Rassah Posted December 24, 2017 Share Posted December 24, 2017 12 hours ago, WileyWarWeasel said: @Rassah Perhaps banks aren't trustworthy if you're not friends with the right people in them (not saying I am just that they don't offer the same shitty service to all ). I'm not talking about the service, I'm talking about the inflating, seizing or restricting funds because of government regs, and other crap that governments make them do. Even transferring large sums ($50k for instance) is a pain in the ass! 12 hours ago, WileyWarWeasel said: Bitcoin isn't used as money (for transactions) by the vast majority of people "using" it, they're only in it for bigger fools to buy in later. Maybe, but it's not "fools" if the people buying it later are doing it to actually use it. 12 hours ago, WileyWarWeasel said: As for the rest, the previous arguments still stand: bitcoin is far more volatile than the vast majority of currencies I never disputed that. The previous argument also still stands that as its adoption increases, it's volatility decreases, and will continue to decrease. 12 hours ago, WileyWarWeasel said: Don't pretend you're not looking at Ash's posts either ;P I'm not. 3 hours ago, EXA said: Bitcoiners are very normal men with very normal brains. https://twitter.com/i_zzzzzz/status/944379028642893826 https://twitter.com/i_zzzzzz/status/944382521701273600 https://twitter.com/i_zzzzzz/status/944719481812799488 I don't even know who that guy is, or who any of those guys are. They're not really representative of typical bitcoin users anyway. Most of them don't bother with Reddit. They're too busy doing business, or driving lambos. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AshleyAshes Posted December 24, 2017 Share Posted December 24, 2017 So, in conclusion, even Rassah himself would not use bitcoin to pay wages, unless those wages came with the bizarroland clause of the rate being paid could change DAILY. Bitcoin: No, really, it's a currency. Oh, no, fuck no, I wouldn't pay someone's WAGES in bitcoin though. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
WileyWarWeasel Posted December 25, 2017 Share Posted December 25, 2017 @RassahYou don't seriously think that everyone is treated the same by governments and banks, especially if they know the right people and/or have greased the right palms? As for Bitcoin, you keep dancing around the fact that barely anyone uses it as an actual currency (for everyday transactions in case you've forgotten). Given its recent movements I wouldn't say its volatility is decreasing either. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Rassah Posted December 25, 2017 Share Posted December 25, 2017 1 hour ago, WileyWarWeasel said: @RassahYou don't seriously think that everyone is treated the same by governments and banks, especially if they know the right people and/or have greased the right palms? Of course not! You have to be pretty rich and pretty connected to get access to some pretty nice and unlimited banking services. Or you could be a random Joe schmoe, and just download a bitcoin app on your phone and get most of the same services. It's only the interface back to fiat that's still a problem, but it's a temporary problem, since fiat is temporary. Actually I think this recent price run-up may be the last time we have bitcoin go up and then pop. Next time, if Lightning Network is out and working, the price may go so high that it causes hyperbitcoinization... 1 hour ago, WileyWarWeasel said: As for Bitcoin, you keep dancing around the fact that barely anyone uses it as an actual currency (for everyday transactions in case you've forgotten). Well, sure. People still use their main currency because it's the one most widely accepted. So what? That doesn't detract from the fact that bitcoin has value, that it's very good money, that it's already used to store and send value, and that it's growing exponentially. It will be used as actual currency by everyone eventually. It's practically as inevitable as everyone using the internet or email. The technology and money is just too superior to the old systems. 1 hour ago, WileyWarWeasel said: Givenits recent movements I wouldn't say its volatility is decreasing either. It is, actually. Back in... 2013?... it was normal for it to fluctuate between $7 and $10 a day. Like, that wasn't a spike or a crash, or even an eventful day, it would just jump around in price for no reason. That's 30% swings. This year daily swings have been around 2% to 4%. Even the crazy spike days were only 8% or so. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AshleyAshes Posted December 25, 2017 Share Posted December 25, 2017 26 minutes ago, Rassah said: Or you could be a random Joe schmoe, and just download a bitcoin app on your phone and get most of the same services. Except for the critical service of 'Being able to actually buy things at nearly any location with ease' bit. ...But... Ya know... Minor detail. Meanwhile I can just tap my bank card at literally anywhere I shop and the money is deducted from my bank account to the merchant and I get to own things instantly. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
WileyWarWeasel Posted December 25, 2017 Share Posted December 25, 2017 @RassahThe daily volatility (especially the latest downward slides) have been of a greater percentage than that. Given the transaction costs and time even at small scale we have yet to see the supposed superiority of this technology. Maybe if the significant issues are solved, the currency stablizes and people actually use it as a currency it might be something more than a pyramid scheme only having "value" because of outside suckers coming in with sovereign currency. 10 hours ago, Rassah said: download a bitcoin app on your phone and get most of the same services. Again this is flat out untrue. Barely any businesses or individuals use it for actual transactions. 11 hours ago, Rassah said: It's only the interface back to fiat that's still a problem, but it's a temporary problem, since fiat is temporary. Interesting, care to explain what you mean by temporary in this case? 10 hours ago, AshleyAshes said: Except for the critical service of 'Being able to actually buy things at nearly any location with ease' bit. ...But... Ya know... Minor detail. Meanwhile I can just tap my bank card at literally anywhere I shop and the money is deducted from my bank account to the merchant and I get to own things instantly. Quiet you fool, don't you know that digital transactions were impossible until 2009 when an unknown individual calling themselves "Satoshi Nakamoto" invented it? :V Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Rassah Posted December 25, 2017 Share Posted December 25, 2017 6 hours ago, WileyWarWeasel said: @RassahThe daily volatility (especially the latest downward slides) have been of a greater percentage than that. No, I meant a normal day when it wasn't really climbing or dropping was doing that, every day. Not like the recent run-up and subsequent slight pull back. What's going on right now is kind of an unusual event. Quote Giventhe transaction costs and time even at small scale we have yet to see the supposed superiority of this technology. We've already seen it though. Buy BTC, send it, and sell it, for a total of about $0.10, is what buyers and merchants were doing just a few years ago. They were giving discounts on using bitcoin over credit cards because it was so much cheaper and faster. The scalability just failed to keep up with the sudden MASSIVE adoption, but it's getting there. Quote ...it might be something more than a pyramid scheme only having "value" because of outside suckers coming in with sovereign currency. That's the only reason all money has value, dude. It's a piece of paper that is only valuable because you hope there's an outside sucker who will take it from you in exchange for something else valuable. You all don't seem to understand bitcoin as money because you don't understand money itself, which is all just a collective delusion and a pyramid. Quote Again this is flat out untrue. Barely any businesses or individuals use it for actual transactions. Oh, people don't use banks for "actual transactions." They use it to safely store their money, and to send value to others. You're thinking payment processors. Quote Interesting, care to explain what you mean by temporary in this case? You know what I mean. http://nakamotoinstitute.org/mempool/hyperbitcoinization/ http://nakamotoinstitute.org/mempool/speculative-attack/ All fiat is temporary, having an average life span of 27 years. Hell, the internet existed longer than the Euro. Quote "Meanwhile I can just tap my bank card at literally anywhere I shop and the money is deducted from my bank account to the merchant and I get to own things instantly." Meanwhile I can just tap my bitcoin backed BitPay VISA bank card literally anywhere I shop and the money is deducted from my bitcoin account to the merchant, anywhere in the world and in any currency, and I get to own things instantly. So what? I can do that too. Can Ashley order anything she wants off Amazon for 15% off with free shipping? I'm guessing no. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AshleyAshes Posted December 25, 2017 Share Posted December 25, 2017 2 hours ago, Rassah said: Meanwhile I can just tap my bitcoin backed BitPay VISA bank card literally anywhere I shop and the money is deducted from my bitcoin account to the merchant, anywhere in the world and in any currency, and I get to own things instantly. So what? I can do that too. That's funny, because BitPay seems to otherwise; https://bitpay.com/card/#howitworks Quote The BitPay Card is one of the fastest, easiest ways to turn your bitcoin into dollars. Quote Load dollars onto your BitPay Card using your bitcoin wallet Quote Load your card with dollars using your bitcoin wallet, or via direct deposit through your employer. The Bitpay Visa Debit card is literally nothing more than a bog standard Visa Debit Card that must be pre-loaded with US Dollars. While it does use BitCoin to BUY the USD that the card is pre-loaded with, it's still just that, a Visa Debit Card pre-loaded with USD. The only thing being bought with bitcoin is the USD that the card is being pre-loaded with. The actual transaction with the merchant is in good old fashioned fiat currency. Once again we return to the root criticism in this thread that we keep coming back too; BitCoin continues to serve negligible function beyond being used to buy OTHER currencies and that it considered to have no value beyond how much of a DIFFERENT currency that it can buy. Any examples of BitCoin having 'practical, every day usability' are entirely reliant on the long standing financial and payment systems which BitCoin is supposed to have replaced. Also, as a side note, with how brilliant Rassah wants to believe he is, you'd think that his example of 'Using Bitcoin Anywhere' wouldn't be entirely reliant on the US Dollar and VisaNet. Most people would be smart enough to not expose their argument to a take down like that. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
WileyWarWeasel Posted December 26, 2017 Share Posted December 26, 2017 @RassahStill not the kind of volatility you want, though again hardly anyone uses it for transactions anyway. 5 hours ago, Rassah said: The scalability just failed to keep up with the sudden MASSIVE adoption People aren't adopting it for transactions, they're using it because they're hoping bigger suckers will give them more "real" currency for it than what they paid. 5 hours ago, Rassah said: That's the only reason all money has value, dude. It's a piece of paper that is only valuable because you hope there's an outside sucker who will take it from you in exchange for something else valuable. You all don't seem to understand bitcoin as money because you don't understand money itself, which is all just a collective delusion and a pyramid. You don't seem to understand that people aren't exchanging bitcoin for goods and services (except in a few very rare cases) like any other normal currency they're only buying in to it hoping that others from outside will give them "real" currency for it. How many times does this need to be repeated? Ten years after its release, bitcoin is rarely being used for trading for goods and services like a REAL currency. If anything one can call it a derivative currency, because its only value is in trading real currency for it and back again. A derivative of a collective delusion and a pyramid within a pyramid one could say 5 hours ago, Rassah said: Oh, people don't use banks for "actual transactions." I never said people use banks like currencies, I've been saying this entire time that they've been using real currencies for transactions. You know, US dollars, Canadian dollars and so on? 5 hours ago, Rassah said: You know what I mean. http://nakamotoinstitute.org/mempool/hyperbitcoinization/ http://nakamotoinstitute.org/mempool/speculative-attack/ All fiat is temporary, having an average life span of 27 years. Hell, the internet existed longer than the Euro. And here I was daring to hope you were alluding to something beyond the financial realm. Yes fiat currencies come and go, but that doesn't validate pyramid schemes such as this. You can pretend not to see Ash's post about the preloaded USD for Bitpay. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Rassah Posted December 26, 2017 Share Posted December 26, 2017 2 hours ago, WileyWarWeasel said: @Rassah People aren't adopting it for transactions, they're using it because they're hoping bigger suckers will give them more "real" currency for it than what they paid. And so far they have, and likely they always will. Like with all good money. Quote You don't seem to understand that people aren't exchanging bitcoin for goods and services (except in a few very rare cases) like any other normal currency they're onlybuying in to it hoping that others from outside will give them "real" currency for it. Oh, no, I do understand it. When dealing with what is effectively a foreign currency, you will obviously have to trade it for local currency before you can buy things locally. Some places do take bitcoin directly, and the number of those places is growing every year, but even the fact that you can convert it into your local currency proves it has value and can be used to buy things. I mean, the argument "you have to go through one extra step, so it's worthless" is pretty... um... actually it's literally retarded. Quote Ten years after its release, bitcoin is rarely being used for trading for goods and services like a REAL currency. Depends on where. It's used pretty frequently in Venezuela. And how many times do I have to say, you have to look at the trend, not the current state. Five years ago no one accepted it period. Ten years after it's release it's worth more than all the currency of New Zealand. Have the brains and the vision to see where it came from and where it's going... Quote Ifanything one can call it a derivative currency, because its only value is in trading real currency for it and back again. A derivative would imply it's based on actual currency. But it's completely independent of it. A bitcoin as a derivative of a USD that is measured in USD would disappear if the USD were to crash. Bitcoin wouldn't disappear, it would replace it. It's an independent currency, that just still doesn't have much adoption. Which, yeah, no shit. Quote I never said people use banks like currencies, I've been saying this entire time that they've been using real currencies for transactions. You know, US dollars, Canadian dollars and so on? ... So? And some people have been using bitcoin. Quote Yes fiat currencies come and go, but that doesn't validate pyramid schemes such as this. Explain how this is a pyramid scheme please. No one ever could so far. Quote You can pretend not to see Ash's post about the preloaded USD for Bitpay. I didn't, and don't care I guess. By the way, hypothetically, when hyperbitcoinization happens and your own currency crashes in value, what will you do, or say? How would you prepare for such an event? And separately, at what point would you consider Bitcoin to be a legitimate thing? Obviously $200 billion worth isn't it, so, is it a higher total value, like a trillion (just a 5x increase)? Or acceptance at your local store? Or something else? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AshleyAshes Posted December 26, 2017 Share Posted December 26, 2017 1 hour ago, Rassah said: I mean, the argument "you have to go through one extra step, so it's worthless" is pretty... um... actually it's literally retarded. It's hardly retarded because it's not just 'An extra step to use bitcoin' it's that bitcoin accomplishes nothing but to add an extra step. Usage of bitcoin for transactions makes nothing easier and only adds additional complication. ...Assuming you can even use it at ALL in the scenario. 1 hour ago, Rassah said: I didn't, and don't care I guess. The best part is that I know he totally read it and that his need to announce that the 'totally didn't' only makes it more delicious. :3 1 hour ago, Rassah said: Obviously $200 billion worth isn't it, so, is it a higher total value, like a trillion (just a 5x increase)? Or acceptance at your local store? Or something else? 1) I think it's funny that Rassah thinks that, in terms of global economics, 200 billion is a lot. If he's supposed to be 'hot shit bitcoin business guy' shouldn't he be able to see that 200 billion is a drop in the bucket? 2) The '200 Billion In Bitcoin' is a misrepresentation. The number is drives from simply multiplying the number if bitcoins mined vs their value. However this fails to account to bitcoins that have been lost, putting them entirely without of circulation for eternity and which thusly have no value. http://uk.businessinsider.com/nearly-4-million-bitcoins-have-been-lost-forever-study-says-2017-11 It's actually estimated that about 3.7 million bitcoin out of the 16+ million that have been mind are 'gone' but those who need a spin on the how much all if bitcoin is worth won't hesitate to to include them anyway. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
