Yes, there was a big run-up, but that was largely drafting off the increase in the bitcoin exchange rate. The real test will be how much further XRP drops (or doesn't) from here.
It might have been mostly priced in already - I was reading some articles about possible delistings last week, and I consider myself a hobbyist, not a serious investor.
> The real test will be how much further XRP drops (or doesn't) from here
Do we know who holds most XRP?
Naïvely, I would guess retail investors and the company. I am not convinced either will be convinced to abandon ship by anything short of a court order.
Most sources put that at Ripple and/or its two top execs. They obtained these positions by virtue of the Ripple consensus protocol, which conjured the coins into being and granted the network creator (Ripple) sole ownership.
AFAICT, that's the crux of what SEC will be going after.
Terrible news for XRP and Ripple but nobody can be surprised by this. Next up we may see the delisting of some stable coins given the SEC's advice about establishing a nexus in the US. I'm not sure how this will work for a decentralized coin like maker / dai, so perhaps this is the end for them. However, this seems consistent with other regulation since they operate like an autonomous fx swap fund.
This provides clarity on what constitutes a security. The SEC have been telegraphing this move for several years, ever since the crackdowns on ICOs and STOs. Bitstamp said they would delist XRP several days ago so coinbase are hardly unique in their response to the SEC's announcement.
If the platform supports programmatic proportional issuance and withdrawal (vs. mint and burn), vs. market-priced collateral, then negative-feedback loop controlled inflation/deflation can be implemented...
Well, in that case, I suppose it depends on the asset being collateralized, and what oracle is the input for the programmatic issuance.
If the collateral can be seized in an act of violence (as opposed to being custodied on a smart contract), and the math is unable to protect the asset, then I think it's strictly a collateral solution and not a mathematical one.
This is the paradox of wanting crypto to be both widespread and free of government influence. It cannot gain "market share" without interacting in some form or fashion with the regulatory structures already in place, putting it under de facto regulation of any jurisdiction of the people who want to use it.
I don't think it is a paradox at all but simply a separation of concerns. I believe government regulation is essential to a healthy economy, but it can still be useful to have methods to store and transact value outside of centralized control in case there is a failure of government.
It's kind of like how the fourth amendment makes it easier to commit crimes, but we accept it as a society anyway because it is more important to provide opportunities for individuals to defend themselves against government overreach. It is part of the checks and balances that ensure a healthy democracy.
I agree. There is nothing to suggest that something can't both behave in a regulatory environment and exist if that environment fails. Cars, for instance - They require registration so long as the body enforcing registration exists. If that changes, cars can still run.
The paradox is in both wanting the cars (well, crypto) alive & function and also not be subject to the regulatory environment, while that environment is alive & functioning. That seems to be the dream of a certain subset of crypto enthusiasts: Widespread crypto that bypasses existing regulations. I don't think it can get to that point. In order to gain widespread adoption, you need on-ramps & off-ramps for people to actually use it. Those are the regulatory choke points for crypto. Like an unregistered car you can drive on your own property, but the minute you take out on the highway you're obligated to play by the rules that govern the highway.
You can't buy crypto without the consent of banking systems that are subject to regulatory frameworks. You can't make a loan payment with crypto without converting it to the local currency, putting it in a bank, and writing a check or ACH transfer or getting the bank to convert it to local cash.
The vast majority of major transaction that require money cannot be done with crypto, and as that changes they will still only be done with crypto by interfacing with systems subject to regulatory structures. That keeps unregulated crypto in relatively small scale shadow economies. Sort of like cash, except cash is more or less dead as a means of making large transactions.
Well, okay, what makes BTC inherently worth anything, then? Who cares that someone, somewhere, some time ago, solved some useless math problem? Why dedicate the equivalent of 7 nuclear power plants' worth of electricity[0] to it, when we could use that electricity to offset fossil fuel consumption?
I have literally have yet to have anyone explain this adequately beyond the level of "there's a market for it, so, obviously people think it's worth something."
There’s lots of things worth lots of money that don’t have much use value. So yes, in a market, the definition of price/value is generally where supply and demand meet.
As for why people currently /want/ bitcoin, I assume some people find it a good speculation instrument, some people hope that it will be a more stable store of value than fiat currencies, some people have political reasons for wanting to own some, some technical, etc
What’s to explain beyond what’s there at face value? People “want” bitcoin enough to buy it, other people are willing to sell it...
Now as we move further and further away from BTC (not including significantly different cryptocurrencies - ethereum has other advantages for example) into like dogecoin, which has held value for years, it’s clear that we are getting mostly into pure speculation territory. But from a market perspective, even that territory is fine, just don’t want to be the last one holding the bag...
Demand. Just that. And no, its obviously not pegged to the USD or to anything. Price is a direct result of supply and demand. It has value because people pay for it.
XRP is centralized - it was issued by a centralized corporation, the ledger is permissioned (which is why it’s so fast) so not just anyone can join the network in a meaningful way, and the way it was distributed is highly suspect.
