I was making a light hearted point, but my agnosticism can be dispelled with an actual working demonstration on a test chain. I couldn't care less about deanonymization. I can barter and have made a good living at it.

"Floating peg" is an oxymoron.  It was intentional. Markets aren't going away. They will become decentralized, but not replaced by confederate functionaries. Altcoins will evolve into state sponsored fiat currencies while Bitcoin flourishes in free states and as a voluntary reserve currency.

Necro. My apologies (sort of).

You argument, in three words: network insufficiently decentralized.

The counter argument, in just one more word: according to which alternative?


First, it would be pointless imo to argue against the facts: mining is concentrated more than most expected, say, 2 years ago, and more than many are fully comfortable with.

Fact as well, however: none of those conjectured 'mining cartel attacks' ever took place, and there's good reason for that: they might be technically possible, but economically not viable for anyone who holds a stake in Bitcoin (hint: sunk cost in single purpose hardware is a "stake" as well) because of the resulting market reaction upon discovery (or even suspicion such attacks are taking place). They would therefore only be mounted from someone who is willing to pay for an attack on the network itself, and I have yet to see any evidence that this is a realistic vector consistent with what we know about existing hashpower and who paid to employ it.

Finally: the level of decentralization doesn't look so bad anymore when one considers the existing alternatives. Well, there's only one really: traditional banking. It's like you're blaming jet plane air-travel for being hopelessly outdated and slow: until there's a superior alternative, it is the de facto optimum wrt speed.

One coin to rule them all:

the creeping fear is accelerating:

Bitcoin has clearly failed in an 'exchange' role as evidenced by still not needing to fiddle with the 7 tps transaction rate (1MB block size) and not being on a trajectory to need to do so any time soon.  The reason for this is abundantly clear and I've been saying so for years:  Bitcoin is simply not competitive in this role.

Bitcoin could be, however, extremely competitive in the role of a reserve currency.  But if we are relying on a foundation of 'subversion and failure could happen, but has not yet so maybe it never will', this detracts hugely from it's potential value as a reserve currency.

The pipe-dream of using Bitcoin as an exchange currency has unsurprisingly sucked in a school of intellectual herring, but more surprisingly also a bunch of VC predator food-chain class who I would have not expected to be such dullards.  This has been great for my pocketbook, but their utility is nearing the end-point.  Now is the time to appreciate the true value of Bitcoin and work toward preserving what remains of it and unrolling the damage done by centralization.  This is what sidechains mean to me.

Did I stutter?  'cause I don't think I did.

Unfortunately, the 7 tps is an old estimate, and the reality of large blocks is that 2400 tx is maximum, or 4 tps. However, even this is too large because some miners still turn out near empty blocks, and would do so even if the network had a severe backlog. So 3 tps is a more accurate working number.