WileyWarWeasel Posted December 26, 2017 Share Posted December 26, 2017 1 hour ago, Rassah said: And so far they have, and likely they always will. Like with all good money. Again you keep on equating bitcoin to actual currency and again, I keep telling you that barely anyone uses it for everyday transactions. 1 hour ago, Rassah said: Oh, no, I do understand it. When dealing with what is effectively a foreign currency, you will obviously have to trade it for local currency before you can buy things locally. Some places do take bitcoin directly, and the number of those places is growing every year, but even the fact that you can convert it into your local currency proves it has value and can be used to buy things. I mean, the argument "you have to go through one extra step, so it's worthless" is pretty... um... actually it's literally retarded. Again, only a tiny handful of places actually use it for products and services. Local currencies can at least be used to buy all local services and products, which is not the case with bitcoin. Again, I have to tell you that it is a derivative of actual currency. You are twisting my argument to create a convenient straw man. My argument has always been that it is not being used as a currency to trade directly for goods and services. It is only being used by almost all participants in the hope that others will come in with real money. It is a textbook pyramid scheme. I never said that it was worthless, only that it derives its entire worth from the new suckers who keep paying REAL currency into it. What's more, it scales up horribly. Even at its insignificant size and relatively small number of overall transactions relative to the global financial system it has horrendous transaction times and costs. Again, before you say that is like all currencies read the underlined point above. Hell, reread the part about how it scales badly. If you're going to want to be taken somewhat seriously you have to stop pretending that bitcoin is equivalent to real currencies and look at how the vast, vast majority of people are using it, not how you want it to be used. 1 hour ago, Rassah said: Depends on where. It's used pretty frequently in Venezuela. And how many times do I have to say, you have to look at the trend, not the current state. Five years ago no one accepted it period. Ten years after it's release it's worth more than all the currency of New Zealand. Have the brains and the vision to see where it came from and where it's going... I'm talking about its significance in the global financial system which it's supposedly replacing, not in some tiny backwater country. The only thing that has changed since ten years ago is that some more people are speculating on it relying on the bigger fools principle. Perhaps you should have the brains to see that apart from a tiny handful of places that accept it for products and services, everyone else is using bitcoin for exclusively that purpose. Even if it has a market value larger than all the currency used in NZ (which is simply number of theoretical coins times current market value), it is still being used for one purpose: to profit off of bigger fools buying into it from elsewhere. At least with New Zealand's currency you can use it to buy products and services in New Zealand. 1 hour ago, Rassah said: A derivative would imply it's based on actual currency. But it's completely independent of it. A bitcoin as a derivative of a USD that is measured in USD would disappear if the USD were to crash. Bitcoin wouldn't disappear, it would replace it. It's an independent currency, that just still doesn't have much adoption. Which, yeah, no shit. It's derivative in that outside of trading for actual currencies hardly anyone uses it. Again: its value is 100% dependent on its relativity to real currencies because almost no one uses it for products and services. 1 hour ago, Rassah said: ... So? And some people have been using bitcoin. Out of the people using bitcoin only a tiny handful of people use bitcoin for products and services. Even your delusional mind should be able to see that. 1 hour ago, Rassah said: Explain how this is a pyramid scheme please. No one ever could so far. Lets look at the common definition of a pyramid scheme: "A pyramid scheme (commonly known as pyramid scams) is a business model that recruits members via a promise of payments or services for enrolling others into the scheme, rather than supplying investments or sale of products or services." Bitcoin is used by a tiny insignificant number of people (mostly criminals) for actually buying and selling goods and services. Even with its tiny size (relative to the financial system it's supposedly replacing) it has godawful transaction times and costs. That means that almost the entirety of those who have paid real money to own bitcoin have done so for only one purpose: because they're hoping others will enroll into the scheme with real money so they can leave with more than what they themselves enrolled with, because they're sure as heck ain't using it to buy good and services. 1 hour ago, Rassah said: I didn't, and don't care I guess. By the way, hypothetically, when hyperbitcoinization happens and your own currency crashes in value, what will you do, or say? How would you prepare for such an event? And separately, at what point would you consider Bitcoin to be a legitimate thing? Obviously $200 billion worth isn't it, so, is it a higher total value, like a trillion (just a 5x increase)? Or acceptance at your local store? Or something else? I thought it would've been obvious to you what would make bitcoin "legitimate" for me, since I've been talking about it for the last couple of pages: seeing its primary use being for purchasing and selling goods and services and without having to wait obscenely long times and incur high costs for all transactions. It's amusing that you keep going on about how exploitative real currencies are and yet bitcoin like any other good pyramid scheme benefits those that come in early (and leave before it collapses) more than anyone else. We can discuss hypothetical scenarios all day, in this discussion (which seems to mostly consist of you ignoring bitcoin's obviously failings while touting services like Bitpay which is just a USD denominated visa debit card) I was more interested in what's actually happening with this cryptocurrency. @AshleyAshes Good points, also didn't realize there were that many coins completely out of circulation. 18 minutes ago, AshleyAshes said: The best part is that I know he totally read it and that his need to announce that the 'totally didn't' only makes it more delicious. :3 This is a bit silly though, having a discussion where one person is pretending to ignore another. @AshleyAshes@Rassah I know I've posted this before but it bears repeating: http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-11-03/all-worlds-money-and-markets-one-visualization I know that visualizing stuff makes it easier to understand, hopefully this will help you Ras ;3 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AshleyAshes Posted December 26, 2017 Share Posted December 26, 2017 9 hours ago, WileyWarWeasel said: @AshleyAshes Good points, also didn't realize there were that many coins completely out of circulation. I'm mostly just surprised how openly he'll demonstrate the power over him. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Rassah Posted December 26, 2017 Share Posted December 26, 2017 10 hours ago, WileyWarWeasel said: Again you keep on equating bitcoin to actual currency and again, I keep telling you that barely anyone uses it for everyday transactions. And again, I keep telling you that "actual currency" is your own subjective term based on your own subjective opinion and experience. Bitcoin is actual currency to many of us, because we have both gotten paid in it, paid others in it, and used it to buy things. Your whole argument is based on some subjective level of use, and your argument is a losing one, since its use as "actual currency" is growing every year. Quote Again, I have to tell you that it is a derivative of actual currency. Can you define your version of derivative? Because bitcoin isn't derived from anything, and doesn't depend on any currencies to exist. Quote My argument has always been that it is not being used as a currency to trade directly for goods and services. ... Out of the people using bitcoin only a tiny handful of people use bitcoin for products and services. And I'm telling you that your argument is wrong. Your argument is entirely based on the level of acceptance, because if it was only based on anyone anywhere using it to trade directly, that argument is already lost. You refuted it yourself. Quote It is a textbook pyramid scheme. Again, before you say that is like all currencies read the underlined point above. "Local currencies can at least be used to buy all local services and products, which is not the case with bitcoin." And, again, I've broken this argument down to either: A. Every foreign currency is a pyramid scheme outside of its jurisdiction. Canadian dollars are a pyramid scheme in US for example. B. All currencies are pyramid schemes, because there is no difference between using them to buy "services or products" and using them to buy other currencies, since in both transactions you're just buying something of value, and the only reason you are holding that currency in the first place is because you hope there is a "new sucker" who will take it from you in exchange for something valuable later. Quote Hell, reread the part about how it scales badly. Scaling is no more an issue than it was in any other tech, like our Internet. Solutions are in the works. I showed you the YouTube video. If your argument is that "software and technology never improves," that's obviously a losing argument too. We're not talking about government issued product that can't be improved here, like USD or Zimbabwean dollars. Quote If you're going to want to be taken somewhat seriously you have to stop pretending that bitcoin is equivalent to real currencies and look at how the vast, vast majority of people are using it, not how you want it to be used. Ironically, the vast, vast majority of people are using it to store and secure their wealth, expecting that it will become the real currency as it destroys other currencies 😁. Why else would they invest money into it and expect it to grow? The very premise of bitcoin is an "electronic cash system" that makes central banks obsolete. That's the investment prospectus. Quote I'm talking about its significance in the global financial system which it's supposedly replacing, not in some tiny backwater country. The only thing that has changed since ten years ago is that some more people are speculating on it relying on the bigger fools principle. As I said, "its significance in the global financial system" is growing exponentially. And I'm sorry, I guess you're just uninformed. Some countries have made it a legally recognized currency (Japan), some countries have laid down regulatory framework to treat it as such, some are embracing it in hopes of becoming world's financial powerhouses (Switzerland and possibly St. Kitts), and a whole lot of banks, financial institutions, hedge funds, and other overseeing funds have already adopted it as a way to diversify and protect their and their customers' wealth, and to transfer that wealth between each other. What, you thought $200,000,000,000 worth of dollars that poured into it just this year was from small investors who were only speculating, hoping to get rich? Things are changing. A LOT. Just because you don't know about it... (Incidentally, did you know that about 20 people of Trump's closest transition team were bitcoiners?) Quote It's derivative in that outside of trading for actual currencies hardly anyone uses it. Again: its value is 100% dependent on its relativity to real currencies because almost no one uses it for products and services. That's not what a derivative is, and you're confusing "100% depended on relativity to real currencies" with it just being an easy way to measure value. That's what currencies do, they help measure value. It's not measured in dollars and such because it has no choice to. Why do you believe that bitcoin would not be able to exist if no other currency in the world existed? Do you think people would be incapable of estimating the value of bitcoin against real tangible products? Quote Lets look at the common definition of a pyramid scheme: "A pyramid scheme (commonly known as pyramid scams) is a business model that recruits members via a promise of payments or services for enrolling others into the scheme, rather than supplying investments or sale of products or services." This definition already fails, as bitcoin makes no promises of payments or services for buying or holding it. It's not even a business model. It's just "money." All it does is provide an investment, the "rather than" part of that definition. Quote Bitcoin is used by a tiny insignificant number of people (mostly criminals) for actually buying and selling goods and services. Criminals who use the currency to protect themselves from dictatorships and from asset seizures by failed governments are not really criminals in my opinion (most of bitcoin's "criminals" are just regular people in China, Russia, Venezuela, and a few African countries). That, and store of wealth as a hedge against failing global currencies, is its main use right now. Which is fine, because the idea is that they can still spend it later, which is the main purpose of a currency. Quote That means that almost the entirety of those who have paid real money to own bitcoin have done so for only one purpose: because they're hoping others will enroll into the scheme with real money so they can leave with more than what they themselves enrolled with, because they're sure as heck ain't using it to buy good and services. You just described every investment on the planet. Forgetting the part about bitcoin growing an actual economy and businesses around it like any good investment, one which you can actually evaluate to try to see expectations of growth, which you obviously failed to do before making your declarations. Quote I thought it would've been obvious to you what would make bitcoin "legitimate" for me, since I've been talking about it for the last couple of pages: seeing its primary use being for purchasing and selling goods and services and without having to wait obscenely long times and incur high costs for all transactions. Oh, well, I guess then just wait a few years. Ignore the trend that that's where it's going to, and wait a bit longer. Quote It's amusing that you keep going on about how exploitative real currencies are and yet bitcoin like any other good pyramid scheme benefits those that come in early (and leave before it collapses) more than anyone else. Again, you described every investment on the planet. Why would a protocol collapse? That's like saying "before SMTP/POP3 (email) collapses." It can't collapse until a better technology comes along that bitcoin itself can't assimilate. Maybe the problem is that you still can't get around thinking of bitcoin as a single product issued by a single company or government? Quote I was more interested in what's actually happening with this cryptocurrency. Oh, ok. Well, there was a big scaling argument between the single development team and its users about it being too limited and the scaling options not coming fast enough. The development team reassured that these scaling options will be out in time and nothing else needs to be done, but this year a large group of users and early investors decided they had enough, and split off the development. Now we have two competing bitcoins, one that has none of the issues with scaling and speed that you mention, and another that does, but finally has those scaling options on the horizon. With two competing teams tackling the scaling issue, bitcoin now has twice as much chance of succeeding. If the old team's solutions fail, that branch will just fail and everyone will move to the already scaled one. If not, it will dominate and the split one will go away. Either way, bitcoin will continue. Other than that, big money is moving into bitcoin right now (explains the hundreds of billions moving into it), it's finally starting to be traded on "real" regulated commodity exchanges and is finally finishing up the requirements to be traded on Wall Street in the form of ETFs, and a bunch of big traditional investors and economists are thinking that this last run-up bubble that grew it by 15x is the last time such bubbles will happen and pop, as the next 15x run-up will put it right at about the price at which hyperbitcoinization will happen. That is assuming those scaling solutions by the two competing teams, like Lightning Network or on chain scaling, are ready and widely deployed by then, which should be ready by 2019. Quote @AshleyAshes Good points, also didn't realize there were that many coins completely out of circulation. Out of circulation? Not sure why that matters. Most money is out of circulation. Quote This is a bit silly though, having a discussion where one person is pretending to ignore another. I'm not pretending. If I could make her posts permanently disappear, I would. Now I just don't click on them, because I don't need the negativity, and I know she never says anything new, or even intelligent. Quote @AshleyAshes@Rassah I know I've posted this before but it bears repeating: http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-11-03/all-worlds-money-and-markets-one-visualization I know that visualizing stuff makes it easier to understand, hopefully this will help you Ras ;3 Please find that chart for the previous years. You'll be surprised to see that bitcoin grew quite a bit in relation to this. Hell, it wasn't even a single block just a few years ago. Also note that this chart shows all of USD to be $27,700 billion. Bitcoin is currently at $200 billion, but grows about 2 to 10 times a year. In the worst case: $200 billion it's worth now $400 $800 $1,600 $3,200 $6,400 $12,800 $25,600 $51,200 8 more years of current growth is needed for it to surpass the USD. In the best case much less than that. And it only needs to get to about half for hyperbitcoinization to happen and the USD to lose its reserve status. Hope this visualization helps you too. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AshleyAshes Posted December 26, 2017 Share Posted December 26, 2017 44 minutes ago, Rassah said: And I'm telling you that your argument is wrong. You know that someone in an online argument won't stop arguing but has openly entirely stopped caring about any opinion but their own when.. 44 minutes ago, Rassah said: $27,700 billion Does anyone else find it weird that 'Super Smart Internet Money Guy' can't write '27.7 Trillion'' and has to resort to the rather awkward and unconventional '27, 700 Billion'? Like, say that out loud; 'Twenty-Seven Thousand Seven Hundred Billion' doesn't that sound like something a six year old would say because they're just stitching random names of large numbers to make it sound 'cool'? 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Rassah Posted December 26, 2017 Share Posted December 26, 2017 (edited) Really, the crux of this argument is that I was right about it being an incredible investment when I found out, reat about, understood it, and moved my (paltry) savings into it 7 years ago, that I was right about it when I started telling furs on Furaffinity and forums about it (hoping they don't miss out)... shit, 4 or 5 years ago? That I'm still right about it, and everyone who listened, or to whom I've given paltry 5BTC (or in one case even a 20BTC, $250 at the time) gifts now has more money than the vast majority end up saving up their entire lives for retirement, and that I will continue to be right... But you have to nitpick at insignificant or irrelevant issues because you don't want to admit that I was right and you were wrong all these years. But that's fine, because of where each of us ended up eventually. EDIT: Oh, I just found out that furaffinity forums have been restored with all the old posts. Seems like I first mentioned bitcoin and started talking about it in 2013 when it was $10 Edited December 26, 2017 by Rassah Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AshleyAshes Posted December 26, 2017 Share Posted December 26, 2017 6 minutes ago, Rassah said: Really, the crux of this argument is that I was right about it being an incredible investment when I found out, reat about, understood it, and moved my (paltry) savings into it 7 years ago, that I was right about it when I started telling furs on Furaffinity and forums about it (hoping they don't miss out)... shit, 4 or 5 years ago? That I'm still right about it, and everyone who listened, or to whom I've given paltry 5BTC (or in one case even a 20BTC, $250 at the time) gifts now has more money than the vast majority end up saving up their entire lives for retirement, and that I will continue to be right... ...All of these furs who remain unnamed and have never presented themselves in a thread where Rassah argues about Bitcoin but are, rest assured, totally real people and not made up in the slightest. 3 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
