Long time Bitcoin developer Mike Hearn is claiming that the Bitcoin experiment has failed:
Why has Bitcoin failed? It has failed because the community has failed. What was meant to be a new, decentralised form of money that lacked "systemically important institutions" and "too big to fail" has become something even worse: a system completely controlled by just a handful of people. Worse still, the network is on the brink of technical collapse. The mechanisms that should have prevented this outcome have broken down, and as a result there's no longer much reason to think Bitcoin can actually be better than the existing financial system.
Among the problems he lists are:
- A conceptually wrong new feature.
Allowed buyers to take back payments they'd made after walking out of shops, by simply pressing a button (if you aren't aware of this "feature" that's because Bitcoin was only just changed to allow it)
- Technical problems of the network.
The block chain is full. You may wonder how it is possible for what is essentially a series of files to be "full". The answer is that an entirely artificial capacity cap of one megabyte per block, put in place as a temporary kludge a long time ago, has not been removed and as a result the network's capacity is now almost completely exhausted.
- Extreme concentration of hash power.
Why has the capacity limit not been raised? Because the block chain is controlled by Chinese miners, just two of whom control more than 50% of the hash power. At a recent conference over 95% of hashing power was controlled by a handful of guys sitting on a single stage. The miners are not allowing the block chain to grow.
[More after the Break]
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Censorship on bitcoin.org.
So he decided to do whatever it took to kill XT completely, starting with censorship of Bitcoin's primary communication channels: any post that mentioned the words "Bitcoin XT" was erased from the discussion forums he controlled, XT could not be mentioned or linked to from anywhere on the official bitcoin.org website and, of course, anyone attempting to point users to other uncensored forums was also banned. Massive numbers of users were expelled from the forums and prevented from expressing their views.
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And finally, he traces back the root of the problem to the Bitcoin Core developers.
One of them, Gregory Maxwell, had an unusual set of views: he once claimed he had mathematically proven Bitcoin to be impossible. More problematically, he did not believe in Satoshi's original vision.
[...]
In a company, someone who did not share the goals of the organisation would be dealt with in a simple way: by firing him.But Bitcoin Core is an open source project, not a company. Once the 5 developers with commit access to the code had been chosen and Gavin had decided he did not want to be the leader, there was no procedure in place to ever remove one. And there was no interview or screening process to ensure they actually agreed with the project's goals.
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But the first mistake was already made by Satoshi himself:
When Satoshi left, he handed over the reins of the program we now call Bitcoin Core to Gavin Andresen, an early contributor. Gavin is a solid and experienced leader who can see the big picture. His reliable technical judgement is one of the reasons I had the confidence to quit Google (where I had spent nearly 8 years) and work on Bitcoin full time. Only one tiny problem: Satoshi never actually asked Gavin if he wanted the job, and in fact he didn't.
Is Bitcoin rotten to the Core?
(Score: 4, Insightful) by VLM on Sunday January 17 2016, @01:07PM
Looks like pretty solid mid size growth pains, and those are only avoidable by dying off before reaching them... some projects survive them, some don't. Some will try to strengthen the project, others will try entryism to push their own aims, etc.
It would probably be useful WRT sophistry to separate BTC from the "common project patterns" discussion. Search and replace and put KDE in the place of BTC or whatever.
Sort of like watching how every generation of idiot teenagers think they're the first ones to ever discover sex, drugs, reputations, politics, etc. Mostly a good laugh.
On a very long term perspective (like many decades, since the 70s) its interesting to watch "computers" as no matter how decentralized the technological tools are initially designed, humans insist on making massive brittle centralized systems out of them, its an insane self destructive desire. Doesn't matter if we're talking usenet to reddit or the corporate takeover of linux or corporate takeover of BTC in this discussion.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Francis on Sunday January 17 2016, @02:40PM
I take it you haven't been following the BTC circus for very long then. These are just things that are too big for the fans to ignore. There've been problems with the implementation and design from the beginnning leading to people getting rich for doing nothing and other people getting defrauded out of large sums of money. Mt. Gox springs instantly to mind, but the generally deflationary design of the currency ensures that the cash flow will mostly be moving from newcomers to old timers the way that a typical Ponzi scheme would.
The idea of a crypto-currency isn't necessarily a bad thing, but this implementation was planned by people who have no knowledge of how currencies work or economics or anything other than the technical side of things and even there they failed to apply any thought into the consequences of committing to a specific amount of deflation at the beginning that can't be changed. The Federal Reserve has revised it's sense of what a healthy inflation rate looks like over the years and BTC doesn't have that option.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 17 2016, @07:53PM
Not the bottom yet. Wait for it...
