Bitcoin visions
I believe most of the Bitcoin community agrees more or less on the general direction, and as of 2015 it seemed to me that everyone would agree on those targets:
- We want Bitcoin to be adopted
- We want Bitcoin to be accepted
- We want Bitcoin to be used
- We want a steady appreciation of the market price
- We want the whole population to be aware of the Bitcoin project
- We want people to recognize Bitcoin as something good
- We want Bitcoin to remain decentralized
- We want Bitcoin to remain censorship resistant
- We want Bitcoin to remain permissionless and trustless
The problem, as I see it, was that at some point people started believing that the three latter were in conflict with the three first ones - one narrative became that if we let go of the 1MB block size limit, we'll also let go of the three last bullet points. Another narrative is that the bitcoin community splintered due to a disagreement on direction - with the people thinking that the first three bullet points are more important than the last three bullet points splintering off to make Bitcoin Cash.
Bullocks! I bet that the very most of the Bitcoin Cash supporters are firm supporters of decentralization and censorship resistance - and I believe most of the "bigblockers" even think that the current block size limit is a great danger not only to the first three ones but also the last three ones.
Hence, the disagreement is not on the visions of Bitcoin, but the belief on how it's best to get there. While this is no exact science, I'm still confident that we could have found some answers through an honest and open discussion - instead we have censored forums, ad-hominem-argumentation, echo-chambers, groupthink etc.
Very good points. I don’t believe the current bitcoin will be the success we want. but there are too many forks out there currently. What do you think of ethereum?
I've always had a positive feeling about Ethereum, though there are some things that are bad with it ...
You definitely have a lot of knowledge my friend and you communicate very well. Let me ask you about IOTA. Is the Tangle technology better than Blockchain in your opinion?
I didn't find the time to read the whole whitepaper yet, but I started at it - and I also started setting up a wallet.
From the little I read in the whitepaper, it seems to be some kind of sharding - and sharding is on the roadmap both for Bitcoin Cash and Ethereum, so if I'm right it's not so novel after all.
If I've understood it right, every node needs to keep the full history of at least the coins they own plus more. If this network is supposed to be used for microtransactions between embedded devices then this may be a choke-point, it may be quite a bit of data with time.
The nodes in the network (low-power embedded devices) are supposed to secure the network through proof-of-work, I have a hard time understanding how this can give sufficient security.
The tangle is largely unproven technology. As of today, the network hinges on a black-box central coordinator. That taken into account, I fail to see how their tangle has any advantages as compared to holding all the transactions in a central database.
Indeed, security is the biggest elephant in the room, they have decided to make their own cryptoalgorithms - and people have already been poking holes in it.
There seems to be social issues as well, such as censorship of all critics in their subreddit, and the reactions from the team when the security issues hasn't been up to expectations.
Just like Ethereum decided to define the byte to be 256 bits, the IOTA team has also made a weird technical decision, defining a bit to have three possible values.
You mention them creating their algorithms and the surety issues they have seen and need to fix. Does this make them better in any way? If they fixed the security issues first I mean. Also, I’m trying to understand how the tangle can be sustainable if the transaction weight grows with speed overtime? Wont this bog down the system eventually? If new transactions need to reference the old transactions, wont this lead to a slow network overtime?
In computer engineering, one should avoid reinventing the wheel whenever one can. There exists cryptographic libraries that are used in many other software products. The probability that some grave security flaw will exist undetected by "white-hats" for a longer time is much bigger when using an ad-hoc home-brewed crypto library.
It's generally of course a nice thing that security flaws gets detected and patched - but if 14 critical bugs are found and fixed in software product A, and meanwhile software product B is equally much used and no critical bugs are found there, then that says something about the quality - it's much more likely that one will find 14 more bugs in A than in B.
(Y) great reply @tobixen
Smart people invest on bitcoin. If we don't adapt new technology, we have to suffer at the end. The world is moving faster. Sometimes you just have to go with the flow.
Agreed. But I dont belive Bitcoin is the best option to be adopted as THE cryptocurrency. Sure it is the most mainstream. But there are too many issues with it that haven’t been solved yet. There are better cryptos out there
Smart people invested in Bitcoin several years ago. Nowadays I have a feeling most people are just buying into a trend, without knowing much about what they invest into.
Yes, I think so.
I want Bitcoin to appreciate.
It seems to me that currently most people are buying bitcoins because the market price is appreciating, and the market price is appreciating because people are buying bitcoins.
I believe that it can't be sustainable, especially with a growth averaging on several percent per day ... and especially when the usability value of Bitcoin is steadily decreasing. Sooner or later there must be a crash, and in the aftermath we'll laugh at the "digital tulip mania".
Though, I said so a year ago too - for all I know we'll see yet another year with tenfold increase in market value ... but in my opinion the risk now is very high, a correction is way overdue.
... so to me, a steady market appreciation is important. The growth we have been witnessing the last year is a bit out of hand, IMO.
good post,nice topic sharing
We want people to recognize Bitcoin as something good, this line touched my heart.
Very good points
Ive learnt few things about bitcoin here thanks to you guys