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Interesting article. But none of the problems described are actually with fiat currency. I see criticisms of the Fed, Banks, Credit Card Companies, Credit Union
by zajd 10y ago
Interesting article. But none of the problems described are actually with fiat currency. I see criticisms of the Fed, Banks, Credit Card Companies, Credit Unions. All the problems were due to issues with exchanges and intermediaries and with handling USD. It seems the actual fiat currency part worked fine.
- nicky0 10y agoThe point you have missed is that we don't need these intermediaries if fiat currency is taken out of the mix.
- zajd 10y agoAs the essay posted so clearly demonstrates.
- jstanley 10y agoThe difference is it's perfectly possible to use Bitcoin on your own without dealing with intermediaries. But you can't send cash over the internet.
- zajd 10y agoI find it amusing that you consider the internet "on your own" like there isn't a gigantic investment being made into that infrastructure that even enables bitcoin in the first place. Do people who are in to Bitcoin think intermediaries solely exist to extract value from transactions? There's actually a service being provided.
- nicky0 10y agoThe internet (at least theoretically) a neutral infrastructure though. Bitcoin is just an application like email, the web or IM.
- zajd 10y agoWell let me be the first to invite bitcoiners to rejoin us back in reality where the internet isn't. If the entire argument of the bitcoin community is "providing an alternative to fiat currency" and they can't, what's even the point? The internet IS NOT neutral. Never has been, never will be.
- daptaq 10y agoCould you elaborate ob your last point? Regarding the first point: To my understating, as a Ex-Bitcoiner, the whole point is a massive distrust in financial institutions + the idea that the whole hierarchy of banks and clients seems superfluous, and could be done away with. Insted of giving up your responsibilities that you get by having money, you take them into your own hand, leaving banks and the similar with nothing left to do. Now it will obviously make no sense to use bitcoin like Dollar/Pound/Euro+bank, because it isn't made for that. Currently (as far as I know) there are some internal struggles between the "core developers" because of this fact. For-Profit companies like CoinBase and BitPay would like to expand their market at the cost of the distributed network, while others say the whole point of the network would be lost by giving in to them.
- zajd 10y agoIt's more or less that all value created from Bitcoin only exists because of the fiat currency systems in place today. It's not like banks hold your money for days when transferring for no reason. Trust is a social problem and simply cannot be solved via technology because the infrastructure that technology is built on cannot be neutral... we live on a planet with limited resources. If your master plan includes chopping down the tree that holds your treehouse... sounds pretty terrible. Look at international politics to see what "neutrality" in the real world looks like. It's just power dynamics that are outside our control. Is that really what we want out of our financial system? You see the same thing in the eth community thinking they can use "code" to solve the problem of trust. You can't. Lawyers have been trying for millenia. Bitcoiners are going to need a much more compelling reason/feature than they do now if they want any sort of widescale-adoption (and beyond that, to avoid being smashed when the illegal activities that take place on the network force someone to care)
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- rndmind 10y agoThe argument here is that the protocol itself is independent and can run on the internet like bittorrent, IRC, SMTP, XMPP etc. This is not about the physical laws and resources governing the internet.
- zajd 10y agoThe protocol cannot be separated from the physical infrastructure required to carry it out. Until Bitcoin separates from the internet itself and shows it can actually fund the infrastructure required to maintain it... don't see what the pull is.
- bertiewhykovich 10y agoHave you tried torrenting anything recently?
- bertiewhykovich 10y agoThe point being, of course, that it's gotten fairly difficult. It's all very well and good to treat the Internet as an abstraction, but those "physical laws and resources" are critically important for any service that wants to be useful in the real world -- where physical laws and resources are very important.
- bduerst 10y ago>it's perfectly possible to use Bitcoin on your own Though not competitively, which was the point being made in the article.
- anarcat 10y agoyou can send cash over snail mail, who needs the internet anyways? heck, you can transfer huge piles of cash with paper checks, which cost around 75¢ around here, try to beat those kind of fees...
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- AsyncAwait 10y ago> It seems the actual fiat currency part worked fine. I don't think Bitcoin is made at will out of thin air like flat currency routinely is. You can still argue that this is not a problem with flat currency itself, but the problem is, unlike Bitcoin, the laws regarding printing and production of flat currency are not governed by hard-to-break math.
- eli 10y agoAs a consumer, I'm not sure I care.
- rhino369 10y agoBitcoin is made at will out of thin air. It's just an arbitrary amount created every day. The creation rate was just picked by whoever created it. I think it can actually be changed by concensus. I see no reason why an arbitrary rate is better than a rate chosen to minimize inflation and deflation. Bitcoin basically is a fiat currency, except no government forces people to use it.
- zajd 10y agoThe irony being if something like Fusion power happened bitcoin hyperinflation would be guaranteed.