7 ms·

Is Bitcoin breaking up?

85 points by antonius 11y ago

ZoeZoeBee 11y ago
If you want to read the article without being blocked by WSJ's paywall just Google the name of the article and click on the link. More often times than not you can get to a WSJ article via GoogleNews even if it is pay-restricted.
- xiaoma 11y ago
  If you click the link titled "web" under the title, it will do that for you.
  - colinbartlett 11y ago
    Wow when'd that get there? That's incredibly useful. Thanks DanG et al!
  - ZoeZoeBee 11y ago
    Yep thanks, that is useful if someone posted the article to HN. Now if you want to read any article not on HN. Edit Cool Beans Thanks for the DownVote Mark, glad to be of help.
  - echochar 11y ago
    Even with Javascript disabled and only session cookies?
- djsumdog 11y ago
  So they do reference checking...huh...that would mean Google News doesn't strip out the ref like their search engine does
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
powertower 11y ago
> Is Bitcoin Breaking Up? If they have to frame a headline as a question, you can usually assume the answer is "no"... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines#Betteridge_.282009.29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline... The reason why journalists use that style of headline is that they know the story is probably bullshit, and don’t actually have the sources and facts to back it up, but still want to run it.
- tlrobinson 11y ago
  Indeed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines
- narrator 11y ago
  Narrator's law of headlines is : one should prepend "We would like you to believe that" to any headline that ends in a question mark.
ohthehugemanate 11y ago
This headline is a great "grabber" for older bankers and financiers. It implies that the whole "bitcoin thing" is finally blowing over, without going out and saying it. Music to their ears.
- nols 11y ago
  Bankers and financiers are nowhere near as worried about bitcoin as many bitcoiners seem to think.
  - gesman 11y ago
    Bankers and financiers has bigger things to worry about in 2016
- increment_i 11y ago
  I seriously doubt this is the case. Most bankers I know have regarded bitcoin with a keen curiosity rather than some kind of malignant threat.
  - drcross 11y ago
    In which case I proffer that they don't understand the implication of the cryptocurrency endgame.
    - Locke1689 11y ago
      It seems far more likely that you do not, actually. There are thousands of extremely intelligent people working in finance with a lot of domain knowledge -- in the case that something as widely publicized and easily studied as bitcoin is not being taken seriously in finance, it's far more likely that there are serious issues you don't understand.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
pash 11y ago
The Bitcoin community is rapidly coalescing around an effort to increase the maximum allowed blocksize to 2MB as soon as possible. This increase is being implemented in a new client, Bitcoin Classic [0], which is a fork of Bitcoin Core that changes only the single line of code that sets the blocksize limit. Bitcoin Classic was created by Jonathan Toomim, an American miner and developer who went to China to talk directly with Chinese miners and to test the effect of bigger blocks on mining operations behind the Great Firewall. Gavin Andresen, Bitcoin Core's former lead developer, and Jeff Garzik, another prominent Core developer, as well as many others, are collaborating with Toomim on further changes that Bitcoin Classic may implement later. The big difference between Bitcoin Classic and Mike Hearn's failed Bitcoin XT is the concerted effort by the people behind Classic to garner the explicit support of miners (and other important members of the Bitcoin ecosystem) for a blocksize increase. At my last check yesterday, mining-pool operators representing 72% of global hashing power had explicitly expressed their support for Bitcoin Classic's blocksize increase, as had the operators of many popular exchanges, web wallets, and payment providers. (There is a growing compendium of prominent supporters on Bitcoin Classic's website; the complete list is on the project's Github page [1].) That means that Bitcoin Classic is very likely to break Core's monopoly on the protocol soon. The blocksize increase, and the fork of the blockchain that it will create, is tentatively scheduled to take place after March 1. Get ready. (By the way, the best sources for information and discussion about the Bitcoin world are now the /r/btc sub-Reddit and the discussion forums at bitcoin.com and bitco.in; the community's former hubs, /r/Bitcoin and bitcointalk.org, are both controlled by the same operator/moderator, and he has strongly censored and perverted all discussion of changes to the protocol that are not supported by Core's intransigent cabal of developers.) 0. https://www.bitcoinclassic.com https://www.bitcoinclassic.com 1. https://github.com/bitcoinclassic/website/issues/3 https://github.com/bitcoinclassic/website/issues/3
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
  - MCRed 11y ago
