Bitcoin has failed - Article: The Resolution of the Bitcoin experiment

This is correct, and Mike Hearn makes this point many times in his article. Hearn’s critique is not that it can’t scale, but that various human factors have emerged in a way that is blocking it from doing so.

Unless those human factors change, things do indeed look pretty dire - how can bitcoin grow from here unless they do? He doesn’t rule that out, he says he’s had enough, considers it has failed, but hopes new entrants will find a way through these problems.

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What about the lightning network? I know that it also needs some fork, but I wonder how difficult it would be to convince people to do that fork. (If it is part of the official bitcoin core, I believe miners would install it…) And in the short term it would work decently even with small blocks (not in the long term, though).

I couldn’t disagree more. Effectively what we have is a situation in which hard forks are competing for the votes of miners. I believe that both choice and competition are a good thing in both software upgrades and economics in that they lead to better and more efficient systems, because decisions are decentralised. This process could still fail and so could bitcoin, but if it does the impact will probably be devastating for other crytocurrencies and the MaidSafe project. I sincerely hope that doesn’t happen.

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Blockchain technology is about driving human behaviour using game theory, it’s pretty useless on it’s own. It seems like an exception has occured in that game theory if it’s indeed true that dominant Chinese miners don’t want the blockchain to scale up to safeguard their own (short term) profits.

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It’s nothing to do with the theory, but the sad state of the world economy and freedoms in which thanks to the Fed and criminals from the US government a command economy such as China’s can be financed enough to develop an insane credit bubble and malinvestment in which these Bitcoin miners thrive.

On the other hand Western politicians systematically impoverish people and exterminate industry though various nationwide renewable energy scams.

End result: most miners are in China.

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We keep talking about Bitcoin and it’s blockchain. But where are the other projects which support 200 Ts/sec? Bitshares told us a great story, but they can’t even deliver 1% of what’s theoretically is possible. Great we have all these projects, but it’s time to deliver scalability.

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Great news for bitcoin. Shake the trees. Hearn is a smart guy, but he’s not the smartest guy.

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You make some interesting points. Can you please expand on how you feel that alternative projects like MaidSafe would be devastatingly impacted. I tend to think that many in the cryptocurrency community would be looking for alternatives to invest in if Bitcoin fails. Those who are not already currently invested in cryptocurrencies are irrelevant at this early stage anyway imo. Once a project like Maidsafe proves itself, the bystanders will jump on the bandwagon.

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Bitcoin is not going to disappear. Public image of cryptos will be tarnished but if you believe in the tech then you welcome the price being driven down yet again by misperceptions of the tech. I stopped believing in bitcoin when I understood that the control of the hashing power was in a few hands and is not likely to change. That doesn’t mean those hands are inherently evil, but it does mean that those hands can be coerced by a motivated agency or state. Maidsafe is a completely different beast with no connection to blockchain tech outside of its presale token. So why would a failure of BTC have a great effect on Maidsafe or Bittorrent for that matter?

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This is just another good example or reason on why not never build anything on the well-behaving of peers or other nodes or actually people out there. If this whole story has any truth, then it only teaches you that you absolutely must create your software in a way that it can deal with misbehaving entities out there. You can never control the masses out there, so you can only compute with the local software that runs on your premises and try to make sure your paradigms and your design and fundamental idea deals with misbehaviour of the rest of the pack. They now cry that others destroy bitcoin, or that some few control the rule-set these days or have the majority and whatnot. This is also exactly what I meant when I wrote if you are in for money, then you will receive nothing but money (and problems). Others will try to game you, game the system, create advantages out of flaws and ill design, out of corner cases and much more. Its people out there and as long as humans have their mind-set these symptoms will show everywhere. If software relied on trust that others will behave just sanely or the same way that you initially had thought, then you simply very wrong. This is probably the hardest part in self governing and dependent and autonomous systems.

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Your spot on. Devs and miners need to find a happy medium from which they can progress, bitcoin will never fail imo. I think hearn was wrong to ever suggest that. But I cannot ignore his valid points. The conflict of interest will hopefully be resolved in time, However, the miners greed is overpowering the core devs logic atm. Whats the point of core devs working on proposals when 2 or 3 chinese guys can and will always deny it, due to short term risk. By doing so the miners are creating long term risk. What were going to see is a lot less technical growth because the pool operators are not interested at all in any hard forks proposals. Im not at all suprised hearn got sick it and sold out for R3cev.

I thought he left? Who kicked him out? He was naintaining bitcoin j library so he wasn’t exactly a crucial part of the team.

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Perhaps, and that would certainly be the optimistic scenario. It’s still early days, but in terms of market cap bitcoin has been the only cryptocurrency (so far) to scale to what I consider to be a significant size. To gain some acceptance among the general public. I can’t remember the exact number, but it’s bigger than something like the next 15 cryptocurrencies combined. Growing the market cap is no mean feat. It requires a lot of people to trust and accept that there is some sustainable value to the currency they buy/obtain/hold. So what happens if the most successful cryptocurrency loses that status, perhaps because people believe there is a better alternative? Well, where does that process end? What’s stopping the currency that replaces bitcoin from being replaced by something better when it comes along? Why then would anyone accept the alternative currency if there’s substantial doubt about the sustainability of its value?

I love the Maidsafe project and the people associated with it seem genuinely smart, honest, hard-working and well-intentioned. I really hope it works, especially because they deserve to see it succeed and it would be a huge benefit of course to the rest of us. For this to happen I feel safe coin will have to be widely accepted and to do so it will have to have something more than just a token value. I think this will be much more challenging if bitcoin fails.

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LN is a fud vaporware.

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Seems a bit OTT. He probably needs to step back a bit for perspective.

When the block size issue becomes critical, XT is there to step in. Sure, it may be nicer to not wait for it to get critical first, but markets are like that.

Just because people may be able to control the network, it doesn’t mean they can force payments to be made to them. Moreover, any foolishness will kill the value of their coins and mining hardware.

I’ve seen other technology improving on Bitcoin, but I don’t see a need to panic.

A fair number of people here think that Maidsafe economics don’t have to matter to the extent they do on Bitcoin because unlike Bitcoin here enthusiasts will somehow make up for it. And they even made a pro-argument out of the idea that farming may not be profitable for pro-farmers.

What a difficult choice. Failed to create a coup, now he’s largely discredited, and his next step is “where the money is”. R3cev is 100 times more likely to fail than Bitcoin, but at least they pay salaries.

Isn’t that obvious? What is the only currency you can get for MAID today? And likely for SAFE tomorrow.

I understood there would be an impact but a “devastating” one seems to me a little extreme.

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If the price of BTC and MAID dropped 60% from here, it’d be devastating for many SAFErs.
Of course everyone has their own definition. I think it would be devastating.

Valid point if your focus is on price vs the technology.

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Technology here still comes from paid developers. There is no sustainable dev and there can’t be unless there’s money spent on bootstrapping the ecosystem

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