Re: "Failure to Understand Bitcoin Could Cost Investors Billions" (Bitcoin's flaws)
Pedantic and irrelevant part of our discussion don't you agree? There is gold throughout the universe. And we are not close to tapping all the gold on earth. Mankind's technology for tapping gold on earth and throughout the universe will continue to improve. Malthusians always annoy me, because throughout the history of the world they have never been correct.
No I think it's very relevant to this discussion. Even if we get the ability to move gold to earth from other planets at a cost less than the worth of the gold, there's still a finite limit ...
Irrelevant to the trust in gold today. Gold is not trusted because it might be finite someday in the distant future (we will all be dead and we won't be stuck to living on earth, who said we have to store it all on earth). I will quote myself again.
They both have their advantages, gold will always be trusted so long as the amount on this planet always remains finite.
Gold is not trusted because the total is not finite. It is trusted because it takes real effort to mine it, thus the supply can't be debased egregiously in corrupt ways, i.e. it won't go hockey stick tomorrow as Bernanke did. And the mining of gold is thus competitively available to everyone. Humans want a fair game of competitive opportunities not a corrupt one of top-down slavery. Actually many humans want socialism where they get everything equally without competition, but this is a failed economic system (The government and society is $150 trillion in global total debt and I estimated upthread only $241 trillion in global net worth but much of that $91 trillion balance is concentrated among the upper 1% and much illiquid such as real estate.
)A few pools control more than 51% of the hash processing power. A cartel of them could eliminate the requirement to use Proof-of-Work (PoW) and so then we are right back to fiat again
And the moment they attempted to change any such critical aspects of the system would be the moment everyone lost faith in Bitcoin and then those pools would have doomed their entire business to failure.
Nope. The masses will love the centralized coin, because fees will be more stable and lower, transactions will be approved in seconds instead of 10 minutes, anonymity will gone so they can hunt down all the illegal activities to remove tainted coin threats to users, etc.. Remember the majority loves socialism and the government. And thus the value of Bitcoin will be rising, and no one will want to cause a fracturing of that ecosystem and lose that rising value. So the colluding (carteled) pools can make the changes slowly and the frogs will boil in the pot happily agreeing to these changes.
Welcome to the power vacuum of democracy. The leaders win and take all.
But I don't think that will happen because when ever a pool gets near 50% of the hashing power we always see a rebalancing of power by concerned parties.
Your fantasies aside, that in fact is not what is happening in reality today. It is fact that hashing power is becoming concentrated in a few major pools.
It is impossible to have a finite supply of anything without a top-down controller stealing the thing.
Why, explain to me the exact reason why that would be true.
I already did. Because there is nothing finite. The Second Law of Thermodynamics assures us the trend of entropy is always towards maximum. You just try to find one finite bound of anything in the universe. You won't be able to find it. Even if you count the number of a certain species, you can't guarantee with 100% certainty it will remain less than some bound (e.g. changes that you can't predict such finding another planet which can host).
And the mining of gold is thus competitively available to everyone.
How so? I surely cannot afford to buy the mining equipment required to mine gold. I might be able to sift out a few flakes of gold worth a few dollars if I spend hours panning down at a river, but I doubt anyone would be willing to buy a few specks of gold from me.
Actually there are people making a decent living mining gold individually in Alaska now. Ditto here in Mindanao where I am. I was offered to buy gold that is locally refined from the small miners.