Bitcoin Developer declares the death of Bitcoin



  • https://medium.com/@octskyward/the-resolution-of-the-bitcoin-experiment-dabb30201f7#.kpm0wmzd6

    Think about it. If you had never heard about Bitcoin before, would you care about a payments network that:

    • Couldn’t move your existing money
    • Had wildly unpredictable fees that were high and rising fast
    • Allowed buyers to take back payments they’d made after walking out of shops, by simply pressing a button (if you aren’t aware of this “feature” that’s because Bitcoin was only just changed to allow it)
    • Is suffering large backlogs and flaky payments
    • … which is controlled by China
    • … and in which the companies and people building it were in open civil war?

    I’m going to hazard a guess that the answer is no.



  • It's about damn time that square wheel of a "currency" was laid to rest.



  • I never got around to learning what Bitcoin was, and apparently now I don't have to.

    Cool with me.


  • FoxDev

    It was meant to revolutionise money or something; in reality, it simply wasted millions of computing hours that could have been spent on more productive activities like streaming porn or hosting Halo deathmatches.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @RaceProUK said:

    it simply wasted millions of computing hours

    And a whole lot of people-who-weren't-me's money buying them.



  • This is a bad year indeed, it's only January and Bitcoin already died once. That's above average.

    @blakeyrat said:

    Allowed buyers to take back payments they’d made after walking out of shops, by simply pressing a button

    Actually, don't credit cards have that?


  • FoxDev

    @anonymous234 said:

    @blakeyrat said:
    Allowed buyers to take back payments they’d made after walking out of shops, by simply pressing a button

    Actually, don't credit cards have that?

    If by 'press a button' you mean 'spend six months fighting with the credit agency', then yes.


  • BINNED

    @RaceProUK said:

    productive activities like streaming porn

    :sadface:


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @RaceProUK said:

    If by 'press a button' you mean 'spend six months fighting with the credit agency', then yes.

    Not in the UK for credit card transactions (above £100, below £30,000). At least not if it's a legitimate claim (as in you didn't get the service/goods as described for which you paid, or the company goes bust before you get them.)

    Under Section 75 of the Consumer Credit Act, the credit card company is jointly and severally liable for any breach of contract or misrepresentation by the company.

    This means it is just as responsible as the retailer or trader for the goods or service supplied, allowing you to also put your claim to the credit card company.

    You don't have to reach a stalemate with the retailer or trader before you can contact your credit card provider - you can make a claim to both the retailer and credit card provider simultaneously, although you can't recover your losses from both.

    This right is particularly useful if the retailer or trader has gone bust, or it doesn't respond to your letters or phone calls.

    Debit card transactions have a sorta similar, but not as enforceable, scheme. (Section 75 is enshrined in law, Chargeback is only part of scheme rules.)


  • Java Dev

    :whoosh:


  • BINNED

    I think you are under estimating the seriousness of porn.

    <and over estimating the seriousness of my statements


  • Java Dev

    There's probably industries that think of themselves as extremely serious that turn around less money than porn.


  • BINNED

    Now you are just looking down at Pencil Pushers Inc.


  • Notification Spam Recipient

    @Luhmann said:

    I think you are under estimating the seriousness of porn.

    <and over estimating the seriousness of my statements

    They're predicting that porn will make or break vr. It certainly did the internet!

    My sister got a present of 5 bitcoins as a gag gift an age ago. She sold them when they were about €1000 a pop. Best gag gift ever.


  • BINNED

    @DogsB said:

    porn will make or break vr

    aka Teledildonics



  • At least you cannot single-sidedly take back the money.

    Say you run e-commerce business and someone buy something and then pay you some bitcoin, after the transaction is completed the buyer use a higher amount of same money elsewhere. RBF rule kicks in an suddenly the bitcoin transaction you think is completed and settled is invalidated.

    You suddenly found your bitcoin wallet shrinks, you may know that amount reduced but have no idea on which transaction goes wrong.

    Now what?

    I read the linked article in the linked article and it seems worse than what I originally thought

    The idea behind “scorched earth” is that if someone buys something with an unconfirmed transaction, when they walk out of the shop and press undo they double spend the original output to themselves with a higher fee, but the merchant sees this and then adds a spend-to-self transaction on top of their original payment with a slightly higher fee, and then the fraudsters wallet does the same to bump the fee on his chain of transactions, and so on and so on until the entire payment has been consumed in fees. The fraudster gets the goods, the payment is now going to a miner instead of the merchant, and the merchant is left with nothing.

