Not sure, what exactly is the point you are trying to make. Government does not control the Decentralized BTC ledger, they cannot manipulate it.
You can only regulate custodial / centralized finance institutions. DeFi cannot be regulated. Regulating Bitcoin = Regulating Internet. You can’t, you can only shut it down, which won’t stop, it will only prevent new fiat inflows, by closing fiat onramps. OTC / P2P buying could still infiltrate and cause capital inflows into Digital Assets.
I have traded crypto-currencies. I’m not a HODLer by nature so I’ve missed out on big runs.
Right now, a worthwhile crypto-currency to track is PolkaDot:
I was bullish on Cardano but its development hasn’t reached where PolkaDot is now. PolkaDot is well suited as the coin for DeFi projects to launch on due to its cross chain swap technologies.
Found an interesting website on cryptocurrency www.nitrate.in the website has basics explained with videos from youtube.
Also the below i guess are some important thoughts / perspectives from legends on this technology.
Drinking Tears of perma bears gives me strength to HODL bitcoin through the volatility.
It was last year I was arguing the benefits on this thread. Now we have worlds best hedge fund managers and technocrats making the arguments on our behalf.
Various narratives will emerge and test the robustness of Bitcoin as a tech and its network effects. Bitcoin shall overcome each one.
I can now finally rest and just keep hitting refresh on my portfolio screen.
WazirX
China Russia & Iran already control 90% of bitcoin’s hash rate and now this happens
Why is Iran’s central bank so interested in a currency which cannot be regulated? Maybe because this allows them to bypass US sanctions? Or perhaps they like the thrill of crypto volatility? Or perhaps they believe that a “decentralized” currency (not) which 3 countries control (actually China alone has > 70% of the hash rate) is the future?
After Mining Crackdown in China, hash rate has taken a steep drop, however over the course of next year we will see a rise as some Mining Cos are shifting operations to Texas. The criticism that China controls 60% of the hash rate no longer holds water.
This event has completely changed the Crypto Market Trend
At the heart of the capitalism lies property right. Most people would not work hard without the right to spend their earnings as he/she sees fit. Respect for property rights distinguishes the prospering countries from chaotic ones. A just society, with strong guarantee of property rights, unleashes the entrepreneurial spirit of its working population, whereas an unfair society keeps falling into chaos.
Although violence threatens property rights, its guarantee is provided by the threat of bigger violence - that is government. The government is given the monopoly over just use of violence, and it is expected that a fair government will only use it to protect property rights of its citizens. Whether it is land, gold, or equity, we have to rely on threat of violence (from government) to enforce their just ownership. Until 2008, there has never been an asset whose just ownership did not rely on violence.
But the invention of Bitcoin by Satoshi Nakamoto changed that. For the first time, we have an asset (bitcoins) whose ownership is guaranteed by mathematics, and not by violence. Like land, there is only finite amount of bitcoin. Like gold, it can be used as a form of money without relying on any government. But those metaphors only explain some features of Bitcoin. In truth, something like Bitcoin has never existed, and if this experiment fails, we might not get another such asset in future.
Bitcoin suffers from a distribution problem. (Early adopters got most of the pie and within 12 years of its existence 90% of the supply is already mined. The distribution was most certainly not equitable and the price volatility testifies the concentration of wealth among those at the top of the pyramid.) This will be a threat to Bitcoin’s long term security if price doesn’t stay suitably elevated.
Bitcoin network is controlled by a cabal of rent seekers called Miners who have historical been opposed to the best interests of improving the network and user experience. Meet Miners, our new masters, gone are the days of Central Bankers.
Number go up, narratives/use cases emerge. Number goes down, BTC becomes practically worthless. Using Bitcoin is 2021 is akin to using Dial up modem in 2021. Massive scaling issues.
Bitcoin is a wasteful and inefficient way to transfer value. Price is pumping so why not greenwash it? https://www.cnbc.com/2021/07/14/bitcoin-looks-attractive-from-an-esg-standpoint-says-ark-invests-cathie-wood.html
Bitcoin is a poor poster boy for crypto technology and portrays crypto to outsiders as energy intensive, serving no external world purpose. It was not always that away. Those who were in it for the tech have left and those who are in it for the money will shamelessly shill and give you mindless permabull predictions.
It is more equitable then pre-issue of coins in ICO. There was no pre-issue, and anybody can mine bitcoins. It takes tremendous foresight on the part of those who held through over 10x gain bull and over 80% drawdown bear markets. Besides we are still early. There are more dollar millionaires in world than the number of bitcoins.
Unlike Central Bankers, miners cannot change the monetary policy of Bitcoin. As I mentioned in my previous post, the ownership of bitcoin is guaranteed by mathematics, and no amount of brute force can change it. That is to say, miners cannot reverse or make invalid transactions, as those transactions will be verified by node before adding it to the blockchain. The only thing miners can do is to censure some transaction, and possibly prevent the adoption some network improvements. That will require a united effort from all miners and we haven’t had any such issue till now.
