Haven't you heard of the latest technical improvement to the protocol? The development team determined that price does not matter.

That may be a significant price for the miners, but they do not influence the price directly. 

They can only influence the price by retaining or dumping some of their mined coins.  However, in that respect they are acting as investors, and can be lumped with them.

The price is now the same as it was on October 28, 2013.

One could interpret this drop as being the complete deflation of the Nov/2013 bubble proper, that began around 2013-11-01; leaving the price at the plateau  of the smaller Oct/2013 bubble, that started on 2013-10-05 at 125 $/BTC and settled down at 205 $/BTC.

Perhaps that Oct/2013 bubble will not deflate.  Or perhaps it and/or several previous bubbles are deflating, too.

Anyway, I would guess that the next interesting price is 125 $/BTC, and after that 50 $/BTC.

Really? Could you please explain how those 100'000 people get more "freedom from oppresive governments" by using bitcoin?  Is "freedom"  just evading taxes, or buying illegal drugs, weapons, child porn -- or is there something else?

Claim: in its 6 years of existence, bitcoin has caused 1000x more damage than benefits to the world.

The number may be exaggerated, but can you dispute it?  If you add MtGOX and all the other bitcoin scams and thefts, add the use of bitcoin in financing crime, all the people who had their life ruined for believing in the fantastic price predictions or gambling in online casinos -- you will get easily a billion dollars of damages inflicted on mankind.  Even if you subtract the cases of thieves stealing from other thieves, crooks scamming other crooks, and scumbags profiting at the expense of other scumbags, you are still left witha balance of hundreds of millions transferred from those who worked for that money to those who did nothing to deserve it, by the force of misleading claims and impossible promises.

And what good has bitcoin brought to mankind?  Savings of a few % in the purchases of trinkets from Newegg and Overstock?

Bitcoin is mostly a Chinese thing now: they make the most ASICs, they have the most miners, their exchanges have most of the volume.  But hwat has bitcoin done for human rights in China?  Or in any part of the world?

Perhaps bitcoin will one day make good on its promise to bring freedom and productivity.  But so far its score is not good at all.


It is precisely the "people who feed me" that are most in danger of losing money to this "industry".  Aren't first world bitcoiners looking at the people of Latin America as the possible next market for bitcoin investment -- i.e., as the "greater fools" whose money will ensure their profits?

Of course I don't have the power to "shut bitcoin down", or to pop its speculative bubble (that is collapsing on its own).  All I can do is to advise those who would pay attention to me; but they are not that many either, and my powers of persuasion are no match for those of the Vers and Antonopouloses, alas.

Ok, sorry, by "applications" I meant replacing cash, bank transfers, credit cards, Paypal, Western Union, contracts, land registries, ...  Not to mention vaporizing governments, evading taxes, liberating illegal trade and online gambling, financing dissidents, ...

Yes; but then (as of now) the economics will strongly favor large miners, so there may be just one company with all the 10'000 rigs, collecting all the 36'000 $/day and making 12'000 $/day of profit.


... which means that almost all the mining will be done in places with cheap electricity.  This would be the case anyway, even if the price was stable at 300 $/BTC or 3000 $/BTC.

If each 1 TH/s rig makes only 1,2 $/day of profit, it may not be worth upgrading.  If it dies, another one like it can be bought cheaply from the miners who had to close shop.  There may not be enough demand to motivate the design of new ASICS.  If a substantially more efficient chip becomes available, a company with 1000 rigs may buy a couple of them per week.

No, nothing that abstract.  I belive that bitcoin cannot be more than a great technical experiment, because:

* The protocol has one fatal flaw: it inevitably leads to centralization of mining in a few large corporations, who then have nearly unlimited power over the system, and must be trusted not to abuse of their power.  It is a fatal flaw because it negates the very goal of the protocol ("decentralized trustless"), and no one knows how to fix it.  It seems that another genial invention will be needed to fix that flaw.

* The protocol has many defects that make it unsuitable or uncompetitive for the applications that have been (retroactively) proposed for it.  For example, the bounded supply led to expectations of astronomical value increases,  which induced extreme hoarding of the coin, which made its speculative price rise to 100x its utilitarian value, which caused mining to become 100x more expensive than it should be, which meant 15$ cost per transaction, ... Also, I do not consider the "pay to script" feature worth the complexity that it adds to the blockchain.  The cost structure is such that it invites spamming of the blockchain with bogus transactions and messages that have nothing to do with its payment function.   The distributed organization limits its response time.  The block reward should decrease gradually, instead of being abruptly cut by half every 4 years.  The transaction fees should perhaps be required from the start.   The organization of the ledger as a linear chain means very long 'sync' times for low-end clients. And many more.  These flaws are not fatal, because they do not invalidate the goal stated in the white paper, and could be fixed in a new iteration.  But they cannot all be fixed now in the current blockchain.

