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What's the use for Bitcoin?

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Re: What's the use for Bitcoin?

#51

Post by jjbiotech »

random28345 wrote: post #38
jjbiotech wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Physical currency such as gold or cash is for Criminals, Cowards, and Crazies. Criminals, who find it useful as a mechanism for transferring and storing income from illegal activities. Cowards, who want to hide behind physical currency to protect themselves from social and government problems that can only be solved through education and democracy. And crazies who think that Obama is a secret atheist muslim who is fi…

Haha, because currency issued by a central reserve bank with historical origins in letters of credit and promissory notes is totally just like a cryptocurrency designed for illegal activity and backed by the wasteful expenditure of millions of dollars of electricity. It's the same thing, and you're so clever for noticing.

I never said it was the same thing. My point was to illustrate that they have similarities. The amount of mental energy you use to formulate these insane mental projections must be enormous. You should try to put it to better use.

It's fine that we're having a disagreement though. I probably won't change your mind anyway and you'll just go back to purporting the status quo being fed to you by authority figures. That's probably for the best though because you don't seem to have the cognitive abilities to formulate ideas and opinions on your own.

Re: What's the use for Bitcoin?

#53

Post by [deleted] »

CJefferson wrote: post #37

One of my biggest problems with bitcoin is that half the bitcoins which will ever be created are already in circulation. That means the rise of bitcoin is just going to create a new "1%", who own the majority of the currency.

[deleted]

Re: What's the use for Bitcoin?

#54

Post by IkmoIkmo »

zzleeper wrote: post #29
random28345 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bitcoin is for Criminals, Cowards, and Crazies. Criminals, who find it useful as a mechanism for transferring and storing income from illegal activities. Cowards, who want to hide behind a cryptocurrency to protect themselves from social and government problems that can only be solved through education and democracy. And crazies who think that Obama is a secret atheist muslim who is fighting a secret war of confiscat…

So I was kinda agreeing with you, but a quick google search did turn out some insane accusations made by the US Govt that rogue DEA officers were behind retaliations to MtGox, including seizing 5MM of cash. Not so sure what to think anymore..

Bitcoin wasn't designed, ran, maintained or owned in any way by Mt. Gox, anymore than a local currency exchange is in charge of printing dollar bills for the US government. They're completely different things.

It appears thieves or perhaps the owner of Mt. Gox stole a large amount of their money.

And in addition it appears a rogue DEA agent stole a small amount of money.

That's all there is to it. Neither say anything about bitcoin. Scams and theft of dollars happens every single day, and corrupt or criminal individual governmental officials stealing or scamming in the dollar currency is nothing new.

Re: What's the use for Bitcoin?

#55

Post by njharman »

This is a miss-guided question. We can't predict the future, therefor we can't imagine the uses for new tech/thing. In fact disruptive new tech creates it's own uses. Asking what the use of Arpanet back in the day totally misses what the Internet has become.

Re: What's the use for Bitcoin?

#56

Post by random28345 »

streptomycin wrote: post #7

The conclusion ("It’s incorrect to say Bitcoin doesn’t have a use case. It does. It’s just illegal in the US.") seems strange given that there is a big section of the article on semi-illegal things - basically things that are legal but traditional financial companies don't want to touch. The article says "mostly gambling, marijuana, and porn" but I'd also add politically controversial things, like when all the paymen…

> when all the payment processors decided they didn't want to handle donations to Wikileaks after the US government asked them to make that change.

On the face of it, this seems like the one legal use of Bitcoin, to circumvent situations where the government uses influence to block certain economic activity through words (a request to payment processors) instead of the threat of force (new laws).

However, the only reason that Bitcoin has any value to Wikileaks is because it can be exchanged for dollars to fund Wikileaks activity, and the only reason Bitcoin can be exchanged for dollars is because it is a medium of exchange for drugs. Without the drug market, Bitcoin would have little value, making it pointless to donate to Wikileaks.

Re: What's the use for Bitcoin?

#57

Post by ThomPete »

To me the trick about Bitcoin is to think about it as a protocol before you think about it as a currency or a ledger. Then think about how the TCP/IP protocol have managed to move way beyond it's original purpose.

Bitcoin/Cryptocurrency might very well be a way to get around the issue we currently have where technology is moving faster than legislation. And so by using cryptotechnology we will be able to circumvent the political process but still maintain accountability.

