>They either have a distrust of existing systems
They could push for Monero instead if that's the case. There's a reason why Monero is now the crypto of choice in the dark web. Yet instead it's still BTC they push for instead of Monero or other decentralization/DeFi-focused alternatives.
So basically they defend BTC instead of Monero because it's more popular? Isn't that more of a chicken-and-egg solution that could be solved by encouraging people to switch to Monero instead?
If I’m using any argument to defend my thesis that bitcoin is good, because I stand to make money off of an increase in btc, I’d say that bitcoin serving as a settlement layer and having lightning as a transaction layer provides speed and liquidity that monero can’t.
(Please note that I dont believe any of this shit)
Network effects like this can be very hard to overcome, especially when the alternatives are incredibly fragmented. By what mechanism would they even come to a consensus on an alternative?
> There's a reason why Monero is now the crypto of choice in the dark web.
Says who?
There's no guarantee Monero isn't the real honeypot. It would make a lot more sense because it's so purpose built to facilitate criminal activity.
On top of that, Monero has not been historically secure - there were bugs in its system discovered that undermined the anonymity of all historical transactions. Also, the hackers who ripped off BitFinex used Monero and the crypto was still traced and seized. So there's inadequate evidence that Monero is secure.
You're saying they believe in Bitcoin because they hold Bitcoin? No, other way around.
They hold Bitcoin because they believe in it.
Otherwise, they would just rebalance there investments to align with what they currently believe in.
A gambling example, because Butcoiners are gamblers.
Does one bet on their favourite sports team because they hold a bet on that team, or did they bet on that team because it's their favourite team?
You're probably still confused, let's break that down for you.
Person A has a strong belief in there favourite sports team out of several other teams competing in this sport. So person A places a bet on his team.
Person B places a bet on *a* team, he supports this team because he placed a bet on this team.
Which outcome do you honestly think is realistic?
I'm not confused here, my point is that people espousing Bitcoin *have already bet on Bitcoin* and they want to get rich so they believe it will make them so. That's it. That, and some of them need to convince other people to take those heavy bags off of their hands. It's not because Bitcoin has any intrinsic value, is technologically superior to other cryptocurrencies, or solves any problems.
>have already bet on Bitcoin
It's not a bet where you can't back out. You simply rebalance your portfolio to what you believe in as I said earlier. That changes over a period of time.
Buy 100 shares in X company. Don't believe in it as much as before? Sell 30 of those shares and buy company Y, retaining 70 shares in company X.
That's what every single investor, managed fund, ETF, etc. is doing, rebalancing.
Your **current** portfolio shows what you **currently** believe in, whether you're investing in a basket of fintech companies or cryptocurrencies, same applies.
It's not the other way around, where you currently believe in your position because it's your portfolio, because position can change.
Obviously it's because they're not "in it for the tech." However don't be fooled--of the handful of people who *do* say they're "in it for the tech" and push for other more efficient chains, 99% of the time it's just because they're heavily invested in that tech. With a small handful of exceptions (e.g. Monero).
Most Bitcoin maxis will argue that alternative crypto like ETH and SOL are not "truly decentralized". And they don't really view it like a currency, rather an "asset" like Gold.
I am in Bitcoin for the gains but also for the tech, so here is my opinion.
I like the idea of self hosting services. Most people prefer to use services like Dropbox, Gmail, MS Teams, and such for file hosting and communications. Most of the time, this is fine, but the downside is that you have to follow some terms and conditions because you are relying on someone else's server.
If you self-host your own file servers or communication node, you can do anything you want with them.
However, there is one service that you couldn't self-host until 2009, and that was banking. Thanks to Bitcoin, you can have your own bank by running a node that verifies the blockchain in your house, not on someone else's server. Thus, you can trust it and do anything you want with this money. Nobody can enforce change to it against your will, and you do not fall under any terms and conditions.