    If they are wise, that is literally what they will do. It won't undo the fork, though, the fork is really in the blockchain (as he's using the term fork) rather than in the source code. For some period of time there will be two versions of bitcoin running on the machines that mine, and it will take some time for them to switch over-- but since Classic is doing the switch with major support now, the transition should be smooth. Bitcoin the protocol can and is run by a wide variety of software... the blockchain is a consensus agreement of that software. Basically its an agreement on protocol based on the rules in the software. For most of its history, that software has been based on Bitcoin Core. That may change in the future to Bitcoin Classic, or both may be running at the same time with different variances, but supporting effectively the same protocol. Nobody wants %50 of the network to be running software incompatible with the other %50.
Exuma 11y ago
I hate pay walls. Why is this even on HN. And also what a garbage headline.
- striking 11y ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10920390 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10920390
sisk 11y ago
> The problem is bitcoin is open-source software, so any change has to be approved a majority of the community, and it hasn’t been able to agree. The author has conflated a couple of things. That is the exact opposite of how OSS works. The reason why the majority need to adopt is purely from a "one true coin" standpoint—there is nothing stopping forks or new alt coins from spinning out.
greggarious 11y ago
Not sure due to the paywall.
- davidklemke 11y ago
  Google News link which bypasses paywall: https://www.google.com.au/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=newssearch&cd=1&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0ahUKEwjTvqun2bHKAhVFX5QKHeCSDHQQqQIIHCgAMAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.wsj.com%2Farticles%2Fis-bitcoin-breaking-up-1453044493&usg=AFQjCNGU5YDWRdJ5-1ZcGer_j1BM9J-Zyw&sig2=zhlVV8upWsewf0vJew98bg https://www.google.com.au/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=ne...
  - greggarious 11y ago
    I'd prefer a site that doesn't require a hack to read the text.
wemysh 11y ago
The current situation reminds me a lot of the time when Firefox replaced Internet Explorer as the most popular browser. And of the time when Chrome replaced Firefox as the most popular browser. Currently there is only one Bitcoin implementation. And the developers a) refuse to implement what users want. And b) implement bloat that users dont't want. So Bitcoin will "break up" in a similar way the WWW "broke up" when new browsers were introduced. It's a good thing.
- JohnTHaller 11y ago
  Internet Explorer is still the most popular browser among users worldwide. Chrome is the most popular browser among certain techies. Chrome is also popular among users tricked into installing it via forced bundleware with Java updates, free antivirus engine updates, and (ironically) Flash plugin downloads for Firefox.
  - PhasmaFelis 11y ago
    Just like IE is popular among users tricked into installing it via forced bundleware with Windows?
    - reitanqild 11y ago
      Microsoft was forced to include the browser choice thing for a few years in Europe. I wish someone would take a closer look at how Google push Chrome as well.
  - bhousel 11y ago
    Oh hi 2012, what are you doing here?
  - pbhjpbhj 11y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers#Summary_tables https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers#Su...
    - deleted 11y ago
colindean 11y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...
Animats 11y ago
The block size issue is missing the point. The use case that matters for Bitcoin right now is converting yuan to Bitcoins, then Bitcoins to dollars. That's one way people in China get around China's exchange controls. (Note that mining in China also is used to move yuan to dollars.) Those are big transactions. They'll get through regardless of the block size. Bitcoin as a retail currency doesn't seem to be going anywhere. Robocoin, the Bitcoin ATM company, just went bust. Lots of companies nominally accept Bitcoin, but that's just a shopping cart program talking to Coinbase or Bitpay for immediate conversion. The retail transaction volume is small. Given the volatility problem, the conversion costs, the risk of loss, and the general headaches, Bitcoin is a lose vs. paying 1% - 3% for credit card processing.
- RockyMcNuts 11y ago
  > They'll get through regardless of the block size. They'll get through until China bans it. China has a classic trilemma : let the currency depreciate, give up on monetary stimulus, or institute capital controls. Pick any 2 : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impossible_trinity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impossible_trinity To date, they've shown pretty good success in controlling the Internet and Bitcoin is no different. I don't think Bitcoin advocates have necessarily thought through the implications if countries were no longer able to control capital movements, hence pursue independent monetary and currency policies. As the euro experience has shown (also the history of the gold standard), it's not necessarily an improvement in monetary arrangements.
  - Animats 11y ago
