Seems pretty devastating.
Originally shared by Roberto Bayardo
If Mike Hearn is calling Bitcoin a failure, it’s a failure. Maybe there are a few sour grapes there, but his conclusions are accurate. The idea that Bitcoin was decentralized was never true (as I’ve stated multiple times in the past). It’s always been at the mercy of those authorized to update the core software. And unfortunately those in charge are complete lunatics.
What was meant to be a new, decentralised form of money that lacked “systemically important institutions” and “too big to fail” has become something even worse: a system completely controlled by just a handful of people. Worse still, the network is on the brink of technical collapse. The mechanisms that should have prevented this outcome have broken down, and as a result there’s no longer much reason to think Bitcoin can actually be better than the existing financial system.
Never Stop Posting 
In six months the mining reward drops to 12.5 BTC. If the value of bitcoin falls while the reward for mining also falls then there’s a certain point at which the big miners will feel the pinch, as power and hardware costs make it less economic.
The blockchain size is still a point of contention but the core developers have some leverage getting users to adopt a bigger size. Ultimately it benefits no-one if the whole thing fails due to greed of a few. There are improving alt-coins to choose from if people see bitcoin’s demise. As an ongoing proof of concept bitcoin should still be viewed as a huge success, even though it’s a waste of electricity in it’s current state.
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Andrew Kidoo the “waste of electricity” is not just it’s current state, it is a fundamental part of the algorithm in that it guarantees cheating the algorithm is too expensive to ever be profitable. If you get rid of that expense, cheating becomes more likely and the currency becomes worthless due to loss of trust. Bitcoin is necessarily a waste of electricity.
There are probably ways to solve the block chain size problem, and the problem of loosing bitcoins due to loosing wallets.
I believe one proposal was to essentially flatten the old block chain, and then spin off an entirely new block chain (a new currency) that was initialized with the values of the flattened old block chain. It works sort of like splitting the value of the stock. So the old stocks become worthless, but investors receive a number of new stocks equivalent in value to the old stocks. This would lead to inflation, but at a reasonably low rate.
The biggest problem, alluded to in this article, was that the software was too complicated and only a few technocratic elites understood it well enough to control it. They paid lip service to it’s open source nature; hypothetically anyone could implement their own Bitcoin software as long as it obeyed the protocol, and the protocol was ostensibly democratic, but in actual fact the protocol was decided by the elite technocrats, and the maintainers of the reference implementation had a total monopoly on the currency.
I don’t recall if there was ever a DDoS committed against the Bitcoin network, but that is also a problem that I don’t think was ever addressed.
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Ramin Honary Yep, i mean in it’s current state “as bitcoin” rather than any of the alternatives suggested in other white papers. It’s not hard to envision a p2p web hosting protocol (ex. IPFS) that could use proof-of-storage with proof-of-content-delivery-and-satisfaction on an inverse ratio which supports fast transactions (of web data) with some longevity for limited archiving. Okay, it still uses electricity, but in turn supports a distributed internet.
The current problems with bitcoin (centralized control) are exactly mirrored on social networks, news sites, e-shops, etc. Even the article brings up bitcoin.org‘s centralized censorship. As we move to an ‘uncensorable’ p2p web then distributed hosting will likely develop a functional rewards system based on the lessons learned from bitcoin.
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Meanwhile…
http://blog.cryptsy.com/
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Fiat money lookin’ good.
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mathew murphy Ouch. Pick-pocketed by a backdoor in an IRC client. This doesn’t mean Bitcoin isn’t secure, it just means that the computers we use to make Bitcoin exist aren’t secure. Nothing is actually insecure about Bitcoin itself (sarcasm).
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Yeah, technically secure is best kind of secure.
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All money is digital, being debased, bailouts, corruption, theft, you name it. The interesting part here is that the victim can see the money hasn’t been spent, then initiated their own reward including the offer of immunity. I honestly wouldn’t put it past certain financial institutions to sub-sub-sub-contract hackers to find some easy targets to destroy the reputation of bitcoin. Call me cynical. Why hasn’t the money been spent?
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