Bitcoins/Litecoins/Virtual Currencies

This was the pandemic crash for crypto 1 year late. If you gobbled stocks this time last year you made a killing. If you gobble up yesterday you will be paid in gold as well.

Torrid said:

The primary criticism of Ethereum is that it's taking half a trillion (well, used to be half a trillion) of assets into unknown territory by switching to unproven tech. PoS is not well tested. Generally speaking you want to see something working and proven before investing large amounts of capital into it. More complexity = less security = more testing required. Ethereum is migrating to PoS, AND sharding, AND importing their PoW legacy chain to the new one at roughly the same time. If they pull it off that's super bullish. If they fuck it up? Not a risk I want to take. Consider that serious problems may not even manifest until many months after the transition. PoW has 12 years of confidence.

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12 years on the lifetime of blockchains is a tiny amount. If you think in 60 years that PoW will be able to secure and maintain even a simple distributed ledger like Bitcoin on a global scale, you're dreaming. It was never going to be able to, hence all of the research behind PoS. Your entire argument here is that PoS isn't safe because it hasn't been developed yet, which is pretty fucking stupid, and only shows how out of touch with crypto research you are.

Torrid said:

Additionally there is the argument that with PoS, a massive amount of capital is tied up in staking instead of being put to use. That's fine for a smart contracts blockchain I suppose, but not for a store of value blockchain used for buying things that aren't related to smart contracts. It's conceivable that Ethereum could 'flip' bitcoin and become worth more (I doubt it, but whatever) because Ethereum 'does stuff' while bitcoin is still used as the gold replacement coin. Equities are worth more than gold after all. (although Bitcoin continues to get smarter, just at a slower pace)

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What's a "store of value" blockchain? I'm unaware of any specific blockchain mechanism that determines whether a coin will be a good store of value or not. This is a narrative the Bitcoin community has sold itself in order to justify the incompetency of Nakamoto consensus for a peer-to-peer cash system on a global scale.

Torrid said:

Ethereum also started with a ridiculously large premine-- 72 million coins. The current circulation is 115m after years of mining. Any other coin doing this would be laughed out of the room but Ethereum has a cool name and an autist cult leader that picked up mandarin in a week or whatever. With PoS you want the coins to be spread out considerably, so a premine is counter to this. Unless of course you're one of the premine ICO buyers or original devs, then you fucking love PoS with the premine, because your cohort will be getting almost all of the newly minted coins from now on and your control over the network increases. PoW miners in contrast are forced to sell the vast majority of what they mine shortly after mining it because of operating costs, thereby diluting ownership. Bitcoin gets less concentrated with time.

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This whole paragraph is bereft of any sort of statistical analysis whatsoever. You have no idea how concentrated wealth is on the Ethereum network, nor what any of Ethereum's tokenomics actually do for the network, you just think PoW is safer because miners sell their coins. Literally not a point about the value of a network. What do you think is going to happen when you stop getting flat BTC rewards from blocks and instead rewards volatile transaction fees? Do you think the network will shed hashrate that can't cover the volatility? Hint: the answer is yes.

Torrid said:

If you think wealth concentration isn't a big deal, then consider this: these super large whales who got their coins very very cheap in the early days have the power to take massive dumps on the price at any given time or otherwise have the power to keep the price suppressed. Furthermore they're going to have information before you will. It's also undesirable for a money coin to be concentrated. Bitcoin's dispersion is a huge advantage over rivals as they cannot replicate it.

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Yes they can, and in fact they have. I have no idea where you're getting this Ethereum is concentrated bullshit. It's not any more concentrated than Bitcoin, and there exist no statistics which say otherwise. You've somehow taken the ETHEREUM PREMINE meme and extended it into your own bullshit reality as an irrefutable piece of evidence that Ethereum isn't decentralized. Hogwash.