Cryptocurrencies like bitcoin are entirely different. Ripple is not like bitcoin and the regulations of the USA and other countries will affect bitcoin’s value but not determine bitcoin’s continuing existence unlike XRP.
Correct - they explicitly said BTC and ETH are not securities. However ETH's launch was conducted via ICO, where people sent BTC in return for ETH, and the exact same launch style was later declared de-facto illegal security sales with companies being penalized.
The SEC essentially caved to the crypto industry and said (paraphrasing) "Yes, ETH was launched as a security, but it became 'decentralized enough' where it is now a commodity". But gave no guidance on how any other coin could become "decentralized enough" to accomplish the same feat, to the detriment of the US crypto industry which has fallen way behind offshore entities.
I read that more as the SEC saying "We didn't reall know what we were dealing with at the time." And their thinking and policy decisions have evolved.to fit both their understanding and evolving crypto scene.
Same should apply to XRP then because it exist way longer than ETH. But unlike ETH, XRP was never sold in return for and arbitrary amount of BTC/USD it was first given away for free and later sold at market value.
Useless statement XRP is the token there is no definition what makes the token centralized or not. Half the tokens owned by one party? or maybe a quarter is enough already? Its a useless statement as there is no common definition. no one talks about token decentralization anyway. Its about the control over the network that should not be centralized.
>the ledger is permissioned
This is factually wrong. Anyone can transact on the ledger there is no permission required form anyone and no one has the power to exclude someone.
>so not just anyone can join the network in a meaningful way
Also factually wrong. You can "join" the network in any possible way (node/full node/validator/participant/developer/you name it). You can change the code and send in you amendment. If 80% think is worth adding its added. If not its probably because the proposal was garbage not because someone has the power to block your amendment. So far there has been 1 amendment not supported by ripple that still reached the 80% support. Ripple could do absolutely nothing against that.
XRPs existence is also not determined by the USA. XRP would exist without ripple or the USA as long some people run the software it exists. Even if all would go offline it could be restarted any time.
The best case would be a parallel economy developing, where you can hide yourself from government. No burglar can cost you as much as government. I sadly have yet to find a client for coding who wants to pay in crypto and not report it to the state...
That would only work on a small scale. Large scale, truly massive adoption can't occur until the major financial institutions are on board. If businesses can't legally accept it, put it in a bank, make loan payments with it, all of the normal things you do with money-- or have off ramps to convert to currency to allow that-- then you won't get widespread adoption.
This is true for large business. But an independent contractor, a hair dresser, a carpenter, a plumber, or any number of other people can do business without involving the violent and coercive group known as the state
As I said, small scale. All of those people in those jobs may want to buy a car, a house, go food shopping at a store that doesn't take crypto... If they're only paid in crypto, they can't do those things unless there's on-ramps and off-ramps from crypto currencies. Those ramps are bottlenecks subject to the regulations of the jurisdictions in which they take place.
At best, even if a shadow economy built up to facilitate those transactions, tax agencies (IRS for those of us in the US) will knock on a lot of doors and say "you have lots of stuff. That means you're receiving value of some sort. You owe us a cut of that, pay up."
Without tax I could provide my service at a lower rate and still make more, which I would then invest in the most efficient way I could, unlike government.
“Tax fraud” makes it sound like one breaks a contract - but I never agreed with the state who threatens me to include them in any transaction I make.
If ethics exists it must be universal - otherwise ethics is just = power.
If ethics is universal, rules apply equally to anyone.
Let’s say theft is not moral, unlike receiving a gift. Both are cases of receiving without payment - the difference being that “giver” giving voluntarily or not. The same goes for how sex is moral, but rape is the furthest from moral, or how work is moral but slavery isn’t.
Tax is money collected under threat of violence - pay, or be punished. It can thus not be moral if morality is universal.
It is also bound to be inefficient - spending “other people’s money” is easy, but when you spend it yourself, you ensure it is invested where it creates the greatest value, unless you’re an addict. This is evident as governments waste money in any way that can to buy rulers the currency they need most - votes or special interest groups goodwill.
Something I struggle with personally is how much money I give the government despite having significant ethical concerns over how my money is being spent.
I know my taxes have contributed to the death and suffering of countless people. I try to remind myself that it also helps some people, but I still struggle to justify my lack of resistance knowing that at least some amount will be used in ways I consider evil.
I think there is some pragmatism needed here though. As individuals we don't really have any incentive to pay taxes if they were optional. I think what's needed is more localised spending and the ability for local communities to withhold tax collectively when concerns are raised about how federal governments might spend it. This would give individuals far more input into how their tax money is spent and the system overall would be far more consensual and prompt people to ask if they're okay with x amount being spent developing nuclear weapons or killing civilians in distant lands. I do find it quite odd that the default assumption is that you're a bad person if you don't pay taxes. I suspect someone who avoids tax then contributes an equivalent amount to charity is almost certainly more ethnical than a tax payer like myself.
