- Aug 22, 2015
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@lunar
That is a nice and well-researched article.
That is a nice and well-researched article.
i disagree,I'm skeptical of these off-chain systems that trade trivial vanity amounts, because as of yet it doesn't look like there's any real economic utility to these kinds of transactions. It's a cool idea to tip bitcoin to people over social media / websites, but it's not exactly solving any real economic problem (at least as of yet).
There are so many use-cases on the other hand that make lots of sense right now today, and this is nowhere near exhaustive:
-Store of value / capital flight / portfolio management (i.e. looking for growth assets with high risk / high return to diversify against more low risk / low return assets)
-Remittance (it doesn't need to be reduced to some no-brainer Bitcoin in the background type situation, Chinese people for example in the US can easily purchase bitcoin and immediately send to relatives who will have no trouble getting CNY or whatever they want there)
-International B2B settlement (ability to pay suppliers immediately is amazing in the numerous countries around the world with insane red tape, for instance having to wait for authorization from the central bank)
- Domestic B2B settlement, there are a lot of situations in highly volatile fast-moving businesses such as logistics where organizations suffer from the fact that all business has to be conducted through credit arrangements that take a long time to setup through corporate accounting departments. Many LTL trucking businesses for example are willing to do pickups at the drop of a hat for businesses with whom they have no-pre-existing business arrangements if presented on pickup with a cashier's check. Bitcoin is ideal for these situations that require cash payment (or equivalent) for one-off emergency service, and could facilitate alot of efficiency by allowing buyers and sellers of services to do business without the existing friction. These scenarios are extremely common, for example in vicinity of New York City and Los Angeles, there is literally an entire third party warehousing economy built on the fact that small delays in container schedules can over-burden existing warehousing arrangements for unloading and reloading onto more long-haul roadworthy trailers, so there is constant shopping around of nearby providers to handle overflow.
- Cash-based e-commerce in areas with poor credit card acceptance / availability, or where the seller needs to settle quickly in order to properly provide service with chargeback risk
- International freelancing for any kinds of services that are easily remotely-deliverable (graphic/website design, writing blog/news copy, translation services, coding, etc.)
- and just to keep it real, let's not forget everything black market, which is an immediate no-brainer.
None of these use-cases specifically need any over-engineered off-chain solution at all.
Again, disagree...Calling for thoughts on what the fate of chaintip means for off-chain solutions.
Chaintip (formerly bitcointip) is a quick and easy way for people on social media to donate or pay small sums to each other. This seems like a promising niche. Sure it might not make profits to begin with, but neither does Twitter or Snapchat and many others.
People aren't using chaintip enough, and as /u/giszmo points out: this type of service should have flourished with on-chain fee pressure. It hasn't and frankly that does not bode well for the Lightning Network either. So "Why should LN attract huge off-chain volume when even a toy example like chaintip fails?" (where trust isn't much of an issue because micropayments).
Might have to look in mempool. If the fee isn't large enough at the time, they might not make it in.So, no proof of life for JA from Wikileaks. It's all "black PR". Uh huh.
So many rabbit holes, so little time.
I wonder if (when?) those insurance file passwords will turn up in the blockchain.
Would be good publicity for Bitcoin.
https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/5ddiqw/im_haipo_yang_founder_and_ceo_of_viabtc_ask_me/Great write up of the Haipo Yang's, - ViaBTC AMA today on reddit.
You have to like this quote
https://www.cryptocoinsnews.com/majority-miners-planning-shift-bitcoin-unlimited-says-viabtcs-founder/
don't forget to vote
how about this, when users want to withdraw all their tip jar money they have to pay a 1% fee.There is literally no imaginable business model for ChangeTip that does not involve in some way monetizing the personal information or at least aggregated analytics of its users, and the fact that BashCo has been flagrantly in a position of conflict-of-interest being a toxic /r/bitcoin mod and having extraordinary means to target the personal information of reddit users who might've linked to platforms with more personally-identifiable information is fucking bonkers.
more fun things to read, ill save this for tomorrowThis article is fantastic. Some of my favorite excerpts below, but definitely read the whole thing.
Artificially Limiting the Blocksize to Create a "Fee Market" = Another Variety of Lifting the 21 Million Bitcoin Cap
...
But even if the reader is unfamiliar with economics to the point that there seems a way for this to somehow be more profitable for the miners, exorbitantly over-free-market-rate fees nevertheless violate the original sound-money aspects of Bitcoin equally as much as raising the 21 million coin cap. Many will object here: losing your purchasing power only when you spend it is different than losing it when you are just holding it. Yes, it is different, and that difference does create a change in user behavior; they will tend to consolidate transactions more, spend less often, etc.
However, these differences in incentivized behavior must never be allowed to obscure the fact that there is no principled distinction, as far as sound money is concerned, between (1) unsoundness by arbitrary additional payment to miners via extra block rewards (>21M) and (2) unsoundness by arbitrary additional per-tx payment to miners via fees that are many times higher than the free-market clearing rate. Either way, users are leached of a great deal of purchasing power they invested believing they would not be leached of. This undermines the entire point of holding BTC in the first place.
...
Bitcoin is not competing only against fiat money and gold. Bitcoin is competing against the most powerful, fastest, most optimized, most cost-efficient version of itself that can be created.
That means Bitcoin of today competes against every altcoin, albeit with a massive advantage in network effect. However, massively overpriced fees due to developer-knows-best economic intervention are just the trick to open a great big gash in that network effect advantage.
...
No person or group is qualified to dictate consensus settings, even should we dare allow one to, and I find it in bad taste for developers to cajole people into adopting such settings — as has been the practice heretofore — by bundling them up in a package with the rest of their code offerings in a “love it or leave it” gesture that forces users to choose their controversial consensus settings and their dev teams as a tightly bound set. Gratitude only goes so far. This is like the landlord who demands to be part of every important decision, such as who you date, because they are letting you stay for free.
This is why I like Bitcoin Unlimited. The dev team is all from the big block school, but they don’t try to force you into any controversial consensus settings just because you prefer their team or their implementation. Bitcoin Unlimited is the “no strings attached” implementation. In that way, they have opened up a market process among miners, which is a major step. Whereas — for better or worse — Bitcoin Core has so far been the “clingy ex-girlfriend” implementation.
Whichever team or philosophy you like best, I hope everyone in Bitcoin — being a free-marketeer — realizes that only the market can effectively aggregate and distill the knowledge of diverse persons across the community, anonymous and well-known, by putting their money where their mouth is. This process of opening the Bitcoin ledger to market decision-making has a name in the world of blockchains. It is called a “hard fork.” A controversial hard fork, to be precise, because without controversy there is no need to bring the matter to the market — in such mundane cases it is merely a protocol upgrade.