LESSWRONG
LW

Comment Permalink

As far as I can tell, the recent rise in Bitcoin prices is overwhelmingly due to speculation, and is probably a repeat of the 2011 bubble on a larger scale.

That was my own view back when it was around $60, but now that it's ~$233, I've been reconsidering (because, well, my predictions were wildly wrong, and that seems like the sort of thing which ought to make you rethink things).

What drivers do we have? Well, there's:

almost 2 years of growth baked in, so any bubble ought to be able to peak well beyond the 2011 bubble. People scoff and claim Silk Road makes up the bulk of the Bitcoin economy, but if this were ever true, it stopped being true a long time ago. There are many little businesses, and some big ones and infrastructure like BitStore or BitPay.
Many of the catastrophic Bitcoin failure modes have ceased to materialize:
- exchange hacks have been few
- there have been no fundamental breaks in the protocol or algorithms involved,
- there has been close to zero government actions anywhere; the one I can think of, the recent US regulations released, was surprisingly moderate and very far from Moldbug's predicted wave of indictments going out worldwide.
- SatoshiDice continues spamming the blockchain, but it is still functioning.
- The temporary blockchain fork recently did not lead to any lasting consequences or serious loss of confidence.
- The deflationary spiral doesn't seem to have materialized, with people still buying stuff even with this recent price spike.
- Heck, even Silk Road is still ticking along with nothing in that entire period happening to it worse than some big scammers abusing out-of-escrow transactions, downtime due to traffic, a very limited SQL injection attack, and a possible leak of its IP address spotted by a friendly user.
The world economic situation doesn't seem especially improved; the US continues to slide along, China has not collapsed but it hasn't resumed high growth either, the Greek mess is just as messy as before, Spain is in a world of pain, and the Cyprus confiscations just destroyed the faith of any European depositors that they will be treated well (on top of existing concerns). Some of the responses to Cyprus I've read, like a translated Der Spiegel column, strike me as almost hysterical. There are a great many Europeans, and I do not think the impact is trivial on the marginal European Bitcoin buyer.
There is substantial spread outside the Anglosphere; Zooko has been commenting about the apparent Chinese uptake, and as is legally mandated whenever China comes up, I must point out that there's over a billion Chinese and my understanding is that the Chinese are generally being screwed over badly when they hold renminbi in savings accounts, with negative real rates.
the Bitcoin market cap is still very small compared to many of its plausible roles
real markets can sustainably spike, and it is not an infallible sign of a bubble. One of the arguments long since made in favor of buying and holding stocks, and not attempting to time the market, is that the bulk of your stock market gains over the 20th century comes from the spikes on just a handful of days; I've seen as few as 10 days cited as giving the lion's share of appreciation. (I wonder if this were predictable just from EMH? If all spikes failed to hold, that seems like an easy money-making algorithm: any time there's a spike, short it.)

More generally, if Bitcoin were the Real Deal, we would expect large price increases as people learn of it and it directly gains value from increased use, an ecosystem slowly unlocking the fancy cryptographic features of it like all the kinds of smart contracts it enables, etc. This is the same problem as startups: how do you tell Pets.com from Facebook? In retrospect, one is a fool's bet and the other a genius investment, but we all know how much retrospective assessments are - and ultimately, in 2013, Amazon.com sells plenty of dog food, with 26k hits for "dog food".

wedrifid12y50

slowly unlocking the fancy cryptographic features of it like all the kinds of smart contracts it enables, etc.

What kind of smart contracts does it enable?

14[anonymous]12y

It strikes me as being exactly the sort of thing you saw in industrial economies on strict gold standards before central banks. When you have an expanding pool of goods and services (either via industrial expansion, or the market for a type of money increasing) being chased by a money supply that is growing significantly slower, money deflates rapidly, and some people decide to hold onto their money rather than spend it as they think it will increase in value. This effectively shrinks the money pool, making the effect even stronger. Then the speculators come in, and it gets hairy and unpredictable. Eventually the money value collapses, and it starts being used for currency again. You should EXPECT massive booms and crashes as a new currency with a fixed rate of expansion grows in use (or in speculation-attractiveness) faster than its supply does.

7John_Maxwell12y

So maybe the bubble is still growing... I don't see how that should make you reconsider much. I wouldn't be super surprised to see bitcoin hit $1000 or greater, but I also think it's likely to lose 50% of its value or more at some point in the next 12 months. I don't think bitcoin is a bad long-term investment. Maybe not even at the current price, for 1% of your portfolio or whatever. But I do think the recent rise has been overwhelmingly speculation-driven, and a panic is pretty likely. I think Bitcoin's price as a commodity isn't necessarily related to its use as a currency, either. The more volatility in bitcoin, the more merchants (like reddit) will convert out of bitcoin after completing a transaction. We can do this kind of fundamental analysis all we want, but realistically I think speculation has been and will be the overwhelming factor affecting bitcoin prices... and speculation is random and hard to predict, hence the rebalancing recommendation. (Has there been any investigation in to bitcoin transaction volume by speculators vs real usage?) But it sounds like you're a lot more informed on this issue than I am. I'm also sick right now and therefore less intelligent than usual :P

See in context

11 Bitcoin Cryonics Fund

by lsparrish

14th Apr 2013

1 min read

11

The bitcoins that I had set aside for a Cryonics contest two years ago (and were unredeemed) are suddenly worth a lot more.

Details: I had added 10 bitcoins to get things started, and there were 4.75 worth of additional donations. These were partially lost when the hosted online wallet that I was using (MyBitcoin) was hacked, but 49% was recovered. As of today, after refunding part of the donated money, it is now worth 5.2675. I will be adding from my personal store to bring it up to an even 5.5. At $140 per coin, the new total is $770.

I've decided to follow the buy-and-hold strategy for at least another year, since it worked so well. I don't have exact details on what I'll do with it, but it will not be converted or spent for at least one year, and will eventually be used for promoting cryonics in some way.

