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You can begin to see the beauty of Bitcoin when you want to accept payments. All you need to do is download a wallet, generate an address and put it online. You

You can begin to see the beauty of Bitcoin when you want to accept payments. All you need to do is download a wallet, generate an address and put it online. You don't need anybody's permission, as would be the case with PayPal or the likes. The risk of somebody deciding on a whim to freeze your funds is also greatly diminished (again, very different from PayPal and the likes). "Governance" and "Accountability" seem to be the antithesis to that. No, Bitcoin doesn't need that and doesn't want that. Yes, it is a bit scary, it is a system that develops on its own, depending on the way it is being used (network effects and so on). I guess economists freak out because they are unsure about the rules, and they can't have that. But it is also not true that it would be a huge problem if there were forks. Why would it be? People will simply use what works best for them, controlled by market forces (they need other people to use the same fork). Who decides how Bitcoin develops? Ultimately the users do, by using it or not. Developers and miners merely provide proposals. And why does a system need 100% agreement on everything? Such a system may well never exist.

SkyMarshal 9y ago
>But it is also not true that it would be a huge problem if there were forks. Why would it be? People will simply use what works best for them, controlled by market forces (they need other people to use the same fork). It's a problem for any tech that aspires to go mainstream and thus must contend with the already high cognitive loads on the majority of people who don't follow the tech in detail, don't know what a hard fork/chain split entails, what it means for their money, or the economy. Most mainstream users, when confronted with having to understand something like that to safeguard their money, will conclude, rightfully, it's best left in a traditional bank or under the mattress.
- anothercomment 9y ago
  Maybe true, but in a way, classical investments are even more complicated. Some of them are even deliberately complicated to obfuscate their risky nature to naive investors.
  - rosser 9y ago
    I don't think the predatory complexities found in some shady securities are a very prudent way of "excusing" the technical complexities and consequences of BTC, or any other cryptocurrency. "Not as bad as" is broadly fallacious, anyway.
    - anothercomment 9y ago
      OK then, explain to me: what is money?
      - rosser 9y ago
        I'm probably not the person to ask, because my "succinct to the point of sounding flippant, but offered completely honestly" answer is: a profoundly destructive social fiction whose time is well past. The notion and role of a medium of exchange are things on which I have ... divergent views. It's a human invention we have collectively chosen to value more than the thing it was presumably created to serve — you know, "humanity". Any tool that becomes more important than the lives and well-being of the folks that tool was invented to benefit (that is: all of us [0]), I'd submit, needs some serious critical re-examination. I'm not holding my breath on that happening any time soon, though. Your question is a complete non-sequitur, anyway. It's entirely possible to create systems and stores of value that aren't as abusable, abusive, exploitable, exploited, and just generally bad (or at least less good) for the overwhelming majority of the monkeys involved in its circulation and use, as compared to "money". [0] If your counter is that it doesn't have to serve all of us, then I'd say it was the wrong tool out the gate.
        anothercomment 9y ago
        I just meant to illustrate that money is actually quite complicated, even though we use it daily without giving it much thought.
        rosser 9y ago
zilchers 9y ago
I think this is the point though - for something like bitcoin, this tension is ok. It's when you start getting into things like blockchains for real estate in developing countries (I think there are a few startups working on this) when it becomes an issue. Someone still fundamentally needs to issue the blockchain deeds, or ok that you, in fact, own the property you are claiming to own. At that point, you have a central authority, and a normal database with some sort of public backup or checkpointing would be as good as a blockchain solution. So, I'd agree bitcoin doesn't want central governance, and that's a feature not a bug, but for other block chain solutions this article makes a very good point.
- anothercomment 9y ago
  Agreed, and it is a reason why I am holding back on Etherium so far. I don't know if they have a proposed solution to that, tbh, but it seems pretty impossible to solve. Although, to be fair, "classic" contracts also need that someone to enforce them. Maybe Etherium & the likes only replace one aspect of it, not the whole process. If company X publicly announces that they'll adhere to a certain contract in the blockchain, they can be held accountable for it and transactions can be completely transparent.
  - zilchers 9y ago
    Haha, my issue with Ethereum has always been that, as a software engineer, I know it's impossible to write bug free code. It's a great idea to have a code driven contract utopia, but our first experiment with that model proved we still need human intervention. If it were that simple, we would just have hyper formalized real world contracts (in an almost mathematical notation) - but that obviously never happened. Frankly, hand written contracts are already incredibly decentralized, it's only enforcement that is centralized.
    - aaron-lebo 9y ago
      Slightly pedantic, but you and your parent did this, and people do it all the time. It's Ethereum, not Etherium.
cortesoft 9y ago
Your dismissal of the problem with forks is missing a big danger to users. You say that market forces will control it, and people should just use what works best for them. The problem is that you might guess wrong; you might look at the two forks, make your best guess as to which side is going to win out via the network effect, and put your money there. If you are wrong, and your fork dies out, there goes all your money. The market forces did their thing, and they wiped you out. Yes, the 'users' are the ones who decide how the system develops, but that doesn't mean you as an individual user have any say; your voice will be overwhelmed by the crowd. Of course, these risks aren't any different from the risks we face in the rest of the world. You can lose money by making the wrong choices, and your choices often get forced because of the decision of the crowd. However, we don't really face that risk using a stable national currency BECAUSE of the very things bitcoin fans tout as reasons to use bitcoin. The reason using a currency like the US dollar is so popular is BECAUSE of the fact that the government forces everyone to accept the currency 'for all debts, public and private'. People are FORCED to accept the currency, so you can have confidence that you aren't going to be left with useless money if you accept dollars in payment. You don't have to worry about some other currency winning out as the defacto payment system, and losing all your wealth. Of course, you have to put faith in the US government to maintain the currency, but it has a pretty strong track record of doing a fairly good job at that. I can't imagine a cryptocurrency every being able to be as stable as the dollar for hundreds of years; I mean, just look at the price volatility for bitcoins.
- zilchers 9y ago
  Ya, I was going to point out there's a lot of faith with normal currency too - I think bitcoin still is a grand experiment. So far, when there have been forks, a winner has emerged very quickly (see Ethereum), but the UASF is going to be an interesting test of this. I think it's in everyone's interest for the decision to happen quickly and stay sticky though, so it's hard to imagine a drawn out fork battle, but could be interesting. Also interesting, I suppose we're incentivized to get in before any forks, wonder if any of the run lately could be attributed to that.
- Taek 9y ago
  Forks tend not to die out. See ethereum classic. As long as people are using the currency that you use, your currency will have value. Also, if your currency is losing traction, the value will decrease gradually, not evaporate to zero all at once. Well, highly speculative currencies can tumble dramatically, but as we've seen with Bitcoin, as the legitimate use cases grow, so to does the price stability.