If you are interested in universal morals, the effects of incentives, and a world without coercion, I’d recommend checking out the website of the Mises Institute or the podcast of Stefan Molyneux. Good night from a small socialist European country!
Ethics are subjective. Asking "Is it ethical?" to a large group of people is little better than asking "Is chocolate the best flavor of ice cream?"
Legality is a more concrete and easier to give a firm answer to. If you want to have a reasonable conversation on the internet with random strangers of different belief systems, questions like "is it ethical" go right out the window.
Assuming free people could not create internet and electricity infrastructure is like an East German assuming free markets could not provide a Trabant alternative
So long as governments exist you will need to pass your data through government-controlled spaces. You may produce your own electricity, you may create your own wireless mesh WAN spanning a continent even, but that continent might contain the US, and the FCC will come knocking on doors and knocking down you signal towers. You cannot operate on any significant scale without touching on something under the regulatory jurisdiction of nation-states. This is not a problem of imagination, it's the current structure of power. East Germans undoubtedly both imagined and were often aware of Trabant alternatives outside of East Germany. But their dominant power structure did not easy allow for home grown competition.
We agree. Reread my comment - I said it was “just like” the similie.
Just like East Germans lived under forced government monopoly and regulations in the car market but most could dream of Benzes and BMWs, you and I can dream about a world where voluntary relationships replace government force in areas such as internet, conflict resolution, health insurance (where I live we only have government health care, and like for Trabants, there are long lines...), road management, and all other tasks government bureaucrats so selflessly have relieved us of
The same argument was surely made by slave owners since the beginning of history, but westerners managed to abolish slavery, and after that industry was invented
given that free people can't even fend off a bunch of garbage stealing bears I have little confidence that they can get an electricity grid running.
The East Germans were wrong to assume that central planning is very good, they weren't wrong to assume that public governance and central authority is pretty good, which it is.
If you follow to it’s end the principle that makes gifts moral but theft immoral, or sex moral but rape immoral, or work moral but slavery immoral, yes you reach “anarcho-capitalism”
Beyond that, the formulation is really funny (bad?) though:
> Trading will move into limit only starting December 28, 2020 at 2:30 PM PST, and will be fully suspended on Tuesday, January 19, 2021 at 10 a.m. Pacific Standard Time
Assuming limit only == post only orders (which sounds like it in the sentence), how do you expect the trading to work?
They never should have allowed it in the first place. By testing the waters of trading custodial currencies they were really pushing the limits.
BTC has been a joke ever since the GitHub repo was hijacked by Blockstream and Adam Back. The only interesting cryptocurrencies are Ethereum, Bitcoin Cash and Monero. The rest are either obvious scams or dead ends at this point.
A lot of people were holding out hope for decentalized storage projects like FileCoin but that project now seems to be dead in the water as well.
Just to note: the "Bitcoin was hijacked by <corp>" is a running joke at this point and not to be taken seriously. Ask anyone to provide verifiable proof of this and they will respond with hyperbole or conspiracy theory.
> I'm seeing a lot of valid concerns and criticisms of Blockstream's actions and methods
I've carefully reviewed each post in the thread and cannot find that. Instead, I see a couple vague and clearly false allegations which are unambiguously debunked.
What specifically are you referring to?
For the avoidance of confusion, the anonymous maintainer of "Bitcoin Cash" (a deceptively named Bitcoin clone) is named "Freetrader". Are you they?
And it doesn't age well either. Both gmax and pieter are not even in it anymore. Blockstream's contributions (what you consider 'hijacking') to Bitcoin are pretty slim at this point.
Which is a pity, honestly. Blockstream was a good force for bitcoin, despite the continuous stream of baseless lies coming from you people.
Gmax made a much better summary of why your statements are all baseless babbling below...
I'm curious why you chose to use the term "bcash" to refer to BCH. No exchanges or mainstream projects use that term to refer to BCH. As far as I'm aware it's primarily used as a pejorative, so it seems strange that you'd use it here.
As far as BCH's additional value: I'd suggest researching the block size debate. This debate is BCH's entire reason for existing. This article [1] from 2016 by Mike Hearn contains a good primer on the block size debate itself. He ended up quitting development of Bitcoin, but others decided to raise the blocksize limit - with or without the majority, thus creating BCH. Succinctly, BCH is the continuation of big-blocker's vision of the Bitcoin experiment.
Its authors, original funders, and most exchanges originally referred to it as "BCC" which was, unfortunately, also the symbol for the Bitconnect ponzi scheme.
"Bitcoin Cash" is both a mouthful and enabler of outright fraudulent behaviour, where people are sold BCH and think they got Bitcoin at a really good price (was more common in the past but still happens now). Just about every business that accepts Bitcoin payments has continual problems with people sending BCH because they thought they had and were sending Bitcoin and BCH copied Bitcoin's address format.
In any other field a knock-off-name like "Bitcoin Cash" would be knocked flat as a trademark infringement, so the public is atypically prepared to protect itself from it.
So you can imagine that many Bitcoiners are not eager to use a purposefully deceptive name that has already created a lot of problems for actual users.