Some things I have in mind if it gets big include:

subsidizing cryonics dues for low-income people
covering funding shortfalls for those unable to obtain life insurance due medical problems
cryonics scholarships to support the development of expertise in neural cryobiology, the dying process, and other neglected areas of concern to cryonics
hiring a public relations team professionally to repair the image of cryonics
research to improve viability and reduce dehydration
empirical validation through scanning the connectome

Contributions can be made to:

1Jdn36JUwvJdr3Qiie4aAseFdcoTsND9Qo

(Updated, since the previous address was attached to my personal wallet on an outdated client, which was causing money to be moved out of it by accident. The above is a brainwallet with a reasonably secure passphrase, generated using Blockchain.info.)

Personal Blog

11

New Comment

69 comments, sorted by

top scoring

Click to highlight new comments since: Today at 4:15 PM

[-]gwern12y440

Some things I have in mind if it gets big include: subsidizing cryonics dues for low-income people, covering funding shortfalls for those unable to obtain life insurance, cryonics scholarships to support the development of expertise in neural cryobiology and other areas, and hiring a public relations team to fix the image of cryonics.

My own preference would be to donate to the Brain Preservation prize. Apparently no one has ever actually looked at imaging of how well cryonics procedures preserve brain cells, and the prize is a step towards really evidence-based cryonics. (If Bitcoin gains another order of magnitude or two, it would be even more valuable to see if you could fund a simple experiment like vitrifying & reviving some C. elegans or something to see if they retain learned memories like maze-running.)

[-]lsparrish12y70

Agreed, emphatically, that we need more funding to go for empirical validation of cryonics premises and procedures. However, Aschwin de Wolf has pointed out one reason it is difficult to compare vitrified brains to fixed-embedded, namely dehydration. So I'm somewhat suspicious of the usefulness of the prize at this point in time.

A specific concern for Brain Preservation Technology Prize competitors using cryopreservation is that cryopreserved brains are currently very dehydrated. Due to this dehydration, which typically persists even after cryoprotectant removal, it is not yet clear that cryopreserved brains can be effectively evaluated by the Prize organizers. To be specific, the criterion for success is preservation of the connectome, which requires two things: preservation of synapses and preservation of enough information to infer the pattern of connections between them. Neural cryobiology researchers believe that they can achieve good ultrastructural preservation of the brain but dehydration compactifies the neuropil, reduces space between structures, and makes the tissue so dark in the electron microscope that it is hard to actually observe the synapses. So if a quick scanning method doesn’t discern all synapses that are actually there, it will fail. There are techniques for doing electron microscopy at cryogenic temperatures in the vitrified state, but these depend on the tissue being sliced before vitrification. Making slices out of a whole vitrified brain while vitrified is a tough problem. It is easier to make thin slices out of a whole brain that’s been turned into solid plastic because the resin used is designed for being cut into thin slices for microscopy. So plastination has a natural advantage in this competition — in terms of processing for the tests rather than in actual results.

A non-dehydrated brain is not only more likely to survive by information-theoretic criteria, and to e.g. benefit from ice-blockers, it is easier to scan for evidence of survival. So a high priority should be to achieve reduction in dehydration. An earlier discussion with Mike Darwin had me thinking it was a problem with myelination, but currently I am given to understand (per Aschwin de Wolf and Greg Fahy) that it is primarily a matter of the blood-brain barrier. Aschwin also mentioned that there should be evidence in the literature of what ideas to try next, since this is a problem in conventional drug delivery. Yuri Pichigu has developed an approach to opening the BBB, however 21CM found that it did not increase viability in rabbit brain slices. I'm not sure whether that failure is limited to viability or also extends to the morphological characteristics we are interested in here.

Anyway, dehydration and the blood-brain barrier is high in the search order for the next thing to solve. Without it, vitrification is a bit of a shot in the dark. We can speculate that dehydration is okay as long as it is relatively uniform, but it may not be (and of course isn't, in more poorly perfused patients).

[-][anonymous]12y40

OpenWorm could use some money too: http://www.openworm.org/donate.html

[-]gwern12y100

That's good too, but I think directly measuring the quality of cryonics as it is currently being practiced and people are being cryopreserved right now is more important than speeding up some work that will get done sooner or later.

[-][anonymous]12y20

Agreed. Although BPF has been really quiet for months now, and I'd recommend them more strongly if they posted about their current status.

[-]CronoDAS12y20

That's interesting, but what is their model of a cell like? I assume it's not simulating protein synthesis, for example. There's an awful lot of complexity in even a single-celled organism such as an amoeba that's probably getting swept under the rug here...

[-]gwern9y30

a simple experiment like vitrifying & reviving some C. elegans or something to see if they retain learned memories like maze-running

And it's done! "Persistence of Long-Term Memory in Vitrified and Revived C. elegans", Vita-More & Barranco 2015:

Can memory be retained after cryopreservation? Our research has attempted to answer this long-standing question by using the nematode worm Caenorhabditis elegans (C. elegans), a well-known model organism for biological research that has generated revolutionary findings but has not been tested for memory retention after cryopreservation. Our study’s goal was to test C. elegans’ memory recall after vitrification and reviving. Using a method of sensory imprinting in the young C. elegans we established that learning acquired through olfactory cues shapes the animal’s behavior and the learning is retained at the adult stage after vitrification. Our research method included olfactory imprinting with the chemical benzaldehyde (C6H5CHO) for phase-sense olfactory imprinting at the L1 stage, the fast cooling SafeSpeed method for vitrification at the L2 stage, reviving, and a chemotaxis assay for testing memory retention of learning at the adult stage. Our results in testing memory retention after cryopreservation show that the mechanisms that regulate the odorant imprinting (a form of long-term memory) in C. elegans have not been modified by the process of vitrification or by slow freezing.

[-][anonymous]12y20

Following up on this: I contacted someone at BPF, and they say they have some initial images they will be posting soon.

[-]gwern12y10

Great. Some actual funded work will, even if useless, help BPF's credibility.

