you are right, i don't think we are disagreeing here.

tomcollins' argument:
we can do the same for bitcoin:
Bitcion is trivially censorable. Although it uses addresses, it also has a central authority (Blockstream, a company that funds development of Bitcoin Core) that can decide the rules of the system, and can change them as it suits them. And it certainly isn't irreversible, as the block 74638 hard fork pointed out. The so-called "irreversible payment system" turned out to be just something that central authorities could reverse at will. Guess who governments will come to whenever they need some other rules enforced?

It's a combination of worldwide developers, miners and users. No one body has ultimate authority and the government definitely does not. Yes, Vitalik et al have a strong say, but what they suggest is not something that will definitely be followed. Look at the current debate with btc unable to scale.

Litecoin is trading at a ridiculous $44 USD, which is hilarious for a currency that no one uses.

It's a scarce and useful resource, thus it has value.

It may look thin on one exchange, but there are many exchanges. As soon as one exchange crashes a lot of arbbots will execute and move around money and soon after price will rebound.

Care to mention which ones are scam? Which ones of these are scams?


Imo most of these are likely not scams.

Currency
Smart contracts
Dice-sites
Blackjack
Prediction Markets

I wonder what properties makes it good at this task.

Fool or no fool, any buyer will do. And as ETH is limited to 103M coins and there will be plenty of burnt gas and lost coin, its value should go up even if there a fixed supply of fools/no fools.

This is one thing that makes Bitcoin valuable. It is cheaper&faster than noncrypto alternatives for many types of transactions.

It was well engineered for this. See


Bitcoin is fast and cheap. Fees have gone up making low value transactions relatively expensive. But for high value transactions it is still very cheap.

10 minutes average for settlement is pretty fast compared to Swift, VISA etc.

Ethereum is already much better at this.

Increased blocksize should lower fees substantially and allow for more activity on the network. Also read Satoshis whitepaper, it explains how Bitcoin can scale.

There is no censorship failure yet. I assume if there was censorship from miners that Bitcoin would hardfork away from them.

zkSNARKs should give Ethereum a large advantage over Bitcoin here, likely this summer.

Miners can if they control 51% of the network.

Ethereum is a state machine. Thus you only need the current state, not the bloat from previous states. It is easy to look up entries due to hash tables.

Read satoshis whitepaper why the centralized model has failed.

No it doesn't.

No it doesn't. It already handles more transactions than Bitcoin, while having more complex transactions and fees are two magnitude lower. It can likely scale a factor 5-50x more today, but we don't know this as we have not run into any issues yet.

Not if the community doesn't agree to it. And I am pretty sure it would not.

As long as the community supports it. As soon as it doesn't there will be hardforks like with ETC.

Nothing was reversed with TheDAO.

If they do I assume there will be hardforks.

Feel free to use ETC if you think immutability is more important than network effects.

I could mention Blockjack, Etherroll etc. But sure, no killer app yet. My own prediction is that we will see more complex and useful smart contracts in the future.

We will see. I am not from the future so I can't tell what will happen.

Like Amazon? Imo they don't produce profit until they do. And sometimes then they produce a lot of profit. That is what the investors are betting on.

I have listened to maybe 10 interviews by him. My own impression is that he answers questions well. Sometime I have to think a bit to understand them, because he seems to be much smarter than I am.

I can see some differences. I will let Ruja explain it:

I´m not TomCollins, but I share the same opinion regarding PoS.

I have read a ton on this subject and this is one of the resources that I found very useful:
https://blog.sldx.com/whats-wrong-wi...e-77d4f370be15

There are several other possible attack vectors that doom Proof of Stake in the long-term. The reason it seems to work for some existing cryptos, is that there is no real incentive to attack them.

Satoshi Nakamoto decided for Proof of Work for a reason in spite of the disadvantages associated with it (like high energy consumption due to mining).

Repeatedly comparing the DAO hack to the bitcoin fork is absurd.

1. The price of bitcoin at the time was 7 cents. Bitcoin was still an experiment at the time.
2. The bug caused a fundamental flaw to the bitcoin protocol. The price of bitcoin on the forked chain went to zero after a patch was released and miners rolled back a few blocks.