Plus in many people's view Bcash is earnestly a better name, but due to weird symmetry breaking and hateful cult like behaviour means that even though it's a perfectly fine name the BCH pumpers go all RMS-whining-about-GNU/Linux over any use of it which is just amusing.
> He ended up quitting development of Bitcoin
You've seen his side. For an uncharitable take on his contributions:
Mike's sum total contributions to the development of the bitcoin software were a half dozen commits, most of which were trivial string changes. ( https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1337008.0 )
Mike Hearn has a long history advocating for user hostile features in free software, for example he lobbied the Tor project extensively to add censorship. He pushed for adding centralizing features in Bitcoin like blocking all tor peers, phoning home, etc. He was a former employee of QinetiQ, a R&D organization for British intelligence and a system he created at google turned up in the snowden documents as one whos data was being leaked to the british government, shortly after that he parted ways with google. His long term view for Bitcoin security is that it would depend on (government backed) trusted institutions.
Hearn was always largely cultural outsider to Bitcoin-- which many Bitcoin users were wary of, not just on the tech side but in the community in general. There is nothing wrong with reading his perspective, but you should understand some of the context for it.
[I'm aware that this perspective is arguably not the most 'fair'-- e.g. pointing out he worked for British intelligence when I have no reason to think his efforts to centralized Bitcoin were due to anything but his own personal fetish for authority-- but I think it's a good example of how far apart culturally he was from most Bitcoiners. It's also a bit ironic: some of the attacks cited in this thread accuse me/blockstream/bitcoin-devs of being intelligence agents, but they happily ignore the person we know worked in signals intelligence. In any case, unlike the attacks that he and his supporters here lob at me, they're not falsehoods. I'm happy to support them with links.]
> Succinctly, BCH is the continuation of big-blocker's vision of the Bitcoin experiment
I think that's a largely correct statement. But what that experiment shows is telling. BCH's usage is insubstantial compared to Bitcoin (even though the way it was launched forced exchanges almost universally to adopt it). As predicted it is completely unable to secure itself using fees (it typically generates less than $1 per block in fees), making it dependant on continued inflation to pay for security. Not only does the usage not exist, but it has also failed economically in the market: It has lost ~90% of its value in USD terms, and ~95% of its peak value compared Bitcoin. It currently trades at 1.2% of Bitcoin's value after years of almost monotone decline after its first few months.
[It also, sadly, is not a pure realization of the Big Block experiment. Acknowledging the tradeoffs highlighted by the Bitcoin developers, they have continued to limit the blocksize in BCH (though to levels a few times higher than Bitcoin) and introduced many other questionable and controversial changes, spawning multiple additional incompatible forks. Their changes also include an "automatic checkpoints" mechanism that totally breaks the proof of work security model. Weirdly, the "big block vision" is probably most faithfully followed by "BSV", which is a system created and promoted by people that few would disagree are outright scammers, so it too is going nowhere]
I think it's fine and good that people experiment with things (even where I think that the outcome is obvious), the world is only improved by that. But fraudulently claiming the system "is" bitcoin, or spreading malicious, false, and defamatory claims about their competition and critics and engaging in outright harassment in an effort to justify and promote their tokens is really uncool and shouldn't be rewarded.
The argument as far as I'm aware is that it's like Bitcoin, except with transaction fees low enough to make it actually usable as a currency as opposed to being a pure store of value.
It's not only that. There is also the "replace by fee" stuff that allows BCH to make instant payments with 0 confirmations for small values. This was hinted by Satoshi as well, but was made impossible by the current BTC.
The original Bitcoin software supported transaction replacement. You could mark a transaction as non-final and then it could be replaced until it got confirmed (potentially gated by its locktime) or until a replacement was made that was marked final. As is necessary in a distributed system, the replacement and non-replacement was best-effort and an older version could be confirmed (or a version made later than a final version). Replacement was intended for use with payment channels, like incrementally updating an open account paying someone.
Unfortunately, the functionality had a flaw: It enabled a DOS attack. You could make a transaction then replace it 2^32 times and only pay one fee. So we disabled it. Without the explicit functionality you could still replace transactions by spamming nodes (and esp miners) with the new transaction and hoping they accepted it, but it wasn't very reliable but also no longer DOS-attackable.
Later, people pointed out that the DOS attack could be avoided if it was also required that each replacement increase the tx fee by at least the minimum transaction fee that would have been accepted. And the functionality was re-enabled: you could again mark transactions as non-final.
When BCH was created they ripped out the functionality and falsely claimed that this made 'instant payments with 0 confirmations for small values' possible. This makes literally zero sense: First, in BCH you can still replace unconfirmed transactions, it's just less reliable. Secondly, replacement is functionality intended to enable faster transactions! Thirdly, you can disable it in Bitcoin (or replace a non-final one with a final version) and get the same behaviour as BCH if that's what your use case requires.