(Score: 3, Insightful) by julian on Monday January 18 2016, @07:20AM
Not to mention that the people who came in right after the creators/innovators were the libertarians/ancaps who made decisions about Bitcoin based on ideology, not technology. They think BTC is a tool to destabilize the USD, disintermediate and eventually bring down the US Government, usher in a glorious new golden age of libertarian economic freedom--and of course they'll be rich since the currency of this new Paradise will be Bitcoin.
These people are absolutely insufferable to talk to. Any criticism you make of Bitcoin and they label you a "statist".
I think Bitcoin (and the blockchain) is an excellent idea, extremely clever, has some technological problems that are probably fixable, and that something like it will exist to supplement traditional fiat currency. However, the fiat currency isn't going anywhere. It's also not a force of pure evil in the world like ancaps and libertarians seem to think. It's an inevitable invention of the state, and the state is an irresistible expression of human spontaneous self-organization in a 4-dimensional universe.
(Score: 4, Informative) by canopic jug on Sunday January 17 2016, @01:16PM
Though Mike has valid points, there have been many repeated claims of the end of Bitcoin before. Bram Cohen has already written a rebuttal to Mike Hearn's post [medium.com]. Though Bram starts out with a bit of an ad hominem he quickly gets to the details.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Bot on Sunday January 17 2016, @02:09PM
the rebuttal doesn't address what is to me the most worrying thing, the concentration of mining power. Waiting a day for a transaction is not the worst problem.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by maxwell demon on Sunday January 17 2016, @02:59PM
The rebuttal also didn't address the issue of taking back payments. Indeed, I wouldn't exactly call it a rebuttal at all, as the only thing he actually somewhat addresses is the block size (and even that only quite indirectly) and the "questioning of Greg Maxwell's authority" (the essay didn't question his authority, but his alignment with the vision of Bitcoin — admittedly a quite subjective point, but then, I have to wonder if Bram Cohen chose that point exactly because of that less-objective character).
All in all, of the two texts, the one that sounded whiny was certainly the "rebuttal". I'm still looking for hard facts in that one (but then, Cohen claims: "Presenting highly technical debates by getting into the weeds in postings meant for the general public is a fool’s errand." — which makes me wonder: Why? Because people could actually fact-check it? I certainly prefer texts that tell me facts to texts that just tell me "if you were to look into the facts, which I'm not going to tell you, you'd agree with me").
And note that I'm not invested in or against Bitcoin; I think it's a fascinating experiment, but I don't have any strong feelings about it. If it succeeds, great. If it fails, also great. But from the two texts (the essay and the "rebuttal", the essay is far more convincing to me. But then, maybe someone comes out with an actual rebuttal, as opposed to a text half of which is a big ad-hominem, and the other half doesn't really address most of the issues raised.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 18 2016, @01:10AM
If the concentration of hashing power is keeping the hashing cost artificially low then competition will rapidly increase in direct proportion to More's Law and they will lose their dominance.
The 1MB limit kludge will also be remedied, because it is possible and profitable to do so.
Give it FNORD time grasshopper. When you can snatch the FNORD coin from my wallet, then you will be a FNORD master.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 17 2016, @01:50PM
IT'S OVER, BITCOIN IS FINISHED
THIS TIME FOR REAL YOU GUYS
NO SRSLY
this time it will really happen you guys
i'm srsly
(Score: 2) by Bot on Sunday January 17 2016, @02:17PM
another crippling bombshell... oh wait, not everything is fine is it?
Embattled digital currency exchange Cryptsy is now claiming that it is insolvent.
http://www.coindesk.com/cryptsy-bankruptcy-millions-bitcoin-stolen/ [coindesk.com]
Account abandoned.
(Score: 2) by Fnord666 on Sunday January 17 2016, @04:16PM
another crippling bombshell... oh wait, not everything is fine is it?
Embattled digital currency exchange Cryptsy is now claiming that it is insolvent.
That was a result of a social engineering attack though, not an inherent flaw or shortcoming of digital currency design.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 17 2016, @09:55PM
I'd like to see a social engineering trick that convinces me to give them my /entire/ bank balance in a single irrevocable transaction with absolutely no further recourse.
Hell, the most anyone has ever convinced me to give them is $5 worth of cash, and this they did usually through minor bets on things that turned out to be biased.
