141–150 of 447 posts
If I posted an article about Linux 4.1 or something, I wouldn't expect to see comments saying 'meanwhile, I used Windows yesterday, and played GTA5, and it was good'.
What gives? Are there forums in which people have this sort of reaction to, I dunno, HTML5?
From some of the posts here you would think that it's IED control software.
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> I take your TND, and then I give you BTC which I've purchased. In that case you end up holding TND and need to purchase the bitcoin to give to your customers in another currency. You would have an easier result if you just directly exchanged TND to EUR without putting BTC in between. Likely that's about as legal as your solution. Just because at some point the value is hold in BTC doesn't mean currency controls cea…
I agree, it's quite risky and can easily be shut down by the authorities if they catch wind of it. I think the simplest way to avoid the risk is to setup a decentralized exchange that connects buyers to sellers. But that means it becomes much more difficult to take a cut, as people will just meet face-to-face.
I could see this as Steam testing the Bitcoin waters. Steam games created an entirely new market of digital items changing hands for real world money, and this is done globally across all currencies--bitcoin would be an ideal fit. I could also see value in using bitcoin to reward content creators (modders). Obviously this is crazy speculation, but seem to be solid use cases.
The "omg futurist" brownie points are just a side-effect. Steam/Valve isn't terribly progressive. Heck, its only recently that they put in a refund policy and started putting in common sense limitations on trading to stop fraud. Someone did a cost/benefit analysis here and it simply worked out. I guessing this is part of a larger anti-fraud initiative at Valve.
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I've always wondered why hackernews hates bitcoin so much. Can someone explain?
It's because it's not just comprised of tech people, who are excited about its theoretical underpinnings, but also by business savvy people, who know that it will hardly fly for numerous reasons (and if a similar technology ever catches up, it will have so many government imposed regulations as to be totally different), plus old jaded tech persons who know a marginal at best tech and/or snake oil when they see it. As…
I could see this as Steam testing the Bitcoin waters. Steam games created an entirely new market of digital items changing hands for real world money, and this is done globally across all currencies--bitcoin would be an ideal fit. I could also see value in using bitcoin to reward content creators (modders). Obviously this is crazy speculation, but seem to be solid use cases.
I don't think this was done for any political or idealistic reason. I imagine bitcoin makes it a lot easier for purchases in countries with unreliable banking, high levels of fraud, etc. Try transfering a non-trivial amount of money to Eastern Europe, Africa, Russia, Brazil, etc. Steam deals with this millions of times a day with fraud credit attempts, legitimate credit cards being turned down, etc. Legitimate buyers…
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A $100 cellphone isn't a decentralized peer to peer network. You are comparing apples to nose-hairs. Bitcoin will scale in the same way the internet scaled... slowly and then suddenly.
For me the largest put off with Bitcoin is the community. They seem to be very intolerant of criticism, to the appearance of a cult or ideology.[1] The problem lies in that unlike most open source projects, a sizeable portion of the community stands to make huge profits, giving rise to a permanent conflict of interest. Time and time again, the financial interest of the early adopters continue to stifle actual develop…
On the other hand a global payment system would require a currency which is at the very least stable (and not increasing in value). But a stable value might not be enough to cover the expenses of most of the miners. Mining is already dominated by Chinese miners which happen to have access to the cheapest electricity - which incidentally completely undermines the aspect of decentralization.
In summary it seems that at this point a decentralized payment system just appears to be too expensive (computationally) to be any serious competition for currencies in countries with a well established, trusted payment system. It still might be of use in the developing world.
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A $100 cellphone isn't a decentralized peer to peer network. You are comparing apples to nose-hairs. Bitcoin will scale in the same way the internet scaled... slowly and then suddenly.
People don't use cars because they have a hard on for internal combustion engines. They use cars to go from one place to another, i.e their utility. The utility of bitcoin is its TPS rate.
Like I said, Bitcoin will scale like the internet scaled which is in direct proportion to demand. Blocks aren't often full and if you are in a hurry then you need to pay 10 or 20 cents to prioritize your transaction.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I take your TND, and then I give you BTC which I've purchased. In that case you end up holding TND and need to purchase the bitcoin to give to your customers in another currency. You would have an easier result if you just directly exchanged TND to EUR without putting BTC in between. Likely that's about as legal as your solution. Just because at some point the value is hold in BTC doesn't mean currency controls cea…
I agree, it's quite risky and can easily be shut down by the authorities if they catch wind of it. I think the simplest way to avoid the risk is to setup a decentralized exchange that connects buyers to sellers. But that means it becomes much more difficult to take a cut, as people will just meet face-to-face.
I find the vitriol towards Bitcoin kind of odd. If I posted an article about Linux 4.1 or something, I wouldn't expect to see comments saying 'meanwhile, I used Windows yesterday, and played GTA5, and it was good'. What gives? Are there forums in which people have this sort of reaction to, I dunno, HTML5? From some of the posts here you would think that it's IED control software.