Finally, its alleged that this was some dastardly move by Bitcoin devs to "break" "0-conf" transactions, fuled by people who can't understand that Bitcoin devs saying 0-conf transactions are not very secure doesn't mean that they don't like your ability to make them if you want to, and it ignores the fact that the basic replacement functionality was there in the very first version ( https://github.com/trottier/original-bitcoin/blob/92ee8d9a99... ) and had been disabled by the self-same people being attacked for adding it.
It's basically 5G CAUSES COVID level of inanity, and it breaks my heart to see people duped by telephone-game polished versions of it.
Thanks for the thoughtful response. According to it, 0-conf transactions are possible in BTC as well. Why isn't more people using this? It seems safe enough, since attacking such a transaction is probably more expensive than the gains from the scam.
>It's not only that. There is also the "replace by fee" stuff that allows BCH to make instant payments with 0 confirmations for small values.
Can you elaborate on this? I did a quick search and the gist of it seems to be that BCH doesn't support replace by fee and bitcoin does, so therefore it's possible to "safely" accept 0 confirmation transactions on BCH because you can reasonably believe that it won't be double-spent before it gets its first confirmation. The only problem I can think of is that there's nothing preventing the attacker (the person making the purchase) from bribing a miner to mine his double spend transaction. Indeed, even without RPF there are "transaction accelerators"[1] that allow you make out of band payments to miners to increase your transaction's priority. It's not too hard to imagine a service where you can pay $$$ for a miner to mine your double-spend transaction.
Bitcoin cash is the only cryptocurrency I have regularly used in the past 3-4 years. Almost all the crypto payment options support bch seamlessly (because they aim to integrate bitcoin which results in no-effort integration of bitcoin cash).
I just can never get myself to pay the tx fees of bitcoin or ether. I recently discover that USDT exists on bch (but BitPay doesn't accept bch usdt) so I keep USDT on BCH and do JIT swaps to BCH and make almost zero fee payments.
Just to be clear, BCH will never dethrone BTC, but BCH is becoming a defacto layer 2 solution for Bitcoin. Now there are tokens and NFT tokens on BCH too.
Blockstream bought out most of the the btc devs who had commit ability. Their end goal is to cripple btc to where it is today. The goal of this is to build an unnecessary product they can charge for on a second level. Think skimming money like charge cards do, but offering no real advantage or service beyond that. So far they have found building a new network neigh impossible. Hence the memes: Lightning only 18 months away, after 3 years of "development." You can find hilarious round table interviews with Adam Back where one asks how they can use btc for transactions like at bars with the fees dwarfing the regular transaction. Adam Back suggested using an IOU network out of paper or maybe build an IOU app for that. Can you believe that? Hilarious!
Sure but it would have to be special paper, hard to duplicate with security measures, probably special ink, weird watermarks, a whole bunch of things. Should probably name it something other than IOU to distinguish it from normal IOUs. I've always liked Johny Cash's music, maybe we could derive a name from him.
This is all true and anyone who payed attention to more than the heavily censored propaganda soaked /r/bitcoin saw it happen in real time. Years of saying that a throughput of more than a few kilobytes was impossible while one of the devs repeatedly - and this is not a joke - stated the sun revolved around the earth.
> I don't think anyone thought that was impossible from a technical standpoint, just from a decentralization standpoint.
That's the same thing and it makes zero sense. Most people never sync with the chain and those that want to only need bandwidth far less than watching a low res youtube video. Validating blocks is at least 600x faster than real time on a computer from last decade. I would love to hear how you can rationalize a statement like that. I watched people repeat this for years and when asked for explanations never saw anyone come close to something coherent.
> source?
Here he is denying evolution and claiming the sun revolves around the earth:
>The goal of this is to build an unnecessary product they can charge for on a second level. [...] Hence the memes: Lightning only 18 months away, after 3 years of "development."
Can you elaborate on this? Isn't lightning free and open source? I'm not sure how that's going to be monetized.
Yes it is FOSS and multiple different implementations from different development groups / companies are available including c-lightning, LND, and eclair (I'm probably missing one or two).
The claim is truly a meme -- one that can only be laughed at when faced with the reality that I mentioned above.
Bitcoin adoption was growing and working well for monetary transfer but its capacity was throttled to encourage use of an unproven technology, the lightning network.
The claim, as far as understand it, is that Blockstream supported this plan, anticipating its failure, while working on its own replacement technology, Liquid.
Ironically, both liquid and lightning appear to be failing. Nb, both grubles and nullc have some close relationship with Blockstream.
> Bitcoin adoption was growing and working well for monetary transfer but its capacity was throttled to encourage use of an unproven technology, the lightning network.
What? Bitcoin's capacity has been limited its entire life, the limits were coded in by Bitcoin's creator. The limits are integral to protecting Bitcoin's decentralization, and have nothing in particular to do with lightning. Alternative blockchains without functional limits such as "BSV" are so bloated that it is practically unreasonable to run nodes, leaving participants blinding trusting third parties.