[-]Dr_Manhattan12y40

I think the goal is very worthy, and also interested in promoting cryonics. But why tie it to a particular highly speculative currency? I don't have any advantage as a currency trader.

[-]lsparrish12y30

They both fall under the category of a highly underestimated long bets in my mind. Bitcoin's recent rise in value vindicates my earlier speculative feelings and makes me wish I had listened to them more consistently (not selling out my personal stock, e.g.). So I should be more confident associating it with cryonics than I was before.

If you think of them as simple independent variables, success for both cryonics and bitcoin would appear a less probable conjunction than success for either cryonics or bitcoin. However popularity can drive technology and vice versa in both areas. So given that both are early-adopter material at present anyway, it is plausible that they would complement / benefit from association with each other overall.

Another point is that cryonics encourages long-term thinking about end of life / post-death long term trusts for patient care. If we assume the thing that makes it harder to win in bitcoin is the urge to spend too soon, this gives cryonicists a competitive advantage.

[-]lsparrish12y20

I'm interested in sending $485 via paypal in exchange for an equal amount in MTGOX dollars. Anyone who holds bitcoins and wants to cash out a few let me know. I will also accept bitcoins at the going rate. My intention is to assist others in converting their dollars to bitcoins. PM for details.

[This comment is no longer endorsed by its author]Reply

[-]ArisKatsaris12y60

I'd advise caution to everyone if they attempt to combine paypal and bitcoin -- see here

[-][anonymous]12y00

I wonder if paypal considers buying credit with an exchange like mtgox to be problematic, or if they would only complain at attempts to buy bitcoin directly?

[This comment is no longer endorsed by its author]Reply

[-]V_V12y20

As an aside, why did bitcoins undergo such a tremendous deflation? IIUC the system is still supposed to be in the planned inflation phase.

[-]John_Maxwell12y130

As far as I can tell, the recent rise in Bitcoin prices is overwhelmingly due to speculation, and is probably a repeat of the 2011 bubble on a larger scale. If you google "bitcoin bubble", there's lots of info on this.

I'm not a quant, but if you're holding bitcoins, I'd recommend selling off half of them and then rebalancing (keeping the value of your MtGox account 50% bitcoins and 50% dollars) going forward, which basically allows you to make money off of volatility in Bitcoin (while also having the potentially useful side effect of stabilizing its price and making it more viable as an alternative currency). (You can read about the theory behind rebalancing here.)

[-]gwern12y290

As far as I can tell, the recent rise in Bitcoin prices is overwhelmingly due to speculation, and is probably a repeat of the 2011 bubble on a larger scale.

What drivers do we have? Well, there's:

almost 2 years of growth baked in, so any bubble ought to be able to peak well beyond the 2011 bubble. People scoff and claim Silk Road makes up the bulk of the Bitcoin economy, but if this were ever true, it stopped being true a long time ago. There are many little businesses, and some big ones and infrastructure like BitStore or BitPay.
Many of the catastrophic Bitcoin failure modes have ceased to materialize:
- exchange hacks have been few
- there have been no fundamental breaks in the protocol or algorithms involved,
- there has been close to zero government actions anywhere; the one I can think of, the recent US regulations released, was surprisingly moderate and very far from Moldbug's predicted wave of indictments going out worldwide.
- SatoshiDice continues spamming the blockchain, but it is still functioning.
- The temporary blockchain fork recently did not lead to any lasting consequences or serious loss of confidence.
- The deflationary spiral doesn't seem to have materialized, with people still buying stuff even with this recent price spike.
- Heck, even Silk Road is still ticking along with nothing in that entire period happening to it worse than some big scammers abusing out-of-escrow transactions, downtime due to traffic, a very limited SQL injection attack, and a possible leak of its IP address spotted by a friendly user.
The world economic situation doesn't seem especially improved; the US continues to slide along, China has not collapsed but it hasn't resumed high growth either, the Greek mess is just as messy as before, Spain is in a world of pain, and the Cyprus confiscations just destroyed the faith of any European depositors that they will be treated well (on top of existing concerns). Some of the responses to Cyprus I've read, like a translated Der Spiegel column, strike me as almost hysterical. There are a great many Europeans, and I do not think the impact is trivial on the marginal European Bitcoin buyer.
There is substantial spread outside the Anglosphere; Zooko has been commenting about the apparent Chinese uptake, and as is legally mandated whenever China comes up, I must point out that there's over a billion Chinese and my understanding is that the Chinese are generally being screwed over badly when they hold renminbi in savings accounts, with negative real rates.
the Bitcoin market cap is still very small compared to many of its plausible roles
real markets can sustainably spike, and it is not an infallible sign of a bubble. One of the arguments long since made in favor of buying and holding stocks, and not attempting to time the market, is that the bulk of your stock market gains over the 20th century comes from the spikes on just a handful of days; I've seen as few as 10 days cited as giving the lion's share of appreciation. (I wonder if this were predictable just from EMH? If all spikes failed to hold, that seems like an easy money-making algorithm: any time there's a spike, short it.)

More generally, if Bitcoin were the Real Deal, we would expect large price increases as people learn of it and it directly gains value from increased use, an ecosystem slowly unlocking the fancy cryptographic features of it like all the kinds of smart contracts it enables, etc. This is the same problem as startups: how do you tell Pets.com from Facebook? In retrospect, one is a fool's bet and the other a genius investment, but we all know how much retrospective assessments are - and ultimately, in 2013, Amazon.com sells plenty of dog food, with 26k hits for "dog food".

[-][anonymous]12y140

You should EXPECT massive booms and crashes as a new currency with a fixed rate of expansion grows in use (or in speculation-attractiveness) faster than its supply does.

