The Bubbly Bitcoin Thread -- Merged Threads

[doomed]

3 minutes ago, Eddie_George said:

If 2X fails, will you concede that users rather than miners enforce the rules in Bitcoin?

What I believe is miners enforce the rules and users decide what chain they want to keep value on. I have made my decision that Bitcoin Cash has by far most room for growth given the current market dynamics. 

[goldbug9999]

2 hours ago, doomed said:

Technical arguments for keeping blocksize at 1mb?

Segwit give between an x2 and x4 increase in transactions per block, hence full adoption of segwit would easily handle current tx demand with a 1mb block. Segwit also results in a lower rate of increase of blockchain size for a given tx rate.

Thus IMO segwit vs raw block size increase is a no brainer.

Segwit vs 2x is a bit more nuanced - it harder to argue against the relatively modest 2mb blocksize, personally I think core should have just merged in the size increase into core which would have killed 2x stone dead.

The block size issue is a complex one. As well as the centralization issue, having block being too large creates perverse incentives such as encouraging miners to mine empty blocks. At some point though transaction speed and cost will be a make or break issue, the question is whether BTC core can get its shit together before this time.

 

Edited November 3, 2017 by goldbug9999

[goldbug9999]

9 minutes ago, doomed said:

I have made my decision that Bitcoin Cash has by far most room for growth given the current market dynamics. 

To be fair thats been a spectacularly good call so far.

[doomed]

[dugsbody]

On 02/11/2017 at 5:23 PM, jiltedjen said:

I’m still think we will £6k a bitcoin before crashing, coming to rest around £3,000.

Seriously, what is the point in making random predictions like this?

[ChumpusRex]

8 hours ago, goldbug9999 said:

Segwit give between an x2 and x4 increase in transactions per block, hence full adoption of segwit would easily handle current tx demand with a 1mb block. Segwit also results in a lower rate of increase of blockchain size for a given tx rate.

Thus IMO segwit vs raw block size increase is a no brainer.

I don't think it's that good in reality. Realistically, with 100% segwit transactions capacity would be increased by about 70%. At present, segwit transactions have approximately 12% penetration and current block size is hovering around 1.07-1.08 MB during the current major transaction backlog. Extrapolation to 100% segwit transactions would suggest a maximum block size of approx 1.5-1.7 MB.

At the moment, block capacity is also wasted by miners either mining only partially full blocks (there are lots of exactly 750 kB blocks even during periods of severe backlog), or not releasing the extra block capacity provided by segwit (i.e. delivering 1.00 MB blocks which, due to segwit might be only 90% full). Interestingly, the miners most aggressively pushing for BCash or segwit 2x are those who are mining statistically the smallest blocks. I'm not quite sure of the motivation behind this - possibly it is incompetence, possibly they are pushing 2x by deliberately exacerbating blockchain congestion, but with transaction fees, now at around 3 BTC per block - some miners are throwing away close to 0.3 BTC in fees (about $2.4k) for every block mined.

I think core, at the moment, are more concerned with the fallout from a hard fork. Around 3-4% of nodes are still running code which is not segwit compatible and which would have to operate in compatibility mode. This is despite the segwit code being released over a year ago, and lying dormant waiting for the triggering conditions to activate it, and the intervening code releases containing a number of other compelling upgrades. 

Similarly, many large users (exchanges, etc.) may run customised versions of the core code, which may require redevelopment to support a hard fork, hence the need for a sufficiently large notice period. 

I think an increase in the block size, beyond segwit is badly needed, and indeed, the solution used by BCash (where the maximum block size is decided by consensus) seems a reasonable enough approach, as it avoids the need for future hard forks, should even more capacity be needed. The problem is that there was vehement opposition even to activation of segwit, so I don't know how any consensus approach taking over BCash's approach would work. At any rate, the segwit 2x approach is the worst possible option - a hard fork, with no built in upgradeability, should capacity be inadequate.

[evetsm]

13 hours ago, Eddie_George said:

For the millionth time:

Raising the block size lead to centralisation. Without decentralisation, Bitcoin is censorable.

Big block sizes mean that only companies or organistations can run full nodes as bandwidth requirements rise significantly.

It's easy for governments to shut down companies, they find it very difficult to target individuals. See BitTorrent for an illustration.

You're wasting your time with him. He's doomed !

Bcash has been caught before using sockpuppet shills to disrupt forums, all day yelling black is white. This one was so dumb he outed himself. He's from London lol !

 

https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/79i01f/popular_rbtc_sockpuppet_account_gets_called_out/
 

[evetsm]

11 hours ago, doomed said:

White paper cultist. Please show where in the White Paper bible does it calls for Emergency Difficulty Adjustment EDA to game mining rewards ? 