Liquid isn't some replacement technology for Bitcoin, it's something it's a distributed-centeralized (federated) system that can do things Bitcoin and other completely decenteralized systems cannot do like offer instantaneous settlement. It trades off decentralization to for latency. When users have funds in exchange they've already substantially lost their decentralization benefits, for for e.g. rapid arb between exchanges this tradeoff is probably a good one.
Bitcoin gives people the freedom to use their money in a bunch of different ways.
> nullc have some close relationship with Blockstream.
I haven't have any relationship at all with blockstream for over three years now.
That doesn't answer my initial question, how is blockstream supposed to monetize lightning, or anything for that matter?
>The claim, as far as understand it, is that Blockstream supported this plan, anticipating its failure, while working on its own replacement technology, Liquid.
I took a quick skim of blockstream's materials on liquid, and it sounds like it's something totally different to lightning? They describe it as some sort of ripple-like network for transacting in tokens? eg.
>Liquid uses an approach to consensus called Strong Federations. A Strong Federation removes the need for costly Proof of Work mechanisms and replaces it with the collective actions of a group of mutually distrusting participants called functionaries.
This is just an outright lie and malicious defamation from top to f*king bottom. Hateful nonsense by scam promoters like you turns HN into a toxic enviroment.
Because it's just pure nonsense, untrue, and totally unsubstantiated (and thoroughly off-topic for the thread). Falsehood flies, and the Truth comes limping after it.
Rather than any substantive argument, it merely lists a set of wild allegations.
But since you asked nicely I'll break it down sentence by sentence.
> Blockstream bought out most of the the btc devs who had commit ability
Blockstream hired myself and Pieter, two of six people at the time that had commit access to the Bitcoin software project at a time when none of the many "bitcoin companies" of the day were willing to fund developers. Though I was independently wealthy at that point, supporting my own work on Bitcoin meant spending down my Bitcoin or not working on it most of the time, so being able to get funded to work on Bitcoin and well aligned technology was appealing. Two people is not most of by any measure.
The Bitcoin software has no particular control over the Bitcoin system, but none the less we took measures to reduce any potential conflict of interest: We were substantially paid denominated in Bitcoin (pre-purchased when the company was founded), so our compensation was directly tied to Bitcoin's value. The company took no copyright interest in our work on Bitcoin, and released all our patents for public use (both under defensive licensing and the IPA). Pieter and I both had employment agreements that allowed us to quit at and continue to get paid for a year as additional insurance against any unethical conduct by the company. I also dropped my commit access.
Neither of us continue to work for blockstream, I haven't for three years now.
> Their end goal is to cripple btc to where it is today.
Blockstream hasn't done anything to "cripple" bitcoin, nor would it have made any financial sense for its employees (100% of whom were (and I believe still are) substantially compensated in Bitcoin). Quite the opposite: Blockstream's purpose was to build on-ramps to Bitcoin to help the impedance mismatch with traditional finance systems, and to monetize Bitcoin unrelated applications of the same technology (e.g. private systems) and use that to fund development work in the public interest (particularly at a time when no one else was doing so).
> The goal of this is to build an unnecessary product they can charge for on a second level. Think skimming money like charge cards do, but offering no real advantage or service beyond that. So far they have found building a new network neigh impossible.
I can't even figure out what this is attempting to talk about.
> Lightning only 18 months away, after 3 years of "development."
Lightning is a large Bitcoin industry effort involving dozens of independent developers and a half dozen companies. It isn't blockstream specific. It's just the logical progression of the payment channel idea initially described by Satoshi and baked into Bitcoin since day one. (And for a weird on-topic tangent: It's a secure implementation of the "Ripple" concept which Ripple labs bought the name of and stuck on an entirely unrelated system.)
It's not "18 months away" it exists now, it's widely used, and it works pretty well.
However, cryptocurrency for small retail payments remains a pretty uncompelling use case: It is extremely tax disadvantaged in many jurisdiction's, including the US: mandatory per transaction gains tax reporting. And retail transactions are extremely well addressed by existing solutions-- would you prefer to pay with the hardest money available, or would you prefer to pay with a credit card that is already accepted virtually everywhere, provides substantial anti-fraud protection, and extends you 28 days of credit with several percent negative fees for debt in constantly debased fiat? It's important that people have the option-- and they do-- but expecting widespread use in this application over night is fantasy.
(And not a particular problem for Blockstream, which doesn't make any fees off transactions using lightning, contrary to the parent posters allegations)
> You can find hilarious round table interviews with Adam Back where one asks how they can use btc for transactions like at bars with the fees dwarfing the regular transaction. Adam Back suggested using an IOU network out of paper or maybe build an IOU app for that.
I have no idea the context there but I can only imagine that someone asked about buying single drinks with Bitcoin and he mentioned that it's customary for people at a bar to open a tab and settle up at the end of the night. Kind of ironic that Adam, who's a teetotaler, is more aware of how bars commonly work than his critics. :)
In any case, Bitcoin is a global broadcast network whos long term decentralized security is utterly and totally dependant on getting large amounts paid in transaction fees. That has always been part of the trade-off: Centralized systems can offer extremely low fees. The only arguments about avoiding market rate fees in Bitcoin have also been argument to unlimit the supply of coins and pay for security through debasement, which is an obvious non-starter.
