Crypto Sold my house and put it all into bitcoin.

Cause you cannot buy milk with bitcoin. And you never will.
for crypto to become mainstream currency, the milk bar will have to be able to process 1000 different currencies, and have 1000 different "prices" for the milk and it'll take you different amount of time to get your milk, depend on how busy the network is, how profitable it is to mine at the specific time of purchasing the milk and how quick the algo is.

 

Because, despite the name, cryptos are not currencies. They are tokens of their respective ecosystems and not a replacement of fiat currencies. The tokens serve specific functions to the operation of those ecosystems which partly gives them value. Most people think that because it has value and can be traded it should be money or is replacing fiat. This is incorrect.

 

Let me use a real world example that everyone should be familiar with. Think of each crypto project as a company and each token as shares. This isnt exactly correct but is close enough to get my point across. Shares cannot be used to buy milk. There are thousands of different companies and shares. And all shares have different values that fluctuates daily. In order to purchase your milk you need to sell the shares and settle the purchase with fiat.
This is exactly what happens with crypto. To buy the milk you need to sell the crypto and settle with fiat.

 

You can theoretically buy milk by giving the seller shares.
It's not a new concept.
The idea behind crypto was to enable the transfer with much ease and without anyone in the middle (such as stock exchange) and without supervision (aka ATO who wants their share of the party).

In reality, there are fees, it's not easy, it's not fast, it's not simple (the need to safeguard crypto means trading it involves lot of safety checks; no one will just take out their hardware wallet, stick it into a usb port somewhere and type in their password on some provided keyboard. That would be crazy! you cannot trust anyone!!!)

 

I hear you mate and those issues are being worked on. Cryptos is still very very young and will take time to build out its infrastructure. The internet wasnt built within a decade, which is how old cryptos are. Current projects are looking very promising at addressing those issues you highlighted. Layer 2 solutions are looking good, skaling is working and we are seeing fees in the cents per transaction which is much cheaper than banks and credit, transitioning to eth pos has started, we have biometric and keyless wallets. Lots happening in this space.

 

I'm a techie, so for me - yeah sure. The technology is awesome.
The implementation now? I feel it's the biggest ponzi that ever happened. COVID really fuelled it.
It'll be taught in schools for years to come.

(Yep, I could buy lots of bitcoins when it was like $0.01. I didn't. I could be rich, but I'm not. I lead a low risk life and I prefer to earn money by working, rather then put everything on Black and hope for the best)

 

From a technologists viewpoint, you dont see any use cases for blockchain?

 

I used to own bitcoin but lost it through an exchange hack years ago.
Back then bitcoin was dominant so I was easily sold into it.

Nowadays there's hundreds of crypto currencies, all claiming to be better than the last. The fact a new one comes out every week should have alarm bells going for anyone.

 

If you spend a bit of time researching and understanding the real problems that DLT can address it becomes pretty easy to differentiate the garbage popping up day to day from those projects with a serious team, who have been working on solutions hand in hand with real world companies for a number of years.

 

Of course. Blockchian is nice, I don't see it as that groundbreaking as it's basically an encrypted and immutable log.
I'm not sold on distributed non-decenterlised network to sign transactions.
Bitcoin is a great example why it can never be true. In theory it is, but in real life, when real life problems comes into play - you'll end up with a network that is heavily controlled by someone (in the case of bitcoin, China. Again. Due to the fact that most other places the sheer power it requires leads to governments getting nervous (the use of power to maintain a currency holding vassal vs heating people homes and produce real stuff).
In China it's totally acceptable to have large cities with power only parts of the day.

Whatever they come up with, if you need "proof or work" - means in other words "spend money of it".
That alone leads to the only those with wealth to be the ones who control the network.
Without "proof of work" you cannot have any currency and since crypto is all about networks without trust - it's what makes it short lived if you ask me.

As soon as one major currency flung deep enough - the whole eco system will collapse.
It takes long time to build a tower, but only few seconds to take it down.

 

China doesn’t control the network. Miners don’t control the network. Nodes do. This is the reason why it’s important to keep the blockchain as small as possible on layer one to keep the cost of running a node as low as possible so majority can afford it.

 

The economic majority controls Bitcoin (not full nodes or miners, which are also a type of node).

