Bitcoins/Litecoins/Virtual Currencies

There's always either one person or a very small cadre of people in control. You're fooling yourself if you think that isn't the case with BTC. With Vitalik at least we have a face to put to a name, rather than some mysterious pseudo-Japanese guy that may or may not still be alive

Flobee said:

You don't need smart contracts to replace SWIFT.

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No, but you need a system that can handle more than 7 fucking transactions per second, which Bitcoin does not.

Arden said:

There's always either one person or a very small cadre of people in control. You're fooling yourself if you think that isn't the case with BTC. With Vitalik at least we have a face to put to a name, rather than some mysterious pseudo-Japanese guy that may or may not still be alive

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You're missing the point. Satoshi could reappear right now and dump all his coins, start demanding changes to the network, but that wouldn't mean a damn thing except an obvious price dump in the short term. Bottom line is that bitcoin is structurally decentralized and there is nothing anyone can do about it. That's the entire point of its creation, not even Satoshi can change it now.

James said:

No, but you need a system that can handle more than 7 fucking transactions per second, which Bitcoin does not.

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That's layer 2 as I said. You're smarter than this, I know you understand what I'm saying.

Nowhere in that point did you describe how the power centers of Bitcoin are decentralized, you have just assumed that this is the case because Satoshi himself could not influence them, but all that means is that Satoshi has been unseated from his position of power.

Flobee said:

That's layer 2 as I said. You're smarter than this, I know you understand what I'm saying.

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Again, actually read Vitalik's qualified math about L2 development. You can't just magically handwave away hard TPS requirements by saying an L2 will fix it.

Crypto hit again. Biden says IRS staffing doubling to target crypto.

US Treasury calling for all crypto transactions over $10k to be reported to the IRS. (same as standard banking transactions)

If anything those announcements should be lending more legitimacy to crypto and thus be bullish for the long run.

Edit: key words "long run"- will probably cause a panic in the short term

James said:

Nowhere in that point did you describe how the power centers of Bitcoin are decentralized, you have just assumed that this is the case because Satoshi himself could not influence them, but all that means is that Satoshi has been unseated from his position of power.

Again, actually read Vitalik's qualified math about L2 development. You can't just magically handwave away hard TPS requirements by saying an L2 will fix it.

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Do I really need to explain Bitcoin decentralization to you? I figured you understood the separations between individuals running Bitcoin code, Miners, and devs? Satoshi or any dev could make new code that drastically changes Bitcoin, but if individuals running nodes don't like the changes, they don't run the code. At best you get a hard fork. Same situation with Miners demanding changes, see the block wars for an example.

Lightning already handles transaction via payments routed through payment channels. You should really do some more reading on this, you don't seem to have a strong understanding of what you're talking about if Vitalik didn't blog on it. Lightning isn't a finished product but it already massively scales on Bitcoins 7 TPS an allows for nearly free micropayments.

Maybe the issue here isn't that Bitcoin isn't innovating, its just that you're not paying attention to it?

Spoiler alert, Lightning will never be a finished product because, again, Vitalik's qualified math about building on top of L1 cannot be ignored or handwaved away. Do you have any idea what Lightning is currently used for, its security properties, or how you expect it to scale to the point that it handles SWIFT amounts of transactions per second? I'll bet you don't, because it's fucking impossible. Maybe the problem is you don't understand decentralization and what it means, instead choosing to believe some Bitcoin maxi reblogger about what it is and how Bitcoin is the only chain to achieve it.

James said:

Spoiler alert, Lightning will never be a finished product because, again, Vitalik's qualified math about building on top of L1 cannot be ignored or handwaved away. Do you have any idea what Lightning is currently used for, its security properties, or how you expect it to scale to the point that it handles SWIFT amounts of transactions per second? I'll bet you don't, because it's fucking impossible. Maybe the problem is you don't understand decentralization and what it means, instead choosing to believe some Bitcoin maxi reblogger about what it is and how Bitcoin is the only chain to achieve it.

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Lightning only writes to the main chain when a channel is opened closed, or when channels need to be rebalanced. I would encourage you to learn more about this because you are not framing the system properly. Since we're only dealing with value transfers on layer 1, and value transfers are only finalized when channels are opened or closed you're point is invalid.

Lets say Lightning fails though, you can still scale BTC on more centralized layer 2 systems like the current monetary system does while maintaining a decentralized settlement layer. It isn't ideal and not what I'd like to see happen but still achieves the 10x improvement over SWIFT. It can still achieve an end goal similar to reversion to the gold standard in this case, flawed as it would be.

wormie said:

What the shit is qualified math?

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Math that's actually useful and agreed upon, and not just some stupid TOTAL EFFECTIVE HITPOINT calculation or some shit that's entirely meaningless. You know, the kind of shit Vitalik deals in, viable logic.

Flobee said:

Lightning only writes to the main chain when a channel is opened closed, or when channels need to be rebalanced. I would encourage you to learn more about this because you are not framing the system properly. Since we're only dealing with value transfers on layer 1, and value transfers are only finalized when channels are opened or closed you're point is invalid.

Lets say Lightning fails though, you can still scale BTC on more centralized layer 2 systems like the current monetary system does while maintaining a decentralized settlement layer. It isn't ideal and not what I'd like to see happen but still achieves the 10x improvement over SWIFT. It can still achieve an end goal similar to reversion to the gold standard in this case, flawed as it would be.

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You can go back to 2018 in this thread to find me shitting on Lightning and its technical capabilities, it's a worthless system that Bitcoiners believe is somehow revolutionary. It's vaporware. I have no idea why you think massive financial institutions would rip out SWIFT and replace it with unproven tech running on top of a blockchain with an unscalable consensus mechanism.