Wall Street doesn't want Bitcoin to serve its intended purpose of removing their control over the money supply. They did this by co-opting the software project with venture capital money and making technical decisions that make Bitcoin ecommerce economically infeasible due to high fees. Initially they intended to replace Bitcoin with an alt-coin whose issuance was controlled by the Blockstream corporate entity. That project failed, and wall street investors pivoted to another alt-coin called Lightning that has failed to produce a reliable payment network after 7 years of investment, all the while the BTC fork remains unusable, which they are just fine with.
EDIT: The Lightning network markets itself as an improvement to Bitcoin, but it is a completely alternative settlement network that just happens to denominate in BTC. I don't think debating the use of the term "alt-coin" is material.
Man, your post is just full of malicious disinformation, most of it addressed elsewhere in this off-topic subthread.
> EDIT: The Lightning network markets itself as an improvement to Bitcoin, but it is a completely alternative settlement network that just happens to denominate in BTC. I don't think debating the use of the term "alt-coin" is material.
That is just entirely untrue. :( Whoever fed you that idea was confused or outright lying to you.
Lightning is a technique for using Bitcoin's smart contracting ability to pay bitcoin without bringing each and every transaction to the network.
The basic idea is that you take some Bitcoin and set a script on it that says that if there is a disagreement over who owns it, the involved parties will post to the ledger the last record in an external ownership transcript which is signed by the involved parties, and if anyone cheats and posts an outdated record, anyone else can post proof that a later entry existed and all the coins go to the non-cheating party.
With this in place, the parties can then transact back and forth securely as fast as they can sign and send Bitcoin transactions to each other without any global broadcast taking place. Taking it a step further, collections of these transactions can be made mutually atomic so that they're all successful or all fail (essentially by making them conditional on a common secret). This is how lightning makes it possible to pay people you've never transacted with before, by routing on a graph of these pairwise payments (that's what the 'network' in lightning network refers to).
All the transactions exchanged between participants are Bitcoin transactions-- which could be posted at any time to the network at the participant's whim, they refrain from doing so to save fees--, the system is built from the novel programmatic ability of Bitcoin, and it is completely ununsable without Bitcoin (or some clone that copies the required functionality, of course).
This kind of channelized usage of Bitcoin was foreseen by Bitcoin's creator and enabled by the consensus rules of the protocol from day one (particularly: nlocktime and sequence numbers which were explicitly added to support channels).
Lightning is not an “alt coin”. This whole comment is so absurd I don’t even know what to say other than it’s entirely conspiratorial and misinformed nonsense.
I don't think there are any major implications. The point of blockchain currencies is to be decentralized so hacking a random github repo shouldn't have major implications. It's not even the only bitcoin node implementation out there at this point.
Before wall street involvement there was a single fork of Bitcoin that was a viable currency with low transaction fees. After Wall Street involvement there are at least 3 forks, the biggest of which had fees spiking at 60 USD per transaction making it nonviable for anything but speculators, and the others having very low adoption. The protocol was decentralized but enough of the community that controlled it was bought out to bring it down.
EDIT: calling something a lie does not make it so. also, what on earth is hateful here
Bitcoin has an incentive model based on transaction fees. This is currently being "boot-strapped" by a mechanism called subsidy, where miners get "extra" bitcoin aside from the transaction fees.
That subsidy shrinks every 4 years and will eventually be zero.
As we move towards that point, the transaction fees need to be high enough that the miners are incentivized to continue protecting bitcoin.
For regular coffee-style orders, this becomes infeasible; that's why you can use layer-2 (or higher) tech to pay really low fees for each transaction.
As Bitcoin usage increases, we hit new speed bumps -- transaction fees spiking was one of them. While this is the inevitable (for a successful bitcoin) future, there need to be ways to make cheaper payments, but everyone (who's given it some thought, and who doesn't have an agenda of some kind) agrees that permanently storing coffee sales in the blockchain directly is not the way to go, if we can avoid it, and we can.
“The threshold should probably be lower than it currently is. I don't think the threshold should ever be 0. We should always allow at least some free transactions.” -Satoshi Nakamoto
The p2p electronic cash system I signed up for in June 2010 is not working “how it is supposed to work”. $7.77 average transaction fee? Why not try raising the block size to even 2MB? That would do nothing to hurt decentralization. And do you really think an asset currently worth $500B needs to incentivize people to keep it working?!
“I would never spend $100/yr to validate/store transactions and keep my Bitcoin investment working unless I can make a profit on that $100/yr on fees!”
The above shouldn't be downvoted. It's an interesting statement
What do you think of the Lightning Network?
