MBitcoiner on Nostr: Barak Allahu feek. Thanks for taking the time to write this all out. We disagree ...
Barak Allahu feek. Thanks for taking the time to write this all out.
We disagree about Bitcoin having the same centralized influence as other cryptocurrencies. There is no one single entity that can change the monetary policy or force a hardfork. This has already been tried during the blocksize war and it failed miserably. I recommend the blocksize war by Jonathan Bier.
I will say that privacy is definitely one of the downsides right now in the Bitcoin space, but there are tools that are actively being developed to address this. The base layer of Bitcoin is optimized for transparency, so solutions for true anonymity will have be made on the higher layers, or exchanging btc peer to peer largely addresses this as well.
And you don't need a big investment to start a mining rig. There are very cheap options for people that want to mine at home. See bitaxe as an example.
And I also disagree with your point about bitcoins security as it relates to running a node. It's not because of "market adoption". The more people that are running nodes, the more distributed the network, the harder the network is to attack. Again, see the blocksize war for a real life example for how this played out, where the node runners ultimately prevailed over the big mining companies that wanted to force a block size increase.
Regarding the second point, perhaps reliability isn't the correct word here. But by design, updating and upgrading a centralized system is far easier and more desirable than trying to coordinate the upgrade of thousands of separate entities that are running and deploying the same service. And no, I honestly wouldn't care if "blockchain" had its Google moment or whatever. Literally changes nothing about Bitcoin dominating all other forms of money. I still fail to see the application of blockchain besides money.
The biggest disagreement I have is with the comparison of Bitcoin's tps to visa's tps. This doesn't take into account settlement assurance which is a concept that's described further down in the essay. Visa transactions are easily reversible and take weeks to finally "settle". Bitcoin on the other hand takes around 10 minutes to settle. Bitcoin's base layer settlement is better compared with swift or international settlement systems. But bitcoins higher layers, like the lightning network, can be compared to visa, since they're both payment networks.
We disagree about Bitcoin having the same centralized influence as other cryptocurrencies. There is no one single entity that can change the monetary policy or force a hardfork. This has already been tried during the blocksize war and it failed miserably. I recommend the blocksize war by Jonathan Bier.
I will say that privacy is definitely one of the downsides right now in the Bitcoin space, but there are tools that are actively being developed to address this. The base layer of Bitcoin is optimized for transparency, so solutions for true anonymity will have be made on the higher layers, or exchanging btc peer to peer largely addresses this as well.
And you don't need a big investment to start a mining rig. There are very cheap options for people that want to mine at home. See bitaxe as an example.
And I also disagree with your point about bitcoins security as it relates to running a node. It's not because of "market adoption". The more people that are running nodes, the more distributed the network, the harder the network is to attack. Again, see the blocksize war for a real life example for how this played out, where the node runners ultimately prevailed over the big mining companies that wanted to force a block size increase.
Regarding the second point, perhaps reliability isn't the correct word here. But by design, updating and upgrading a centralized system is far easier and more desirable than trying to coordinate the upgrade of thousands of separate entities that are running and deploying the same service. And no, I honestly wouldn't care if "blockchain" had its Google moment or whatever. Literally changes nothing about Bitcoin dominating all other forms of money. I still fail to see the application of blockchain besides money.
The biggest disagreement I have is with the comparison of Bitcoin's tps to visa's tps. This doesn't take into account settlement assurance which is a concept that's described further down in the essay. Visa transactions are easily reversible and take weeks to finally "settle". Bitcoin on the other hand takes around 10 minutes to settle. Bitcoin's base layer settlement is better compared with swift or international settlement systems. But bitcoins higher layers, like the lightning network, can be compared to visa, since they're both payment networks.