"the third-child deterrent appears stronger among wealthier families"
So this has both the most and least effect on families that have little reason to care about needing a bigger car (because they can easily afford it, or they can't afford any car at all, respectively). When you go fishing for a correlation, form a post-hoc hypothesis for its mechanism, and then other data fits that hypothesis poorly, it's a strong sign you've found yourself a red herring. Which is the usual result of failing to properly understand the distinction between correlation and causation.
With increasing wealth, per-child cost goes up. It's self-imposed of course.
Getting a larger Porsche or BMW or Mercedes is going to be harder than getting a larger used Hyundai or Kia. At the extreme, you're just out of luck; there is no Ferrari with more than 4 seats.
Not being depended on craftsman for small things like fixing your toilet safes you a lot of stress in my experience. Not problems with appointments, no waiting, no arguing in case if improper work, no other people in your home.
But you can't order Pizza (or drugs) with Bitcoin anymore. And I don't see much of use case of a currency that can't do that. Without adoption a fiat currency like bitcoin is not worth anything.
And this is a perfect example of the disconnect that is behind the current problems in the Bitcoin community. Why would 5 extra dollars matter for a pizza purchase? Are you kidding?
True, but someone on the minimum wage is not the current target of businesses that accept Bitcoin. Their target market is more likely techies, probably reasonably well paid, and in particular with Bitcoin holdings that have appreciated over time. For these people, $5 may not be a big deal, and in particular it may be an even lesser deal since it's not priced in dollars but in Bitcoin. If my Bitcoins have appreciated tenfold since I bought them, that $5 fee suddenly corresponds to only $.50 that I put in in terms of dollars. Also, such people are interested in seeing Bitcoin succeed in the long term, and supporting the network with fees, even such high ones, is one way of contributing towards that. If you want, you can see Bitcoin's "value added services" as supporting real-world use, which supports a high price for the Bitcoins you bought for cheap.
So... fitting squarely into the stereotype sketched above, I don't mind that much paying a few dollars for ordering a couple of pizzas. My problem (as mentioned in a cousin comment) is the annoying unpredictability of the fees.
But if Bitcoin is competing with another crypto such as Bitcoin Cash when buying the pizza... why not just buy it for next to no fee with Bitcoin Cash? Doesn't matter who the target is - its a no brainer. People don't want to spend extra money.
Techie here. Paid well. If I have the choice to pay $15 for a pizza with a credit card and $20 for a pizza with BTC I will choose the credit card every time.
Good for you. If I have the choice to pay $15 for a pizza with a credit card and $0 for a pizza with BTC I bought a long time ago at 1/500th of their current value, I'll factor in several things.
Not at all what I said. You can spend them any time. But if you spend them, you have to realize that you lose the current value they have, not the value you got them for. So that Pizza costs you 5$ more with bitcoin.
In a certain sense, yes, sure. What I'm saying is that, due to appreciation of my Bitcoins, those $5, as well as the actual price of the pizza, were essentially a gift to me from the Bitcoin community.
I don't mind spending free food tokens that were gifted to me. Even if spending the free food tokens costs me fees (expressed in free food tokens), and I might possibly trade those free food tokens for a slightly higher amount in dollars (but incurring other fees). Especially since, if everyone stopped using their free food tokens, everyone's free food tokens would stop being usable.
I would certainly maximize my pizza buying power by minimizing the transaction fee costs. I.e. convert a larger fraction to USD and incur the overhead only once. If you convert the value of 4 pizzas, you get a 5th for "free". But maybe I just like pizza more ;)
It seems there is currently more hashpower behind BCH than BTC. [1] Because of the current price surge mining bch became way more profitable, but this will change with the next adjustment.
If more hashpower sticks with BCH, I would consider it to be the winner.
Mining pool operators are in a position to manipulate the markets.
Given the extremely low liquidity of all the exchanges (large holders often move their funds off-line), the markets rates are trivially manipulated. This in turn manipulates miner incentives.