    "They'll get through until China bans it." China's leaky exchange controls are a strange subject. So much is leaking that investors in China are buying large amounts of property in London, New York, and Miami, but not occupying it, as a way to stash cash. However, the outflows aren't big enough to affect the value of the yuan. The People's Bank of China (comparable to the Treasury Department plus the Fed) hasn't cracked down as much as they could. There seems to be an internal policy disagreement within China's government over whether the yuan should be an international currency. To be used internationally means allowing convertibility and giving up some control, and facing the possibility that China's domestic economy can be yanked around by world events. But convertibility increases China's external economic power. Back in 2013, there were announcements of convertibility within the next year. In November 2015, the target date was 2020.[1] China's stock market crashed last week, which may prompt tightening up on capital outflows again. Much of what happens with Bitcoin is driven by these far larger issues. [1] http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-11-03/china-development-plan-to-promote-tech-capital-markets-reform http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-11-03/china-deve...
kobayashi 11y ago
What is the downside to moving from 1MB to 2MB blocksizes, instead of moving up to 8MB or 20MB? If the reasonable maximum number of trades per minutes is 3 at the moment, does a doubling of the blocksize merely double the allowable number of trades per minute, or is it somehow a logarithmic change?
- martinko 11y ago
  It does just double it. The problem with increasing it more is propagation speeds around the planet (this needs to be as fast as possible or another miner may get the block reward), especially if the miner is sitting in china.
  - kobayashi 11y ago
    So is increasing the blocksize beyond 2MB expected to favour Chinese minors more so than average users? And if that's the case, would you mind explaining how so, exactly?
    - simoncion 11y ago
      I'm fairly certain that the problem is that users with catastrophically slow or spotty internet connections are the ones that stand to lose in that situation, and that > 50% of Bitcoin's miners are in China, which partially explains the rabid past support for a refusal to increase the max blocksize.
    - martinko 11y ago
      The dynamic is not one in which when miners win, users lose. The issue is that users want more transactions per second and therefore want bigger blocks to be created, however, when miners create larger blocks, they have a hard(er) time propagating them to the entire network and thereby run the risk of their block being orphaned (someone else's block will be accepted first, and the miner's block and work done on that block will be wasted).
      - kobayashi 11y ago
cornholio 11y ago
"Bitcoin is breaking up" = Buy like a madman. The blocksize cuts down on the transaction spam making transactions non-free, maybe a few cents each. This is not optimal and certainly needs to fix in the next few years, because it harms microtransactions. But "breaking up" ? That's just sensationalist bullshit. That's like saying Netflix is on the edge of bankruptcy because it's raging success has temporarily killed HD streaming in Australia & Antarctica. As a community building exercise, this debacle is great for Bitcoin, it really shows no one is in control and consensus to change the rules of the game is very hard to reach.
- woah 11y ago
  The fact that every transaction ever is saved for ever harms microtransactions. Luckily nobody actually uses Bitcoin, especially not for microtransactions. The network can't handle more than 3 transactions a second, and luckily it doesn't have that volume. Lightning is the only thing that can actually make Bitcoin more performant than a small VPS with postgres, if it is something that people want. Also, "Lightning-like" channels aren't unique to Bitcoin- they can be implemented on Turing-complete currencies, and even on bank servers[1] 1. http://altheamesh.com/blog/universal-payment-channels/ http://altheamesh.com/blog/universal-payment-channels/
zekevermillion 11y ago
Bitcoin is already specified. I doubt that nodes, miners, and the bitcoin richlist will converge around any alternative spec (whether XT or Litecoin) and decide to call it "bitcoin". However, the ecology of decentralized digital assets inspired by the nakamoto consensus has already fragmented and will continue to do so at an exponential rate. As a rough estimate let's say there are already 1000 bitcoin clones that have more than a handful of nodes and miners. I would not be surprised to see that number increase to 10,000 within 2016. That some of the individuals associated with Bitcoin Core are moving onto other projects is not going to mean very much one way or another for the original bitcoin spec, though we may see the Core project change. There are other alternatives for those who want to run an implementation of the original bitcoin spec. (http://thebitcoin.foundation/ http://thebitcoin.foundation/) And there are an exponentially growing number of alternative networks for those who do not.
mrb 11y ago
