@Onyx
Apologies, but this is going to require some significant length to explain in full.
> But if it’s not scalable, why Any of this?
Blockchains aren’t scalable. Traditional software architectures leveraging the bitcoin blockchain as a state machine are, where data can be held privately to secure each private party instead of collectively held and managed by all participants and where state can be verified and trust mitigated by storing proofs via bitcoin. That’s why we build in layers, again like traditional software.
One example, my first use case was taking merkle tree roots of legally sensitive data sets and posting them to the bitcoin blockchain, where I could prove a given state existed at a given time by recreating the root hash if necessary from the data set - or proof relative to the cost of the economic state machine to reorder the block depth of the proof. Being able to create this kind of proof and economic assurance of the state of my data allowed me to reduce insurance costs and eliminate possibilities of fraud or corporate negligence being accused of the data handlers in courts. Ultimately bitcoin is a low-trust machine, and it allows me to mitigate trusting contexts such as in this example.
Another example is lightning, where privately held transaction data is used to form the spending conditions for onchain bitcoin - allowing the batching of off chain transactions via 2 onchain ones as well as more traditional scaling properties and IP to IP round trip settlement times.
> The value is based on hypothetical future utility
I use Bitcoin as my automatically executing last will and testament, as my primary bank account for a decade, as my corporate treasuries, as point of sale, and for remittances among many other thigs including the off chain use cases described above. It’s not the future, I’ve been paying rent and groceries while making my money programmable for over a decade now.
> and if it that utility can’t scale because it’s based on the validator network then all of this is a non-starter.
As explained, you’re right that nothing append only can scale and blockchains have no special properties. That’s why we do our scaling off chain. The world can possibly afford one well managed, minimally appended to blockchain. That’s why we optimize transaction sizes, data stored, and total possible append-size via blocksize - all while moving the bulk of our efforts and applications off chain in the manner of traditional software. it’s a shared resource, it cannot scale, it requires very prudent management.
> It can’t just be functional, it needs to be preferential over existing financial institutions and programming methods and I’m yet to see any reason why it is.
I can’t prove something happened with a given economic assurance and timeframe within traditional scopes of software development, I can’t permissionlessly automate my money internationally, I can’t dictate monetary nor security policy. I can do all of these things and more with Bitcoin.
Also - it is functional, like I said it’s been my native currency and daily driver now for a long time. I use it for countless and ever changing use cases - as one does all money or protocols. I stand as an example that these assumptions about what can bitcoin be used for are in fact assumptions, they aren’t built on experience like mine which invalidates those assumptions through action.
> If I’m talking about a Fork in Ethereum, the 2nd biggest crypto. If a fork like that is the flaw in shitcoins, then Everything is a shitcoin.
Everything is a shitcoin. Size means nothing. The merit of the architecture and the use cases it creates either speak for themselves or they don’t. That shitcoin and it’s many forks, the many forks of Bitcoin related shitcoins, are corporately controlled. They have state systems not secured by economic nash equilibrium and fully verifying node-users, but by the cheapest cost to have ever acquired tokens printed freely by a central entity with marketing teams and promises of profit. That shit is an illegal security by any other name. We’ve got minority proof of work shitcoins that require no more than a botnet to reorganize their state - anything short of majority global hashpower for a given algorthim is an enormous opening for abuse.
In contrast Bitcoin has been rebuffing attacks costing billions of dollars and even encompassing over 80% of all miners. Fully verifying and sovereign nodes are what enable the properties of decentralization, miners job is economic security. They are the bouncers at the door and when they fuck around it’s nodes who decide what Bitcoin is and what miners roles are and what they even get paid - so the miners find out. Just as they did in the blocksize wars.
> And the corruption charges you give shitcoins doesn’t change that it’s just impractical for utility.
Shitcoins are impractical, and yes Bitcoin’s fees go up as it combats the scams in its own ecosystem. It’s part of how we defend ourselves. Where a normal service may collapse under resource consumption attacks such as a DoS, Bitcoin simply gets more expensive. If getting more expensive doesn’t stop the attackers we make it more expensive still. it doesn’t prevent normal people from using it, nor does it make these many use cases including especially the off chain ones unpractical. What it does do is bankrupt our attackers, even as it takes months to do.
> Both turned out scammy but the technical issues they faced were illustrative for how much it sucks to work on a long-term project with crypto.
You are 100% right, all of these are scams and the same kinds of scams attempt things on Bitcoin. However on Bitcoin their damage is limited and far more self destructive than it is on these shitcoins. Any time you have something permissionless you will get scammers. The economic nash equilibrium is slowly encouraging them to scam in more responsible, off chain ways - just as we saw with the most recent scam protocol moving away from abusing witness script discounts we will hopefully see their next move is to move away from storing fucking JSON on chain and taking their scams entirely off chain.
> I live in Canada, and have no clue what you’re talking about. We have e-transfer for all the digital convenience you can ask for and that doesn’t burn however much oil for validation.
I live in Canada. I’ve had banks deny me my own money. I’ve had e-transfers take far more than the thirty minutes you’d expect, and I’ve frequently had e-transfers and payments blocked due to absurd transaction limits. Hell I couldn’t even pay the paltry sum of taxes I owed this year without a 30 minute conversation pleading with my bank to raise my limits just this one time. I certainly can’t expect my bank to automatically execute my will whether I am present or not, I can’t use them for international remittances, I can’t use them as an economic state machine.
As for the commentary of burning oil, how surprised would you be to learn that the banking sector - which uses power sources in population centers and is grossly inefficient in both their application of technology and manpower - actually consumes significantly more power than Bitcoin? Would you be equally surprised to learn that around half of Bitcoin’s usage is renewables? Funding nascent renewables projects, abandoned hydro projects, and genuinely revolutionizing the logistics of power management through consumption of wasted power (curtailment) from dynamic energy sources and stranded power logistically unfeasible to transport. Bitcoin goes wherever the cheapest power is, unlike most other power consumers, and it’s global. How much better is using would-be flared natural gas to instead run bitcoin miners that only produce heat as a waste product? How much better is it to run bitcoin and fund power generation, especially dynamic power generation like comes from solar, wind, and other renewables - than pump 30% or more of it into the ground? Bitcoin is genuinely a revolution in power logistics. Compared to buying a shit ton of batteries, wouldn’t you rather have customers you can turn on and off at will who will pay you for vast sums of buffer capacity on your grid?
You can read more at Energy | End The FUD.
> And yeah, banks suck in all kinds of ways, but they’re not in some eternal bank run. They let you buy stock digitally and self-manage portfolios. That’s not unique to Bitcoin.
Banks do suck, but I think your definition of self manage and mine are very very different. Everything I do with my banks is permissioned and I personally have had no end of headache dealing with it. I’m glad it works fine for you, but it doesn’t work fine for me or my businesses.
Thanks for coming to my TED talk. Sorry about the length, just trying to engage your comments in good faith.
, plus look at remittances that are a major use case of Bitcoin, and oddly enough, Tron (an Ethereum alternative that can transmi USDT for next to nothing). That is cutting out a massive middleman.