Bitcoin is none of the things it was supposed to be
theoutline.com
Bitcoin is none of the things it was supposed to be
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Re: Bitcoin is none of the things it was supposed to be
#2The article repeatedly quotes statements to the effect “this was supposed to show what a truly free market looks like. Instead, it’s a shitshow.”
The word “instead” doesn’t belong there. Really.
Re: Bitcoin is none of the things it was supposed to be
#3The author seems to expect that the changes created by cryptocurrency should be visible immediately. It is a lack of patience, and lack of understanding that changing deeply rooted systems and behaviors takes time.
People have never managed software where if you lost your "password", your money was gone forever. They never had to keep a 12-24 word recovery phrase. They've never sent money to addresses that look like hash strings. Their money value was never this volatile (in some countries anyway) and never this complicated to use (understanding and waiting for block confirmations, looking up transactions in the blockchain explorer).
That's why Coinbase exists, to obfuscate these complexities, to sell security as a service. The cryptography behind cryptocurrencies allows you to basically be your own bank vault; this is not intuitive to people.
The fundamentals for Satoshi's vision have been laid out, the rest of the implementation details will come in time.
Re: Bitcoin is none of the things it was supposed to be
#4The fact that the majority of people only trade/hold bitcoin to exchange for centralized currency i.e. USD tells you something, no?
Re: Bitcoin is none of the things it was supposed to be
#5The fact that the majority of people only trade/hold bitcoin to exchange for centralized currency i.e. USD tells you something, no?
Yes: that it's not universally accepted (yet?) and highly volatile.
Re: Bitcoin is none of the things it was supposed to be
#6>Bitcoin was designed so that users had to take care of their private cryptographic keys for every address they used, and Nakamoto advised making a new address for every transaction. This proved too confusing and burdensome, so along came wallet services, which stored users’ Bitcoins like a bank account and substituted a password for the private key
wut? if you used a online wallet, you still had to manage addresses. the only advantage comes in the form of not having to wait hours/days for the client to sync up (back then there weren't any thin clients), and not having to back up a wallet file.
>Whether it was out of incompetence or an attempt to save itself from selling at an inflated price (at one point, the price of Bitcoin was $3,000 higher on Coinbase than on other exchanges),
that's not how exchanges work. the counterparty is another buyer, not the exchange. coinbase is getting x% fee regardless if the price was $1000 or $10000.
>this was exactly the kind of thing Bitcoin was supposed to prevent.
sounds like a strawman. i don't think anyone realistically thought if bitcoin came along, all the AML/KYC laws around handling fiat will magically evaporate
Re: Bitcoin is none of the things it was supposed to be
#7Remember how Coinbase, the San Francisco-based startup which raised more than $200 million in venture capital, put a freeze on my money? Whether it was out of incompetence or an attempt to save itself from selling at an inflated price (at one point, the price of Bitcoin was $3,000 higher on Coinbase than on other exchanges), this was exactly the kind of thing Bitcoin was supposed to prevent.
Um no, I don't think so.
Coinbase.com is not the Bitcoin experience, just like Facebook is not the internet experience. Nothing in the Bitcoin whitepaper mentions Bitcoin solving problems inherent with a central currency Exchange or hosted, custodial wallets.
Use localbitcoins.com and a non-custodial wallet if you want to experience Bitcoin per it's original specification.
Exchanges != Bitcoin.
Re: Bitcoin is none of the things it was supposed to be
#8Then don't buy any.
Re: Bitcoin is none of the things it was supposed to be
#9The fact that the majority of people only trade/hold bitcoin to exchange for centralized currency i.e. USD tells you something, no?
Yes: that it's not universally accepted (yet?) and highly volatile.
Do you mean universally accepted as payment for goods?
The fact that it takes an hour+ for one transaction to be confirmed (i.e. behind ~6 blocks) seems like a huge UX problem for buyers/sellers. If I'm going to use bitcoin to buy a TV, I'm not going to wait around an hour for the merchant to say I'm good to go. And transaction fees are so high now that it makes no sense to use bitcoin for small transactions.
Other issues include refunds/disputes. If you receive something in the mail from a seller that is not as described, then no equivalent of a dispute/chargeback process to get your bitcoin back.
Re: Bitcoin is none of the things it was supposed to be
#10The author seems to expect that the changes created by cryptocurrency should be visible immediately. It is a lack of patience, and lack of understanding that changing deeply rooted systems and behaviors takes time. People have never managed software where if you lost your "password", your money was gone forever. They never had to keep a 12-24 word recovery phrase. They've never sent money to addresses that look like…
What, then, exactly is the difference between your scenario and Coinbase being the bank?