[-]John_Maxwell12y70

now that it's ~$233

I don't think bitcoin is a bad long-term investment. Maybe not even at the current price, for 1% of your portfolio or whatever. But I do think the recent rise has been overwhelmingly speculation-driven, and a panic is pretty likely. I think Bitcoin's price as a commodity isn't necessarily related to its use as a currency, either. The more volatility in bitcoin, the more merchants (like reddit) will convert out of bitcoin after completing a transaction. We can do this kind of fundamental analysis all we want, but realistically I think speculation has been and will be the overwhelming factor affecting bitcoin prices... and speculation is random and hard to predict, hence the rebalancing recommendation. (Has there been any investigation in to bitcoin transaction volume by speculators vs real usage?)

But it sounds like you're a lot more informed on this issue than I am. I'm also sick right now and therefore less intelligent than usual :P

[-]A1987dM12y70

but I also think it's likely to lose 50% of its value or more at some point in the next 12 months.

$133 as of now. (Bitcoincharts.com is down, but I think I saw it at around $260 this morning.)

[-]satt12y40

Mt.Gox is giving a high of $266 and a low of $105 right now, so in that sense it's lost ≥50% of its value already. But that's exaggerated by cherrypicking the high & the low, and the exchange rate's hovering around $170 now. We'll have to wait and see whether it returns below $130ish and stays there.

[-][anonymous]12y00

It collapsed again during the time it freakin' took me to get back home from university, during which I had 0.42 bitcoins on bitcoin-24.com (I'm not crazy enough to play with more money than that), but now it's back up. (Mt. Gox seem to be down at the moment and I don't dare imagine what happens when it's back; I'm selling some of my bitcoins in case they collapse, but not all of them in case they skyrocket again.)

[This comment is no longer endorsed by its author]Reply

[-]gwern12y30

So maybe the bubble is still growing... I don't see how that should make you reconsider much.

The longer a 'bubble' goes on without popping, the less it looks like a bubble and the more like a permanent price increase.

(Has there been any investigation in to bitcoin transaction volume by speculators vs real usage?)

The only one I can think of is the Shamir blockchain paper, which since it's using the blockchain, is a rather naive and guaranteed-to-be-wrong approach.

[-]David_Gerard12y80

cough

[-]gwern12y80

Ah, the nay-saying begins. "Oh no, it's only up 5x over the last month and not 10x!" Remember that the predictions I was talking about blowing were that it would peak in the $30s or $40s; I and and anyone like me was wrong, still are wrong, a fall to 'just' $100 does not make me feel much better about having blown them, and I will still have learned that there are enough people willing to buy into Bitcoin for any reason that its exchange rate can be pushed all the way to $260.

More generally, just as a large price increase does not prove that Bitcoin will ultimately not be a bubble and will go to $100k, a large price decrease does not prove that Bitcoin will ultimately be a bubble and go to $0. We of all people should know to not apply double standards and hindsight bias.

[-]gwern12y60

Heh, apparently I have absorbed Sumner's thinking to the extent that I almost wrote his post for him:

When the bitcoin price crash comes, most people will wrongly say; “Aha, I told you that it was a bubble.” But why? Because they will have forgotten about their first bubble prediction. People were calling it a bubble at $2, and again at $30. Now it’s over $200. If it plunged to $35 dollars, the bubble predictors will say they were right all along, but they will have been wrong. They’ve merely remembered their bubble predictions, not where bitcoin was when they made their predictions. [Ha! I wrote this yesterday and delayed posting--that'll teach me. It's $160 tonight]

...I can’t predict where bitcoin is going, but I can predict there will be many false “bubble” claims when it eventually crashes—and it will crash. The only question is whether it will crash from a price so far above the current price, that it’s still a good buy at $160. And the EMH says that the answer to that question is; “God only knows.”

[-]wedrifid12y50

slowly unlocking the fancy cryptographic features of it like all the kinds of smart contracts it enables, etc.

What kind of smart contracts does it enable?

[-]gwern12y60

The single best resource seems to be https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Contracts but it only covers a fraction of the possibilities; for example, I corresponded with Hearn about timestamping for time-lock crypto but that hasn't been added.

[-]wedrifid12y30

The single best resource seems to be https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Contracts but it only covers a fraction of the possibilities; for example, I corresponded with Hearn about timestamping for time-lock crypto but that hasn't been added.

Excellent! I had no idea the bitchain included all those extra fields. So much potential!

[-]gwern12y30

Yeah; people don't realize how Bitcoin can do so much. It's not (just) sending some irreversible transactions around, as useful as it is to replace Paypal/WU. It's like every financial cryptographic construct ever got mashed up in an academic paper, except it's not a paper, it's a real system in use worldwide and the constructs can be actually used by real people for real things. Of course none of them are easy to use, many aren't even enabled - but I think the situation is like the early Linux kernel: it's a rare geek who understands why you would want to hack on a kernel, a rarer techie who can compile kernels and mess with kernel settings, and an even rarer techie who can write a kernel module to do something, but the potential and power are there.

[-]wedrifid12y30

Of course none of them are easy to use, many aren't even enabled - but I think the situation is like the early Linux kernel: it's a rare geek who understands why you would want to hack on a kernel, a rarer techie who can compile kernels and mess with kernel settings, and an even rarer techie who can write a kernel module to do something, but the potential and power are there.

You have just created "a rare geek who understands why you would want to hack on a kernel". These features are screaming out to be used and may facilitate some of the projects that I have in mind (including some plans for small-scale crowdfunded research).

Do you have any other resources on bitcoin to recommend? In particular I a resource that lists definitively which features are enabled and ready to use in current clients? (I hate accidentally building or planning things that rely on features not yet in the mainstream software. It feels like crippling myself when I try to backport.)

[-]gwern12y60

Do you have any other resources on bitcoin to recommend? In particular I a resource that lists definitively which features are enabled and ready to use in current clients?

No idea. I have a vague understanding that colored coins are a work in progress and may be added at some point in 2013, but I've never seen anyone lay out a list of the scripting language elements with the enabled and disabled ones specified. Since this is such an obscure area of Bitcoin, you probably will have to read the source to find out.

[-]wedrifid12y80

Since this is such an obscure area of Bitcoin, you probably will have to read the source to find out.

