrong because you were not aware that there is an actual community out there, even in your hometown, who accepts Bitcoin, pays with it and as such makes it an actual payment system. You could admit that you were not aware of this, but that now you are, you know that Bitcoin is used; just not in the way you envision it, or not by the people and companies that you would like to.
Also note that many people (I'm not aware that you did this!) mention that bitcoin is both a failure because no-one ever pays with it, yet also mention that it is a failure because the confirmation times are high and fees are growing; which is a direct effect of too much people using it.
No, I said I didn't notice them in the physical world (and I still haven't, fwiw). Never seen any physical store say "we accept Bitcoin", never. I was clearly talking about my anecdata which is still, from my perspective, valid.
That has a different meaning than what you make out of it. I never wrote about the online world. You gave as example Thuisbezorgd; that's not the physical world. That's not a brick & mortar store. They're a virtual middleman service.
I avoid them btw, because I can get cheaper deals by cutting them out as middleman and giving a higher tip to the hard working delivery boy instead.
> (mollie, btw is one of the largest, if not the largest PSP in the netherlands)
Really, never heard of. I guess iDEAL and PayPal just went out of business. Good luck competing with iDEAL, btw.
> You could also just admit that you were wrong because you were not aware that there is an actual community out there, even in your hometown, who accepts Bitcoin, pays with it and as such makes it an actual payment system.
The existence of something doesn't describe its state or, in this case, adoption level. The adoption level (or market penetration) is very important in the subject of payment systems, but you prefer to ignore it and spout red herrings like this instead to pursue your character assasination agenda.
> You could admit that you were not aware of this, but that now you are, you know that Bitcoin is used; just not in the way you envision it, or not by the people and companies that you would like to.
I was aware Thuisbezorgd accepted Bitcoin. I was also aware that it wasn't being used much, as I quoted. That article was no news to me. The question whether its used or not is important in the discussion as put forth above. Is it used a lot? No, not really (far less than 1%). The question about transaction costs/time was also still up in the air. I guess you don't know the answer to that either.
> Also note that many people (I'm not aware that you did this!) mention that bitcoin is both a failure because no-one ever pays with it, yet also mention that it is a failure because the confirmation times are high and fees are growing; which is a direct effect of too much people using it.
My orig. point was it doesn't scale.
As for what you wrote here the fact transactions happen doesn't mean people are paying with Bitcoins in the physical world. It might as well be a bunch of astroturfers (the way Reddit came to existence), or a bunch of people buying drugs (the way Silkroad ran). You don't know.
But we do have a statement like the one from Thuisbezorgd.
Now I'd like to see a statement from a serious computer manufacturer like Apple or reseller like Media Markt or Bol.com stating they accept Bitcoin (all I read is businesses like Steam quitting accepting Bitcoin as payment method instead). Things like that are a sign of widespread adoption. What isn't a sign of widespread adoption: 8 bloody restaurants/pubs in the capital city (!!) accepting Bitcoin. That's a sign of a tiny, irrelevant niche.
PS: Oh, and with regards to the bubble, we didn't discuss Tether.
They do the iDeal, Sofort, Creditcards, Bitcoin And so on, for some of the largest ecommerce platforms in the netherlands, as well as the majority of the small ecommerce shops. They are a PSP, which is very much a middleman, which is why you may not have heard of them.
Albert Heyn, Deliveroo, Douwe Egberts are just a few of the larger Dutch brands that use Mollie.
Note that not evey merchant using mollie will have Bitcoin enabled, I'm not sure if e.g. ah.nl has the bitcoin option enabled, but I haven't checked them either.
I'm leavin this discussion here. You come across as someone who has some axe to grind with Bitcoin. Which makes you appear angry, frustrated and shifty. There are places where you can spend your bitcoin. In Amsterdam. A lot. I've spent mine in some. There are places where you can spent your Bitcoin in my hometown, I've spent them there. I've seen stickers on doors, in both Amsterdam and Arnhem (And Barcelona, Berlin, Antwerp, Ghent). My wife and I were selling her stuff on several markets in Amsterdam (and festivals such as Lowlands), my wife has a "bitcoin accepted here" sign. You may not have seen it, but it was there. I know, because I was there. And you know what? People buy stuff with bitcoin from her. Very few, true, but they do.
But as soon as I point this out, it suddenly does not count as places to spend your bitcoin in the physical world because you haven't seen them yourselves, or because you decide that the volume processed there is too low. I'm out.
Their entry on Wikipedia got deleted. That's how relevant they are. They're a BV with <= 50 people. MKB.
iDEAL/Currence is a PSP as well.
How important has Bitcoin been for Mollie? Do you have any data on the absolute or relative amount of Bitcoin transactions?
> Note that not evey merchant using mollie will have Bitcoin enabled, I'm not sure if e.g. ah.nl has the bitcoin option enabled, but I haven't checked them either.
??? Hello? Have you ever ordered on ah.nl??? I order there practically every week. You pay either in store if you pick it up, or you gotta pay by PIN if they deliver. You CANNOT pay online. Do you get that? They got barely time to deliver the groceries in your house. Do you think they'd be cool to wait till the Bitcoin transaction was finalised? Who are you kidding?!?!?!
> You come across as someone who has some axe to grind with Bitcoin.
Of course I do, its akin to MLM. I already burned my hands on that. Why would I want other people to get burned by scammers?
> or because you decide that the volume processed there is too low
You never refuted the volume being important premise. You had the opportunity to do this in your previous 2 posts but you neglected that by coming up with more niche examples which simply don't prove the existence of a Bitcoin techhub as you put forth in your earlier post. I know there are niche examples, and I know you're well aware of them. Here, have a cookie. What I'm interested in is figuring out how important Bitcoin is for the Amsterdam Area. From what I can tell by the data I have we have:
* Adoption (market penetration). Terrible. Only a few niche cases.
* Volume. Terrible. One data point from Thuisbezorgd, one data point from yourself.
And this isn't rocket science its reflected by the lack of large online stores accepting Bitcoin. Its reflected by the high transaction fees, and slow transaction speed. You say that's a sign of Bitcoin being used for legit transactions in the physical world. Where's the proof for that? Nothing we observe points to that. Might as well be bots to ensure people cannot and do not cash out their Bitcoins. All you've proven is that there are quite some niches which reluctantly accept Bitcoin, and very few data on volume. The rest is all red herring & ad hominem.
- In `for (var i = 0; i < arrayName.length; i++) { ... }`, the type of `i` will be `uint8`, because this is the smallest type that is required to hold the value `0`. If the array has more than 255 elements, the loop will not terminate.
- The `constant` keyword for functions is currently not enforced by the compiler. Furthermore, it is not enforced by the EVM, so a contract function that "claims" to be constant might still cause changes to the state.
WTF?! Trivial loops won't terminate to due (unchecked) integer overflow, and the `constant` keyword does nothing? It's a complete gong show. I'm not touching anything to do with this language with a 100 foot pool. Is the hype bubble just that big?
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14807779
[1] https://solidity.readthedocs.io/en/develop/security-consider...
Edit: Oops, it looks like I'm mixing up my multi-million dollar screw-ups. First in July $30 million was stolen due to the "public is default" debacle, and then the fix for that problem introduced another bug (the developers forget to call the `initWallet` function), which lead to the $280 million being frozen in November[2]. Holy crap.
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15642856