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Bitcoin Is Dead, Long Live Bitcoin

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Re: Bitcoin Is Dead, Long Live Bitcoin

#81

Post by CyberDildonics »

aurelius12 wrote: post #60
wmf wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would put it in a slightly different way: Everyone wants "Visa" functionality, but there is a debate about whether the solution is a one-layer system where base Bitcoin provides transaction throughput or a two-layer system where transaction throughput is provided by a separate layer on top of Bitcoin.

The trouble is that Visa functionality already exists and it already works really, really well for both consumers and merchants.

Companies who lose 3% of their revenue to visa may dispute that, as well as companies with lots of charge backs like porn, or politically controversial organizations like wikileaks, or 'morally dubious' companies that are either gouged or not welcomed into the network like dispensaries or porn, or anyone who has had paypal freeze their account for no reason...

Russian carders who make their living off of selling credit card numbers probably agree with you that the system is great.

Re: Bitcoin Is Dead, Long Live Bitcoin

#82

Post by nickbauman »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #30

Back in 2009 when I was getting into bitcoin, it was widely described as a "stateless currency" and not just an alternative to Visa or credit cards. Having a background in economics, bitcoin looked to me like a truly revolutionary technology and if it was adopted en masse would change politics forever. The problem however is that a nation's currency is arguably the primary source of it's sovereignty. Whomever control…

The US never really had commodity money. The Bretton Woods system had a merely theoretical commodity status. Nobody in the 1960's believed for a moment that the convertibility to gold was a real thing unless unwinding the entire monetary system was on the table.

Re: Bitcoin Is Dead, Long Live Bitcoin

#83

Post by vanattab »

supster wrote: post #66
aurelius12 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The trouble is that Visa functionality already exists and it already works really, really well for both consumers and merchants.

The Visa fee of 1-3% is too expensive in the internet era. It made sense 50 years ago when cost of moving information was high, but now it's just rent seeking.

Can anyone comment with regards to Mike's statment about bitcoins current fees being higher then cc fees. What is the driving factor behind this? Does the cost of mining directly raise the fees?

Re: Bitcoin Is Dead, Long Live Bitcoin

#84

Post by AndrewKemendo »

snowwrestler wrote: post #64
AndrewKemendo wrote: post #30

Back in 2009 when I was getting into bitcoin, it was widely described as a "stateless currency" and not just an alternative to Visa or credit cards. Having a background in economics, bitcoin looked to me like a truly revolutionary technology and if it was adopted en masse would change politics forever. The problem however is that a nation's currency is arguably the primary source of it's sovereignty. Whomever control…

> The problem however is that a nation's currency is arguably the primary source of it's sovereignty. The reverse is also true--any significant currency creates sovereignty by elevating the power of those with the greatest influence over that currency. In the case of Bitcoin, the "core" developers, in addition to the highest-volume miners, have been elevated to the sovereign position. Rather than a distributed statel…

Yes. I love the tyranny of structurelessness and reference it frequently.

Also, just to compound things - this gets even worse and more magnified with investments from VC's etc... which already have outsized power. Now they become the de-facto power holders in a sovereign currency.

Talk about disruptive technology.

Re: Bitcoin Is Dead, Long Live Bitcoin

#85

Post by ErikAugust »

snowwrestler wrote: post #64
AndrewKemendo wrote: post #30

Back in 2009 when I was getting into bitcoin, it was widely described as a "stateless currency" and not just an alternative to Visa or credit cards. Having a background in economics, bitcoin looked to me like a truly revolutionary technology and if it was adopted en masse would change politics forever. The problem however is that a nation's currency is arguably the primary source of it's sovereignty. Whomever control…

> The problem however is that a nation's currency is arguably the primary source of it's sovereignty. The reverse is also true--any significant currency creates sovereignty by elevating the power of those with the greatest influence over that currency. In the case of Bitcoin, the "core" developers, in addition to the highest-volume miners, have been elevated to the sovereign position. Rather than a distributed statel…

Well, right.

One may frame this whole "failed versus not failed" as a power struggle between two camps:

a. Those who own a large stake in the original BitCoin - such as the developers, miners, venture capitalists, the Winklevoss Twins, etc.

and

b. Those who don't own a large stake in BitCoin currently, but wish to own a large stake in the dominant cryptocurrency. Wall Street...