Time for me to do an expected value calculation. Is it worth becoming an expert on bitcoin? Not at all implausible. Apart from the intrinsic value of personal interest there seem to be things that the world needs that bitcoin could help with (an actual prediction market that doesn't suck for example). Some things that the world needs it is possible to create ways to be paid for doing. It aligns well with my aptitudes.

A very tempting rabbit hole to jump down.

[-]RomeoStevens12y60

a distributed prediction market and distributed exchange with built in escrow would do wonders for making bitcoin an attractive financial instrument.

[-]hg0012y50

Creating a bitcoin prediction market is a great idea.

One thing I've been wondering recently is why more people don't create Bitcoin alternatives. Many of the alternatives that already exist have ridiculously high market capitalizations, with what appears to be minimal marketing and almost zero rationale for their existence. If you could create an alternative that had "baked in" solutions to some of the problems people complain about re: long-term adoption of bitcoin (limited divisibility, difficulty of transferring in/out of USD, volatility (somehow fix this? e.g. if the protocol was somehow robust to high-frequency trading, perhaps that would deal with volatility as HFT people traded using volatility pumping strategies), performance problems as the network grows large, general awkwardness of waiting for confirmations and stuff), or had some kind of killer app that bitcoin didn't have, and then put an actual marketing push behind all this (and bribe the existing exchanges to accept it or find a way to piggyback on the existing bitcoin infrastructure), it seems like it could be a great way to make money.

[-]wedrifid12y60

Creating a bitcoin prediction market is a great idea.

I'm considering seriously. In the last several days I've analyzed the technology already in widespread, looked at the possibilities and explored the limits. The potential is huge. Cryptography is like wizardry that works in the real (abstract) world!

One thing I've been wondering recently is why more people don't create Bitcoin alternatives.

The main not-ridiculously-pointless alternative on the horizon is ripple, which has a different focus to bitcoin. If they have marketing awesomeness behind them they could get people to play their game. (Low probability, high reward for them.)

An awesome cryptographic feature of the bitchain mining system is that new bitchains can be mined using the same computational resources that bitcoin miners use for negligible extra effort. ie. Instead of creating lottery tickets and entering them in one lottery they can create lottery tickets and enter the same ticket in 20 different lotteries. This drastically lowers (but doesn't remove) the difficulty in getting alternate bitchains to be secure.

If you could create an alternative that had "baked in" solutions to some of the problems people complain about re: long-term adoption of bitcoin (limited divisibility

Is this a significant problem? 1 satoshi (the minimum division) is 0.000 000 01 BTC. That's... not very much. And from one I understand changing the system such that it could allow lower divisions would be plausible if it became necessary. (ie. It is the kind of change that could easily be implemented and adopted by a supermajority of computing power of the miners and thereby become "distributed official".)

, difficulty of transferring in/out of USD

The 'ripple' currency system has dreams of solving this via webs of (limited) trust and social networks. If this were solved in the ripple network it would also incidentally solve it in any currency that is significantly used.

, volatility (somehow fix this? e.g. if the protocol was somehow robust to high-frequency trading, perhaps that would deal with volatility as HFT people traded using volatility pumping strategies),

This volitilty can be solved within bitcoin itself via the adoption of "coloured coins". Essentially, this means credible institutions can issue "MyBankUSDcoins" for example, with coins with a certain history being declared redeemable at a specified rate via whatever banking mechanism that kind of company does. Similarly pecunix could offer "Pecunix coins" which it backs with gold (its normal business model). Then transactions can be made in gold, or USD, or AUD via the same technology (and distributed security structure) that bitcoin uses.

The above is possible right now. It requires no change to the bitcoin (mining server side) software. It is just a matter of people with sufficient social influence potential making it happen and customers (including merchants) being convinced that they want it.

performance problems as the network grows large, general awkwardness of waiting for confirmations and stuff)

Yes, systems without the awkwardness would have an advantage.

[-]John_Maxwell12y00

Has anyone tried to solve the marketing issue by giving their coin a referral system similar to what Paypal had in the early days? I'm not 100% sure about this, but I think maybe the way it worked was if you referred your friend to Paypal, you would get $x and your friend would get $x. Supposedly this was a big reason why Paypal beat out competing services in its early days, 'cause people had this monetary incentive to spread it. (I have an acquaintance who worked for a startup that competed with Paypal and lost; I could probably get in contact with him if anyone has any questions.)

[-]hg0012y00

This volitilty can be solved within bitcoin itself via the adoption of "coloured coins". Essentially, this means credible institutions can issue "MyBankUSDcoins" for example, with coins with a certain history being declared redeemable at a specified rate via whatever banking mechanism that kind of company does. Similarly pecunix could offer "Pecunix coins" which it backs with gold (its normal business model). Then transactions can be made in gold, or USD, or AUD via the same technology (and distributed security structure) that bitcoin uses.

Hm. Sounds like colored coins have all the advantages of Bitcoin, plus lack of volatility. So if they existed then would we ditch regular Bitcoins for them? How much software would need to be changed in order to implement colored coins?

Ultimately, I suspect that Bitcoin is a product that no one really wants that bad, and ultimately the interest in them is mostly from speculation... if there's any interest in using them as an actual currency, it's liable to be faked interest from people who have large bitcoin balances and would profit if that happened.

[-]Eugine_Nier12y00

Ultimately, I suspect that Bitcoin is a product that no one really wants that bad

Well there was a lot of interest in Bitcoins in southern Europe following the Cyprus, bank account confiscations. Basically, if people are treating putting money into Bitcoins as an alternative to putting it in banks.

[-]wedrifid12y00

Hm. Sounds like colored coins have all the advantages of Bitcoin, plus lack of volatility.

Alas no. They have most of the advantages of bitcoin since they are still bitcoin in full. However, whatever additional value the 'color' grants to the coin over the base worth os a BTC is based on trust in a specific agent. They are nothing more than a promise from a supplier to redeem the coins into another form of value at some time in the future. It is a trade off. Convenience and stability purchased by requiring trust.

