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mudcore wrote:

just brew it! wrote:

So IOW it's just a vehicle for gambling/speculation, and we'll figure out if it is actually practical as a way of moving money around later.

If you're using it to speculate then sure, I guess that's what it is for you. It already widely used as a means for moving money around, how is that in dispute? It just isn't to the point where most can use it for that purpose. "Why isn't it mature already?" is basically all I see you getting at. Chances of this same cycle happening, like it has already, a few more times are high before we even begin puberty.

Seems more like it is maturing, and that's the problem. Once it gained broader recognition and people started trying to use it on a meaningful scale, the crippling transaction time and cost issues inherent in its design have became apparent.

just brew it! wrote:

Seems more like it is maturing, and that's the problem.

That's because the older, slow-to-adapt coins are the ones that are seeing the huge volume. There are actually other cryptos out there that have solutions to the scaling problem. Regardless, any ecosystem like this needs time to adjust, and the rampant adoption of crypto this year has just been too quick for the products to keep up.

Glorious wrote:

I mean, it's gibberish, sorry.

What was "gibberish" is the ludicrous extreme you take a informal analogy and then argue against your own extreme that no one else is defending. We're not even talking to each other. You're arguing against the straw man you created. You may have the energy for this but I don't.

just brew it! wrote:

Seems more like it is maturing, and that's the problem. Once it gained broader recognition and people started trying to use it on a meaningful scale, the crippling transaction time and cost issues inherent in its design have became apparent.

And the space is over flowing with ideas and attempts to rectifying these obstacles. Yes, an 8 year old is maturing too. But he'll just be 9 in a little bit and has a long way to go before he's a useful adult.

JBI wrote:

we'll figure out if it is actually practical as a way of moving money around later.

Should this day even come, why wouldn't we just fork bitcoin into bitcoin2 and have the exact same thing in every respect?

Oh, sorry: It wouldn't be the same, we wouldn't have any pre-existing bagholders who are convinced they should be millionaires.

Which, I'm supposed to believe, is an anti-feature.

mudcore wrote:

If you're using it to speculate then sure, I guess that's what it is for you

That is what it is to everyone though, save people buying drugs on the darknet (and they are mad about the volatility + price too).

mudcore wrote:

It already widely used as a means for moving money around, how is that in dispute?

I don't know, let's ask mudcore:

mudcore wrote:

Because of the times it takes to get in/out of BTC there is definitely a use case for LTC as the medium to transfer the value

You might have missed this comment, it was a few posts up.

mudcore wrote:

It just isn't to the point where most can use it for that purpose.

This bubble is only pushing ever further from it, and fundamentally, as I told JBI, the existence of massive bagholders is not a boon to adoption. I know that you think you deserve to be rich, but as an entrant into the world of cryptocurrency for actual commerce, where is my motivation to fight for the scraps left by the whales when I can re-create the identical thing without them?

I mean, please, think clearly: If the masses, who do not own bitcoin, suddenly think the properties of bitcoin are useful and valuable to them, why is the completely extraneous property of mudcore already being rich beneficial to them? You, yes. Them, no.

mudcore wrote:

"Why isn't it mature already?" is basically all I see you getting at. Chances of this same cycle happening, like it has already, a few more times are high before we even begin puberty.

How is it maturing? What would "puberty" even be?

LMAO Glorious my guy my entire "crypto" position is .1 BTC, .5 ETH, and 1 LTC. I have no aspirations of becoming rich by holding cyrptocurrency. Again, you're solely interested in attacking a made up straw man. But hey at least your vitality for attacking your own made up positions is high, that's good.

I got into mining just so I could buy a new GPU or two to replace my R290s; and since I had an old mobo, cpu, memory and PSU sitting and gathering dust... my 2 R9 290s started my "mining" rig, which led me to buying several GTX 1070s, 1060s and RX Vega 56s, which have all pretty much paid for themselves since I started in mid-June of 2017. Not looking to get rich, but will make some money with them while I can.

Beside, block-chain tech isn't going away... whether it will be "mined" a year or two from now is another story...Financial institutions may want to create their own and same with some other industries and of course government regulation will have to jump in at some point (they need their "cut" of the action).

