wachtwoord

Increasing the blocksize will destroy the unique value propisition of Bitcoin (security, distribution and censorship resistance). Segwit (effectively) increases the blocksize (so I don't like that) buthas some other advantages (it enables 2d level scaling). All the ideas to plain out increase the blocksize are made by people who are either ignorant and aim to destroy bitcoin through social engineering.

@rkabang I agree with you about Bitcoin and Monero being the likely winners for their respective categories. Although there is a chance Bitcoin will get strong privacy (for example through Mimblewimble). I'm not yet sure about your second category and if it ends up proving useful I expect something like RSK to win as its build on Bitcoin and the currency aspects of Ethereum are just beyond terrible.

Well the very characteristics of Bitcoin make it particularly suitable for storing wealth. Erik Voorhees wrote about it in 2012 http://moneyandstate.com/bitcoin-libertarian-introduction-used-care/ (it shares many of gold's characteristics but is doesn't cost money or time to store or transfer) So if we accept that Bitcoin is good money Gresham's law applies: "bad money drives out good. For example, if there are two forms of commodity money in circulation, which are accepted by law as having similar face value, the more valuable commodity will disappear from circulation." (Wikipedia). Which will lead to people storing wealth in Bitcoin (removing them from circulation). It's true that Bitcoin and bitcoin (the token and the network) are two different things, but it's important to note one doesn't work without the other. The bitcoin network is only secure because people are willing to put resources at work to secure it. That's something they would never have done at this scale without monetary compensation. The "currency" aspect bootstrapped the whole network into place. This is why banks and financial institutions that want blockchain but not Bitcoin don't understand anything about this. They often even don't want the mining to be distributed and in effect end up making the world least efficient database with nothing going for it but the blockchain buss word.

Primarily for Bitcoin it's the most secure immutable transaction ledger ever created which is distributed and therefore extremely strong against attack and censorship. It doesn't scale though without sacrificing security and distribution (but lower security solutions will be build on top of it). A primary application of such a ledger is for storing and transfering wealth (and this application was needed to make the network as strong as it is to incentive people) but its useful for anything which requires an extremely strong notion of truth (contracts, unchangable record keeping, trades etc) and is willing to pay for it.

This is the exact reason why the Ethereum bubble is so big. Make your own decision but Bitcoin is the vastly superior investment (still) if you ask me.

To those invested in Ethereum: What do you think of RSK (http://www.rsk.co/)? With RSK, why would you need Ethereum?

I disagree with you on ETH. It is technically infinite, but it increases by a small fixed amount of ETH every year, so the inflation starts out tiny and approaches (but never quite reaches 0%). In fact it may even be deflationary in some years due to coin losses, which nobody disputes is a thing. I've heard some estimates that as much as 15% of bitcoin may be irretrievably lost already. People are not always smart about backing up things, thumb drives are lost, hard drives crash, hardware wallets are lost/damaged, paper wallets are lost/damaged, people die without leaving instructions to their heirs on how to retrieve their cryptocurrencies maybe the heirs don't even know it exists at all. Back in the first few years when bitcoin was almost worthless many people lost a lot of coins and didn't worry too much about it, etc, etc. There will always be some loss, so the tiny, almost zero inflation rate doesn't worry me. These new coins will be used to pay miners every year which is something I see as a problem with bitcoin. Once mining isn't very profitable because of coin creation I think fees are going to rise dramatically. The bitcoin fees are already too high. I did some reading on ZCash and I now think you are correct. I was reading too much of the ZCash official line on how the trusted setup went and cheerleading by supporters on how secure the encryption is. I only had a tiny amount, but I just shapeshifted it back into BTC as I am no longer comfortable with it. Thank You for bringing this to my attention. There is a lot of back and forth and lies, and tribalism, on the message boards about this, and it is hard to know what to believe, but this piece written by one of the 6 people involved in the trusted setup is what really changed my mind. I just don't see ZCash as one of the eventual winners. My Role In The 2016 Zcash Trusted Setup Ceremony No worries, it's hard to follow. When I first read about zero-knowledge proof in the context of Bitcoin I was really enthusiastic but the way they implemented it is just terrible. Even implemented well I think Monero is preferable cause ring-signatures are proven technology while zero-knwoledge proofs are cutting (bleeding?) edge. I was even (mildly) enthusiastic about the original idea behind Ripple (a trust network where actors provided lines of credit to each other, which would allow people to provide p2p loans to each other without moving funds and without strong required direct trust between loaner and debtor) but it was completely corrupted. Ethereum: Are you talking Ethereum or Bitcoin regarding inflation? Bitcoin follows a completely defined structure for releasing its coins that has never been deviated from. Ethereum says something along the lines of: Vitalek will decide in the future. Vitalek is also the biggest liability of Ethereum as he is a single point of failure. That's why it's so important that Satoshi Nakamoto is anonymous in Bitcoin: there is no-one to corrupt and there is no (less) "follow the Messiah" mentality. Why was ETH forked and did ETH win instead of ETC? Because Vitalek said so. He will be subverted by powerful groups (and held responsible if illegal activities are supported by Ethereum). All of this comes on top of the fact that Ethereum was pre-mined and will not be workable long term due to the Truing completeness. BTW: Fees in Bitcoin are not too high but a few orders of magnitude too low. Bitcoin is the most secure payment network on the planet and because of its distribution resistant to censorship and other limitations. I expect fees in the future to rise top an equivalent of $100-$1000 at least and it will be worth that. Those fees is what will pay for the security offered by the most secure transaction network the world has ever seen. The only one that (without strong social engineering that is being attempted right now) cannot be defeated by any state, party or nation.

