Incorrect. The fact is the network lacked the capacity to handle the requested number of transactions, and in turn auctioned off the tickets to the lifeboat to whoever paid the most.
You’re arguing “nobody died in the titanic that didn’t pay enough”, when the problem is clearly there aren’t enough lifeboats.
I mean from an end user perspective maybe but it's always been an auction where you can buy yourself priority. Nothing has really changed except now there are more people bidding higher.
This defeats the entire purpose of bitcoin. The goal is a decentralized currency that isn’t controlled by shady political interests, and can reasonably replace normal currency.
No it doesn't. The purpose of Bitcoin is sound money.. A finite currency immune to governments' and central banks' desire to devalue currency for debt financing.
Bitcoin is more scarce and therefore better store of value than any fiat currency could ever be.
Do you not understand second layer solutions do not put your Bitcoin at risk? You commit to a payment channel which defaults to closing the channel according to original amounts when opened.. if the other party doesn't follow through. Again, your funds are not at risk so it's not like a bank, and there's no fractional reserve nor devaluing, so the SOV use case is preserved.
You can certainly have fractional reserve banking in a Bitcoin financial system, just as we did under the gold standard. Banks would give you an incentive to deposit BTC with them (could be interest rates or lower transactions fees) and then lend out some percent of those deposits. Voila, FRB and money supply growth.
The bank would have no capital to lend at fractional reserve. It could not lend out 90% deposit value without getting run on, because there is no deposit insurance. There is no M1 money supply growth coming from the central bank. You would be buying a bond but also necessarily acknowledging the possibility of default, unlike today in the funny money world of perpetual debt money.
Fractional reserve banking predates deposit insurance by hundreds of years. All of what you say was also true about gold, which was of relatively static supply.
Well bitcoin fluctuates like crazy for one. It shouldn't cost me more than a dollar to make a transaction. Some exchanges charge upwards of $4/transaction now.
The vision was, you can have transactions of any value with very minimal fees. like less than 10 cents. People would have micro transactions for all sorts of things.
But what it has now become is a place to store your money. 10X growth in one year. And you can't trust your exchange to still be there when everyone tries to convert that 10X back to cash if the price were to take a dip.
I would love to see online marketplaces taking a flat fee in cents because they can bypass dumb credit card percentage based fees and can still be profitable because they are doing it at scale processing thousands of transactions a second on a digital currency
There will always be derivatives of underlying assets. Preventing that is not the “entire point” of bitcoin. Replacing the underlying asset, currently fiat currency, is the point.
It provides a ton of value even if you can’t reasonably buy coffee with it. The path to replacing fiat is not adding risk or unpredictability to the figurehead cryptocurrency.
This is by design. If you break bitcoin, such that it’s only usable by large financial institutions, you completely remove the decentralized nature that made it attractive in the first place.
Congratulations guys, you made the banks SWIFT 2.0. I’m sure they appreciate it very much.
The lighting network completely undermines the entire purpose of bitcoin, and blockstreams seeming desire to sabotage bitcoin for daily use coincides suspiciously with their outside “investment”.
If you read the original bitcoin white paper it is clearly evident that the purpose of bitcoin was as a currency. These insane fees, wait times, and rediculous technical decisions by core have made it such that bitcoin is becoming “bank coin” aka only used for settling between large groups and useless for individuals (unless you’re a speculator).
If you believe lightning undermines the whole purpose and is the product of sabotage (or whatever core is being accused of these days), there are multiple forks to choose from that don't use it.
No need to attack Bitcoin, just go all in on Bitcoin Cash , put your money where your mouth is, and move on.
Yea! And I wish all these American liberals would stop complaining about Trump policies. Put your money where your mouth is and move to Mexico already! /s
Terrible analogy. To be more accurate, you would copy america and change the policies you want. Then the market decides on what they believe in and want.
Yea, no. Lightning network still depends on the bitcoin network. All it means is any two parties can transact off chain and settle up later. Not sure what the problem is.
You’re upset the core devs didn’t let Bitcoin become a centralized coin? If you refuse to acknowledge the benefit of SegWit or the other scaling solutions then I can’t help you.
Big blockers have their Jihan and Roger coin now. Stop trying to steal the bitcoin brand. If there was consensus for big blocks then Bitcoin would have activated. Jihan and Roger couldn’t convince the educated people that their proposals would work. Now they’re throwing a tantrum.
Each additional kb results in an additional 80ms of delay until the majority learns about a block. Increasing to 8mb means you’re adding a 9min delay in propagation. That is pretty much guaranteed centralization.
Perhaps you have some research you can point me to that demonstrates otherwise?
Which does not take into account xthin/compact blocks which cuts down propagation time a lot. In the future graphene will further reduce the time necessary.