We are still some way from that but to be critical about it's future at this point is not just unwarranted IMHO it's also counterproductive.

Just from the top of my heads here are a couple of ideas I had with regards to bitcoin/crypto:

Digital Pokemón Cards. Basically the ability to create digital collectors items.

E-books and other digital assets that could gain value. You could sell ebooks at a premium and allow people to re-sell them. Because the history of their ownership is recorded you could even see them gaining value if they had been owned by a celebrity.

Private but public healthcare records. For research and usage. Store the health-records publicly as personas but allow individuals people to link it with their identity. This would help with research in completely new ways.

Voting made public but anonymous Make it impossible to fake voting results by making the results available for everyone.

Artificial Intelligence Using the protocol to create automated consensus models for how prioritize.

Companies without owners Build a company with a political purpose without any owner.

It doesn't need to be 100% fool proof it just needs to be good enough for a majority of people just like everything else and I don't see anything that stands in the way of it being good enough.

Re: What's the use for Bitcoin?

#58

Post by chias »

random28345 wrote: post #45
chatmasta wrote: post #35

I don't understand why we even need to discuss the usefulness of Bitcoin beyond the fact that it's decentralized. Its decentralized nature, alone, is its most important attribute. Bitcoin cannot be stopped. Period. As long as multiple people can run a program on a set of computers that can connect to each other, Bitcoin can exist. If you want to receive it anonymously, you can perform services anonymously and take pa…

> Its decentralized nature, alone, is its most important attribute. Bitcoin cannot be stopped. Period. It's just as decentralized as tulip bulbs ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_mania ), and Bitcoin will be "stopped" when a) it is illegal to transmit or receive a blockchain (unlikely), or b) when people realize the only value Bitcoin has is in the belief that Bitcoin has value. All it takes for Bitcoin to be wort…

> when people realize the only value Bitcoin has is in the belief that Bitcoin has value

For the record, people said the same thing about paper currency. And again when paper currency stopped being backed by gold.

And this periodically actually happens to real government-backed currencies in the world, especially during times of hyperinflation (e.g. Germany in the 1920s, Zimbabwe in 2008, etc)

Re: What's the use for Bitcoin?

#59

Post by bunderbunder »

aboutus wrote: post #6

I derided Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies in general until I seriously looked into it, and then I could hardly sleep for days because of the huge implications of it. Bitcoin allows people who are unbanked, especially in developing countries, to hold and transmit money across the world at practically zero cost. Since bitcoin is decentralized, there are no middlemen like banks to take a cut or freeze your account. Besides…

> Bitcoin allows people who are unbanked, especially in developing countries, to hold and transmit money across the world at practically zero cost. Since bitcoin is decentralized, there are no middlemen like banks to take a cut or freeze your account.

There aren't any now, but that's not because it's inherently impossible to have such a thing with BTC. It's just that the economy hasn't grown enough for them to exist yet. When (if) it does, they will come. I'm not going to say I know exactly how they will come, but I can think of quite a few plausible scenarios:

- Honest-to-goodness BTC accounts with banks, to solve the same problem with lost/stolen wallet keys that they solved with lost/stolen money-under-the-mattress for traditional currency.

- Wireless providers leveraging their position as most people's only constant/regular access to the Internet to exert control over how BTC is transferred over their networks.

- Online wallets becoming necessary to help deal with scalability problems (not entirely dissimilar to how electronic transaction processing networks have superseded paper checks) and then leveraging that privileged position.

Re: What's the use for Bitcoin?

#60

Post by kpommerenke »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #48
random28345 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Its decentralized nature, alone, is its most important attribute. Bitcoin cannot be stopped. Period. It's just as decentralized as tulip bulbs ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_mania ), and Bitcoin will be "stopped" when a) it is illegal to transmit or receive a blockchain (unlikely), or b) when people realize the only value Bitcoin has is in the belief that Bitcoin has value. All it takes for Bitcoin to be wort…

> All it takes for Bitcoin to be worthless is the belief that Bitcoin is worthless. Isn't this true for every currency that isn't literally a physically scarce and useful resource (gold, grain, uranium, gold-pressed latinum?)

No, it's not necessarily true for a currency backed by a state, since the state can force you to pay taxes in that currency, thus creating demand for the currency and underpinning its value.
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