When you attack BitCoin on any grounds, technological or otherwise, you are attacking those stakeholders.

Re: Bitcoin Is Dead, Long Live Bitcoin

#86

Post by ErikAugust »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #84
snowwrestler wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The problem however is that a nation's currency is arguably the primary source of it's sovereignty. The reverse is also true--any significant currency creates sovereignty by elevating the power of those with the greatest influence over that currency. In the case of Bitcoin, the "core" developers, in addition to the highest-volume miners, have been elevated to the sovereign position. Rather than a distributed statel…

Yes. I love the tyranny of structurelessness and reference it frequently. Also, just to compound things - this gets even worse and more magnified with investments from VC's etc... which already have outsized power. Now they become the de-facto power holders in a sovereign currency. Talk about disruptive technology.

Well, do you honestly believe that VCs have even a fraction of the power that Wall Street does?

Re: Bitcoin Is Dead, Long Live Bitcoin

#87

Post by pcmaffey »

1. I have no idea how to get Bitcoin. A quick search takes me to several exchanges that look like torrent sites for pirating shit.

2. Nor has anyone presented me a compelling reason to get bitcoin (other than the future). Off the top of my head, if a company offered me an account that would take care of my online transactions in a secure way using Bitcoin, I might be interested. Maybe I'd put a few hundred in it each month and use it for random expenditures, and hopefully get access to some cool micro-services.

But I have zero awareness anything like that exists.

3. If it's to succeed as capital, it will be a daring bank that creates their own bitcoin equivalent... followed by one of the norwedish countries making their own national bitcoin. Then the floodgates will open.

Re: Bitcoin Is Dead, Long Live Bitcoin

#88

Post by geofft »

kang wrote: post #40
Dylan16807 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No it's not.

Contribute to the discussion please as to why private property rights should not apply?

Why are "rights" and "complaining" related? It is generally the case that my rights include both things I should do and things I should not do, and it is generally the case that a healthy, free society encourages people to figure out what they should do via discussion ("complaining"), instead of via suppression of rights.

For instance, an employer has the right to fire under-performing employees, and the right to make the decision about that on their own (as long as their decision does not conflict with other fundamental rights, such as equal protection, that society has recognized). They are explicitly permitted to make bad decisions. A society that only gave you the right to make good decisions would not be a free one; a society that prohibited discussion about whether it was a good decision would also not be a free one.

Re: Bitcoin Is Dead, Long Live Bitcoin

#89

Post by maaku »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #59
slg wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone with an economics background, I'm surprised you think the biggest problem is the statelessness of Bitcoin. The biggest economic problem to me has always been an unintelligent control of the money supply. You can criticize some of the actions that many central banks do to manipulate the economy, but I have a hard time buying the answer to bad management is no management.

>I'm surprised you think the biggest problem is the statelessness of Bitcoin. In fact it's the opposite I think that's its biggest strength. If no one else sees it that way however, then it will not live up to it's potential because there is no reason for them to move over to it. Adopting bitcoin is a political decision because money is as equally political as it is economic. It's super complex because the vast major…

I can assure you the Bitcoin Core developers see it the same way as you. But it seems that view is not universal among the userbase.

Re: Bitcoin Is Dead, Long Live Bitcoin

#90

Post by dmm »

droffel wrote: post #61
pavel_lishin wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait, did they keep the fact that they had over 13,000 BTC stolen for over a year and a half ?

Yup. They were insolvent for a year and a half, and paid out people with pending withdrawals when new people deposited new coins. How people thought it was a good idea to keep using them, I have no idea. There had been warnings about their solvency literally for the past year, starting with permanently "pending" BTC withdrawals, and slowly spreading to not allowing withdrawal of the altcoins on the site.

Just being pedantic here :)

Banks are fractional reserve because at any given time they don't have enough cash to pay demand deposits but that's because they've lent that money out. So while banks don't have cash they do have _assets_ that could be sold or borrowed against to fulfill deposits.

If I have an uninsured, full reserve bank and somebody steals half the deposits I don't become fractional reserve, I become _insolvent_. Just like a fractional reserve bank whose assets drop significantly in value is insolvent.

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