What's the use for Bitcoin? • Hacker News Board

Re: What's the use for Bitcoin?

#171

Post by swswsw » Fri, Apr 03, 2015, 1:48 AM UTC

georgyo wrote: post #15

cporios wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The problems Bitcoin claims to be trying to solve were already solved by the banks a while back. Bitcoin (according to its website) claims to provide instant P2P transactions and very low processing fees. International bank transactions take days or weeks and have very high fees. But even more importantly, bitcoins do not require a bank account. All it requires is internet or text messaging access. This is very imp…

It still requires a bank account, just a difference sense of the word. If someone only has a phone, they need to store their bitcoin somewhere, and its unlikely to be their phone. So whoever is holding their bitcoin is acting as their bank.

There is also a way to create a smart contract that locks the fund until a certain time. And you can make it in such a way that the smart contract is executed by the network, not by an entity.

Re: What's the use for Bitcoin?

#172

Post by CyberDildonics » Fri, Apr 03, 2015, 2:34 AM UTC

ostikk wrote: post #168

CyberDildonics wrote: post #156

Surely people here are not so short sited that they actually think these 'not useful' cases are really not useful or that these are the only use cases. Right now you could travel around Thailand and bring only your phone and passport. There is a service that allows you to give btc and get a code that can be used at any ATM of a major bank and get cash. You can cut down the 8% spread of changing money at the airport t…

With your Thailand example, the author made the point that it's actually cheaper through P2P model (like Hawala) without the need to eat the exchange spread/fees by changing BTC. And yeah, fraud is still a huge problem for e-commerce, but how does Bitcoin solve that? As stated in the article, it just pushes more responsibility to the user. Multi-sig doesn't solve that either, you still need a 3rd party escrow provide…

P2P? Meaning you have to go find people also on a service that I've never heard of until seeing is plugged in this thread? And why would people in Thailand want to buy a specific currency someone is selling anyway. Even USD or Euros would be rare, but every other currency would be hugely exotic. The service right now allows you to take out cash from bank ATMs that are everywhere.

How does Bitcoin solve fraud? It is devoid of fraud. It doesn't 'just push responsibility to the user' it avoids the broken concept of giving someone all the information necessary to charge money to you at will. The fraud you are describing would be fraud from a business not delivering which isn't on the same level as credit card fraud that is happening on a massive scale.

Re: What's the use for Bitcoin?

#173

Post by dismal2 » Fri, Apr 03, 2015, 4:40 AM UTC

dragonwriter wrote: post #98

dismal2 wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Go ahead and vote for the next FED chairman!

There is a big excluded middle between "all government officials are directly elected" and "the general public has no agency in government policy".

So are you going to vote for the guy who opened Guantanamo and started illegal wars that cost thousands of innocent lives of the guy who won't close Guantanamo and uses robots to kill thousands of people with no oversight who end up being classified as enemy combatants as long as they are male, Arab, and of fighting age? Or maybe the leader who illegally spies on all the citizens of his country or the other guy who will do exactly the same thing. Decisions decisions...

Re: What's the use for Bitcoin?

#174

Post by dragonwriter » Fri, Apr 03, 2015, 5:09 AM UTC

smokeyj wrote: post #150

walterbell wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0032.mediawi... 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.

Funds can be hidden as soon as they are converted from bitcoin to other goods and services.

Re: What's the use for Bitcoin?

#175

Post by dragonwriter » Fri, Apr 03, 2015, 5:15 AM UTC

CyberDildonics wrote: post #160

Frondo wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"the government doesn't control the inflation of bitcoin like it does with dollars"-- This is exactly the thing about Bitcoin that concerns me most; it has economic implications baked into its design and operation, but We, the People, have no voice in deciding those implications. What if We, the People, want to change the inflationary/deflationary properties of the money? If we're on bitcoin, someone else made that c…

You do realize that anyone can create their own crypto-currency correct? Right now you can't really choose what currency to use. When you can, you can choose an inflationary currency. Most people I would think will not.

You can create your own non-crypto currency, to. The difficult part isn't creating a currency, its making it useful -- a social, not technological, problem.

Re: What's the use for Bitcoin?

#176

Post by aliakhtar » Fri, Apr 03, 2015, 6:54 AM UTC

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.

I'm from a developing country (Pakistan). The people you are referring to are the least likely candidates for using Bitcoin. To use Bitcoin you need to, at minimum, be able to read and write, and own a device with an internet connection. To actually use Bitcoin securely, you need to be a -lot- more technically proficient. The unbanked people are the least likely to fit this description.

