"It is impossible to independently implement Bitcoin..at reliability levels sufficient for financial applications"
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.
What does the spot price of a Bitcoin have to do with the question of whether Bitcoin can feasibly and safely be standardized to a point where there are many interoperable implementations that don't share any heritage in code?
Because that's the question you posed.
He said it unreliable for financial transactions as demo'd by the fork. I said I agree but it is worth something even today as evident by the money people store in bitcoin already.
In the larger scheme of the economy, virtually nobody uses Bitcoin for transactions.
Yes you are right. And that is not of importance to me. I don't even care if bitcoin dies. Lets talk blockchain.
In the larger scheme of the economy, virtually nobody uses blockchain technologies for transactions.
yet.
Lots of people do lots of stupid things with money. The current $3B market cap of Bitcoin is a tiny fraction of the $64B that Madoff Investment Securities made off with (and cryptocurrency market cap is an extremely generous measure to use to compare to that value). And that's hardly a reason to claim that making Bernie Madoff trustworthy is difficult but not impossible.
Only because you are lucky enough to see this so early. And I don't care if bitcoin dies but what I meant there was the market cap of cryptocurrencies; that will rise beyond many Madoffs because even the Madoffs would use it.
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.