So if they existed then would we ditch regular Bitcoins for them?

The regular coins are still what are required to produce coloured coins (the name is really good analogy). Coloured coins being used more would seem to lower the expected price of uncoloured bitcoin, but they couldn't make uncouloured coins worthless since they themselves entail a demand for them.

How much software would need to be changed in order to implement colored coins?

It would mean taking the existing 'beta' implementations, making them stable and having people start to use them. Merchants accepting them automatically (and being able to tell they are worth more than uncouloured coins) would also require making improvements to whatever software it is that they use now.

[-]gwern12y00

An awesome cryptographic feature of the bitchain mining system is that new bitchains can be mined using the same computational resources that bitcoin miners use for negligible extra effort. ie. Instead of creating lottery tickets and entering them in one lottery they can create lottery tickets and enter the same ticket in 20 different lotteries. This drastically lowers (but doesn't remove) the difficulty in getting alternate bitchains to be secure.

I thought merged mining only worked for Bitcoin+Namecoin? I was looking into mining Bitcoin and Litecoin simultaneously, but it looked like it simply wouldn't work with cgminer and in general.

[-]wedrifid12y40

I thought merged mining only worked for Bitcoin+Namecoin? I was looking into mining Bitcoin and Litecoin simultaneously, but it looked like it simply wouldn't work with cgminer and in general.

Merged mining requires a small change to the bitchain of all but one of the currencies. So you can merge mine bitcoin + 20 merge mining enabled currencies OR you can merge mine litecoin + 20 merge mining enabled currencies.

Currencies that can currently be merge mined with BTC (and that I am aware of):

NameCoin --- Store aliases and soforth conveniently. Is complementary to bitcoin for some use-cases.
DevCoin --- (Roughly speaking) a charity for funding opensource developers.
TonalCoin --- Which somehow is also embedded in the bitcoin blockchain and allows bitcoins to be traded using a different number system.
IxCoin --- Utterly pointless attempt to cash in on crypto speculation.

[-]wedrifid12y60

No idea. I have a vague understanding that colored coins are a work in progress and may be added at some point in 2013

I have been looking into the protocol for how this works. It doesn't require anything additional to be added (to the bitcoin daemon). To be practical it does require that clients are made that process them conveniently, this is what is the work in progress and does seem to be at the 'usable in a stable form some time this year' point.

The above distinction matters to me because it influence whether it is something I can just use if I find customers who want it and I am willing to do some coding to facilitate it versus features that require creation of a Bitcoin Improvement Proposal then the politically influence of a miners to start adopting it. For example zerocoin (the solution to anonymity and privacy) would require huge political advocacy to get into play in the existing bitcoin currency.

but I've never seen anyone lay out a list of the scripting language elements with the enabled and disabled ones specified.

Indeed, my research has failed to turn up such a document too. The information that is out there is also significantly out of date unless pieced together rather carefully. A summary of the availability of the features that are of interest. I am reasonably confident in these findings but not certain. (90% confidence.)

Timelocked transactions: The protocol (and actually in use bitchain) supports it but miners will nearly always reject transactions with future dates. This seems stupid to me but there doesn't seem to be any strong pressure to start accepting them. It is still possible to create such transactions and store them until the time is up then send them in. This solves some timelock usecases but the possibility of double spending prevents it solving many other use cases.
Multisignature transactions. ie. Escrow. Transactions that require n of m signatures in order to spend the output. These work. Technically. You can create them manually via the command line, send them to the blockchain and then use the command line and use of or access to someone who will cooperate with n of m signatures to create transactions that spend them. But current clients don't do this for you (except in the crippled case whereby if you have m of m keys in your wallet it will deign to let you spend them.) But this feature is there to be used if you want it.
Zero Knowledge Proofs eg. Zerocoins. Reliable privacy and anonymity right there within bitcoin. The research and cryptographic technology is available. As are proof of concept reference implementations. But this system (or an equivalent or superior one) isn't accepted and likely will not be for at least several years. An alternate currency could do it today.

Since this is such an obscure area of Bitcoin, you probably will have to read the source to find out.

Done. Now I'll have to read the source even more to work out how to make clients that use the (available) features to serve my purposes.

[-]gwern12y00

Well, good luck. I don't know a lick of C++ or real crypto coding, so as interesting as I find it all to read and watch and write essays about, don't expect any help from me. I hope you succeed in getting some of the features in more general use.

But this system (or an equivalent or superior one) isn't accepted and likely will not be for at least several years. An alternate currency could do it today.

But also risks there being some minor problem with the unpublished Zerocoin proposal which de-anonymizes everyone who ever uses the functionality. Since laundries/mixes currently seem to be working pretty well, it's better to be conservative and get it right, than push for it to be implemented right now and in 2 years, watch every transaction be de-anonymized.

[-]wedrifid12y10

Yeah; people don't realize how Bitcoin can do so much. It's not (just) sending some irreversible transactions around, as useful as it is to replace Paypal/WU.

On a related note do you have any thoughts on ripple? It seems to offer huge potential convenience if 'distributed payment processing', which could work well to enable bitcoin to be easily spent and traded. From what I can tell their business model is based on making an essentially free, incredibly convenient service and if it takes off it will produce value in their own currency of which they will (allegedly) be distributing 80% for free. I don't precisely understand how it magically operates as a distributed currency exchange and payment processor but it seems plausible (if enough people want it).

[-]gwern12y40

Reading about it right now, I would analogize it to an automated barter system, the hawala money transmission system, pre-modern banking's system of drafts and correspondents like the Medici Bank, and Szabo's bitgold minting.