WileyWarWeasel Posted December 27, 2017 Share Posted December 27, 2017 I can't believe I'm arguing with someone who thinks that pointing out that most people don't use bitcoin for buying products and services (the main reason for a "currency" in the first place) is nitpicking. That its horrible scaling is nitpicking. @Rassah Yes some people did well out of the scheme, but that doesn't change the fact that without later suckers money coming in to pay those that came in early it wouldn't have gone anywhere. The only substantiated claims you've made of bitcoin so far are that a few early comers have gotten rich off of it, but that has happened in many pyramid schemes before. You say my use of the term "currency" is subjective yet you ignore the primary usage of currency in the first place (trading for goods and services). Yes the number of people using it for transactions has technically gone up a bit over the last several years but it remains an insignificant share relative to the number of people who buy bitcoin so later people can give them real money for it. Also by "collapse" I meant that the amount of real currency that people would be willing to use to buy it would collapse. Something tells me you already knew that but I suppose it's easier to twist the argument so you can argue against a straw man. Perhaps I should tell you how pyramid schemes usually collapse. They go down because eventually the return on "investment" for newcomers goes too low relative to the cash they have to pony up, outside interest dries up and the people still in the scheme panic and try to get out of it usually ending up with nothing. I realize bitcoin is not a pyramid scheme to the absolute letter because it can theoretically be used for goods and services transactions (though again barely anyone uses it for that and it has horrendous scaling for transactions). I know that bitcoin doesn't technically promise people a return (though it does seem to have a few loud preachers like Ras) but that is the major reason why people buy this cryptocurrency. It is still a pyramid scheme in function though as the early comers benefit the most and the ones that come in later and later benefit less and less, with the early comers getting the largest share of any gains made and with no products or services being produced by anyone. Do some other parts of the financial system function like pyramid schemes? Yes, but that doesn't mean that trading one scheme for another legitimizes that other scheme. As people pay more and more real money per bitcoin to enter the scheme the return on investment goes down (yet the amount that newcomers have to pay to enter balloons to ridiculous proportions). The return on investment for the price going from $1000 to $2000 is 100% for example but the ROI from $15000 to $16000 is about 6% and requires a much more substantial investment to enter the scheme as well. The reason that so many people are so desperate to enter such a scheme is because the return on investment for many other avenues has gone down over the years (in particular things like bonds and treasuries). This is mostly because real world economic growth has slowed down, especially from 2014 onward. As the ROI goes down for bitcoin, the outside interest will eventually go down as well. This will lead to current holders of bitcoin becoming more and more antsy to offload their positions. Eventually the people still in the scheme start to panic as they see their supposed gains dwindle and then dry up, then they desperately try to unload their positions on relatively disinterested buyers and the price crashes. Can the underlying software be improved? Yes. But even when transaction times and costs were lower, barely anyone used bitcoin for everyday transactions. The recent spike in activity is almost entirely from speculation, not from a desire to use it for trading for goods and services. You can make whatever promises you want of it toppling the central banks and being used for everyday transactions, but the reality is that almost all the participants only buy into it because they want to get more of that central bank money. The fact that it ran into severe scaling problems even at its current diminutive size (both in market value and transactions being processed) clearly indicates that the underlying software has major issues that need to be addressed before it can even be used for everyday transactions in any significant capacity. It's got a very, very long way to go before it gets anywhere close to that stage and that's assuming that people use it for that purpose rather than as a get-rich-quick scheme (and provided its value doesn't crash). TLDR: I love how by your own words the crux of your entire argument is that a few early comers got rich. What you conveniently omit is that they got rich purely because of other people's money coming in later. There really is nothing special about getting rich from later suckers money, it's happened time and again in other pyramid/ponzi schemes. Congratulations @Rassah for coming in early on such a scheme. That doesn't change the nature of the scheme though. In case you haven't been paying attention I was arguing about the nature of the scheme, not that there weren't suckers funneling money to the early comers. 7 hours ago, AshleyAshes said: ...All of these furs who remain unnamed and have never presented themselves in a thread where Rassah argues about Bitcoin but are, rest assured, totally real people and not made up in the slightest. Or perhaps they're phantom furs DD: 8 hours ago, AshleyAshes said: You know that someone in an online argument won't stop arguing but has openly entirely stopped caring about any opinion but their own when.. I'm surprised that I haven't been blocked yet actually. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Rassah Posted December 27, 2017 Share Posted December 27, 2017 Its 🙏 not 🙏 a 🙏 pyramid 🙏 scheme. I knew there would be "later suckers" just like I knew there would be "later suckers" in this useless thing called "the internet" which is only for hackers and pornographers. You could still use bitcoin like gold is used. Gold's return is paltry to non-existent, yet countries and people use it to safely store their wealth, and to sometimes transfer. Even if bitcoin were to stop growing, it can still be used in the same way, except having way lower storage and transfer costs and risks. That's actually why the big investment banks and hedge funds have been buying it up. Not for the return, but as a way to store wealth without relying on risky stocks or fiat currencies. And that's why it's not a pyramid: it doesn't need to grow or keep having new people come in. It can just hold value where it's at (as it's done for long periods of time through its short life). Yes, the returns on bitcoin won't last. It's an S curve technology adoption curve Eventually everyone in the world who is ever going to adopt it, will, and it will just level off (not crash, level off), with not having much of a return besides just the growth of the economy it sustains as money (deflation). There's no need to "off-load" positions. Why would you? Your money stays safe in bitcoin, especially safe from prying eyes of government and tax collectors, and you can just sell whatever you need to pay for things you want to buy. The rest you just keep in bitcoin. That's what everyone who has large investments in it is doing. Nobody knows how much money I or others who have their wealth stored in bitcoin actually has, which provides a lot of extra safety and security. And like I said, the idea of cashing out of bitcoin is like cashing out of dollars or euros: it's already cash. I know I'm never cashing out, and the few people who I know have hundreds of millions of dollars worth of bitcoin won't either (like for example these guys https://www.ccn.com/winklevoss-twins-will-not-sell-bitcoin-even-if-its-price-hits-380000/). Honestly it's just safer to hold that much money in BTC than anything else. Of course back when transaction times and costs were lower barely anyone used it. Barely anyone knew about it. Barely anyone knows about it still. The scaling issue happened not because this thing has major underlying software issues. The software works fine. It was a political issue. The software was purposely limited back in 2010 to 1meg of transactions every 10 minutes to prevent transaction spam, back when it wasn't worth anything (developers didn't want someone to spam the network with terabytes of transactions, making it too bloated from the start). This limit has no purpose anymore, since spamming the network costs real money now, but the dev team in charge got too political and egotistical, and couldn't come to an agreement as to how much to loosen the restriction (increase it to 2mb, or 4, or 8). Since no agreement could be reached, no change could be made. So it got stuck at this limit, just as a massive influx of new users came it and hit the limit. Now this group is trying to expand capacity using that second layer Lightning Network idea, which would work on the wallets without a need to change the bitcoin protocol in any way that requires agreements (which demonstrably works really well), while a competing dev team that disagrees with the original one made an alternative branch that did increase that protocol limit to 8mb. On that branch, transactions are once again near instant and cost pennies. So the software works fine, it's the drama and egos of devs that's the problem. A problem that can just be branched off from if needed. You know who else "got rich purely because of other people's money coming in later?" Investors in Ford, GE, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Twitter, Walmart, Amazon... hope you're seeing a trend here. Are all of those "pyramid schemes" too, where early investors got rich from later suckers money? Or are all those examples of innovative ideas that simply grew and expanded as more users started to use them? Yes, I'm arguing about the nature of the "scheme," that being an innovative, revolutionary technology that has no equal, which does what we have done for centuries, but much better, faster, and more securely. Regarding the furs who remain unnamed, go to the Furaffinity forum, search for "bitcoin," and look at the earliest thread. Those are all the furs who were told about it as early as 2013, who mostly dismissed it same as you are doing it now, back when it was at $10. Their loss. And no, I wouldn't block you. Compare your replies and demeanor to what I'm sure Ashley is posting. I don't block people just because I disagree with someone, I block someone because they are toxic garbage. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AshleyAshes Posted December 27, 2017 Share Posted December 27, 2017 25 minutes ago, Rassah said: The scaling issue happened not because this thing has major underlying software issues. The software works fine. It was a political issue. The software was purposely limited back in 2010 to 1meg of transactions every 10 minutes to prevent transaction spam, back when it wasn't worth anything (developers didn't want someone to spam the network with terabytes of transactions, making it too bloated from the start). This limit has no purpose anymore, since spamming the network costs real money now, but the dev team in charge got too political and egotistical, and couldn't come to an agreement as to how much to loosen the restriction (increase it to 2mb, or 4, or 8). Since no agreement could be reached, no change could be made. So it got stuck at this limit, just as a massive influx of new users came it and hit the limit. Now this group is trying to expand capacity using that second layer Lightning Network idea, which would work on the wallets without a need to change the bitcoin protocol in any way that requires agreements (which demonstrably works really well), while a competing dev team that disagrees with the original one made an alternative branch that did increase that protocol limit to 8mb. On that branch, transactions are once again near instant and cost pennies. So the software works fine, it's the drama and egos of devs that's the problem. A problem that can just be branched off from if needed. "BitCoin, the 'future of currency', has it's entire future in the hands of multiple groups of bickering open source software developers. Everything is going to be fine. 100% fine. Nothing could go wrong at all." Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
WileyWarWeasel Posted December 27, 2017 Share Posted December 27, 2017 @RassahLast time I checked Bitcoin wasn't the internet either Also I believe Ford, GE, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Twitter, Walmart and Amazon provided goods/services. It's also pretty easy to make a branched-off version of bitcoin have lower transaction times and costs when it has far less transactions per day: https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/bitcoin-transactions.html https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/bitcoin cash-transactions.html Lets see what happens with bitcoin if the volume of transactions being processed ever becomes significant (relative to the financial system that it's supposedly replacing). Sounds like you and @AshleyAshes need to kiss and make up. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Rassah Posted December 27, 2017 Share Posted December 27, 2017 Bitcoin is a technology in the form of an open source protocol that allows to transfer value in a decentralized, censorship-proof way, better than any system before it. Internet is a technology in the form of an open source protocol that allows to transfer information in a decentralized, censorship-proof way, better than any system before it. All those companies provide products and services, and bitcoin provides services. And as I said, it provides the same services that are provided by the companies that own the biggest buildings in every city: banks. And that's just one of the services. Branched off version has lower number of transactions, but it also has 8x more capacity that can scale to 32x more if needed. Don't care to make up with her. Without even looking at her frequent posts here, I'm sure it's all just toxic negativity. I don't need any of that in my life. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tsuujou Posted December 27, 2017 Share Posted December 27, 2017 1 hour ago, Rassah said: Don't care to make up with her. Without even looking at her frequent posts here, I'm sure it's all just toxic negativity. I don't need any of that in my life. But he's still posting here...which means...he doesn't think the rest of us are toxic negativity. AND that he needs us in his life. ... ...... 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AshleyAshes Posted December 27, 2017 Share Posted December 27, 2017 2 hours ago, Rassah said: Without even looking at her frequent posts here, I'm sure it's all just toxic negativity. I don't need any of that in my life. Spoiler Alert: He still looks at them. :3 2 hours ago, Rassah said: Internet is a technology in the form of an open source protocol that allows to transfer information in a decentralized, censorship-proof way, better than any system before it. Also, critical point here the internet is not an 'Open source protocol' but rather that the Internet Protocol 'Open Protocol' in that it's specifications are publicly available and may be freely implemented without royalty. However it's various iterations are rigidly defined by the Internet Engineering Task Force. ...Of course, one should not have to explain to Super Smart Internet Money Guy what is and is not 'Open Source' right? 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AshleyAshes Posted December 28, 2017 Share Posted December 28, 2017 So, here's a new question for this thread: What in the fuck does it matter? If Bitcoin has reached a point where using it as some cash cow mega investment that can only be exploited through dumb luck or dumb luck that pretends to be skill has passed, there's nothing to be accomplished in pushing people to buy into it. If Bitcoin eventually WILL be the way EVERYONE does financial transactions, why does it have to be argued now? If bitcoin is to be adopted en mass (Or 'Hyperbitcoinization' if you need some sorta creepy word to describe it) then that would happen naturally for some reason or another it becomes easier to use and more attractive to consumers than current systems. There's nothing to accomplish in arguing a hypothetical future if it's of no concern today. It'd be like traveling back in time to 2005 just to argue that 'One day you'll pay Amazon $99 a year to have them send you socks 12hrs after you order them'. The argument is irrelevant in 2005 so why argue it in 2005? So what in the fuck does it matter? It matters because this entire mess is not rational or even a debate. It's a religious argument. This whole bitcoin thing is ideologically important to Rassah and that makes it emotionally important to him to convert others to his bitcoin gospel. For some reason he even thinks that this dinky little forum is important for him to convert. For some bizarre reason he wants us to look up to him and see how successful he is. ...If he's so successful, shouldn't he be able to afford therapy? Cause seriously, none of that is healthy. 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