Trust minimisation and decentralisation is all a scale. Bitcoin is further out on the decentralisation scale than other crypto, but the suggestion you can't have a currency without proof of work is demonstrably false. Everything in this space is trade-offs e.g. do we reduce the likelihood that nearly anyone can store the entire ledger history to allow for greater throughput of transactions on layer 1...

 

The banks will setup their own blockchain network and that will basically "witness" their financial transaction around the world.

 

And since China already is the majority on miners (which is the heavy lifters of the bitcoin network), what stops them from becoming the majority of nodes and the "economic majority"?
There's no power in the world that can overwhelm the power of China when they decide to chase something, simply cause of their level of control and sheer numbers.

So in effect, China can, if they wish, alter the results of destiny of a currency vassal.
When bitcoin started, before the big hype - it was an undoubtable truth that no one group could have the majority of the network, just to find out that China is such a group.

In a decentralised system without trust - you have to have some kind of way to ensure trust.
currently, the idea behind bitcoin and most of the other cryptos, is to ensure trust by statistically make it impossible for bad actors to sway the network.
Can you show another way to ensure that without "proof of work" (which is basically anything that creates an impossibility for bad actors to have more "power" then the good actors.

Since the heart of the whole thing is build on the idea of "no trust", to trade something that requires total trust (aka - money)

 

I am getting conflicting messages from your comment here. On one hand you seem to imply that China can decide the fate of Bitcoin's direction, on the other you are saying that PoW makes it impossible for bad actors to have that amount of power... so which is it?

Click the link in my post to read what the economic majority means. That may shed some light on why I don't think China would win in a battle for control of Bitcoin. If the Chinese government took control of all the hash power in China and made changes to Bitcoin or exerted undue influence on actors in the space, my expectation would be that we'd see a hard fork. At that point we find out where loyalties lie. Which network do the exchanges accept? Which network will have the most capital, goods, and services bidding for the coins? I don't think it would be the Chinese owned version.

There are no guarantees in crypto (i.e. there is no "impossible"), only probabilities. The probability is very low that a single entity would have the capability to achieve 51% of Bitcoin hash power in the same way that the probability is very low that a single entity would have the financial capability to achieve a similar stake in other cryptos that use PoS or derivative consensus mechanisms.

At the end of the day the real security lies in the social contract rather than the consensus technology. If the economic majority chooses to alter the state of the ledger, it can do that regardless of PoW and the rules in place for day to day consensus. The ETH/ETC hard fork showed us that.

 

Nope. Not conflicting.
I'm saying that the premise was that PoW means no bad actor can, and China showing us that what we thought not possible (or as you state - not probable) - can happen, if a big enough entity (aka China), decide that want it.

It won't matter.
I believe most of the money in the bitcoin comes from people who has no idea how bitcoin works, what is encryption, what is decentralised or anything real for that matter.
Those are people who heard bitcoin can make them rich and they dump their money into it.
Part of the reason why even the great hardware super secure wallets won't stop bitcoin from being stolen in the masses. People will buy a super duper extra safe biolaser hypersrive wallet from eBay cause it cost $20 less, just to store their $50,000 worth of bitcoin. People are stupid. And bitcoin is build for people who has brain.
If you'll tell me again that for those people (the vast majority) there will be "banks" to handle coins - then who needs crypto? The whole idea was to not have regulated institutions handling one's money.

If and when such hard fork will happen, the events leading to the hard fork might be the end of party.
The brainless people will go into panic mode, will try to dump all their coins, won't be able to, go into more panic, end up losing most or all of it (either cause the value will drop or cause someone will scam them "helping" them to get rid of the coins.
And it'll be very hard - to impossible to recover the coin.

 

LOL!

 

Indeed. BTW you sound like Saylor. Most can not understand this. See you on CT I guess. I don't bother with this stuff here wrong crowd.

 

Interesting timing. I wonder if it related to the AN0M app...

 

Is there not risk then people get robbed and lose everything lol? The day I can get some sort of insurance (with a payment of course) or it is included in my contents insurance I shall buy and hold crypto within the home. Otherwise I feel it is best to keep crypto on the exchange (even though that within itself is a risk). I've been robbed 3 times in 24 months. **** leaving a hardware wallet within the house and my keys somewhere if it is well hidden. These crims are smart.