The Great Bitcoin Train Wreck of 2018

in #bitcoin7 years ago (edited)

I'm talking about the Bitcoin Industry, not Bitcoin. Actually, I'm mostly talking about Ethereum and the End of Mining. Friday after midnight EST that's exactly what I'll be discussing on Coast to Coast with Connie Willis.

Wait, what? Who said anything about a Bitcoin Industry Train Wreck?

You heard it here first.

You see, hundreds of cool applications are currently being developed using popular blockchains like Bitcoin and Ethereum without having given any consideration to their ability to handle the load. I talk to executives of these companies all the time where they proudly boast how their applications are going to "convert their millions of existing users over to digital currencies the first month of operation." I ask them, "Um, how many transactions per second do you expect to handle at your site?" They say, "Oh, hundreds! maybe thousands! We're the biggest site of our kind, don't you know?"

Train Wreck.

I politely ask, "Um, how many transactions per second will your chosen blockchain handle?" Their smile fades a bit and they ask, "What do you mean?" Then I show them the second row this chart:

"Guys, your awesome new service has to share less than 30 transactions per second (TPS) with all the world's other traffic on that blockchain including hundreds of other applications just like yours coming on line early next year. Haven't you been paying attention to how it already slows down to a crawl every time a big ICO launches?"

They turn to their tech guru and ask, "Is that true?" That's when the guru turns pale.

The Great Bitcoin Train Wreck of 2018.
Coming, to a web site near you.

The trend has already started with smart projects abandoning slow mining-based blockchains because their application needs the performance of real time blockchains like BitShares:

Why Bitspark.io stopped using Bitcoin for Global Remittance and now uses Bitshares

I know of several others planning to switch over who haven't announced yet, but we'll save that for another day.

At Cryptonomex, we are already planning to help scores of companies make the switchover to BitShares without losing too much momentum from their Big Product Launch. It will be a busy spring for us. We are already doing this for several companies we got to just in time before their Big Product Launches go live. Most won't be this lucky.

"Train wrecks, nasty things, make you late for dinner." - Bilbo Baggins


Anyhow, I'll be talking a lot about it on Coast to Coast Radio with Connie Willis this Friday After Midnight EST.

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Coast to Coast AM?

I'm going to be able to say:
"I knew Stan Larimer back when all he had was a few posts on steemit.com"

Same airwaves used by Rush Limbaugh.

I used to stay up most of the night listening to Art Bell on Coast to Coast 20 years ago. It was a big part of what knocked me off of the straight and narrow of the mainstream media! Congratulations Stan!

I actually met Art Bell, years ago... Have a Delicious Thanksgiving Dinner...
@pocketechange

yep!
~bluerocktalk🖖

Haha, a real early bird ;p
Though we're all still very early on here...

Ah man I thought you were going to say "onceuponatime I knew Stan".

I, onceuponatime, knew Stan.

Stan, please tell me this isn’t true. We’re all, (well not you), about to sink as the blockchain fills with sticky gunge and it’ll take days to move a satoshi.

I know bitshares is claimed to be super fast (I’m trading BTS, OPEN.BTC and bitUSD on the Bitshares exchange and it’s true, it’s super fast.

I still don’t understand this bit.currency and open.asset thing. It looks like real money, but for all I know it could be just imagination.

Let us pray....

bit.currency is market pegged asset (MPA) and backed by at least 200% collateral, ie. bitUSD and bitCNY. It is the most honest, trustworthy crypto-money on the planet and several Chinese exchanges are starting to replace Tether with bitAssets like bitUSD and bitCNY (https://www.aex.com/).

open.whatever is a user issued asset (UIA) created by gateways (such as OpenLedger) and is theoretically backed 1:1 by "whatever". So when you deposit 1 BTC via OpenLedger they issue you 1 open.BTC to go trade with on the DEX. This is exactly what Binance, Polo, Bittrex etc. do but Bitshares is honest and transparent about it.

Crypto-bridge (http://crypto-bridge.com/) is creating a decentralized gateway that solves the trust issue with gateways like OpenLedger, Rudex, etc.

"It looks like real money, but for all I know it could be just imagination."
Same can be said for grand dad bitcoin ;-)

Many questions already presented @stan
I think we should learn a lot, and study the important details
But what is the right direction and how do we benefit from this change?

Good one Stan. Love your updates. :)

I love how you said "I think the Earth is round"

I love how you can spread Bitshares by sending people borrowed BitUSD. Getting all my friends onboard for the moonshot.

What exactly do you mean? Why wouldn't you just send Bts? Am I missing something here?

On Bitshares you can keep your principle locked up while you borrow dollars interest-free. Basically I'm spreading Bitshares without having to send from my stash. I send BitUSD so they can try out the exchange, buy BTS, and get a feel for it.