WileyWarWeasel Posted December 28, 2017 Share Posted December 28, 2017 9 hours ago, Rassah said: Bitcoin is a technology in the form of an open source protocol that allows to transfer value in a decentralized, censorship-proof way, better than any system before it. An interesting claim to make, given that bitcoin runs into massive issues at relatively low transaction volumes. Maybe in time it can be fixed to function at significant scale, but that is not happening any time soon (even if your claim that it can have up to 32x its current transaction capacity is actually true). Lets look at the Bitcoin figures: https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/bitcoin-transactions.html The Bitcoin network processed about 300 thousand transactions a day for this year, with current transaction costs about $20 each time and a one-day waiting period. Sounds impressive, right? Now lets look at a competing payment system such as Visa, that Bitcoin is supposedly better than and set to completely replace: https://usa.visa.com/dam/VCOM/global/about-visa/documents/visa-facts-figures-jan-2017.pdf Figures for 2017 are not yet available as they seem to be released annually, however for 2016 Visa had 141 billion transactions equating to 386,301,369 as a daily average. That is about 1287 times larger than the transaction volume of bitcoin, each transaction costs next to nothing and is almost instantly processed. What's more, most people use the Visa system to purchase goods and services unlike bitcoin. But Visa is only one payments network, and Bitcoin is supposed to take over the world according to your linked article: http://nakamotoinstitute.org/mempool/hyperbitcoinization/ ""This article is about the possibility of Bitcoin-induced currency demonetization, or hyperbitcoinization, which is what would happen to any hapless currency that stands in Bitcoin’s path of total world domination." Lets have a look at global non-cash transaction volumes, shall we? https://www.worldpaymentsreport.com/reports/noncash 522.4 billion estimated for 2017, with a daily average of 1,431,232,876. This is about 4771 times larger than bitcoin volume. But that doesn't matter of course, because you can promise capacity improvements of over 1000 times right (and without needing to use dedicated central servers since it's meant to be decentralized)? I wonder what mental gymnastics you are going to perform given the figures. 10 hours ago, Rassah said: All those companies provide products and services, and bitcoin provides services. And as I said, it provides the same services that are provided by the companies that own the biggest buildings in every city: banks. And that's just one of the services. If you're talking about its uses as an electronic payments network, it is awful. See the figures above. It's no wonder that the majority of people buying bitcoin are just buying it hoping that they can get more real currency later from other suckers. Please enlighten me about its other services. 10 hours ago, Rassah said: Branched off version has lower number of transactions, but it also has 8x more capacity that can scale to 32x more if needed. That might impress you (assuming that it's actually true) but it's not really that great when you look at its scale relative to other electronic payment networks like Visa. 10 hours ago, Rassah said: Don't care to make up with her. Without even looking at her frequent posts here, I'm sure it's all just toxic negativity. I don't need any of that in my life. No, it's far better to indulge in delusions of being part a new "currency" achieving world domination Seriously though, stop with the pretense and talk to her directly. Don't make me dig up the old ship art ;P Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AshleyAshes Posted December 28, 2017 Share Posted December 28, 2017 6 minutes ago, WileyWarWeasel said: But that doesn't matter of course, because you can promise capacity improvements of over 1000 times right (and without needing to use dedicated central servers since it's meant to be decentralized)? I wonder what mental gymnastics you are going to perform given the figures. He keeps referring to Bitcoin's recent adoption rate as 'massive' too, multiple times, it's like he can't appropriately comprehend the sheer vastness of scale of the number of electronic transactions made globally. More over, these numbers will keep getting larger. Year over year, debit and credit transactions increase while cash transactions go down and this is just in the first world. There are literally billions of people on this planet who live in areas where transactions are still predominantly cash based and are still moving to adopt more digital transactions. To even design a Blockchain that would be capable of scaling to TODAY'S level of transactions will leave it unprepared for even five years from now then alone fifty years. I mean, I'm sure the crypto anarchists will just explain 'Then they'll update the software and fork it' or 'They'll build or fork an even NEWER thingy that runs on top of bitcoin', cause 'We'll figure it out later' is a sure solid plan'. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
WileyWarWeasel Posted December 28, 2017 Share Posted December 28, 2017 4 hours ago, AshleyAshes said: For some reason he even thinks that this dinky little forum is important for him to convert. Or perhaps this furrum is more important than you know DDDDDDDD: 3 hours ago, AshleyAshes said: To even design a Blockchain that would be capable of scaling to TODAY'S level of transactions will leave it unprepared for even five years from now then alone fifty years. Yep, the CAGR for world transaction volume for the past few years has been roughly 10% on the average. While the global economy continues, it looks like transaction volume will continue with such increases. Between 2016 and 2017 for example the volume increased by 49.8 billion, or a daily average of 136,438,356 transactions. 4 hours ago, AshleyAshes said: There are literally billions of people on this planet who live in areas where transactions are still predominantly cash based and are still moving to adopt more digital transactions. Indeed, as a percentage the developing world far outpaces the developed world for non-cash transaction growth. 4 hours ago, AshleyAshes said: I mean, I'm sure the crypto anarchists will just explain 'Then they'll update the software and fork it' or 'They'll build or fork an even NEWER thingy that runs on top of bitcoin', cause 'We'll figure it out later' is a sure solid plan'. Funny, that's the same sort of thing that technophiles say as well. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Rassah Posted December 29, 2017 Share Posted December 29, 2017 On 12/27/2017 at 10:33 PM, WileyWarWeasel said: Lets look at the Bitcoin figures... The bitcoin network processed about 300 thousand transactions a day for this year, ... Now lets look at a competing payment system such as Visa, that Bitcoin is supposedly better than and set to completely replace: Why not look at the actual technology involved rather than simply the number of transactions done so far? (Btw, the $20 per transaction only started happening in December). For a VISA transaction: You swipe your card, sending a pull reauest to the VISA transaction network, which charges 2.7% or so. This isn't a fee by your or any bank, that's just what VISA charges to use its network. VISA transaction network sends the pull reauest to the merchant processor. Merchant processor sends the pull request to the bank associated with your VISA. The bank receives and processes the transaction, taking typically two days, then sends the money from your account (either credit or debit) and sends it to the merchant processor. A lot of the work here is actually still done manually. About a week or two later, the merchant processor bundles all the transactions, and sends the sum of the money to the merchant's bank account. If this was a credit purchase, you then send the money to your VISA bank to pay for that transaction. In this case, the money takes up to two weeks to show up, and the transaction isn't actually finalized for up to six months, since that's how long the VISA bank has to pull that money back if it wants to. For a Bitcoin transaction: You send money directly from your account to the receiving account number provided by the merchant. In this case the transaction shows up and is spendable instantly, and is finalized in 10 minutes to a few hours. Who cares how much each network does right now, the old system is a dinosaur compared to the new one. That's why I keep comparing bitcoin to email with the old system to the paper based post office. Quote 522.4 billion estimated for 2017, with a daily average of 1,431,232,876. This is about 4771 times larger than bitcoin volume. Oh, that's actually not too bad. I thought it would have to be hundreds of thousands larger. Scaling for this is actually pretty simple. You said bitcoin did 300 hundred thousand transactions last year? It only needs two transactions per person per year (less, if multiple people group together in a single transaction) for Lightning Network to work. Remember, with that, all transactions happen not in bitcoin itself, but in a direct peer to peer second layer. The only bitcoin transactions required are to open a trading channel into the network, and close it if something happens. For example, let's say we do business all the time and send money back and forth to each other. With LN, we both set up a channel between us, which is one transaction, and then we can pass a transaction that updates a balance between us millions of times (each new transaction replaces the old). For instance I can create a transaction that sends you $10, then you can replace that one with one that sends you $5, effectively paying me back $5, then I can pay you another $20 by replacing this transaction with one that sends you $25, and so on. None of those millions of transactions actually have to be posted to the block chain, since all we're doing is updating the balance between us. If one of us disappears, or we need to close the channel for some reason, one of us just posts the last version of that transaction to the blockchain, creating the second bitcoin transaction. In the end, we traded money millions of times, but only used up two transactions. And the cost of these transactions won't be much more than it costs to route some data through a server. And if we are linked to other people, we can chain these transactions through them to pay those we aren't even directly connected to. It's just like how the internet works, where web pages residing on one server bounce through a whole bunch of different routers to get to you. Quote If you're talking about its uses as an electronic payments network, it is awful. Actually even in its current terrible state it's better than most for international options. $25 to $35 to send money to Ukraine, vs $20 or less through bitcoin. Not even talking about it being practically impassible to send money to Venezuela, with bitcoin being the only sure method. But no, not just sending money. Having your own secure bank account (without relying on a bank, giving up your private info, or even not having a bank anywhere near you in the first place). Being able to receive payments. Proving ownership and time stamping things. What else do banks do? Quote Seethe figures above. It's no wonder that the majority of people buying bitcoin are just buying it hoping that they can get more real currency later from other suckers. Why would they think they can get more real currency from other suckers if it doesn't give anything new or useful??? Quote That might impress you (assuming that it's actually true) but it's not really that great when you look at its scale relative to other electronic payment networks like Visa. Theoretically it can scale to about 10,000 transactions per second with a few minor optimizations. The 32x is just a start, since it doesn't need any more. Quote No, it's far better to indulge in delusions of being part a new "currency" achieving world domination I like this delusion. In this delusion I think I'm now in the 0.1% of richest in the world, both my husband and I are now retired, I can buy cars and planes without really noticing it hitting my finances, and I'm getting ready to open my own bank. And I'm not even near the richest top in this group. So world domination, here I come. But fine, let me address Ashley's last comment: On 12/27/2017 at 10:49 PM, AshleyAshes said: There are literally billions of people on this planet who live in areas where transactions are still predominantly cash based and are still moving to adopt more digital transactions. Those are the places without banks that I mentioned, that bitcoin is the most print target for. So you guys know how a lot of third world countries completely skipped the landline telephone and network stage, and jumped right into the newest technologies of cellphones and wireless data? Those places will also be the ones to skip the banking stage and skip right to bitcoin. It's not profitable there to open a bank or service those people with credit cards, but those people have internet and can download a bitcoin app. On 12/27/2017 at 10:49 PM, AshleyAshes said: To even design a Blockchain that would be capable of scaling to TODAY'S level of transactions will leave it unprepared for even five years from now then alone fifty years. You underestimate technological growth. Processing and storage capacity doubles every two to three years. Human population isn't growing anywhere near that pace. On 12/27/2017 at 10:49 PM, AshleyAshes said: I mean, I'm sure the crypto anarchists will just explain 'Then they'll update the software and fork it' or 'They'll build or fork an even NEWER thingy that runs on top of bitcoin', cause 'We'll figure it out later' is a sure solid plan'. Or just use faster computers and bigger hard drives. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Victor-933 Posted December 29, 2017 Share Posted December 29, 2017 27 minutes ago, Rassah said: Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AshleyAshes Posted December 29, 2017 Share Posted December 29, 2017 1 hour ago, Rassah said: You underestimate technological growth. Processing and storage capacity doubles every two to three years. Human population isn't growing anywhere near that pace. Or just use faster computers and bigger hard drives. This is just... Stupid and ignorant. Firstly, it's ignorant, because it ignores trends where the growth on processing performance gains year over year have in fact been slowing. Technologically speaking we are nearing the physical limits of certain technologies and research into alternative materials and technologies are not progressing quickly enough to continue the pace of 'processing and capacity doubling every two to three years'. That's a Moore's law fantasy. This is MORE true for storage where the size of storage available is not increasing at the rates it once did. We are a society that produces massive amounts of data and it's increasing exponentially and the rate at which storage increases is slowing. These are serious -near future- issues that can't be ignored. Oh, I'm sure you're just going to say 'Well, they'll invent better storage' or 'find a new way to make better processors' or 'better compression' but none of those are REAL answers. Human beings have to actually research those things, make them work, make them viable in the field or for manufacturing and affordable enough for mass sales. It's super easy for you to sit in your arm chair and say 'Well, they should just make a better thing' as if that just happens by MAGIC and it is guaranteed to happen for forever. It's not. More over, physical limitations aside, saying the solution to 'not enough computer' is 'use more computer'. That's something a stupid 15yo on the internet says. It's not something you, someone who at least claims to be an adult, should say. There are countless systems in the world that can not continue to scale upwards simply by putting more hardware behind it. Eventually new systems must be developed to do the work because the inadequacy in old systems can not be effectively scaled up just by throwing more hardware at the problem. A prime example is big data. Relational database management system have huge inadequacies in the face of big data and instead whole different systems must deal with this. In short, there are lots of modern situations where something like MySQL can't get the job done and saying ''Well just get a bigger server' is not the answer. This is WHY you have nerds trying to re-invent and Frankenstein different things onto Bitcoin. Because 'Just use bigger computers' is not the way to solve the fucking problem. ...Unless, hey, maybe you're right and it's just that NONE of them thought of that? You should go email some Bitcoin devs and be like 'Holy shit guys, I solved it! Get some bigger computers! :D' This is just another situation where everything you post seems entirely nonintellectual and instead religious. Your answers to challenges are basically becoming a technobabble version of 'God works in mysterious ways' when you can't come up with a better answer. That also explains your dependency on magical thinking rather than rational, educated thought. It's almost like you're TRYING to make yourself seem less knowledgeable with each post. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
WileyWarWeasel Posted December 29, 2017 Share Posted December 29, 2017 11 hours ago, Rassah said: Why not look at the actual technology involved rather than simply the number of transactions done so far? (Btw, the $20 per transaction only started happening in December). For a VISA transaction: You swipe your card, sending a pull reauest to the VISA transaction network, which charges 2.7% or so. This isn't a fee by your or any bank, that's just what VISA charges to use its network. VISA transaction network sends the pull reauest to the merchant processor. Merchant processor sends the pull request to the bank associated with your VISA. The bank receives and processes the transaction, taking typically two days, then sends the money from your account (either credit or debit) and sends it to the merchant processor. A lot of the work here is actually still done manually. About a week or two later, the merchant processor bundles all the transactions, and sends the sum of the money to the merchant's bank account. If this was a credit purchase, you then send the money to your VISA bank to pay for that transaction. In this case, the money takes up to two weeks to show up, and the transaction isn't actually finalized for up to six months, since that's how long the VISA bank has to pull that money back if it wants to. For a Bitcoin transaction: You send money directly from your account to the receiving account number provided by the merchant. In this case the transaction shows up and is spendable instantly, and is finalized in 10 minutes to a few hours. Who cares how much each network does right now, the old system is a dinosaur compared to the new one. That's why I keep comparing bitcoin to email with the old system to the paper based post office. Most people are saying that bitcoin transactions actually take several hours to one day to process, but otherwise some interesting info even though it contains glaring omissions. See response further below on what banks and payment processors do for more detail. 11 hours ago, Rassah said: Oh, that's actually not too bad. I thought it would have to be hundreds of thousands larger. Scaling for this is actually pretty simple. You said bitcoin did 300 hundred thousand transactions last year? It only needs two transactions per person per year (less, if multiple people group together in a single transaction) for Lightning Network to work. Remember, with that, all transactions happen not in bitcoin itself, but in a direct peer to peer second layer. The only bitcoin transactions required are to open a trading channel into the network, and close it if something happens. For example, let's say we do business all the time and send money back and forth to each other. With LN, we both set up a channel between us, which is one transaction, and then we can pass a transaction that updates a balance between us millions of times (each new transaction replaces the old). For instance I can create a transaction that sends you $10, then you can replace that one with one that sends you $5, effectively paying me back $5, then I can pay you another $20 by replacing this transaction with one that sends you $25, and so on. None of those millions of transactions actually have to be posted to the block chain, since all we're doing is updating the balance between us. If one of us disappears, or we need to close the channel for some reason, one of us just posts the last version of that transaction to the blockchain, creating the second bitcoin transaction. In the end, we traded money millions of times, but only used up two transactions. And the cost of these transactions won't be much more than it costs to route some data through a server. And if we are linked to other people, we can chain these transactions through them to pay those we aren't even directly connected to. It's just like how the internet works, where web pages residing on one server bounce through a whole bunch of different routers to get to you. I'd rather see this in practice and in significant scale, rather than how it should all ideally work. I'd also like to see people using bitcoin for actual trading of goods and services rather than just hoping for bigger fools to give them real currency later. 