"Mining already is so expensive that it takes company-sized investments to participate" This is not true at all. I do not understand why journalists repeat this claim. It is like saying "investing in the stock market is so expensive that it takes company-sized investments to participate". It is not true. Whether you invest $1000 or $1 million your returns—as a percentage of your initial investment—will be the same regardless if this is the stock market or Bitcoin mining. In fact I would say the opposite is true: small miners have a slightly better profitability than large-scale miners, because they are so small they do not even have to cover certain costs. A large-scale miner will have to pay for hosting or for building a data center but a small miner will host the hardware in his house at no extra cost. A large-scale miner will have to hire staff to maintain the miners but a small miner will maintain his machine himself. Of course profitability depends a lot on electricity costs, but again you might be a small miner and live (for example) in Douglas County, Washington and pay a domestic electricity rate of 2.5 cents per kWh, and you will beat many large-scale miners who almost always pay more (see my previous comment on this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10907584 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10907584). Large-scale miners may get a financial advantage by buying hardware in bulk, or manufacturing it themselves, but this is a cost saving of at most 20 or 30%, and this certainly does not make mining so expensive that small miners cannot participate.
- nharada 11y ago
  I was under the impression that specialized ASIC based miners have made even GPU mining relatively pointless.
  - mhluongo 11y ago
    Not really relevant- small miners can buy ASICs too.
SCAQTony 11y ago
I think these are very exciting problems. The bigger the problem the more creative the solution. It took us two thousand years or so to go from using the weight of a bale of barley to represent the value of silver, bronze, copper to eventually actual coinage. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_money https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_money Maybe digital currency takes 15-years or so to work out the problems much like they did with barley to coins but it is definitely the future.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
darwins_pitbull 11y ago
Hi Mike. I met you at San Jose conference in 2013. I remember very clearly- you were the most dashing, handsome, well spoken and charismatic person at the entire conference, a very rare find in the developer community. I was just finding my bearings in this technology at the time, I was a long way from home, and remember the confidence it instilled in me, knowing that someone like yourself was involved in this. But as I followed your contributions to the effort in the months after the conference, it was so confusing- nothing you did really seemed to help, your suggestions were widely panned by most of the best technical minds, and you seemed to devote your energy to platforms that are largely made up of newbies. If I was a handler for an organization that wanted to insert an asset into the bitcoin community, someone like you would be the ideal candidate. Someone that young people, new to the community, naturally respect and will listen to. Strange how you've spent so much time cultivating your standing with people like that, while your reputation plummeted among the people that understood the network (and had far more skin in the game than you did, because if I remember correctly you never foresaw the spectacular growth of the bitcoin network, never thought it would work, and therefore did not really have that many coins yourself). I have a long history of having a keenly skeptical eye, I have solid critical thinking skills, and I bat away wacky theories all day long. I have NEVER, in any forum, posted any comment of any type in regards to bitcoin, this is my first one- I believe in speaking humbly, thinking deeply and acting bravely. While the evidence that your motives in the bitcoin network may not be what you say they are is only circumstantial, it has been accumulating for some time now. And the strongest allegations have come from the people who have the best reputations for clear thinking and scam calling. I mean you no ill will Mike, regardless of your intentions. But the forces at play and the implications of our technologies' reach is so spectacular that it is quite reasonable now for us to assume that smart and highly motivated people will appear who will use great cunning to harm the network. Every spidey sense I possess has been going off about you for a long time now. I can remain silent no longer. J'accuse Mike, J'accuse.
- solotronics 11y ago
  cui bono? Mike and his peers have everything to gain by trying to splinter BTC. Given the stability and distributed nature of Bitcoin itself the weak point is obviously the developers and that is exactly what they are going after.
daggerhashimoto 11y ago
HAHAHHAHHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHHA people are waking up to your trickery. You are conman. Take your shit coin and shove it up your bosses ass!
- dang 11y ago
  We banned this account for obvious reasons and detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10921219 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10921219 and marked it off-topic.

