151–160 of 578 posts
If you think Mastercard and Visa fees are too high, fees are higher on Bitcoin. It's like the way Amway victims will try to sell you an $8 tube of toothpaste, "draw circles" to show that 7 people get a cut from that tube of toothpaste and then say "How does Amway bring you great prices on quality products?" (tap whiteboard) "By eliminating the middleman!"
As soon as you have a trusted central authority (monitoring and reversing payment transactions, interacting with government agencies to execute real estate transaction, etc.) I’m lost on why you need a blockchain.
> "The top credit-card merchant fee actually rose in the United States between 1991 and 2009, and this is a goddamn tragedy, since these fees are baked into the cost of most retail goods and thus born by the working poor (who pay them even if they use cash.) . . . Why are these IT-focused industries so consistently immune to the same technological improvements and cost reductions we see everywhere else?" The simplest…
Cash ain't free!
Sure, I give you the cash, now you have the cash. But you don't want a heap of singles in the back room, you want money in the bank.
Firstly, you need to keep that cash securely, which has a cost. Then, you need staff to reconcile your takings with your figures for the day, which is a cost. Then it needs (secure) transport to the bank (cost) and the bank may charge you fees for cash handling.
Sure, for individuals who sell things infrequently, it's fine, but for a business there are significant costs. This is why (for example) in the late 90s and early 2ks in the UK, large businesses pushed pretty hard for the 'cashback' feature on debit transactions, so they could offload some of it back to the consumer!
This is almost always missed in this debate. Credit cards are evil because they have fees attached and I, as a pure, innocent cash user have to pay the same price! Scandal!
But you may actually be costing the business more, especially in places where such fees are capped. This is part of the reason why we see card-only retailers popping up in some countries now.
"transaction reversibility is not about the ledger, but rather about the transaction rules that a currency uses. A reversible currency requires that someone anoint this trusted party (or trusted parties) and that they use their powers to freeze/burn/transact currency in ways that are at odds with the recorded owners’ intentions. And indeed, this is a capability that many tokens now possess" I think this is arguing th…
Many real world systems are "nearly trustless". Of course you still need some sort of court system if someone decides to break bad. But in the 99%+ of times you're in the happy path, economic transactions occur based on autonomous rules encoded in software. The analogy I like to use is what's harder to buy a $1 million house or $1 million of Microsoft stock? The former process takes weeks, and dozens of man hours fro…
Have you read any of the proofs behind any of these algorithms? Ever notice how often some one finds a crack and disappears millions of dollars? Think we’ll actually make it secure some day?
I’m also not convinced this even needs technology. Some things are better locked up on paper in slow, bureaucratic institutions surrounded by layers of administrators. Makes it a lot harder to break in and steal stuff.
Most people aren’t buying properties online like games on Steam. If it takes 6 weeks or 5 it won’t make much of a difference.
Even if you want to digitize proof of property ownership it would be orders of magnitude more efficient to host your blockchain on a handful of Raspberry Pi’s. You could probably manage all property sales on an entire continent with it. Not dealing the Sybil attack problem is a lot cheaper and easier than trying to deal with it.
This article doesn’t address the main objection I have about the practical value of cryptocurrency, namely, why I can’t take such an application, replace the distributed ledger with a SQL database, and get a solution that’s better in every way. As soon as you have a trusted central authority (monitoring and reversing payment transactions, interacting with government agencies to execute real estate transaction, etc.)…
You might have missed the entire point of cryptocurrency. The idea is that it is not centralized and a single entity can't "reverse" transactions.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, L2 systems aren't on a blockchain at all, so do they even count? If we get to cherry-pick from whatever money transfer systems exist, it's worth remembering that bank transfers within the Eurozone area are free and practically immediate. What crypto can beat that? Clearly you don't need cryptocurrency to deliver a service that's ideal for consumers, as regulation has achieved it in Europe.
I think the right way to look at a block chain is to think about it as a global computer that enables trusted execution on untrusted hardware. At present, this global computer is very weak. Cryptocurrencies are a good first program to implement on this computer because each transaction is essentially just adding and subtracting a few numbers. So yes, in some sense, it's crazy that the cost of adding and subtracting a…
Any fraudster that wants to!
There are more reasons than technical why such things are limited.
This article doesn’t address the main objection I have about the practical value of cryptocurrency, namely, why I can’t take such an application, replace the distributed ledger with a SQL database, and get a solution that’s better in every way. As soon as you have a trusted central authority (monitoring and reversing payment transactions, interacting with government agencies to execute real estate transaction, etc.)…
>As soon as you have a trusted central authority You might have missed the entire point of cryptocurrency. The idea is that it is not centralized and a single entity can't "reverse" transactions.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Or maybe Nakamoto was simply full of crap, like people talking up their cryptocurrency schemes tend to be?
I just don't understand why crypto discussions seems to draw out so many rude comments. If satoshi wanted fame and fortune he could have both easily, but there are a ton of early bitcoins that haven't moved - so obviously he wasn't in it for the money or he would've used those coins.
This article doesn’t address the main objection I have about the practical value of cryptocurrency, namely, why I can’t take such an application, replace the distributed ledger with a SQL database, and get a solution that’s better in every way. As soon as you have a trusted central authority (monitoring and reversing payment transactions, interacting with government agencies to execute real estate transaction, etc.)…
>As soon as you have a trusted central authority You might have missed the entire point of cryptocurrency. The idea is that it is not centralized and a single entity can't "reverse" transactions.
This article doesn’t address the main objection I have about the practical value of cryptocurrency, namely, why I can’t take such an application, replace the distributed ledger with a SQL database, and get a solution that’s better in every way. As soon as you have a trusted central authority (monitoring and reversing payment transactions, interacting with government agencies to execute real estate transaction, etc.)…
>As soon as you have a trusted central authority You might have missed the entire point of cryptocurrency. The idea is that it is not centralized and a single entity can't "reverse" transactions.