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..What? 1. You can't create new bitcoin at any time - not after all blocks are mined 2. Same as bitcoin, Gold needs to be mined. This is basically "conjuring" gold. 3. Wiped cryptocurrency can be returned. 4. Gold can be destroyed as well.
> You can't create new bitcoin at any time - not after all blocks are mined Bitcoin Cash did exactly that. New value was conjured up out of nowhere - Bitcoin didn't drop, and every owner of a Bitcoin suddenly had $2-3k worth of Bitcoin Cash. > Wiped cryptocurrency can be returned. ... What? Are you sitting on a SHA-256 exploit we don't know about?
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No, obviously you can. You're confusing the bits covered by a signature with the real-world interpretation of those bits.
Well, good luck getting even the real inflation rate from a corrupt government.
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No, you are missing the "network" part of "Lightning Network" it uses an onion-routing-like protocol to allow you to pay "through" other people. So if I have a channel with you, and you have one with coinbase, I can buy bitcoin from coinbase through you without ever opening another channel, entirely counterparty-risk-free. And in that scenario if you "refuse" to relay my transaction, or you try to do something sneeky…
Counter-counter-transactions sound like textbook example of overengineering. Bitcoin's only advantage at this point is its price, which will go away as soon as there is a crash. Then we can scrap Bitcoin, LN, and all the baggage and start with a clean 3rd generation crypto slate.
The counter-counter-transaction solves a very real problem and makes the entire system counterparty-risk-free. It's no more "overengineering" than your airbags are overengineering.
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I honestly don't know what use-case remains for Bitcoin. If you have large value transactions you'd probably choose something with privacy like Monero, and if you want something cheap and fast, maybe Bitcoin Cash. In both use-cases, you have a few competing alternatives. In no circumstance is Bitcoin preferable to one of the mature alternatives. ...and if no one is using it as a transaction medium, then acting as a s…
I think Bitcoin is the AOL of blockchain technology. It was a first mover, it had huge uptake and valuation, but in a few years (or perhaps already) someone is going to build a protocol that is capable of hundreds of thousands of secure transactions a second, and it will make Bitcoin look archaic.
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Very little though. If the demand for gold were merely industrial it would not need to be mined in such quantities as it has throughout history. I would put jewelry in the 'sentimental' category as well. Not only is Bitcoin purely sentimental, it represents has huge costs in the form of raw energy. Bitcoin's only claim to value is that it is an artifact of an act of ritual sacrifice. One might imagine a precedent in…
Someone's been reading their Georges Bataille... Edit for less smug more content: sacrifice is an interesting lens through which to look at bitcoin. You could argue that burning "excess" compute power is the real point, not the tokens.
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I think Bitcoin is the AOL of blockchain technology. It was a first mover, it had huge uptake and valuation, but in a few years (or perhaps already) someone is going to build a protocol that is capable of hundreds of thousands of secure transactions a second, and it will make Bitcoin look archaic.
FWIW that is the goal of the Lightning Network on Bitcoin: https://lightning.network/
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> the problem with regulating anonymous transactions is you don't know who's doing them Every government has departments of agents adept at tracing cash transactions. Bitcoin offers the advantage of total transactional transparency. Shady wallet? Trace back until you find a known wallet. An exchange, vendor, et cetera . Subpoena, find their counterparty, rinse and repeat. Best case: you find your guy. Consolation: mo…
Of course with enough effort and investment you can probably stop many things, the point is whether the increasing marginal costs of enforcement are worth it to the government and society. By that same argument, the US could round up every illegal immigrant and deport them, or every casual drug user and lock them up for life. We don't do that because it'd be ruinously expensive (not to mention immoral) and transform…
Honeypot drug purchase, paid via bitcoin to DumbSeller. DumbSeller routes bitcoins to tumbler. Using the NSA backdoor in TOR, they trace DumbSeller to VPN service, who they then subpoena. VPN service either complies or gets charged as accomplice to money laundering and other crimes and gives up customer as part of plea deal. They then trace the payment to VPN until they reach a warm body at the other end.
We have integrated Coinbase recently. Transactions take over a day to get verified. This is fine because the product is an annual subscription. That being said, except as an alternative to an international transfer, BTC has not much e-commerce value from our end.
Are you converting straight to USD (or your local currency), or keeping the BTC? I know most storefronts that accept crypto do the former, but I can't help but wonder how much more they could have made if they had done the latter.