SkyMarshal 9y ago

>But it is also not true that it would be a huge problem if there were forks. Why would it be? People will simply use what works best for them, controlled by market forces (they need other people to use the same fork). It's a problem for any tech that aspires to go mainstream and thus must contend with the already high cognitive loads on the majority of people who don't follow the tech in detail, don't know what a hard fork/chain split entails, what it means for their money, or the economy. Most mainstream users, when confronted with having to understand something like that to safeguard their money, will conclude, rightfully, it's best left in a traditional bank or under the mattress.

anothercomment 9y ago
Maybe true, but in a way, classical investments are even more complicated. Some of them are even deliberately complicated to obfuscate their risky nature to naive investors.
- rosser 9y ago
  I don't think the predatory complexities found in some shady securities are a very prudent way of "excusing" the technical complexities and consequences of BTC, or any other cryptocurrency. "Not as bad as" is broadly fallacious, anyway.
  - anothercomment 9y ago
    OK then, explain to me: what is money?
    - rosser 9y ago
      I'm probably not the person to ask, because my "succinct to the point of sounding flippant, but offered completely honestly" answer is: a profoundly destructive social fiction whose time is well past. The notion and role of a medium of exchange are things on which I have ... divergent views. It's a human invention we have collectively chosen to value more than the thing it was presumably created to serve — you know, "humanity". Any tool that becomes more important than the lives and well-being of the folks that tool was invented to benefit (that is: all of us [0]), I'd submit, needs some serious critical re-examination. I'm not holding my breath on that happening any time soon, though. Your question is a complete non-sequitur, anyway. It's entirely possible to create systems and stores of value that aren't as abusable, abusive, exploitable, exploited, and just generally bad (or at least less good) for the overwhelming majority of the monkeys involved in its circulation and use, as compared to "money". [0] If your counter is that it doesn't have to serve all of us, then I'd say it was the wrong tool out the gate.
      - anothercomment 9y ago
        I just meant to illustrate that money is actually quite complicated, even though we use it daily without giving it much thought.
        rosser 9y ago

