hybridsole

Why does JPM Coin need a distributed ledger if it will inevitably have identity requirements and central control by the bank itself? This is something like when CompuServe wanted to create their own version of the internet, and pretend it was still open. No thank you. Bitcoin is both open, distributed, and has a non-inflationary gold-like token as its underlying currency.

They don't make any sense. Anyone planning something will now anticipate this. It only discourages honest people from staying in a traditional hotel. You can either relax in an air-bnb or worry about the hotel service demanding entry to your room (while being reminded of horrific mass shootings).

I'll give you $5k for a bitcoin, and I could find you 100 people within 100 miles of you who would do the same thing today. It has value because people give it value.

To which the honey badger says, "Bring it on". Bitcoin is a public network that has been attacked relentlessly by the best hackers in the world for the past 10 years. It is currently protecting/storing around $115 billion dollars in wealth, which can be seen as a bounty to anyone who succeeds in bringing it down. So far it hasn't happened, and even in the face of hypothetical challenges there's no reason why the protocol cannot patch a fix and move on.

But it doesn't mean they propagate "fine" if it pushes smaller participants off the network. That is exactly what cryptos like Bitcoin are trying to avoid.

The difficulty recalculation in Bitcoin ABC was reduced significantly. I believe it is 6 blocks but could be wrong. At most it would take several days as opposed to several weeks.

Litecoin has a fraction of the transaction fees of bitcoin, so instead of buying something that costs $10 and paying about $1 in miners fees, with LTC you would pay a few pennies at most. Granted, most retailers only accept Bitcoin if they accept cryptocurrency at all, but this may change as more people use LTC for smaller payments.

Computationally difficult is a bit of an understatement. It is not possible to alter the bitcoin blockchain once a block is added and confirmed. With limitless resources, you could perform a withholding attack to modify the most recent half-hour to one hour's worth of transactions, but that would take tens of millions of dollars in hardware and only be temporarily successful.

Lyft user here. I always ask the question "What do you like about Lyft compared to driving for Uber"? The answer is that Lyft takes better care of them with better pay incentives and less rigorous scheduling demands. If you want more of your money to go to the driver instead of a central command, use Lyft. I've never noticed a lack of drivers in most medium-to-large sized cities that I'm.

Thank you for your contributions, NobleSir. I think out of all the cryptocurrencies, if there's one that will take real market share away from Bitcoin, it'll be Monero.

Why not just use a big SQL database that they all control? What's the difference between that and a private blockchain?

That's not really accurate. There are many stakeholders in bitcoin that are part of the ecosystem and all can determine its future. Mining is one part of the equation, there are nodes that validate transactions, there are exchanges that give bitcoins value by providing on-ramps to other currencies, there are merchants who accept bitcoin for goods/services, there are core developers, and finally the end users, investors and hodlers. If miners decide to damage the network through collusion, then it's unlikely the other actors will allow this for long without altering the code to mitigate the threat. What good are these ill-gotten coins if exchanges will not give them dollars for it, or users have no demand for them? Contingency plans have already been developed for this scenario and, so far, they've not been needed because the miners are as invested in the long term success in bitcoin as anyone else.

Yep, they should just stick with the current system of 3-5 day transfers, giving over all of your personal information, and being subject to freezing/closure at the whim of authorities with no due process.

Bitcoin transactions rarely take more than 30 minutes, including peak times, if you apply a sufficient network transaction fee (right now equiv. to $0.05). It cannot be "arbitrarily" reversed. RBF is not even in production, and if/when it is, it's is a separate type of transaction that is optional and marked as such. China does not control bitcoin, yes they perform most of the mining but it's because China is huge, has cheap electricity, and produces mining hardware. There are a lot of independent actors involved and if there was foul play (which there has not been any evidence of) the network could route around China without too much disruption.

Bitcoin is not perfect and it's still in its infancy, but it is improving and it is still more censorship resistant and decentralized than any other form of money.