DPete27 wrote:

That's because the older, slow-to-adapt coins are the ones that are seeing the huge volume. There are actually other cryptos out there that have solutions to the scaling problem. Regardless, any ecosystem like this needs time to adjust, and the rampant adoption of crypto this year has just been too quick for the products to keep up.

They don't. The entire concept is massively inefficient, and there is no purposed solution beside snake-oil like lightning which, taken even as vaguely proposed, fundamentally mutates the essentially characteristics of the overall concept.

You are inherently bounded by two things: synchronization time and storage space. The first limits the block time, the second limits the block size. Together they represent maximum throughput.

1) If you want a global network, you're ultimately bounded by the speed of light, which for 1 half-circumference of the earth is ~30ms. More in line with actual (halved) pings, let's say ~100 milliseconds. Coming close to that guarantees probabilistic chain forks, and anything lower is immediately and always infinitely generating blockchain(s). I'm not going to model it, but let's take a half-second as a reasonable baseline for something that has a suitably low chance of contesting chains.

2) If you have maximum utilization of even 2 MB blocks per every 500 milliseconds, that is ~120TB a year. You'd be spending 300 dollars a month to just keep up. And before you say "...but it becomes cheaper" have you, erm, checked up on the actual Kryder rate lately? In any event, your growth is still bounded by it.

and assuming a transaction size of 200 bytes per second, which is a very small/simple BTC transaction, that's ~20,000 transactions as what's pretty much the theoretical limit. You can't go any faster, and if your blocks get much larger people can't store the chain without a data center.

That's theoretical, here's practical:

I've already detailed one of the more prominent and recent ones (ethereum) and illustrated how it doesn't offer much of an improvement on TPS, it's basically double, maybe 15 TPS and it's growing extremely slowly.

Even LTC, the vaunted "silver", is maybe 60ish.

Visa, by itself, handles a little less than 2,000 a second on average and can cope with peaks of 24,000 (in other words, it practically achieves more than what cryptocurrency can even theoretically extend)

https://usa.visa.com/run-your-business/ ... etail.html

And those numbers are from FIVE YEARS AGO, it's almost certainly much more now.

DPete27 wrote:

Regardless, any ecosystem like this needs time to adjust, and the rampant adoption of crypto this year has just been too quick for the products to keep up.

"Rampant adoption" is untrue. There is no adoption. You've offered no evidence of adoption. Virtually no one accepts bitcoin, some of the exchanges (including the one with the most volume) do not even accept USD.

Of the few places that took BTC because it was popular amongst their particular demographics, many of them are dropping it. To with, Steam, just last week. Regardless of even that extremely pertinent fact, BTC was always pittance to their revenues and they never handle it directly anyway (Valve used bitpay, they never saw anything but USD on their end)

What you are saying about adoption is flagrantly false. If you continue saying it, after my repeated factual corrections with zero refutation, it becomes a lie.

So don't do that.

mudcore wrote:

What was "gibberish" is the ludicrous extreme you take a informal analogy and then argue against your own extreme that no one else is defending. We're not even talking to each other. You're arguing against the straw man you created. You may have the energy for this but I don't.

The analogy is completely baseless and it's used to lure the gullible.

If you can't handle any criticism of it, don't approvingly repeat it.

mudcore wrote:

And the space is over flowing with ideas and attempts to rectifying these obstacles.

No, it isn't. All you proponents do is repeat that premise, never do you ever attempt to even vaguely elucidate upon it.

I get the feeling that you guys so poorly understand the subject that you cannot even understand my criticisms. Certainly you all frequent the (non)arguments that I am "ignorant of it" (apparently because I don't like it, as to know it is to love it) or that "I'm not worth your time" (as if shilling tropes common to bubbles and repeating short platitudes takes a lot of it) or that I'm "arguing past you" (of course I am, your only purpose here is to shill whereas mine is to explain).

mudcore wrote:

But he'll just be 9 in a little bit and has a long way to go before he's a useful adult.

What would make him a useful adult?

