Any protocol could come along and displace http, or a parallel internet could come along and displace it. But we're going on 22 years now and that's how we're communicating. What if these protocols are not so easily displaced as you imagine?
yeah as ars mentions, it's already happened... plus there is litecoin, buttcoin, etc etc When people compare to internet & DNS & things like that I get kinda pissed off. Those are standard protocol that we agree to because it helps ensure successful communication. Bitcoin is not anything like this stuff, it falls more into the category of "some code that runs on the internet". Think of it more like a website (Faceboo…
Actually there is no buttcoin (other than the website), which is the proof that you are a troll.
Bitcoin befuddles experts who analyze it from a narrow perspective, because it is not just a new medium of exchange or a new store of value: it is also a new kind of point-of-sale payment system (one that doesn't require payment processors), a new kind of global financial transfer system (one that doesn't require financial institutions), a new kind of time-stamping certification system (one that doesn't require notar…
They are applying old-world money ideas to something that is so new that we don't have useful models yet for deciding how it will behave, thinking that they do apply without loss of content. The rules of supply and demand apply, sure, but none of the other common-sense intuitions about how money works. BitCoins don't have any resistance to movement, or very little. Physical money does. This means the difference betwe…
Did you forget about wire transfers? At least where I live it is possible to live without touching physical money for a long long time, we have pretty advanced e-banking and m-banking (and we never had checkbooks).
Yes id does involve the bank, but from the end user perspective it is almost no overhead and sometimes even saves the trouble.
Is stuff like direct-debit even possible with bitcoin?
One thing I never quite understood, but haven't really heard mentioned, is what makes this instance of a digital currency special. If I were to start another pool of bitcoins, with it's own mining etc. (like say, litecoin, but not necessarily technologically different from bitcoins) is the only disadvantage, from the perspective of adoption, that it wasn't the original, and is a little less prominent? If so, I can em…
The computing power directed at bitcoin is already huge. You would need to persuade those miners (who also verify transactions don't forget) to switch to your new coin. If they stop mining bitcoins then they fall behind their competitors. They then have to swallow the risk of mining a new coin that has no users yet.
But presumably the computing cost would be much lower for the new coin, since it'd be earlier on in it's mining history. Who knows where the respective expected values stabilize.
Also, what if the new coin has some minor technical improvement? How do we know that won't outweight the established network effects?
Inflation is a separate issue. That comes from the nature of money, not its source. You can have a decentralized, distributed inflationary currency. See Freicoin for example.
Inflation definitely isn't a separate issue. It's a fundamental issue in the topic of currencies and money, as in deflation. Inflation is the expansion of money supply. Once bitcoin reaches full supply, by definition there can be no further inflation from bitcoin. There can be price fluctuations in the value of bitcoin, but not inflation. It's necessary to differentiate between prices going up / down, as opposed to i…
What I'm saying is that deflation is an arbitrary choice made by Satoshi in the construction of bitcoin. It is unrelated to the issue of state backing.
Bitcoin could just have easily had a perpetually increasing monetary supply. This literally would have been a single line change to the bitcoin source code. Freicoin does something similar with it's demurrage and perpetual reward.
Bitcoin befuddles experts who analyze it from a narrow perspective, because it is not just a new medium of exchange or a new store of value: it is also a new kind of point-of-sale payment system (one that doesn't require payment processors), a new kind of global financial transfer system (one that doesn't require financial institutions), a new kind of time-stamping certification system (one that doesn't require notar…
I'll jump on this and say that the script issue is irrelevant to Bitcoin's success.
In fact, I would argue that the script functionality is a huge flaw in bitcoin, probably the largest flaw. The existence of a scripting language within the transaction log makes it much more difficult to analyze whether I hold bitcoins or not -- my ability to spend bitcoins "held" in my address is contingent on my having additional information at the time that I post the transaction.
Having a generic proof-of-work-chain-based cumulative notary service might be valuable in and of itself. But bitcoin's value as "money" is independent of that functionality, and in the long run, the complexity of that scripting language and the difficulty of answering the question "have I been paid" will become problematic.
My prediction is that bitcoins are midway through a short-lived bubble and then rapidly fall to approximately 0, and in a few years people will look back with the disbelief now reserved for pets.com. The hype - get in right now and get rich, or you'll miss out and kick yourself - reminds me of 1999. My in-laws were talking about bitcoins yesterday, so bitcoins are getting the attention of the public at large; I take this as a bubble sign rather than a sign of success. Other factors: ease of switching crypto currencies to something else. Zero intrinsic value (unlike e.g. gold). Price manipulation. Risk of theft. Possibility of spectacular software bug blowing everything up.
[I'm not interested in debate; I just want to give my prediction. And if I'm wrong, I will be sure to add this to my list of spectacular mistakes.]
Articles like this are actually quite revealing. It's incredibly interesting to watch "experts" comment on bitcoin as they study it, now, for the first time and have to think about it. Like a lot of people my initial impression was that of scam (it lasted for three hours) then realization of the ingenious concept with the thought that "this will not survive long enough to become what it is intended for". So I kept se…
I don't get that; runs and crashes means your confidence is improved; that bitcoins have 'proved themselves'? I would argue just the opposite. No responsible financial counselor would recommend something as volatile as bitcoins; no business can survive the busts ("Just wait a few months Mr Vendor; my money will be worth something again then I promise!") So its used by - who? Speculators and suckers?
I agree with you. Let me explain - I think you have to separate bitcoin, the protocol and bitcoins, the currency. Secondly, if you separate the two functions of bitcoins as a storage of value and bitcoins as a currency, it might make more sense.
After each of the last three big crashes, the price built a new base at twice the initial level before the bust and then beat the original high in a relatively short amount of time. This has been going on for 3 years now. If I want to save some money that I can afford to lose potentially, with the main rational that it cannot be inflated long term and can "forget" about (so I don't lose sleep over the fluctuations) now I found a secure home for capital that I don't want to touch. It took a long time for me to develop that confidence (I daytraded in the past, esp. penny stocks, so "supernovas" are not something new).
Now, if (the big question of course) bitcoin as a currency continues to be adopted, a bitcoin will be unaffordable and most trading will be in the μBTC etc range we could see it stabilize due to the sheer volume of participants. However, even if that would never be the case, bitcoin as a protocol could lead to innovations in the entire supply chain that make transactions of raw material all the way up to product pricing instantaneous.
Bitcoin befuddles experts who analyze it from a narrow perspective, because it is not just a new medium of exchange or a new store of value: it is also a new kind of point-of-sale payment system (one that doesn't require payment processors), a new kind of global financial transfer system (one that doesn't require financial institutions), a new kind of time-stamping certification system (one that doesn't require notar…
> It may fail as "money" (in a narrow sense) and still succeed as a global platform. I think that was the author's point. For example, Paypal, Amazon or the IRS could announce tomorrow they will accept payment in Bitcoins but peg their BTC/USD exchange rate to one. Speculation would all but stop and Bitcoins would become a transaction platform.
But we're seeing a layer appear with companies like Bitpay that solves the volatile exchange rate issue.
Right vs left. Somehow its all politics and its not on his side and therefore doomed to fail. Maybe its neither and the other is an ideologue and imbecile.