Torrid said:

Another thing to note: People think that miners have all the power in bitcoin. This isn't true. In 2017 a supermajority of miners wanted to increase the block size, but a majority of node operators did not. Miners lost that war, hence why we have Segwit. (is also why bitcoin cash exists and failed) Node operators have a lot of power in bitcoin. With PoS, the power will be entirely in the hands of stakers who must run nodes 24/7 with no downtime; particularly when Ethereum nodes require MUCH beefier systems to run. The largest stakers will be exchanges or places that collectively stake coins for people who can't (or won't) run a node 24/7 (which is basically all the small fish) and they'll have a tremendous amount of influence over the network, unlike bitcoin where exchanges have basically zero.

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Miners aren't developing Bitcoin? WHO KNEW? Literally a useless qualification, the kind of power miners have if concentrated is the ability to reorganize transactions on the chain, which would be lethal, btw.

Torrid said:

Lastly, the entire point of these networks is to decentralize control; you can mock us for mentioning Vitalik so much, but the fact that his name is brought up so often is indicative of a problem. The Bitcoin dev in charge of the repo just stepped down recently because he thought he was becoming too much of an authority figure and none of you can even name him. Do you think multibillionaires are going to put the bulk of their generational wealth in the hands of Vitalik? I don't

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If anything, you should mention Vitalik more. He's the single biggest crypto expert on the planet, and a swell guy all around. The fact that Ethereum has him on the core dev team is a point in its favor, not a detraction, and you only look stupid to the millions of people who look up to Vitalik when you say shit like this. Do I think multibillionaires will use Ethereum? Yes, they already fucking are.

Bitcoin is old technology with all the use case of a meme coin. Figure it out, or get left behind.

Jackie Treehorn said:

I’m currently sitting on $105,000 in USDC. I feel like the market is gonna go down a bit again before going back up. And this time, I’m ready for you, you son of a bitch.

And if it doesn’t go down, I don’t give a shit at this point. Feels good to be sitting on some cash that isn’t going anywhere.

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Was curious if we would get a dead cat bounce myself. Guess we'll see. I already have my crypto positions locked in for the foreseeable future and I have zero dry powder left if there is another crash/dip, so it's kind of irrelevant to me.

James said:

If anything, you should mention Vitalik more. He's the single biggest crypto expert on the planet, and a swell guy all around. The fact that Ethereum has him on the core dev team is a point in its favor, not a detraction, and you only look stupid to the millions of people who look up to Vitalik when you say shit like this. Do I think multibillionaires will use Ethereum? Yes, they already fucking are.

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I don't think the issue with Vitalik is that he's not brilliant, he is. However he is a single point of weakness for the network. He's an arm that can be twisted to manipulate the network. He has the power to do so as has been shown in the past.



This entire industry was built on the idea of removing centralized points of control. Removing government control over the currency. Vitalik and Consensys from that perspective is a weakness. You may be right about a lot of the technical aspects that ETH is pioneering but you've lost sight of the entire reason the crypto industry exists in the first place.

That's such a bullshit take of the whole TheDAO situation that we've already gone over -- go ahead and read any of the numerous things Vitalik and others have written about that, and how it didn't destroy the community. Meanwhile, the motherfucker is innovating on the Ethereum blockchain like it was going out of style, and Satoshi is long gone, his chain stuck forever with 2010s technology while its development community bickers over how to innovate.

James said:

That's such a bullshit take of the whole TheDAO situation that we've already gone over -- go ahead and read any of the numerous things Vitalik and others have written about that, and how it didn't destroy the community. Meanwhile, the motherfucker is innovating on the Ethereum blockchain like it was going out of style, and Satoshi is long gone, his chain stuck forever with 2010s technology while its development community bickers over how to innovate.

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I'm not concerned about the community man. You're either intentionally being obtuse or you legitimately don't understand the core reason behind the creation of Bitcoin. Satoshi is gone BECAUSE he would be a lever to be used to control the network. This is way bigger than your hardon for innovative tech, we're talking about the future of the monetary system here.

