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Bitcoin is most useful as an alternative to awful systems like Western Union. The rest of these systems seem to be research projects at this stage. Not saying t
by api 9y ago
Bitcoin is most useful as an alternative to awful systems like Western Union. The rest of these systems seem to be research projects at this stage. Not saying they won't mature, but they're not like the Internet in 95. More like the Internet in 75.
- wpietri 9y agoOk. Who's using it as an alternative to Western Union today on a regular basis? I live in a city, SF, that has plenty of signs up to attract people sending money back to their family back home. But I've never seen a single sign getting people to use Bitcoin for that. It's certainly possible that Bitcoin is like the Internet was in 1975. But at that point, they hadn't even invented TCP/IP, which came in '82. At that point, ARPANET was just one of many approaches to networking, including BITNET, Merit Network, Tymnet, and Telenet. Not to mention the circuit-switched networks that were probably dominant in revenue terms. It seems totally plausible to me that Bitcoin and/or blockchains could end up as a similar "people used it for a little while but it's hard to remember why" thing. Or, worse, it could end up like the OSI protocol stack: a collection of exciting ideas that nobody ever really got working to deliver much value in the real world.