How you can conclude a 9min propagation delay for 8MB blocks is beyond me as miners are basically directly connected to each other. This is the only thing that matters decentralization wise.
Your link is a news article and not actual research. The details of their specific test are barely provided. Please provide actual research as I have provided you.
This overcautious, "let's test everything for 10 years before trying it" approach is exactly what Bitcoin doesn't need when it has 0.001% of world transaction throughput.
Bitcoin is the conservative approach to any change that decreases the keystone of decentralization that allows it to survive. The market is deciding what it values.
The market is reacting to the fact that Bitcoin is in the public consciousness, and that is a result of years of advocacy done for Bitcoin, when its advocates (e.g. Roger Ver, Coinbase, PayPal, and all of the other signatories of the SegWit2x agreement) still believed that it would scale with large blocks and thousands of transactions on-chain per second.
Is there any data available on how long BCH blocks take to propagate? It's testing big blocks out in the real world so we can see how much delay that introduces and whether that leads to a significant increase in centralisation.
The BCH blocks are all very small. Go look at their blockchain stats. Most blocks are 10kb in size. The network is barely used. Once they start actually mining big blocks we’ll get some real data. I think it’ll be very interesting to see, tbh.
Ah that's a shame it would have been really interesting to see how that worked in reality.
I wonder if it could be measured the _other_ way around - i.e. are the sustained tiny blocks on BCH _increasing_ decentralisation compared to BTC right now? I can't find any good information on block propagation time though :(
I am not sure why it matters what the original purpose was. It seems that current consensus of bitcoin is to be a competitor to gold for store of value. there may be other cryptocurrencies that act more like currencies
This you may not be aware of, but there have been periods where the fee has remained in excess of over $1 for over 72 hours. A 20 cent fee will not cover you there.
Looking at my transaction history, of my last 10 transactions, all had fees in excess of $1, one as high as $14.
I'm not losing any sleep over it, but I'm also not going to call the fees reasonable.
It depends on your definition of "micro payments" ... With a fixed number of bitcoin ever in existence for it to ever become a real world currency two things have to happen
A) it's value inflate to a value that is an order of magnitude of all the value of the world ....
B) be cheap enough, and fast enough that you can buy gum at the corner store
Without micro payments it's stuck in a niche paying ransoms and doing drug deals
Who decided the quality of the idea? You are acting as if quality is an objective / unbiased concept. That's especially not to so in the tech industry.
Listening means actively and with interest and curiosity taking in someone's idea being presented. Your sentence doesn't make sense, you stop listening as soon as the quality of someone's idea goes down?
OP seems to dance around saying the idea that punishing people is wrong.
OP is wrong.
We want cultural and financial incentives not to do wrong. We also want raw primal fear, if you do this evil shit they’re gonna get you and lock you away forever type fear... if you do this stuff.
I don't believe that punishing people is wrong. I believe that punishing people is a waste of resources unless it accomplishes useful goals, such as discouraging that person or others from behaving in a similar manner in the future.
And if you accept that that is the goal, it is then logical to put resources toward the most efficient means of accomplishing it, to maximize your chances of success. I find it unlikely that long prison terms are that most efficient means in most cases (an exception might be dangerous likely re-offenders), given considerable evidence that it is ineffective in discouraging most forms of crime, and in some cases can increase likelihood of engagement in crime by ex-convicts.
Edit: there probably is value in some amount of prison time as a deterrent though, as I elaborate on in the comment below. My main point is that I highly doubt there is anything like a linear relationship, if any relationship at all, between the length of prison sentences and the effectiveness of the deterrent. And given that (if in fact it's true,) we might as well keep sentences reasonably short, and use the resources saved more effectively.
So what exactly do you propose? I agree that yes drug dealers and likes don’t stop selling drugs or killing people because of prison sentence. But they are afraid of cops because they prefer not to get locked up.
Likewise capital punishment does not prevent or lower murderer rate. There is no correlation at all.
So we have to seperate prevention and fear. The fear that you’d have to go to jail is the reason why punishment exists. we want people to know their actions are always held accountable in the perfect system - but unfortunately not.....
Prevention is education and make sure every community has a fair balance of income - a poor community is of course going to have a high crime in theory.
I don't have all the answers. And I do think some amount of prison as a deterrent is probably effective. But consider this: how many things would you consider doing if getting caught would mean a year in prison, but wouldn't do if it could mean 10 years? I can't think of very many. Like, assume you have no other reason to avoid doing these things, so it's something you saw as a completely moral act. Either one I'm going to do everything possible to avoid; I'll avoid the act if it isn't completely necessary, and if I perceive that it is, I'll do whatever I can to avoid getting caught. But I can't see my behaviour really changing based on the length of the term - what would be _worth_ a year in prison but not 10? (Especially considering that in any kind of theft or something along those lines, you're not going to get to keep what you took if caught.)