Removing centralized points of control over the money is the point. You remove control and free markets are possible again for the first time since Bretton Woods or perhaps the creation of the current iteration of the Fed (1913 current iteration). This isn't a tech argument, its a monetary policy argument

Flobee said:

I'm not concerned about the community man. You're either intentionally being obtuse or you legitimately don't understand the core reason behind the creation of Bitcoin. Satoshi is gone BECAUSE he would be a lever to be used to control the network. This is way bigger than you're hardon for innovative tech, we're talking about the future of the monetary system here.

Removing centralized points of control over the money is the point. You remove control and free markets are possible again for the first time since Bretton Woods. This isn't a tech argument, its a monetary policy argument

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I understand exactly why Bitcoin was created. I also understand that the technology behind Bitcoin, without innovation, is insufficient at achieving those goals. The good intentions of Satoshi do not change this fact whatsoever.

James said:

I understand exactly why Bitcoin was created. I also understand that the technology behind Bitcoin, without innovation, is insufficient at achieving those goals. The good intentions of Satoshi do not change this fact whatsoever.

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Then you should understand the point RE: Vitalik and why Satoshi disappeared. Innovation needs to happen, I'm not convinced ETH is the answer regardless of how smart and well intentioned Vitalik may be

Flobee said:

Then you should understand the point RE: Vitalik and why Satoshi disappeared. Innovation needs to happen, I'm not convinced ETH is the answer regardless of how smart and well intentioned Vitalik may be

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No, you should understand why having someone smart like Vitalik, able to direct and coordinate bleeding edge crypto research, is an invaluable asset to blockchain development. You can't seriously believe that we figured out how to create a blockchain that will scale to the world's financial needs in 2011, do you?

James said:

No, you should understand why having someone smart like Vitalik, able to direct and coordinate bleeding edge crypto research, is an invaluable asset to blockchain development. You can't seriously believe that we figured out how to create a blockchain that will scale to the world's financial needs in 2011, do you?

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On the settlement layer? I think Bitcoin does the job just fine. Transactions largely won't happen on layer 1, settlement will. Layer 2 covers transactions be that a platform like Paypal or (better) a p2p system like Lightning. There is still work to be done but honestly Bitcoin is very close to a point where it can handle its use case as a p2p monetary system. See places like Nigeria, El Salvador, and Venezuela where is it already doing this. It is easily over 10x better than the current settlement layer (SWIFT). I believe it will disrupt and replace SWIFT just like every other 10x improvement on a system disrupts its predecessor.

I see you're still completely ignoring Vitalik's qualified math about building on top of L1, Bitcoin L1 is insufficient to run smart contracts built on top of it, period, and there's no guarantee Bitcoin's L1 won't change to retroactively invalidate any L2 solution that clashes with the philosophical vision of BTC core devs. I have no idea why you continue to believe that Bitcoin smart contracts are anything but fucking vaporware, while Ethereum's currently operating smart contracts are somehow irrelevant to the entire crypto space?

Jackie Treehorn said:

My thought process is, even if I lose a little bit by buying back in at a higher cost than what I exited, I’ll take the peace of mind at the moment. I’m already up huge over the past two weeks.

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If you're up huge over the past two weeks, you should be teaching classes on this shit lol. I didn't lose out as much as many people, but I sure as hell am not up.

James said:

I see you're still completely ignoring Vitalik's qualified math about building on top of L1, Bitcoin L1 is insufficient to run smart contracts built on top of it, period, and there's no guarantee Bitcoin's L1 won't change to retroactively invalidate any L2 solution that clashes with the philosophical vision of BTC core devs. I have no idea why you continue to believe that Bitcoin smart contracts are anything but fucking vaporware, while Ethereum's currently operating smart contracts are somehow irrelevant to the entire crypto space?

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You don't need smart contracts to replace SWIFT. Anything created on Bitcoin to run smart contracts, defi, etc is gravy. The core use case for Bitcoin is solid, fully decentralized, and in my opinion inevitable. Solving this problem is by FAR the biggest hurdle faced by civilization at this time. If we fix the money we fix the world. Neato defi toys can wait. I'm focused on an incorruptible settlement layer that we can base the world economy on. Something that a group of assholes can't debase to enrich and empower themselves.