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>Both mining and transacting are impossible (or at least very difficult) for many people/in many areas. This is just not correct. You can mine with the same eq

>Both mining and transacting are impossible (or at least very difficult) for many people/in many areas. This is just not correct. You can mine with the same equipment you use to transact (something with a CPU and memory and internet access). Is it expensive to do so? Yes. But it is possible. Your argument could be "anonymity is expensive". >Transacting for most goods with real value without de-anonymizing the currency [...] is also extremely difficult [...] That is a "how I give you what you bought" problem and not "how I pay you for what I have bought" problem, i.e. it is not solvable by changing payment technologies. If I pay you a dollar over paypal, paypal automatically knows who gave what to whom. If I pay you bitcoin, I would have to give out this information voluntarily (it does not come with the money).

shawabawa3 9y ago
> You can mine with the same equipment you use to transact (something with a CPU and memory and internet access). Is it expensive to do so? Yes. But it is possible That depends on the definition of "possible". Most people wouldn't be able to mine a block within a million years, which i'd argue means it isn't possible
zbentley 9y ago
> Is it expensive to do so? Yes. But it is possible. That's a fair point. Perhaps I should have said "impractical" or "cost-preventative" instead. > paypal automatically knows who gave what to whom. Correct, but my point was that the number of opportunities to directly pay someone bitcoin for a physical good are so limited as to make using it for what most people need a "currency" for impossible.
UncleMeat 9y ago
You have to mine in a pool. A typical person in a developing nation isn't going to be able to mine alone and have any reasonable chance of ever mining a block. For most people, you are looking at a big fat zero coins mined on local machines without working with some centralization.

shawabawa3 9y ago

> You can mine with the same equipment you use to transact (something with a CPU and memory and internet access). Is it expensive to do so? Yes. But it is possible That depends on the definition of "possible". Most people wouldn't be able to mine a block within a million years, which i'd argue means it isn't possible

zbentley 9y ago

> Is it expensive to do so? Yes. But it is possible. That's a fair point. Perhaps I should have said "impractical" or "cost-preventative" instead. > paypal automatically knows who gave what to whom. Correct, but my point was that the number of opportunities to directly pay someone bitcoin for a physical good are so limited as to make using it for what most people need a "currency" for impossible.

UncleMeat 9y ago

You have to mine in a pool. A typical person in a developing nation isn't going to be able to mine alone and have any reasonable chance of ever mining a block. For most people, you are looking at a big fat zero coins mined on local machines without working with some centralization.