85 points by antonius 11y ago

If you want to read the article without being blocked by WSJ's paywall just Google the name of the article and click on the link. More often times than not you can get to a WSJ article via GoogleNews even if it is pay-restricted.

xiaoma 11y ago
If you click the link titled "web" under the title, it will do that for you.
- colinbartlett 11y ago
  Wow when'd that get there? That's incredibly useful. Thanks DanG et al!
- ZoeZoeBee 11y ago
  Yep thanks, that is useful if someone posted the article to HN. Now if you want to read any article not on HN. Edit Cool Beans Thanks for the DownVote Mark, glad to be of help.
- echochar 11y ago
  Even with Javascript disabled and only session cookies?
djsumdog 11y ago
So they do reference checking...huh...that would mean Google News doesn't strip out the ref like their search engine does
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]

powertower 11y ago

> Is Bitcoin Breaking Up? If they have to frame a headline as a question, you can usually assume the answer is "no"... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines#Betteridge_.282009.29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline... The reason why journalists use that style of headline is that they know the story is probably bullshit, and don’t actually have the sources and facts to back it up, but still want to run it.

tlrobinson 11y ago
Indeed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines
narrator 11y ago
Narrator's law of headlines is : one should prepend "We would like you to believe that" to any headline that ends in a question mark.

ohthehugemanate 11y ago

This headline is a great "grabber" for older bankers and financiers. It implies that the whole "bitcoin thing" is finally blowing over, without going out and saying it. Music to their ears.

nols 11y ago
Bankers and financiers are nowhere near as worried about bitcoin as many bitcoiners seem to think.
- gesman 11y ago
  Bankers and financiers has bigger things to worry about in 2016
increment_i 11y ago
I seriously doubt this is the case. Most bankers I know have regarded bitcoin with a keen curiosity rather than some kind of malignant threat.
- drcross 11y ago
  In which case I proffer that they don't understand the implication of the cryptocurrency endgame.
  - Locke1689 11y ago
    It seems far more likely that you do not, actually. There are thousands of extremely intelligent people working in finance with a lot of domain knowledge -- in the case that something as widely publicized and easily studied as bitcoin is not being taken seriously in finance, it's far more likely that there are serious issues you don't understand.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]

pash 11y ago

The Bitcoin community is rapidly coalescing around an effort to increase the maximum allowed blocksize to 2MB as soon as possible. This increase is being implemented in a new client, Bitcoin Classic [0], which is a fork of Bitcoin Core that changes only the single line of code that sets the blocksize limit. Bitcoin Classic was created by Jonathan Toomim, an American miner and developer who went to China to talk directly with Chinese miners and to test the effect of bigger blocks on mining operations behind the Great Firewall. Gavin Andresen, Bitcoin Core's former lead developer, and Jeff Garzik, another prominent Core developer, as well as many others, are collaborating with Toomim on further changes that Bitcoin Classic may implement later. The big difference between Bitcoin Classic and Mike Hearn's failed Bitcoin XT is the concerted effort by the people behind Classic to garner the explicit support of miners (and other important members of the Bitcoin ecosystem) for a blocksize increase. At my last check yesterday, mining-pool operators representing 72% of global hashing power had explicitly expressed their support for Bitcoin Classic's blocksize increase, as had the operators of many popular exchanges, web wallets, and payment providers. (There is a growing compendium of prominent supporters on Bitcoin Classic's website; the complete list is on the project's Github page [1].) That means that Bitcoin Classic is very likely to break Core's monopoly on the protocol soon. The blocksize increase, and the fork of the blockchain that it will create, is tentatively scheduled to take place after March 1. Get ready. (By the way, the best sources for information and discussion about the Bitcoin world are now the /r/btc sub-Reddit and the discussion forums at bitcoin.com and bitco.in; the community's former hubs, /r/Bitcoin and bitcointalk.org, are both controlled by the same operator/moderator, and he has strongly censored and perverted all discussion of changes to the protocol that are not supported by Core's intransigent cabal of developers.) 0. https://www.bitcoinclassic.com https://www.bitcoinclassic.com 1. https://github.com/bitcoinclassic/website/issues/3 https://github.com/bitcoinclassic/website/issues/3

