Being able to check that a ledger is accurate is a feature. It can be captured by a PHP app which uses MySQL transactions. This is, in fact, the most popular way to ensure ledger integrity even in the Bitcoin community (on exchanges, where transactions happen "off chain" because Bitcoin is wholly unsuitable for processing the type of transaction that mosts interests the Bitcoin community).
The cost of verifying transactional integrity with MySQL transactions is, generally speaking, less than $900,000 per day, which is the present cost of verifying transactional integrity on the Bitcoin blockchain.
I will respectfully decline to respond to the rest of your comment as it includes no statements which can be true or untrue about Bitcoin as a technical artifact.
I'll try to explain. The banks have a ledger of all the notes in circulation maintaining a record of the number printed on the note. Now when I give you a note, and its fake, you can figure it out by checking the unique factors. But lets say that my 3D printer is advnced and printed it so accurate that it is same as a real dollar. Now the way to catch this note would be to check if the number on this note also exists on some other note. So basically proof-of-work is you checking for unique factors(not counterfeit) and then somehow check all the notes in the world that none of them have the same number(unique). Both of these are in addition to the use of mining as a way of distribution of wealth.
Could you just reply to why you don't consider the blockchain to be an algorithm?
Also, I mostly meant that you are paying too much attention to what the media is throwing at us, in the form of bitcoin and exchanges. As a thinker, forget bitcoin and its code and just think about blockchain. Saying that blockchain enables value transfer and must be considered as the 8th layer of OSI model is technical artifact.
I find this part of the conversation to be uninteresting, primarily because it attempts to make a distinction between "Bitcoin" and "the blockchain" (despite the fact that the Bitcoin consensus blockchain as annointed by the Bitcoin Core client at this moment in time is the only one of the infinite number of possible blockchains which is cared about) but can't make a distinction between "algorithm" and "protocol". This leaves me in a position where I say "Some people call IE6 a protocol. While one could rigorously examine the entire possible space of inputs and outputs associated with IE6 and attempt to describe some set-of-rules which would resemble a protocol, this is not what we mean when we say 'protocol' and it is, importantly, not the source of the benefits which IE6 fans say when they claim that IE6 is a protocol."
To which "Why don't you think IE6 is an algorithm?" is rather non-responsive. (IE6 is, vacuously, an algorithm. Whee.)
Saying that blockchain enables value transfer and must be considered as the 8th layer of OSI model is technical artifact.
I find it difficult to extract any signal about the reality which I live in from this statement. When I say "technical artifact" I usually want to imply something about the reality I live in. For example, calc.exe is a technical artifact: it actually exists, on yonder computer, and I can right now walk over to it and calculate 6+5 with a reasonable degree of confidence that this will enlighten me. I would also say the HTTP specs are a technical artifact: I, or anybody with modest technical capability, can read the specs, open up telnet, fire it at www.google.com on port 80, and then type in a predictable series of letters which results in search results presented in the middle of a lot of HTML.
I do not know of any comparable fashion in which "the blockchain" actually exists as distinct from "the data structure embedded in the much-more-complicated series of operations that is Bitcoin Core."
It feels as if your real problem is that I am not using technical jargons :)
I understand the meaning of 'protocol' vs 'algorithm' but this is a special case where the protocol is also the algorithm. Suppose you invented making tea and wrote down the recipe for doing so. This constitutes an algorithm for making tea for people who don't care how the ingredients came about, but this can also be called a protocol for making tea involving many algorithms like sugar-making etc.
If you'd say that tea making is strictly an algo and not a protocol then I'd simply agree with you to use that term and move on since whats happening here is more important to me than the technical jargons.
It is, instead, led and managed by an entity indistinguishable in form if not in intellect from every other governmental federal reserve.
This entity responds, 100% correctly for the health of the currency, by issuing fiat mandates, just like the US government did when, e.g., real-world counterfeiters came up with supernotes and began flooding the world with fake $20 bills, mandating a switch to new notes.
Although this behavior is correct, it does conclusively prove that the emperor has no clothes, and that bitcoin is a ponzi scheme run for the benefit of the early BTC holders.
