War On Cryptocurrencies [LWN.net]

War On Cryptocurrencies

Posted Jan 13, 2018 11:30 UTC (Sat) by smurf (subscriber, #17840)
In reply to: War On Cryptocurrencies by excors
Parent article: Welcome to 2018

Well, in a rational world the Bitcoin A plus Bitcoin B price after the split would be the same as before, but there's no sane way to discover their relative utility (such as there is) beforehand. So the market will be volatile until that sort itself out. And since bitcoin volatility easily exceeds 20% over the course of a day or two …

Bitcoins per se aren't the problem IMHO. The idea itself has a lot of merit. And just like in the early days of industrialization there's a lot of cash and hype floating around, and there's stupid ideas like prohibiting dealing with cryprocurrencies instead of regulating the whole business (let's start with applying existing regulations to it) which is about as dumb, or long-term effective, as requiring a man with a red flag to walk in front of a car. You all know *that* story.

The one major problem I see is that proof-of-work leads to an arms race w/ investing in hardware that gets obsolete as soon as it's deployed. To be fair, nobody had any idea how to do a reasonable proof-of-stake system ten years ago. (Actually, proof-of-work is just proof-of-stake expressed in nonredeemable hardware and energy cost.) These days the Ethereum people are at least working on a viable solution. Bitcoin? not so much.

The other problem, which I'm not holding my breath about it getting resolved without another MtGox-like big crash (except that it's going to be worse), is Tether / Bitfinex. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/21/technology/bitcoin-bit...

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War On Cryptocurrencies

Posted Jan 18, 2018 2:57 UTC (Thu) by Garak (guest, #99377) [Link]

"which is about as dumb, or long-term effective, as requiring a man with a red flag to walk in front of a car. You all know *that* story."

Actually I must have missed that memo, please elaborate.

"The one major problem I see is that proof-of-work leads to an arms race w/ investing in hardware that gets obsolete as soon as it's deployed. To be fair, nobody had any idea how to do a reasonable proof-of-stake system ten years ago."

This sounds perhaps overfocused on the Bitcoin model. Another model I've been considering for more than a decade is something along the lines of bittorrent/network-file-sharing. I'm sure there have been and will be other quite different models than the bitcoin one (which I may not understand- is it basically about making the recursively generated ledger signature easier (less computationally costly) for the many wallet-nodes to compute?, i.e. is that the useful product of the proven work, or is there some other useful product, or none at all?)

NYTimes - "These days, no exchange is bigger than Bitfinex, an opaque operation that provides no information on its website about where it is or who operates the company."

For anecdotal evidence, I recently made my first (sub$100, entertainment/experimentation value) crytpocurrency buy from Coinbase(tm) because I saw it referenced in some cryptocurrency discussion thread, looked it up as being one of the top few, checked it's wikipedia page and saw it was headquartered in California, so figured it was safe enough. Oddly my visa transaction log shows 'FRGN TRANS FEE-COINBASE CH'. Which seems weird. I wouldn't have done business with them if I had thought it involved a financial transaction with a company in a foreign country. However despite these things, and despite a future with an equal proportion of shenanigans and charlottanism to what we have seen with traditional currency markets, I still would bet on the general future of cryptocurrency. With math discovery epochs along the way. Diversification of risk of course being the common sense wisdom.