11 hours ago, Rassah said: Actually even in its current terrible state it's better than most for international options. $25 to $35 to send money to Ukraine, vs $20 or less through bitcoin. Not even talking about it being practically impassible to send money to Venezuela, with bitcoin being the only sure method. It's not much of a comparison to compare bitcoin to the currency options of minor failed states. Also it is completely worthless if there aren't functioning telecommunications around. There are also no protections for fraud. See further below for a comparison of bitcoin transaction volumes and non-cash transaction volumes for the developing world. 11 hours ago, Rassah said: But no, not just sending money. Having your own secure bank account (without relying on a bank, giving up your private info, or even not having a bank anywhere near you in the first place). Being able to receive payments. Proving ownership and time stamping things. What else do banks do? Lets see, banks (as well as payment processors such as Visa and Paypal) provide some measure of protection against fraud and provide some opportunities to recover your funds or to get refunds. Bitcoin does neither. You failed to mention in your very first paragraph that Visa and the other institutions involved do many security-related checks during the process to see if the transaction is genuine or fraudulent (such as checking previous history and purchase locations and timings). Bitcoin does none of these checks. The merchant has to wait a small while to receive the payment thanks in large part to these checks (yes, additional checks occur after the initial transaction from the customer's perspective), the customer on the other hand gets the transaction processed almost instantly on their end. It is not a perfect process but it works on a large scale and continues to work while non-cash transaction volume continues to significantly increase worldwide. See the bottom of the post for the growth figure for 2016-2017. Outside of your fantasy, in the real world almost no one accepts bitcoin for goods/services which means that if you want to actually USE the bitcoin for anything practical you have to also pay the exchange fees to convert it to and from a real currency. This is on top of the bitcoin transaction fee to purchase the bitcoin and another fee to sell it. For someone with some knowledge of finance you seem to be rather ignorant of the services provided by such payment processors. Or perhaps you ignore them because bitcoin offers none of those protections. 11 hours ago, Rassah said: Why would they think they can get more real currency from other suckers if it doesn't give anything new or useful??? Same as just about any other bubble: some people see an opportunity and park money there, some others join in, the price of the held "asset" goes up, others join in seeing the apparent gains and the bubble grows from there as greed takes over. Bitcoin is not unique in this regard. The heightened speculation in bitcoin (and in ICOs or initial coin offerings) as well as in businesses making zero or negative profits in general is part of a trend of money seeking any avenues to pawsibly make any sort of return, due to the opportunities for real investment diminishing as real world economic growth slows. 11 hours ago, Rassah said: Theoretically it can scale to about 10,000 transactions per second with a few minor optimizations. The 32x is just a start, since it doesn't need any more. Theory is one thing, like I said before I want to see it actually being used in practice. 11 hours ago, Rassah said: I like this delusion. In this delusion I think I'm now in the 0.1% of richest in the world, both my husband and I are now retired, I can buy cars and planes without really noticing it hitting my finances, and I'm getting ready to open my own bank. And I'm not even near the richest top in this group. So world domination, here I come. If that were the case then you would be a billionaire or at least close to it. If that were true then why do you have the need to prove yourself over and over to a furry forum? 11 hours ago, Rassah said: Those are the places without banks that I mentioned, that bitcoin is the most print target for. So you guys know how a lot of third world countries completely skipped the landline telephone and network stage, and jumped right into the newest technologies of cellphones and wireless data? Those places will also be the ones to skip the banking stage and skip right to bitcoin. It's not profitable there to open a bank or service those people with credit cards, but those people have internet and can download a bitcoin app. Quote To even design a Blockchain that would be capable of scaling to TODAY'S level of transactions will leave it unprepared for even five years from now then alone fifty years. You underestimate technological growth. Processing and storage capacity doubles every two to three years. Human population isn't growing anywhere near that pace. You overestimate bitcoin's presence in the world financial system, including the developing world. You also keep making false equivalencies of bitcoin to other technologies. Bitcoin and its underlying blockchain technology is just a method of storing and processing a list of records. Bitcoin is not the Internet. Bitcoin is not an automobile. Bitcoin is not a central processing unit. Bitcoin is not a hard drive. https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/bitcoin-transactions.html#1y For 2017 Bitcoin's transaction volume was mostly between 200k to 400k daily, with roughly 300k daily transaction volume on the average. Even with the spikes and falls in market value its transaction volume has almost entirely remained within these bounds. https://www.worldpaymentsreport.com/reports/noncash Current estimates of 2016 and 2017 non-cash transactions for developing regions are 161.3 billion for 2016 and 192.6 billion for 2017, with growth of 31.3 billion between the two years, or otherwise growth of a daily average of 85,753,424. I'm afraid that bitcoin's transaction volume is trivial compared to merely the growth in transaction volumes for developing countries, let alone their overall transaction volumes and bitcoin's transaction volumes are for both developing and developed regions. 12 hours ago, Rassah said: Or just use faster computers and bigger hard drives. Using more powerful equipment is a poor way of compensating for a method of record storage that scales poorly and is missing various protections that other payment processing systems offer. It's good to see you are communicating directly with Ashnyan. Please keep it up 10 hours ago, AshleyAshes said: Firstly, it's ignorant, because it ignores trends where the growth on processing performance gains year over year have in fact been slowing. Technologically speaking we are nearing the physical limits of certain technologies and research into alternative materials and technologies are not progressing quickly enough to continue the pace of 'processing and capacity doubling every two to three years'. That's a Moore's law fantasy. This is MORE true for storage where the size of storage available is not increasing at the rates it once did. We are a society that produces massive amounts of data and it's increasing exponentially and the rate at which storage increases is slowing. These are serious -near future- issues that can't be ignored. Oh, I'm sure you're just going to say 'Well, they'll invent better storage' or 'find a new way to make better processors' or 'better compression' but none of those are REAL answers. Human beings have to actually research those things, make them work, make them viable in the field or for manufacturing and affordable enough for mass sales. It's super easy for you to sit in your arm chair and say 'Well, they should just make a better thing' as if that just happens by MAGIC and it is guaranteed to happen for forever. It's not. God damn if only every technophile knew this stuff in general. 10 hours ago, AshleyAshes said: This is WHY you have nerds trying to re-invent and Frankenstein different things onto Bitcoin. And while their tiny patchwork system is stitched and restitched together, currently world non-cash transactions GROW BY 136,438,356 EVERY DAY on the average. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AshleyAshes Posted December 29, 2017 Share Posted December 29, 2017 7 minutes ago, WileyWarWeasel said: It's not much of a comparison to compare bitcoin to the currency options of minor failed states. Also it is completely worthless if there aren't functioning telecommunications around. There are also no protections for fraud. See further below for a comparison of bitcoin transaction volumes and non-cash transaction volumes for the developing world. Lets see, banks (as well as payment processors such as Visa and Paypal) provide some measure of protection against fraud and provide some opportunities to recover your funds or to get refunds. Bitcoin does neither. You failed to mention in your very first paragraph that Visa and the other institutions involved do many security-related checks during the process to see if the transaction is genuine or fraudulent (such as checking previous history and purchase locations and timings). Bitcoin does none of these checks. Also, Rassah's whole thing on Visa payments from the consumer side are bullshit. I can see Visa transactions on my banking app in about 10mins. For Interac (Canada wide network for debit transactions) they appear instantly. Regardless of how many steps happen inside the transaction, from the consumers perspective, things happen basically instantly. Interac also offers 'eTransfers' of cash where by email or SMS you can send money directly and the transaction is immediately seen between both party's bank accounts once the transfer has been accepted. Me and my friends use them all the time to square up food delivery bills since none of us carry cash. And yeah, a critical thing as you mention are consume protections. If I order something online with Visa and it's never shipped. Visa can fully reverse the transaction and I get a refund. With bitcoin, you're just shit out of luck. On some tech forums I post on, somewhat infrequently there are posts by users who decided to buy something by mail (As in, used, craigslist style or similar, NOT an online retailer) and paid with bitcoin or some other system that offers no consumer protections and are asking what to do because they never got the item. They're just screwed. Now, to be fair, this isn't EXCLUSIVE to Bitcoin. As an example, money on PayPal sent as a 'Gift' can't be disputed and some people are daft enough to pay for purchases as 'Gifts' to dodge out on the fees only to have no recourse once they get screwed. You'd almost think that, as a consumer, paying a small fee on top of my transaction to gain consumer protections is appealing to me. Much like how I pay an insurance company a small fee so that they will buy me all new stuff in the event that my apartment burns down. 19 minutes ago, WileyWarWeasel said: God damn if only every technophile knew this stuff in general. As someone working in the film industry, storage of data is an frequent topic. Also, as a horrendous pirate with a 50TB server, I have the anecdotal experience 8TB HDDs remaining the best 'bang for dollar' for 2 years now where as before every year the sweet spot would be a larger and larger hard drive. Now, to clarify, larger hard drives DO continue to come out but they are very expensive and the '$ Per GB' sweet spot hasn't moved from 8TB drives. The much larger drives for enterprise are prohibitively expensive. You see occasional headline grabbing articles about large, non-mass production drives, or 'what the future may bring' and such but these are not Representative of what's going into most data centers or consumer products. Right now, in terms of what you can go and buy from a supplier right now, are usually 12TB at the most and WD announced a mass production 14TB enterprise drive in October. Meanwhile, Seagate was shipping the first 8TB drives 2.5 years ago. 2.5 years and we haven't even doubled the size of mass production drives and that trend is going to continue to slip. Meanwhile, as a society, with our streaming everything, bajillion phone photos videos backed up to the cloud and the cloud replicating itself to regional mirrors for expediency, our data production just grows exponentially. Like, in all seriousness, and Rassah's apparent technical ignorance aside, this should concern everybody. And I'm sure that people will LOVE citing articles about prototypes or road maps for great advancements, but until they materialize as mass producible products they are irreverent. It's ONE thing to manage something in a lab and an entirely different to make it cheap enough to actually manufacture outside of a lab. We keep hearing about next generation batteries but meanwhile everything is still running on the same basic Lithium Ion (Polymer) tech for the last 15 years. And those LiIon batteries that we've been using in everything since the early 00's? They were invented in the 1970s. It took THAT LONG to actually evolve a mass producible version of the technology that could see wide scale adoption. This is true for a LOT of technology. The stuff makes for great Popular Mechanics articles of 'what's just around the corner' but there can be a lot of time to actually get us around that corner. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Rassah Posted December 29, 2017 Share Posted December 29, 2017 4 hours ago, WileyWarWeasel said: Most people are saying that bitcoin transactions actually take several hours to one day to process Still super fast compared to the banking system. Especially for international transfers. Quote I'd rather see this in practice and in significant scale, rather than how it should all ideally work. You saw it working in the YouTube video. You'll see the scale later this year once it's out of beta. I'm hoping to implement it in the bank I'll be opening hopefully later next year too. Quote I'd also like to see people using bitcoin for actual trading of goods and services rather than just hoping for bigger fools to give them real currency later. Then go to Venezuela, or New Hampshire. Quote It's not much of a comparison to compare bitcoin to the currency options of minor failed states. You're not looking at trends again. Failed states have currency that's declining due to excessive debt, not just currency that has a small cap. This one is growing and has no debt behind it. I wouldn't call New Zealand a failed state either. Quote Also it is completely worthless if there aren't functioning telecommunications around. So are most of our currencies. Luckily we have telecommunications around the world. Even sat phones are getting cheaper. Quote Thereare also no protections for fraud. Yeah there are. Besides traditional third party escrows and transaction monitoring, there's also multi-signature options where you need X of Y signatures to spend from an account. Like 2-of-3. You can have two keys, one in a safe and one in your wallet, and a third party can have the third, and verify your transactions against possible fraud like credit cards do. Except having one signature all they can do is approve or reject your transaction, not take your money. Same for a third party escrow, where you and someone else can have two of the three signatures, and the escrow agent has a third, where all they can do is decide whether the money goes from you to the other guy, or back to you. Stuff traditional money can't even do. Quote See further below for a comparison of bitcoin transaction volumes and non-cash transaction volumes for the developing world. Again, who cares about the volumes? Why are they so important? Were email volumes compared to land line phone volumes important to the success of email in 1993? Quote Lets see, banks (as well as payment processors such as Visa and Paypal) provide some measure of protection against fraud and provide some opportunities to recover your funds or to get refunds. Bitcoin does neither. If a bank gets robbed of its cash, it can't just reverse the transaction. That's where insurance comes in. Businesses like Coinbase are insured against loss, so can recover your bitcoins if you get robbed too. Quote You failed to mention in your very first paragraph that Visa and the other institutions involved do many security-related checks during the process to see if the transaction is genuine or fraudulent (such as checking previous history and purchase locations and timings). Bitcoin does none of these checks. As mentioned earlier, third parties can, and will. And some exchanges actually already do, blocking transactions if they are above a certain amount, or if they are unusual going to unknown addresses. Quote The merchant has to wait a small while to receive the payment thanks in large part to these checks It's actually not because of the checks, it's because much of the banking system is still manually run. That's why banks have such big buildings. Quote Outside of your fantasy, in the real world almost no one accepts bitcoin for goods/services which means that if you want to actually USE the bitcoin for anything practical you have to also pay the exchange fees to convert it to and from a real currency. This is on top of the bitcoin transaction fee to purchase the bitcoin and another fee to sell it. Sure... So what? Quote Or perhaps you ignore them because bitcoin offers none of those protections. It's cause they're already provided, and can be provided in ways that other currencies aren't able to, but I didn't care to explain the multi-signature stuff. More of this is coming too. I hope to provide such a service myself even. Quote Same as just about any other bubble: some people see an opportunity and park money there, some others join in, the price of the held "asset" goes up, others join in seeing the apparent gains and the bubble grows from there as greed takes over. Like what? The dot com bubble was because people thought the internet was going to be a useful tech. The real estate bubble was because people thought real estate is valuable and will continue to be useful... Every bubble was because people invested in something they believed had a lot of use and potential, not just "to park money there." So why do you think bitcoin is different, offering nothing of use but for people to speculate on? Hell, why are you so convinced that all the useful features I explained that it has and is working on are worthless in the long run? Quote If that were the case then you would be a billionaire or at least close to it. If that were true then why do you have the need to prove yourself over and over to a furry forum? I'm not a billionaire yet. I guess I just have a bad habit of liking to argue on the internet when someone on the internet is wrong, and I have a passion for this topic. I do work on other things throughout the day. Quote You overestimate bitcoin's presence in the world financial system, including the developing world. No I'm not. I'm saying that it has a much greater than zero presence, but that the presence is irrelevant. The potential and the current growth is what matters. I do think you may be understimating its presence though. Quote Bitcoin and its underlying blockchain technology is just a method of storing and processing a list of records. And the internet is just a method of sending beeps (1's) to people at very high speeds. So what? Quote Bitcoin is not the Internet. Bitcoin is not an automobile. Bitcoin is not a central processing unit. Bitcoin is not a hard drive. Right. It's just the best money that exists right now. Quote I'm afraid that bitcoin's transaction volume is trivial compared to merely the growth in transaction volumes for developing countries, let alone their overall transaction volumes and bitcoin's transaction volumes are for both developing and developed regions. ... again, so what? Why does this even matter? Hell, bitcoin grew by 100 billion in one month. Quote Using more powerful equipment is a poor way of compensating for a method of record storage that scales poorly and is missing various protections that other payment processing systems offer. No it's not. Worked for the internet and everything else. Tech has scaled just fine over the last 30 years, and continues to scale. And as I said, that's just one of the scaling methods. Regarding Ashley's comment on storage (no, I'm still not reading her stuff), there is one absolutely BRILLIANT solution to the storage scaling issue: get a second hard drive. I know, mind-blowing, right? Besides, that part doesn't even have to scale that much. You don't need to keep copies of old spent transactions. If you were to get rid of all those right now, you'll probably only need about a gig of storage for the whole blockchain. If every single person in the world used it (7 billion) three times a day, at 250 bytes per transaction, you'd need 5.25 terabytes of storage to accommodate them. That not difficult even using today's tech. And we probably won't get to 3 transaction by 7 billion for a few decades. Quote And while their tiny patchwork system is stitched and restitched together, currently world non-cash transactions GROW BY 136,438,356 EVERY DAY on the average. That's it? Linear scaling is even easier. It's the exponential one that's being worked on the most. