Bitcoin et al

[Behemoth]

wombleh said:

I'm a lot more sold on the idea of ethereum too, solid governance avoiding all the silliness that bitcoin is having and capabilities way beyond just payments with contracts, distributed apps, storage etc.

You basically have this the wrong way round. Governance in Bitcoin is supreme. It is the most secure coin, bar none, precisely because of its open and decentralised governance process, its simple implementation and its limited remit.

Ethereum may have a plethora of potential applications but that also means a plethora of potential attack vectors. There is no control over who writes these smart contract scripts and what they do. There will be bugs, they come with the territory. The DAO fiasco was the first big one but there'll be more. I enjoyed Ethereum as an experiment, but I've come to doubt there is much value in decentralised smart contracts. Who is censoring contracts that they need to be decentralised to prevent censorship? As Henrico said, it's a very expensive way to get such things done. I sold all my Ether a few months back.

[Croutons]

dbs2000 said:

Long term, I still expect BTC to be near $7k by the end of the year.

Serious questions here-

1) Do you think the year end is "Long term"? I really don't mean that facetiously, I just can't get my head around the speed at which prices move, 24/ 7 on this.

2) Why do you think $7k, and not $77k, or $2k? What reasoning are you applying?

3) At the start of the year when it was (for arguments sake) $1k, did you think it would be at $6k now? When it was $5k about a week ago did you think it would blow over 6 so quickly, and if so how does that relate back to your expectation of merely $7k by year end?

I know there is no central authority on this, and that everything is opinion, but I really would love to hear other opinions that are not the nonsense on the likes of Cointelegraph, to which with not even a crypto currency to my name (until later today) I could submit an article, which they would likely put out, especially if I was bullish on it all.

[x5x3]

dbs2000 said:

So what are people's thoughts on the fork this week?

the general opinion seems to be that it is a scam, they were planning to pre-mine $100M worth of coins for themselves.....

dbs2000 said:

1) there has been a lot of alt coins traded to BTC given that the snapshot is happening in the next 48 hours and people believe BTG is free money

the concern is around their replay implementation - as far as anyone knows it has not yet even been written.... in fact they have a bounty open for someone to do it here. Before you try to sell your new BTG make sure you understand what it means to have no replay protection.

[dbs2000]

Croutons said:

Serious questions here-

1) Do you think the year end is "Long term"? I really don't mean that facetiously, I just can't get my head around the speed at which prices move, 24/ 7 on this.

2) Why do you think $7k, and not $77k, or $2k? What reasoning are you applying?

3) At the start of the year when it was (for arguments sake) $1k, did you think it would be at $6k now? When it was $5k about a week ago did you think it would blow over 6 so quickly, and if so how does that relate back to your expectation of merely $7k by year end?

I know there is no central authority on this, and that everything is opinion, but I really would love to hear other opinions that are not the nonsense on the likes of Cointelegraph, to which with not even a crypto currency to my name (until later today) I could submit an article, which they would likely put out, especially if I was bullish on it all.

I certainly didn't read your post as facetious, it's well constructed and asks questions my friends ask.

1) Absolutely not, long-term for me is 5 years. I do consider this recent rise a little crazy and an awful lot of 'dumb' money has flooded the market. My reasons for selling this weekend were mainly around 58% profit on trades in less than 5 weeks. That's a serious bump for my pension portfolio and also my trading account. I'm not greedy, so profit is taken and now protected... I will await a new entry point. If I'd bought at $80 years ago then of course this trade would have remained open.

2) My figure is based on my interpretation of graphs and (while no expert I've been in or around the right mark) experience on these movements previously. I think we'll see a retracement, possibly as low as $4500 before some stability and then the rise. In loose terms, BTC doubles in price every 8 months, given that I'd expect the absolute bottom to be $3200 at year end given the price in April / May.

3) Given this fork has been coming and known about and the last fork saw people receive the equivalent BTH for free and it then rocket to $700 before dropping back, the rise to $6k I did predict to a few friends near the beginning of this month, purely on peoples greed and wanting "free money".

As x5x3 states below my post, BTG seems like a bit of a scam. I have put a small amount of BTC on to Bitrex in the off chance it isn't and I will hold the BTG but in reality I'm expecting it to be worthless. BTC will retract when people realise this, and convert BTC back to Litecoin, Dash, XRP etc

Overall BTC remains a great product, with a great Dev Team who find bugs in established producsts such as SSL, more and more people are accepting it as a currency, we see cars, houses and more being bought and sold for it. I'd certainly take payment in BTC for my DBS.

[sc0tt]

Still not verified on coinbase so I have submitted a ticket to request help ...

[wombleh]

Behemoth said:

You basically have this the wrong way round. Governance in Bitcoin is supreme. It is the most secure coin, bar none, precisely because of its open and decentralised governance process, its simple implementation and its limited remit.

Works both ways, Look at the current segwit2x argument. The core developers consider it an attack on the chain, the 2x side consider it crucial to performance. It's going to end up with another two forks because people can't agree. The two warring factions will create mass uncertainty until it's resolved which is the most popular chain.

[Behemoth]

wombleh said:

Works both ways, Look at the current segwit2x argument. The core developers consider it an attack on the chain, the 2x side consider it crucial to performance. It's going to end up with another two forks because people can't agree. The two warring factions will create mass uncertainty until it's resolved which is the most popular chain.