Also, I think its quite unethical to consider putting the unbanked people at risk of losing 40-70% of their money by putting it in a volatile currency like Bitcoin.

Re: What's the use for Bitcoin?

#177

Post by Frondo » Fri, Apr 03, 2015, 6:58 AM UTC

swswsw wrote: post #166

Frondo wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"the government doesn't control the inflation of bitcoin like it does with dollars"-- This is exactly the thing about Bitcoin that concerns me most; it has economic implications baked into its design and operation, but We, the People, have no voice in deciding those implications. What if We, the People, want to change the inflationary/deflationary properties of the money? If we're on bitcoin, someone else made that c…

I think you might be confused about how bitcoin actually works. If you want to change bitcoin's economics properties, you can. You just have to get all the nodes to agree with it. That is obviously very very difficult. Bitcoin runs on a decentralized consensus system and uses this consensus as the truth. You can change that truth if everyone agrees with you. In that sense, this is actually the true democracy.

I'm not confused about how bitcoin works.

Saying "write code and persuade everyone to replace the current code with your new code" does not refute my original point that bitcoin is undemocratic.

Democracy isn't based on "build a new system and then persuade 100% of the populace to adopt it".

When I try to come up with analogous situations to what you're describing, I can't think of anything else, either, that would at all resemble a democratic process.

I can't think of a single example of the political process where you could replace a voting citizenry with a "build a new system and persuade 100% of the populace to accept it" model, and still have that resemble, in any way, the original one of a voting citizenry.

I also don't know why anyone in this day and age would be comfortable with promoting such obviously undemocratic functions of society. What next, calling for kings to make a comeback?

Re: What's the use for Bitcoin?

#178

Post by aliakhtar » Fri, Apr 03, 2015, 6:59 AM UTC

tptacek wrote: post #142

stevenh wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Those bank branches burn electricity to keep lights on so that people can work, and to run computers that keep track of the same information you'd need to track in a hypothetical all-Bitcoin economy. Bitcoin burns electricity to solve a math problem of escalating difficulty and cost whose solution has no intrinsic value. That's overthinking it, though; really, the dig about electricity simply comes from the fact that…

Bitcoin's transaction rate is also 3 transactions per second. That's laughably low for using up the same amount of power as an entire small country. Something running on a Pentium 3 could have a higher TPS.

Re: What's the use for Bitcoin?

#179

Post by Frondo » Fri, Apr 03, 2015, 7:01 AM UTC

dismal2 wrote: post #173

dragonwriter wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a big excluded middle between "all government officials are directly elected" and "the general public has no agency in government policy".

So are you going to vote for the guy who opened Guantanamo and started illegal wars that cost thousands of innocent lives of the guy who won't close Guantanamo and uses robots to kill thousands of people with no oversight who end up being classified as enemy combatants as long as they are male, Arab, and of fighting age? Or maybe the leader who illegally spies on all the citizens of his country or the other guy who w…

I voted for the guy who pushed a lousy healthcare bill through the system, because if the other guy had won, I still wouldn't be able to afford health insurance as a freelancer.

I also voted for the guy who's been pushing, feebly, for better conditions for workers, rather than the guy who joked, "I like to be able to fire people. Hey, nice ponchos, you garbage-bag-wearing peasants!"

Did I get everything I wanted? No, of course not. Is any politician perfect? No, of course not. Is there a difference between the two major US parties? Oh yes.

Re: What's the use for Bitcoin?

#180

Post by IkmoIkmo » Fri, Apr 03, 2015, 8:12 AM UTC

Locke1689 wrote: post #158

IkmoIkmo wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Bitpesa takes 3% Here's an example of remitting money to Kenya between various services: http://remittanceprices.worldbank.org/en/corridor/Canada/Ken... Bitpesa is a Kenyan remittance company after all. > Coinbase charges 1% to buy, and another 1% to sell Coinbase costs 1% to process, period. It's cheaper for a merchant than the 3% of a CC, Stripe, Paypal, Square etc. If you want to look at the consumer side, that'…

Microsoft does not accept Bitcoin -- BitPay accepts bitcoin and Microsoft accepts dollars.

Irrelevant for the point that was made on cheaper transactions. If Microsoft had accepted the payment in any other way it'd have left them with less profits on that particular transaction.

It's relevant when talking about e.g. bitcoin as a store of value, but that topic wasn't raised. On that topic you could say that accepting bitcoin and buying a derivative to hedge, a bit like Bitreserve or Coinapult locks, would allow you to transact and store bitcoin, immune to bitcoin's volatility, yet cheaper than your average 3% Paypal, Stripe, Square or Creditcard transaction.

Beyond that, it's merely semantics.