I mean, you're not even handwaving here. Just sort of furtively moving your arms as if to suggest that you eventually might.

mudcore wrote:

LMAO Glorious my guy my entire "crypto" position is .1 BTC, .5 ETH, and 1 LTC. I have no aspirations of becoming rich by holding cyrptocurrency. Again, you're solely interested in attacking a made up straw man. But hey at least your vitality for attacking your own made up positions is high, that's good.

So since your aspirations of profit (for why else do you even have a current crypto position) don't exceed some arbitrary threshold, the criticism is invalid?

How so? If you are holding them now in the anticipation of some future, non-speculative utility, why is that utility enhanced by virtue of you, and all other "investors", holding onto those bags?

Yes, yes, your bag is "small", not "big", so clearly this is a strawman.

DPete27 wrote:

The reason LTC is surging is because Charlie Lee appeared on a few TV shows in the past few days to talk about LTC. This brought publicity and understanding of LTC to a large number of "new" crypto investors who likely had no idea what LTC even was before then. We're talking about people that invested in BTC because it was all over the news when it hit 10k. Charlie Lee actually did a good job catering to the audience that LTC is faster, lower transaction fees, unit price is cheaper than BTC (weak argument, but it works), etc etc and described it's place as the transacted currency (cash) to Bitcoin's gold. Of course, there are "stalwart" crypto investors that joined in to amplify this pump, but that's how markets work.

If a major figure in any other "market" would go on air and talk about the mundane non-novel generalities of that market, no, you would not see a massive surge in price. This is known because that happens all the time, every hour, for dozens and dozens of figures and market. Charlie Lee was, almost certainly, bracketed in his appearances by examples of this.

What you are seeing is therefore indisputable not "how markets work", as evidenced by everything else like that, ever.

It is, however, how the irrational exuberance behind bubbles works: People are unreasonably excited by the absolutely ridiculous "gains" that can be had in this thing that they don't understand in the slightest because there are ringleaders pumping it and waving dollar signs.

In any event, I'm sort of doubtful anyway, as Charlie Lee has been in the news all year talking about the 9-month long price run up:

http://www.nasdaq.com/article/litecoin- ... s-cm787577

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OxWM6rJV0nk

https://www.cnbc.com/2017/08/29/litcoin ... -high.html

https://www.barrons.com/articles/3-must ... 1504058015

Glorious wrote:

mudcore wrote:

LMAO Glorious my guy my entire "crypto" position is .1 BTC, .5 ETH, and 1 LTC. I have no aspirations of becoming rich by holding cyrptocurrency. Again, you're solely interested in attacking a made up straw man. But hey at least your vitality for attacking your own made up positions is high, that's good.

So since your aspirations of profit (for why else do you even have a current crypto position) don't exceed some arbitrary threshold, the criticism is invalid?

How so? If you are holding them now in the anticipation of some future, non-speculative utility, why is that utility enhanced by virtue of you, and all other "investors", holding onto those bags?

Yes, yes, your bag is "small", not "big", so clearly this is a strawman.

I don't have aspirations of profit. That is my point. The amount isn't consequential to that notion, just to especially quash you pushing the thought that I think I will become rich when I know I won't (not this way at least). I am not holding them, I have them because you need them to experiment and learn about the space in a practical manner. You could... oh I don't know... try asking before assuming but who in the world am I kidding...

A couple of my coworkers (one not at all tech-savvy) are talking about how much they've made in LiteCoin in the last 48 hours. It clearly has hit the mainstream.

mudcore wrote:

I don't have aspirations of profit. That is my point. The amount isn't consequential to that notion, just to especially quash you pushing the thought that I think I will become rich when I know I won't (not this way at least). I am not holding them, I have them because you need them to experiment and learn about the space in a practical manner.

Outright nonsense, you absolutely do not. In fact, that is contraindicated by everyone in the space.

You're supposed to use the testnets. All three of your crypto-currencies have them and ethereum actually has three.

https://live.blockcypher.com/btc-testnet/
http://testnet.litecointools.com/
https://ropsten.etherscan.io/ (this is the standard ETH one).