What are your thoughts on Ripple and XRP? Ripple truly is the largest scam around. It's a company releasing a currency which the can inflate infinitely and assign to themselves. On top of that it's not even a cryptocurrency, there is no mining either through POW or POS.

At the current valuation I would own most scamcoins over ETH, it's fully centralized, has an infinite supply and trades at half the valuation of Bitcoin? On top of that it's Turing complete so it will be exploited until it dies. I would be really surprised if Ethereum exists in 10 years, while I would be equally surprised if Bitcoin did not. Edit: Why would you buy ZEC? Did you read what it is? They can't prove they didnt keep the initialization seed and if the did can create an infinite supply without it being visible. On top of this they assign themselves 20% (iirc) from the block reward of every mined block.

Fixating on metrics is at least an investment thesis. The worst is fixating on your purchase price, which is irrelevant for anybody but yourself. You & LC are super right here! I have a really hard time paying more than my last execution price for an issue. Kind of crazy, "I'm pretty confident that it'll be worth a lot more in a decade but I don't want to pay a premium above the benchmark I've established in my head." Or even worse is that you don't buy it at all, because after you have convinced yourself that you want to own it, you then want to wait until it is back down to the price it was when you first added it to your watchlist. You just can't bring yourself to pay that premium, as if the universe owes you the opportunity to buy it where it was a few months ago when you first started looking at it. Ughh. The human brain sucks sometimes. These are the default modes of thinking unless you consciously override them which takes some effort. Yes that one really sucks. The only question should be whether it's objectively cheap (enough). This is why averaging down is so much easier. I also always feel hesitant adding to positions I initiated years ago which have gone up.

A blockchain has no value without the monetary aspect because there is no incentive to secure it without it. The tokens on a blockchain need to have value (so yes bitcoin is by far the most interesting one, by several orders of magnitude).

I know they joined late but they got the spoils anyway (with less effort). Who controlled western Europe after WW2 for instance? Marhall plan anyone? Bombed down Europe was an awesome export destination for many decades, there certainly wasn't a trade deficit.

They had a free market up until the early 1900s and won many wars (among which the two world wars) in the last century.