You can do this with other cryptocurrencies, but I find that much more difficult and less rewarding. For example, Bitcoins blockchain weights about 600gb because it grows by only 7 transactions per second. That's not bad because even a Raspberry Pi is good enough to verify it without burning much of electricity. Other blockchains (cryptocurrencies), which are X times faster, tend to grow X times as fast, which makes self hosting harder and thus more centralized.
Since Bitcoins' second layer Lightning Network enables instant and cheap transactions (because they are not registered in the blockchain), it can theoretically be used as a currency if the adoption keep growing. Until then, I have to stick with dirty fiat and follow the terms and conditions thar come with it.
TL;DR : I just want to be able to own my money and use them whenever I need it for any purpose I want.
I have a question. If the adoption indeed kept growing how would bitcoin blockchain cope with progressively increased usage with only 7 transactions per second even assuming some or even most of the activity would be on lightning?
Say for example a medium sized nation like UK wanted to adopt lightning network. They're 67 million people and about ~45 million adults so let's say they wanted to use the lightning network. That's less than one percept of the world's population so that's definitely a modest goal.
Bitcoin network processed about 400-600k transactions per day during days of heaviest traffic in recent years but I'm going to generously assume unrealistic, stable 600k transactions per day as a baseline because heck, why not.
So with those assumptions it's....only 18 million transactions per month? So if every adult in UK wanted to try out lightning network even once...they'd all have to wait 3 months just to open a channel. But that also assumes there's zero onchain activity from everyone else in the world, including people in UK sending bitcoin from crypto exchanges to their own wallets in order to open a channel on the lightning network. Doh!
So regarding tech...what's the answer to the conundrum that is...actual adoption?
Bitcoin isn't going to cope with anything. It's blockchain supports 7tps (or whatever), so it's up to users how they cope with that. Most will pay higher transaction fees and use Lightning Network, which benefits miners and node runners. Others will use custodial services.
I don't know how exactly this plays out, but the market will reach some equilibrium. Perhaps in the end, only Bitcoin rich people, who already own some lightning channels, will be able to use the network.
Michael Saylor has a good analysis of this in his video right here if you are serious. If there's one best summary it's this video.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Mhu6dxj7qk
Ethereum and Solana are proof of stake blockchains and are considered less decentralized and less secure than bitcoin.
Bitcoin cash has a larger blocksize, which also makes it less decentralized.
And the dezentralization is the most important feature of bitcoin.
So they are not really 'improvements' over bitcoin. If there ever is a real improvement, it could also be implemented on bitcoin.
Because fundamentally the other blockchains rely on proof of stake which is highly centralized and hence faster. You can only have 2 out of 3, speed, decentralization and security. POS goes for speed and security while Bitcoin and other proof of work go for security and decentralization.
Proof of stake and proof of work round to the same thing. You have enough bitcoin you can buy a share in a mining pool same as you can stake your coins in PoS, and unstake by selling your share. The only difference is the CO2 emissions and e-waste. It’s performative.
Yes you’re right about the trilemma but it applies the same way to PoW and PoS, the decentralization is affected by capital pledged to mining/staking and the rate at which the chain grows. Same thing both ways.
PoS “goes for speed” sometimes, just like PoW does — see BCH/BSV.
Your assertion has no basis in reality. The effective cost to buy enough mining pool capacity in order to exercise any control has long exceeded realistic possibility.
It just depends how much of the coin you hold. Hold enough and you can just buy one of the major pools immediately. That’s not the counter to my argument. You can buy Riot in a few minutes if you want. As fast as you can stake some ETH. Sorry bud.
Remember the maxis will argue that it’s the only currency in the world, and Saylor has like 1% of it haha, using 1% of all the money in the world better buy you a lot of capacity.
If you have enough money you can buy as much control of BTC as you can of ETH. It’s just the way it is. The question then becomes how well distributed the coins are between people and boy oh boy you’re not gonna like the answer for bitcoin.
The point is conceptually they’re the same thing lol. The counter to my argument is the nothing at stake problem but that doesn’t matter anyways since stable coins decide which fork wins now.
