There is no missing out though. There is buying when it's lower and selling when it's higher and you can do that starting now as you always could. Or buy and hold if you think that's what you should do or whatever.
I really have no dog in the fight and don't really care one way or another. Just for the sake of the argument though: something can be complete shit with no redeeming qualities. It is not a must that it's good but imperfect and that it requires a solution to make it better. So the opinions of "no-coiners" are not inferior by default. You have to actually prove that they are with some form of argument or evidence.
And that can also be true of pyramid schemes with no redeeming qualities, Bernie Madoff style fraud, or of sheer random gambling. You have to actually prove that blockchains are not in those categories.
If you were aware of Bitcoin when it was worth a couple hundreds of dollars and you wrote it off as a fad or whatever and turns out you were completely wrong about it, you would definitely feel like you missed out, no? Sure, better late than never, but you still can't change that feeling.
Of course, the question then becomes whether Bitcoin will be more like Pets.com or whether it will climb higher. I have a guess, but I don't claim to know for sure.
Bernie Madoff's fraud lasted longer than that.
Not to mention that the entire argument is based on a get rich quick scheme which is exactly what the doubters argue crypto coins are, and the entire post which I replied to originally can be summed up to 50Cent "You just jealous cause I'm rich".
I was aware of Bitcoin when it was under a dollar. I wrote it off as a fad. I continue to write it off as a fad, albeit one that became more dangerous than I expected.
This approach enables you to disregard the opinion of literally everybody who owns no BTC. That's going to cause trouble.
It's possible to dislike Bitcoin for its waste of its energy, centralization one step removed or economic policy without being "the guy who bought at the top".
citation needed
> If my goal is X, then this what my goal is
does this not strike you as circular? :)
one of my goals is to visit nepal. tell me how is that objective?
It is the most outlandishly, ridiculously wasteful that humanity has ever produced. There is nothing in the history of mankind that comes even close to this level of utterly deranged waste.
Actually it's even less than that in practice. It really is that shit.
As it exists, it does not work beyond the toy levels of usage it is seeing today.
Routing in the Lightning network is an open problem in computer science, one that nobody know how to solve. Payments aren't peer to peer, they have to be routed through intermediaries. And how to do that is basically impossible to figure out, except if you just have a handful of giant hubs you can route through.
if you're trying to say that routing in lightning is an instance of traveling salesman, you're not only wrong - routing is actually shortest path problem, but even if you were right, your statement that TSP somehow makes the system unworkable is simply false in light of the fact that businesses like USPS and DHL and countless more delivery companies exist and are profitable.
> Payments aren't peer to peer, they have to be routed through intermediaries
by this metric nothing on the internet is peer to peer, because packets are routed through intermediaries.
> how to do that is basically impossible to figure out, except if you just have a handful of giant hubs you can route through
yes, there will be hubs, large and small and there will be clusters of interconnected local meshes and there will be users routing however they wish through the system instead of taking the cheapest most connected path.
if you say something is impossible to figure out - you need to back up that claim with something, anything.
what if i told you, you were lied to by skeptics and scammers, trying to sell their shitcoins, and you need to put away your biases for just a minute and invest a little time to see, if what they were saying is actually true?
I am not. I am saying we don't have the map that we need to solved the shortest path problem, and we have no way to get that map.
> by this metric nothing on the internet is peer to peer, because packets are routed through intermediaries
And we have routing protocols to do so for the internet. We do not have one for the Lightning network that works at scale.
> yes, there will be hubs, large and small and there will be clusters of interconnected local meshes and there will be users routing however they wish through the system instead of taking the cheapest most connected path.
No, there will only be a small number of very large hubs. Nothing else actually works in practice.
of course we do, connectivity graph and updates to it are gossiped all the time and each node has imperfect representation of it.
> we have routing protocols to do so for the internet. We do not have one for the Lightning network that works at scale.
we do, lightning nodes do that all the time right now.
> there will only be a small number of very large hubs. Nothing else actually works in practice.
again, you're making a statement without backing it up by anything.
your entire argument boils down to: if a node can't have perfect information about connectivity graph, then it can't perfectly route payments.
and you're right, that statement is true, but it is irrelevant because imperfect routing through imperfect connectivity graph is fine and works great.