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Rassah Posted December 29, 2017 Share Posted December 29, 2017 Oh, with regards to protections, over the last three years I've probably bought about $20,000 worth of stuff from Amazon with bitcoin (and got 10% to 15% discounts every time). Never lost any money. Just used an automatic escrow for every purchase. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AshleyAshes Posted December 29, 2017 Share Posted December 29, 2017 11 minutes ago, Rassah said: Oh, with regards to protections, over the last three years I've probably bought about $20,000 worth of stuff from Amazon with bitcoin (and got 10% to 15% discounts every time). Never lost any money. Just used an automatic escrow for every purchase. Thanks to this single individuals anecdotal experience, we have determined that consumer protections in the purchases of goods are not needed at all! BRB, emailing PayPal to dismantle their ENTIRE dispute system right away. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AshleyAshes Posted December 29, 2017 Share Posted December 29, 2017 38 minutes ago, Rassah said: Regarding Ashley's comment on storage (no, I'm still not reading her stuff) He quoted me like two posts ago but you should in no way interpret his quoting and responding to me as in reading my posts in any way shape and form. Seriously, I've literally seen angry 14yos do a better job at 'Pretending to have someone on ignore' than this. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
WileyWarWeasel Posted December 30, 2017 Share Posted December 30, 2017 3 hours ago, Rassah said: Still super fast compared to the banking system. Especially for international transfers. Except that Ashley already provided an example of a much faster process in the post right before yours. 3 hours ago, Rassah said: You saw it working in the YouTube video. You'll see the scale later this year once it's out of beta. I'm hoping to implement it in the bank I'll be opening hopefully later next year too. A bitcoin bank? Talk about reinventing the wheel. Also I'm not holding my breath about seeing the blockchain operating on large scale. 3 hours ago, Rassah said: Then go to Venezuela, or New Hampshire. A few people using bitcoin on miniature scale is not the same as it being used on large scale. 3 hours ago, Rassah said: You're not looking at trends again. Failed states have currency that's declining due to excessive debt, not just currency that has a small cap. This one is growing and has no debt behind it. I wouldn't call New Zealand a failed state either. Actually, you're not looking at trends. I even have proof of the trends of non-cash transactions and bitcoin's insignificance but you ignore the evidence. In Venezuala's case, they were heavily reliant on oil exports and somewhat less reliant on agriculture exports. With the current low prices they are not doing well, especially as their oil is expensive to extract. Never said or implied that NZ was a failed state. As for bitcoin "growing" the only thing that was significantly growing about it until recently was its market capitalization, which is simply number of coins multiplied by current market price (and with a good chunk of bitcoins permanently out of circulation its actual market capitalization is much lower). This is due almost entirely to speculation. It is an impressive speculative bubble I'll admit. 3 hours ago, Rassah said: So are most of our currencies. Luckily we have telecommunications around the world. Even sat phones are getting cheaper. Actually one can still use cash for transactions, which requires no telecommunications. 3 hours ago, Rassah said: Yeah there are. Besides traditional third party escrows and transaction monitoring, there's also multi-signature options where you need X of Y signatures to spend from an account. Like 2-of-3. You can have two keys, one in a safe and one in your wallet, and a third party can have the third, and verify your transactions against possible fraud like credit cards do. Except having one signature all they can do is approve or reject your transaction, not take your money. Same for a third party escrow, where you and someone else can have two of the three signatures, and the escrow agent has a third, where all they can do is decide whether the money goes from you to the other guy, or back to you. Stuff traditional money can't even do. So by your own admission Escrow already provides a similar service for real currencies, but I suppose reinventing the wheel is better than nothing. Sounds like traditional money can already do this stuff. 3 hours ago, Rassah said: Again, who cares about the volumes? Why are they so important? Were email volumes compared to land line phone volumes important to the success of email in 1993? Holy false equivalencies Batman! Bitcoin is not email. I suppose I shouldn't be surprised at you trying to dismiss proof of bitcoin's insignificance. Alright Mr Financial Wiz, lets learn about why transaction volumes are important. A transaction occurs every time something is traded for something else, tangible or intangible. The more trades occur the more transactions there are, ie transaction volumes increase. Since trade cannot occur without transactions, transaction numbers and how much of a percentage of those transactions are being done with one transaction processing system or another is a critical metric on how you gauge the importance of that system in a particular market or region. I hope that spells it out well enough for you. 3 hours ago, Rassah said: Like what? The dot com bubble was because people thought the internet was going to be a useful tech. The real estate bubble was because people thought real estate is valuable and will continue to be useful... Every bubble was because people invested in something they believed had a lot of use and potential, not just "to park money there." So why do you think bitcoin is different, offering nothing of use but for people to speculate on? Hell, why are you so convinced that all the useful features I explained that it has and is working on are worthless in the long run? I'm sure that some of the people "investing" in bitcoin initially were true believers like you. Again you're making false equivalencies. Bitcoin is not a plot of land with or without a building on it. Bitcoin is not the internet. The dot come bubble came about from people speculating in all sorts of loss-making ventures simply because they had a connection to the internet in some way and saw bigger fools piling into many such stocks, inflating stock prices. Similarly, real estate bubbles tend to happen when there's easy credit floating around and not much else to invest in and/or there is hype about a particular region and bigger fools rushing in to buy and resell over and over. Bitcoin as a payment processing system does not work particularly well even in small scale. The vast majority of people using bitcoin are simply hoping to get more of that sweet central bank money, they don't give a damn about your sanctimonious ideals. Blockchain developers can try to patch new features into it but they are trying to play catch-up to a non-cash system that is growing by 136,438,356 transactions processed EVERY DAY on the average while they stagnate on roughly 300k transactions per day. At best they might succeed in emulating some of the features of non-cash processors in miniature scale while being left in the dust. 4 hours ago, Rassah said: I'm not a billionaire yet. I guess I just have a bad habit of liking to argue on the internet when someone on the internet is wrong, and I have a passion for this topic. I do work on other things throughout the day. You dismiss outright proof that the payment processing network you are advocating for is insignificant and has major problems at miniature scale. That's not passion, that is religious zealotry. 4 hours ago, Rassah said: No I'm not. I'm saying that it has a much greater than zero presence, but that the presence is irrelevant. The potential and the current growth is what matters. I do think you may be understimating its presence though. Bitcoin transaction volume has bounced up and down between 400k to 200k transactions per day for the entire year, indicating its adoption by the wider world is almost entirely stagnant. Meanwhile world non-cash transactions grow by 136,438,356 every day on the average. I have given you the figures that clearly show just how insignificant bitcoin is and how stagnant its adoption is, even how tiny its market capitalization is. No sane person can look at bitcoin and conclude that a market cap value (almost entirely determined by bigger fools) of less than 0.1% of world finance and a stagnant transaction volume that is roughly 1/454 of the GROWTH alone in overall non-cash transactions is significant. 4 hours ago, Rassah said: And the internet is just a method of sending beeps (1's) to people at very high speeds. So what? False equivalency strikes again! Bitcoin is not the internet. 4 hours ago, Rassah said: Right. It's just the best money that exists right now. The figures and issues encountered even in miniature scale disprove this. Unless you want to once again put the entire crux of your argument on its value as a get-rich scheme relying on later suckers money. 4 hours ago, Rassah said: ... again, so what? Why does this even matter? Hell, bitcoin grew by 100 billion in one month. https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/bitcoin-marketcap.html#1y ...before its market cap crashed 25% after its peak. Seriously, you're still using large market capitalization to legitimize it (because large market cap is such a great indicator of quality, like the large cap stocks of loss-making companies during the dot com bubble)? Or are you trying to say that it will go up another 100 billion (plenty more suckers to fleece I guess)? 4 hours ago, Rassah said: No it's not. Worked for the internet and everything else. False equivalency, bitcoin is not the internet. 4 hours ago, Rassah said: Tech has scaled just fine over the last 30 years, and continues to scale. And as I said, that's just one of the scaling methods. Technological improvement has become more incremental in the recent years. 4 hours ago, Rassah said: Regarding Ashley's comment on storage (no, I'm still not reading her stuff), there is one absolutely BRILLIANT solution to the storage scaling issue: get a second hard drive. I know, mind-blowing, right? Besides, that part doesn't even have to scale that much. You don't need to keep copies of old spent transactions. If you were to get rid of all those right now, you'll probably only need about a gig of storage for the whole blockchain. If every single person in the world used it (7 billion) three times a day, at 250 bytes per transaction, you'd need 5.25 terabytes of storage to accommodate them. That not difficult even using today's tech. And we probably won't get to 3 transaction by 7 billion for a few decades. I suppose if bitcoin remains in miniature scale then you won't need much storage space for the transaction records. Also since you're still pretending with @AshleyAshes I'll have to bring out the big guns ;V 5 hours ago, Rassah said: That's it? Linear scaling is even easier. It's the exponential one that's being worked on the most. Actually world non-cash transaction volumes are following a bit of an exponential curve. https://www.worldpaymentsreport.com/reports/noncash But wait a minute, bitcoin transactions growth has been almost nonexistent and it is struggling in its small scale usage. https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/bitcoin-marketcap.html#1y Not that figures mean anything to religious zealots like yourself. After all, it's being "worked on" 4 hours ago, AshleyAshes said: 5 hours ago, Rassah said: Oh, with regards to protections, over the last three years I've probably bought about $20,000 worth of stuff from Amazon with bitcoin (and got 10% to 15% discounts every time). Never lost any money. Just used an automatic escrow for every purchase. Thanks to this single individuals anecdotal experience, we have determined that consumer protections in the purchases of goods are not needed at all! BRB, emailing PayPal to dismantle their ENTIRE dispute system right away. It gets better. You can't actually buy stuff directly on Amazon using bitcoin, you need to buy gift cards first. This is somewhat akin to the BitPay system where you preload a card with actual money before buying anything. Also where do these discounts come from? I like how you sneaked in the following disclaimer: "Just used an automatic escrow for every purchase." That means that you went through some unnamed third party (maybe that's where these supposed discounts came from) to convert your coins to real money before spending that money in the store. Wow, after converting your bitcoin to real money you had no problems using the real money in the Amazon store! HOLY SHIT BITCOIN REALLY IS THE FUTURE #bitcointorealmoneytoamazonthefutureishereomaigawd. 5 hours ago, Rassah said: If a bank gets robbed of its cash, it can't just reverse the transaction. That's where insurance comes in. Businesses like Coinbase are insured against loss, so can recover your bitcoins if you get robbed too. Banks are guaranteed by the central bank which also acts as a lender of last resort. These third party bitcoin-related services are essentially reinventing the wheel on miniature scale, whoop-di-do. 5 hours ago, Rassah said: As mentioned earlier, third parties can, and will. And some exchanges actually already do, blocking transactions if they are above a certain amount, or if they are unusual going to unknown addresses. More reinventing the wheel on miniature scale. And all of this for a "currency" that almost no one uses for actually buying stuff. 5 hours ago, Rassah said: It's actually not because of the checks, it's because much of the banking system is still manually run. That's why banks have such big buildings. Yet even with the human input 522.4 billion (est) transactions were handled in 2017 worldwide just fine and even expanded by 49.8 billion transactions compared to the previous year. This happened while transactions were near instant for most customers and in some cases (like the example that Ash mentioned) near instant for the receivers of payments also. The processors involved usually charge a small percentage fee for various protections but again bitcoin services charge fees on top of the $20 fee that is currently being paid per transaction even on bitcoin's pissant scale. Remember bitcoin itself doesn't provide the vast majority of the protections that payment processors provide yet you still have to pay a $20 fee on top of what bitcoin-related services charge if you want to get anywhere near the same level of protection. 6 hours ago, Rassah said: Sure... So what? So that means you have to take extra steps and pay more money to do the same thing as real currencies. Yes you could pay fees to bitcoin-related businesses to increase your level of protection but these are fees you pay on top of the $20 fee and the waiting time just for the bitcoin transaction itself. A true believer who doesn't care about paying more and waiting longer to trade for goods and services like yourself might not care about such things, but it seems that most individuals and businesses do. 6 hours ago, Rassah said: It's cause they're already provided, and can be provided in ways that other currencies aren't able to, but I didn't care to explain the multi-signature stuff. More of this is coming too. I hope to provide such a service myself even. You're reliant on third-party services to provide these protections which charge fees, which are on top of the transaction fees and waiting times of bitcoin itself. 4 hours ago, AshleyAshes said: He quoted me like two posts ago but you should in no way interpret his quoting and responding to me as in reading my posts in any way shape and form. Seriously, I've literally seen angry 14yos do a better job at 'Pretending to have someone on ignore' than this. It's like watching a train wreck with each post being a carriage. I haven't seen anything quite like it (from an adult anyway). 