That is not correct. Bitcoin is by far the largest, but people also have non-trivial amounts in various alt-coins: http://coinmarketcap.com/
In terms of your Browser-analogy: Next to IE6 (Bitcoin) we also have Safari (Ripple), Firefox (Litecoin) and whole range of smaller players.
They all speak dialects of the blockchain protocol.
An algorithm is not a protocol.
A protocol is something that two people can independently implement and expect to be interoperable. Morse code is a protocol (in addition to an algorithm): you can read the Wikipedia article on Morse code, I can go to the library and read a book on Morse code, and we can reliably communicate.
It is impossible to independently implement Bitcoin and reliably interoperate with the standard C++ implementation of Bitcoin at reliability levels sufficient for financial applications (as the 2013 BDB fork, between two versions of the standard C++ implementation, demonstrated).
It might be possible to define a blockchain-based protocol that does not have this fault, precisely because blockchain is not a protocol, but is (as you say) an algorithm. To my knowledge, nobody has done so, and Bitcoin has certainly not done so.
Why this is important is a different discussion. And yes, perhaps this will be fixed with the second generation of cryptocurrencies, past Bitcoin and its forks/variants, which you seem to favor doing to fix things. But I don't see why that makes patio11's claims wrong, since he was specifically addressing Bitcoin, not any blockchain-based system, or cryptocurrencies in general.
This is the real challenge to us crypto believers. Its hard but definitely not impossible(as demonstrated by the worth ofbitcoin today). Working on it.
Because that's the question you posed.
> "..Bitcoin's disaster recovery plan is a) get a cabal of people together in IRC, b) shut down the entire payment network, c) sort things."
So say somebody finds a bug in the implementation that lets you do bad things like transfer everyone's balance to an attacker's account...what's the back up plan? Is there an equivalent with US dollars where such a thing could happen that has a back up plan?
Putting myself in the shoes of Bitcoin's developers, I can't feel all but terrified that a simple buffer overflow or something similar could wipe out an entire currency. Or is there something I'm not understanding?
A digitally-signed email enables value-transfer too. Depending on your risk profile you could even go for an authenticated TLS connection that just does a RESTful style POST to enable value-transfer.
Value-transfer is not unique to a blockchain, or to Bitcoin's blockchain in particular, any more so than bubble sort is the only possible implementation of a sorting algorithm.
CS majors know to avoid bubble sort because it is so inefficient, yet many refuse to apply the same lesson to POW-based systems like Bitcoin.
And the centralised system is happy printing money calling inflation a necessary evil. If you understand blockchain and the current financial system you will realize then inflation is necessary to facilitate loans so that the economy can grow, but that loans are not required at all. So if I can't take a loan how do I raise the capital for a business? The IPO model. And blockchain is the programmed IPO model.
There is a reason why people haven't figured out an algorithm to trustless-ly loan bitcoins. They never will.
My comment stated that there is no value for user in all the decentralized verification process and just storing transactions in a trusted central database is good enough for most of them.
Your response is more or less completely ignoring this and attacks the current financial system and what not, it does at no point explain why you can not centralize Bitcoin. What prevents doing the exact same thing as the Bitcoin network but with a central server for verification and storage instead of doing it in a distributed way?
Also you didn't address my point that rather quickly there would be people with no money. If you did subdivide the pennies I don't see how that's any different than printing more money. It's just what side of the decimal point you want to be on.
Subdividing pennies might be more dangerous actually because presumably you could only do it by a factor of 10. Would we say that on March 31st a dollar is worth 100 pennies but on April 1st its worth 150? Or would we just add another layer of 1000 micro pennies equal one penny? At least with current inflation they can introduce new dollars as they need so inflation is controllable. In your version its not controllable because its mandated by access to the currency itself.
this is a fact of human psychology that's a real barrier to your system, and unless it is addressed, bitcoin will continue to fail.
Where are those rules? Where the fuck can I see them? Who the fuck made them?
Edit: Ok, I can see the link on the first page - hadn't seen the announcement.