They don't expect, or want, you to risk ~2,000+ in USD value evaporating when you are "experimenting" with something that is rife with easy mistakes and absolutely irreversible (especially not when the fee-attrition of "testing" carries a rather high real-world cost and gums up the real chain to boot)

mudcore wrote:

You could... oh I don't know... try asking before assuming but who in the world am I kidding...

What you are saying is false, and if you thought it was true it belies the notion that you were ever seriously engaging with the subject.

On the contrary, the only viable explanation is that you do indeed expect some value. Whereas this "embarassment of riches" routine is a well-worn trope I constantly hear deployed whenever I have discussions of this type.

It's strange. It is as if you are all arguing from the same script, but yet individually think you are uniquely generating these responses...

---

In the comically unlikely event that you are even remotely serious, stop risking your "investments": if you want to experiment, FOR THE LOVE OF THE FSM USE THE TESTNETS.

I'm supposed to use the test nets for what? What do you even think I am doing exactly? LMAO good lord you are one smart idiot.

Glorious wrote:

Outright nonsense

Clearly your angst increases every day crypto continues to flourish and you're still standing on the sideline instead of making profits.

DPete27 wrote:

Glorious wrote:

Outright nonsense

Clearly your angst increases every day crypto continues to flourish and you're still standing on the sideline instead of making profits.

He's invested heavily in this in some manner. Whichever I don't really care because at this point I'm just laughing at the thought of his face as he types these replies up.

Gotta be careful around Glorious. He might pop a blood vessel because you're not being exacting in your language because you were only interested in a light, informal conversation and he's out to prove someone on the Internet wrong by repeatedly attaching greater meaning to what you said then was ever meant to be implied. You're right Glorious you don't "have to" experiment with this strictly in the currency, but I wasn't making any claims to how development should be done. I am talking about some very hobbyist level activities just to kinda learn the space, use it a few times for purchases and not really care if it booms or busts because it wouldn't change my life on that basis all for my own interest and nothing more. I have repeatedly tried to get this across to you but you repeatedly go back to attaching greater meaning and more formal interpretations of my words. It's so god damn silly there's no reaction left but to laugh at it.

JustAnEngineer wrote:

Damned miners are destroying the planet...
https://www.yahoo.com/news/bitcoin-mini ... 17809.html

It is more like energy companies are indirectly "fleecing" foolish speculators a.k.a 95% of the crypto-currency crowd. The whole system will crash long before it starts make up significant portions of global energy consumption.

mudcore wrote:

I'm supposed to use the test nets for what? What do you even think I am doing exactly? LMAO good lord you are one smart idiot.

The better question is what on earth do you think you're even doing.

DPete27 wrote:

Clearly your angst increases every day crypto continues to flourish and you're still standing on the sideline instead of making profits.

Right, absolutely, disregard every argument I've ever made and just chant "FOMO MAD, FOMO MAD" over and over.

mudcore wrote:

He's invested heavily in this in some manner. Whichever I don't really care because at this point I'm just laughing at the thought of his face as he types these replies up.

I'm invested in keeping you shills from perpetuating this affinity fraud upon a community I love.

But sure, keep singing "MONEY MONEY MONEY" at the top of your lungs to drown me out. Unhinged greed is such a great argument towards justifying technical inevitability.

mudcore wrote:

He might pop a blood vessel because you're not being exacting in your language because you were only interested in a light, informal conversation and he's out to prove someone on the Internet wrong by repeatedly attaching greater meaning to what you said then was ever meant to be implied.

What was meant to be implied was "BUY BUY BUY", which you idiots can't even effectively dissemble away from because you're so in thrall to that delusion that you see everything in its terms: I *MUST* be driven by jealousy of your sick gains.

mudcore wrote:

You're right Glorious you don't "have to" experiment with this strictly in the currency, but I wasn't making any claims to how development should be done.

False. You actually said that you needed to own them to experiment.

Your words: "I have them because you need them to experiment"

Which is also false. In fact, as I said, everyone in that space will strongly caution you against such a thing.

