Blockchain Revolution: from the internet of information to the internet of value

[kneehighs]

21 minutes ago, Shyheels said:

You are absolutely correct.

There was also a time when the same could be said of tulip bulbs. 

That's an outdate talking point.  CEM regulations wipe out your position 100%.

Also ignores my arguments against comparing Bitcoin and Tulip mania shared here:

 

[Shyheels]

I'm not ignoring it - I am just not buying the argument that it is different than the tulip craze. That argument sounds more like salesmanship to me. A bit of pyramid selling - the more people who climb aboard the better it is for those already taking the ride. The trick then is to time your leap so you are not still aboard when it topped over the cliff.

I mixed more than a few metaphors there but I hope you take my meaning. :-)  

[kneehighs]

Well, today in one day, CoinBase.com gained over 100,000 new users.  Broader market demand outside of innovators is increasing.

If you put in just 100 pounds and hold, in 5 years you will thank me.

 

[Heelster]

52 minutes ago, kneehighs said:

Well, today in one day, CoinBase.com gained over 100,000 new users.  Broader market demand outside of innovators is increasing.

If you put in just 100 pounds and hold, in 5 years you will thank me.

 

I've read elsewhere that some investors are using bitcoin as a safe harbor investment as an alternative to Gold. Seems there are some jitters in the markets. As for myself, I'm still a bit skeptical of it's theoretical value, and I don't see a feasible use for it. It's not like I can go to my local ""small bank"" and buy any.

[Shyheels]

I don't doubt for a second there is money to be made on this, or my own uncanny knack for missing out on 'the next big thing' but like Heelster I am skeptical of its theoretical value. Furthermore I distrust greatly the thick layers of jargon and salesmanship surrounding it, the notion of 'mining' something that does not exist except in the abstract, the taint of the dark web and dodgy dealing that hangs over it, the idea that the collective 'wisdom' of the internet will establish its value. And, as noted above, it is not like you can pop down to your local bank and buy any.  

[kneehighs]

Actually, guys, this site registers some 70+ Bitcoin ATM's in the greater London metro area.  While not a "bank", it's a close second.

https://coinatmradar.com/city/92/bitcoin-atm-london-uk/

Bitcoin ATM's are all over NYC.

[Shyheels]

And what exactly do you put in your wallet? 

[kneehighs]

One can deposit cash (FIAT currency) to convert into Bitcoin or one can withdraw Bitcoin that then converts into the proper local FIAT currency.   

 

[Heelster]

12 hours ago, kneehighs said:

Actually, guys, this site registers some 70+ Bitcoin ATM's in the greater London metro area.  While not a "bank", it's a close second.

https://coinatmradar.com/city/92/bitcoin-atm-london-uk/

Bitcoin ATM's are all over NYC.

I'm in the sticks - One branch bank and it only has about 5 branches within 100 miles. All most have no idea what any of this is.

[at9]

Whether you pro or anti bitcoin, one thing cannot be denied: they are an ecological horror story. The energy cost of mining bitcoin is high.

https://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/policy/the-ridiculous-amount-of-energy-it-takes-to-run-bitcoin

There are possible fixes for this but the energy cost of mining needs to come down for bitcoin to play a major role as a currency. I think that Etherium has fixed this problem so it might be that in the medium term bitcoin will be an "also ran" in crypto currencies. Much as bebo and others lost to facebook and many early online retailers lost out to Amazon.

Fiat currencies have energy costs too. In minting coins, printing notes, distributing credit cards etc but I think these are relatively small compared to face value. Though when the scrap value of pennies (US or UK) became higher than the face value the composition was changed from bronze to plated steel.

[kneehighs]

3 hours ago, at9 said:

Whether you pro or anti bitcoin, one thing cannot be denied: they are an ecological horror story. The energy cost of mining bitcoin is high.

https://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/policy/the-ridiculous-amount-of-energy-it-takes-to-run-bitcoin

There are possible fixes for this but the energy cost of mining needs to come down for bitcoin to play a major role as a currency. I think that Etherium has fixed this problem so it might be that in the medium term bitcoin will be an "also ran" in crypto currencies. Much as bebo and others lost to facebook and many early online retailers lost out to Amazon.