On the announcement: Where does it say anything about reducing the number of fucks in a post? It talks about gratuitous negativity. How does saying "Fuck bitcoin" or "Fuck money" involve gratuitous negativity? It's not directed at anyone.
Seriously, if this place becomes some sort of Political Correctness bubble where swearing is discouraged in this way, that's an amazing distortion of the hacker spirit.
Sam's article talks about not directing gratuitous negativity at people when you're arguing with them. That has very little correlation with your use of words like "fuck" or "shit". Seriously.
The OP wanted to express a point about money and about bitcoin. It was best expressed with the word "fuck". The word "forget" doesn't get it across to me at all. That has nothing to do with the person he was responding to.
Correct. That, plus not being gratuitously dismissive of others' work, like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9314065 was. (I don't cite that to pick on a particular commenter; some users said they would find examples helpful and it's a random recent one.) Substantive, respectful criticism is of course fine and valuable.
The problem is that it's being used quite aggressively here, dismissing bitcoins, dismissing money, and being overly combative. After the second "fuck [whatever thing]" statement, it's already noticeable enough and an easy way to pinpoint an exact instance of combative or aggressive tone. I like the new rules about less negativity, so I thought I'd try to "enforce" them. Wrong word, remind people about them, instead.
By "gratuitous negativity" we're mostly talking about how community members treat each other and their work. It's ok to kick ideas around a bit harder. And certainly a few uses of "fuck" don't hurt. It looks to me like kang was just being enthusiastic.
That kind of thing can break the guidelines if someone overdoes it repeatedly and their comments add no new information or arguments. But that's not the case here.
It's natural for there to be a few glitches while the community works out how to interpret what "gratuitous negativity" means in practice, but as a hint, we're mostly talking about being mean to others and/or being glibly dismissive of their work. We're definitely not talking about bowdlerizing conversation. We'd hate that as much as most HN users would.
1. Resist complaining about downvotes. It makes boring reading (and hence gets downvoted). This is literally one of the guidelines.
2. If you find yourself saying "Downvoted because I <position in an argument>, really?", the answer is always, no, downvoted because you expressed <position in an argument> in a non-constructive manner that nobody wanted to read. If you had expressed <opposite position> in the same way, you'd have been downvoted too. This might be that you were overly aggressive, this might be that you were insufficiently clear in making your point, this might be because both <position> and <opposite position> are dead horses, etc.
But the answer is always no.
A lot of times if your tone is unintentionally off you'll get a few initial downvotes but other people will see your intentions and bring you up out of the grey, which is what happened here. You're continuing to get downvoted on other comments because they're contributing to a discussion nobody wants to see, the discussion about the discussion. It's best to just stick to the topic, and treat downvotes and the score in general as the ultimately meaningless internet points that they are. HN prizes the generally high signal-to-noise ratio of the comments.
Also Bitcoin is a political topic, one that will draw lots of people who will downvote you just because they don't agree with you.
There's some truly transformative tech at the core of Bitcoin, which is why it's been as successful as it has been (and will be) as a technology. On the other hand, there really is a contingent of supporters that primarily has a profit motive.
I've come to see it like politics. People pick a side and then become extreme about it, to no one's real benefit.
People are weird about money, in several directions at once. Bitcoin is money. Therefore people are weird about Bitcoin.
That's my theory, anyway.
Which the HN community helpfully confirms by downvoting your perfectly reasonable comment.
I think Bitcoin tickles a rather deep-rooted fear in many people.
Money is fundamental to everyone's existence and has always been exclusively issued and controlled by "the authority". Seeing a completely different system appear out of nowhere, and seeing it actually work (on a small scale), triggers a strong enough anxiety-reflex in enough people for every debate about Bitcoin to immediately derail into discussing BTC as if its definite purpose was to replace "real money", starting tomorrow, completely and entirely, and to devalue my pension fund in the process.
When enthusiastic bitcoin supporters parade around this kind of nonsense while simultaneously heaping on volumes of nebulous praise like "transformative", "revolutionary", "world-changing", likening bitcoin to the early internet, claiming it will stop wars, stop corruption, free the people and all the rest, it really puts up red flags for a lot of people.