If I'm understanding the wiki documentation right, you can basically think of Ripple as a Bitcoin in which everyone can issue as many bitcoins as they want but each user produces a different kind of bitcoin. The only reason anyone is willing to hold a wedrifid-coin is because they know you in real life and expect you to pay up, or the reason someone is willing to hold gwern-coins is because I have in the past upheld my agreements to, say, order something off Amazon.com for them. I might decide to accept wedrifid-coins and now the wedrifid-coin holders have the option to either shake you down in real life or buy something off Amazon via me; and if someone else decided to accept gwern-coins, a holder of wedrifid-coins could convert to gwern-coins and then convert to someoneelse-coins.... Automated barter of personal IOUs, almost - like those circles you hear of involving scores of people in which A gives something to B, B gives something to C, and so on to Z who gives A what A really wanted (most famously used in kidney transplants; I need a transplant, but my brother is not compatible with me, so he gives his kidney to B, and B's son gives a kidney to C, and C's father gives me a compatible kidney).

Since you're deciding whose coins to accept directly or transitively, Ripple seems to pass the security buck to your decision there. This obviously makes Ripple's job much much easier. Since you'll be deciding basically on social or extra-network factors, Ripple also doesn't bother with any worries about anonymity. (Their list of features re mining, if I'm understanding the architecture right, less than impressive in this light.)

There's also a centralized aspect which is nasty and probably part of how they plan to monetize it.

So yeah, interesting. I don't feel compelled to trade in my one bitcoin for any Ripple stuff, though.

I don't precisely understand how it magically operates as a distributed currency exchange and payment processor but it seems plausible (if enough people want it).

I think it operates pretty much the same way a PGP web of trust operates. You specify a few public keys who you trust, and you can bootstrap from there.

[-]wedrifid12y00

If I'm understanding the wiki documentation right, you can basically think of Ripple as a Bitcoin in which everyone can issue as many bitcoins as they want but each user produces a different kind of bitcoin.

So (I assume) the way it can operate as a distributed currency exchange is if there is someone with Yen out there and someone with USD out there and either Yen-guy or USD-guy trust each other directly or their is a web of trust between them. So RandomJoe can sell Yen-guy coins for stuff and buy USD-coins then USD guy will give actual cash to him.

[-]gwern12y00

Yes, I think that's how it could go down. Or Yen-guy and USD-guy could exchange currency directly, or they could do it hawala-style indirectly (for example: Yen-guy could hand out yen to anyone wandering into his Tokyo shop with USD-guy coins, and then USD-guy, to settle his bills with Yen-guy, can fly in and visit Yen-guy with a case of wine which Yen-guy can drink or sell).

[-]lsparrish12y00

I wonder if a form of coin-locking could be used to create simulated versions of other currencies. Depending on the demand and level of trust in the given currency, a given bitcoin sum could be locked in such a way that it gets automatically distributed to all holders at some future point (if they don't choose to hold onto the simulated currency instead) in proportion to how much they have. The choice to hold or drop the simulated currency would be a way of measuring its value against the bitcoin.

[-]wedrifid12y00

I wonder if a form of coin-locking could be used to create simulated versions of other currencies. Depending on the demand and level of trust in the given currency, a given bitcoin sum could be locked in such a way that it gets automatically distributed to all holders at some future point (if they don't choose to hold onto the simulated currency instead) in proportion to how much they have. The choice to hold or drop the simulated currency would be a way of measuring its value against the bitcoin.

I can think of various ways to facilitate this using the techniques I am considering (or considered and discarded) for the creation of a distributed prediction market. The details of the precise implementation would depend on precisely what your goal was. I can't fully determine what you are aiming at from what you have said so far? More detail? A use case?

[-]lsparrish12y00

What I have in mind is something a little bit like the zerocoin proposal, in the respect that it's an alternate coin which can be translated to Bitcoin and back as part of how the system works.

But instead of being fixed with respect to the bitcoin it would increase or decrease in relative value in response to market signals. There would be an exchange rate determined by dividing the number of spendable units of alternate currency against the number of bitcoins locked behind it.

So what you need is a series of rules for controlling that number that tend towards economic stability. Which is itself kind of tricky. I had thought locking the coins by a time-lock could do it, but I haven't thought of a way to base an exchange rate on that. Empirical work with simulator or a smart math person with a whiteboard might turn up something.

The following uses incentives to accomplish something similar-in-principle:

Alice creates 100 dollarcoins at a cost of 1 bitcoin. She transfers 1 to Bob, he can turn it into 0.01 bitcoin.
The dollarcoin has a specification that includes things like interest payments. If Bob waits 30 days after receiving a dollarcoin he gets 1% of its nominal bitcoin value in interest. He gets another 1% payment 30 days later, and so forth. But if he spends it right away or converts it to bitcoin there are no payments.
Claire decides to use the dollarcoin specification to mint some dollarcoins. She has to pay a 1% minting fee, so 1.01 bitcoins to make 100 dollarcoins. The backing rate becomes 200 dollarcoins to 2.01 bitcoins.

Thus the more dollarcoins get minted the more valuable/highly backed they are, initially. If people spend them quickly, or convert them to bitcoin quickly without collecting interest, they continue to grow in bitcoin value. On the other hand if people hold onto them over time, they become less valuable as the savers get paid for keeping them.

Criticisms: It's complicated, and the numbers for interest rates and minting fees are pulled out of thin air. Presumably there's some range that works well, and could be tested by implementing multiple currency specifications side by side.

[-]RomeoStevens12y40

Most mined coins never hit the open market. Many miners are only recouping equipment and electricity costs and holding the rest.

The market is still very thin, though thickening a bit in the last couple weeks.

[-]gwern12y80

Most mined coins never hit the open market. Many miners are only recouping equipment and electricity costs and holding the rest.

This is not an explanation; bitcoins are fungible. Everything except transaction volume would look identical if all the miners sold off every coin they made and instead a different group bought up all those coins; you need to explain why there are so many people willing to hold bitcoins. Whether those people going long on Bitcoin happen to have mining rigs or not is irrelevant.

[-]RomeoStevens12y40

you need to explain why there are so many people willing to hold bitcoins.

