If you're in it for short term moves (gl as prices fluctuate the most during Asian hours)...there were long periods of time this year where prices diverged greatly (BTC and ETH) and buying those temporary ETH dips while BTC was zooming turned out to be fantastic trades.

you are going to get rekt.

trading ETH/BTC pair is for dummies.


If you have a technical thesis in ETH, long/short eth/usd. Do not trade eth/btc pair until youve been trading crypto for atleast a year.

I need to read a lot more about the "Proof of Stake" approach ETH may go with but right now a major thing I don't like about it is it appears it will take a TON of coinage to be allowed to make a stake? If this is so large (1000 ETH?), to me that means the rich just get richer over-time as long as they don't do anything nefarious with their large stakes.

Faster yes, more secure yes...but the above would be a very-large turn off for me.

one fundamental problem with all crypto currencies is that someone has to run the network. to do this you must give an incentive to people to run the network because depending on a gang of nerds to run it for fun is not going to cut it.

the idea of a decentralized currency is doomed from the beginning. the incentive to mine or stake will always lead to large entities mining or staking. there's no way around it. then the power lies with these large entities, miners and coders, instead of politicians and bureaucrats. there's nothing decentralized about that.

once you introduce the incentive, just like in any free market, people who are good at making money will accumulate quickly and eventually dominate the market. rich getting richer is a feature, not a bug.

more i think about it, the more i'm convinced that a currency must have an entity controlling it. this entity must act in EVERYONE'S best interest. only way this is remotely possible is if it's the government.

the only other option seems to be having a "benevolent currency dictator" who will probably remain benevolent for as long as his company is profiting sufficiently from the currency they have created.

God you're clueless.

please elaborate! i'd prefer to be clueful.

i like to talk to crypto zealots but it would be nice to get a response other than a troll or an ad hominem attack! i realize that the easiest way to respond when someone challenges your views is to attack them and go back to thinking about cheetos but perhaps you could burn a few calories and tell me what you specifically disagree with in my post.

Your most clueless statement is the government acting in the best interest of all? Talking about the federal reserve would be more appropriate considering they control the money supply.

How did having quantitative easing help out poor people? It essentially jacked up the prices of all homes and the stock market and made the gap bigger from poor people who have to rent and have no savings to people who owned homes and stocks. They don't act in the interest of everyone, they act in the interest of themselves.

The reason I don't want to elaborate is I think you're very arrogant for thinking that you have found the fundamental problem with crypto just by thinking about it when some of the smartest minds on the planet have been debating these issues for years.

The network of Bitcoin has grown to over 70b and, contrary to what some believe, so far this has mostly been 'smart' money and still relatively early adopters. This isn't mom and pop investors pushing up the price but rather people who delve into the idea and all the possible setbacks / points of failure and still decide to invest.

But to address your issue head on, OK. First, why is mining centralisation bad in your eyes? Do you think miners will try to increase the total supply or supply curve? Do you think they'll try a 51% attack to double-spend? What exactly are you concerned about?

You see for the most part miners have the same incentive as HODLers, they want a higher BTC price. Anything they do to undermine the network will affect this goal.

Hey augie--

Try to think of currency as a product. This was difficult for me at first too, since I've lived most of my life in a world where USD had a monopoly and I didnt know alternatives were possible.

Whoever controls a given currency must make their product useful to the end user. The entities which have grown quickly in the 21st century (Google, Amazon) have nearly universally shared this focus on great products and UXs. If a currencys controlling entity is something people want to use, they become Google. If not, they're Altavista. Therefore the laymen have power even if they don't directly control the currency.

please explain why you think a loose affiliation of miners and coders are better equipped to set monetary policy than government appointees?

i think the government sucks at everything but it's laughable to instead put your faith in financially self interested miners and or devs. they will always act in their own financial interest first. at least you know that the government will act in the interest of the US economy first.

i'm confused why you think that the main beneficiary of monetary policy should be the least productive members of society.

however, i can still answer your question. as the saying goes, a rising tide lifts all ships, and overall general economic growth benefits poor people by giving them jobs. obviously, if you're going to mess around with the money supply you are doing a delicate dance and you have to be careful.

this is a very very strange thing to say. as if janet yellen somehow personally profits from inflation. when is said "everyone" i meant "the greatest possible number of people" because the fed is concerned with the economy as a whole.

I'm not saying the least productive members should have benefited the most. What I'm saying is poor people got the short end of the stick so there was no "everyone's best interest in mind".

So now your saying you mean "the greatest possible number of people".