Meanwhile, in a single instant Cryptsy's entire wallet balance went poof, forever, because of just /one/ mistake on the part of their part.
In other words, Bitcoin is safe for humans to use, provided they trust themselves never to make a single mistake ever.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 18 2016, @10:39AM
The same argument can be made against the use of cash or other valuables.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 18 2016, @04:27PM
The same argument can be made against the use of cash or other valuables.
Correct. One should not entrust your entire store of cash or other valuables to a single uninsured location where a single error may wipe out your entire balance with no recourse. It is another reason why stuffing all your cash in your pillowcase is a Bad Idea.
But it is not an argument for placing your cash in an insured bank (for values less than the insurance amount,) and/or opening multiple accounts with different insured banks.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Sunday January 17 2016, @03:16PM
Better than all the pro-Bitcoin hype meant to enrich the early adopters of the pyramid scheme.
Except for that guy who accidentally tossed his $millions of bitcoin in the landfill along with his hard drive.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 17 2016, @04:56PM
Bitcoin goes MOO, like cow?
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Sunday January 17 2016, @02:33PM
There are many other digital currencies now. Litecoin or Dogecoin anyone?
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Runaway1956 on Sunday January 17 2016, @03:03PM
Historically, banks were pretty much unregulated. Probably no one alive remembers it, but banks used to print their own currency. Some of that currency was backed by real estate, or by gold, or sometimes by nothing. Banks failed, investors lost their funds, and the world moved on. In large part, thanks to the big crash in 1929, regulation came along. Banks no longer print their own money, and the FDIC insures investors funds up to $100,000. Banks still fail, but the investors are protected from complete loss.
Cryptocurrency has no regulation. Funny thing, when there is no regulation, slick characters can take advantage of other suckers. I've thought from the beginning that the average Joe who invests resources into these cryptocurrencies was just helping to make some slick operator rich.
Abortion is the number one killed of children in the United States.
(Score: 1) by dbv on Sunday January 17 2016, @05:23PM
Your chequing account is protected up to 100k, not your savings or investments. Who keeps 100k in their chequing account?
I'm in Canada and they quietly introduced the "bail-in" laws, meaning bank can dip into your investments or savings should it become insolvent.
And you've seen what happened in 2008, the bailouts. They gambled with customers' funds, pocketed the profits, and when the gamble failed, taxpayers bailed the out.
You can keep your regulation, I think this is better.
(Score: 2) by RedGreen on Sunday January 17 2016, @05:43PM
"I'm in Canada and they quietly introduced the "bail-in" laws, meaning bank can dip into your investments or savings should it become insolvent."
Yet another thing we can thank the piece of shit CONservatives for, thankfully that lost decade is behind us now. Though I highly doubt it would ever get used the banks keep posting record profit after record profit every year, bend over and smile they are only going to stick it in a little ways.
"I modded down, down, down, and the flames went higher." -- Sven Olsen
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 18 2016, @04:12AM
Point of fact it is 250k.
https://www.fdic.gov/deposit/deposits/faq.html [fdic.gov]
Also it does include savings, money market, checking, and CDs.
https://www.fdic.gov/deposit/deposits/brochures/deposit_insurance_at_a_glance-english.html [fdic.gov]
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 18 2016, @10:05AM
But does it also cover DVDs and Blurays?
(Score: 2) by opinionated_science on Sunday January 17 2016, @05:32PM
historically, lumps of gold were not regulated. But in order for currency to be, the exchange rate had to be correlated for a given economic system.
The problem came when governments decoupled the correlation with a physically limited resource, the whole artifice of the dead-weight banking system. Once there is a "price" for moving a bit of paper, scams are not far behind. Having said that, they used to scam gold too, only you risk your life trying to pass off fake gold. No risks in ripping billions off a population....
I once saw a program in the UK called "Bank of Dave", which highlights quite effectively (IMHO), just how contrived banking is.
(Score: 2) by melikamp on Sunday January 17 2016, @06:05PM
There is a notion that banks still "create" money (although not in any tangible form) whenever" rel="url2html-28924">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Money_creation#Money_creation_by_the_commercial_bankshref="">whenever [wikipedia.org] they sell loans.