And what does "development" have to do with this? You obviously have nothing to do with development of cryptocurrency, and the fact that you own various cryptocurrencies does not relate to any claim towards how development should be done either. It's a complete non sequitor. Do you even understand the meaning of the words you are using?

mudcore wrote:

I am talking about some very hobbyist level activities just to kinda learn the space, use it a few times for purchases and not really care if it booms or busts because it wouldn't change my life on that basis all for my own interest and nothing more.

Who are you kidding? Yourself?

mudcore wrote:

I have repeatedly tried to get this across to you but you repeatedly go back to attaching greater meaning and more formal interpretations of my words. It's so god damn silly there's no reaction left but to laugh at it.

What's laughable is your ridiculous play-acting. Who do you think you're fooling?

LOL

The exact image in my head: https://xkcd.com/386/

Though I kinda think higher of you than that. I mean you probably have a pretty nice office, right? But yet....

I'm screwing around with a hobby. It's all a bubble right? So it must be worth nothing really, why are you so concerned? You're the one that made insinuation I was doing anything more than playing with it. I've never claimed to be an expert, I just disagree on some things and at that point you completely lost it and here we are. Again, you're a smart person but also clearly kind of an idiot whose just hulk raging out right now.

mudcore wrote:

The exact image in my head: https://xkcd.com/386/

Yeah, hilarious.

Here's the thing, this isn't some generic internet argument, is it?

No, we're talking about real-world sums of money, aren't we?

Which you guys are encouraging the people here to invest in an obvious bubble, the justification for which is so transparently ridiculous that you can't even respond to my lengthy technical discussions of your single-sentence handwaves.

I've analyzed the computational capacity of ethereum in great depth. I've detailed the theoretical limitations of the blockchain concept. Your side has done nothing other than occasionally mumble about the vague "ideas" you may have heard in between the attacks on my supposedly unjustified vehemence, laughable claims of my ignorance and taunting over my ostensible "Fear of Missing out".

Why am I arguing?

Two reasons:

1) I actually do find cryptocurrency interesting. I mean, not remotely in the way you do, rather strictly academically as intersection of so many fields that fascinate me (technology, computers, economics, sociology, etc..). But nevertheless, yes, it definitely holds my interest.
2) I feel that this irrationality has deliberately targeted *MY* cherished demographic! Computer enthusiasts are my chosen people, my friend, and I fear they are unfortunately susceptible to your brand of derangement. I seek to defend them from such depredations, ok? Sure, they very will might succumb and follow you into your folly, but by golly, yes, I'm going to say my piece until a mod (i.e. not you) tells me otherwise.

---

Finally, I might note, it takes two tango. So if you want to stop counter-arguing that "Someone is wrong on the internet" I would inevitably stop as well, right?

Mudcore, here's why Bitcoins are in a bubble currently: there are too many buyers. We know this is true because of the price increases.

For every buyer there must be a seller; BitCoin is designed to be un-minable eventually, the whole point of the virtual currency is supply exhaustion. What happens when everyone tries to take a profit all at once? Oops, no buyers.

Yes, you can be smarter than everyone else. Yes, you can panic first and best and get a good price for YOUR bitcoins.

Everyone else? The people you are trying to help/convince? They would be screwed. There's no way even half of them can recoup their investment, this is basic math.

One other thing about bitcoin...

From "I used to be a bitcoin bull heres why that changed A big challenge, however, is that the network is becoming increasingly congested. Right now, the network is struggling to process more than about four transactions per second, and intense demand for network capacity has pushed the average transaction fee above $20. There are various proposals to relieve this congestion, from increasing the size of Bitcoin blocks to developing new technologies to allow many transactions to occur outside of Bitcoin's blockchain.

How can a cryptocurrency that slow actually be a replacement for commerce? Wall Street speculation trades are happening in the microsecond range.

Vhalidictes wrote:

Mudcore, here's why Bitcoins are in a bubble currently: there are too many buyers. We know this is true because of the price increases.

For every buyer there must be a seller; BitCoin is designed to be un-minable eventually, the whole point of the virtual currency is supply exhaustion. What happens when everyone tries to take a profit all at once? Oops, no buyers.

Yes, you can be smarter than everyone else. Yes, you can panic first and best and get a good price for YOUR bitcoins.

