Bitcoins/Litecoins/Virtual Currencies

Tmac · Aug 13, 2021

Flobee said:
Huh? a Bitcoin can be subdivided into 100,000,000 satoshis and sent instantly to anyplace in the world essentially for free. How is that not much better than gold? Lightning network solves small payments, feel free to look into it. Check out Strike app on Google Play or Apple store for a simple example. Lightning also allows for instant payments for paying for goods. Why do you think El Salvador made it legal tender? They're actually using it for daily transactions... so is Nigeria.

Nigerians Moved Nearly $40 Million In P2P Bitcoin Trading In 30 Days

Despite the ban in early 2021, Nigerians are trading millions of dollars worth of bitcoin in peer-to-peer markets every month.

bitcoinmagazine.com

DOGE has none of the qualities of Bitcoin save that it uses proof of work and a blockchain. I've gone over this a lot in this thread so I'm not going to do so again but I would encourage you to dig a bit deeper into Bitcoin. It does everything you say it doesn't and your opinion is not uncommon at all. Revolution in money is happening right under our noses.

Do you not know the difference between someone being able to send one transaction for anywhere in the world and everyone in the world sending transactions at the same time? BTC cannot operate at this scale. If it got mass adoption today it would take weeks for a single transaction to go through and the cost would be inhibiting.

Lightening isn't even real yet and has challenges. To be used as a transactional asset you have to add BTC to a wallet, do your transactions, and then at some point down the line you "close your transactions" and they all get validated at a later date. That's wildly more ineffecient than our current system that reconciles millions of transactions a second.

BTC is still more transferable than gold and more easily divisible than gold, so it's a better gold. It is not a better daily spender than what we have today by leaps, bounds, and miles upon miles.

DOGE has all of the same qualities of BTC minus the burden of the same blockchain verification strategy, while still being proof of work. DOGE transactions can already happen in the multitudes, instantly, at a fraction of the cost of traditional wires. I don't have to use a ridiculous example like, "Anyone can send a single DOGE to anyone else in the world for a fraction of the price." Who gives a fuck? Noone cares about single transactions?

BTC is gold. BTC has not figured out millions of simultaneous transactions. Lightening's solution is cumbersome.

Flobee · Aug 13, 2021

Tmac said:
Do you not know the difference between someone being able to send one transaction for anywhere in the world and everyone in the world sending transactions at the same time? BTC cannot operate at this scale. If it got mass adoption today it would take weeks for a single transaction to go through and the cost would be inhibiting.

You should actually use Lightning. I run a node, it works right now. You're incorrect sir. You're using outdated information. Download Strike and try it. Lightning still has a ways to go before its ready to take on the entire monetary system true, but if you wanted to buy a coffee? Fuck yea it can handle that today and already is. See the Nigeria link I posted, that's all layer 2 traffic.

Now do you want to be spending your Bitcoin right now? Probably not if you have a strong currency like the USD. I'm sorry if you don't understand this, but I'm quite confident that you will soon.

Intrinsic · Aug 13, 2021

ShakyJake said:
Alright, in y'alls professional opinion what are the top cryptos to accumulate?

I don't remember your history in this thread so this may not be hepful, but if you aren't going down the path of shitcoins and are looking for something more interactive you could look at liquidity pools. That's been my afk coin farming method the past two months or so due to being so busy. It is a step or two up from "just buy ETH on Coinbase." I figure if I'm going to be holding shit might as well put it to some use.

Tmac · Aug 13, 2021

Flobee said:
You should actually use Lightning. I run a node, it works right now. You're incorrect sir. You're using outdated information. Download Strike and try it. Lightning still has a ways to go before its ready to take on the entire monetary system true, but if you wanted to buy a coffee? Fuck yea it can handle that today and already is. See the Nigeria link I posted, that's all layer 2 traffic.

Now do you want to be spending your Bitcoin right now? Probably not if you have a strong currency like the USD. I'm sorry if you don't understand this, but I'm quite confident that you will soon.

I'll check out the article.

Tmac · Aug 14, 2021

So, they did $40m in a month. $40m in a month is 0.13% of what BTC would need to be able to handle at scale. Even if they did $40m in a day it would be still be 3% of the required capacity, which is currently $1.01b per day if you use credit card transactions as the standard (which I do).

So, I guess your analogy of one person making one transaction per day on BTC is pretty accurate, lol.

And it's all P2P which is a different thing entirely than being able to interact with POS systems and reconciliation. IDK man, I read the article, and it didn't discount anything I said. I thought there was going to be some sort of tech angle. There wasn't.

The rise in trading after the ban does bode well for crypto in general though. Maybe P2P is the new POS?

