In contrast with proof of stake there is quite literally nothing at stake.

The majority use case for Bitcoin isn't using Bitcoin at all. It's speculating on Bitcoin. Those people definitionally don't care about Bitcoin for its own sake.

I'm pretty sure the exchanges are offering these not because anybody actually has forward needs to buy or sell Bitcoin, as they would with, say, wheat. People just want to speculate. For those people, cash settlement is exactly what they're after.

Perfectly buying at the bottom of a dip and selling at the top are both very RISKY trades, particularly if trading with your whole stake: you don't have much information to indicate that the market is changing and could have been very wrong.

I think the healthiest perspective is just to compare investment vs. return in dollars. If you're beating the broad market, you're doing fine and should be happy. If you think about what you could have done with perfect hindsight, you'll just make yourself miserable.

And if not DDOS, it's entirely possible that these exchanges are not able to handle the rush of people logging in to buy the dip. I don't think any of these exchanges have the throughput of something like NASDAQ, not yet anyway.

As I said I bought VPN with it when this stuff was in baby stages. Now at 10k USD valuation the real world usage hasn't grown all that much from there...certainly nothing like the price growth. So I'm staying really fkin far away from this.

People called it right & made a killing of it - more power to them. Realistically this can't going though without some monster sized improvement in the underlying non-speculative transaction volume.

Real world utility and pricing have to converge at some point. Right now they seem to be growing apart exponentially and all I can think of is RIP whoever is on the wrong side of that when it returns to reality.

I should ask her if she still has it next time I see her, but I am pretty sure she threw it in the garbage.

If/when your stock exchange starts accepting bitcoins, they may still continue to take days to clear things.

You don't see how that might be a red flag? What vitamins could possibly be so important that you couldn't wait a little while, and would be unavailable from another source?

Plus, the rudeness of "I'm more important than everyone else in the queue, hurry up" can't have helped.

Just go out to a target and ask 5 people... Unless you live on mars already.

Uhhh, no

Is there a term for this?

No Bitcoin pumpers can give a proper value analysis because its actual value is something approaching 0. It has no use for which it is better than alternatives, even among cryptocurrencies. It is a classic bubble where people buy assuming that a greater fool will come along and buy at a higher price.

This is gambling.

My point is that there have been skeptics and people saying it's a bubble or too volatile for nearly all of Bitcoin's history. But if you bought BTC and held it--at any high or low, for any significant amount of time--you made a lot of money (either realized or unrealized, that doesn't matter).

[0] https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1NgvD2kFT69mSXuJPzPDu...

[1] https://www.coinbase.com/careers/923993

(Gemini has been much better but they went down for a lot of today too.)

[1] When they had ~4 volume related outages.

I don't think Ethereum is the only cryptocurrency community like this, it's just the one I'm involved in.

Or etch the key on a piece of metal, seal it in plastic, and throw THAT in the ground, if your are that way inclined!

I don't see the difficulty.

The advantage of bitcoin is you can encrypt it and store it offline in as many locations as you want.

Ponzi schemes are similarly profitable but for some reason they are frowned upon.

If an attacker manages to gain control of 51% of the processing power, he can either a) choose to earn ~$350,000 per hour playing by the rules (mining to his own address) or b) perform a double spend attack on someone (in which case he needs to own over ~$350,000 and find someone willing to pay him in cash before either the mining pool or the network discovers the attack). Which will he realistically choose? The settlement time for USD is in the order of days. Will he risk a USD transfer being aborted before he can get his money, or play it safe and generate 12.5 bitcoins (~$100,000) within 20 minutes to his own address?

Also, exchanges and nodes can easily see that a fork is ongoing, with just barely half the hashing power on the honest chain. Chances are exchanges would shut down, clients would warn of a 51% attack, and the attacker would be left with the only option of mining honestly on the longest chain to his own address, thus taking money from poorly secured mining pools, but not affecting the stability of Bitcoin.

> What happens if a bitcoin core dev gets compromised?

I don’t know. What do you suggest would be the consequences of a single Bitcoin Core dev getting comprised? I highly doubt any code of his would even be merged into master, much less make it into a release.

Nodes control consensus in bitcoin, not miners. If miners ever 51% attack, the nodes simply change the pow algorithm. Miners get crushed. That's why they don't dare.