zilchers 9y ago

I think this is the point though - for something like bitcoin, this tension is ok. It's when you start getting into things like blockchains for real estate in developing countries (I think there are a few startups working on this) when it becomes an issue. Someone still fundamentally needs to issue the blockchain deeds, or ok that you, in fact, own the property you are claiming to own. At that point, you have a central authority, and a normal database with some sort of public backup or checkpointing would be as good as a blockchain solution. So, I'd agree bitcoin doesn't want central governance, and that's a feature not a bug, but for other block chain solutions this article makes a very good point.

anothercomment 9y ago
Agreed, and it is a reason why I am holding back on Etherium so far. I don't know if they have a proposed solution to that, tbh, but it seems pretty impossible to solve. Although, to be fair, "classic" contracts also need that someone to enforce them. Maybe Etherium & the likes only replace one aspect of it, not the whole process. If company X publicly announces that they'll adhere to a certain contract in the blockchain, they can be held accountable for it and transactions can be completely transparent.
- zilchers 9y ago
  Haha, my issue with Ethereum has always been that, as a software engineer, I know it's impossible to write bug free code. It's a great idea to have a code driven contract utopia, but our first experiment with that model proved we still need human intervention. If it were that simple, we would just have hyper formalized real world contracts (in an almost mathematical notation) - but that obviously never happened. Frankly, hand written contracts are already incredibly decentralized, it's only enforcement that is centralized.
  - aaron-lebo 9y ago
    Slightly pedantic, but you and your parent did this, and people do it all the time. It's Ethereum, not Etherium.

cortesoft 9y ago

Your dismissal of the problem with forks is missing a big danger to users. You say that market forces will control it, and people should just use what works best for them. The problem is that you might guess wrong; you might look at the two forks, make your best guess as to which side is going to win out via the network effect, and put your money there. If you are wrong, and your fork dies out, there goes all your money. The market forces did their thing, and they wiped you out. Yes, the 'users' are the ones who decide how the system develops, but that doesn't mean you as an individual user have any say; your voice will be overwhelmed by the crowd. Of course, these risks aren't any different from the risks we face in the rest of the world. You can lose money by making the wrong choices, and your choices often get forced because of the decision of the crowd. However, we don't really face that risk using a stable national currency BECAUSE of the very things bitcoin fans tout as reasons to use bitcoin. The reason using a currency like the US dollar is so popular is BECAUSE of the fact that the government forces everyone to accept the currency 'for all debts, public and private'. People are FORCED to accept the currency, so you can have confidence that you aren't going to be left with useless money if you accept dollars in payment. You don't have to worry about some other currency winning out as the defacto payment system, and losing all your wealth. Of course, you have to put faith in the US government to maintain the currency, but it has a pretty strong track record of doing a fairly good job at that. I can't imagine a cryptocurrency every being able to be as stable as the dollar for hundreds of years; I mean, just look at the price volatility for bitcoins.

zilchers 9y ago
Ya, I was going to point out there's a lot of faith with normal currency too - I think bitcoin still is a grand experiment. So far, when there have been forks, a winner has emerged very quickly (see Ethereum), but the UASF is going to be an interesting test of this. I think it's in everyone's interest for the decision to happen quickly and stay sticky though, so it's hard to imagine a drawn out fork battle, but could be interesting. Also interesting, I suppose we're incentivized to get in before any forks, wonder if any of the run lately could be attributed to that.
Taek 9y ago
Forks tend not to die out. See ethereum classic. As long as people are using the currency that you use, your currency will have value. Also, if your currency is losing traction, the value will decrease gradually, not evaporate to zero all at once. Well, highly speculative currencies can tumble dramatically, but as we've seen with Bitcoin, as the legitimate use cases grow, so to does the price stability.