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Bitcoin physical bearer instrument using NFC JavaCards

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Re: Bitcoin physical bearer instrument using NFC JavaCards

#111

Post by peterscbrown »

mjburgess wrote: post #17
V__ wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not going to argue against some benefits' crypto can have. Especially with the under banked. But it had over a decade to improve society and so far the main use case is: Trick people with tech-bro talk and then scam them.

Sorry, but can we just stop repeating the wildly unevidenced claims of the gullible and frauds? Who are the 'underbanked' ? What are their needs? What are the current solutions? There is nothing "there" in crypto. It's a scam. Go and obtain every textbook you can on amazon about blockchains, bitcoin, crypto systems etc. and investigate their authors. I've just done that: they're all part of various crypto schemes. Th…

"...none show that blockchain is even minimally relevant to solving ANY problem."

The price of Bitcoin in 2013 was $200. Today it's $29,000. Wouldn't you say that, at a minimum, it's doing a good job of storing value in an inflationary environment? At best it is creating some spectacular wealth which is real.

Re: Bitcoin physical bearer instrument using NFC JavaCards

#114

Post by peterscbrown »

amanj41 wrote: post #21

This is interesting, though ultimately the private key is ostensibly only protected by a pin code of a few digits. At the end of the day that might be ok since no one would reasonably carry a large amount of cash in their wallet. Perhaps one would only load small amounts to their corresponding BTC wallet for the card.

[dead]

Re: Bitcoin physical bearer instrument using NFC JavaCards

#115

Post by cryptohuney »

Problem is your parents or anyone else in the mainstream still won't use it. There is no denomination and they don't know that it won't be hacked. There is a reason that physical assets in private vaults are fiat and precious metals... their value is self-evident and therefore completely trusted and fungible by everyone. Once you cloak the value in a card, all bets are off for mainstream adoption.

Re: Bitcoin physical bearer instrument using NFC JavaCards

#116

Post by cryptohuney »

Problem is your parents or anyone else in the mainstream still won't use it. There is no denomination and they won't have any confidence that it won't be hacked. There is a reason that physical assets in private vaults are fiat and precious metals... their value is self-evident with the printed or forged denomination and therefore these assets are completely trusted and fungible by everyone. Once you cloak the value in a card behind proprietary tech, all bets are off for mainstream adoption.

Re: Bitcoin physical bearer instrument using NFC JavaCards

#118

Post by ephbit »

PretzelPirate wrote: post #11
brianf0 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is reductive. It may bear some resemblance to cash but it's more like a voucher, and the actual value is transferred on an immutable ledger. Wish Hacker News wasn't so curmudgeonly about crypto and actually tried to imagine the multitude of ways it would improve society if adopted.

Exactly. The idea of cash is great: we can pay each other without intermediaries and we know that the payment we're receiving has the value it appears to. Moving to a cashless society has some real drawbacks when it comes to privacy and freedom. Digital cash that can give us the befits of paper money without the privacy drawbacks of CBDCs or 3rd party middlemen isn't a bad thing at all.

> Moving to a cashless society has some real drawbacks when it comes to privacy and freedom.

As I understand it, the people developing GNU Taler, are trying to solve this problem and have come up with a promising system.

https://taler.net/en/

Re: Bitcoin physical bearer instrument using NFC JavaCards

#119

Post by ephbit »

arcticbull wrote: post #6
brianf0 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is reductive. It may bear some resemblance to cash but it's more like a voucher, and the actual value is transferred on an immutable ledger. Wish Hacker News wasn't so curmudgeonly about crypto and actually tried to imagine the multitude of ways it would improve society if adopted.

> Wish Hacker News wasn't so curmudgeonly about crypto and actually tried to imagine the multitude of ways it would improve society if adopted. I wish crypto could improve society, but it can't. That said this is a neat hack. Reminds me of what the Kong folks were doing, I bought a couple of bills as a sousvenir. [1] [1] https://kong.cash/

> I wish crypto could improve society, but it can't.

You did not specifically write it, but the way you plainly state ".. but it can't." makes it appear as if it were an evident fact that can be derived from simple reasoning available to everyone who spends some time thinking.

I'd say it is absolutely possible that "crypto" (or as I would narrow it down: Bitcoin) can improve society.

One can think of it this way: society/humanity can be seen as a very complicated board game (that's played simultaneously by all humans) with certain elements (cards, rules, ..). The rules somehow evolve during the game, some are stable some change, new elements get added from time to time.

The set of elements in the game at some certain point in time might strongly favour a very narrow set of participants which might already be in a very strong position (which could be seen as unfair). A new rule or other element in the game might counter/dampen the effects of the existing rules, so that after adding the new element there's now less tendency for concentration of success than before.

Technologies in the real world are like such new elements/rules in the game. New real world technologies (such as Bitcoin) may very well change the dynamic of the real world in a way that dampens various unfavourable outcomes.

No, one cannot easily prove whether Bitcoin does ineed have this effect.

But likewise, one cannot prove that Bitcoin certainly has only negative effects on humanity/society either.

Re: Bitcoin physical bearer instrument using NFC JavaCards

#120

Post by deweller »

danShumway wrote: post #104
bb88 wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Basically your argument is "Don't let perfect be the enemy of the good." I think the issue I have is the crypto folk haven't wanted to fix any of it -- with the rare exception being ethereum moving to PoS. A lot of the "fixes" would break the "features".

Exactly. Perfect is the enemy of the good, but sometimes terrible is also the enemy of the good. It's not that perfectionists are holding back the ecosystem, it's that the community is satisfied with terrible. Cryptocurrency communities are aggressively hostile to improvement. Every chance to make the ecosystem better is met with pushback. It's funny you bring up PoS, because how much energy was spent (pun absolutely…

There is a (loud) community of Bitcoin maximalists who fit this description for sure.

But there is a thriving ecosystem of developers who are very interested in improvement. The Ethereum (and level 2 chains) community has a culture of innovation and shipping features.

There are members of the broader Bitcoin ecosystem like this as well even if the core developers are not.

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