Fiat currencies have energy costs too. In minting coins, printing notes, distributing credit cards etc but I think these are relatively small compared to face value. Though when the scrap value of pennies (US or UK) became higher than the face value the composition was changed from bronze to plated steel.

This is the best point I've seen so far in this thread and a great argument against BTC. 

Yet, it can be argued that electricity is an infinite resource, especially when drawn from renewable resources.  Plus, the market demand will ultimately determine sustainability over time.  If the demand exists, people will find a way to make it work.

[Shyheels]

And I keep coming back to demand. Other than by people who will profit directly by its adoption, I do not see any demand.

Edited November 4, 2017 by Shyheels

[at9]

8 hours ago, kneehighs said:

This is the best point I've seen so far in this thread and a great argument against BTC. 

Yet, it can be argued that electricity is an infinite resource, especially when drawn from renewable resources.  Plus, the market demand will ultimately determine sustainability over time.  If the demand exists, people will find a way to make it work.

Not strictly infinite, though solar (PV and/or thermal) resource is potentially so large as to make it seem so.

The market will indeed determine the future of bitcoin and other cryto currencies. 20:20 hindsight is a wonderful tool for assessing the past. If you had invested in bitcoin a little while ago you would have won handsomely. However it is pretty useless for forecasting the future. If you buy bitcoin now it's not a guaranteed win, it's an outright bet with utterly unknown and unknowable odds.

I'm not sure if bitcoin amounts to a zero sum game. In other words if I win £1000 then others elsewhere must lose £1000.

[Shyheels]

I doubt that it is a zero-sum game. It is all theoretic and abstract. 

[Gudulitooo]

On 25/09/2017 at 9:51 AM, Gudulitooo said:

While Blockchain technology looks nice, it certainly has flaws and work arounds that will be discovered soon or later by people as skilled as the inventors.

I read a series of articles in "Science & Vie" magazine (french) (or was it "La rercherche" I can't remember?) about blockchain. There was one paragraph or two about the problems, I will try to sum it up here:

1) downloading the whole blockchain and having it updated takes time and memory, you can't do it on a smartphone that easily. So in practice only fragments of the blockchain will be available for decision making, thus leaving room for trichery.

2) Mining one transaction requires time. Not because the mining process is long, but conserversely the mining process is intended to be long enough so that a number of transactions happen after yours so that they can be agglomerated in one block. The issue is the time is currently around 20 minutes,  and you are not waiting that long at the supermarket nor at the ATM. The Visa network is able to compute 10 000 operations while the bitcoin networks does only one.

3) new blockchains (eg for another app) show a weak period at their beginning because the number of computers that check the transactions is sufficiently small so that an organisation can take the control of a large enough proportion of them to alter the results.

4) you need a website client to connect to the blockchain. This client is a weak point that could be hacked and recorded by thefts.

There was also a few other issues.

 

I suppose issue #2 reported here is a non issue. With more and more transactions, the time to wait for new transactions before agglomeration of the block will be drastically reduced, while someone may come up with a solution that allows to skip the agglomeration into blocks.

Conversely, issue #3 is to me much more important than only at the beginning of new blockchain. It is supposed that the thief organisation has limited computational capability. Underestimating your enemy is a very bad idea. I am sure that the hackers will find a cascading way to convert the checking computers one after another to their tainted goal.

The environmental issue of the mining process requiring energy is really not an issue to me. First, the purpose of mining is to slow down the computer, so that other solutions than occupying the processors can be figured out. Second, you could imagine that these processing capabilities are made available to scientists (or to Google) so that their -not so confidential of course but intensive- calculations can be processed by the miners.

Finally, if you think of a bank using the blockchain as an internal and completely private way of securing theirs transactions - eg between the agencies and the central data centers - then it is not so ankward at all. There are other applications too. So that if I had money, I would invest in technology providing companies. Not so much in user companies (like bitcoin), because many problems are still to overcome.

My 2 cents.

 

 

Edited November 6, 2017 by Gudulitooo

[meganiwish]

Mining, eh? Words are cheap.  I should know, I deal in them.  So go and do some actual mining and I'll believe there isn't charlatanism afoot.