Where  in the White Paper bible does it say you should have coin inflation because the EDA causes block mined to be mined at less than 1 minute intervals ? ......followed by longer periods where nothing gets mined for hours ?

The White Paper bangs on about decentralization , but bcash is so centralised   that during pumps almost all transactions come out of Korea ?  Probably its one miner backer buying and selling to itself ,back and forth to drive up price  ? Eg. Yesterday :

 

Source.       Pair.            Volume (24h)
1 Bithumb BCH/KRW $863.92 M
2 Korbit      BCH/KRW $149.41 M
3 Bitfinex.  BCH/USD $143.57 M
4 Coinone BCH/KRW $139.65

https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/bitcoin-cash/#markets

Edited November 4, 2017 by evetsm
Sp

[dugsbody]

5 hours ago, evetsm said:

White paper cultist. Please show where in the White Paper bible does it calls for Emergency Difficulty Adjustment EDA to game mining rewards ? 

Where  in the White Paper bible does it say you should have coin inflation because the EDA causes block mined to be mined at less than 1 minute intervals ? ......followed by longer periods where nothing gets mined for hours ?

The White Paper bangs on about decentralization , but bcash is so centralised   that during pumps almost all transactions come out of Korea ?  Probably its one miner backer buying and selling to itself ,back and forth to drive up price  ? Eg. Yesterday :

 

Source.       Pair.            Volume (24h)
1 Bithumb BCH/KRW $863.92 M
2 Korbit      BCH/KRW $149.41 M
3 Bitfinex.  BCH/USD $143.57 M
4 Coinone BCH/KRW $139.65

https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/bitcoin-cash/#markets

Maybe doomed knows this and just wanted to profit from the gaming in the short term. 

[leonardratso]

im not reading very good things about bitstamp, still people having trouble cashing out to SEPA or getting choaded by the bank on fees.

I know coinbase just take in money but wont verify to get it out, is it same at bitstamp?

[doomed]

3 hours ago, leonardratso said:

im not reading very good things about bitstamp, still people having trouble cashing out to SEPA or getting choaded by the bank on fees.

I know coinbase just take in money but wont verify to get it out, is it same at bitstamp?

Try out Coinfloor for cashing out. They operate with a European bank but money remains in GBP so do not get killed by conversion fees by your bank. I have had no problems moving decent sums through there after getting my account verified.

[Marshmellow]

I don't think any of this helps Bitcoin at all. Clearly the coin doesn't work, which is why there is all this drama and it's really looking scammy. It just seems to be mining cartels having wars with eachother.

It's probably going to rocket to the moon but it feels like this could be the beginning of the end.

Kind of like when the Sex Pistols went on Bill Grundy. The next day they became the biggest band in the world, but barely played another show after and imploded into a farce.

[Marshmellow]

I think there needs to be some kind of system that allows wallets to vote for who has the right to be a miner. Then the users can actually control the network. 

If one of these forks allowed me to vote for my miner from my wallet, I might consider buying it. But probably miners have all the BTC anyway and will just vote themselves in.

Edited November 4, 2017 by Marshmellow

[jiltedjen]

Just buy and hold. it’s pretty simple. millions have done that already. Although at much lower prices.

it might halve in value after this bubble bursts. Next bubble will be many times bigger. 

the forks will all fail. but even if they don’t, as long as you bought before the fork your just fine. 

have a heck of a lot more growth to come in bitcoin. Eventually bitcoin will be worth so much it won’t move in such massive percentages. 

i risked a small amount of money, and I’m being rewarded for the risk. The risk is lower now, thus the growth and reward won’t be quite as spectacular (instead of a cheap bet buying you a house it might get you a nice car instead) but it’s still early days.

you should all have an extreamly diversified portfolio, gold, cash, bonds, shares. That’s sensible. allocate maybe 0.5% to bitcoin. 

will it destroy you if it becomes worthless? No. Move on with your life. 

is is risky? Yeah sure.

could you live with yourself in 20 years time when 1 house is £300,000 or we would take 0.5(BTC). 

Frankly by now if you don’t own even a few pounds worth of bitcoin your either stupid, lazy or both. 

[leonardratso]

2 hours ago, doomed said:

Try out Coinfloor for cashing out. They operate with a European bank but money remains in GBP so do not get killed by conversion fees by your bank. I have had no problems moving decent sums through there after getting my account verified.

hmm cheers for that, looks damn good, ive signed up and got verified in under 30 mins, ill load it with btc, flog em off and try a clawback, lets see how that goes.

might just chuck some back in as well as a test. grand minimum looks painful, could go the gdax route i suppose.