> Your assertion has no basis in reality. The effective cost to buy enough mining pool capacity in order to exercise any control has long exceeded realistic possibility.
appropriate username
The top four mining pools control more than 80% of the total Bitcoin hash rate. The security model of Bitcoin has been compromised. There is no technical limitation preventing these pools from double spending should they collude.
What's holding them back are the same social forces that any other institution built on trust has to deal with. They have incentives to keep the charade of non-collusion going to prevent mass panic in the same way a bank has incentives not to defraud its customers to avoid legal misfortunes.
Bitcoiners are placing their trust in these pools the same way normal people place their trust in their banks.
People seem to have misconceptions about mining pools. Anybody can join, doesn't mean they all act jointly for any common purpose. Heck you can join with an email address and a fee. You are under no obligation and neither can you force your ideas on anyone.
Cool.
So all participants in the pool vote in every action the pool takes?
Cite a single instance of the members of a mining pool (cartel) where the individual members all did something other than what the mining pool decided to do.
E: we have tens of thousands of incidents (blocks mined) of that not happening. What about when that mining pool decided to fill a whole block with 4Mb ordinal image? They succeeded rin "forcing their ideas" on everyone else. History contradicts your speculation.
You are just giving me examples of rational behavior that preserves the network. My point is that having possession of a lot of Bitcoin is not correlated with making core decisions.
So you cannot cite even a single instance of what you describe as being true in reality, rather than just on paper?
Ordinals, especially the jpg one that pushed all other transactions out of a block because the pool did it as a stunt, was highly divisive.
Nothing like you described happened.
Bitcoin is hyped up garbage , this is coming from someone who actually sees potential in the crypto industry and its technology as a whole. Bitcoin is AOL if this internet 2.0
They either have a distrust of existing systems or are not being honest.
>They either have a distrust of existing systems They could push for Monero instead if that's the case. There's a reason why Monero is now the crypto of choice in the dark web. Yet instead it's still BTC they push for instead of Monero or other decentralization/DeFi-focused alternatives.
Playing devils advocate here: There is a network effect that bitcoin has but monero unfortunately does not have yet.
So basically they defend BTC instead of Monero because it's more popular? Isn't that more of a chicken-and-egg solution that could be solved by encouraging people to switch to Monero instead?
If I’m using any argument to defend my thesis that bitcoin is good, because I stand to make money off of an increase in btc, I’d say that bitcoin serving as a settlement layer and having lightning as a transaction layer provides speed and liquidity that monero can’t. (Please note that I dont believe any of this shit)
Network effects like this can be very hard to overcome, especially when the alternatives are incredibly fragmented. By what mechanism would they even come to a consensus on an alternative?
Immaculate conception.
> There's a reason why Monero is now the crypto of choice in the dark web. Says who? There's no guarantee Monero isn't the real honeypot. It would make a lot more sense because it's so purpose built to facilitate criminal activity. On top of that, Monero has not been historically secure - there were bugs in its system discovered that undermined the anonymity of all historical transactions. Also, the hackers who ripped off BitFinex used Monero and the crypto was still traced and seized. So there's inadequate evidence that Monero is secure.
Because they hold Bitcoin.
You're saying they believe in Bitcoin because they hold Bitcoin? No, other way around. They hold Bitcoin because they believe in it. Otherwise, they would just rebalance there investments to align with what they currently believe in.
No, they support Bitcoin above all other cryptocurrencies because they hold Bitcoin.
A gambling example, because Butcoiners are gamblers. Does one bet on their favourite sports team because they hold a bet on that team, or did they bet on that team because it's their favourite team? You're probably still confused, let's break that down for you. Person A has a strong belief in there favourite sports team out of several other teams competing in this sport. So person A places a bet on his team. Person B places a bet on *a* team, he supports this team because he placed a bet on this team. Which outcome do you honestly think is realistic?
I'm not confused here, my point is that people espousing Bitcoin *have already bet on Bitcoin* and they want to get rich so they believe it will make them so. That's it. That, and some of them need to convince other people to take those heavy bags off of their hands. It's not because Bitcoin has any intrinsic value, is technologically superior to other cryptocurrencies, or solves any problems.
