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Bitcoin: the Stripe perspective

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Re: Bitcoin: the Stripe perspective

#211

Post by marcosdumay »

Natanael_L wrote: post #188
marcosdumay wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It has the same problem of every cryptographic (and not cryptographic - see paper) voting system. It's impossible to create a system that assures both a correct result and voter anonymity. Paper assures none, but has quite strong guarantees on both. I'd settle on some system that assures the result, and has good guarantees of anonymity, what one can create with pseudonyms, but at that point it's a political debate, n…

Not impossible, actually! Heard of Secure Multiparty Computation? http://www.reddit.com/r/crypto/comments/r003r/are_others_int...

"Now, the voter makes his vote. He generate a nonce (unique number used once), makes his vote, signs it with his keypair, and encrypts this with the public SMPC key. ... Since the vote wasn't encrypted with the voter's key, he can't decrypt it which means that nobody can prove what he voted for using the encrypted message."

Eh, he didn't encrypt it, but he signed it. How can people not prove that he created it? Whoever holds the SMPC key knows everybody's votes.

Re: Bitcoin: the Stripe perspective

#212

Post by mrb »

dublinben wrote: post #204
Natanael_L wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's no fault of Bitcoin, however. Getting USD isn't magically easy either.

Sure it is. You can sit on a street corner and people will literally hand you physical cash. It doesn't get any easier than that.

Someone merely held a Bitcoin address sign on TV and received coins from all over the world: http://www.theverge.com/2013/12/1/5163926/one-college-footba... How awesome is that? It sure beats the reach of sitting on a street corner...

Re: Bitcoin: the Stripe perspective

#213

Post by freedom123 »

jp555 wrote: post #60
freedom123 wrote: post #44

Bitcoin, no matter how you word it or rationalize it will always have a root problem and inherent risk...it is backed by nothing. Users today think its usage gives it market value and it can but to a limit. Money (USD) originally (the dollar bill) worked because it was back by gold. A metal that worked because everyone on the planet wants it. That dollar bill was a "check" or agreement stating, this dollar bill repre…

Aluminum was more expensive than gold until a cheap way to purify it was developed. Now we wrap our food in it. Gold is only valuable until the first metallic asteroid is placed into high Earth orbit. Not tomorrow, but probably sooner than you think.

You are going in an infinite loop trying to equate something (gold) to nothing (bitcoins). Typing zeros into a screen will not equate to a hand full of gold coins. The value of gold or any other metal is not a relevant argument because in a free market you can have competing currencies. Bitcoin could compete if the USA was a free market (its not) and if it was backed by something (its not). Thus the reason why investing in Bitcoin in any manner has risk. The argument with the asteroid doesn't support simply bc the metals will still be around after it hits earth. Your hard drives with stored zeros will be annihilated (much like your premise).

Re: Bitcoin: the Stripe perspective

#214

Post by BrendanEich »

nawitus wrote: post #45
MichaelGG wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

JavaScript could have had a better design without impacting adoption. Likewise if IE had fixed the language along with all the other improvements they added, it'd also be better by now. IPv4 is vastly better than JavaScript for what it does.

If Brendan Eich wouldn't have rushed the JavaScript design, Netscape would've chosen another language which was already in the works (or complete?). It was apparently similar to PHP, and probably would've been worse than JavaScript.

Something got garbled here -- apologies if it's my fault, please cite your source and I'll try to fix it upstream.

The PHP (but much simpler) server side embedded mini-language idea was part of LiveWire, and would never have made it into the Netscape browser instead of JS. Rather, it was intended to do conditional server-side markup, string interpolation based on HTTP header values, etc.

Upper management -- Rick Schell, VP Engineering -- argued "we already have two languages, we can't justify three". The two were Java and JS. This killed the PHP-like exercise.

I rushed JS for many reasons:

1. Everyone at Netscape was rushing, because Microsoft was coming after Netscape and we all knew it. People were working around the clock. This was not healthy, but it happened.

2. There was little time to get the rest of the browser JS integration (AKA "the DOM Level 0") done in the rest of calendar year 1995 before the code froze for Netscape 2.0 final. The first public beta was in the fall, and code freeze in early fall or even late summer (my memory fails me here) meant critical bug fixes only after that point.

3. The Netscape IPO was coming up, which added to (1).

4. JS was called Mocha, then LiveScript, but Netscape marketing wanted to get the JS trademark, which required showing Sun that a VB-like companion to Java was viable. Some of the rushing was based on trying to keep Sun on board, in the person of Bill Joy (who eventually signed the trademark license for Sun, as "Bill Joy, Founder, Sun Microsystems").

5. LiveWire wanted JS frozen as its server-side language, and was on its own hard-charging schedule. I think it was trying to release with Netscape 2, but again my memory fails me. Anyone reading this who was there should weigh in.