Im not too bothered by the price gouging (fx++, fees, whatever) if its transparent and is a one or two off, its the constant fee adding fees that irritates me plus the really crappy support, enough to hack anyone off.

 

[leonardratso]

2 hours ago, jiltedjen said:

Just buy and hold. it’s pretty simple. millions have done that already. Although at much lower prices.

it might halve in value after this bubble bursts. Next bubble will be many times bigger. 

the forks will all fail. but even if they don’t, as long as you bought before the fork your just fine. 

have a heck of a lot more growth to come in bitcoin. Eventually bitcoin will be worth so much it won’t move in such massive percentages. 

i risked a small amount of money, and I’m being rewarded for the risk. The risk is lower now, thus the growth and reward won’t be quite as spectacular (instead of a cheap bet buying you a house it might get you a nice car instead) but it’s still early days.

you should all have an extreamly diversified portfolio, gold, cash, bonds, shares. That’s sensible. allocate maybe 0.5% to bitcoin. 

will it destroy you if it becomes worthless? No. Move on with your life. 

is is risky? Yeah sure.

could you live with yourself in 20 years time when 1 house is £300,000 or we would take 0.5(BTC). 

Frankly by now if you don’t own even a few pounds worth of bitcoin your either stupid, lazy or both. 

hehe, your going to have to live with yourself what ever you do right or wrong, this life is a one hit wonder.

[Traktion]

https://medium.com/@dennyk/why-and-how-the-cryptobubble-will-burst-de9bc7fc5332

Seems appropriate for this thread. Lots of speculation without substance out there.

[jiltedjen]

Yes everyone knows ICO’s are a scam, that’s pretty obvious. plenty of people will loose their shirts to it.

the smarter ones who end up with alt coin gains will sell and buy bitcoin at the earliest opportunity before the alts fade to zero value.

there is a lot of money wanting to get into crypto. and the alts and especially ICO’s capture a lot of the stupid money (greedy morons who can’t see a scam). 

the bitcoin bubble will burst as it has done before, but no-time is a bad time to buy on a 5 to 10 year horizon with bitcoin. 

bitcoin is probably expensive on a 1 year time scale. But you could say buy £100 worth now, if it crashes then buy more to dollar average your position down. 

bitcoin is simple buy and hold. there will come a day when some bitcoin holders on here eventually buy very nice houses in bitcoin itself. 

someone will have a field day ‘rubbing it in’ will all the doubters. 

I fully expect after this short term bubble bursts there will be plenty of people claiming bitcoin is dead (for the ten thousanth time) 

 

[goldbug9999]

This chart is interesting ...

https://coinmarketcap.com/charts/#dominance-percentage

Looks like the move back to higher BTC dominance, which has been underway for some time now, is gathering momentum.

For me, a massive wipe out of alts is absolutely the best thing that could happen to crypto right now because the relatively few genuinely good ideas are getting lost in the noise.

[jiltedjen]

a lot of the alts were powered by people wanting to GPU mine. It gave many some value. as people saw it as an easy way to get a cheap/free position in alts.
That was always going to be a short term bubble.

the era of the alts will pass as just another learning lesson. They will all trend to zero or little value, occasionally getting pulled up during the worst of the bitcoin bubble phases, similar to silver but without any long term residual value. 

During the growth phase alts and forks are around far too early. The time for forks or alts is when bitcoin is over 100k a BTC, maybe 10 years to come. Right now they do serve a purpose, which is to show how strong bitcoin (BTC) actually is. it keeps shrugging off all these attacks (attack being the right word at this stage in the game), which is making it stronger.

might not like that those who took the early risk are now making out like bandits, but its all about context. what currently can give you a decent wealth store (again wealth store is what bitcoin is, not a currency, and thats just fine!) over a long period of time against inflation. 

as far as how risky bitcoin is? well i would say other than obvious scams like ICO's as an actual investment asset i would say 'extremely highly risky'.

i set savings targets for myself for every 6 months, for 2018 i'm planning of bitcoin being worth around 3k, and accepting that its going to be 'dead' again for another 4 or 5 years. Come 2021 it will probably clear whats left of my hopefully by then mortgage. 

Bitcoin will destroy the boomers. Its a generational wealth transfer. Possibly humanities last chance to make the banks impotent.

Its the end of the 'banking era', which was after the 'industrial/modern era' which was before the 'post medieval period', now its the (possibly very dark period) the 'decentralised stateless era'

[Traktion]

1 hour ago, goldbug9999 said:

This chart is interesting ...

https://coinmarketcap.com/charts/#dominance-percentage

Looks like the move back to higher BTC dominance, which has been underway for some time now, is gathering momentum.