Clearly you haven’t tried lightning.
I assume the alternative you are suggesting is proof of stake. Proof of stake is an old idea, that proceeded proof of work which was introduced by Nakamoto in his 2008 paper. In proof of stake, security of past transactions does not increase as more transactions are added to its chain. This may give the validators power over censuring any past transaction. That is not something possible in proof of work, you can only censure future transaction through united efforts of miners.
That is certainly not true. I am myself a dev trying to contribute my best to bitcoin infrastructure in my free time, and I can attest that there is lot of good work being carried out in Bitcoin. Some are working on base layer, implementing decentralized exchange (Bisq), or better wallets (Bluewallet, Samourai), or one step solution to running on your own node (Umbrel),or payment processor (BTCpay). A lot of work is also being done to develop layer 2 (lightning, sidechains) applications, which would enable Bitcoin to scale.
Sure, that doesn’t mean Block halving is a good way to distribute coins. Allowing anyone to mine is a good idea, however Block halving creates a pyramid scheme like distribution structure.
Not endorsing the below project but it seems to have a solution for Fair Distribution. (https://zero-zed.com/)
Disc: I do not own/mine zero-zed
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sCt3iikKy3o
Block size wars? No? Initially Bitcoin’s block size was 32 MB which was changed to 1 MB to combat spam transactions. Satoshi would have certainly changed the block size above 1 MB if he were around, to the displeasure of miners.
Yes, I haven’t. Bitcoin had “one job” to transfer value and can’t do it well on-chain even after 10 years, that we need centralized L2s. Jumping hoops to L2 and L3 waters down decentralization and requires some degree of trust in the security of underlying L2.
Agreed on this one. But Governments have the power to censor PoW networks a la Chinese Miner Crackdown, PoW will be more resilient as it can be done pseudonymously without actually requiring physical space like ASIC farms or data centers.
Agreed. Wallet tech has certainly progressed. Still trying to build layers around BTC to make it scale, doesn’t it defeat the original vision to BTC? Bitcoin will lose its soul as we move away from mainnet to sidechains and secondary layers. Masses may adopt, but a truly tech savvy person would prefer a hassle free L1.
I don’t follow how it becomes a pyramid scheme. The way I see, if we didn’t had halving, bitcoin supply would have been higher than it is now, and its price would have been lower than present, allowing newcomers like me, who came to know about it late, to accumulate more. But from Austrian Economics perspective, money production (like gold mining) is a wasteful activity, and money producers are parasite who live by inflating, thereby indirectly stealing, the value of existing money. Bitcoin, by halving, ensures that money production will eventually stop and that the total supply of bitcoins will be limited. This makes it an ideal money from economic perspective, and as investor, we can only bet on the winning horse, instead of complaining about it being unfair to newcomers.
Please check your information source. I had to go and skim through book “The Blocksize Wars” to make sure I hadn’t misread things (as I was unaware of Bitcoin back then). There was no size limit, until Satoshi himself put the 1 MB limit at block height 79,400. No reasoning was given for 1 MB limit, but spam transaction couldn’t have been one. Every transaction need to spend fees to be included in limited block space, which would make spamming economically costly and unsustainable in long run. A very low fee transaction, which has no chance of getting included in winning block, will even get ignored by the nodes and won’t manage to propagate, much less become spam.
An argument for a limited block size can be made on the ground of miner death spiral, which will come into action once the bock subsidy ends, and if the marginal cost of including transaction is zero (which would be the case without block limit).
Once we agree on limited block size, one can argue that smaller blocks lead to greater decentralization, as running node remains cheap.
Agree. Satoshi’s vision was probably to scale Bitcoin at layer 1 and reach the capability of VISA’s system. But as a computer scientist, I think the idea of broadcasting a small transaction, between two honest parties, to the whole world is unjustifiable. The world doesn’t need to know my act of buying a cup of coffee, as long as I am honest. Only when there is a dispute does one need to invoke base layer. In this way transactions can remain private while judiciously using the most important resource - the block space.
You can look at the Bitcoin Wiki to get some background. I’m sorry, I didn’t mention it clearly enough in my previous post.
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Scalability_FAQ
Bitcoin Core was initially released without an explicit block size limit. However, the code did limit network messages to a maximum of 32 MiB, setting an effective upper bound on block size.[2]
Around 15 July 2010, Satoshi Nakamoto changed Bitcoin Core’s mining code so that it wouldn’t create any blocks larger than 990,000 bytes.[3]
Two months later on 7 September 2010, Nakamoto changed Bitcoin Core’s consensus rules to reject blocks larger than 1,000,000 bytes (1 megabyte) if their block height was higher than 79,400.[4] (Block 79,400 was later produced on 12 September 2010.[5])
True. At B Word, Elon joked to lower BTC block time to keep the cost of running a node cheap.