/be

Re: Bitcoin: the Stripe perspective

#215

Post by wpietri »

neom wrote: post #133
wpietri wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bitcoins are way more volatile than gold: http://btcvol.info/ That you bought something and had it go up is great for you, but it does not mean the volatility is low. Indeed, if it went up a lot, it means volatility is high. Volatility is the inverse of stability.

A currency can be as volatile as it wants from day to day, but if over a very long time the value appreciates consistently then wouldn't that make it a good value store? You're hedging day to day against a long term win, surely?

Nothing goes up consistently. If it did, people would invest in it until the price changed so that it didn't go up consistently.

Re: Bitcoin: the Stripe perspective

#216

Post by nathan7 »

dublinben wrote: post #203
Bakkot wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The answer to basically all of your questions is that to transfer money, you need to move money . This can be basically a promise of money, as with wire transfers, or physical, as you'd do by transporting bullion or cash. The problem with using a promise to move money is that you have to trust whoever's promising. That works alright if there's a central authority, like a bank, but less well if you don't want to trust…

You might be interested in the Hawala system[0] of money transfer. It has existed for hundreds of years, and allows efficient international money transfers with no central authority. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawala

Hawala has fascinated me to no end, as essentially an anarchistic peer-to-peer web-of-trust banking system. It has existed for a long time, and keeps functioning even where traditional banking systems have broken down. As cool as Bitcoin is, I have more hope for a system akin to Hawala than some proof-of-work based system. Guerilla banking that depends on having more (computational) power than your enemies isn't too realistic. PGP'd remittances are much more cryptographically robust, and depend just on the one factor that any real monetary system relies on anyway: human trust.

Re: Bitcoin: the Stripe perspective

#217

Post by saalweachter »

brg444 wrote: post #51
nlh wrote: post #5

This is one of the best posts on the "state of the Bitcoin economy" I've read yet. They nail a few key points that shows they get it in a real-world sense. * Mass-consumer adoption of Bitcoin is a tough sell in developed countries (USA, etc.) * Bitcoin the Network may ultimately be more valuable than BTC the currency * "No chargebacks!" is a pitch to merchants for BTC, not consumers. Consumers like chargebacks & trus…

> * Bitcoin the Network may ultimately be more valuable than BTC the currency This is a fundamental misunderstanding of Bitcoin. Because each and every Bitcoin function as a sort of "token" that provides access to this payment network, their value is closely tied to the value of the network. For Bitcoin to become an international payment gateway system, liquidity requires every Bitcoin to be worth a lot.

The value of individual bitcoins depends as heavily on how long bitcoins are held as it does on the transaction volume.

If there are 20 million BTC in active circulation and the bitcoin network processes 20 billion USD per day in transactions, than the "intrinsic value" could be $7000/BTC if the average bitcoin is held for a week between transactions (eg, you are paid biweekly in BTC and spend them constantly), or it could be $40/BTC if the average bitcoin is held for an hour between transactions (eg, people hold fiat and the BTC are in constant use by the gateways).

A high intrinsic value really requires adoption both as a payment network and as a store of value.

Re: Bitcoin: the Stripe perspective

#218

Post by billyarzt »

Potentially dumb question: if there are 21 million bitcoins (and therefore 21 million bitcoin addresses), would that limit bitcoin's efficiency as a medium of exchange? Ie wouldnt there be potentially billions of transaction moving through a financial system powered by bitcoin daily? (Apologies in advance for any flawed assumptions).

Re: Bitcoin: the Stripe perspective

#219

Post by nathan7 »

billyarzt wrote: post #218

Potentially dumb question: if there are 21 million bitcoins (and therefore 21 million bitcoin addresses), would that limit bitcoin's efficiency as a medium of exchange? Ie wouldnt there be potentially billions of transaction moving through a financial system powered by bitcoin daily? (Apologies in advance for any flawed assumptions).

The flawed assumption is "and therefore 21 million Bitcoin addresses". Generate an RSA keypair, and give out the hash of the public key (encoded in a Bitcoin-specific way). Anyone can send you Bitcoins there now.

Re: Bitcoin: the Stripe perspective

#220

Post by sanswork »

mrb wrote: post #207
flavor8 wrote: post #24

It's not quite as simple as that, though. To, for example, send money from the US to Kenya via bitcoin, you need somebody in the US who is willing to sell you their bitcoin in exchange for dollars, and somebody in Kenya who is willing to buy your bitcoin in return for shillings (which are then paid to the destination seller). Creating the technology that makes this relatively transparent is quite doable, but you stil…

"big banks charge only cents to send large amounts of cash internationally" This is utterly false. The entire reason the remittance industry exists (Western Union, etc) is because banks don't offer cheap ways of sending money internationally, and/or recipients often don't even have bank accounts. In fact, remittance fees are so high[1] that this is precisely why many analysts see Bitcoin's potential to disrupt this i…

You missed out on the word large. Remittances are generally very small.

Also the cost of remittances isn't in moving the money it's in having lots of people in the destination country that your family can go to and get cash from. There is no indication that bitcoin would make that cheaper.

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