Social media is a shit show of shills and propaganda from all angles. So really only time will tell.
The truth of this statement cannot be emphasized enough. I think one of the real weaknesses of the crypto world is the complete absence of a community where people whose mouths are not connected directly to their brainstems can talk and discuss issues related to crypto -- and I mean not just about investment (I'm not very interested in that) but about relevant technological and social issues. There is literally no place to have a sane discussion on any of this that I've found -- would _love_ to be corrected if someone knows better.
I think the larger problem is that most anyone talking about cryptocurrencies has a financial interest in them, and indeed, people without a financial interest are considered biased against them and not worth listening to.
>Social media is a shit show of shills and propaganda from all angles. So really only time will tell.
The r/bitcoin and r/btc sub-reddits really went to trash recently. Everyone's been bickering about their own opinions. Worst of all, constant front page vitriol about each other.
I read /r/BitcoinMarkets. It's more centred around day trading, they are very optimistic about the future (i.e. bullish, "to the moon!"), so take their opinions with salt, but it's a good, up-to-date source of information.
> Mining pool operators are in a position to manipulate the markets.
I don't know what this fixation is on hashrate. As long as it doesn't drop to low enough a level for someone who wants to attack it to be successful, it doesn't make any difference to the coin's functionality.
Anyone with the ability to buy or sell a large amount of crypt can manipulate the markets. This holds doubly true in the middle of the night on a weekend.
It makes a giant difference in the amount of time it takes to mine blocks, especially during hashrate fluctuations, where a currency without a responsive difficulty adjustment algorithm (e.g., Bitcoin) can be 'stranded' with a too-hard difficulty, which means transactions don't get processed, which means there's a giant lag in money movement and fee escalation, etc. etc.
The interplay between hashrate, difficulty, txs, fees, price, and sentiment is pretty complicated and definitely important. See http://www.fork.lol to see this illustrated.
> Social media is a shit show of shills and propaganda from all angles. So really only time will tell.
I'm curious about historic precedents - I really don't know much about the history of currency. There must have been analogues in the past - I know Isaac Newton famously went to war with counterfeiters, but that (and vague memories of hearing about bank currency in the US) about the only instance of currency competition I know of.
Anyone want to recommend a quality book on the topic?
Which is a good argument for off-chain scaling (i.e. Segwit). As it is miners have way too much power and their incentives are not aligned with the holders of the currency. Off chain scaling massively reduces their ability to hold the network hostage: value can still be transferred even if transactions slow to a crawl.
That https://fork.lol site is fascinating. Thanks for linking to it.
Right now BCH has a way higher hash rate than the difficulty, but that is going to adjust in 8hr or sooner if the trend continues. At that point, BTC will again be more profitable and you would expect everyone to switch back. Meanwhile, the fees on BTC are going way up because that chain gets used more frequently. That will also pressure miner back to the BTC chain.
That happened when BCH was new. What happened then was that everyone switched to BTC, the BCH chain stopped completely for a few hours, and then BCH's extra difficulty adjustment rule kicked in and lowered the difficulty a lot, so everyone switched to BCH again. That oscillation was leading to periods of nearly zero blocks and periods of nearly a block per minute for the BCH chain. To prevent that, some BCH supporters left enough miners in the BCH chain that the extra difficulty adjustment rule didn't kick in, even when it was less profitable.
From what I've read, this time there's a difference: in a few days, BCH (or at least some of it) will have a hardfork which changes the extra difficulty adjustment rule. I haven't seen a good explanation of the new rule so far (only complaints that it was unilaterally decided by some developers), but depending on how it works this might be the last time miners can get thousands of blocks in a few days, which would explain why this time there's so much hash power in the BCH chain. And depending on how it works, there might be no longer a need for BCH supporters to keep enough miners in the BCH chain to prevent the extra difficulty adjustment rule from kicking in, so it's even possible that every miner switches to BTC at once.
