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"I'm pretty certain BSV now has unlimited block size "
That creates its own problem, the larger the Block the more data storage required by miners and nodes. Something else to consider is who Polices the chain? Since placing Immutable images or video on the blockchain, opens up all sorts of possible issues around undeletable illegal content being stored on nodes. If criminals did put illegal content on the Blockchain like certain pornography, if I'm understanding it correctly the only way to remove it would be to introduce a hard fork on the preceding Block, potentially losing all transactions post the illegal content and every node on the Blockchain requiring a resynchronization. There are probably other issues with storing data within an immutable Blockchain (Database/Ledger), one of them being lost tokens due to loss of private keys, which everyone already knows about.
You probably understand this better than I do, so you'll probably be able to put me right on my misunderstandings. Bitcoin has a maximum Block size of 1 Megabyte and apparently using "Taproot" enables Ordinals up to 4MB in size? Since I have no idea how you can fit 4MB into a 1MB block, I assume Taproot allows the data to be linked over multiple Blocks? The data is stored as Satoshi's, identified by a numbering scheme and accessed using a Schnorr signature?
As far as the BTC fans ethos of "Don't shovel unrelated cr4p onto the Blockchain", no doubt Ordinals will result in further disagreement between various groups. BSV clearly lends itself more to Ordinals, due to the much greater Block size, but the community is further splintered when things like Ordinals are introduced. Crypto appears to be a hobby workshop for developers, each with their own ideas on the direction of travel; What use are Ordinals of 4MB in the case of Bitcoin, or potentially 128MB in the case of BSV? They're just feeding the hype machine in my opinion and learning skills developing a flawed concept. The more I look at the technology, the more I'm convinced it has no future.
I watched a good percentage of the video and Jack Pitts is obviously an intelligent guy who believes in what he's saying, but he basically trashes BSV by its association with vanilla BTC.
The Crypto Universe is splintered into factions and they all think their Token will win. if you listen to Raoul Paul he seems to be pumping Ethereum, whereas Jack Pitts hasn't got a good word to say about Proof of Stake, so who do you listen to? Do you listen to any of them? They all have a vested interest, talk their own book, and present good convincing arguments in favour of their preferred Tokens.
In my opinion the whole Crypto industry is built on belief, with success dependent on that belief building into a significant majority base, leading to mainstream wide spread adoption of the Tokens. Since the community is splintered and have their own opinions on the best Token, it stands to reason that a failure of one Token reduces the overall belief in the concept. If you're a true believer and your favoured Token fails, will you jump into a different Token that you'd previously trashed? Especially if you lose money. Even if it looks as though a Token is heading toward mainstream adoption, you then have to contend with the regulatory authorities who could kill it dead.
"Continuing with my BSV"
It's a good video and explains the Bitcoin Hard Forks really well, but it highlights my point that the Bitcoin scarcity hype is a fake narrative. Should Bitcoin become successful, what would stop developers engineering yet another hard fork at 21 million and creating more tokens? And that doesn't change the fact that each Bitcoin is infinitely divisible into smaller tokens, even smaller than Satoshi's. The fact that every man and his dog can create their own tokens, at will, and each Crypto currency can be changed with new hard forks whenever, proves that Crypto has no real value.
There's nothing unique about any Crypto Currency, there are basically two types with one type relying on proof of work and the other relying on proof of stake. The underlying Blockchain technology is useful and no doubt many of the developers will find decent jobs, working for big companies on their private Blockchains, but as a decentralised currency I don't see it.
"Bloody hell fleccy you're loaded"
Not really, just saved hard and invested over the last 30 years.
"If I ever did invest in an AIM type stock, i'd view it as a gamble rather than an investment and it'd involve relatively small sums."
Because of the relatively small sums involved, it wouldn't be worthwhile for me. As an example, I own over 400,000 Lloyds share so a penny move either way is over £4000 loss or gain.
Your risk/reward profile is much higher than mine, I only invest in dividend paying Blue Chips, but I invest a lot relative to the average retail investor. If I ever did invest in an AIM type stock, i'd view it as a gamble rather than an investment and it'd involve relatively small sums.
"Fleccy BSV would appear to be about Blockchain technology with superior scaling which I thought would be something of interest to you."