The right question isn't whether it can be improved but rather whether it's good enough :)

I'm not sure if it is even comparable like this. If there is a huge advancement in social media, Facebook can simply change their core code to put that feature into it. Other smaller social networks did stuff like videos, live streaming, stories, etc first and Facebook adopted the ones that worked well. Facebook at launch was a wall that people can write on. Now it is very different. The crypto-currencies are very limited in their ability to change like that. What if someone figures out something better than Bitcoin's block chain? It's almost certain to happen over time. When someone invents a vastly superior crypto-currency, is everybody going to stick with the old one? Over time sure something better might be found. Thus far it took all of human civilization to come up with a solution for the Byzantine generals problems allowing for the trust-less transactions enabled in Bitcoin.

I currently have a lot of small companies for which reading the filings isn't so much work and easily doable. For my larger companies I take a more directed approach.

For what it's worth I'm an atheist (religion was mentioned). I think this is fully congruent with libertarianism because both imply the power of the individual over society as a whole and both agree that the world isn't and cannot be 'fair' and any attempt to do so will make the situation worse (example: socialism and charity towards underdeveloped nations). I have grown up in a very socialistic country with a population of entitled and weak people who cannot think beyond the borders of the society they grew up in despite to have their primary needs met and having neigh ubiquitous access to information due to the internet (they don't use it to educate themselves). This has painted my opinions and possibly made me more harsh and cynic than I otherwise would have been. I'm a happy cynic though :)

It's been my experience that in the general case the vast majority of the population is wrong.

Tezos isn't even clear about the number of tokens they are giving out which makes it impossible to calculate a market cap. Completely uninvestible.

To expand on what's been instead of repeat I like to point out a reason why these dialogues rarely go anywhere. For this I'll take a small example from RichardGibbon's post (I hope you take no offense as I'm mostly reacting to your post anyway). The things is, you take very strong statements I don't agree with and declare them to be true a priori. Examples are calling not stopping a child rape abhorrent and taxation is theft, government exertion of force is almost always unethical "ridiculous in the real world". Not only are these statements false according to me, also the tone is condescending, which is not exactly a catalyst for a fruitful discussion. Following that you go into a long discussion based on those statements which I can't respond to because I believe the the fundament of your discussion to be flawed (and disrespectful).

The only reason not curing your kid when it's sick is the following: taking care of the kid is a voluntary responsibility you took upon yourself (explicitly or implicitly). If you don't have such a voluntarily taken responsibility ( e.g. someone took your sperm and impregnated themselves against your will) you have zero responsibility to lift a finger to save the child.

Because to a non-libertarian, anything they consider good is a right and must be mandated by force if necessary and anything they consider bad is pure evil and must be outlawed by force if necessary. There is no grey area between must-do and must-not-do. "I'd likely do it, but I wouldn't force someone else to." is an incomprehensible position. To be completely honest, I consider forcing someone to do 'good' (or punishing him for not doing 'good') evil.

@RichardGibbons railing? :o please go and re-read my very respectfully formulated post. I even say I would likelý do the nice thing. Not doing so is just not evil to me. It's also not nice. How is this hard to understand?

Thought experiment: There's a button in front of you. If you push it, everybody in the world will stop suffering and be forever happy (kidnapped kids held as sex slaves will be freed, cancer patients will be cured, etc), each according to their very own definition of happiness. There's no catch, no downside, nothing bad happens to you if you don't push the button. You're aware of those rules, of everything that's going on, so there's no confusion. I think that if you don't push it, that's an evil act, IMO. I think it's been established that your thought experiment is so far detached from reality that is is not suitable to reflect on morality in the real world. It's actually the very reason why people's morals are often internally inconsistent: if you grant someone what they wish you must deny someone else that very something. Many people think it's 'good' to feed the poor, yet it implies taking resources away from people (or people that granted them those resources) that actually contributed to the world. This is why I personally consider a system people refer to as 'social' extremely unfair (even more unfair than the world in it's state without socialism) and anti-social. For the sake of argument I'll answer the question anyway: No, to me not pressing the button is not evil (it's neutral by definition) but if what you write would be possible I would personally likely press it.

"The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing". - Edmund Burke No judgement though, to each his own. I'm honestly not even sure what I would do until I am actually in those circumstances. I'd want more details to estimate life expectancy ^^ The quote is correct. But doing nothing as a "good" men is not evil in itself (of course according to me).