The whole point of the development process is that it lies outside centralised control. Consensus has a broad base and is democratic. The best solution will win out. The community using the resource simply uses the best software. The fact that disagreements are out in the open is a very good thing as it leads to better scrutiny, peer review and better solutions. Much of the underlying internet infrastructure that you use every day follows the same software development process. There isn't mass uncertainty. Nobody holding BTC will lose anything.

[wombleh]

A hard fork seems the perfect definition of uncertainty, no?

Edited by wombleh on Monday 23 October 17:32

[Behemoth]

wombleh said:

A hard fork seems the perfect definition of uncertainty to me, do you disagree with that or do you not think there will be one?

Disagree fundamentally. Many forks have happened in the past and many will happen in the future. It is the way software of this kind gets upgraded. It is simply the language that scares people.

Segwit2 is going nowhere, that's been clear to most for quite a while now. There's nothing wrong about coming up with new ideas and seeing if consensus follows. It should be encouraged.

[wombleh]

Ah I edited to make it sound less like I was telling you what to think but overlapped the reply.

I guess the previous forks have all been happy endings, interesting to see the result of this one. And to be fair there is also ETC so ethereum isn't immune.

I don't really disagree with anything you say, so should probably stop arguing with you. Ethereum is the one I can actively get involved and play with so interests me more, which doesn't necessarily translate to it being a better investment vehicle! Although working in the energy industry there is far more interest in ethereum than bitcoin, be interesting to see how projects like grid+ get on.

[Behemoth]

wombleh said:

Ethereum is the one I can actively get involved and play with so interests me more, which doesn't necessarily translate to it being a better investment vehicle! Although working in the energy industry there is far more interest in ethereum than bitcoin, be interesting to see how projects like grid+ get on.

I understand. I think the acid test for anyone trying blockchain ideas out in commerce is whether there is really any efficiency benefit in having a database decentralised. Most of the time. it's far cheaper to run a normal database. If Ethereum is promising real benefits for you, that's great. But as you allude, that in itself has nothing to do with the value of Ether as a token.

[x5x3]

Behemoth said:

I think the acid test for anyone trying blockchain ideas out in commerce is whether there is really any efficiency benefit in having a database decentralised. Most of the time. it's far cheaper to run a normal database.

so you see no benefit whatsoever in the guarantee the blockchain provides?

I can run a centralised database and update it all day to suit myself. I cannot do that with the blockchain.

[Behemoth]

x5x3 said:

so you see no benefit whatsoever in the guarantee the blockchain provides?

I don't see much point in any private blockchain. It needs to be widely distributed to attain security guarantees. It's unlikely to achieve that in any private environment.

[x5x3]

Behemoth said:

x5x3 said:

so you see no benefit whatsoever in the guarantee the blockchain provides?

I don't see much point in any private blockchain. It needs to be widely distributed to attain security guarantees. It's unlikely to achieve that in any private environment.

that is certainly true if "private environment" = "my database" but surely that is not the definition of distributed?

[Yipper]

Jordan Belfort, Wolf of Wall Street, a convicted fraudster, widely quoted in the press this week saying digital currencies / ICOs are a scam.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/jo...

[Henrico]

Yipper said:

Jordan Belfort, Wolf of Wall Street, a convicted fraudster, widely quoted in the press this week saying digital currencies / ICOs are a scam.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/jo...

And people go to seminars on how to be rich by this guy, what a putz!

[x5x3]

x5x3 said:

Before you try to sell your new BTG make sure you understand what it means to have no replay protection.

According to their website they hit the block target for launch - but I'm not able to confirm if they did.

The replay protection code did not get written either so please everyone take care if you are planning to dump your BTG - if you are not careful you could lose your BTC.

[Behemoth]

x5x3 said:

that is certainly true if "private environment" = "my database" but surely that is not the definition of distributed?

I wrote widely distributed, not distributed. No, for me private environment is not your desktop database. It means anything controlled by an organisation and thus not subject to public scrutiny. You may be able to decentralise to an extent, but it requires truly massive distribution and decentralisation for the security gains to kick in. A private environment doesn't cut the mustard. In a similar way, the internet was always going to be far superior to private networks like CompuServe and AOL. At the time, detractors insisted this was not the case. How could you possibly run a planet-wide network without a central authority in command & control?

[Croutons]

Henrico said:

Yipper said:

Jordan Belfort, Wolf of Wall Street, a convicted fraudster, widely quoted in the press this week saying digital currencies / ICOs are a scam.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/jo...

And people go to seminars on how to be rich by this guy, what a putz!

And he's selling a new book.

However if you've been following the Tezos debacle, ('Under the terms of the Tezos coin offering, there's no guarantee participants will ever receive a single Tez. Participants agreed to accept the risk that the project "may be abandoned."')

Or of course, Harry Redknapp, you might think The Wolf has a point!

http://uk.businessinsider.com/r-special-report-bac...

https://cointelegraph.com/news/technologically-ine...

Edited by Croutons on Tuesday 24th October 10:22

[Behemoth]

Segwit 2x was already toast and now it is thoroughly burnt toast. It only really had one developer of note & it now turns out the chap (Jeff Garzik) has been spending all his time creating a new alt coin rather than bothering with tiresome replay attack protection work on his Segwit 2X fork. Moreover, his whole motive behind creating Segwit 2x was arguably to make his new coin (Metronome) attractive. Because Metronome is designed to mitigate "infighting between developers". You couldn't make it up Move along, nothing more to see here