* Finally, it is not clear to me that the world really needs a payment system like bitcoin.  Its expected virtues, of liberating people from oppressive regimes and from excessive bank fees, have yet to be demonstrated (or have already been debunked).  On the other hand, bitcoin has been eagerly adopted by criminals and scammers, precisely for those features  that were supposed to be virtues.  Perhaps the invention of crypto-currencies was not so much like the invention of electricty or the internet, but more like the invention of firearms, or of crack cocaine.

I know that there are people who care for bitcoin for "ideological" reasons, and would get very upset about any deviation from what they perceive as the "core values" of the project.  (Mircea Popescu's "war declaration" about increasing the block size is an example of that.)

However, I believe that the ideologues are a very small fraction of the people involved in the bicoin "industry", and have very little power over it -- economic, computational, or managerial.  I believe that the vast majority of the bitcoiners (say, 99.9%) do not care about those "core values", and would not be upset if they are violated.  On the contrary, the major players would use their economic power to convince everyody that the violations are unimportant, or even good for bitcoin.

In fact, I believe that many of the "ideological" supporters would choose to conform to some violations of the principles, rather than see the project collapse because of "civil war".

I see that already happening now, about the centralization of mining.  True believers should have committed suicide the moment that GHash.io got more than 50% of the hashpower.  Instead, people preferred to believe the argument that a majority miner (or coalition of 4-5 miners)  would never want do any of the naughty things that it could do, because of "the incentives"; and just carried on.

I don't think that bitcoin will die so soon.  Bitcoin does not need to be worth more than 0.10$ to fullfill its purpose of a proof of concept, and will find plenty of volunteers to keep it running, even at that price.

What may die is the economy that was built on top of it, that assumed it would replace national currencies replace paypal replace Western Union become the 'gold backing' for a multitude of better altcoins.

If the price were 10 $/BTC (as it was a couple of years ago), the miners as a whole would receive only 36'000 $/day.  At 0.10 $ per kWh (say), that could pay for 360'000 kWh per day, or 15'000 kW.

Therefore, in that situation, almost all of the current miners would have pulled the plug; but there will be still be the equivalent of 10'000 (say) ASIC rigs in use, each consuming 1 kW and doing 1 TH/s, and their owners together would make 12'000 $/day of profit.  The total network power would then be 10'000 TH/s, or 10 PH/s.  Which, surprise, is about 10$/220$ of the current network power.

Can you quantify that 'faith of the community' in dollars?  Starting from: what percentage of the bitcoin holders and traders would understand what that piechart means, or care about it?

AFAIK, the only way to tell whether a 'starving attack' is going on would be this chart
https://blockchain.info/charts/n-orphaned-blocks?showDataPoints=false&timespan=&show_header=true&daysAverageString=56&scale=0
(Note that it is smoothed by 56-day running averaging, check the URL).  It shows that one found block gets discarded every 16 hours or so (because the next block found does not use it as parent).  Note the chart is zero before Mar/2014; I don't know whether the count was really zero, or just there is no data for that period. 

Anywy, these orphan blocks may be just accidents, or maybe some miner is doing something like Sirer's selfish mining attack.

If a coalition with 60% of the hashpower were really trying to steal an unfair share of the rewards, we probably would see many more orphan blocks. Or maybe not, I don't know.  Perhaps the coalition (that could deploy thousands of relay nodes of their own) would find a way to cloak the attack and/or hide the identity of the attackers.

Weeeelll, yes, all the top 4 companies would have to collude in order to launch a 51% attack (e.g. to take 100% of the rewards, by ignoring blocks mined by other miners and thus orphaning them).

OK, I cannot say much about the "common bitcoiner".    I have yet to meet one in person.  However, judging by what they post on forums and twitter, they behave like Amway reps at their worst.  (I don't know how it is in the US, but in the 1990s Amway started an aggressive MLM scheme down here, that forced the courts to intervene.).  They push bitcoin even to people who cannot possibly understand the risks, even their own family members. 

It is hard to believe that those bitcoiners are doing so because they firmly believe that it is a good investment.  People who buy Apple stock or Treasury bonds do not try convincing everybody else to do so.  The self-interest is obvious: every bitcoiner knows that his profit depends on lots of other people buying the thing for more than he bought it.