10 hours ago, AshleyAshes said: As someone working in the film industry, storage of data is an frequent topic. Also, as a horrendous pirate with a 50TB server, I have the anecdotal experience 8TB HDDs remaining the best 'bang for dollar' for 2 years now where as before every year the sweet spot would be a larger and larger hard drive. Now, to clarify, larger hard drives DO continue to come out but they are very expensive and the '$ Per GB' sweet spot hasn't moved from 8TB drives. The much larger drives for enterprise are prohibitively expensive. You see occasional headline grabbing articles about large, non-mass production drives, or 'what the future may bring' and such but these are not Representative of what's going into most data centers or consumer products. Right now, in terms of what you can go and buy from a supplier right now, are usually 12TB at the most and WD announced a mass production 14TB enterprise drive in October. Meanwhile, Seagate was shipping the first 8TB drives 2.5 years ago. 2.5 years and we haven't even doubled the size of mass production drives and that trend is going to continue to slip. Meanwhile, as a society, with our streaming everything, bajillion phone photos videos backed up to the cloud and the cloud replicating itself to regional mirrors for expediency, our data production just grows exponentially. Like, in all seriousness, and Rassah's apparent technical ignorance aside, this should concern everybody. And I'm sure that people will LOVE citing articles about prototypes or road maps for great advancements, but until they materialize as mass producible products they are irreverent. It's ONE thing to manage something in a lab and an entirely different to make it cheap enough to actually manufacture outside of a lab. We keep hearing about next generation batteries but meanwhile everything is still running on the same basic Lithium Ion (Polymer) tech for the last 15 years. And those LiIon batteries that we've been using in everything since the early 00's? They were invented in the 1970s. It took THAT LONG to actually evolve a mass producible version of the technology that could see wide scale adoption. This is true for a LOT of technology. The stuff makes for great Popular Mechanics articles of 'what's just around the corner' but there can be a lot of time to actually get us around that corner. Dear gawd the number of hare-brained schemes that I've seen that are marketed as going big "just around the corner" is ridiculous. I'll admit it's amusing to revisit such schemes years later to find out that they're still "just around the corner" from mass adoption. Fusion power and hydrogen fuel for automobiles are some of my favs. That's some interesting experience with hard drives as a concrete example. Also gives me an idea of what sizes to go for the next hard drive Sounds like hard drive capacity could be a concern over the long term. The bold section is particularly important because most people don't seem to notice the difference between something being technically pawsible and something being actually viable/affordable on a significant scale. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AshleyAshes Posted December 30, 2017 Share Posted December 30, 2017 The fact that Rassah has to argue so intently that Bitcoin can do everything that existing payment systems can do, only faster and better! But then for every case scenario you need to add additional systems or services that add complications. Third party escrow services. Prepaid Visa card systems. The 'Lightning' network because Bitcoin itself can't actually get the jog done but 'Lightning' is only in Beta so who knows how we'll it'll work. (I'm sure that Rassah has predictions that he firmly believes in, but in the end predictions aren't reality.) Consumers want something easy. If you have to DEBATE that something 'isn't as complicated as it sounds' then it's not easy. You don't have to ARGUE that an easy thing is easy. You demonstrate it once and people are like 'Ooooooo.'. I have a bank account, a Visa with the same bank, I can access my chequeing, savings, and Visa all from my website's banking site or it's app. I can move money between any of the three with a single website or app. I can use either the bank card or visa card to make payments. While Interac is a Canadian network so direct payment options for my bank card are limited to some Canadian retailers, the Visa works basically everywhere It all works simply and nicely. No one has to ARGUE that into being easy and friendly to use. It just already is. If a discussion about bitcoin has to be an argument about a multitude of concerns then it's already failing to be easy to use, accessible and to offer utility to consumers. Period. No joke, here's a Usenet NZB indexer that will only accept cryptocurrency for it's VIP API access. I'm literally like 'Jesus CHRIST, the number of steps needed to turn my money into what these guys will accept. Fuck it, too much effort'. Meanwhile my main NZB indexer.... They take PayPal. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Fossa Posted January 1, 2018 Share Posted January 1, 2018 These bitcoins would be a disaster and failure for Uncle Scrooge, who would not like them at all, as evidenced from the last page of US#1: Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Rassah Posted January 1, 2018 Share Posted January 1, 2018 @WileyWarWeasel I'll take your word for it with regards to Ashley's example of something faster, though I suspect (actually know) that the actual transfer of money doesn't happen that fast. Either whatever she thinks is faster is just the transfer showing up in her account with the word "pending" omitted and her not being able to spend it right away despite seeing it, or whatever service she's using simply gives her a temporary credit while the actual money moves from one account to the other. The actual system of money transfer that banks use in the background, SWIFT, is just not that fast. A "trend of bitcoin's insignificance" isn't a trend, it's its current state. The trend you showed of cash growth was pretty small compared to bitcoin's trend of its growth. The reason for Venezuela's economic problem is irrelevant. I was talking about the huge bitcoin adoption going in in that and other similar countries as people move their money from their state currencies to bitcoin. It's not speculation, its protecting their wealth, and in the case of Venezuela actually saving lives. Let me know how one uses cash to buy from Amazon, or to pay businesses and suppliers your business works with. I'm not aware of anyone shipping a pallet of $5mil in USD bills to a Chinese factory, but maybe it happens? Or maybe you're still thinking too small here. No, traditional escrow doesn't "provide similar services." Escrow requires you to find a very trustworthy third party to hold the money, which will not run away with it. Bitcoin doesn't let the third party hold any cash, and in some cases can have an escrow without even requiring a third party! Yes bitcoin is email. It's the first entirely digital value that can be sent over the internet, instead of the old system where the value is held in paper or banks, and the internet is just used to arrange moving and settling it between banks. You stating otherwise doesn't make any points, it only proves again that you have no idea what the hell you're even arguing against. Transaction volume doesn't matter because IT. IS. GROWING. EXPONENTIALLY. You keep telling me how insignificant it is, and I don't give a shit, because I know it was almost nothing a few years ago, it grew to over 250,000 a day in just a few short years, surpassing even PayPal, and is poised to scale to millions a day in the next few years. "Stagnate" my ass! Do you believe that technology will never improve beyond what you have now, despite living in a world where it has been continuously improving for over a century? Where do you live? In a mud hut in sub saharan Africa? Are you replying to me on a 1990's Nikoa phone? I love that you're comparing bitcoin to the internet and real estate bubbles, since we all know that internet turned out to be a total speculative fad that no one uses anymore, and real estate turned out to be a completely worthless bubble and no one lives in houses anymore, but you really should learn about what the hell bitcoin is and what it does, and especially what money actually is, instead of just making these rather ridiculous stupid and uninformed claims. I tried. I really honestly tried. But it's impossible to explain it to someone who absolutely KNOWS how things work despite being absolutely wrong about it, and impossible to argue with someone who believes the world does not progress whatsoever. So go write crap about other technologies that will never scale, like about the inefficiencies of the internal combustion engine and how the automobile is a fad that simply can not be scaled, because there are no places to gas up, and no way to increase production from manually assembling each one one at a time, making horses the superior mode of transportation. I'm not going to bother with this stupid shit anymore. You guys are too spoiled, living in your own teeny tiny little world, thinking the only country that exists is America or Canada, and that everyone in the world lives in those countries, with their bank accounts, visas, stable currencies, etc. that you enjoy. Bitcoin is obviously not for you. And p.s. I still don't give a shit about Ashley. I read and responded to that one post you asked me to, and it was complete idiocy and vitriol as expected. But all her hidden replies to me does makes it seem like she really obsessed. That, or really vain, thinking I care. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Rassah Posted January 1, 2018 Share Posted January 1, 2018 Here's a list of articles and people who you naively think are stupider than you (and I don't mean the authors of these articles). https://www.caseyresearch.com/how-bitcoin-is-saving-lives-in-venezuela/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/09/big-in-venezuela/534177/ https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-06-15/venezuelans-are-seeking-a-haven-in-crypto-coins-as-crisis-rages https://www.reuters.com/article/us-investment-summit-novogratz/institutional-investors-close-to-adopting-bitcoin-says-ex-fortress-executive-novogratz-idUSKBN1DD2RE http://fortune.com/2017/12/21/goldman-sachs-bitcoin/ http://deadline.com/2017/12/bitcoin-arrives-to-wall-street-bringing-good-news-for-blockchain-entertainment-1202223747/ http://www.newsbtc.com/2017/10/05/serious-mainstream-bitcoin-adoption-led-japan/ But please, keep convincing yourself that it's just a $200+ billion dollar, thousands of businesses, billions in raised capital to develop technology around it, adopted and regulated by dozens of countries, and growing exponentially by every metric, "speculative useless fad." Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AshleyAshes Posted January 1, 2018 Share Posted January 1, 2018 15 minutes ago, Rassah said: the actual transfer of money doesn't happen that fast. "What are 'Things that are irreverent to consumers and thus unable to to sway them'?" 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
WileyWarWeasel Posted January 2, 2018 Share Posted January 2, 2018 @Rassah I've provided the actual numbers around bitcoin and the rest of the financial system while you've given press releases and act like bitcoin's pissant numbers are significant relative to the rest of the system. I think it would just be easier and less time-consuming to just visualize what it is you mean by "exponential growth" of bitcoin's transactions uptake. This is an example of a typical exponential function on a linear scale and a logarithmic scale: Here is bitcoin's transaction volume in linear scale and logarithmic scale: It took about 6 years for bitcoin to go from a few thousand transactions daily to 300k daily. Between 2016 and 2017 worldwide non-cash transactions grew by 136,438,356 every day on the average. In bitcoin's current tiny state you have to wait and pay about $20 per transaction before you even use any third party services to try to emulate some of the features of the global financial system. 14 hours ago, Rassah said: A "trend of bitcoin's insignificance" isn't a trend, it's its current state. The trend you showed of cash growth was pretty small compared to bitcoin's trend of its growth. The above figures and figures of world non-cash transactions contradict your claims: https://www.worldpaymentsreport.com/reports/noncash 14 hours ago, Rassah said: I was talking about the huge bitcoin adoption going in in that and other similar countries as people move their money from their state currencies to bitcoin. It's not speculation, its protecting their wealth, and in the case of Venezuela actually saving lives. Even in developing countries the adoption of bitcoin is minor which is the point I was making, and what do you know I've quotes figures on that before: On 12/30/2017 at 4:12 AM, WileyWarWeasel said: You overestimate bitcoin's presence in the world financial system, including the developing world. You also keep making false equivalencies of bitcoin to other technologies. Bitcoin and its underlying blockchain technology is just a method of storing and processing a list of records. Bitcoin is not the Internet. Bitcoin is not an automobile. Bitcoin is not a central processing unit. Bitcoin is not a hard drive. https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/bitcoin-transactions.html#1y For 2017 Bitcoin's transaction volume was mostly between 200k to 400k daily, with roughly 300k daily transaction volume on the average. Even with the spikes and falls in market value its transaction volume has almost entirely remained within these bounds. https://www.worldpaymentsreport.com/reports/noncash Current estimates of 2016 and 2017 non-cash transactions for developing regions are 161.3 billion for 2016 and 192.6 billion for 2017, with growth of 31.3 billion between the two years, or otherwise growth of a daily average of 85,753,424. I'm afraid that bitcoin's transaction volume is trivial compared to merely the growth in transaction volumes for developing countries, let alone their overall transaction volumes and bitcoin's transaction volumes are for both developing and developed regions. 14 hours ago, Rassah said: Let me know how one uses cash to buy from Amazon, or to pay businesses and suppliers your business works with. I'm not aware of anyone shipping a pallet of $5mil in USD bills to a Chinese factory, but maybe it happens? Or maybe you're still thinking too small here. I never said anyone buys Amazon stuff or pallets of Chinese stuff directly with cash, you're making a straw man. Also factories and other businesses do not use bitcoin on a significant level when you're looking at it worldwide. See the figures above. It is ironic that you accuse me if thinking too small, when you tout an insignificant payment processor and currency in the face of concrete numbers showing exactly how insignificant it is. 14 hours ago, Rassah said: No, traditional escrow doesn't "provide similar services." Escrow requires you to find a very trustworthy third party to hold the money, which will not run away with it. Bitcoin doesn't let the third party hold any cash, and in some cases can have an escrow without even requiring a third party! How does the payment receiver know for certain that you've set aside money for them using bitcoin? 14 hours ago, Rassah said: Yes bitcoin is email. It's the first entirely digital value that can be sent over the internet, instead of the old system where the value is held in paper or banks, and the internet is just used to arrange moving and settling it between banks. You stating otherwise doesn't make any points, it only proves again that you have no idea what the hell you're even arguing against. That doesn't explain how bitcoin is email. Are you saying that email is just "digital value that can be sent over the internet"? If that's how you're defining email then almost anything that uses the internet as a medium can be classified as email. If you're talking about value as in the value of money (which email is not) then this "value" (or more accurately, the records of ownership and transactions) of bitcoin is held in a distributed network of computers. Just like the records of ownership and transactions for bank-issued currency it still needs to be held somewhere, it's just that it's held in a disparate collection of devices spread around the world rather than in a few dedicated servers. We've seen firsthand the difficulty in scaling such an approach. While bitcoin developers argue about how to increase transaction volume capacity to a few more hundred thousand daily the annual worldwide non-cash transaction volumes grow by over a hundred million every day. Given your compulsion to compare bitcoin to email despite not actually saying how "bitcoin is email" besides saying it uses the internet (as do many other things) it seems you don't know what you're arguing for even. 14 hours ago, Rassah said: Transaction volume doesn't matter because IT. IS. GROWING. EXPONENTIALLY. The actual figures disprove your claim. 14 hours ago, Rassah said: You keep telling me how insignificant it is, and I don't give a shit, because I know it was almost nothing a few years ago, it grew to over 250,000 a day in just a few short years, surpassing even PayPal, and is poised to scale to millions a day in the next few years. Paypal is a small payment processor compared to say Visa, and even then your claim is false. https://investor.paypal-corp.com/releasedetail.cfm?releaseid=1009339 6.1 billion transactions processed for 2016, or 16,712,328 daily. Bitcoin has not surpassed paypal in transaction volume. As for poised... 14 hours ago, Rassah said: "Stagnate" my ass! Do you believe that technology will never improve beyond what you have now, despite living in a world where it has been continuously improving for over a century? Where do you live? In a mud hut in sub saharan Africa? Are you replying to me on a 1990's Nikoa phone? I said that recent bitcoin transaction volume was near stagnant, not world technological progress. Well who'd to think? 14 hours ago, Rassah said: I love that you're comparing bitcoin to the internet and real estate bubbles, since we all know that internet turned out to be a total speculative fad that no one uses anymore, I'm not comparing bitcoin to the technology of the internet itself, rather to bubbles formed on stock speculation of unprofitable internet-related companies of the dot com bubble. No straw man for you. 14 hours ago, Rassah said: and real estate turned out to be a completely worthless bubble and no one lives in houses anymore, I was comparing bitcoin's market value to the bubbles that sometimes form in real estate, I even specifically said once that bitcoin is not real estate itself. No straw man there for you either. 