Yes, that is exactly the part that does not scale beyond a toy network, and for which there is no solution.
maintaining imperfect and incomplete connectivity graph - much less hard.
be careful, maybe you're invested into something that becomes irrelevant if LN works, in which case you might want to be less rigid in your thinking and follow the developments more closely to pull out or risk losing your investment. because LN already works: tens of thousands of nodes and channels, millions of dollars in the network and growing at healthy rates.
Thus, it doesn't scale.
you're wrong for two reasons:
- hubs do exist (big and small) and can exchange connectivity information more efficiently (and take fees for that service), so the network isn't growing like a full mesh (that is indeed very hard to maintain connectivity graph of) but rather as a collection of interconnected smaller meshes
- payments can be split up into smaller chunks that follow different paths and are executed atomically (either all or none), and if some chunks fail you can retry them within the same payment context
right, there will definitely be huge hubs. what you didn't even try to demonstrate is why can't there be smaller hubs?
> it just progressively works worse and worse. Doing multiple routes atomically just gives you more reasons a single payment can fail.
no, exactly the opposite is true. in case with single payment for X satoshi you need to re-try it multiple times until you find a route that has X capacity on every hop. with atomic multipath payments you need to find N routes that support X/N capacity (much easier) and if any number of those fail you can retry only those failed parts, so after 2-3 iterations your entire payment succeeds.
Maybe you are right that I do not know enough about the Lightning network, because I was not aware there was a vulnerability that big and easy to exploit built into it.
p.s. i'm sure you can google about DoS attacks on lightning and how to deal with them yourself
But it is working! Bitcoin has hundreds of thousands of transactions per day on the main chain alone where it settles 2B+$ in value, eth has tons of really useful defi projects that people actually use (maker, compound, aave, uniswap, etc).
Yes, a big part is speculation but how could it not be? Any bet on the future is speculation. Apologies if your argument is actually more subtle, in which case I'd like to hear it.
This is not true. Speculation is specifically referring to the situation where you are betting specifically because you think the bet you made will result in positive financial return.
Just go through github, whitepapers and technical discussions to see the serious side of the industry, rather than being stuck to the surface level of fraudsters/speculators promising 100x money returns on social media.
Although there are some cases under oppressive regimes where black markets may be a moral good, on the whole enabling financial crimes is, in my value system, bad.
Furthermore I think regulatory systems will eventually move against this - in fact you see it starting. See https://doomberg.substack.com/p/a-stablecoin-applies-to-beco...
Why is this different?
One part of it is:
As both a matter of norms and law, we expect and desire more public scrutiny of financial transactions than of speech. In particular, various taxes mean that a large fraction of financial transactions cannot and should not be private. Conversely the great majority of 1 on 1 conversations raise no legal or regulatory issues.
The fact that Ethereum is tackling the energy use problem head on with proof of stake and and doing so within the next year makes it incredibly appealing.
https://tokenist.com/buterin-explains-why-ethereum-2-0-upgra...
> Originally, the plan was to work on shard chains before the merge – to address scalability. However, with the boom of layer 2 scaling solutions, the priority has shifted to swapping proof-of-work to proof-of-stake via the merge.
My ETH is already staked as ETH2, and it looks like the plan is still to do the merge in “2021/2022”.
You don't get to claim PoS is happening until it happens, given Ethereum's consistent track record of failure to make any such thing happen.
If the ETH token readily tradeable for money on crypto exchanges is not at all based on PoW before the last quarter of 2022, I for one will be tremendously surprised.
Missed out on what profit? I've just started reading about Ethrereum and its still a baby. No one really knows what its going to grow into. But it reads much bugger than coins / NFTs when you start peeling back the layers. But people love blood and theres a lot of it in the coin / NFT space.
she's been in crypto journalism for years, and knows her stuff thoroughly, and where the bodies are buried.
I like to get a balanced view of crypto but I have grown to find these so-called no-coiners really insufferable.
I might get heavily downvoted but I would rather criticize Bitcoin from the perspective of how can we make this better, rather than oh this is a useless ponzi scam rhetoric, which their audience loves.
It's not nice to say but I honestly believe many of these people just dont want to see something they missed out on succeed, this is coming from someone who has lurked in their communities for a long time.
FWIW Bitcoin is not perfect. And many of it's biggest promoters are self serving scammers but I don't appreciate, or lets say grew tired of people who just like to bash something without offering a solution.