141–150 of 191 posts
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> Like virtually everyone in the world, I pick #1. Then why Bitcoin? If you add regulation compliance, replace the block reward with higher transaction fees (which is built into the protocol as an inevitable end-goal), and remove (pseudo-)anonymity, what good is it? If you take away the ability to use it for illegal activity, why waste millions of dollars of electricity to sustain it?
I don't care about the Bitcoin argument either way, but I'm annoyed by how you keep bringing up its use of electricity. There are over 877,500 bank branches in the world, each consuming a nontrivial amount of electricity every day.
That's overthinking it, though; really, the dig about electricity simply comes from the fact that Bitcoin is essentially a competition between "miners" burning escalating amounts of cycles.
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Okay, but that is also (not being snarky) the killer app of a deck of cards.
Do you have any thoughts on the scenario I described?
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You describe the Western Union of bitcoin. The game changer will be the Nasdaq of bitcoin. The frictionless issuance of stocks bonds and dividends will change everything. Operating agreements will be codified in software and organizations can operate entirely transparently with a degree of accountability never before seen. Why would this be cool? Communities can come together and finance join ventures that were previ…
> The frictionless issuance of stocks bonds and dividends will change everything. Right now, I can issue all the stock I want for a minimal filing fee. In spite of this, companies regularly pay investment banks billions of dollars to file an IPO. If you think that Bitcoin is somehow going to change that, I have a blockchain to sell you.
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Isn't extreme volatility a very bad attribute for a store of value?
Buy low, sell high. For now, at least. Play out the end of an asset bubble in your head. Lots of people sell their assets, and now have dollars. The job of our policy makers is to make sure dollars don't increase in value at all, and don't decrease in value too quickly. But if lots of people are exchanging assets for dollars, the demand for dollars makes the value go up. Our policy makers will take a variety of actio…
Being as how a transaction requires two parties, this is not possible for everyone.
2. No, not remittances. The expensive bit of Western Union is in fact that last mile. http://www.reddit.com/r/Buttcoin/comments/2ne03g/the_buttcoi...
3. It will remain difficult to turn your Bitcoins into conventional currency (which is the only reason there's such a spread between exchanges). http://www.thebtcindex.com/
4. It will get even harder to turn your conventional currency into Bitcoins, as any exchange not being run by blatant crooks puts you through the anti-money-laundering mill.
5. The protocol problems will continue not to be fixed, unless most of the hashing power and Mircea Popescu can be convinced to go along with the Bitcoin Foundation. No 20-meg blocks for you!
6. 99% of current hashing power came online in 2014; this will be very price-sensitive http://www.coindesk.com/bitcoin-mining-firm-cointerra-files-... and much will go offline as the price drops, maybe coming back next hash adjustment.
7. Miners will continue to sell their coins immediately to cover costs: we are circling equilibrium, where the cost of mining 1 BTC is about 1 BTC. The pool of money to pay for them comes from new Greater Fools.
8. Transaction irreversibility will remain Bitcoin's sticking point, as speculators who are insufficiently computer-savvy keep getting burnt. "No chargebacks" will continue to repel customers and not attract businesses.
9. More exchanges will get hacked and/or just take everyone's money. (e.g. just in January: BitStamp, 796, LocalBitcoins, EgoPay.)
10. Everyone who bought in the last year and held is a bagholder. Their claims and speculation will get increasingly frenzied. Ask for non-Bitcoinsphere numbers supporting all claims.
11. The bagholders and gambling addicts will continue to be taken by obvious scams, e.g. the two Ponzi scheme sites in just January.
12. Sidechains will continue to be vaporware and not in fact a thing that exists, let alone solves any problems. Bitcoiners will still talk about them as if they exist in the present, therefore you should ignore that altcoins are possible. (OTOH, pettycoin might get finished this year.)
13. Altcoins will continue to be even scammier than the Bitcoin ecosphere, boggled as I was to realise this.
14. The price is presently being held up by speculation and wishful thinking. No new reason will come along. The "fundamentals" are a castle in the air.
15. Nobody actually wants smart contracts. They know that the plot of Dr. Strangelove is literally an unstoppable smart contract going wrong. Real customers want problems to be fixable when circumstances change, real companies want to retain the option of lawyering out of a stupid deal. The only people who would want smart contracts are businesses looking to screw over their customers even more than "mandatory arbitration" clauses do. This is about as appealing to customers as no chargebacks, for the same reason.
16. Blockchains, even if by some remarkable wrinkle they turn out useful for something, will not lug Bitcoiners' 33 GB of SatoshiDice penny shavings with them. Bitcoiners will continue to bring up "blockchain technologies" as a reason to bother with Bitcoin regardless, because that's literally all they have.
(Bitcoiners misunderstand that when a techie calls something "interesting" they don't necessarily mean "useful", "feasible" or "practical" — often they mean "what the hell even is that" or "I ain't even mad, that's amazing". The blockchain, particularly as implemented in Bitcoin, is very much the last.)
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I think the argument against the remittance case is that if you're going USD->BTC->EUR, you're probably better off just going USD->EUR because it doesn't expose you to the risk of BTC. I actually disagree with this; the remittance case can be quite useful when the government has an artificial exchange rate that disagrees with reality. Maybe that falls under the "illegal" category. But as for illegal uses, the US doll…
USD to EUR is not interesting at all. It's the thousands of combinations of the other 200 currencies that are.
BTC would be a great intermediary currency if there wasn't one already in the form of USD. I just don't see any advantage that BTC would offer over USD, even in the presence of high levels of BTC liquidity (assuming nothing catastrophic happens to the USD, of course).
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If the IRS is going to work out in the long run, it will need arguments that work even if the blockchain retains its ability to maintain a globally distributed ledger. Are you surprised bitcoin still exists considering the white paper unapologetically spoke heresy against government and bank collusion? That must be frustrating. Seeing the NYSE invest in a bitcoin company must have been a poke in the eye for you!
This kind of comment is probably why Mr. Ptacek chose the word "believer" downthread.
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Except the unbanked have been transmitting money across the world outside of banks for a few centuries now: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawala I'm not so sure Bitcoin is a ground breaking change for the unbanked in developing countries, especially when the hawala market is substantially bigger and already widely used.
You describe the Western Union of bitcoin. The game changer will be the Nasdaq of bitcoin. The frictionless issuance of stocks bonds and dividends will change everything. Operating agreements will be codified in software and organizations can operate entirely transparently with a degree of accountability never before seen. Why would this be cool? Communities can come together and finance join ventures that were previ…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You describe the Western Union of bitcoin. The game changer will be the Nasdaq of bitcoin. The frictionless issuance of stocks bonds and dividends will change everything. Operating agreements will be codified in software and organizations can operate entirely transparently with a degree of accountability never before seen. Why would this be cool? Communities can come together and finance join ventures that were previ…
> Operating agreements will be codified in software and organizations can operate entirely transparently with a degree of accountability never before seen. Are there any articles or papers which explain why Bitcoin is better than alternative implementations of transparent accounting? E.g. existing access control can be used to make accounts available to any subset (all the way up to public) of interested parties. Tec…
I think the main advantage to a blockchain solution is the cryptographic verifiability. Not only is the accounting accurate, but the funds cannot be forged or hidden. Also the rules for managing funds can be programmatically encoded using a series of technologies such as multi-sig keys, pay-to-script-hashes, and HD Keys.