14 hours ago, Rassah said: but you really should learn about what the hell bitcoin is and what it does, and especially what money actually is, instead of just making these rather ridiculous stupid and uninformed claims. I have learned about bitcoin as a currency and payment processing system and the block chain technology behind it. I have seen its limitations and how the vast majority of its participants use it (for speculation). You have made claim after claim of bitcoin being akin to "real" money. Yet you refuse the acknowledge that the primary use of money is to trade for goods and services and that bitcoin is not used for that by the vast majority of those that hold it or how poorly it scales for such usage. You have made claims again and again about bitcoin's "MASSIVE adoption" yet I have shown time and again through basic statistics that its worldwide usage (or even just the developing world) is insignificant. You promoted Bitpay as an easy and immediate way to spend bitcoin yet @AshleyAshes showed that all Bitpay did was preload a debit card with USD converted from bitcoin. Your claim: On 12/26/2017 at 6:31 AM, Rassah said: Meanwhile I can just tap my bitcoin backed BitPay VISA bank card literally anywhere I shop and the money is deducted from my bitcoin account to the merchant, anywhere in the world and in any currency, and I get to own things instantly. So what? I can do that too. Ash's rebuttal: On 12/26/2017 at 9:13 AM, AshleyAshes said: That's funny, because BitPay seems to otherwise; https://bitpay.com/card/#howitworks Quote The BitPay Card is one of the fastest, easiest ways to turn your bitcoin into dollars. Quote Load dollars onto your BitPay Card using your bitcoin wallet Quote Load your card with dollars using your bitcoin wallet, or via direct deposit through your employer. The Bitpay Visa Debit card is literally nothing more than a bog standard Visa Debit Card that must be pre-loaded with US Dollars. While it does use BitCoin to BUY the USD that the card is pre-loaded with, it's still just that, a Visa Debit Card pre-loaded with USD. The only thing being bought with bitcoin is the USD that the card is being pre-loaded with. The actual transaction with the merchant is in good old fashioned fiat currency. You also implied that Amazon accepted bitcoin and even offered a discount: On 12/26/2017 at 6:31 AM, Rassah said: Can Ashley order anything she wants off Amazon for 15% off with free shipping? I'm guessing no. However Amazon does not accept bitcoin and there's no evidence of this discount for using bitcoin for Amazon either (obviously, since they don't accept it. The closest you can get is buying gift cards with bitcoins and then using the cards). Later on you expanded on this claim: On 12/30/2017 at 9:00 AM, Rassah said: Oh, with regards to protections, over the last three years I've probably bought about $20,000 worth of stuff from Amazon with bitcoin (and got 10% to 15% discounts every time). Never lost any money. Just used an automatic escrow for every purchase. You implied that bitcoin provided protections related to Amazon purchases, yet you now admit that you used a third party to convert to real money before spending that real money at Amazon. The buyer protections came from using the fiat currency with Amazon (and an appropriate payment processing system for that currency). Also where did these supposed discounts come from, the nameless escrow service? Talk about making spurious claims. 15 hours ago, Rassah said: I tried. I really honestly tried. But it's impossible to explain it to someone who absolutely KNOWS how things work despite being absolutely wrong about it, You have offered occasional explanations of certain processes, and a lot of hype and false claims about bitcoin. I have even provided hard data to dispute your claims on certain occasions as shown above. 15 hours ago, Rassah said: and impossible to argue with someone who believes the world does not progress whatsoever. The false equivalency fallacy is strong with this one. I've never said that "the world does not progress whatsoever". Bitcoin is not the world. 15 hours ago, Rassah said: So go write crap about other technologies that will never scale, like about the inefficiencies of the internal combustion engine and how the automobile is a fad that simply can not be scaled, because there are no places to gas up, and no way to increase production from manually assembling each one one at a time, making horses the superior mode of transportation. HOLY FALSE EQUIVALENCIES BATMAN. I have gone out of my way to state that bitcoin is not the automobile or those other false equivalencies. 15 hours ago, Rassah said: I'm not going to bother with this stupid shit anymore. You guys are too spoiled, living in your own teeny tiny little world, thinking the only country that exists is America or Canada, and that everyone in the world lives in those countries, with their bank accounts, visas, stable currencies, etc. that you enjoy. Bitcoin is obviously not for you. An ironic condemnation given the teeny tiny world of bitcoin compared to the rest of the world that you fixate on. I even show the figures to prove bitcoin's insignificance even in the developing world and you ignore them. 15 hours ago, Rassah said: And p.s. I still don't give a shit about Ashley. I read and responded to that one post you asked me to, and it was complete idiocy and vitriol as expected. But all her hidden replies to me does makes it seem like she really obsessed. That, or really vain, thinking I care. Another interesting condemnation given you're pretending to block Ashley's posts. Stop this silliness and just keep talking to her directly. 15 hours ago, Rassah said: Here's a list of articles and people who you naively think are stupider than you (and I don't mean the authors of these articles). https://www.caseyresearch.com/how-bitcoin-is-saving-lives-in-venezuela/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/09/big-in-venezuela/534177/ https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-06-15/venezuelans-are-seeking-a-haven-in-crypto-coins-as-crisis-rages A few people using bitcoin in a tiny country does not make a "massive adoption". I've shown time and again how insignificant bitcoin's usage is for both the developing world and the world overall. 15 hours ago, Rassah said: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-investment-summit-novogratz/institutional-investors-close-to-adopting-bitcoin-says-ex-fortress-executive-novogratz-idUSKBN1DD2RE http://fortune.com/2017/12/21/goldman-sachs-bitcoin/ http://deadline.com/2017/12/bitcoin-arrives-to-wall-street-bringing-good-news-for-blockchain-entertainment-1202223747/ http://www.newsbtc.com/2017/10/05/serious-mainstream-bitcoin-adoption-led-japan/ If there's money to be made (even if it's purely from bigger fools) it is natural that some of the big players (the companies themselves not just a few individuals) might dabble in it. Also most of these players seem to be aiming to be middlemen rather than risking significant sums of their own money to "invest" in this. My point isn't that you can't make money off of bigger fools, it is that bitcoin in its current form is a speculative vehicle and that it scales horribly as an actual payment processing system and currency. Given the current squabbling on how to increase its pathetic capacity and the rate of growth of overall non-cash transactions worldwide (yes including the developing world) it is no surprise that the vast majority of bitcoin users use it in the hopes of getting that sweet central bank money from bigger fools further down the line. 15 hours ago, Rassah said: But please, keep convincing yourself that it's just a $200+ billion dollar, thousands of businesses, billions in raised capital to develop technology around it, adopted and regulated by dozens of countries, and growing exponentially by every metric, "speculative useless fad." First of all I have shown clearly that it is not "growing exponentially by every metric" yet you keep convincing yourself otherwise. As for the significance of its market capitalization, lets visualize the world's money and markets: Unfortunately I can't expand the image here, but bitcoin's capitalization is one of the pixels on the second row. It did spike this year however that spike was almost purely driven by bigger fool "investors", and like I've pointed out such speculative bubbles have grown (and eventually burst) time and again in the past. You say "thousands of businesses" as if this vague figure is significant, yet as clearly shown by transaction volumes and market capitalization (both almost completely speculation driven anyway) it really is insignificant. The only thing significant was its market cap growth relative to what it started as, but again such bubbles have appeared before. As can be seen in the following article one can certainly raise billions in market capital even when the business raising the capital in question is losing money hand over fist. Taking advantage of hype is not a new phenomenon: https://wolfstreet.com/2017/12/28/im-in-awe-of-how-far-the-scams-stupidity-around-blockchain-stocks-are-going/ 15 hours ago, Rassah said: adopted and regulated by dozens of countries Wow governments/banks have taken notice and made some provisions just like with any other financial "asset", speculative or otherwise. World domination must surely be around the corner, because governments only regulate massive industries and never anything minor (though calling bitcoin an "industry" is giving it too much credit) /s 15 hours ago, Rassah said: "speculative useless fad." I never said useless, only insignificant Seriously though the blockchain technology itself might be useful for something at a later point and with a lot of work. It's difficult to rationally talk about bitcoin and the blockchain technology though when there is so much hype and fraudulent claims floating about. Oh well, at least I learned a few more things. 15 hours ago, AshleyAshes said: "What are 'Things that are irreverent to consumers and thus unable to to sway them'?" Don't be silly, customers are more than willing to pay an extra $20 on top of any third-party payment processing fees and wait several hours to a day (with the paltry few businesses that accept bitcoin as payment). The whole world market is poised for such a massive adoption of this groundbreaking technology which is clearly the very embodiment of the whole world's technological progress up to this point. THE WHOLE WORLD I TELLS YA. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AshleyAshes Posted January 2, 2018 Share Posted January 2, 2018 18 hours ago, Rassah said: I'm not going to bother with this stupid shit anymore. You guys are too spoiled, living in your own teeny tiny little world, thinking the only country that exists is America or Canada, and that everyone in the world lives in those countries, with their bank accounts, visas, stable currencies, etc. that you enjoy. Bitcoin is obviously not for you. Is this Rassah admitting that he does not believe that Bitcoin can take off in the west? (i.e. 'The largest economies in the world') Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
WileyWarWeasel Posted January 2, 2018 Share Posted January 2, 2018 3 minutes ago, AshleyAshes said: Is this Rassah admitting that he does not believe that Bitcoin can take off in the west? (i.e. 'The largest economies in the world') It hasn't even taken off in the developing world: On 12/30/2017 at 4:12 AM, WileyWarWeasel said: https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/bitcoin-transactions.html#1y For 2017 Bitcoin's transaction volume was mostly between 200k to 400k daily, with roughly 300k daily transaction volume on the average. Even with the spikes and falls in market value its transaction volume has almost entirely remained within these bounds. https://www.worldpaymentsreport.com/reports/noncash Current estimates of 2016 and 2017 non-cash transactions for developing regions are 161.3 billion for 2016 and 192.6 billion for 2017, with growth of 31.3 billion between the two years, or otherwise growth of a daily average of 85,753,424. Bitcoin meandering in 2017 around its 300k daily average is 1/285th of the daily average growth alone of non-cash transactions in developing regions and remember that 300k for bitcoin is for both developed and developing regions. Sure looks like exponential growth to me! ^_____^ Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Rassah Posted January 3, 2018 Share Posted January 3, 2018 It's funny you keep telling me that bitcoin is insignificant compared to the rest of the world's currencies, because I didn't really argue that it wasn't. I keep saying I don't give a shit, because it doesn't matter. These are the only graphs that really matter here: And this is just the volume on all exchanges for USD. You can look at all the currencies traded here https://bitcoincharts.com/markets/, which, if you add them up, you'll see that there is well over a billion dollars being traded every single day. This used to be in the hundreds of millions last year, maybe 50 million the year before, and just a few million 4 years ago. You also need to keep in mind that not all bitcoin transactions are just for one person, and not all happen on the blockchain. There are many cases where transactions are batched together, with one single transaction sending money from one to many, or even many to many people. And Coinbase, BitPay, and other exchanges sometimes settle between users and businesses on their own accounts (though admittedly that's no different from using a bank). And this thing is coming this year so while you'll continue to point at how there aren't many transactions on the chain itself, the actual number of transactions will grow even more. This one shows how much money has flown out of government currencies and into crypto tech in general. Even if all it's used for is speculation where people buy and sit on it, and the transaction volume never really grows (despite you claiming that it scales horribly, and me already showing a way in which it can scale easily), in the very worst case scenario it will replace gold as a store of value, and the USD as the reserve currency that governments use to back their own currency and settle debts. But you'll keep focusing on how it's not used by anyone right now and most importantly will not bother investing in it, because it's a bubble, just like it was when it's price hit $1. But that's fine. As I said, you are where you are because of your dismissals, and I am where I am because I didn't dismiss this by looking at where it's at, but was capable of understanding it and seeing where it's going. Honestly, don't you wish you knew what you know now and bought even $1000 worth of BTC even 5 years ago? And that's really what separates us: I knew then what you only know now, but even now you keep dismissing it, believing that exponential growth into hundreds of billions of dollars over the course of 8 years is just a temporary speculative bubble. Regarding your question of "How does the payment receiver know for certain that you've set aside money for them using bitcoin?" You can have two people create an account that they both have keys to and can only spend from if both of them sign off on the transaction. Both can see the money is in there, and both have to come to an agreement to get it out. That's impossible with any other currency. And FYI, Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Rassah Posted January 3, 2018 Share Posted January 3, 2018 What's funny is that I started telling people and furs about bitcoin as something they should invest in, because I knew this being new revolutionary tech that it will grow in value like nothing else. But all I got back was arguments and dismissals. Was I wrong? Obviously not. But people will continue to argue. Their loss. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AshleyAshes Posted January 3, 2018 Share Posted January 3, 2018 Hey didn't he say he was done with this thread because we're spoiled? 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
WileyWarWeasel Posted January 4, 2018 Share Posted January 4, 2018 @AshleyAshes I thought he said that but what the hell. @Rassah As for any other get-rich scheme involving bigger fools, yes I wouldn't have minded getting in and out at the right times. Still doesn't change the fact that the vast majority of people are in bitcoin (and other cryptocurrencies) because they want to get real currency from bigger fools. The kind of real currency that you actually use for products and services. As for the real currency "disappearing" into cryptocurrency it's actually going into the pockets of those that got in early and are cashing out by selling the coins to later fools. The market cap of bitcoin is simply number of coins (which is usually quoted including the 3.7 million coins that are permanently out of circulation, and while there is some real currency no longer in circulation quoting the market cap in this way is like quoting the market cap of a publicly traded company by including 3.7 million shares that don't exist) multiplied by current price. That's not "money disappeared into bitcoin" either. 11 hours ago, Rassah said: It's funny you keep telling me that bitcoin is insignificant compared to the rest of the world's currencies, because I didn't really argue that it wasn't. I keep saying I don't give a shit, because it doesn't matter. Wait a minute, if bitcoin was always meant to be just a get-rich scheme for people who came in early then how come you argued the following previously? On 12/25/2017 at 1:11 PM, Rassah said: So what? That doesn't detract from the fact that bitcoin has value, that it's very good money, that it's already used to store and send value, and that it's growing exponentially. It will be used as actual currency by everyone eventually. It's practically as inevitable as everyone using the internet or email. The technology and money is just too superior to the old systems. On 12/26/2017 at 6:31 AM, Rassah said: The scalability just failed to keep up with the sudden MASSIVE adoption, but it's getting there. On 12/26/2017 at 3:27 PM, Rassah said: And how many times do I have to say, you have to look at the trend, not the current state. Five years ago no one accepted it period. Ten years after it's release it's worth more than all the currency of New Zealand. Have the brains and the vision to see where it came from and where it's going... On 12/30/2017 at 4:12 AM, WileyWarWeasel said: So you guys know how a lot of third world countries completely skipped the landline telephone and network stage, and jumped right into the newest technologies of cellphones and wireless data? Those places will also be the ones to skip the banking stage and skip right to bitcoin. As for transaction volume, the transaction numbers shown on bitinfocharts are the number of unique transactions, not bundled crap. And whatya know, those unique transaction volumes are barely rising. The growth of the rest of the world's non-cash transactions is leaving bitcoin in the dust. So what are you arguing then? Are you arguing that bitcoin is a phenomenon taking over the world's financial system? Or are you arguing that a few early-comers to the scheme got rich ( thanks to bigger fools coming in, inflating the "value" of each coin in the expectation that bigger fools will come in to pay them out)? If it's the former, I've shown clear trends that bitcoin is not being adopted in any significant capacity by the developing world or the world as a whole including in recent times. Its market price and cap is quite the bubble to be sure given what it is but like previous bubbles it will inevitably burst. Schemes reliant on bigger fools have crashed before when the price of entry gets too high and the payouts relative to the entry price become too small (eg payout for price going from $1k to $2k as opposed to going from $19k to $20k). If it's the latter, congratulations are in order for those that got in at the right time and managed to cash out at the right time. Similar schemes have transpired before though so it's not special in that regard. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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