Lightning Network channels specify a blockchain hash, so Bitcoin is supported but other cryptocurrencies could be used (if the HTLC scripts, etc., were ported)
The Lightning Network web of payment channels looks good to me. You can see how it can form an efficient "overlay" on any cryptocurrency that provides sufficient scripting power:
So they are still putting money into the project and promising things in the future. Years ago, before venture capital took over BTC, I could buy games on Steam with Bitcoin. Can I buy video games with Lightning?
Ok. What can I actually buy with it? There's tons of venture capital going into this project and no commerce happening. Bitcoin had more real commerce 5 years ago than BTC and Lightning combined do today.
>So they are still putting money into the project and promising things in the future.
I don't get it. A major cryptocurrency exchange says they're planning to adopt it, and that doesn't count as "real-world adoption"? I guess that's true if your original statement read as "not seen any real-world adoption ...[today]" but it certainly doesn't follow that it's dead.
>Ok. What can I actually buy with it?
One of the merchants I've made multiple purchases on uses coingate for payments so that's something for me, at least. That said I'll admit that I haven't used lightning yet because I'm quite happy with the status quo of waiting for a lull in transaction volume so I can pay pennies per transaction (my payments aren't usually urgent). Going through the hassle setting up a lightning node isn't worth saving a few pennies each month in my opinion.
>Years ago, before venture capital took over BTC, I could buy games on Steam with Bitcoin. Can I buy video games with Lightning?
To be fair, bitcoin was launched in 2009 and it took until 2016 for steam to accept it. How many years has lightning been around? Also, while looking up when steam first accepted bitcoin I also found https://twitter.com/udiWertheimer/status/952206482715660289, which answers your second question.
I find LN's UX really painful. Ethereum's layer 2 solutions are far ahead in terms of user experience. The other day I had to settle an election bet, and either I settle it in stablecoin on high tx fees of ETH/BTC or try explaining one of the layer-2 solutions.
And no, I can't pay them in USDT on bch because that requires them to get a new wallet.
Raiden network which is Ethereum's LN like solution, faces the same problem. Whatever bitcoin folks envision, they will never get LN bitcoins to have the same network effect as bitcoin itself.
This is clearly FUD pushed by bitcoin cash supporters. I’m coin-agnostic and don’t get into these fights but bitcoin is 100% doing exactly what it was designed to do.
Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System - “The cost of mediation increases transaction costs, limiting the minimum practical transaction size and cutting off the possibility for small casual transactions, and there is a broader cost in the loss of ability to make non-reversible payments for non-reversible services.” https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf
Since transactions will only increase in price as demand grows (and the tx limit has been effectively capped for years), I don’t see Bitcoin ever improving in this regard. Bitcoin may be successful as a speculative asset and for other purposes, but as “peer-to-peer electronic cash” it’s a failure.
>bitcoin is 100% doing exactly what it was designed to do
Bitcoin was designed to allow low-fee small amount internet commerce. From the first paragraph of Satoshi's white paper:
>The cost of mediation increases transaction costs, limiting the minimum practical transaction size and cutting off the possibility for small casual transactions [emphasis added]
This is clearly no longer the case with the BTC fork of Bitcoin:
As soon as Bitcoin market cap starts shooting up, the SEC starts banning coins and increasing regulation. It’s a correlation as clear as day. The US government is actively trying to suppress Bitcoin/crypto growth. This is no coincidence
On the contrary, one could argue that the drop in XRP prices (and corresponding outflow of capital) has been one key drivers of the successive ATHs BTC has hit this week.
Longer term, there are many other tokens/protocols that can fulfill XRP’s functions without its obvious weaknesses.
Well, rather than attacking alt-coins wouldn't lobbying for laws to allow them to block bitcoin exchanges (or tightly regulate them) as other countries have done be stronger evidence they were trying to undermine crypto?
The GP has drawn a strange correlation in my opinion that doesn't follow logic. But I admit I could be missing the logic.
>The US government is actively trying to suppress Bitcoin/crypto growth
It's complicated. US regulators would absolutely ban all crypto if it started threatening the dollar and they had no other choice. However right now that isn't happening, and they are actually only going after pretty clear cases of fraud, which it seems like XRP was doing.
> Cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase Inc said on Monday it would suspend trading in cryptocurrency XRP after U.S. regulators last week charged associated blockchain firm Ripple with conducting a $1.3 billion unregistered securities offering.
It reads to be a good reason to suspend XRP trading
I don't follow the logic here. Cryptos biggest battle (and thus Coinabse's battle by proxy) has been legitimacy. A listed coin coming under SEC ire and Coinbase banning said coin actively harms their IPO, not assists it.
Oh okay. That makes more sense. Still a bit weird that it's out of a sense of self preservation instead of caring that it was potentially immoral in the first place.
Ripple/XRP is under SEC investigation for selling an unregistered security, Coinbase has to stop trading or they'll be an accessory to the crime as well.
https://www.tradingview.com/symbols/XRPUSD/?exchange=BITFINE...
Yes, there was a big run-up, but that was largely drafting off the increase in the bitcoin exchange rate. The real test will be how much further XRP drops (or doesn't) from here.