Compare this to the DAO hack

1. The price of ETH at the time was ~$15 well above toy experiment phase.
2. ETH split into two coins with value. ETH and ETC. Some people rejected the fork as legitimate. ETH worked perfectly fine and as programmed after the hack. In fact one of ETH's promises was "code is law" which they broke by rolling back and forking. The flaw was with a dapp running on top of ETH not ETH itself. It would be the equivalent of bitcoin rolling back transactions and forking after the bitfinex hack. It would never happen and people would reject it if they tried.

stop equating a dollar value that you randomly picked with "the point at which a technology stops being an experiment" threshold. it is an absolutely nonsensical metric to gauge whether a rollback should be carried out or not.

if another bug emits 1 billion bitcoins into existence today, is a hard fork acceptable or are you content with having 1 billion coins more because it's no longer in toy experiment phase?

it has nothing to do with the $ value of the currency. both situations are analogous in that both ecosystems had a high chance to perish without the hard forks. and both projects are still toy experiments despite their collective market cap being close to 80 billion dollars.

Why are you laughing at Vanguard?

welcome back, i crown u king of the multi-quote

The SEC is notoriously slow at stuff and waits until things are too big to ignore.

I just remember the part about asking him questions and he basically gave bull**** answers. Sorry I don't remember more, after my conversation with him, I figured Ethereum would be just another ****coin that disappeared after a few months of hype and didn't make excessive notes of it.


Why is proof of stake going not going to work? Simply because there's nothing at stake. They will never switch to it.

Nothing was "rolled back". A new rule was enforced (you cannot print money out of thin air), and the chain that did it did not have the most work.

even if they tried it, vitalik doesn't live in the US and he's not a US citizen. they'd have a super hard time with it and it's a fight they would ultimately lose. there's evidence from governmental officials themselves that indicates that it's a big part of why they haven't tried to crack down harder on cryptos: they can't win and if they try to fight they look stupid and weak.

It's proof of stake, not proof of nothing at stake. You really think eth won't switch to pos?

Wow, someone must have been on some mETH to do this reply.

Scare, yes, useful, no. My turds are scarce but have no value.

[QUOTE=heltok;52398650]
It may look thin on one exchange, but there are many exchanges. As soon as one exchange crashes a lot of arbbots will execute and move around money and soon after price will rebound.
True, the base layer will probably be superior than legacy systems for large value transactions. I think this is the area where Bitcoin will shine.

Only because fewer people are using it. And not once SegWit and LN come online.

Aha, there we go, you are one of the Satoshi Whitepaper Bible Thumpers! I had figured. That phrase is such a tipoff for cluelessness.

Satoshi was able to do some amazing things, but he is not a demigod. He got things wrong. He made mistakes. He missed the mark here. Not to take away from everything he did, but he invented something new and made some speculations and was wrong. It happens.

True, the base layer will probably be superior than legacy systems for large value transactions.

Perhaps

If you say so.


The Chinese mining cartel controls well over this. They split into smaller pools to seem decentralized, but they coordinate like any good cartel. They are laughing all the way to the bank with the high fees by stalling SegWit.

You are advocating a trusted model. You are trusting miners. If you want a trusted model, just eliminate the blockchain and just use a SQL database.

New or Old Testament?

Ethereum has a bigger blockchain and a fraction of the transactions. Yes, when you turn to a centralized, trusted model, you can scale. But now you are competing against a SQL database, which is much more scalable than the world's most poorly designed computing device.

The DAO bailout is proof the community is full of dumb sheep.

And the community has been whittled down to only those who follow the central authority. Anyone with a brain is on ETC or not involved.

Technicality at best. Lie at worst. An additional entry was made to steal funds from the rightful owner and turn it to others. Is it a "reversal?" Of course, unless you get into nitpicky semantics.

Why? I see no reason to think this.

I absolutely would if I thought the project was worthwhile before the bailout, but I don't.

complex yes, useful, of course not.



yeah, 8 quarters of profit in their history, lol.

Try finding one with no softballs.

I would rather invest in Onecoin than Vitalikoin.

it's really sad to see you do nothing but make one line ad hominems and act like a religious zealot yourself, TomCollins. please don't turn into a different flavour of toothsayer, i used to really enjoy your posts.

then the entry made to steal funds from the rightful owner of 184 billion bitcoins is also a reversal and therefore also suffers from the same criticism that you made of ethereum.

This is simply not true. ETC working just fine is evidence that the hard fork was unnecessary and would not have resulted in the end of ETH if they chose not to fork. Instead they chose bailouts because those in power of ETH at the time had a lot invested in DAO and had a lot to gain by doing so.

In the bitcoin fork, 184 billion BTC were created out of thin air on an a blockchain no one mines anymore.

A BUG in the protocol caused the total money supply of bitcoin to increase 9000x. Clearly everyone's coins are worthless at that point. In DAO a bunch of people invested in a risky asset that happened to run on top of Ethereum and Ethereum said, here's a bailout for your mess up. How can you not see the difference in these two scenarios?

