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[Phobophile]

It is parallel universe.

I know economy professors on pHD studies that can't explain bitcoin.

I dunno, IMO, currency is practically a religion; it's a faith-based social system that works because people want it to. A rather glib description, but I think we got more people that consistently use the Almighty Greenback and other fiat currencies than proper religions. Just think of this as a Great Schism separating the dogmas of cryptocurrency into two similar but fundamentally different entities.

 

[perfectchaos007]

Seriously WTF?

How is this even possible?

I though the entire point of Bitcoin was to avoid situations like this one.

It ended up getting too big. Nothing is immune to politics when lots of money is involved. It was cute though when Bitcoin was this little anti-currency movement everyone rooted for.

 

[SecretMoblin]

the currency's speculators - who are an entirely different breed of wild-eyed youngsters than the hardened capitalists from the days of yore - ensured this would happen

anyway, I'm looking to upgrade my PeeSee soon so as long as video card prices come down I don't care if a bunch of gamblers lose money.

 

[Lubricus]

I dunno, IMO, currency is practically a religion; it's a faith-based social system that works because people want it to. A rather glib description, but I think we got more people that consistently use the Almighty Greenback and other fiat currencies than proper religions. Just think of this as a Great Schism separating the dogmas of cryptocurrency into two similar but fundamentally different entities.

Kind of like the UK Anglicans and North American Episcopalians?

 

[Steel]

the currency's speculators - who are an entirely different breed of wild-eyed youngsters than the hardened capitalists from the days of yore - ensured this would happen

anyway, I'm looking to upgrade my PeeSee soon so as long as video card prices come down I don't care if a bunch of gamblers lose money.

The annoying thing is that this will make bitcoin minable again and make things worse. Additionally, the currency that has been driving video card prices up the wall lately wasn't Bitcoin, but Ethereum.

 

[jon bones]

Boy I sure do love my new currency derived from eternal math and not subject to the political whims of man

very good first post 👏🏾👏🏾👏🏾

 

[Phobophile]

Kind of like the UK Anglicans and North American Episcopalians?

Pretty much, but I was specifically alluding to the Great East-West Schism that split Christianity into Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy.

 

[Ty4on]

Seriously WTF?

How is this even possible?

I though the entire point of Bitcoin was to avoid situations like this one.

Bitcoin works basically because you have rules that everybody agree with and they run the system.

A hard fork is when the rules are changed and it is split because people disagree with the rules.

It helps to know about the blockchain. The way you verify how many bitcoins someone has is by checking every transaction in the blockchain. This chain splits so you have people using one rule and only accepting blocks adhering to it while others use a different rule and reject the other blocks.

Ethereum is split so you have regular Ethereum and Ethereum Classic.

 

[DEAD RABBIT]

Bitcoin works basically because you have rules that everybody agree with and they run the system.

A hard fork is when the rules are changed and it is split because people disagree with the rules.

It helps to know about the blockchain. The way you verify how many bitcoins someone has is by checking every transaction in the blockchain. This chain splits so you have people using one rule and only accepting blocks adhering to it while others use a different rule and reject the other blocks.

Ethereum is split so you have regular Ethereum and Ethereum Classic.

To add to this, anyone can fork a blockchain, but not necessarily process all the transactions (a.k.a. "mining"). The forks that matter are those performed by communities or organizations with consolidated mining capacity comprising a large fraction of the total mining capacity. The fact that a fork like this became news-worthy means that a significant portion of the mining community agreed with the protocol changes and switched. Miners are typically interested in only one thing and that is processing as many transactions as possible. They will perceive efficiency bottlenecks in the Bitcoin protocol as threats to their earnings. The CPU power needed for Bitcoin mining grows exponentially with the number of coins / transactions that have been mined. ASIC hardware, low temperature climate and low power costs are prerequisites these days to run a competitive mining farm. However there are ways for speeding up the transaction processing by tweaking the Bitcoin protocol settings. Small mining communities are not in favour of this as it would allow the larger mining communities to push them out.

There are alternatives to the Bitcoin consensus mechanism. Bitcoin uses a Proof-of-Work implementation. Ethereum as well, but it is ASIC-resistant, meaning that you can still mine with a decent GPU. There are others, such as Proof-of-Capacity, Proof-of-Burn and then there is Proof-of-Stake, probably the most interesting "next-gen" consensus mechanism. Ethereum will migrate to a PoS system with the release of Casper.

 

[Ty4on]

To add to this, anyone can fork a blockchain, but not necessarily process all the transactions (a.k.a. "mining"). The forks that matter are those performed by communities or organizations with consolidated mining capacity comprising a large fraction of the total mining capacity. The fact that a fork like this became news-worthy means that a significant portion of the mining community agreed with the protocol changes and switched. Miners are typically interested in only one thing and that is processing as many transactions as possible. They will perceive efficiency bottlenecks in the Bitcoin protocol as threats to their earnings. The CPU power needed for Bitcoin mining grows exponentially with the number of coins / transactions that have been mined. ASIC hardware, low temperature climate and low power costs are prerequisites these days to run a competitive mining farm. However there are ways for speeding up the transaction processing by tweaking the Bitcoin protocol settings. Small mining communities are not in favour of this as it would allow the larger mining communities to push them out.

There are alternatives to the Bitcoin consensus mechanism. Bitcoin uses a Proof-of-Work implementation. Ethereum as well, but it is ASIC-resistant, meaning that you can still mine with a decent GPU. There are others, such as Proof-of-Capacity, Proof-of-Burn and then there is Proof-of-Stake, probably the most interesting "next-gen" consensus mechanism. Ethereum will migrate to a PoS system with the release of Casper.

Thanks for the extra details! I just know the basics and don't know much about the details and the latest developments.

What makes Ethereum more ASIC resilient than scrypt which was supposed to resist ASIC too iirc?

 

[Ri'Orius]

I'm no economics major but if the price has decreased it sounds like a buy time to me?

The price is expected to keep dropping. You want to buy at the lowest point of the hill, not right after it starts falling.

 

[DEAD RABBIT]

What makes Ethereum more ASIC resilient than scrypt which was supposed to resist ASIC too iirc?

I don't know the specifics. But the algorithm Ethereum uses and Scrypt are memory-bound, not CPU-bound like in Bitcoin. I am not an expert at this, but AFAIK several GB of memory are needed with large amount of bandwidth. This is why GPU's are typically used, good performance balance between memory and bandwidth, rather than say a server CPU with 64 GB of RAM.