Torrid · Aug 14, 2021

No layer 1 is going to handle all the world's transactions. That's fantastical nonsense for a distributed public ledger. ETH and Radix and such are going with shards but what that does is trade security for more TX capacity, and that capacity is still going to be too limited. Sidechains have the same problem. Doge and litecoin and god knows how many shitcoin forks can increase the block size and proclaim themselves better than bitcoin, but they all sacrifice security for this and don't gain much in the way of TX capacity. Dodge is 'more usable' right now BECAUSE nobody is using it and they would run into the same problems if people started using it. And nobody is going to use it because it has no developers and poor security. What it has is an eccentric billionaire who doesn't understand blockchain very well hyping it up. (I remind you that Elon personally has far more BTC than dodge)

Lightning can scale infinitely and the transactions are instant and near-free. That is WAY better than any layer 1 solution could hope to achieve. The only hassle is that you have to have multiple wallets-- which you should have anyway if you have many thousands of USD worth of BTC and you also buy lots of shit with it-- or a wallet that has both a mainchain balance and a lightning balance in it; then you may have to keep track of when the mempool is empty to open/close channels if fees are a concern. I just did an on-chain BTC transaction for pennies while the mempool was empty a month ago.

Exponential curves are flat until they are vertical. Adoption rate is exponential, not linear. The amount of time between flat and vertical is quite short. Lightning adoption is about to explode.

edit: BTC mempool has been empty the entire last five weeks

Intrinsic · Aug 14, 2021

Are comparisons to credit card transactions applicable? Maybe I’m thinking about this wholly incorrectly but with a CC you’re really just transferring debt. Being able to transfer $1b in actual money… well debt is basically money since that’s all people use, anyways. And it is digital. But still, there’s probably a point I’m trying to ask but it’s 6am so will revisit later.

Caliane · Aug 14, 2021

Intrinsic said:
Are comparisons to credit card transactions applicable? Maybe I’m thinking about this wholly incorrectly but with a CC you’re really just transferring debt. Being able to transfer $1b in actual money… well debt is basically money since that’s all people use, anyways. And it is digital. But still, there’s probably a point I’m trying to ask but it’s 6am so will revisit later.

yes. mostly. Is even worse as noted, credit card transitions don't represent ALL transactions. just credit. theres still cash, check, bank transactions, etc.. But if a Crypto can't even handle the load of credit card transactions, it sure can't do all that either.

I think thats one area where multiple coins will come into play. BTC probably won't ever be used to buy groceries, gas, etc. you'll have BTC in cold storage, while using NANO or something like it, day to day.

I got $25 of nano on my phone, everything else is in staking, or storage.

Flobee · Aug 14, 2021

Intrinsic said:
Are comparisons to credit card transactions applicable? Maybe I’m thinking about this wholly incorrectly but with a CC you’re really just transferring debt. Being able to transfer $1b in actual money… well debt is basically money since that’s all people use, anyways. And it is digital. But still, there’s probably a point I’m trying to ask but it’s 6am so will revisit later.

Legacy system transactions require settlement between institutions over a network like SWIFT. Finalizing takes 3-5+ days. Bitcoin finalizes transactions with each block (~10 minutes) and each additional block afterwards further secures that transaction.

Regarding transactions I don't think people think broadly enough about layers 2+. Lightning is the most promising due to it truly being a decentralized routing network, but even something like Cashapp is a layer 2 network for Bitcoin. If on-chain transaction are used for settlement between layer 2 networks it will scale just fine even now. Bitcoin layer 1 is already 10x better that the SWIFT network with significantly faster finalization of transactions (~10 minutes for block to finalize, maybe you wait for a few more to lock it in for a big trade).

Using something like Cashapp is obviously a big security sacrifice (you're trusting Cashapp) but it will scale today with no further tech improvements. It also allows the world to get off the current inefficient payment rails owned by, fully controlled by, and fully transparent to the US. This includes US ability to debase. We may not care about that... but a lot of the world does.

Bitcoin can already do this and its only going to improve in privacy, security and user experience. A large portion of use cases for alts comes from a lack of understand of what Bitcoin is and what it can and will do.

The lightning network is driving the current burst of mainstream adoption in bitcoin — here's how it's speeding up transaction times and cutting fees

Since early 2018, the lightning network — a layer on top of the bitcoin network — has been speeding up transactions.

markets.businessinsider.com

CoinShares compared use of the network to how credit-card providers Visa or Mastercard interact with the financial system overseen by the US Federal Reserve.

"Most transactions in the dollar economy never touch the systems of the Fed. They are processed by payment aggregators, who in turn use intermittent commercial banks, who then use the Fed for final settlement," CoinShares said. "Lightning does the same thing for bitcoin transactions, only using the bitcoin blockchain for final settlement."