[kneehighs]

On 11/5/2017 at 1:28 AM, at9 said:

Not strictly infinite, though solar (PV and/or thermal) resource is potentially so large as to make it seem so.

The market will indeed determine the future of bitcoin and other cryto currencies. 20:20 hindsight is a wonderful tool for assessing the past. If you had invested in bitcoin a little while ago you would have won handsomely. However it is pretty useless for forecasting the future. If you buy bitcoin now it's not a guaranteed win, it's an outright bet with utterly unknown and unknowable odds.

I'm not sure if bitcoin amounts to a zero sum game. In other words if I win £1000 then others elsewhere must lose £1000.

It's speculative.  It's volatile.  No doubt.  5-10% of a diversified portfolio in crypto is good.  My point about market demand?  It's already growing in leaps and bounds.  Especially with the CME add.    Up over 200% since start of this thread.  

The questio: currency backed by fiat or currency backed by consensus?  The world is moving towards consensus. In everything.

[Shyheels]

Where are you finding consensus these days in anything?

 

[kneehighs]

14 hours ago, Gudulitooo said:

I read a series of articles in "Science & Vie" magazine (french) (or was it "La rercherche" I can't remember?) about blockchain. There was one paragraph or two about the problems, I will try to sum it up here:

1) downloading the whole blockchain and having it updated takes time and memory, you can't do it on a smartphone that easily. So in practice only fragments of the blockchain will be available for decision making, thus leaving room for trichery.

2) Mining one transaction requires time. Not because the mining process is long, but conserversely the mining process is intended to be long enough so that a number of transactions happen after yours so that they can be agglomerated in one block. The issue is the time is currently around 20 minutes,  and you are not waiting that long at the supermarket nor at the ATM. The Visa network is able to compute 10 000 operations while the bitcoin networks does only one.

3) new blockchains (eg for another app) show a weak period at their beginning because the number of computers that check the transactions is sufficiently small so that an organisation can take the control of a large enough proportion of them to alter the results.

4) you need a website client to connect to the blockchain. This client is a weak point that could be hacked and recorded by thefts.

There was also a few other issues.

 

I suppose issue #2 reported here is a non issue. With more and more transactions, the time to wait for new transactions before agglomeration of the block will be drastically reduced, while someone may come up with a solution that allows to skip the agglomeration into blocks.

Conversely, issue #3 is to me much more important than only at the beginning of new blockchain. It is supposed that the thief organisation has limited computational capability. Underestimating your enemy is a very bad idea. I am sure that the hackers will find a cascading way to convert the checking computers one after another to their tainted goal.

The environmental issue of the mining process requiring energy is really not an issue to me. First, the purpose of mining is to slow down the computer, so that other solutions than occupying the processors can be figured out. Second, you could imagine that these processing capabilities are made available to scientists (or to Google) so that their -not so confidential of course but intensive- calculations can be processed by the miners.

Finally, if you think of a bank using the blockchain as an internal and completely private way of securing theirs transactions - eg between the agencies and the central data centers - then it is not so ankward at all. There are other applications too. So that if I had money, I would invest in technology providing companies. Not so much in user companies (like bitcoin), because many problems are still to overcome.

My 2 cents.

 

 

Great points.  Maybe someone can model Steemit for hhplace?

https://steem.io/#whitepaper

[kneehighs]

36 minutes ago, Shyheels said:

Where are you finding consensus these days in anything?

 

The mobile phone market

[Shyheels]

I was thinking of the Internet - the global feast of reason and flow of soul that is going to establish and maintain the value of this currency. 

Edited November 7, 2017 by Shyheels

[Shyheels]

I saw a funny (not intentionally) ad for Bitcoin yesterday - some sponsored thing in a website saying how some young cab driver in Hove (a town in the UK, near Brighton) bought £12 worth of Bitcoin years ago and is now a millionaire - trouble is the photo, which is painfully obviously a stock shot, shows a young model smiling behind the wheel of what is obviously a NYC yellow cab. This is hardly the kind of thing that makes one think warm happy trusting thoughts about Bitcoin and this brave new world of cryptocurrency....

