Bitcoins/Litecoins/Virtual Currencies

Just blipped again. Unlikely but I wonder if someone (or some group) is trying to trigger a super high limit sell in order to rip off an exchange.

TJT said:

I'll buy some more this week I think. These low prices will rebound just as they always do.

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Might want to wait for this afternoon's announcement.

Oblio said:

What do you know Homie?

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I know I had my finger on the button and bought as soon as news turned good. And I'm up about 12% as of now.

Vitalik:

While there are many paths toward building a scalable and secure long-term blockchain ecosystem, it's looking like they are all building toward very similar futures. There's a high chance that block production will end up centralized: either the network effects within rollups or the network effects of cross-domain MEV push us in that direction in their own different ways.

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Tmac said:

It doesn't necessarily matter if mining is centralized as long as nodes are independent right?

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That seems to be how Vitalik feels. Granted he is doing a lot of handwaving about separating block production from block validation via "specialized anti-censorship magic". I tend to think his explanations sound pretty bogus though. I guess one of those example solutions he provided could work... I can't say I truly understand what he is really talking about. Neither does anyone else though and I think that's the point. No worries though, we have years to wait until its all working properly.

It will likely take years for all of this to play out. Sharding and data availability sampling are complex technologies to implement. It will take years of refinement and audits for people to be fully comfortable storing their assets in a ZK-rollup running a full EVM.

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Centralized chains are eating Ethereum's lunch right now (Solana specifically) and this article is a response to that. He has a method for those centralized chains to "turn into something trustless and censorship resistant" though... so I expect ETH to careen in that direction so they can compete. More or less confirming what I've been saying for a while now, they have to centralize or die because they're competing on TPS and a decentralized system simply can't have the same throughput as a regular database.

Vitalik needs to quit drawing diagrams and get back to coding PoS. If he discovers girls we are all screwed !

ransomvik said:

Vitalik needs to quit drawing diagrams and get back to coding PoS. If he discovers girls we are all screwed !

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In other news, I thought this was an interesting read about El Salvador's Bitcoin move and why Globohomo + US seems to be letting happen.

Flobee said:

In other news, I thought this was an interesting read about El Salvador's Bitcoin move and why Globohomo + US seems to be letting happen.

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American oligarchs have been selling out the nation's interests for decades. They don't give a fuck so long as they get richer. China didn't steal our jobs; they were given our jobs. We trained their workforce. The anti-China propaganda is used to shift blame off the oligarchy and on to them. It's hilarious to feign concern for Muslims in China after we slaughtered 1 million Iraqis. Nobody outside America buys that nonsense. The oligarchy is starting to adopt bitcoin so there is internal resistance to outlawing it. The more it goes up, the more political power bitcoiners have, because wealth is political power. Rich people love democracy because they can buy it. In this case the interests of the rich and the poor actually align.

Bitcoin is just hard to outlaw because it's entirely opt-in and unintrusive. It's like banning weightless invisible gold mined from your backyard. Banning possession of a harmless rock is hard to justify in a (classical) liberal society that likes to trumpet the freedoms it grants its citizens.

Bitcoin however is still not a good replacement for money because of the volatility. The value of bitcoin has to be compared to something stable otherwise you have no idea what bitcoin is worth. Right now that something is US dollars. Michael Saylor makes the argument that crypto will make the USD more relevant in the future, not less, because weak currencies will disappear and they'll use cryptoized USD instead (in the form of stablecoins or similar). Nations won't officially adopt CBDCs of other nations, but they will adopt stablecoins.

Torrid said:

Bitcoin however is still not a good replacement for money because of the volatility. The value of bitcoin has to be compared to something stable otherwise you have no idea what bitcoin is worth. Right now that something is US dollars.

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1 BTC = 1BTC
1 Satoshi = 1 Satoshi

We're not there yet, but its certainly possible that Bitcoin is used as a unit of account some day. Bitcoin is only volatile in USD (fiat) terms. Over time, assuming things swing that way, it may be that fiat currencies are what is actually volatile and BTC is the stable store of value. How Bitcoin and crypto in general affects the international monetary system will be quite interesting. Personally I think that BTC demonetizes just about everything else eventually, but Saylor's version makes some sense as well. May be a question of time frame.

I agree that the higher the market cap, the more stable it becomes. But we're a long way off from the level of stability required to displace the world reserve currency. The downside to a very open and unregulatable monetary system like bitcoin is that trading shenanigans will cause large price swings. Bitcoin keeps dumping and rebounding largely because of overleveraged derivative trading. I love the wild west aspect of this personally but it makes it harder for bitcoin to replace fiat.