Looking at their website you'd think they do anything and everything, but I'm sceptical if they could cover everything listed. A lot of what they list is provided by big Telecoms companies, like operating IOT networks, offering Secure networks, Cybersecurity, etc. If BSV can offer services that Telecom providers can't, then they may do well. BSV are listing applications offered by big players and I don't know enough about them to form an opinion
I can't help but think money thrown at Bitcoin and Crypto in general is money down the drain. The only positive, I can see, is that it's training an army of software Engineers who'll no doubt eventually drift into companies requiring their skills for more traditional "TradFi" applications.
I was amazed at the scale of a Core Scientific Mining Farm, demonstrating the amount of money thrown at the industry, the debt pushed Core Scientific into Chapter 11.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=82vMOVREXzM
The Bitcoin price drop, from $66,000, has taken the magic out of Crypto for many, it's unlikely they'll ever again see it in the same light.
Yeah I saw the Marc Allera interview. BT makes up a third of our portfolio and I have high hopes for the stock. BT's a cost saving play imo, rather than a revenue growth stock. Currently BT is building FTTP and 5G, which requires a lot of capex, but the technology behind current transformation will be the last network upgrade for generations. One of the negative narratives aimed at Telecoms companies, is around constant investment cycles, but Fibre to the premises has the capability to handle more bandwidth than customers will ever need, and is cheaper to run and maintain than copper; Add to that, convergence will bring everything together over the access network and everything will be dealt with in the Cloud. BT will need less staff, use less power and require less network equipment diversity, since voice, video and data will all be processed over the same network.
Whatever happens, the Bitcoin difficulty algorithm will restrict valid Blocks to one every 10 minutes, ensuring the time between halving's remains at around 4 years.
Post the next halving, the reward will reduce to 3.125 BTC for every block and the difficulty level will ensure a maximum global daily reward of around 450 BTC, spread across all the miners.
I can see a case where last men standing can reap rewards in the case of a collapse in the BTC price, with the winners possibly being the ones with access to free electricity, but they may struggle to sell their mined coins if a certain tipping point is reached and the market catastrophically collapses, encouraging the Whales to panic sell their tokens.
Bitcoin miners must be struggling, Bitcoin difficulty and electricity prices are weighing on them.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xo0TpVzR6dE
"If there were an alternative to brute force my gut feeling is that Intel would have worked it out by now"
That's my view too, although I have no idea whether ASIC manufacturers supply software, with algorithmic enhancements, to increase the probability of finding a Golden Nonce faster. Intel's latest Bitcoin ASIC is Blockscale:
https://www.intel.co.uk/content/www/uk/en/products/docs/blockchain/custom-asic-product-brief.html
(?)
People were looking at alternative ways to mine Bitcoin as far back as 2013.
"SAT solving - An alternative to brute force bitcoin mining"
https://jheusser.github.io/2013/02/03/satcoin.html
"Conclusion
I introduced a novel algorithm to solve the bitcoin mining problem without using (explicit) brute force. Instead, the nonce search is encoded as a decision problem and solved by a SAT solver in such a way that a satisfiable instance contains a valid nonce. The key ingredients in the algorithm are a non-deterministic nonce and the ability to take advantage of the known structure of a valid hash using assume statements.
A couple of benchmarks demonstrated that already with simple parameter tuning dramatic speed ups can be achieved. Additionally, I explored the contentious claim that the algorithm might get more efficient with increasing bitcoin difficulty. Initial tests showed that block 218430 with considerably higher difficulty is solved more efficiently than the genesis block 0 for a given nonce range."
"The NFT community is moving to BTC, where Ordinals have brought true scarcity to collectibles."
It's all part of the shell game, it started dropping off on Ethereum so they've reinvented interest somewhere else. I suspect enthusiasm for Crypto related assets are on a downward slope, the whole industry will likely struggle to inflate hype bubbles from here. The next two years will be interesting, we'll probably know where this is all going by 2025. I also think the Bitcoin price has been manipulated up to the current levels, in an attempt to stimulate the market, but the Bitcoin interest user pool appears to be drying up too.
Coinbase results may back up what I've said above; Their overall revenue was up, but trading volume and trading revenue were both down.
"Coinbase’s user base continues to shrink. The company said it had 8.3 million monthly transacting users (MTUs) during the fourth quarter, down from 8.5 million the prior period. Analysts were expecting 8.22 million, according to StreetAccount. Trading volume fell 9% to $145 billion from the previous quarter.