[Amanda]

1 hour ago, Shyheels said:

town and this brave new world of cryptocurrency....

 

That's a great word is it yours?

[Shyheels]

1 hour ago, Amanda said:

That's a great word is it yours?

Alas no....

Although it's the kind of word I would make up!

Edited November 7, 2017 by Shyheels

[kneehighs]

"Smart Contracts for Dummies"

 "A Conversation with an Ethereum Smart Contract Developer, Kedar Iyer" 

https://bitcoinforplebs.com/2017/11/09/ethereum-smart-contract-developer-kedar-iyer/

_{"As an example, let’s say I have 10 ether and I want to use it to buy 100 of your COIN token (made up name), but neither of us know each other and it’s the Internet so we definitely don’t trust each other. If I send you my 10 ether, I have no guarantee that you will send me your 100 COIN. But I can create a smart contract that works as follows: I send my ether to the contract, you send your COIN, and the contract only makes the exchange when both of us have sent our portions. If one of us fails to make the payment within a specified time frame, the smart contract returns our funds.}

_{Ordinarily, this sort of escrow service would require a 3rd party. In fact, there’s a whole industry dedicated to providing escrow services. With Ethereum, the smart contract acts as the 3rd party and unlike a normal person or business it is automated and can be trusted to do what it says it will 100% of the time. These are the sort of businesses that are going to be disrupted by blockchains."}

 

[Shyheels]

And what a target for hackers Ethereum is going to be. 

I can see the logic of this, but one can just as easily accomplish this escrow service with dollar, pounds, euros, whatever, and electronic transfers 

[alphax]

https://medium.com/the-quantum-resistant-ledger/be-prepared-for-quantum-computing-era-bb1a9ec6cd35

Some computer scientists say quantum computers are moving closer to reality and will cripple bitcoin’s encryption systems and doom bitcoin. Governments are investing aggressively in quantum computers, which are ultra powerful.

Quantum computers, first theorized by physicist Richard Feynman in 1982, have promised a new era of computing. The theory has only recently translated into significant real-world advances, with NASA, the CIA and Google working on a quantum computer. Computer scientists now warn the machines will cripple existing encryption methods and destroy bitcoin’s technological foundations.

Andersen Cheng, co-founder of Post Quantum, a U.K. cybersecurity firm, told Newsweek that bitcoin will end the day the first quantum computer arrives. He said the quantum computer will undermine the cryptography surrounding bitcoin’s public and private keys.

Bitcoin recipients share their public key with the sender. To spend bitcoin, a bitcoin owner must use their private key. If another party learns the private key, that party can spend all the bitcoin.

Martin Tomlinson, a professor at the Security, Communications and Networking Research Centre in Plymouth University, said a quantum computer can calculate the private key from the public one in a minute or two.

By learning all the private keys, someone would have access to all available bitcoin. Tomlinson did not know when the first quantum computer will appear that will have this capability, but he noted that extensive research is under way.

The European Commission announced a $1.1 billion project earlier this ear aimed at bringing a “quantum revolution.”

[at9]

When a quantum computer (or an advance in number theory) allows large products of primes to be factorised in a practical time then the whole of internet security comes crashing down. Every time you go to a https webpage there's an RSA key exchange using the properties of large prime numbers. Crack that and there's no such thing as a secure online transaction.

[Shyheels]

The Fermat's Last Theorem for the 21st century

The great honeypot for mathematicians, code writers, spies, snoops, and hackers all over the world 

 

 

[kneehighs]

@alphax The algorithm for BTC is easily upgraded and enhanced.  It can be upgraded to SHA-384, pursuant to Satoshi Nakomoto's original vision.

And speaking of original vision, I'm moving most of my Bitcoin (BTC) into Bitcoin Cash (BCH).  Virtually instant, lower fees than Bitcoin, 24 transactions per second can scale to millions, and 6 teams are competing to build the best Bitcoin.  Bitcoin Cash is closer to the original vision of Bitcoin than BTC is.  By following the original BTC code, BCH's market cap is higher now than BTC was just one year ago.

 

Edited November 11, 2017 by kneehighs