(Score: 2) by jdavidb on Sunday January 17 2016, @10:20PM
Couple of fascinating books on that for anyone who wants to read further:
ⓋⒶ☮✝🕊 Secession is the right of all sentient beings
(Score: 2, Interesting) by YeaWhatevs on Sunday January 17 2016, @04:56PM
The main thing seems to be, there is an power struggle between a splinter group and the self-interested establishment based on principles. These things happen.
Then there's the technical stuff. That'll work itself out. Mike has put a dent in the price with his parting shots. Markets react like that. Except for the imbalance in mining power, the remaining stuff are headwinds. When the erosion in confidence affects the establishment's bitcoin value enough, they'll make a course correction.
Then there's the imbalance in mining power. That's a doozy. The block chain, as a non-deterministic voting algorithm is working as designed, giving the votes that control the ledger to the larges pool of computational resources, but has failed to achieve it's purpose, to act as a check against large players having control over the bitcoin currency. It has become a currency controllable to the highest bidder with the most resources. Then again, so is everything else; I'm not sure it matters.
Forking the Bitcoin source and fighting the uphill battle against the establishment to get enough installs to become the dominant algorithm may fix some of the technical issues with Bitcoin's reliability. That's contingent on winning that battle, which I doubt, but it isn't going to ever fix the computational imbalance.
So move on. Learn the lessons. Write a great new algorithm for a new currency. The block-chain has failed to keep things decentralized, but maybe bitcoin hasn't, after all, all of the other currencies are centralized too.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Thexalon on Sunday January 17 2016, @05:14PM
The problems are inherent to the design of Bitcoin. The big doozies that Bitcoin supporters have yet to find any kind of way of handling:
1. It's deflationary. While that's a very profitable thing if you're both an early adopter and have a sufficient number of suckers^Hlater adopters, it's no good for the long-term prospects because it encourages the currency to be held rather than circulated.
2. It's backed by absolutely nothing. Sure, Bitcoins are now relatively hard to obtain, but they aren't useful in and of themselves, only in exchange. But nobody is required to exchange something useful for Bitcoins, which means that a holder of Bitcoins could very easily find themselves in a situation where they're completely worthless.
Bitcoin supporters claim that, say, the US dollar is backed by nothing, but it isn't, it's backed by 2 rules: A. You need to come up with a certain number of dollars to keep the IRS happy, and if necessary people with guns will come and explain matters to you. B. "This note is legal tender for all debts, public and private", which means that if you owe somebody something (e.g. settle a restaurant bill) and attempt to pay in US dollars (in US jurisdiction of course), they can't refuse and then say you haven't tried to pay them. And again, if they don't understand this, some people with guns have the power to come by and explain things. All of the value of US dollars comes from those two concepts, in other words from the determination of the US government to enforce their value with violence if necessary.
3. Bitcoins were popular among those who opposed banking regulations. Well, it turns out that all those banking regulations existed for a reason. For example, banking laws made it illegal for bankers to just take their depositor's money and run, unlike what appears to have happened at MtGox. This isn't the first time libertarians have been scammed by libertarians: For example, in at least one case a couple claimed at least to be trying to set up a real-life Galt's Gulch in South America, got a bunch of people to buy into it, and then proceeded to just run off with the money.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by RedGreen on Sunday January 17 2016, @05:49PM
"Bitcoin supporters claim that, say, the US dollar is backed by nothing, but it isn't, it's backed by 2 rules: A. You need to come up with a certain number of dollars to keep the IRS happy, and if necessary people with guns will come and explain matters to you. B. "This note is legal tender for all debts, public and private", which means that if you owe somebody something (e.g. settle a restaurant bill) and attempt to pay in US dollars (in US jurisdiction of course), they can't refuse and then say you haven't tried to pay them. And again, if they don't understand this, some people with guns have the power to come by and explain things. All of the value of US dollars comes from those two concepts, in other words from the determination of the US government to enforce their value with violence if necessary."
There is that and the fact that the US economy actually produces real goods that have value to people who want to buy them all over the world.
"I modded down, down, down, and the flames went higher." -- Sven Olsen
(Score: 3, Insightful) by maxwell demon on Sunday January 17 2016, @07:44PM
Actually, the vast majority of dollars are not generated by the Federal Reserve, but by the banks giving out loans (that's what fractional reserve banking is all about). And those dollars are backed with actual goods: Namely whatever security you provided for the credit. For example, the house you just bought with that money. Either you manage to pay back your credit, then afterwards the house is truly yours, and the money disappears again. Or you don't manage to pay the credit back, then the bank gets your house, and sells it to get the money back (at which point the money also disappears).