Transaction revenue fell 12% to $322 million from the previous quarter, which was below the $327 million consensus among analysts polled by StreetAccount."
https://www.cnbc.com/2023/02/21/coinbase-coin-earnings-q4-2022.html
It's may be that many users have moved off exchanges and keep their Bitcoin in Cold Wallets. Bitcoin needs to show it climb significantly from here, otherwise the speculative non believers may bail en masse.
I just watched the video and the Bitcoin Lightning Network Privacy section he says that Lightning Labs has developed a tool for tracking transaction on the network, but limited to the operators own payment channel; This implies that the network is secure, but that's just wrong in my opinion; The reason I think this is wrong, is because any data transiting a computer isn't secure as Network Packet sniffer software, like Wireshark, can be run to capture every data packet transiting a computer in either direction. Once captured the data can be checked by stepping through the data manually, or running specialised software to decode the different streams. Windows 10/11 has a built in sniffer that can be run from the CMD Prompt using the pktmon filter command. I've never tried pktmon, so I have no idea if it's any good, but if you're interested read this:
https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/microsoft/windows-10-quietly-got-a-built-in-network-sniffer-how-to-use/
I've played with Wireshark in the past and found it to be really good:
https://www.wireshark.org/
My point is, if your data is going through someone else's computer then it isn't safe. A sophisticated hacker would likely find ways around any security/privacy, in the data streams traversing their computer, and who Police's the lightning networks to ensure the data is safe?
Blockchain is gaining popularity, as it's a useful technology, but the success of various Blockchain applications doesn't mean Bitcoin is useful, or that Bitcoin will survive in the long term.
The problem with Bitcoin is that they change the narrative every time the use cases are discredited. Originally Bitcoin was supposed to be a world currency, that was discredited because of its volatility. People like Saylor say its cheap to transact with, but the on-chain transaction times are shaped by the fee's user's are willing to pay; The more you're willing to pay, the faster the transaction is processed by the miners. If I'm understanding Lightning correctly, it's an off chain wallet to wallet network using "Watchtowers" to prevent fraud and isn't without issues. Now they describe Bitcoin as a commodity and other Altcoins as securities, they just make it up as they go along. The only way Bitcoin will succeed, is if the politicians and central banks allow it too and I just don't see that happening.
El Salvador is a small country with an insignificant economy, their Bitcoin experiment will cost them dearly as time goes on, in my opinion.
Apparently there's something called the Extra Nonce solution:
"The Extra Nonce Solution
Since 2012, bitcoin mining has evolved to resolve a fundamental limitation in the structure of the block header. In the early days of bitcoin, a miner could find a block by iterating through the nonce until the resulting hash was equal to or below the target. As difficulty increased, miners often cycled through all 4 billion values of the nonce without finding a block. However, this was easily resolved by updating the block timestamp to account for the elapsed time. Because the timestamp is part of the header, the change would allow miners to iterate through the values of the nonce again with different results. Once mining hardware exceeded 4 GH/sec, however, this approach became increasingly difficult because the nonce values were exhausted in less than a second. As ASIC mining equipment started pushing and then exceeding the TH/sec hash rate, the mining software needed more space for nonce values in order to find valid blocks. The timestamp could be stretched a bit, but moving it too far into the future would cause the block to become invalid. A new source of "change" was needed in the block header. The solution was to use the coinbase transaction as a source of extra nonce values. Because the coinbase script can store between 2 and 100 bytes of data, miners started using that space as extra nonce space, allowing them to explore a much larger range of block header values to find valid blocks. The coinbase transaction is included in the merkle tree, which means that any change in the coinbase script causes the merkle root to change. Eight bytes of extra nonce, plus the 4 bytes of "standard" nonce allow miners to explore a total 296 (8 followed by 28 zeros) possibilities per second without having to modify the timestamp. If, in the future, miners could run through all these possibilities, they could then modify the timestamp. There is also more space in the coinbase script for future expansion of the extra nonce space."
https://learn.saylor.org/mod/book/view.php?id=36380&chapterid=19030
Here's another article explaining the Extra Nonce, detailing how the number of Nonce possibilities have increased from 2^32 to 2^96, with an option for future expansion of the extra nonce space if required.
https://iq.opengenus.org/bitcoins-hashing-race-and-extra-nonce-solution/