  • area_deu

    My thought exactly. I have openly laughed into the face of everyone who was all hyped up about that bullshit for years now. Looks like I was right all along.
    I would love to see some numbers about how many tons of CO2 were created by "mining" (given that the majority of "miners" are in china now) and how much bigger the average car engine could have been instead.



  • The thing is, the economics of Bitcoin never worked anyway. The ultimately (and in this case, additionally so) constrained supply meant if demand were a thing, it would ultimately just push the price up and up and up to the point of absurdity.



  • This whole bitcoing thang always reminded me of the Tulip Mania in 1637.

    Tulip mania or tulipomania (Dutch names include: tulpenmanie, tulpomanie, tulpenwoede, tulpengekte and bollengekte) was a period in the Dutch Golden Age during which contract prices for bulbs of the recently introduced tulip reached extraordinarily high levels and then suddenly collapsed

    At the peak of tulip mania, in March 1637, some single tulip bulbs sold for more than 10 times the annual income of a skilled craftsman. It is generally considered the first recorded speculative bubble...

    Like Cartman, I never bothered getting into it, assuming (and probably an element of hoping) that it would all go away.
    I'm not a Luddite by any means, but this hyper-hyped "currency" never seemed real.


  • Notification Spam Recipient

    @skotl said:

    This whole bitcoing thang always reminded me of the Tulip Mania in 1637.
    Ah I remember that well. I was in Spaarndam recruiting for a minor Scottish rebellion and the local lads wanted to farm fucking tulips instead of proving their mettle on the battlefield.

    Incidentally the first time I met @boomzilla was a couple years later while he was escaping the NMA. He was wearing the most ridiculous bonnet I have ever seen.


  • FoxDev

    @DogsB said:

    Incidentally the first time I met @boomzilla was a couple years later while he was escaping the NMA. He was wearing the most ridiculous bonnet I have ever seen.

    I would have loved to have seen that 😄

    *goes to try and find a mad man with a blue box*



  • @Groaner said:

    It's about damn time that square wheel of a "currency" was laid to rest

    @cartman82 said:
    and apparently now I don't have to.

    @ChrisH said:
    Looks like I was right all along.

    OK now, a bit more seriously because it seems people are taking this too literally: bitcoin has not died yet, the system still works, people still use it, and they're still worth about $400 each which is less than what they were 2 years ago but still high if you compare it to further back.

    Yes, there are bad things happening in the Bitcoin Foundation but that's not the same as dying.


  • area_deu

    Think about it. If you had never heard about Bitcoin before, would you care about a payments network that:

    • Couldn’t move your existing money
    • Had wildly unpredictable fees that were high and rising fast
    • Allowed buyers to take back payments they’d made after walking out of shops, by simply pressing a button (if you aren’t aware of this “feature” that’s because Bitcoin was only just changed to allow it)
    • Is suffering large backlogs and flaky payments
    • … which is controlled by China
    • … and in which the companies and people building it were in open civil war?

    I’m going to hazard a guess that the answer is no.

    Sounds dead to me.


  • FoxDev

    If not dead, then definitely dying.



  • @RaceProUK said:

    If not dead, then definitely dying.

    Sadly, in the internet world, many things never go from "Dying" to "Dead"



  • It is, of course, Friday, September 8172, 1993.


  • Banned

    @RaceProUK said:

    If not dead, then definitely dying.

    You know what else is dying? C++.


  • FoxDev

    C++ is dying in the same way the Atlantic Ocean is dry or Antarctica is the hottest place on Venus.


  • area_deu

    @Gaska said:

    You know what else is dyingshit? C++.

    FTFY


  • Banned

    @RaceProUK said:

    C++ is dying in the same way the Atlantic Ocean is dry

    Except you don't hear anyone claiming Atlantic Ocean is dry.


  • FoxDev

    No-one's claiming C++ is dying either. Well, aside from a few crazy people who all got married to the same horse.


  • Banned

    @RaceProUK said:

    No-one's claiming C++ is dying either.

    Not at all.