Please read Satoshi’s posts, and take a note of how many times he references the term “micropayments”. Clearly, Satoshi’s vision of peer to peer electronic payments network has been bastardized.
Ledger bloat is inevitable.
It’s hard for people to give up control over, what they deem, their creation when it grows beyond any individual or organization. That is what happened to the lead developer Gavin Andresen when he pushed for the change in block size limit, triggering what is now known as Blocksize wars. The significance of the war goes beyond deciding just the blocksize limit. It raised question about who controls Bitcoin, who decides what is good for Bitcoin, and how to rollout changes while making sure everyone in the ecosystem - the developers, node users, miners, exchanges, investor, etc are on board. When Bitcoin was a small experiment, it was easy for developer to decide what’s good and how to implement it. But without their realisation, Bitcoin grew beyond them, and the network no longer supported top to down changes introduced/supported by those who believed them to be in power - earliest developers, biggest miner, largest exchanges, early investors. Though these people had a lot of power, they found it impossible to ignore bottom level users and force their changes on the ecosystem. Bitcoin has proven itself resilient against takeover by powerful groups, and hopefully will remain so when it faces even more powerful enemies like central banks and governments.
This is my interpretation from reading
The book reads like thriller, describing the war between large blockers, people who felt Bitcoin fees should be kept low while supporting high transaction throughput so it can be adopted by merchants as payment system. They viewed Bitcoin akin to startup where you need to move fast to capitalize on the advantages you have today. On other hand were small blockers, people who had a more longer term vision. They saw Bitcoin as a new monetary system, and for them it was alright to forgo short term advantage of being better payment system than VISA or Mastercard, if it leads to a more stable and resilient system which can stand against any adversary.
Caution: even though I have a good grasp of how Bitcoin, Segwit, and Lightning works, a lot of technical comments went over my head. This book may not be the right for those who have just started going down the Bitcoin rabbit-hole.
Random observation - this thread gets a lot of posts during a strong up move by bitcoin. December, Feb, March and now August.
Seems the maximalists were too busy buying the dip when bitcoin fell by 40% between March and August 
Most people do not “withdraw” equity. They keep the equity with trusted third party, i.e., in the demat accounts. The same can be done with bitcoin. If you trust the exchanges, like zebpay, you can keep your bitcoin with them, without ever incurring any transaction cost. In future, when the exchanges integrate lightning, it will also become very cheap to take self-custody of your bitcoin.
Hahah!
When I made the post on 26th July, BTC price was hovering around 35k. It bottomed out at 29k, so it was still somewhat early. I’m sure many folks like me would have missed the dip waiting for bullish signals. I personally aped into ETH when BTC was 36k. The trend is still bullish, you’re welcome to jump in at 43k. Not Financial Advice.
Unfortunately, treating Bitcoin or other cryptos like equity is not good idea. The sooner exchanges integrate with Lightning Network, the better it will be for everyone.
Crypto Hedge Manager Ari Paul’s recent twitter thread has some words of caution :
Even for major exchanges like Binance, Huobi and OkEx customer support are laggards and take weeks and months to resolve customer issues.
With Banking Partners cutting ties with Binance from left and right, Regulators from different countries calling their business activity illegal, we are tempted to wonder whether History is repeating itself?
Could Binance suffer the same fate as Mt. Gox?
Maybe you only notice Bitcoin when its price is moving up.
This thread was created in 2017, and still has less than 300 posts, including mine, many of which were posted when the price was well below 10k. This should tell you about the level of activity on this thread.
In fact the most discussed threads in that period were of Yes bank, DHFL, Indiabulls, etc. People tend to discuss more when market price of some stock has crashed a lot. Bitcoin does not get that attention, when its price crashes, because its price is still perceived to be higher even after the crash. Crashing 50% after going up 6 times, means the price is still 3 times up. Most people lose money in market because they want to catch stocks at all time low, instead of buying a technically strong stock during healthy correction.
Bitcoin is not like a stock, where no harm done if you miss the rally, and you can continue to focus on stocks within your competence. Bitcoin raises fundamental questions about what money is, what is the importance of a store of value, what will happen if we change our unit of accounting. We are children of the inflation era, where the unit of account (dollar or rupee) is tending to zero, and therefore stock markets seems to always go up if you wait long enough. But that will change if Bitcoin is successful. If our unit of account is deflationary, stock market can go sideways for decades, and making money from equity investing or any other asset investing like commodities, property, etc, will become much more difficult. At that point, most people will do well by just stacking bitcoins and focusing their efforts on their work, instead of becoming investing professionals that they are now forced to become.
