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Old December 29th, 2018 #28
Alex Linder
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Join Date: Nov 2003
Posts: 45,756
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[against bitcoin]

You guys should understand better what crypto is. There are several false "facts" running in circles. First of all, you can not compare crypto market to housing market or stock market, not even the dot.com bubble. Those were real things, there are real houses made from brick and mortar (or wood), there companies are real, with real assets. In this crypto space you are gambling your money on a piece of software full of bugs, ran by 22 year old programmers that graduated 2 years ago. 99% of the altcoin "companies" have less than 10 people, all programmers and they do nothing but trying to keep the shit running and alive. They are fixing bugs 0-24, nothing more. There is no real value here, only speculation that you don`t jump the bandwagon last.

Here are some real facts, if you don`t believe me go check it with another programmer:

- None of the crypto coins have limited numbers. Give 10 mins to one of the software team and they double or ten-fold it at wish. This is a piece of code, you can change it any time, you do with it anything you want. This is not gold, or let`s say number of houses in a city, you can not double that...

- Nothing is private, actually it is the very opposite. the information is decentralized! This means everybody can see everything. If you get your salary in bitcoin, and you come into my shop to buy icecream and you pay with your crypro wallet, I will know your address in an instant, I will know your salary and all past payments in an instant!

- The technology is so infant and full of severe bugs. Even without the bugs the technology has so many flaws that no one knows how to come over even 10 years after the original white paper of bitcoin. They don`t really admit it, but if you talk to programmers they can explain it to you. Let me just give you few starting points:

1. There is a so called "distributed ledger" mostly you never heard, but that is an actual file on the computer that contains every transaction since the beginning of bitcoin. That file used to be 10Megabyte, later 10Gigabyte, last year it was 150 Gigabyte, in 2019 most likely it will overpass 300Gb. And consider that 99% of the people don`t really use bitcoin for daily transactions, they do a transaction here and there every month, not 10 per day.

If you join the bitcoin network as a so called full-node, you have to have this file on your computer! Yes, you can just use bitcoin and not join as a full-node, but what if less and less people wants to join as full-node? This takes us to the next point.

2. Fee-s are determined based on the importance of full-nodes. In the beginning everybody was able to join as full-node and do some mining. Full-nodes verify the legitimity of your transactions. The less full-nodes the more they charge you. (because they are rare) Already, if you want to transact $30 the fee will be somewhere between $5-$50 depending on how loaded the full-nodes are.

3. There was a bug discovered in October on the Bitcoin network that if discovered by wrong people could have created infinite number of bitcoins in an irreversible way. We were lucky that the core team found the bug. This is 10 years after the software is on the market.

4. Speed. It is a total lie that it`s fast. It`s actually really slow. When you do any transaction fiat or crypto you need two things, #1 check available funds #2 do the actual transaction.

At the bitcoin network this two happens at the same step. When you send bitcoin to me, the network verifies it`s validity by putting it into the ledger and the whole network comes into the consensus that the new ledger is good. To get feedback from the network takes at least 20 minutes, but in non-extreme cases at least few hours. If you are really unlucky, when the network is loaded with lot`s of transactions it takes days, sometimes weeks! yes, weeks.

With VISA for example, when you pay with card, the firs step, check the available funds will happen in 3 sec, always...and they transfer the actual money later (takes 1-2 days....always)

If I`m selling TVs and you come to my shop and pay with bitcoin, I`m not gonna let you go with the TV until the transaction is approved. With bitcoin this can take 20mins - 2 weeks with VISA this is 3 sec.

5. I know, Lightning network supposed to solve this. Let me not go into this, this is the most buggy part of the whole. I wrote too much already. The lightning software is so full of bugs that it freezes on you sometimes and you have to do it again over and over until it passes.

Second huge problem with it, that have you ever read how to use the lightning network? It`s a 10 step process, even me, a programmer had to read twice to grasp the steps.

Just to sum it up:

If 10 times more people would start using bitcoin, and everybody would really use it as normal daily use, the number of transactions would be hundreds fold. You can see from the network statistic links that I attached that #1 the ledger size would go into the several Terrabyte size / year. #2 fees would skyrocket
#3 transaction times would go into the weeks area.

Good luck thinking this piece of software will be used worldwide.