The funny thing is that despite creating money in the loan, the bank still is in trouble if it doesn't get the money back, because the newly created money is not the money they gave you. The new money is on the account of someone who brought real money to the bank. When the bank gave part that money to you, the nominal money on his account did not reduce. Therefore that money was replaced by the new "virtual" money the bank just created. The whole system works because people only take relatively little money from their accounts, so the fraction of it that's real money is sufficient to give them the illusion all the money is there. Of course, if you do a bank transfer, it doesn't matter if you move virtual instead of real money between the accounts. And that's why the virtual money is effectively real: You can do real payments with it.
That's also why bank runs are so dangerous: The bank can only give out the real money, not the virtual money it created when it gave loans.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by RedGreen on Sunday January 17 2016, @08:44PM
Yeah it is called reserve capital that banks are required to keep as percentage of overall deposits. Oh and the mortgages are not given out of banks/your money but by the bond market. That is why the term sub prime was used a lot few years back they packaged up the junk loans then sold them onto the bond market as good assets leading to the crash of 2008 when the scam was revealed. Got to love them Capitalist in the US privatize the profit socialize the losses, that damn evil socialism certainly comes in handy then does it not.
"I modded down, down, down, and the flames went higher." -- Sven Olsen
(Score: 3, Informative) by Thexalon on Monday January 18 2016, @12:25PM
That's not precisely correct.
Banks had reserve requirements, and a bank was required to keep a portion of the loan on its own books. Which is why the vast majority of subprime loans were originated not by banks but by "mortgage brokers", a new kind of firm that wasn't regulated like a bank. Companies like Ameriquest, Countrywide, and DiTech were able to do what they did precisely because they didn't have to follow the rules the banks did. And companies that bought and gambled on the securities those companies generated (investment banks like Goldman Sachs and Lehman Brothers) were able to do what they did because they didn't have to follow the rules they had had to prior to the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (made law by Bill Clinton - Bernie Sanders could really hammer Clinton about that if he wanted to).
This whole thing wouldn't have happened had there been a set of rules that used "duck-typing": If it walks like a bank, and quacks like a bank, then it's a bank for regulatory purposes.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2, Disagree) by RedGreen on Monday January 18 2016, @01:57PM
Pathetic so you quibble with the wording to say in effect the same thing.
"I modded down, down, down, and the flames went higher." -- Sven Olsen
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Monday January 18 2016, @12:17PM
More precisely, bank runs would be dangerous if there weren't deposit insurance (in the US, that's handled by either the FDIC or CRUA). And the requirement that banks have some reserves also means that they're likely to lose money if they make stupid loans. Yeah, those regulations actually matter and have saved lots of people's behinds (e.g. in the 1980's S&L crash).
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2) by Beryllium Sphere (r) on Sunday January 17 2016, @07:45PM
Well said and well thought out.
One thing, though -- a good medium of exchange, by making more and more profitable transactions possible, has a kind of intrinsic value.
When Bitcoin allowed transactions across borders cheaper than banks or PayPal, that was real value.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Thexalon on Sunday January 17 2016, @10:28PM
Was it really cheaper though? I mean, the bank exchange rates (and PayPal, which acts a lot like a bank despite not being one) have all sorts of regulations and insurance and such that help prevent people from being ripped off too badly during the exchange. By contrast, Bitcoin might well have been cheaper on the surface, but there was a much greater risk that the Bitcoins would be lost or stolen, which means that it wasn't necessarily cheaper than doing a straight up currency exchange.
If the foreign currency transfer fees from banks were really exorbitant, that could fairly easily be solved by regulation. They aren't (at least in my experience both doing international travel and doing business across national boundaries), which means the market is more-or-less taking care of it. That isn't surprising, because the richest depositors in most banks like being able to travel internationally without worrying about traveller's checks and similar silliness, so typically it's just a matter of current exchange rates + 1-2% for the bank's trouble in converting the currency when you're, say, charging stuff to your US-based Mastercard in a restaurant in Germany.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 1, Disagree) by tftp on Sunday January 17 2016, @06:28PM
I always believed that the end of BTC will come from technical drawbacks of its then-current implementation. Look, the network gets overloaded at 3 to 7 transactions per second! That ain't good enough even for a small supermarket chain, let alone the planet. I completely ignored the human factor and presumed that the BTC will be under a resposible stewardship - and will fail just because of limitations of the design. But when I read the article last night it struck me that the failure comes from an unexpected angle - from the utter failure of humans to cooperate. (I just discussed that with c0lo [soylentnews.org] in another thread.)