You should probably learn how bitcoin works. It's great.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/274684/global-demand-for...

Gold has been valued from time immemorial for its unique aesthetic and practical properties entirely aside from its value as a currency.

That's clearly distinct from, say, paper dollars, which indeed have value only because we agree that they do (and because they're backed by the robust efforts of a government, of course).

What vitamin is unavailable in the US but available internationally?

Is said vitamin legal to import to the US?

Why does the vendor not take anything but Bitcoin?

Why can't you wait a couple weeks to get it?

Where were you getting it previously without Bitcoin, given that it's so critical you can't go without?

No you don't, which is why you're still talking about it the way you are.

> you have failed to mention any counterexample.

What we have now. Inflation debasing your money.

This is actually a game theory problem. There are three groups in bitcoin. The users, the holders, and the miners. To understand the way that relationship works, you have to understand what keeps everyone separated and honest. That requires an understanding of the incentives of bitcoin, and that requires understanding what proof-of-work (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof-of-work_system) is.

Proof-of-work aligns consensus with the users, because it is the users that are paying the miners through transaction fees. Even holders require users, and more importantly, node owners. Therefore, it is users that are incentivizing the miners. Proof-of-stake (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof-of-stake) aligns consensus with the holders, who are paying the miners. That is an incentive structure that reflects our current financial system. But bitcoin changes this through incentive structures and cryptography. In bitcoin, it is the incentive of the payers, not the paid, that imo is the wild invention of satoshi, and enacted through cryptography.

PoS fails because there is only one outcome given that incentive structure. Holders being miners, and then controlling the users. PoW overcomes this because the outcome is the constant tension between all three.

At the heart of the solution is what was previously thought to be the unsolvable byzantine generals problem. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byzantine_fault_tolerance) It is a variation on the two generals problem. The problem is "if you are a number of generals surrounding a castle, how do you coordinate an attack date and ensure that the message to attack is correctly received, when you know that the message may be altered along the way?". There's game theory around what is possible, but that's the gist of it. In the problem, a bad actor can game the system so that everyone loses. I have reduced it to three. Given you know one is a traitor, how do you deliver the message to attack?

The way that this is managed is that miners order the transactions, and race to hash them to an algorithm (the work in proof-of-work), which is in bitcoin, SHA-256, until they get an answer that will be accepted by the nodes (proof). They are incentivized to become more and more efficient, and spend more resources as the price increases. The nodes provide the proof in proof-of-work. They say "this block is valid", and all nodes that follow consensus will come to the same agreement. For that work, the nodes award miners bitcoin. The nodes can prove which miner spent more work, but it sometimes takes a few blocks to get it right, which is why you have to wait for a few confirmations.

The only real thing that miners can threaten to do is stop users (the people paying them) from receiving blocks. Users and holders, after all, control their own cryptographic proofs to the tokens. But the current miners are only miners of SHA-256 pow algorithm blocks. In an adversarial condition, the miners will have just stopped coming to the party, so the users say 'fuck this' and change the pow. They get a new set of miners, mining a new algorithm, and the holders go 'holy shit, do I wanna spend my cash with a bunch of numpties that couldn't behave themselves?'. And they start spending their cash on the chain that the users say is the real one, and everyone just goes about their business again. Old miners get crushed. New miners think happy days. If the nodes change their software, that's the end of the story. Because the nodes define the consensus, they can. The remaining node owners get to decide whether they want to be owned by the miners, or whether they actually want to still remain users. The holders decide whether they are more likely to be able to realize their money with the miners that now control a drastically centralized subset of nodes, or to continue on in the system that led to them being holders in the first place.

Users can't attack the system, because then they would become holders, and users would no longer trust them for the reasons already stated, and they don't hold the cryptographic proofs of the holders. If the holders do that, they lose all of their users, so the only thing they game-theory-wise would do, would be to instate a pow. Why would anyone prefer a system in which the people with the money have all of the power? Otherwise known as the world financial system.