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
- MCRed 11y ago
  If they are wise, that is literally what they will do. It won't undo the fork, though, the fork is really in the blockchain (as he's using the term fork) rather than in the source code. For some period of time there will be two versions of bitcoin running on the machines that mine, and it will take some time for them to switch over-- but since Classic is doing the switch with major support now, the transition should be smooth. Bitcoin the protocol can and is run by a wide variety of software... the blockchain is a consensus agreement of that software. Basically its an agreement on protocol based on the rules in the software. For most of its history, that software has been based on Bitcoin Core. That may change in the future to Bitcoin Classic, or both may be running at the same time with different variances, but supporting effectively the same protocol. Nobody wants %50 of the network to be running software incompatible with the other %50.

Exuma 11y ago

I hate pay walls. Why is this even on HN. And also what a garbage headline.

striking 11y ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10920390 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10920390

sisk 11y ago

> The problem is bitcoin is open-source software, so any change has to be approved a majority of the community, and it hasn’t been able to agree. The author has conflated a couple of things. That is the exact opposite of how OSS works. The reason why the majority need to adopt is purely from a "one true coin" standpoint—there is nothing stopping forks or new alt coins from spinning out.

greggarious 11y ago

Not sure due to the paywall.

davidklemke 11y ago
Google News link which bypasses paywall: https://www.google.com.au/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=newssearch&cd=1&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0ahUKEwjTvqun2bHKAhVFX5QKHeCSDHQQqQIIHCgAMAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.wsj.com%2Farticles%2Fis-bitcoin-breaking-up-1453044493&usg=AFQjCNGU5YDWRdJ5-1ZcGer_j1BM9J-Zyw&sig2=zhlVV8upWsewf0vJew98bg https://www.google.com.au/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=ne...
- greggarious 11y ago
  I'd prefer a site that doesn't require a hack to read the text.

wemysh 11y ago

The current situation reminds me a lot of the time when Firefox replaced Internet Explorer as the most popular browser. And of the time when Chrome replaced Firefox as the most popular browser. Currently there is only one Bitcoin implementation. And the developers a) refuse to implement what users want. And b) implement bloat that users dont't want. So Bitcoin will "break up" in a similar way the WWW "broke up" when new browsers were introduced. It's a good thing.

JohnTHaller 11y ago
Internet Explorer is still the most popular browser among users worldwide. Chrome is the most popular browser among certain techies. Chrome is also popular among users tricked into installing it via forced bundleware with Java updates, free antivirus engine updates, and (ironically) Flash plugin downloads for Firefox.
- PhasmaFelis 11y ago
  Just like IE is popular among users tricked into installing it via forced bundleware with Windows?
  - reitanqild 11y ago
    Microsoft was forced to include the browser choice thing for a few years in Europe. I wish someone would take a closer look at how Google push Chrome as well.
- bhousel 11y ago
  Oh hi 2012, what are you doing here?
- pbhjpbhj 11y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers#Summary_tables https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers#Su...
  - deleted 11y ago

colindean 11y ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...

Animats 11y ago

The block size issue is missing the point. The use case that matters for Bitcoin right now is converting yuan to Bitcoins, then Bitcoins to dollars. That's one way people in China get around China's exchange controls. (Note that mining in China also is used to move yuan to dollars.) Those are big transactions. They'll get through regardless of the block size. Bitcoin as a retail currency doesn't seem to be going anywhere. Robocoin, the Bitcoin ATM company, just went bust. Lots of companies nominally accept Bitcoin, but that's just a shopping cart program talking to Coinbase or Bitpay for immediate conversion. The retail transaction volume is small. Given the volatility problem, the conversion costs, the risk of loss, and the general headaches, Bitcoin is a lose vs. paying 1% - 3% for credit card processing.

