> or some transactions could be moved to “sidechains” as proposed in systems like the Bitcoin Lightning Network. But the Lightning Network is useful only for a ledger that is denominated in Bitcoin, and we still have to deal with the “central” Bitcoin blockchain, whose size is likely to continue to increase despite the addition of various “sidechain” mechanisms.
This is incorrect for multiple reasons.
> "Takes over 10 minutes to “commit” a transaction"
Incorrect. Average wait time would be less than 5 minutes.
> "Turning your Bitcoins into cold hard cash denominated in the currency of your choice is perhaps the cryptocurrency’s biggest problem"
It is author's world view based on pre-bitcoin times that cold hard cash is better. It can be said that turning cash to bitcoins is fiat's biggest problem.
>"moving money between ledgers actually involves integrating with those ugly legacy systems"
Assets on different blockchains can be swapped using various methods and does not need third parties.
> "there are far more efficient distributed consensus algorithms than this which don’t involve a proof of work."
Author gives the example of Interledger and SCP. Without proof-of-work origin of money will always be controversial. Both Ripple and SCP create money out of thin air.
>a very cool feature I will acknowledge exists and give a quick hat tip to Ethereum
There is NOTHING that ethereum can do that you can't do with bitcoin.
> Bitcoin-NG (paper), a protocol that inverts the ordering of Bitcoin consensus: a miner is first elected leader by winning the proof-of-work “lottery” by mining a “key block”, and then once elected leader becomes a transaction broker who can mint “micro-blocks” via digital signature until the next leader is elected.
I did not read last 3 paras. The author is damn right that Blockchains are world's shittiest databases and should not be used so.
In my personal understanding of what blockchain is, the author didn't mention it as a DMMS(Dynamic membership multiparty signature). This has been explained in the sidechains whitepaper, which most people do not read due to another myth that the employees of a private company 'blockstream' are majority of Bitcoin Core devs. Anyone trying to understand the blockchain should read the introduction of that paper. https://www.blockstream.com/sidechains.pdf
> Both Ripple and SCP create money out of thin air.
So does fiat, and fiat works. It may not work well all the time for 100% of use cases, but in general it works well.
As long as the mechanisms by which money is created out of thin air are well-understood by the people receiving this money (which they are for fiat) and the recipients give informed consent to that (which they... sorta do for fiat), this doesn't seem like a negative.
Fiat money works because governments pay for services in it, and demand taxes in it.
If you are not a government, fiat money does not work for you.*
* Quasi-government entities have a long history of issuing currency like this - company scrip was one such practice, but its important to note that this is a situation of a company becoming more government-like.
I'm a little confused, I think I paid for groceries last night in fiat currency and I certainly got goods in exchange for them, and I don't believe the grocery store was run by the government. Can you clarify what you mean by "does not work for you"? I suspect we mean different things by the phrase.
Sure, but a) I have no interest in issuing Bitcoin or any other currency, just using it as long as it works, and b) if I were to issue an altcoin, I would be creating money out of thin air!
> Incorrect. Average wait time would be less than 5 minutes.
Average wait time for a block is around 10 minutes. You may be thinking of it in terms of buses, where if there is a bus every 10th minute, you'd expect a 5 minute average wait. But blocks are mined practically independently, you could get two in a minute, or none in an hour. Turns out, no matter when you start waiting for a block, the average waiting time will be 10 minutes.
Interesting. Roughly 3,682,674 minutes have passed since its inception so expected blocks would be 368,267 whereas it is 391,933. Thus average should be less than 5. I guess due to low frequency of transactions the median is not the same as average.
'Do with' not 'do in'. For example, there could be an ether-tcp that transports data using unused header bytes. Now factually you don't send data 'in' TCP header so TCP-ether might seem better, but actually you can send data 'with' TCP and thus TCP-ether is redundant.
Think of any Ethereum usecase and you can do it with bitcoin.
Voice can be transmitted as packets using IP, but is VOIP an extension of IP or core use of it? Well, I guess we can call it either, because the end result is similar (but the side-effects are not).
This is incorrect for multiple reasons.
> "Takes over 10 minutes to “commit” a transaction"
Incorrect. Average wait time would be less than 5 minutes.
> "Turning your Bitcoins into cold hard cash denominated in the currency of your choice is perhaps the cryptocurrency’s biggest problem"
It is author's world view based on pre-bitcoin times that cold hard cash is better. It can be said that turning cash to bitcoins is fiat's biggest problem.
>"moving money between ledgers actually involves integrating with those ugly legacy systems"
Assets on different blockchains can be swapped using various methods and does not need third parties.
> "there are far more efficient distributed consensus algorithms than this which don’t involve a proof of work."
Author gives the example of Interledger and SCP. Without proof-of-work origin of money will always be controversial. Both Ripple and SCP create money out of thin air.
>a very cool feature I will acknowledge exists and give a quick hat tip to Ethereum
There is NOTHING that ethereum can do that you can't do with bitcoin.
> Bitcoin-NG (paper), a protocol that inverts the ordering of Bitcoin consensus: a miner is first elected leader by winning the proof-of-work “lottery” by mining a “key block”, and then once elected leader becomes a transaction broker who can mint “micro-blocks” via digital signature until the next leader is elected.
Many problems linked https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3or365/bitcoinng_p...
I did not read last 3 paras. The author is damn right that Blockchains are world's shittiest databases and should not be used so.
In my personal understanding of what blockchain is, the author didn't mention it as a DMMS(Dynamic membership multiparty signature). This has been explained in the sidechains whitepaper, which most people do not read due to another myth that the employees of a private company 'blockstream' are majority of Bitcoin Core devs. Anyone trying to understand the blockchain should read the introduction of that paper. https://www.blockstream.com/sidechains.pdf