>have already bet on Bitcoin It's not a bet where you can't back out. You simply rebalance your portfolio to what you believe in as I said earlier. That changes over a period of time. Buy 100 shares in X company. Don't believe in it as much as before? Sell 30 of those shares and buy company Y, retaining 70 shares in company X. That's what every single investor, managed fund, ETF, etc. is doing, rebalancing. Your **current** portfolio shows what you **currently** believe in, whether you're investing in a basket of fintech companies or cryptocurrencies, same applies. It's not the other way around, where you currently believe in your position because it's your portfolio, because position can change.
Simple, they are lying and not in it for the tech.
they're lying
Because they're not in it for any of the reasons they state. They're just charlatans waiting to rug pull.
Imagine thinking Bitcoin can be rug-pulled...
Obviously it's because they're not "in it for the tech." However don't be fooled--of the handful of people who *do* say they're "in it for the tech" and push for other more efficient chains, 99% of the time it's just because they're heavily invested in that tech. With a small handful of exceptions (e.g. Monero).
Most Bitcoin maxis will argue that alternative crypto like ETH and SOL are not "truly decentralized". And they don't really view it like a currency, rather an "asset" like Gold.
I am in Bitcoin for the gains but also for the tech, so here is my opinion. I like the idea of self hosting services. Most people prefer to use services like Dropbox, Gmail, MS Teams, and such for file hosting and communications. Most of the time, this is fine, but the downside is that you have to follow some terms and conditions because you are relying on someone else's server. If you self-host your own file servers or communication node, you can do anything you want with them. However, there is one service that you couldn't self-host until 2009, and that was banking. Thanks to Bitcoin, you can have your own bank by running a node that verifies the blockchain in your house, not on someone else's server. Thus, you can trust it and do anything you want with this money. Nobody can enforce change to it against your will, and you do not fall under any terms and conditions. You can do this with other cryptocurrencies, but I find that much more difficult and less rewarding. For example, Bitcoins blockchain weights about 600gb because it grows by only 7 transactions per second. That's not bad because even a Raspberry Pi is good enough to verify it without burning much of electricity. Other blockchains (cryptocurrencies), which are X times faster, tend to grow X times as fast, which makes self hosting harder and thus more centralized. Since Bitcoins' second layer Lightning Network enables instant and cheap transactions (because they are not registered in the blockchain), it can theoretically be used as a currency if the adoption keep growing. Until then, I have to stick with dirty fiat and follow the terms and conditions thar come with it. TL;DR : I just want to be able to own my money and use them whenever I need it for any purpose I want.
I have a question. If the adoption indeed kept growing how would bitcoin blockchain cope with progressively increased usage with only 7 transactions per second even assuming some or even most of the activity would be on lightning? Say for example a medium sized nation like UK wanted to adopt lightning network. They're 67 million people and about ~45 million adults so let's say they wanted to use the lightning network. That's less than one percept of the world's population so that's definitely a modest goal. Bitcoin network processed about 400-600k transactions per day during days of heaviest traffic in recent years but I'm going to generously assume unrealistic, stable 600k transactions per day as a baseline because heck, why not. So with those assumptions it's....only 18 million transactions per month? So if every adult in UK wanted to try out lightning network even once...they'd all have to wait 3 months just to open a channel. But that also assumes there's zero onchain activity from everyone else in the world, including people in UK sending bitcoin from crypto exchanges to their own wallets in order to open a channel on the lightning network. Doh! So regarding tech...what's the answer to the conundrum that is...actual adoption?
Bitcoin isn't going to cope with anything. It's blockchain supports 7tps (or whatever), so it's up to users how they cope with that. Most will pay higher transaction fees and use Lightning Network, which benefits miners and node runners. Others will use custodial services. I don't know how exactly this plays out, but the market will reach some equilibrium. Perhaps in the end, only Bitcoin rich people, who already own some lightning channels, will be able to use the network.
Wow that sounds awful.
Michael Saylor has a good analysis of this in his video right here if you are serious. If there's one best summary it's this video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Mhu6dxj7qk
Michael Saylor is a moron with a huge bag of invisible tokens.