Now, I'm a pretty analytical person, so I'm probably most likely to be affected by deterrents (although perhaps also most likely to believe I could avoid getting caught!) A more impulsive criminal might not consider the possible consequences much at all; certainly not enough to distinguish between a low or high number of years locked up.
So if we take it as a given that long prison terms are not particularly more effective at deterrence than short ones - and I believe there is evidence to back that up, but I'm not an expert; if I were actually in a position to change these things I'd obviously do the research! - and that keeping people in prison costs a large amount of money, it seems to me best to reduce prison terms to the minimum degree possible while maintaining their deterrent benefit, and to redirect the savings into things that evidence suggests are effective in reducing crime (education, social programs, etc.)
Ironically, given my initial comment, this kind of highly calculated crime (the VW emissions) is probably most likely to be deterred by prison sentences. Once again though, I don't expect a long sentence (and 7 years seems long to me for a non-violent crime) would be any more effective than a short one. I mean, would you risk _any_ non-trivial amount of time behind bars just to help your bosses make more money?
Why do you want to throw out other people's monitors when they're working fine for them? (Source: I also have a 40" 4K monitor at home, both for coding/reading and gaming.)
Of course if I take off my glasses, then every monitor looks the same. But with proper correction, my vision is better than 20/20.
With my prescription computer glasses, the difference between low DPI and high DPI is like night and day. I can see every pixel on a low DPI monitor, while high DPI monitors look beautiful to me.
Please, everyone: do yourself a huge favor and get your vision checked and get some single vision prescription glasses if they are called for. It's hard to overstate the difference this will make in your quality of life.
Edit: Not sure why you were downvoted for a reasonable comment. It's true that your vision will get worse as you get older. Even if nothing else goes wrong, you lose your ability to focus your eyes dynamically. The lenses harden up and lock into a specific focal distance.
However, many of these vision changes are correctable. Progressive lenses are a great solution for "out and about" use. You can look up and down to see far and near things. They aren't very good for computer use, and that's where the single vision lenses come in.
It is a minor nuisance to switch back and forth between the computer glasses and the progressives, but being able to see clearly makes it all worth it.
No, this is a huge myth. I’m getting older (42) and my eye sight is getting worse, and I can still tell the difference between 110 and 220. Heck, I could easily tell the difference between 150 PPI and 220 (a hitachi 28” 4K vs. a iMac retina 5K).
Coding without seeing pixels in font rendering is just bliss, it is too hard to go back.
I tried varifocals once, gave up on them immediately. They just didn't work for me, I was always trying to see something through the wrong part of the glasses. Now I have two pairs, one for normal distance and one for computer work.
Everyone has different vision, of course! If you don't mind my asking, what is your viewing distance to the screen?
One big consideration for me: I'm 65, so my eyes are not able to focus back and forth to different distances like a younger person.
My solution is a pair of single vision prescription lenses, adjusted to the distance to my monitor(s). I need to be able to use the laptop all on its own, so that determines the focus distance: about 20".
Because of that, I also place any secondary monitor at about the same distance from my eyes, otherwise it would be out of focus. I can't go changing glasses to look at a different monitor. :-)
A 24" 4K display works nicely for this, and as I mentioned it's small enough to work really well in portrait mode.
So I have two recommendations for any programmer. If you haven't used a portrait mode monitor, try it out alongside your laptop display. It's a very practical setup.
But more importantly, if you find yourself gravitating toward lower-DPI monitors, it may be time for a vision check and a good pair of single vision prescription glasses adjusted for your monitor distance (again, about 20" if you ever need to use a laptop by itself). I put off doing this for years - I always thought of myself as the kind of person who "didn't need glasses."
When I finally got the prescription lenses, it was a real eye-opener - pun intended!
Yes, for me 1920x1080 on say a 20-inch is the absolute minimum with these LED monitors that are all the rage now. Even the old CRTs looked better with a lower pixel density; I wonder why
The CRTs looked better because there was more "bleed" from pixel to pixel. A great example I found to describe it was if you were in the iOS ecosystem when the iPhone 4 came out, every outdated iOS app looked terrible. The 4 had the same screen size but double the PPI of the previous generations. An outdated app looked better on a <4 than it did on a 4 because the bigger pixels of the earlier phones bled into each other more while the 4 created crisper edges that were incredibly jarring.
You’re arguing “nobody died in the titanic that didn’t pay enough”, when the problem is clearly there aren’t enough lifeboats.