Please remove mitsuhiko/*

>>Who said anything about ethics? Corporations accepting Bitcoin is evidence of its usefulness.

I don't buy that either. The only thing it is an evidence of is that said corporations want to attract customers of a specific demographic. Overstock.com CEO himself is a libertarian, for example. If it wasn't for him I strongly doubt they would have implemented Bitcoin payments on their site.

I mean, if Bitcoin is so useful, why have sites that have implemented it have done a miniscule if not virtually negligible amount of sales through it?

>[gold has] durability, portability, uniformity and divisibility.

You could argue bitcoin effectively has those qualities too. It also has a cost to mine which may peg its cost in the same way that the cost to mine gold does its.

The thing that worries me about bitcoin as an investment is it can be replaced easily by dogecoin or whatever-coin with basically the same properties whereas there is nothing else quite like gold.

Some countries have strict rules about soliciting or collecting donations.

People in those countries want to avoid the small possibility of legal trouble. They want to opt out of the project.

The project refuses to allow any form of optout.

This means that some people in some countries may have to sepnd time (and this money) talking to police and explaining what's going on.

Dumping this time + cost burden on someone else when they have specifically asked to avoid it is sub-optimal.

As an example of a group who were interviewed by police and who had to explain that their local group was not soliciting donations - the US parent group was: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8543640

There was another problem which has since been fixed. The project would send out an email when a tip had been donated, even when it was a tiny donation and even if the receiver was not able to withdraw that tip. This is unsolicited and probably bulk and thus meets the treshold for spam.

Finally it's not really clear what happens to the money. Say you're involved in $OpenSourceProject. Now imagine I donate a few US cents (but in bitcoin) to GhotiFish for a commit you made to $OpenSourceProject and you never collect it. This thread uas clarified that the money goes into a pool for $OpenSourceProject. But what if they never collect it?

Tl:dr get permission from people before you use their name or project-names in your stuff.

I don't think he is angry, I just think he isn't comfortable having his projects listed on sites like this. Read his comments on the bug; they are polite, they explain his perspective, they ask for a specific action, they don't contain insults.

In your scenario, if you actually wanted to tip a meaningful amount, I think it wouldn't be a big deal to simply contact the project directly and see how they wanted to handle it. If you are talking about software users keeping $0.50 tips instead of the projects collecting them, I think that argument is sort of neutral to the opt-in/opt-out question (if a project thinks the combined small tips are worth dealing with, they will likely opt in).

Saying that you can fund centralized payment systems with Bitcoin isn't an argument for Bitcoin, it's a solution in search of a problem. Even if you think fiat is completely unacceptable you can fund those centralized payment schemes in Africa with gold, or silver, or cowrie shells, or human urea (not making it up; https://twitter.com/UroFoundation), or any of a million other things that don't require billion-dollar foundries to make the mining hardware you need.

You're right that you can't start a new Visa in your garage, but as it turns out even they have competition, and more than "very little". In any case "garage bootstrap ability" is not a value metric that I hear as a serious talking point that often. Normally we bootstrap things in garages and quickly try to scale them up out of garages (Visa itself was probably started in nothing larger than a Bank of America conference room, after all). And good luck fitting the datacenters behind Chinese-based Bitcoin mining operations in a single garage.

As far as competition alone driving fees down, that only works up to a point (which is why no efficient market has managed zero fees, even in high-competition markets where the profit margins are squeezed very low). For Bitcoin as long as miners can turn a profit for the price of electricity they use, they'll continue to come online to buy tickets in the lottery with KW-hr, so the transaction fees will be based on the delta between the price of electricity and the price of Bitcoin itself, and mining itself will migrate to increasingly more efficient (and centralized) operations with plentiful cheap electricity and cooling as less efficient miners are driven out of business. But at 7 tranx/sec even the most efficient miners won't easily be able to pay for that on pennies/transaction.

And since individual miners collaborating in mining pools will probably never go away (since it's not that expensive to "play the lottery" with only a couple of ASICs on your personal power bill), the efficient mining firms will have to eke out a profit on something less than 100% of the blocks out there, causing them to charge even more per transaction.

At the end of the day the "fundamentals" is that Bitcoin in steady-state will convert electrical power into a distributed ledger without trusted third parties (except, of course, for the centralized miners themselves...), and that electrical power has to be paid for by the users of the Bitcoin network itself.

Doing the same thing that Bitcoin does today with distributed networks that are orders of magnitude more power-efficient (even if they did utilize trusted third parties) would result in a much, much cheaper financial network, which would be even that much better for the poor of Africa (and that much easier to drive to near-zero fees by competition).

After all, those transaction fees for Bitcoin don't pay for anything than keeping the ledger up to date, and don't include insurance fees for things such as fraud, scams by the counterparty, and a host of other things that are accounted for in the fees that Visa and its many competitors charges.