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Bitcoin or some derivative is better as a foundational bank reserve currency or wire transfer replacement than the actual direct thing you use. Someone else wi

by mahyarm 10y ago

Bitcoin or some derivative is better as a foundational bank reserve currency or wire transfer replacement than the actual direct thing you use. Someone else will build the next equivalent of visa on top of it.

te_chris 10y ago
The banks already are working on blockchain based interchange, at least from what I hear in the UK
grey-area 10y ago
Someone else will build the next equivalent of visa on top of it. For the reasons given above I find that highly unlikely. Proof of work and distributed consensus are at odds with the requirements of a global real-time processing network.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
daemin 10y ago
I don't like the fact that bitcoin basically relies trading electricity for money in a nonsensical way. Having large exchanges built on it seems like a terrible idea, where financial places will be required to gobble up immense amounts of energy just to operate. It just won't make financial sense to do this as I can see it now.
- CyberDildonics 10y ago
  Mining resources are not correlated to scaleability. Once again, whatever people's views on bitcoin at least realize that mining hashes don't dictate how many transactions can be processed by a miner. They mine a block, then they include as many transactions as they think they can get away with and keep the latency low enough to propagate. Right now they are capped by a block size limit which is the real next hurdle. Some people think there should be no block size limit - latency already becomes a limit in itself. To hammer it home - someone using bitcoin does not need to use any more electricity than a computer and internet connection. The miners use the electricity and the amount of transactions they process is not directly linked in any way.
- stale2002 10y ago
  The amount of money spent on electricity is a rounding error on top of a rounding error, when compared to how much wealth/money the current financial system uses to make it run.
jcfrei 10y ago
Some people have mentioned this before but I forgot who they were: The blockchain is very likely to disrupt the financial sector, specifically the whole industry which is now in place for settlement/clearing when transferring financial contracts (shares, bonds, CDS, etc). A unified API and single public ledger could really bring costs down for those transactions and that's what a lot of financial institutions are interested in. I don't think it will have much value as a reserve currency, especially since it relies on computational power (so the amount of control is mostly based on economics - ie. the availability of cheap electricity and APUs) rather than political power.

by mahyarm 10y ago

te_chris 10y ago

The banks already are working on blockchain based interchange, at least from what I hear in the UK

grey-area 10y ago

Someone else will build the next equivalent of visa on top of it. For the reasons given above I find that highly unlikely. Proof of work and distributed consensus are at odds with the requirements of a global real-time processing network.

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

daemin 10y ago

I don't like the fact that bitcoin basically relies trading electricity for money in a nonsensical way. Having large exchanges built on it seems like a terrible idea, where financial places will be required to gobble up immense amounts of energy just to operate. It just won't make financial sense to do this as I can see it now.

CyberDildonics 10y ago
Mining resources are not correlated to scaleability. Once again, whatever people's views on bitcoin at least realize that mining hashes don't dictate how many transactions can be processed by a miner. They mine a block, then they include as many transactions as they think they can get away with and keep the latency low enough to propagate. Right now they are capped by a block size limit which is the real next hurdle. Some people think there should be no block size limit - latency already becomes a limit in itself. To hammer it home - someone using bitcoin does not need to use any more electricity than a computer and internet connection. The miners use the electricity and the amount of transactions they process is not directly linked in any way.
stale2002 10y ago
The amount of money spent on electricity is a rounding error on top of a rounding error, when compared to how much wealth/money the current financial system uses to make it run.

jcfrei 10y ago

Some people have mentioned this before but I forgot who they were: The blockchain is very likely to disrupt the financial sector, specifically the whole industry which is now in place for settlement/clearing when transferring financial contracts (shares, bonds, CDS, etc). A unified API and single public ledger could really bring costs down for those transactions and that's what a lot of financial institutions are interested in. I don't think it will have much value as a reserve currency, especially since it relies on computational power (so the amount of control is mostly based on economics - ie. the availability of cheap electricity and APUs) rather than political power.