[LINK] Bitcoin is hitting new highs—here’s why it might not be a bubble

[David]

On Mon, 20 Nov 2017 16:30:03 Hamish Moffatt wrote:

> I think you might find this book interesting: 
> https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/book/
> 
> The author argues that pretty much anything you think a blockchain would be useful for, would be better off without a blockchain. There are even commercial products named "xyz blockchain" which in fact contain no blockchains at all, because they wouldn't be helpful.

Thanks for that.  There are too many interesting things...!

An RBA document "Submission to the Inquiry into Digital Currency, Senate Economics References Committee, November 2014" is available at https://rba.gov.au/publications/submissions/financial-sector/pdf/inquiry-digital-currency-2014-11.pdf

It's three years old but a good primer, and I think not much has changed in that time.  It's only 12 pages including an excellent list of web references.

The benefits of bitcoin-like currencies are fairly obvious, though not without a twist:

Irrevocability – Merchants may see the irrevocable nature of transactions (once sufficiently confirmed on the block chain) as decreasing the risk of chargebacks or demands for refunds (although the choice of payment method used is unlikely to modify merchant obligations arising under the Australian Consumer Law).


Possible risks the submission identifies include:

Price – Digital currencies have exhibited substantial price volatility and the markets for such currencies are subject to substantial illiquidity.  Existing digital currencies are privately created assets with no intrinsic value, so their market price at any time is very sensitive to perceptions about what, if any, value they will have in the future. [...]

Scalability – Although not currently widely used, there may be challenges for digital currency systems in supporting increases in the volume of transactions.  For example, Bitcoin can currently only support around 7 transactions per second due to a hard-coded 1 megabyte limit on the size of each block. [12]  In contrast, retail payments systems with wide use are able to process hundreds to thousands of transactions per second. [13]

Hacking – While the cryptographic hash function underlying Bitcoin is generally considered to offer a high level of protection against a successful hacking attack, and the protocol is designed to make it more profitable to confirm transactions for the network than to attack the system, this may change as computing power continues to increase.

The ‘51 per cent’ issue – A single miner, or a mining pool, may gain sufficient computing power to manipulate the system.  The increasing centralisation of mining operations makes it more likely that a single mining pool may contribute more than 50 per cent of the networks’ computing power. [14]  If this were to occur, even unintentionally, there could be a loss of confidence in Bitcoin. [15]

....and more.

Googling <blockchain bitcoin site:.gov.au> brings up a surprising list of references.

David L.