On the other hand, if the new extra difficulty adjustment rule works, jumping from one chain to the other might become less profitable, so some miners might decide to stay on the BCH chain permanently. These miners might be now selling their BTC for BCH, which would neatly explain the rise in the BCH price and the drop in the BTC price.
I wonder what the actual liquidity is of converting BCH in to hard currency? (which ultimately miners need to pay for operations and capital expenditures.)
It was blatantly obvious (to me) that something funny going on at MtGox meant the price was not real. The number of global exchanges, alt coins, and overall crytpocurrency appreciation in 2017 makes it almost impossible to sniff out potential problems. Despite the radical transparency of the blockchain ledger, all of the other trading and exchange activity is quite opaque.
And indeed the difficulty adjusted and the bulk of the miners returned to BTC. They have too much money invested to have an ideology. For the most part, miners will follow the money. Price discovery, you will have mining on each chain in proportion to its profits. Some might switch for other motivations, but a money motivated miner will balance him out.
I find the supposed "voting power" of the miners to be a mirage. When it comes down to it they just follow the money.
That's actually a bad situation for bch. Because of the EDA, their block reward ends up being equal in USD to the bitcoin block reward, regardless of their own price.
Basically, every 12 hours the difficulty resets and then they get 2 weeks worth of mining + inflation in just a few days (at lower prices, just a few hours).
Long-term, whichever is the winner will gain the most price and therefore the most hashpower.
Neither hashpower nor price make it the winner. In the long term, actual people wanting to hold & use it makes a winner. Price and hashpower follow that.
Inside of one coin hashpower makes the winner, because the chain with the most accumulated difficulty wins. It makes sense to transfer this to the relation of different coins. currently BTC wins, but if miners would stick to bch this might change.
I consider it a winner a long time ago, sold my bitcoins for it when the ratio was 0.15, accumalated some more at 0.055 and now its 0.25, I predict 1 BTC = 0.5 BCH before the end of the year
I was discussing the possible price crossover between Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash with a colleague just a few days ago after I found out about the 'New York Agreement' which had been signed by several major exchanges.
If you read about the New York Agreement and you understand the technical implications of it then you should have a very clear idea about what is going to happen when the exchanges start honoring that agreement.
> We agree to immediately support the following parallel upgrades to the bitcoin protocol, which will be deployed simultaneously and based on the original Segwit2Mb proposal:
- Activate Segregated Witness at an 80% threshold, signaling at bit 4
- Activate a 2 MB hard fork within six months
Where does Bitcoin Cash fit in here, and what's going to happen when the exchanges start honouring it? Was BCH the hard fork they talked about? What hasn't been honoured yet?
The hard fork the NY agreement mentions was a protocol upgrade that was scheduled for 11/16/2017. The Segwit upgrade took hold, but the second "2mb hard fork" part proved very contentious, and was later cancelled/suspended citing lack of community support. (That fork was frequently called B2X or S2X).
There is some argument about who all actually signed on to the NY agreement - whether they represented the community at large, or just a smaller non-binding group. The contentiousness was overtly regarding the "2mb" increase's long-term consequences, but IMO it may have also been because adopting it would have essentially kicked out the existing software development group, replacing with a smaller less experienced group.
If the hard fork had happened, the NY agreement asserted it would have simply upgraded the BTC protocol; rather than create a new coin. Agreeing exchanges would have had to go along with the protocol upgrade. But concensus never formed, particularly among exchanges & businesses that didn't sign the NYA.
---
Bitcoin Cash / BCH was a separate coin that forked off of BTC around the same time as the NYA, but wasn't part of the NYA. It increased the block size (the "2mb" bit), but explicitly rejects segregated witness and some related changes. It's kinda odd it happened, because those involved in BCH were leaders in the NY agreement itself; so BCH be seen as an early repudiation of the NY agreement by it's own champions.
The New York Agreement was canceled the other day.
