Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why would FDIC insurance make me feel safer than elliptic curve cryptography?
Because people who sell you food believe in FDIC
Slightly snarky but true retort: Soylent takes Bitcoin.
BitPay and PayPal
61–70 of 150 posts
Re: BitPay and PayPal
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've worked with Bitpay while making https://www.incoin.io/ and their developer docs are average to good. It wasn't horrible, the documentation was good enough and Bitpay offered to help (and were super helpful when we asked any questions). In fact, other than having to implement BitAuth ourselves it was pretty painless. Regarding your AngelHack prize... the same thing happened to me. I'd be more skeptical of AngelHa…
Hey Tony! Great work on your Go implementation of BitAuth: https://github.com/codelittinc/gobitauth – would you mind sending me an email about your AngelHack issues? eric@bitpay.com
Hey Eric! Thanks for the heads up, will send you an email now.
Hah... that library was awesome to work on. Ended up reimplementing the signature algorithm before getting a library that lets us use golang's built in ecdsa libs. Not clever!
Love BitAuth. It's super easy to use and works brilliantly.
Re: BitPay and PayPal
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
Let's be more general. Set A = stuff you can buy with USD. Set B = stuff you can buy with BTC. Set W = all stuff. Set A will always be a subset of set W, and is getting to be a smaller subset every day. Set B will in the future be an exact match for Set W. Which unit of account would you choose? A or B? edited: typo (C instead of B)
Assuming you meant set B with set C - what makes you believe set B will match set W one day? Especially right now set B is incredible tiny compared to set A and there is not much incentive to switch to B which in turn makes it unlikely that set B will quickly converge to set W.
Most people don't yet understand how infungible the USD is becoming. Argentenians and Venezuelans understand the infungibility of their national currencies much better than Americans do theirs. Wealthy Americans and the wealthy of other nationalities who travel understand it better than those with little savings who are largely bound to their own states. Only big players and those on the fringes of society notice the problems with the USD right now.
As more people leave the official economy every day, the fringes grow larger. The more the US clamps down on foreign banks holding USD, the less attractive the USD will be as a store of wealth.
Re: BitPay and PayPal
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
A, until B has FDIC protections.
Why would FDIC insurance make me feel safer than elliptic curve cryptography?
Because someone can point a gun at your head to defeat ECC. They can't do that with banks. That's why people keep their life savings in a bank, and why you'll need a bank even with Bitcoin.
Re: BitPay and PayPal
#65BitCoin is rocketing on this news it seems: * https://btc-e.com/ * https://www.cryptsy.com/markets/view/2 * https://www.bitstamp.net/
> BitCoin is rocketing on this news it seems: For values of "rocketing" approaching "down 6% on the week, 13% on the month"
Perhaps you don't understand the meaning of the phrase "on this news."
Perhaps you do understand, but it makes you feel good to say something nasty about bitcoin. And that feeling is more important to you than honest discussion.
Re: BitPay and PayPal
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
Its free if you have bitcoin and your friend wants bitcoin. Once you bring other currencies into the mix it is often more expensive to comparable services and just as slow if not slower.
And it is only free as long as mining new blocks covers the costs of running the network, after that you will have to pay fees.
Agreed. Bitcoin is not competitive for small transactions. Given the average transaction confirmation time of 7 minutes (which will never go down) it clearly was not meant to be.
Re: BitPay and PayPal
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
'What is the value proposition for consumers apart from sending money to friends? That's valuable, but it's not multi-billions of dollars worth of valuable' It isn't? Western Union makes $5 billion in revenue every year. PayPal - and a reference to sending money to friends is literally the name of the company - also makes $5 billion in revenue every year.
Exactly, it is mostly a solved problem. The question is, what value does Bitcoin add (for the average customer not interested to buy narcotics on Silk Road) and what is the price for this, for example unsolved security issues and large price fluctuations during the early adoption phase?
Transportation was a solved problem when horse carriages were invented. Every solved problem can be solved even better. Isn't that what most startups are about?
Re: BitPay and PayPal
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why would FDIC insurance make me feel safer than elliptic curve cryptography?
Because someone can point a gun at your head to defeat ECC. They can't do that with banks. That's why people keep their life savings in a bank, and why you'll need a bank even with Bitcoin.
> Because someone can point a gun at your head to defeat ECC.
You can store an encrypted paper wallet in a safety deposit box at the bank if you're worried about that threat. You don't, however, need to hand it over to the bank to lend it out to bad debtors if you don't want to, which is the threat FDIC protects against.
Re: BitPay and PayPal
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
Assuming you meant set B with set C - what makes you believe set B will match set W one day? Especially right now set B is incredible tiny compared to set A and there is not much incentive to switch to B which in turn makes it unlikely that set B will quickly converge to set W.
Most people don't yet understand how infungible the USD is becoming. Argentenians and Venezuelans understand the infungibility of their national currencies much better than Americans do theirs. Wealthy Americans and the wealthy of other nationalities who travel understand it better than those with little savings who are largely bound to their own states. Only big players and those on the fringes of society notice the…
Isn't a currency fungible by definition - a dollar is a dollar is a dollar? And we are getting away from the question I asked - what are the advantages of using Bitcoins, advantages that average people actually care about today and that are not offset by disadvantages of using Bitcoins.
Re: BitPay and PayPal
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why would FDIC insurance make me feel safer than elliptic curve cryptography?
Because someone can point a gun at your head to defeat ECC. They can't do that with banks. That's why people keep their life savings in a bank, and why you'll need a bank even with Bitcoin.
I always felt bitcoin was more about replacing paper money than replacing banks. Banks give you interests, Bitcoin just sits there and the amount (in bitcoins) never changes.