But my comment above was mostly directed to bitcoin entrepreneurs and other Famous Persons in the bitcoin commuity.  I have yet to see one such person that I could suspect of being honest and sincere.   Many of them must know that their optimistic predictions and one-sided descriptions of bitcoin are bullshit.  Many of them are revealed as crooks by their past (and by their lack or remorse or shame about it).


YEs, of course, scammers and criminals will use whatever currency they find appropriate.  But the fact is that they love bitcoin, much more than cash or any other payment method, for obvious reasons.   Look at the current epidemic of ransomware, for example: that "business" would hardly be viable if it were not for bitcoin.
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But the Flyer One wasn't the first heavier-than-air experiment either.

It may have been only the first to fly for a non-trivial amount of time.  

Just like bitcoin was the first cryptocurrency protocol that could actually run in a self-sustained way.


Even the simplest crop duster has many essential improvements over the Flyer One, and would not be viable without them.  

I can't think of one real application that the Flyer One could have been good enough for.

Well, maybe one year of insults has eroded some of what was left of my Christian upbringing. 

But mainly I do not like scammers and sleazy people who lie to take other people's money.  Perhaps because I am rather easy to fool myself.  And I have never seen a community so packed with crooks and criminals as the bitcoin community.  Politicians, judges, cops, bankers, even professors -- there is plenty of corruption among them, but nowhere near as much as among the bitcoiners.

I am dead serious with my signature.  When I first heard of bitcoin through twitter (not much before Nov/2013), it was claimed to be a fabulous investiment.  My reaction then was "sounds too good to be true".  The more that I learned about it, the more skeptical I became. I have no intention of investing in it or in any other crypto, and I advise against it.

If people want to gamble their money on it (by day-trading or longer term holding), it is their right -- as long as they don't try to misrepresent it to folks who cannot understand the technical limitations, the economics, and the risks.

As many other have pointed out, the miners have no control on the amount of new bitcoins that are produced.  Except for temporary fluctuations due to the delay in  the difficulty adjustment, here will be about 3600 BTC made each day, no matter what the miners do.

The miners can influence price, however, by holding some of their coins, instead of spending them.  But that is best understood as if each miner Joe were two persons, "Hasher Joe" who does the actual mining and sells all his coins, and a "Hoarder Joe" who buys back some of those coins with some of the money that Hasher Joe made. 

Hoarder Joe is an investor like any other.  He has no more obligation to buy coins than any other investor.  He has the right to decide when and how much to buy or sell, seeking maximum profit.   So, it does not make sense to demand that  miner Joe should hold more of the coins that he mines.

If miner Joe is now dumping coins that he mined months ago, he should not be citicized for that; he should be thanked for having retained them at the time, since by doing so he helped support the price at that time. 

But bitcoin is not an idea, it is a specific implementation of an idea (albeit with some flexibility).  

"A heavier-than-air vehicle with internal combustion engine, propellers, and fixed wings can be made to fly" -- that was an idea.

The Wright Brothers' Flyer One was an implementation of that idea.

That idea was indeed the basis of modern air transport and warfare.  

The Wrights Brothers' implementation was just a technical experiment, that aimed to show that the idea could work.  

Many more experiments, lots of incremental improvements, and a couple of revolutionary inventions were still needed before that idea could become a commercial product.

The word is 'heathens'. 

MAT 24:11 "And many false prophets, like Satoshi, Andreesen, Sielbert, Ver, and Antonopoulos, will appear and will deceive many people."

Indeed, my apologies.  The long int size cannot be the explanation for the 21 million BTC limit.  

21 million BTC times 10^8 satoshis per BTC is 2'100'000'000'000'000 sat, much less than 2^64.  

It is just a little less than 2^51 = 2'251'799'813'685'248.  

A double-precision float in 64-bit IEEE format can represent exactly all unsigned integers up to 2^53.
Some languages (e.g. GNU Awk) use IEEE doubles as the default (or only) numeric format.  

It is good practice to leave a couple of extra bits in the representation of a quantity, to reduce the risk of overflow during computations,
e.g. in 'x = 3*amount/4'.

If the maximum number of satoshis had been set to exactly 2^51 (or 2^51 - 1), the initial block reward would have had to be a
fractional number of BTC, even if the halving period was set to a funny number like 225179 intead of the round 210000.

In other words, 50 BTC/block and halving every 210000 blocks are two round numbers that happen to result in a total number of satoshis just under 2^51.

EDIT: The exact number of satoshis that will ever be created is claimed to be 2'099'999'997'690'000, but I haven't checked that.