251–260 of 279 posts
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...which is also no different than paper money, or the money we store digitally in our banks...
The difference is, you can't pay your taxes in bitcoin.
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Except that regulating things is not the same as holding a monopoly on regulations. If government is so completely confident that its currency is much more superior and stable, well, allow the competition! Make it legal to receive whatever I want to receive as a payment. Let businesses regulate the currency market and determine what currency is reliable. Oh wait, except that then government cannot tax you, of course.…
Make it legal to receive whatever I want to receive as a payment. This is already. You can legally trade things for other things. There is no law saying that you have to use Euro (or your local government issued money)( for everything. The only think you have to use it for, is taxes or paying fines.
"Along with the power to coin money, Congress has the concurrent power to restrain the circulation of money which is not issued under its own authority in order to protect and preserve the constitutional currency for the benefit of all citizens of the nation."
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Gold does not have that much of inherent value either.
Gold is inherently useful as a tangible object with exploitable physical properties. Gold, for example, has good conductivity and is used to plate electrical connections. Gold is also useful for its rust-resistance. Thus, on this basis, like all useable physical goods, gold has some inherent value as a commodity.
Do you really mean to say gold's rust-resistant properties are to blame for it's exceedingly high price on the market?
Fact: In 2013, Bitcoin is the world's easiest way to send a standardized indicator of wealth from one person to another. Forget anonymity, forget open source, forget deflation, forget amateurs building Ruby on Rails websites poorly!
Bitcoin's #1 benefit is the ousting of intermediaries. Because Bitcoin transactions can occur directly between two people without any third party involvement, the platform upon which people trade Bitcoin for goods and services becomes irrelevant. With Bitcoin, the platform only matters to the extent it aids in the market discovery process.
I for one see inherent value in a currency I have control over 24/7, that I can literally park in my brain never to touch the public Internet, carry with me everywhere I go, send to anyone, anywhere at any time, instantly and without an intermediary. If you see no value in that, honestly, what is there to say. Good luck with your financial goals in 2013.
Disclaimer: I know virtually nothing about bitcoin past what I've read on HN. Bitcoin are uniquely identifiable by nature. Has there been any attempt to create and maintain a manifest of "tainted" (i.e., stolen) bc that could be referenced during transactions? If a receiver of bc knows that they are tainted, and that the next receiver might refuse them, then they might refuse them as well. I understand that I'm hand-…
http://anonymity-in-bitcoin.blogspot.ie/2011/07/bitcoin-is-n...
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There was actually a high-profile incident not too long ago with one of the big banks' online banking system. Users could view other people's account information just by incrementing an integer in the URL as I recall. It's not necessarily so much that banks are secure, but hacking them is much riskier than hacking Bitcoin sites, especially for white-hats.
Are you thinking of Heroku? Heroku isn't a bank.
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What made you stop caring?
I built a simple program to transfer money between two of my wallets, and .01 bitcoin (a substantial fraction of my bitcoin wealth) disappeared as a transaction cost. I asked around and was told "oh, yeah, they changed the defaults recently so there is always a transaction cost, you should pay closer attention to mailing list X, it's more up-to-date than the API documentation." I decided I didn't like dealing with so…
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The difference is, you can't pay your taxes in bitcoin.
You can't pay your taxes in gold. Or yuan for that matter. That doesn't invalidate it as a currency.
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That is an absolutely terrible lesson to draw from this episode. First and most importantly, Airbnb and Uber are not disrupting industries burdened primarily by consumer safety regulations; they are disrupting industries burdened primarily by barriers to entrance that are designed to direct economic rents to politically favored actors. Huge difference. There is no plausible 'consumer protection' story for preventing…
Thank you. As an Uber user in DC, I have yet to encounter, or hear of any news event in which Uber put people in a dangerous or even inconvenient situation. It's infuriating to see people compare Uber to a poorly secured Bitcoin site, as if the regulations in banking are somehow equivalent to those with taxi cabs. Uber only uses licensed sedan drivers. They are already subject to safety regulation, but unlike taxi ca…
Not surprising, considering that Uber currently carries a tiny fraction of the traffic that the cab companies do. As the company scales, it's not hard to imagine that they will need to bear more responsibility for background checks on their drivers, and assume liability for damages those drivers may cause. Full-time drivers will begin battling one another for preferred territory, and Uber will have to mediate the conflicts. In short, Uber will start looking more and more like a traditional cab business, and less and less like a peer-to-peer matchmaking service.
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Note how free market works great in this case: the organization costs people their lost money and will most likely go out of business. Unlike big banks. That sounds horrible. If a bank gets hacked and "loses" my money, they owe me that money . Federal and state law requires them to put that money back into my bank account, at the bank's expense. (Note, this is not the same as FDIC insurance, which applies in the even…
> The free market still applies: on top of getting their money back, customers can take their money to more secure banks. Unless the bank goes bankrupt. Basically, if the bank plays fast and loose with customers' money the customers shoulder the risks whilst the bank owners get the rewards - and there's no way customers can tell whether this is happening, since they neither have access to the bank's internal records…
Tip: This is happening. This is how banks have and will always make money.
It is the role of governments to regulate to what extent the bank can use your money and for what purposes in order to minimize customer risk.
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I'm not sure what problems you're talking about in the first place. That's the point. :-) A number of them have been enumerated above: protecting banking customers from loss in the event of theft; regulating the location and safety of hotels; providing some means of recourse against a dishonest cabbie.
How are those "problems inherent in the peer-to-peer model"? Aren't those problems any business in the industry has to face?