Everyone else? The people you are trying to help/convince? They would be screwed. There's no way even half of them can recoup their investment, this is basic math.

First and foremost I have not encouraged or endorsed someone buying Bitcoin. Secondly, I am not actively buying any cryptos and haven't purchased any in months. I did gather some via ming to pay off my video card but a) I was buying that video card regardless of whether it was good for mining and b) that's done now and I don't care to figure out an alternative because I'm not into this to become rich by holding coins. I've spent more on soft drinks in the last 6 months than I have on cryptos or GPU power costs... ever. So... Yeah. Please, if you're reading this and you were somehow confused into thinking I'm encouraging you to buy you are wrong. Don't be like Glorious.

I have already said I believe it is in a bubble currently too and likely to crash. My point was simply I don't think the bubble popping right now is the end of Bitcoin. This has happened before and I can understand the argument this is unique, I just disagree. I haven't gone really any further into it because at that point words were just repeatedly stuffed into my mouth and a guy wanted to argue with himself real, real bad. I'm thinking about this in terms of another 5 to 10 years. Not as an investment but as in that's probably how long it will take to solve the hurdles and challenges because even though its already been 8 it's incredibly immature (though it is maturing, just still young) still. If that's the case then I'd say its almost certain a bubble or more will occur during that time period.

Mr. Bill, just as a Devil's Advocate, at the current values in other currencies, BitCoin could be used for bulk/large payments only and the transaction cost wouldn't be so bad in that case.

EDIT: Mudcore, sorry about that, I get you. Yes, BitCoin is here to stay, although I'm sure the eventual value as measured in USD will reach a far lower equilibrium.

mudcore wrote:

This has happened before and I can understand the argument this is unique, I just disagree. I haven't gone really any further into it because at that point words were just repeatedly stuffed into my mouth and a guy wanted to argue with himself real, real bad.

I never made that argument.

What were you saying about stuffing words into people's mouths?

I didn't do that to you, I quoted you.

Feel free to quote where I either said or implied this was unique or the "end of Bitcoin"

You can't.

Because I didn't.

mudcore wrote:

you were somehow confused into thinking I'm encouraging you to buy you are wrong. Don't be like Glorious.

Who can back up his statements, unlike you?:

mudcore wrote:

The price volatility is frankly these coins biggest feature right now. Its what is driving interest. This will become a problem if it continues forever but this idea that Bitcoin or Litecoin need to be immediately put to use for day to day transactions is weak.

You said the volatility was a feature, that it was driving interest, and that it will only be a problem if it continues forever.

Calling it a "feature" is promoting the bubble.

What event(s) do people see that will bring crypto crashing to the ground and why?
Even if you're bullish, it's always good to keep sight of the potential pitfalls.

Glorious wrote:

mudcore wrote:

you were somehow confused into thinking I'm encouraging you to buy you are wrong. Don't be like Glorious.

Who can back up his statements, unlike you?:

mudcore wrote:

The price volatility is frankly these coins biggest feature right now. Its what is driving interest. This will become a problem if it continues forever but this idea that Bitcoin or Litecoin need to be immediately put to use for day to day transactions is weak.

You said the volatility was a feature, that it was driving interest, and that it will only be a problem if it continues forever.

Calling it a "feature" is promoting the bubble.

Feature as in that's how people perceive it. If it wasn't going up and down people wouldn't get the FOMO fever, which is what's driving the interest. Observing this behavior isn't endorsing it. It's not hard to understand unless you're just looking to argue as you are.

DPete27 wrote:

What event(s) do people see that will bring crypto crashing to the ground and why?
Even if you're bullish, it's always good to keep sight of the potential pitfalls.

When the pool of "investors" or "holders" is no longer demanding it and there hasn't been a transition or "fix" to bring it into use as a day to day way to exchange value. Given I think we're a ways off, even with Lightning and the like looking interesting, on the latter I'd say there's going to be at least one period off prolonged cool off and the exchange prices drop to reflect it.

Disclaimer: The above is purely speculation and is a single individuals opinion. Please do your own research before you spending your hard earned money... on anything.

Saw the SEC issued this statement today