Also, comments like "if you understand the technical implications of it then you should have a very clear idea about what is going to happen" are really unhelpful, like a no-op soaked in condescension.
It does not change anything substantial about the web today. It will just be a saner output format for compilers than javascript. Unless you write compilers, nothing changes.
It does not matter weather your language compiles to JS or WASM, and it does not matter what the browser executes.
There is a major negative effect - you will be running obscure blobs of code - you can't think of anything worse for security.
Sandboxing as such will not help you to any degree with that. People promoting sanboxing as a universal solution have poor knowledge of computer security
That's no how laws work. Not even remotely. Thankfully.
Consider you order somebody (X) to transport your pregnant cow. At the destination the cow arrives. It's not pregnant anymore and X refuses to give you the calf because... well, because he can do anything he wants.
Basically, they said "if your pregnant cow gives birth, we will not give you the calf. If you want your calf, take your cow away from Coinbase and keep it on your own pasture!" And their customers heard it, said ok I'll keep the cow with you, and when the cow gave birth they cried foul.
Sheesh, this situation is 100% predicable because Coinbase announced it ahead of time.
The problem is they have a 48 hour timer on cold wallets. Which leaves you 2 days to move those coins and if you have a withdrawal limit of $10k but you had 20 BTC in cold storage you were only able to get ~4 btc out of coinbase in time.
This fork was foretold weeks or months ago. Sure, the precise timing of the fork wasn't known until July, but everyone has been talking about "bitcoin's gonna fork" for ages - even hit hacker news multiple times.
Bitcoin holders need to take responsibility for their own holdings, especially when there is no FDIC or any type of assurance that your coins are going to be your coins.
Yeah except that email to that affect only went out July 27 @ 11pm EST.
So for Coinbase customers not tracking the fork news, this was a total blindside. This gives you 3 days to get all your coins out?
Not to mention if you used the "Coinbase Vault" your coins are subject to a 48 hour holding period before you can them into a usable Wallet. Then you have to wait for what was at some points an 8 hour transaction delay?
Also you need to figure out how securely set up a wallet, potentially order wallet hardware, etc.
Your cow would die birthing during transport. You could then sue the guy transporting your cow, but the judge would dismiss your case because shipping a cow short before birthing is just a stupid idea.
It's more like, while transporting the pregnant cows, one bird jumped on each cow in the trailer along the way, and now you're demanding X gives you not just the cows, but the birds, too, even though they're hard to catch.
No, is not like that. Both the calf to the cow and bch (bcc ?) to btc are "intrinsic". They are the result of the nature of these things. Not gifts, not accidents, not abritrary.
And coinbase keeps the bch (as they announced), so the bird analogy does not fit at all.
Maybe we can use the brute force of a "math superoptimizer" to "compress" it to something far more reasonable. If we teach said opimizer what structures are well understood by humans we might actually understand at last parts.
I don't know why people keep thinking there's something special about the way we humans do calculations vs what could be achieved with a complex enough computer
Math is not about proofing something, or creating a as big as possible collection of lemmas. Math is about creating structures that can use as tools to solve problems. And problem solving is a task done by humans, so math is only useful if humans understand it and have a intuition.
These are not mere calculations. See, an understandable proof has more structure than plain first order logic alone. This allows such proofs to be extended and worked upon as well as real life implications to be discovered.
They can have any stand they want. But they deny me my property.
Imagine a bank anouncing they would keep all the dividends of one particular stock, because the didn't like it. That's what coinbase is doing. It plain and simply theft.
Is it your property? It's a benefit that people have decided to extend to whoever controls existing Bitcoin wallets. Do you have an agreement with Coinbase that obligated them to transfer to you any such benefit that should accrue to the Bitcoin wallet they control for you?
Of course. The Bitcoins are still mine, even i keep them in a coinbase wallet. (ownsership vs perssesion). Now every btc owner gets bcc. The owner is me, not coinbase. I gave the persession of by btc to coinbase to trade them eventually, not to give up ownership. And as the owner that never 1) gave away usufruct I'm entiled to all profits from them. See the share/divident analogy.