Then how would you explain this irrational aggression in every Bitcoin thread?
As a case in point, why were you so eager to follow up with a strawman of your own:
heaping on volumes of nebulous praise like "transformative", "revolutionary", "world-changing", likening bitcoin to the early internet, claiming it will stop wars, stop corruption, free the people and all the rest
Neither waterlesscloud nor me wrote or implied anything like that.
Why do you attack something stupid that someone else once said about Bitcoin, rather than presenting an actual argument versus my "intellectually insulting" idea that Bitcoin might touch on some mammalian "fear of change", or against any of waterlesscloud's observations?
I don't consider downvotes aggression. I don't consider skepticism or even a general dislike of bitcoin to be aggression either. As far as the the discussion goes, bitcoin discourse is no more aggressive than any other technical topic on this forum.
> Neither waterlesscloud nor me wrote or implied anything like that.
A direct quote from waterlesscloud: >There's some truly transformative tech at the core of Bitcoin.
waterlesscloud is only one example: ctr+f "revolutionary" or "early internet" in this thread for others. It's not a strawman because I'm not making an argument, I'm giving you examples of enthusiast rhetoric that turns people off; it's not "something stupid that someone else once said", it's a category of condescending platitudes commonly laid out by bitcoin enthusiasts.
> presenting an actual argument versus my "intellectually insulting" idea that Bitcoin might touch on some mammalian "fear of change"
My point is that painting bitcoin skeptics as irrational people who can't help but lash out due to a subconscious fear of what bitcoin might mean for world economics is insulting and also subtly pushes the narrative that bitcoin is such a clearly amazing technology that it would be reasonable to ascribe fear of bitcoin's success as a motivator for negative reactions to bitcoin. It's absurd.
Calling the blockchain technology transformative doesn't put him in a bucket with people claiming "it will stop wars, stop corruption, free the people".
Even if you disagree with that assertion, his comment was about the discussion culture surrounding bitcoin and certainly didn't deserve any downvotes. (the irony of seeing this particular comment grayed out was what triggered mine after all...)
My point is that painting bitcoin skeptics as irrational people
What's with the generalizations?
I wrote "many people" and not "bitcoin skeptics".
I was referring to people who can't be bitcoin skeptics by the sheer virtue of not knowing enough about it to form a coherent argument against it. People who seem to never get tired of regurgitating the ever same tulip bulb and "criminals" trites at every opportunity. People who downvote completely innocent comments like the one from waterlesscloud and make any normal discussion about the subject needlessly hard.
Bitcoin skeptics are most welcome (I consider myself one), but you rarely see someone who actually knows a thing about Bitcoin (e.g. 0xFEED) bother posting in amidst the shitstorm anymore.
>"..Most advantages of Bitcoin which matter are captured by, and improved upon by, a LAMP app which simply holds account balances."
The blockchain is a ledger fine. But mining & proof of-work are separate concepts from the ledger. Mining is not only digging gold for distribution but also checking that the money note you just received is 'not counterfeit' + 'unique'.
> "Bitcoin is not a protocol in any meaningful sense of word.."
Bitcoin isn't but blockchain is. It is an algorithm that enables value transfer over any medium of transmission. Similar to how morse code enabled data transfer where only signal was being transferred. Similarly, internet enabled information transfer where only data was being transferred. Blockchain is the 8th layer of the OSI model.
>"..Bitcoin's disaster recovery plan is a) get a cabal of people together in IRC, b) shut down the entire payment network, c) sort things."
Forget bitcoin. Its like looking at the internet and finding faults in hotmail as the first email service.
> "A good portion of geek enthusiasm for Bitcoins comes from the fact that it is programmable money. But: Money is also programmable money."
No. Forget money. Blockchain is the thing. Its like saying internet is all about email. Internet enables information transfer, now what is information-transfer in plain english? A letter. Hence messaging is the first natural application of internet. Blockchain enables value-transfer, what is that in plain english? Money.