Whoever attacks loses, and there's no real way to cheat the system. That's the brilliant solution to the byzantine generals problem. It is a self-sustaining financial system that rewards everyone for participating in it, where incentives are perfectly aligned for its longevity, with an ever reducing supply of tokens that are effectively infinitely divisible, increasing their value per-capita. And no, there isn't any other system in the world that shares these properties. Without these properties, the byzantine generals problem can't be solved, and decentralization can't be achieved. It is a fiendishly clever system, akin to an anti-body to debt-fueled inflation.

Like I said, SN was/is/will be a genius.

> Eventually, you will run out of fools.

That is what is happening to the fixed-asset debt bubble. Bitcoin is its reckoning.

If you printed 50 new blank ledgers, they wouldn't have value because they don't have the history and our mutual agreement.

Bitcoin is the worldwide ledger (WWL).

This was your sole example of a problem that Bitcoin solves better than any other. If you now disavow that example, do you concede that Bitcoin solves no useful problem better than other systems?

Is anyone pricing housing indexes in bitcoin? You could maybe come up with one yourself.

Oh I can do that. I expect it to be 100x or more greater than what it is today. The reason why it is 16 as opposed to 8 or 32 is simply the speed of the uptake. It is going up in value because it is in the process of deflating the fixed-asset debt bubble. The only real question is, how big is that bubble.

> I would also spend some time understanding what "investing"

Investing is understanding what the value proposition is, and investing accordingly. You don't, and that's fine. Don't assume that other people have your understanding of the asset class in question though.

The question you should be asking is, why do you think it's important when other people invest in things that you don't understand.

This is the reason why the price is exploding.

Transactions are necessary but insufficient for something to become a store of value. For example, steel is sold in great amount, but it is not a store of value.

That's pretty much the definition of a pump-and-dump scheme.

Biggest owner wins. That's why it is not trustless. The only long-term game-theory outcome for the system is a monopoly. Owners own the miners, and dictate the rules to the users. Otherwise known as our world financial system.

> In the POW case, what underpins the value of the coin?

The network effect of the decentralization, i.e. the nodes. It is the nodes that are peers in the peer-to-peer cash of bitcoin. It is they who hold the blockchain, validate transactions, and validate blocks. Because there are so many of them (185,000 and counting) unless you can effectively convince all of those nodes to adopt consensus changes, the existing consensus rules apply.

PoW alone doesn't make something valuable. Its successful implementation does.

See? It's all speculative bullshit, where people who took a bet on bitcoin increasing price and expect to profit from this price increase are trolling other fools to keep pumping the bubble until they cash out.

Bitcoin is quite clearly a pump-and-dump scheme, and here we see some users cheering fools to keep on pumping the bubble with their cash.

The only intrinsic value that bitcoin has is it's use in money laundering deals, and only in short time scales. That's it. The rest is just speculative fraud.

Sure it's cryptographically secure, but what is the difference between that and a regular bank using encryption on their money transfer network?

I think the reason it's hard to say whether or not Bitcoin is worthwhile is that there has never been a decentralized currency at this scale before, and for all we know, unless it can serve some kind of purpose that a regular currency issued by a country cannot serve, it's not that useful. This is why Bitcoin is used a lot by people from countries were their own currency is struggling.

But with the central banks of many first-world countries printing money uncontrollably, some even bringing about negative interest rates, many fear the collapse of large economies in the near future. If that happens, Bitcoin will be a way to store your wealth and prevent all your money from becoming worthless pieces of paper.

Other ways of doing the same would be buying gold or some other form of valuable goods and storing it in your house or have someone else store it for you somewhere, but obviously the fact that Bitcoin is digital makes it a much easier to use and viable option.

But, we don't know if that will ever happen. Bitcoin itself also has so many problems. It's also arbitrary as to which digital currency to use since there are so many to invest in, some more popular than others, some have evolved to fix problems with previous versions, so it's really hard to say if all of this will amount to something useful.

You don't have to trust a bank. A bank can't interfere with your transactions.

Of course it can. Its price. Bitcoin is money. Its price is the only measure of value.

What I'm saying is that it doesn't matter what people want it for. It's money. It enables things. It is just better money, because it can't be seized, payments can be made to anyone, it can be transported anywhere easily and redeemed anywhere easily, and most of all, it can't be debased. Any of these reasons is enough to want to use it, and people might not know all of the details, but they certainly understand the effects on their wealth.

> 1. Can that value be measured?

Of course.