RockyMcNuts 11y ago
> They'll get through regardless of the block size. They'll get through until China bans it. China has a classic trilemma : let the currency depreciate, give up on monetary stimulus, or institute capital controls. Pick any 2 : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impossible_trinity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impossible_trinity To date, they've shown pretty good success in controlling the Internet and Bitcoin is no different. I don't think Bitcoin advocates have necessarily thought through the implications if countries were no longer able to control capital movements, hence pursue independent monetary and currency policies. As the euro experience has shown (also the history of the gold standard), it's not necessarily an improvement in monetary arrangements.
- Animats 11y ago
  "They'll get through until China bans it." China's leaky exchange controls are a strange subject. So much is leaking that investors in China are buying large amounts of property in London, New York, and Miami, but not occupying it, as a way to stash cash. However, the outflows aren't big enough to affect the value of the yuan. The People's Bank of China (comparable to the Treasury Department plus the Fed) hasn't cracked down as much as they could. There seems to be an internal policy disagreement within China's government over whether the yuan should be an international currency. To be used internationally means allowing convertibility and giving up some control, and facing the possibility that China's domestic economy can be yanked around by world events. But convertibility increases China's external economic power. Back in 2013, there were announcements of convertibility within the next year. In November 2015, the target date was 2020.[1] China's stock market crashed last week, which may prompt tightening up on capital outflows again. Much of what happens with Bitcoin is driven by these far larger issues. [1] http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-11-03/china-development-plan-to-promote-tech-capital-markets-reform http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-11-03/china-deve...

kobayashi 11y ago

What is the downside to moving from 1MB to 2MB blocksizes, instead of moving up to 8MB or 20MB? If the reasonable maximum number of trades per minutes is 3 at the moment, does a doubling of the blocksize merely double the allowable number of trades per minute, or is it somehow a logarithmic change?

martinko 11y ago
It does just double it. The problem with increasing it more is propagation speeds around the planet (this needs to be as fast as possible or another miner may get the block reward), especially if the miner is sitting in china.
- kobayashi 11y ago
  So is increasing the blocksize beyond 2MB expected to favour Chinese minors more so than average users? And if that's the case, would you mind explaining how so, exactly?
  - simoncion 11y ago
    I'm fairly certain that the problem is that users with catastrophically slow or spotty internet connections are the ones that stand to lose in that situation, and that > 50% of Bitcoin's miners are in China, which partially explains the rabid past support for a refusal to increase the max blocksize.
  - martinko 11y ago
    The dynamic is not one in which when miners win, users lose. The issue is that users want more transactions per second and therefore want bigger blocks to be created, however, when miners create larger blocks, they have a hard(er) time propagating them to the entire network and thereby run the risk of their block being orphaned (someone else's block will be accepted first, and the miner's block and work done on that block will be wasted).
    - kobayashi 11y ago

cornholio 11y ago

"Bitcoin is breaking up" = Buy like a madman. The blocksize cuts down on the transaction spam making transactions non-free, maybe a few cents each. This is not optimal and certainly needs to fix in the next few years, because it harms microtransactions. But "breaking up" ? That's just sensationalist bullshit. That's like saying Netflix is on the edge of bankruptcy because it's raging success has temporarily killed HD streaming in Australia & Antarctica. As a community building exercise, this debacle is great for Bitcoin, it really shows no one is in control and consensus to change the rules of the game is very hard to reach.

woah 11y ago
The fact that every transaction ever is saved for ever harms microtransactions. Luckily nobody actually uses Bitcoin, especially not for microtransactions. The network can't handle more than 3 transactions a second, and luckily it doesn't have that volume. Lightning is the only thing that can actually make Bitcoin more performant than a small VPS with postgres, if it is something that people want. Also, "Lightning-like" channels aren't unique to Bitcoin- they can be implemented on Turing-complete currencies, and even on bank servers[1] 1. http://altheamesh.com/blog/universal-payment-channels/ http://altheamesh.com/blog/universal-payment-channels/

zekevermillion 11y ago

Bitcoin is already specified. I doubt that nodes, miners, and the bitcoin richlist will converge around any alternative spec (whether XT or Litecoin) and decide to call it "bitcoin". However, the ecology of decentralized digital assets inspired by the nakamoto consensus has already fragmented and will continue to do so at an exponential rate. As a rough estimate let's say there are already 1000 bitcoin clones that have more than a handful of nodes and miners. I would not be surprised to see that number increase to 10,000 within 2016. That some of the individuals associated with Bitcoin Core are moving onto other projects is not going to mean very much one way or another for the original bitcoin spec, though we may see the Core project change. There are other alternatives for those who want to run an implementation of the original bitcoin spec. (http://thebitcoin.foundation/ http://thebitcoin.foundation/) And there are an exponentially growing number of alternative networks for those who do not.