    @RaceProUK said:

    Well, aside from a few crazy people who all got married to the same horse.

    The good thing about calling someone crazy is that you can exclude arbitrary groups of people from your data and still say your statement describes whole population without feeling like you're lying.


  • FoxDev

    Of those three articles:

    • The first uses a position in the top 10 of search engine hits without paying any attention to the raw data and the fact it's not a good metric to use; it's therefore bollocks.
    • The second uses commits in open source projects, an extremely poor metric for language usage since it misses all closed-source software; it's therefore bollocks.
    • The third is extrapolating the state of the industry from their own experience; in other words, they're talking bollocks.

    The problem is people believe articles and posts like that without thinking, and it just feeds the ever-growing mass of misinformation and FUD. The fact is that C++ is going nowhere; it'll be around for a long time yet.


  • BINNED

    @RaceProUK said:

    - The first uses a position in the top 10 of search engine hits without paying any attention to the raw data and the fact it's not a good metric to use; it's therefore bollocks.

    Most of my searches when using C++ don't even include it as a keyword, I'm mostly looking for "how to best do this in Qt" rather than "raw" C++. I wouldn't be surprised if this happens a lot with any other popular libraries/frameworks. So yeah, I agree completely.


  • Notification Spam Recipient

    @RaceProUK said:

    The fact is that C++ is going nowhere; it'll be around for a long time yet.
    Much like cobol and rpg. I had a peak at a tesco screen the other day while the techie was working with it and saw that green text on black background and nearly wet myself. Some horrors will never leave me.

    I hear that C# is going to die sometime soon. 🚎


  • BINNED

    @DogsB said:

    Much like cobol

    Hey we killed of our Cobol last year. This year IDMS follows. So we will only be left with assembly on the mainframe ...



  • Did some of you look at the comments under the article? Hilarious.


  • ♿ (Parody)

    LOL:

    Thanks Mike for all your efforts for Bitcoin. I apologize for the rude comments coming from the same people who censor fora and launch DDoS attacks.

    On Civilized Discourse, forum denies service to you!


  • Banned

    @RaceProUK said:

    Of those three articles:

    • The first uses a position in the top 10 of search engine hits without paying any attention to the raw data and the fact it's not a good metric to use; it's therefore bollocksexists.
    • The second uses commits in open source projects, an extremely poor metric for language usage since it misses all closed-source software; it's therefore bollocksexists.
    • The third is extrapolating the state of the industry from their own experience; in other words, they're talking bollocksexists.

    This is enough to prove my point that some people say that C++ is dying. In no way it means I claim that C++ is actually dying. Much like creationism is bullshit, but creationists are real thing.

  • FoxDev

    So basically, you agree with me, but fancied arguing anyway.


  • Banned

    No, I do not agree that

    @RaceProUK said:

    No-one's claiming C++ is dying


  • FoxDev

    And because you insist on snipping out what you don't like, here's the rest of it:
    @RaceProUK said:

    Well, aside from a few crazy people who all got married to the same horse.


  • Banned

    And here's my rationale for snipping it out, which you seem to missed entirely:

    @Gaska said:

    The good thing about calling someone crazy is that you can exclude arbitrary groups of people from your data and still say your statement describes whole population without feeling like you're lying.


  • FoxDev

    Well, if you want to reduce the argument to total absurdity, then go ahead. The fact remains that my point stands on its own merit, and you agreed with it.



  • @DogsB said:

    My sister got a present of 5 bitcoins as a gag gift an age ago.

    At one point I had like 1.5 of them (because that was early enough that you could find sites that would give you .5 BC "for free" as a way of encouraging adoption.)

    I lost the wallet ID of course, so now they're lost forever. Something Satoshi didn't consider I guess when he decided there would only ever be a set amount of them.


  • Banned

    @RaceProUK said:

    Well, if you want to reduce the argument to total absurdity, then go ahead.

    You know what's absurd? Calling non-empty set of people "no one".


  • Banned

    @RaceProUK said:

    The fact remains that my point stands on its own merit, and you agreed with it.

    Well, yeah, but you seem to also missed why I mentioned C++ at all to start with.


  • FoxDev

    Because you're a troll itching for an argument? 🚎


  • Banned

    No, because Bitcoin.


  • ♿ (Parody)

    :letitgo.yar:


Log in to reply