[apo]

This article was published November 28 of this year. From mid-November to now, cryptocurrency exchange rates have fallen by about 50% across the board, with some much higher.

This move took many speculators, including Novogratz, by surprise:

"I did think Bitcoin was going to hold at $6,200," said Novogratz. "It stayed there for four months. It felt like the selling was finished. But then Bitcoin Cash decided to fork again."

https://www.forbes.com/sites/billybambrough/2018/12/12/bitco...

I suspect many of these speculators are betting on a quick recovery. Should that not pan out, Novogratz and many others are headed for a world of pain.

Meanwhile, Bitcoin the technology continues chugging on. The most noteworthy development is the rapid build-out of the Lightning Network scaling solution, but there's a bunch of stuff beyond that which gets almost no attention.

[JumpCrisscross]

> Novogratz and many others are headed for a world of pain

Management fees make for good medicine.

[village-idiot]

Lightning is never going to happen. They have absolutely no idea how to scale that network or handle the routing problem. The entire system is just rife with potentials for monopolies and abuse. No consumer in their right mind would ever commit their money to it.

[tryptophan]

Even if it does happen, I don't see the point of it. Why use centralized bitcoin based transactions vs centralized USD based transactions?

Isn't the whole point of bitcoin that you get rid of centralization? But apparently people want to bring it right back with lightning.

[village-idiot]

I think you hit the nail on the head with regards to centralization.

I think there's a more important aspect here: there is very little demand for transacting in a second currency worldwide, and almost 0 demand within stable economies. As an American who does 100% of his transactions with other Americans in USD, why in the would should I introduce exchange rate risk into my daily transactions? The lightning network might be all the hotness, and I doubt that, but so long as its marked in a currency that I don't get paid in and my landlord doesn't take, I have no earthly incentive to tie up any of my hard earned money in a second currency in some lightning channel.

And that's not even starting on the absolute trainwreck that is general crypto UXD. Open a channel and tie up some of my money somewhere so I can eventually make a payment in the unspecified future? No thanks.

[apo]

Lightning is never going to happen.

It's happening right now:

https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/progress-report-lightni...

[village-idiot]

For something that’s supposed to compete with Visa, $1m isn’t exactly “happening”.

Edit: supposedly there is $62 billion worth of BTC sloshing around out there. If you take that number at face value, then close to .0016% of BTC has been committed to the lightning network. This is not “happening” by any stretch of the imagination.

[apo]

You're right in that VISA volume will dwarf Lightning Network volume for a long time.

However, you made the provably false statement that Lightning "wasn't happening." That train has left the station, leaving a surprisingly large crowd on the platform yelling at passersby that it will never happen.

[jazzyjackson]

"never going to happen" is a sort of valley slang, probably best exemplified in the film "mean girls" wherein one girl is trying to introduce 'that's so fetch' to the local lexicon, and her friend says "Stop trying to make fetch happen. It's not going to happen"

"Lightning" is not simply code that does indeed run at this minute - it is also the idea that Bitcoin will transcend into a pragmatic currency with the widespread usage of this 2nd-layer interface that can handle more than 7 transactions per second. That's the part that's not happening.

[village-idiot]

Different definitions of "won't happen".

You're asserting that it can be turned on and it contains money. You're correct that indeed, there are some nodes containing some money.

I am asserting that the network will never be a functional way for large chunks of the population to move money around, because it is a bad design built on top of a bad currency. Under my definition, the fact that a few people interested in it have moved an infinitesimal amount of money around is mildly fascinating, but not of particular note one way or another.