Quote from: Spaceman_Spiff on March 12, 2015, 01:53:29 PM

Quote from: thezerg on March 11, 2015, 04:59:19 PM

I don't sell (much) at the tops. I don't want to be known as the guy who bilked lots of suckers out of $ if Bitcoin fails. I want to be known as a guy who identified BTC's potential as a force for positive social change through economics early and invested accordingly.

I don't see how selling at the tops is immoral. If anything it is praiseworthy, since selling at the top and buying at the bottom will smoothen out BTC's price, resulting in lower volatility and greater usability for commerce, store-of-value etc. .

Selling at the top gives you the ammo needed to buy at the bottom.
By buying at the bottom you are showing your faith in the continued existence of bitcoin, and stop a feedback loop of declining prices leading to less interest and a smaller network.

Yes, like most real world activities the situation is not morally clear cut. And I do sell some at the tops and certainly have bought on the way down. Perhaps you are right, the real evil is the hype cycle that gets the suckers to invest. Ofc without the hype cycle there would not be enough media coverage to pull in everyone else.

Quote from: mortified on March 12, 2015, 09:14:41 AM

Quote from: tvbcof on March 12, 2015, 07:15:07 AM

I cannot see any noteworthy economic disadvantages with sidechains.

I can think of a big one. You cannot use Proof of Work on a sidechain. Therefore you accept security and/or counterparty risk. It will up to the sidechain user to determine how much risk to accept.

... and for those people who think that a sidechain might somehow "take over" from Bitcoin, this additional risk is a big reason why one won't.

Quote from: Zangelbert Bingledack on March 12, 2015, 09:35:49 AM

Quote from: rocks on March 12, 2015, 06:31:07 AM

It isn't the 20MB block size that scares me, it is the automatic doubling every two years until we reach 20GB blocks. This scares the crap out of me because if a problem turns up we need a fork to pause the scaling.

I'm starting to wonder if forks are really that big a deal.

I think that its fascinating. A fork is like quantum mechanics applied to the real world. In other words both possibilities exist simultaneously until an event (everybody selling one fork and buying the other) collapses the probability wave.

Quote from: iCEBREAKER on March 12, 2015, 05:38:58 AM

Quote from: cypherdoc on March 11, 2015, 04:18:52 PM

Bitcoin has all the properties of a super money that gold can only aspire to be. That has to be on your radar.

Bitcoin is literally at a fork. One path leads to super-gold, the other leads to yet another forgettable/replaceable retail token.

Why "forgettable/replaceable retail token"? You could just as easily have said "spendable super gold".

I think that the promise of Bitcoin is, at its core, disintermediation (transfer to anyone, anywhere, nearly instantly). This is where it gains its intrinsic value which then supports the value holders put on it by holding. But if it costs too much for individuals to make transactions, then txns must be posted through intermediaries who as Circle/Coinbase have shown are susceptible to all the problems with today's banking system. "Welcome the new boss same as the old boss".

Sidechains could solve some of that problem which is why it is interesting to consider them alongside the block size; I suppose we could have sidechains for daily spending and Bitcoin could be essentially be your super-gold "savings account". A carefully designed sidechain would still achieve disintermediation. But money flow between sidechains and Bitcoin will not be quick so it would not be and ideal situation, and is still not achieveable with 1MB block sizes.

So I think we should accept Gavin's scalability plan, and guess what? its not set in stone. If it scales faster than the available hardware, we can always change it.

Really, the crux of the argument for me is this:

The worst case with the scalability plan is that individuals can't in practice be full nodes, but can STILL hold BTC in local wallets and spend them.

The worst case without scalability is that individuals must trust intermediaries to hold their BTC because a single txn is so expensive it must be aggregated -- i.e. the same banking system we have today.

(none of the awesome functionality like multi-sig "custodial" accounts can be used (on a per customer basis); they all require a transaction to unlock the funds which would be too expensive to do per customer)