1) At last not legaly binding, that had to be there at the very least in red flashing letters, possibly even then it would have been void.
I'm not sure if "the Bitcoins are still mine" is an appropriate interpretation - (just as with banks) you don't own those particular BTC that you deposited, these now belong to Coinbase, what you have is a claim, a debt, an IOU, a statement from Coinbase that they'll give you a particular amount BTC on demand. If the standard banking regulations apply (and why wouldn't they? Coinbase is licenced as a money transmitter) there are no any particular "named" BTC held in escrow particularly for you, there's an "account" that tallies how much BTC you "have", i.e., how much BTC Coinbase owes you - as their user agreement states, "you are the owner of the balance of each of your Currency Wallets".
In the absence of any specific agreements with Coinbase regarding usufruct rights, you wouldn't have them (just as you don't have usufruct rights when depositing currency in a bank account) - you don't own that BTC, Coinbase owes you some fixed amount of BTC, and that's that.
Of course, that would be a nice thing to test in courts - after all they decide who owes what to whom, not the algorithms of BTC/BCC.
> The Bitcoins are still mine, even i keep them in a coinbase wallet.
Right, that's governed by your contract with Coinbase, and is the service they offer.
> Now every btc owner gets bcc.
No, everyone controlling a BTC wallet is now also controlling a BCC (or BCH, I've seen both used as the abbreviation) wallet with an equal number of coins.
I'm guessing rights to coins on alternative chains that Coinbase ends up controlling due to BTC forks are not covered in your contract with Coinbase.
There is a difference between ownership and possion. Technically (in the meaning "how it is realized in computer code") bcc is given to the person possessing btc. But by the law the owner is entitled to the profits of a thing. But coinbase does not own my coins, it merely posses them.
> There is a difference between ownership and possion
Yes, ownership is a matter of law. By what law does the act of a fork which grants possession of BCH to controllers of BTC wallets grant ownership to anyone else?
> But by the law the owner is entitled to the profits of a thing
That's, at best, imprecise. I own money, which I hold on a bank, which contracts a certain rate of interest (which may be zero) to be paid on it while I hold it there. I absolutely do not own any profits the bank is able to realize through holding the money (any more than, beyond those contracted, I am liable for any costs associated with their holding of money); indeed, their ownership of the net profits realizable by having the money in their hands is central to their business model. (There are restrictions on their ability to use the money they are holding to prevent undue risk of them not being able to pay my money back, but if they gain a windfall, I don't share in it.)
The real question seems to be legally whether BCH is a gift to those owning BTC or those possessing it. In the absence of very strong evidence to the contrary, I think the law is likely to say that who possession was given to also determines who ownership was given to. If I give a thousand dollars cash to everyone I see wearing a green hat, and one of those people had borrowed the hat, the owner of the hat is going to have a difficult time arguing that they own the thousand dollars.
>The real question seems to be legally whether BCH is a gift to those owning BTC or those possessing it. In
Bch is not a gift. Who should have gifted it? Who is the previous owner? How did the previous owner aquire it? It is a "fructus" of btc. And that belongs to the owner.
This right can be signed away, with life estate or usufructus. But that's a big deal. That can't be somewho implied in a sentence hidden somewhere in a long ToS.
>You don't own Bitcoin if you don't control the keys.
That's wrong, and obviously so. That concept is "possession" and not "ownership".
What they write in their ToS doesn't matter, it does not change fundamentals of porperty law. (Well, as every legal argument on the internet it depends on your jurisdiction and the jurisdiction of the coinbase, as coinbase resides in multiple)
I don't understand why bitcoin is afraid of hardforks. Ethereum hard forks like there is no tomorrow, and so far the number of major block-chain-splits is equal, two. The offical implementation not forking does by no means prevent anybody else from hardforking to begin with, Bitcoin cash demonstrates.
Which one?