So how in a proof of stake type system, where anyone via a pool can stake, does anyone get cut out? Obviously the largest stakeholders want the currency to do well, otherwise they stand more to lose then the small guy. So how does proof of stake not look to incorporate all holders?"

i said "one" fundamental problem. and please point to where i said i invented that idea or that i've made some kind of breakthrough. there are clearly lots of very bright people involved in crypto, but "smartest minds on the planet"...hahahahahahaha come on. some of the best grifters on the planet, definitely.


i don't think it's good or bad. it's a necessary and inevitable. but when 10 profit seeking companies and a group of devs are in charge of everything, it's not decentralized.

the miners and devs can get together to change the currency according to their own whims. gee, i dunno, what could possibly go wrong?

the other side of that coin is a completely decentralized currency can almost never change. if there were a decentralized crypto currency that was intimately connected to the economy, the government would not be able to take action in an emergency situation.

but anyway, centralization of a crypto currency is not something i really think or care about. but the crypto zealots tout the benefits of decentralized currency but none of the big players are actually decentralized. so i want them to stop saying that!

dunno what this has to do with anything or why you wrote it, sorry

Stake holders definitely have a higher incentive then miners though.

BTC has ASICs which are useless for anything else so they have incentive to try and keep the main BTC chain going, but what about GPU's that can essentially mine anything. Those miners don't give a **** about anything about the coin as they will always just mine the most profitable coin.

Predictably terrible response Augie, gl to you sir.

Dunno where he came from, but maybe everyone shall just ignore his statements from now on.

One problem with your post is a lack of support for what appear to be very strong claims.

doomed from the beginning
no way around it
only way this is remotely possible
the only other option

Also, as much as practicable, try to keep political opinion out of it (like in your followup post).

Is bitcoin your son or something? Why do you care so much about someone criticizing it with no emotional dog in the fight (which you and others obviously have)?

Ignore his statements is the last thing you've done. You're clearly emotionally shaken by any construed criticism of bitcoin. It's a sell signal in my mind.

yea i try to do that but every time i do my brain gets an error code. this is probably because currency is not a product.

the idea of currency being a product is american consumerism finally jumping the shark. you thought we did it with beanie babies but it's actually crypto currencies.

USD is not a product. currency is not a product. currency can't be a product because money is not a product. money is an agreement, a medium of exchange, but it's not a product. it only becomes a product in one single instance, an exchange between two currencies. even then, it's not exactly a product.

if a currency IS a product, well...that's pretty weird. i'm pretty sure that when my boss pays me in USD, there isn't some "usd king" off in the corner of the country who gets paid a royalty. "product" is just a completely bizarre description for a currency.

so, i wouldn't formally classify mcdonalds gift cards as a currency, but when compared to an alt-coin tethered to a profit seeking company, they are basically identical.

mcdonalds gift cards can only be spent at mcdonalds, but not really. if i owe my fat friend $10 and i offer him a $15 mcdonalds gift card instead, he might take it. in this instance, the mcdonalds gift card is functionally identical to USD.

right now, mcdonalds gift cards are closer to a currency than 99% of alt coins. i can pay many more debts with mcdonalds gift cards than with $SALT tokens.

i like this example so much, let's flesh it out.

pretend that mcdonalds is going to do an ICO for $McD, which is the only currency you will be able to use to pay at mcdonalds' new chain of self-serve restaurants with no employees, where all of the food is cooked and served by robots.

the sale of the tokens will go directly toward building the restaurants.

obviously, these restaurants will be a big hit, as mcdonalds employees are one of the only low points of a mcdonalds.

how does mcdonalds benefit from only accepting $McD at their kiosk restaurants? their ONLY benefit is the value of the coins themselves. because they get to print them. everything else is a hassle.

$McD is only worth anything at all if mcdonalds promises to cap the amount of $McD they create. this is the "benevolent currency dictator" i mentioned in the other post.

if $McD purchasers were smart, they would hold on to their USD and force mcdonalds to abandon their ICO and offer a share of the company for sale instead.

your gimmick is weak

perhaps proof of stake is ultimately better than proof of work, i have no idea. i guess it's more decentralized but not completely. i don't care either way really.

well hey, since my posts are standing on tall, thin, flimsy stilts, why don't you go ahead and kick one of them out and send the whole thing crumbling? or you could keep responding to the posts without actually writing anything! that works too!

OK...

Some cryptos might not be doomed from the beginning.
There may be some way around it.
There might be more ways this is remotely possible .
There might be other options.

You made the claims. Yo do the work.

So proof of stake rewards people holding large sums of coin? This can be good for everyone in my estimation.

If you buy 1eth, and some billionaires swoop in and all buying 1000eth, you will benefit from the price of eth going up and having more stability. People who have 1000eth because they were in on it much earlier than you are already going to have benefited way more than any proof of stake could compare but now they are incentivized to hold their balance giving the currency more stability.