I dont see very many arguments, mostly repeating the statements or ad hominem. Will address the few I found relevant:

It is not a currency. It's a platform for apps. Currency is one such app. Thus it can be used as a currency. It is like saying "A smartphone is a not a notebook". It is not, but it can be used as a notebook.

https://ethereum.stackexchange.com/q...her-be-created
Maybe you think we will see year 5189 with 520k seconds block times before we see a hardfork? I think this is very unlikely. So for all my purposes Ethereum today is pretty much limited to <104M ETH. Next hardfork may or may not have a limited supply, I think it is very likely, given what Vitalik has said and what the community wants, that inflation will be 0 or going to zero from a low value(say <1%) pretty fast. We will see.

Thank you for being the voice of reason.

All chains are mutable by consensus. (Atleast that I know of.) Whether this is a feature or a bug depends on perspective. I think BTC was a feature and ETH was robbery. Until you strong ID wallets the owner of your magical virtual token is whoever has access (key/pass), having a community start to assert rightful/wrongful "ownership" is dubious and dangerous. But w/e. No one really cares about that, and it'd get solved when the community is large enough. Just steal like 5% of the coins or smth.

i'll repeat my question:
if another bug emits 1 billion bitcoins into existence today, is a hard fork acceptable or are you content with having 1 billion coins more because it's no longer in toy experiment phase?

besides the fact that ETC still functioning is completely irrelevant because no one knew what would happen with the original chain, how exactly is the fact that it's still alive today evidence that it's "working just fine"? ethereum has much bigger goals in sight than sustaining itself as a ****tier version of a superior chain whose only claim to fame is its debatable moral purity. if it ever reaches the goals of sustaining decentralized applications, having a proven malicious actor with that amount of funds is extremely dangerous.

i see you have figured out the dollar value at which a cryptoproject stops being an experiment. you also have figured the threshold at which it's okay intervene when everyone's coins become worthless.

could you provide the values and then the method by which you arrived to such values? what if the bug in protocol produced 200 extra coins? is that okay then? 1000? 50? 5000? because everyone's coins went down in value just a bit, but they're still worth something. at which point do you think intervention becomes acceptable?

i just honestly don't understand what criteria you use to determine when hard forks are okay and when they are not besides arbitrarily drawing a line at which a project stops being experimental. i will provide mine at the end of the post.

i see the difference. my argument is that if an event devalues a currency (such as by buggy emission or hacking) enough, there is a threshold after which intervention by developers becomes acceptable if the life of project is at stake. the market decided it was over the threshold during the DAO hack and the developers proceeded with the hard fork.

The bug would never occur today because once a certain market cap is reached and a coin moves beyond the toy experiment phase the responsible thing to do is move away from "move fast and break things" to "move slowly and test extensively". Bitcoin development and protocol changes happen very slowly for a reason. We'll see how the Ethereum switch to Proof of Stake and sharding goes. It's not at all clear either are even possible at this point.

What do you think the odds are of another Ethereum project with hundreds of millions in funding getting hacked is? Hint: 100% Compare this to the odds of billions of more BTC being created? Hint: 0.000000000000000000000000000000000000000000001%

first, you have absolutely no way of knowing whether a bug will happen or not.
second, answer the question. third, what is that certain market cap when a coin moves beyond the toy experiment phase?

I can assign a probability to it occurring which I did.

There is no point discussing something that is virtually guaranteed not to occur

There is no magic #. It is a sliding scale. Simple logic dictates that the smaller the market cap, the more likely a bug is to occur due to less people working on it and less testing occurring.

Look at the probabilities of each scenario playing out again today and you will see that the odds of another bitcoin fork due to a protocol bug are near zero and the the odds of ethereum fork due to a failed ETH contract are very high. Vitalik has even said he doesn't mind hard forking once a year. It is the opposite of a decentralized, immutable blockchain.

gotcha. so the probability of a bug occurring in the future is close to 0.000000000000000000000000000000000000000000001% because at a certain point (as dictated by simple logic and a sliding scale) the cryptocurrency stops being a toy experiment. additionally, bugs only happen when a currency is at an arbitrary "small market cap" and as it approaches an arbitrary "big market cap," the probability of such bugs suddenly goes down to 0.000000000000000000000000000000000000000000001%.

i think you need to study the history of bugs in software.

the probability of you knowing what you are talking about: 0%. the probability of you having lost this argument: 100%.

A bug in the base layer that was corrected by all participants is far different than a bailout by a central authority. It would be more similar if Bitcoin developers bailed out Mt. Gox.

That block still exists, it just was orphaned by users, just like many other blocks that get orphaned.