For me, a massive wipe out of alts is absolutely the best thing that could happen to crypto right now because the relatively few genuinely good ideas are getting lost in the noise.

I doubt that will happen. Alts have been with us since simple copies + tweaks like litecoin.

I am sure many alts will fade in the next crash, just as they did the last time, but there is far more variety in alts now than there was a few years ago.

The trend towards alts has been a steady march for years too. I don't see why that should change now, considering the increased innovation in the alternatives.

Competition is good. There is no reason to have a single cryptocurrency, as technology allows value to be transferred easily between them. It should mean that the network effect is tempered, when genuinely better technology comes forward.

Better coin distribution mechanisms, faster transactions, cheaper transactions, cheap inline data storage, better privacy, more distributed network security, etc.

Bitcoin has been the vanguard for cryptocurrencies, but no need to deify it. It isn't perfect and things have moved forward since I first got into it. Humanity will benefit most from the best technology in the long run - if that is Bitcoin, it will survive any attempts on its crown.

[tomandlu]

BTW a fairly savage attack on BitCoin's carbon footprint in this week's New Scientist. Currently, maintaining the blockchain is pegging Ecuador for energy consumption, and it's only going to get worse...

https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg23631503-300-bitcoin-what-a-waste-of-resources/

(as well as the above editorial, there was a further piece inside).

[Darby Ram]

2 hours ago, tomandlu said:

BTW a fairly savage attack on BitCoin's carbon footprint in this week's New Scientist. Currently, maintaining the blockchain is pegging Ecuador for energy consumption, and it's only going to get worse...

https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg23631503-300-bitcoin-what-a-waste-of-resources/

(as well as the above editorial, there was a further piece inside).

I'm in favour of moving from Proof-of-Work to Proof-of-Stake if the latter prove feasible but these sorts of "Bitcoin is wasted energy" articles are comparing apples with oranges. They equate the energy-use of the bitcoin network (fairly easy to estimate) with the energy costs of a much narrower set of monetary activities, like a central bank minting currencies or the Visa network clearing transactions, which either aren't estimated at all or are being drastically under-estimated. So, the attacks might be 'savage' but they don't make a lot of sense. Either estimate the net energy costs (i.e., savings from lack of intermediaries and transactions not taking place, as well as the costs of 'wasted' CPU cycles) that come from having a secure, decentralised ledger or this kind of research is useless IMO.      

Edited November 5, 2017 by Darby Ram

[jiltedjen]

uninformed brain fart:

all the food and wages that banks require, the buildings, the transport of the workers, the heating, cash-points re-stocking, printing presses, the security guards, the vans to transport the monies etc etc.

bitcoin would be a lot more environmentally friendly. Besides the brute force mining will eventually give away to free mining, solar power, wind-farms. Spare free energy. Some people have already set up home mining rigs, which only run on the excess unused renewable energy. Could install excess renewables, which could provide all the UK's peak power demand with only 10% of its installed capacity (wind, solar, wave, hydro, thermal), and the rest of the 90% can be used for mining.

Have a stable grid all the time by having excess installed capacity, not having to keep coal stations on idle for when the peak demand comes.  

use the profits to install more capacity, pay down debt etc.

something like that. or and even better idea with the load of excess energy, *(cough oil)* instead of building a national wealth fund like a responsible nation, lets just enrich one generation, lets call that generation 'the booster generation' or 'bloomer generation' or 'boomer generation' or something like that. that seems fair 

[Traktion]

25 minutes ago, Darby Ram said:

I'm in favour of moving from Proof-of-Work to Proof-of-Stake if the latter prove feasible but these sorts of "Bitcoin is wasted energy" articles are comparing apples with oranges. They equate the energy-use of the bitcoin network (fairly easy to estimate) with the energy costs of a much narrower set of monetary activities, like a central bank minting currencies or the Visa network clearing transactions, which either aren't estimated at all or are being drastically under-estimated. So, the attacks might be 'savage' but they don't make a lot of sense. Either estimate the net energy costs (i.e., savings from lack of intermediaries and transactions not taking place, as well as the costs of 'wasted' CPU cycles) that come from having a secure, decentralised ledger or this kind of research is useless IMO.      

We have to think beyond the blockchain too. Mining blocks is one way to gain consensus on a decentralised network, but is it the only way?

Maidsafe are working on creating an autonomous network, with security managed using close group consensus. It is a far more complex model than the relatively simple blockchain and uses familiar math (randomness of hashes) to assign nodes to groups before they can even vote on consensus.

I understand there are other models out there too, which more closely correlate with a traditional blockchain, but allow a more distributed approach.

With other proposals out there, I don't think we should just accept stasis. Miners and VIs might want this, but it is unlikely to be ideal for everyone else.