Gresham etc. If you could magically email gold securely tomorrow I would expect a frenzy of buying that as well.

[-]gwern12y30

Gresham etc.

Gresham's law is for when people are required to accept the 'bad' and 'good' money equally; then people will hoard the good money and transact exclusively in bad. When the coercive requirement is not satisfied, one ought to expect good money to drive out bad, or else they will float related to the risk, ease of acquiring it, etc. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gresham%27s_law#Reverse_of_Gresham.27s_Law_.28Thiers.27_Law.29

(And if people are worried about the euro, they can hold other currencies like the deflating yen; if they are worried about dollars, they can hold euros etc)

[-]V_V12y00

Looks like a deflationary spiral

[-]Slackson12y100

Not the right term for what's happening. Deflationary spiral refers to low demand reducing prices, which reduces production, which reduces the employment rate/average wage, which reduces demand. The bitcoin economy is not large enough for this to be the case. Rather, it appears to be a speculative bubble, where people predict the price will go up, so more people buy it, and so the price goes up, etc. Then enough people at once go "this is as far as the train's going" and everybody panics and tries to sell and the price crashes.

Since bitcoin is a currency experiencing deflation due to a cyclic process, "deflationary spiral" would sort of make sense if it didn't already refer to another specific phenomenon.

[-]gwern12y90

My fellow Americans. As a young boy, I dreamed of being a baseball. But tonight I say, we must move forward, not backward; upward, not forward; and always twirling, twirling, twirling towards freedom!

[-]lsparrish12y00

Even if the value of investing in bitcoin has been underestimated in the past, it doesn't follow that the value of cryonics has been underestimated.

Not what I was trying to get at, sorry for the confusion. My aim is to boost cryonics reputation, and my concern was that e.g. associating it with bitcoin could harm it if bitcoin becomes devalued. (Actually a fairly minor concern, since cryonics already has a lot of early-adopter types.)

Why should we assume that?

Learning from experience. I had 400 bitcoins at one time. Had I held them, they would be worth $40k at $100 each today. This is roughly what I would have predicted at the time, too. I let short-term fluctuations ruin my confidence despite knowing the technology was good.

Beware of the hindsight fallacy.

Yeah. But I have to update based on evidence.

Beware of the conjunction fallacy.

Success of cryonics and success of bitcoin aren't necessarily independent variables. Holding some bitcoins for cryonics could boost the chance of e.g. having assets needed for cryonics research, or having the ability to get people signed up to take advantage of cryonics.

[-]Kawoomba12y-10

Why is this topic constantly on top?

[-]David_Gerard12y10

Does the code automatically put an article to the top when it's edited after saving? Might want to fix that.

(I'd expect something like: set its date in the timeline at the moment it goes from "draft" to "published". Not sure what would be a senslble way to handle putting it back from "published" to "draft"; possibly just ignore that case, and allow the social process to deal appropriately per case with posts that have been bumped. I'm assuming lsparrish was just intending to add a note to the top of the article, not specifically to bump it to the top.)

[-]A1987dM12y20

I think there's the reverse problem with comments: occasionally, I will reply to my own comments instead of editing them because I'm afraid that, since edited comment aren't moved back to the top of New Comments, no-one will read the edit.

There should be a “minor edit” checkbox (for both articles and comments), so that if I'm just tweaking the grammar I can check it and the post stays where it is, and if I'm adding new content I can uncheck it and the post goes back to the top.

[-]lsparrish12y20

Good point. I am thinking the problem stems from Discussion becoming oversaturated -- they move out of New Comments too quickly. Splitting into multiple groups focused on a general topic-area could perhaps alleviate the pressure to make sure that first comment counts / make more comments than needed.

[-]lsparrish12y00

Currently the code puts a post back to the top when it is moved from "draft" to "published". AFAICT there is no way to republish a post that has been moved to draft without bumping it to the top.

The bump was semi-intentional (there were substantial edits for clarity and brevity which the draft stage let me preview, but also I wanted to see more discussion), and happened a total of two times over the past week. "Constantly on top" is a slight exaggeration on Kawoomba's part, as it was not on the recent posts lists for a while yesterday and also was in my drafts for some time thereafter while I made changes. As a long time member, I'm used to seeing posts be visible in discussion for this amount of time. This post is intended to eventually end up in Main, if I work up the confidence for it.

[-]David_Gerard12y20

Right. It's getting obnoxious, please don't do that.

[-]lsparrish12y00

Right. It's getting obnoxious, please don't do that.

Is there some particular harm in bumping posts with substantial edits? Or are you trying to criticize my particular edits as not worthy of the bump?

Edit: Regardless of he reason, sincere apologies to anyone who was annoyed. I do understand the need to keep obnoxious behaviors low because this interferes with the participation fun level for the whole community.

[-]Emile12y20

Is there some particular harm in bumping posts with substantial edits?

A rule like "don't exploit a bug to bump your own posts, period" is much easier to enforce than if you allow exceptions for a fuzzy category of posts with "substantial edits" - posters might be tempted to use that to attract extra attention, or suspect others of doing that.

More specifically, the "landscape" is already moving enough with back-and-forths between main and discussion, and people renaming their posts; if people start bumping their posts up keeping track of what I read and where there is interesting conversation will be even more of a hassle.

[-]lsparrish12y00

That makes sense, and also matches my prior intuitions as to what it might be. Thank you.

I think part of the problem is that I was operating on a mindset of a smaller / lower traffic group where this kind of promotion is has a relatively minor effect and less power to annoy others (as opposed to drawing them into a conversation that they might actually like).

In a larger userbase like we're currently seeing for Discussion, ensuring fun for all participants is more dependent on these kinds of self-filtering rules/norms being followed more strictly. I've commented in open thread expressing a desire for more subreddits, and will be more careful in Discussion.

[-][anonymous]12y00

The post's submission date now say today (April 14th). Maybe the author has been editing the post that increased the post's rank.

[This comment is no longer endorsed by its author]Reply

Moderation Log

69Comments