Quote from: rocks on June 18, 2015, 12:35:01 AM

Quote from: cypherdoc on June 18, 2015, 12:05:47 AM

Oleganza arguing with me that Bitcoin has already achieved gold status and can do so w/o more scaling. c'mon, i don't even argue that. i say it is in the process of doing so:

https://twitter.com/oleganza/status/611298778667220992

The reason the Gold bug's dream is never realized, despite the fact that all of the monetary abuses they predicted came true, is simply because gold is not directly used in day to day transactions. If something is not used in day to day transactions, it is not viewed as money.

CBs have gotten away with their abuses simply because they outlawed real money alternatives to fiat for long enough that the public lost memory of the very existence of alternatives to CB money. Everyone sees the dollar/euro/pound/yen as money because they use them every day, so no one runs away from these mechanisms no matter how they are abused. What would they run to?

The only way to make something else be viewed as money, is if it is used as money in day to day transactions. Using something and knowing others will accept it a basic requirement here. Gold lost that usage which is why it has not come back.

This is what is so frustrating about those blocking the blocksize increase. If people can't use bitcoin directly, the entire project is doomed to a fate worse than gold.

Yes you bring up an important point.
A currency that is not used day to day, has no mindshare which results in low liquidity, which tarnishes it's attractiveness as a store of value. Yet gold has tremendous value despite it's lack of use as a medium of exchange. This has to do with it's scarcity and immunity to control from any actor. Bitcoin tries to emulate the immunity to control property by being decentralised.

It is important to remember that Bitcoin the currency can function off the blockchain in numerous ways. Just as every USD transaction does not occur on the Fed's ledger, all bitcoin txns do not need to be on the blockchain. It is extremely wasteful to do so in a decentralised system where every node has to download/store & verify every txn.
This is already true with many web wallets(Coinbase), exchanges, changetip, etc...
Yet all these services promote the use of Bitcoin the currency and make it useful.

Even at 7 tps, bitcoin already has more actual txns than gold has today.
Im not saying that the anti-20MBers are against any increase in blocksize, i think we all agree it will need to be raised. We are merely concerned with more efficient use of the blockchain where it is used more for settlement while other trustless offchain solutions are developed and offload frequent and small txns off the blockchain.

Raising the blocksize too fast and too soon will disincentivise the creation of these trustless offchain solutions and risk centralising bitcoin txn validation. At a certain point where only a small number of entities can validate txns, bitcoin becomes centralised, regulated, controlled. And without decentralisation, there is no point to bitcoin, we might as well use a standard database and trust someone.