I do not object to digital currency in principle. However BTC is buried in problems, and perhaps it is for better that this phase of the experiment is concluded. The next digital coin should be designed not just by mathematicians, but by financists as well. In particular, the early adopter advantage must be eliminated. But there are far more issues to deal with. For one, the BTC token is too expensive to mint, compared to a nearly free piece of paper or an entirely free number in a computer. Money is a social problem, and trying to fix it with a technological solution is a well known folly.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 17 2016, @06:59PM
I think you mean THE MOST EXPECTED ANGLE.
We set up systems to ruin them. No matter how good or bad the system is at maintaining itself; humans have proved very astute at dismantling them.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Lemming on Sunday January 17 2016, @09:08PM
An important point: Mike Hearn works for R3 Global Consortium since a few months. It's a company which develops block chain technology for banks. They don't use Bitcoin, or any other public cryptocurrency network, they are developing private block chain tech for communication between banks. Link: http://bravenewcoin.com/news/30-top-banks-and-mike-hearn-have-now-joined-r3-global-consortium/ [bravenewcoin.com]
And then there was this live video of a conference on Thursday, where Charley Cooper, Managing Director at R3CEV LLC, is presenting their product. Then he says "I don't know what time it is or how on-the-record we are, but Mike Hearn, who is one of the prominent core developers in the Bitcoin community who works for R3, it will be in the New York Times any minute, has broken up with Bitcoin today. He said it's a failed experiment.": https://youtu.be/R0iArSIU0Z8?t=47m16s [youtu.be]
I'm not saying Mike Hearn has made some valid points, but it seems clear this announcement was set up in coordination with his new employer.
There was a /r/bitcoin post about it, apparently the post itself is now deleted, but the discussion is still there: https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/413pwp/mike_hearns_latest_blog_post_was_a_strategic_move/ [reddit.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 17 2016, @10:23PM
Mod this guy up. Usually it's not great form to shoot the messenger but this certainly is more than a bit fishy.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by arslan on Monday January 18 2016, @02:33AM
Yea.. I'm seeing a lot of hype about "Private blockchains" tech. R3 have been peddling to the banking sector here in Oz as well and have been getting a lot of seed capital.
It all smells fishy to me, like back in the old days where a vendor wants to sell their "private crypto" solution... looks a lot like snake oil... only they are a bit smarter this time around and getting their customers to fund the development of said snake oil. Like getting them involve and letting them "audit" the work is going to make it all peachy.
Even in crypto land with open source implementations and public scrutiny things can still go wrong. But somehow, bank execs and architects, any maybe a few paid PHD shills, scrutinizing a closed implementation is going to be ok. People never learn from history...
(Score: 2) by Lemming on Sunday January 17 2016, @09:52PM
Hitler finds out about Mike Hearn and the bitcoin dump [youtu.be]
(Score: 1) by Scruffy Beard 2 on Monday January 18 2016, @08:06AM
I saw this coming nearly a year ago after reading some of Mircea Popescu's [trilema.com] writings.
This is the fundamental disagreement here. On one side, we have people that feel that the network should expand in order to handle every-day transaction from the world over. On the other side, with have people who feel that the network is easier to secure with smaller block-sizes, and as a a result must remain a niche currency (for the very rich). Anyone who disagrees must be a US Government plant (or just stupid).
Mircea Popescu seems to fit the Villain Has a Point [tvtropes.org] trope (time-suck warning) here. A populist Bitcoin network will fall under government regulation if for no other reason than to get access to data-center space. A payment network handling thousands of transactions per second simply can not hide on tor or IP2 (at the time of this writing). It does not help that the bulk of the miners on the other side of the Great Firewall of China.
That said, I hope Bitcoin can still grow (and some kind of compromise is found). I will concede that the masses do not need Bitcoin for day-to-day transactions. However, I (being a dirty peasant) feel that the average person should have access to the Bitcoin network. It may mean annual transactions costing something similar to wire-transfers. However, even that modest usage adds up over Billions of people.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 18 2016, @02:13PM
Dollars can be used by everybody, and should, therefore, be considered useless by him. Well, if he wants to get rid of all his useless dollars, I'm willing to take them. ;-)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 18 2016, @02:15PM
s/useless/worthless/g of course (I really should have proofread).
But I stand by my offer: He can give me all his worthless dollars, and I won't complain. :-)