Lightning enables users to open payment channels between two or multiple parties. Users on the lightning network can set up nodes - effectively pieces of software that send payments via the quickest routes between parties. A node operator will pick up a small fee for each transaction.

"At the time of writing, the base fee per transaction is 1 satoshi (0.00000001 btc), equivalent to 0.04 cents," CoinShares said.

...

And it looks like it might be working. Over 2020, the network's capacity rose by 22%, and active nodes, by 41%. By July this year, capacity had increased by another 90%, and active nodes, by another 52%, according to the CoinShares report.

Intrinsic · Aug 14, 2021

Flobee said:
Legacy system transactions require settlement between institutions over a network like SWIFT. Finalizing takes 3-5+ days. Bitcoin finalizes transactions with each block (~10 minutes) and each additional block afterwards further secures that transaction.

Regarding transactions I don't think people think broadly enough about layers 2+. Lightning is the most promising due to it truly being a decentralized routing network, but even something like Cashapp is a layer 2 network for Bitcoin. If on-chain transaction are used for settlement between layer 2 networks it will scale just fine even now. Bitcoin layer 1 is already 10x better that the SWIFT network with significantly faster finalization of transactions (~10 minutes for block to finalize, maybe you wait for a few more to lock it in for a big trade).

Using something like Cashapp is obviously a big security sacrifice (you're trusting Cashapp) but it will scale today with no further tech improvements. It also allows the world to get off the current inefficient payment rails owned by, fully controlled by, and fully transparent to the US. This includes US ability to debase. We may not care about that... but a lot of the world does.

Bitcoin can already do this and its only going to improve in privacy, security and user experience. A large portion of use cases for alts comes from a lack of understand of what Bitcoin is and what it can and will do.

The lightning network is driving the current burst of mainstream adoption in bitcoin — here's how it's speeding up transaction times and cutting fees

Since early 2018, the lightning network — a layer on top of the bitcoin network — has been speeding up transactions.

markets.businessinsider.com

I think your first paragraph adds one bit of context and information to what I was putting together in my head. Finalizing that transaction via SWIFT still occurs. Just a continuous process of trying to build analogs before deconstructing them to figure out the new stuff.

Flobee · Aug 14, 2021

Intrinsic said:
I think your first paragraph adds one bit of context and information to what I was putting together in my head. Finalizing that transaction via SWIFT still occurs. Just a continuous process of trying to build analogs before deconstructing them to figure out the new stuff.

One other piece thats related. A Bitcoin standard severely de-emphasizes debt in the system. Quick finalization combined with a non-debt based money creation system (All USD today is created as debt) completely changes financial incentives. Its a deep rabbit-hole but suffice to say it is far superior to a debt based system.

Haus · Aug 14, 2021

Intrinsic said:
Are comparisons to credit card transactions applicable? Maybe I’m thinking about this wholly incorrectly but with a CC you’re really just transferring debt. Being able to transfer $1b in actual money… well debt is basically money since that’s all people use, anyways. And it is digital. But still, there’s probably a point I’m trying to ask but it’s 6am so will revisit later.

It's applicable. The reason is that when people say "You need to be able to process $1.0B a day/hour/whatever in transactions" in comparison to CC networks remember that those CC networks are ALSO the Debit card networks. So essentially it's just saying the "overall economic flow requires $X in daily/hourly/whatever transaction capability". And that has to be in small transactions, as that's how the majority of the world operates.

I think even with Optimism and ETH 2.0 ETH will still have issues with raw transactional speed. This is why I think things such as $MATIC will still have a place in the future. ETH will be like your central banks, MATIC would be like Visa, MC, etc and a transactional entity that then verifies against the banks (ETH). This parallels out existing structure which evolved out of the exact same needs. Banks couldn't handle verifying the massive number of transactions needed. At one point in time people (my grandparents were examples of this) would either write one check a week, or hold $XXX out of their paycheck deposit to cover all the weekly expenses. This means banks had very few transactions per week on a checking account.

When Debit cards became a thing then people started moving away from carrying large amounts of cash, and the number of transactions per week per account skyrocketed. The banks handle this by offloading that work to card processors, and then just squaring up with them electronically on the back end.

Same thing is going on in Crypto right now, with some slight variances. The million/billion/trillion dollar question is going to be which player (or small number of players) will become the Visa/MC/Amex/Discover of crypto transactional processing, and if those players will be sufficiently decentralized enough as to prevent it from becoming a chokepoint of control over people financial freedoms.

Of course, I could also just be a crazy old dude yelling on the internet...