mrb 11y ago

"Mining already is so expensive that it takes company-sized investments to participate" This is not true at all. I do not understand why journalists repeat this claim. It is like saying "investing in the stock market is so expensive that it takes company-sized investments to participate". It is not true. Whether you invest $1000 or $1 million your returns—as a percentage of your initial investment—will be the same regardless if this is the stock market or Bitcoin mining. In fact I would say the opposite is true: small miners have a slightly better profitability than large-scale miners, because they are so small they do not even have to cover certain costs. A large-scale miner will have to pay for hosting or for building a data center but a small miner will host the hardware in his house at no extra cost. A large-scale miner will have to hire staff to maintain the miners but a small miner will maintain his machine himself. Of course profitability depends a lot on electricity costs, but again you might be a small miner and live (for example) in Douglas County, Washington and pay a domestic electricity rate of 2.5 cents per kWh, and you will beat many large-scale miners who almost always pay more (see my previous comment on this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10907584 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10907584). Large-scale miners may get a financial advantage by buying hardware in bulk, or manufacturing it themselves, but this is a cost saving of at most 20 or 30%, and this certainly does not make mining so expensive that small miners cannot participate.

nharada 11y ago
I was under the impression that specialized ASIC based miners have made even GPU mining relatively pointless.
- mhluongo 11y ago
  Not really relevant- small miners can buy ASICs too.

SCAQTony 11y ago

I think these are very exciting problems. The bigger the problem the more creative the solution. It took us two thousand years or so to go from using the weight of a bale of barley to represent the value of silver, bronze, copper to eventually actual coinage. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_money https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_money Maybe digital currency takes 15-years or so to work out the problems much like they did with barley to coins but it is definitely the future.

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]

darwins_pitbull 11y ago

Hi Mike. I met you at San Jose conference in 2013. I remember very clearly- you were the most dashing, handsome, well spoken and charismatic person at the entire conference, a very rare find in the developer community. I was just finding my bearings in this technology at the time, I was a long way from home, and remember the confidence it instilled in me, knowing that someone like yourself was involved in this. But as I followed your contributions to the effort in the months after the conference, it was so confusing- nothing you did really seemed to help, your suggestions were widely panned by most of the best technical minds, and you seemed to devote your energy to platforms that are largely made up of newbies. If I was a handler for an organization that wanted to insert an asset into the bitcoin community, someone like you would be the ideal candidate. Someone that young people, new to the community, naturally respect and will listen to. Strange how you've spent so much time cultivating your standing with people like that, while your reputation plummeted among the people that understood the network (and had far more skin in the game than you did, because if I remember correctly you never foresaw the spectacular growth of the bitcoin network, never thought it would work, and therefore did not really have that many coins yourself). I have a long history of having a keenly skeptical eye, I have solid critical thinking skills, and I bat away wacky theories all day long. I have NEVER, in any forum, posted any comment of any type in regards to bitcoin, this is my first one- I believe in speaking humbly, thinking deeply and acting bravely. While the evidence that your motives in the bitcoin network may not be what you say they are is only circumstantial, it has been accumulating for some time now. And the strongest allegations have come from the people who have the best reputations for clear thinking and scam calling. I mean you no ill will Mike, regardless of your intentions. But the forces at play and the implications of our technologies' reach is so spectacular that it is quite reasonable now for us to assume that smart and highly motivated people will appear who will use great cunning to harm the network. Every spidey sense I possess has been going off about you for a long time now. I can remain silent no longer. J'accuse Mike, J'accuse.

solotronics 11y ago
cui bono? Mike and his peers have everything to gain by trying to splinter BTC. Given the stability and distributed nature of Bitcoin itself the weak point is obviously the developers and that is exactly what they are going after.

daggerhashimoto 11y ago

HAHAHHAHHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHHA people are waking up to your trickery. You are conman. Take your shit coin and shove it up your bosses ass!

dang 11y ago
We banned this account for obvious reasons and detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10921219 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10921219 and marked it off-topic.