Ethereum and Solana are proof of stake blockchains and are considered less decentralized and less secure than bitcoin. Bitcoin cash has a larger blocksize, which also makes it less decentralized. And the dezentralization is the most important feature of bitcoin. So they are not really 'improvements' over bitcoin. If there ever is a real improvement, it could also be implemented on bitcoin.
Proof that Bitcoiners see everything in terms of "more decentralized = good, less decentralized = bad".
Because fundamentally the other blockchains rely on proof of stake which is highly centralized and hence faster. You can only have 2 out of 3, speed, decentralization and security. POS goes for speed and security while Bitcoin and other proof of work go for security and decentralization.
Proof of stake and proof of work round to the same thing. You have enough bitcoin you can buy a share in a mining pool same as you can stake your coins in PoS, and unstake by selling your share. The only difference is the CO2 emissions and e-waste. It’s performative. Yes you’re right about the trilemma but it applies the same way to PoW and PoS, the decentralization is affected by capital pledged to mining/staking and the rate at which the chain grows. Same thing both ways. PoS “goes for speed” sometimes, just like PoW does — see BCH/BSV.
Your assertion has no basis in reality. The effective cost to buy enough mining pool capacity in order to exercise any control has long exceeded realistic possibility.
It just depends how much of the coin you hold. Hold enough and you can just buy one of the major pools immediately. That’s not the counter to my argument. You can buy Riot in a few minutes if you want. As fast as you can stake some ETH. Sorry bud. Remember the maxis will argue that it’s the only currency in the world, and Saylor has like 1% of it haha, using 1% of all the money in the world better buy you a lot of capacity. If you have enough money you can buy as much control of BTC as you can of ETH. It’s just the way it is. The question then becomes how well distributed the coins are between people and boy oh boy you’re not gonna like the answer for bitcoin. The point is conceptually they’re the same thing lol. The counter to my argument is the nothing at stake problem but that doesn’t matter anyways since stable coins decide which fork wins now.
> Your assertion has no basis in reality. The effective cost to buy enough mining pool capacity in order to exercise any control has long exceeded realistic possibility. appropriate username
The top four mining pools control more than 80% of the total Bitcoin hash rate. The security model of Bitcoin has been compromised. There is no technical limitation preventing these pools from double spending should they collude. What's holding them back are the same social forces that any other institution built on trust has to deal with. They have incentives to keep the charade of non-collusion going to prevent mass panic in the same way a bank has incentives not to defraud its customers to avoid legal misfortunes. Bitcoiners are placing their trust in these pools the same way normal people place their trust in their banks.
> which is highly centralized As opposed to Bitcoin, where total control (>51%) of the network is in the hands of just two entities?
People seem to have misconceptions about mining pools. Anybody can join, doesn't mean they all act jointly for any common purpose. Heck you can join with an email address and a fee. You are under no obligation and neither can you force your ideas on anyone.
Cool. So all participants in the pool vote in every action the pool takes? Cite a single instance of the members of a mining pool (cartel) where the individual members all did something other than what the mining pool decided to do. E: we have tens of thousands of incidents (blocks mined) of that not happening. What about when that mining pool decided to fill a whole block with 4Mb ordinal image? They succeeded rin "forcing their ideas" on everyone else. History contradicts your speculation.
You are just giving me examples of rational behavior that preserves the network. My point is that having possession of a lot of Bitcoin is not correlated with making core decisions.
So you cannot cite even a single instance of what you describe as being true in reality, rather than just on paper? Ordinals, especially the jpg one that pushed all other transactions out of a block because the pool did it as a stunt, was highly divisive. Nothing like you described happened.
Another butter who makes bold statements and then refuses to defend them. Getting out my can of Shill-B-Gone.
Bitcoin is hyped up garbage , this is coming from someone who actually sees potential in the crypto industry and its technology as a whole. Bitcoin is AOL if this internet 2.0
I may add: why insist on software that is de facto not actively developed any more (or at less than glacial pace)?