James · Aug 14, 2021

Haus said:
I think even with Optimism and ETH 2.0 ETH will still have issues with raw transactional speed. This is why I think things such as $MATIC will still have a place in the future.

Looking at it wrong here, imo. From the point of view of developers and users, rollups are infinitely better technology to sidechains. Unless the sidechain has an extremely specific purpose, there's really no reason for a developer to choose a general purpose sidechain over a rollup. And the security, composability, and ease of use of rollups make it clearly superior to bridging your assets to a far less secure environment with zero composability for a user.

That said, Cuban is now involved in Polygon, so maybe it does develop a specific purpose -- he's seemed fairly app driven from everything I've read from him.

James · Aug 14, 2021

Deadbears NFT almost halfway through minting, released this past Friday. First $FLOKI based NFT I'm aware of, the money shot:

Once the entire Deadbears range has been minted we will be allocating 150 ETH to our Treasury

100 ETH will be converted to $FLOKI by way of Market Buying via Uniswap and Pancakeswap

50 ETH will remain as ETH for the community to decide how it can best be utilised and if it should be converted into another currency

Torrid · Aug 14, 2021

Cuban is only slightly less clueless than Elon. I doubt he understands the difference between sidechains and rollups. Rollups are an evolution of lightning, so that's why they're exciting. With sidechains you're exiting into a completely different security model/network which is far less secure than layer 1; these sidechains are just trading security and decentralization for capacity and users have no idea what kind of trade-offs they're making. Polygon getting hacked is so surprise to me. Rootstock is kind of an exception due to them using PoW and the same miners as the layer 1, but it's still less secure.

Alterity · Aug 14, 2021

I agree with you that leaving ETH for a side chain introduces a little more of a security risk, but Polygon did not get hacked. The Poly Network's (completely separate from Polygon) cross-chain function had a vulnerability that was exploited.

Polygon also just bought Hermez Network who is working on ZK rollups. It'll be interesting to see how they utilize this acquisition. I have still been a little undecided what I want to do with my MATIC, but for the moment it looks like I am going to continue to hold it.

Arden · Aug 14, 2021

VET up 25ish percent in the last 5 days. Need more news like this and I bet we see a dollar by year's end:

VeChain Is Targeting The Multi-billion Dollar Chinese Pet Food Traceability Market Using Industry Leading Blockchain Technology

Against the overall market downturn from the global pandemic, China's pet food industry bucked the trend with notable growth. It was valued at USD 1.082 billion in 2020, and it is projected to reach USD 1.4749 billion in 2026. Despite the surging expansion, the pet food market in China is not...

finance.yahoo.com

Torrid · Aug 14, 2021

You can call it whatever you like, but they still lost half a billion dollars and had to beg exchanges to blacklist addresses

Lightning Lord Rule · Aug 14, 2021

Alterity said:
I agree with you that leaving ETH for a side chain introduces a little more of a security risk, but Polygon did not get hacked. The Poly Network's (completely separate from Polygon) cross-chain function had a vulnerability that was exploited.

Polygon also just bought Hermez Network who is working on ZK rollups. It'll be interesting to see how they utilize this acquisition. I have still been a little undecided what I want to do with my MATIC, but for the moment it looks like I am going to continue to hold it.

Personally, I converted all my MATIC (at a nice enough profit, though I should have sold it nearer the peak of 2.68

) to truebit/eth today. I had MATIC staked in a 15%-14%APY setup, but after looking at how much I've been making in the Tru liquidity pool for the last 2 weeks, it's a no-brainer in comparison. In the medium term (next 1-2 years, up to when ETH2 comes out), I think MATIC will do pretty well, but in the near term I think I can do a lot better in the liquidity pooling game vs the staking and holding game. In those terms, TRU wins easily.

The risk is if TRU falls off considerably, which is certainly a risk and one that MATIC basically doesn't have, but the upside is considerable. Here goes nothing

Tmac · Aug 14, 2021

Lightning Lord Rule said:
Personally, I converted all my MATIC (at a nice enough profit, though I should have sold it nearer the peak of 2.68 ) to truebit/eth today. I had MATIC staked in a 15%-14%APY setup, but after looking at how much I've been making in the Tru liquidity pool for the last 2 weeks, it's a no-brainer in comparison. In the medium term (next 1-2 years, up to when ETH2 comes out), I think MATIC will do pretty well, but in the near term I think I can do a lot better in the liquidity pooling game vs the staking and holding game. In those terms, TRU wins easily.

The risk is if TRU falls off considerably, which is certainly a risk and one that MATIC basically doesn't have, but the upside is considerable. Here goes nothing

I have like a 10:1 ratio invested in ETH:TRUE but have yet to get into pooling. Seems risky.

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