Once EOS takes over 99% of the developers, the 1% remaining will have plenty of space on the Ethereum network ;)

Highly rEsteemed @stan!
And great work on @projectcamelot the other day as well. Enjoy the Holidays 🙏✌️👍👏
SteemON.

veru good post @stan
But one thing i could not understand..there are so many trmendous feature in BTS but why it is so undervalued.....

in terms of speed of transaction BTS is superfast and still not at par as far as pricing is concerned...

Now, I can't wait to listen to this, most hopefully LIVE!

Thanks a lot for sharing this news and updates with us.

All for one and one for all! Namaste :)

The end of mining will be the end of a wasteful, non-efficient and polluting shady business. I still think DPOS is not the killer ultimate end-all solution, but currently it's the best we have.

Coast to Coast AM is a good place to attract some attention.

Great post, but I hope and expect Ethereum will be able to continue to innovate and develop as they have done so far. Their community is more cohesive so they will not experience BTC's divisive development issues, hopefully.

That is a hope, not an assurance, but I have faith in ETH.

Moreover, we take risks investing in anything, particularly a new field like crypto. Therefore, their are challenges that await this budding industry, scale is certainly a HUGE challenge, but again I have faith.

Lastly, crypto and blockchain tech represent a meaningful improvement over the previous itteration of the internet, and decentralization in my view will revolutionize the internet. Will that take years, yup.

The internet ran on dial-up (40–50 kbit/s), before it ran on fibre optic cable (150 Mbps).

Blockchain transactions per second today, be like:
b2d18704cccece9ba867a33832cdc649f1bb44e00d4b4780077e97115126b96d.jpg

Very good!
Mining based systems are like 300 baud modems.
Real-time blockchains used by BitShares, Steemit and EOS are the fiber optic cables of cryptodom.

Bitcoins developers were cohesive until the transaction volume issue surfaced. And Ethereum has already had a hard fork into 2 currencies so I don’t agree that it’s cohesive!

Yes, too late. Other platforms can already provide the solution.

Ethereum may indeed continue to innovate, but it is already behind in the game. There are a number of other competing smart contract platforms that can out perform it for transaction time and scaling. By the time Ethereum gets up to speed, these others will have launched. I would not hold my breath for Ethereum. It like Bitcoin are prototypes. Others have improved upon this.

I know there are many other solutions, but like Bitcoin, Ethereum has in its space a first mover`s advantage that should not be easily discounted.

Being the first to start what it does Bitcoin has risen to $8200, far higher than coins that offer the same peer-to-peer digital cash solution better, like DASH or LTC.

My point is that ETH like BTC will continue to rise in price until the market decides otherwise. The restrictions around its current limitations do not put people off yet because people don`t truly use the product as they hope to one day use it.

Meaning, no one needs the serious transactions per second that are possible elsewhere yet. If the sites and apps that will come someday, come soon, then demand for through-traffic will become a real issue, but not before.

If you build it... and they cant come, because of bottle necking, then, then they will go elsewhere. But for now, this theoretical place that we will want to one day go, and the transaction per second limits on getting there, are not tangible problems, yet.

...yet.

If things move as fast as we in this space hope, then 2018 might bring the issue of scale to a head, and if so this post will be aptly titled. That really would be a train wreck.

I just doubt decentralized internet and Dapps will blow up that quickly. HOPEFULLY you are right and I am wrong. That would mean MASS adoption and huge profits on our investments in platforms like STEEMIT, etc.

Thanks for the conversation. Really enjoy it.

The point of this article is that I've already seen several about-to-launch applications that can exceed ALL of Ethereum's bandwidth by orders of magnitude.

For example, a game app that wants to pay out via cell phone to the fans in a stadium as they interact with action taking place on the field...

Fortunately, we got that one to switch to BitShares just in time.

BitShares. Saving one train wreck victim at a time.

"no one needs the serious transactions per second that are possible elsewhere yet." ???

Did you read the article? Bitspark.io is switching to BTS for that very reason. The whole rise of Bitcoin Cash is because of people's dissatisfaction with transaction times and fees on Bitcoin. We have already arrived at the issue of speed and scaling, in 2017.

2018 will show us who provides the solution as the big players move into the crypto space and onramp mass adoption.

2018 will show us who provides the solution as the big players move into the crypto space and onramp mass adoption.

yup.`:)

Exactly, and ETH wasn't the first mover on any kind of metric, and it is not uniform like you said, just look at recent history of the Ethereum Classic thing.

Created my account in June. Never log back on. Come back today in hopes of good content. Read this post. Glad I came back.

GOOD LUCK BITSHARES ....We Wanna See Your FLIGHT @Stan
()

Bright future for Bitshares. Keep going!!

bitcoin is a famous method to get payment

Fully agree. I'm on the train of promoting Bitshares and eos as a solution...hope the full crypto industry realize on time.

good infomations & dood work friend.

Great work UPVOTED, Help spread the steem take a look at my submission for todays challenge I thought you might enjoy!
https://steemit.com/travel/@adriansky/foggy-adventure-up-mount-tam

hey @stan! Completely agree that there's a trainwreck coming to Bitcoin. Can't build on top of "digital gold". Thanks for sharing my recent interview w/ BitSpark.io CEO.

Good post!

Hopefully scaling these new technologies to the level required to process transactions on a global level is possible. If it isn't, then the issues you bring up are possible. Maybe not in 2018, but certainly in the near future. Awesome show topic!

i think for short time bitcoin cash can be the rival bitcoin buddy
@kupi from aceh like your post

Recent posts I've been seeing on Steemit made me really start to worry about the potential of this platform. Sometimes it's a lot of fake news, other times, it's posts like these that author takes only a small part of the truth and tries to use it to his advantage.

Seriously, everyone in blockchain space knows Ethereum's roadmap when it comes to how to host the huge amount of applications. So many new technologies are going to be introduced, including a slow shift to PoS which is the very thing that BitShares seems to be taking advantage of.

Stan, please share the whole story if you'll claim to give "information", unless of course, this is simply a promotion of your precious BitShares (which I don't know enough about to have a special dislike against).

Please, use this space to tell the world...

Ethereum has a roadmap for having high tps. Bitshares has high tps.

PoS has been out for years, even before ETH. BitShares uses a DPoS technology engineered by Dan Larimer. Similar but not the same, and copying things that work is easy, knowing what will work before hand it is not. Dan is a genius.

Hi @stan this post has been resteemed to 163+ followers by @afm007
Thanks

That chart seems to be missing a pertinent coin...

Yeah, tis better to be on a different platform than btc. just hodl and chill peeps.

get in @stan I'm amazed the cryptonaut police haven't shot you down yet. had me in stitches !

Hopefully the market pushes bitcoin to evolve and return us to the golden age of yore

Poloniex claims they need your help before we can deposit/withdraw. I had to dump my BTS there due to Bittrex dropping BTS and me not understanding the bitshares DEX at the time. Is it true that they need you to do an update before I can withdraw my BTS from them? Any advice on how to deal with them? I am so pissed off with that situation and want only to get onto the BTS DEX ASAP!

No, that's just the message they post every time they are down for some reason. They've come back up on their own three other times this year without help. And they won't even respond to our offers to help. Smoke and mirrors.

Thank you for that information. It gives me hope they will fix it.

Great Post!!! Pow mining is rely outdated. When crypto currencies goes mainstream, speed will be the winner.

Delegated prof of stake (DPOS) is king. Bitshares, Steem and other using it have great Potential!!

We must not forget Monero. It has outstanding code, good scaling ability, variable block size and ultimate anonymity. It is the only real e-cash solution.

@stan can I find you radioshow online outside the US somewhere? I had a big smile while reading this already, looking out for more haha.

People are serioualy underestimating the transaction speeds. For me living in a country with shit internet this combo feels like Im 1-0 behind on every crypto change.

Here's their web site: https://www.coasttocoastam.com/

I'm on their front page right now, egad! Right up there with Hollow Earth Theory.

For the record, I didn't work for NASA, I was a NASA contractor with Lockheed Martin working with the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena and did a little flight testing at Cape Canaveral. Most of my time was spent on desert test ranges making smoking drone craters.

Very cool mister rocket scientist!
Hopefully I will have chance to listen, or find it back on the interwebz after the show afterwise.

I have been adding to my BTS position as I can (along with steem).

This is going to be one of the hotter blockchains over the next three years. The more governments of the world try to crack down on bitcoin via the exchanges, the more likely that others will flee to BTS. At the same time, BTS does not have the scaling problems that BTC and others are trying to work through.

In the end, much will unfold as expected, a great deal unexpected.

Be sure not to have all eggs in one basket...diversify.

And thank you for the warning about the BTC and ETH networks do not necessarily mean the token price....markets have a way of being disconnected from the fundamental basics.

It was a great show. I just got an acount at bitshares.
been listening to coast scince the 90's.

Hey @Stan, thank you for the advise! But I think you got the timeframe wrong lol (it is happening Ron Poal meme hahaha or not?)

@stan it sounds like bitshares and EOS do similar functions, i.e. support blockchain applications. But you also say it would be prudent to run bitshares on EOS. If this is the case, why would a company choose bitshares over EOS to run their dapps?

How do you come to different block times between BTC and BCH ?

Hmmm. I'll ask.