4 ms·

It is pretty funny how the original value proposition of "being your own bank" given in the bitcoin whitepaper, which is necessitated by actually possessing the

by shiado 9y ago

It is pretty funny how the original value proposition of "being your own bank" given in the bitcoin whitepaper, which is necessitated by actually possessing the private keys, has gone out the window due to convenience and a lack of understanding of the fundamental blockchain technology by speculators. Coinbase is central in these facts.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
skybrian 9y ago
It's not so much that they don't understand, but rather that they don't care. People can buy Bitcoin for fun or to try to make money without believing in the ideology that was originally used to justify it.
- raducu 9y ago
  I think that's a clear sign of bubble -- I'll just buy this thing because it will just appreciate forever.
- IkmoIkmo 9y ago
  Which is why I got out of bitcoin. There's literally nothing special about bitcoin, apart from its decentralised nature. Other than that, it's just a big ledger. No different from virtually any other database. It's special because it's decentralised. The way people use bitcoin however, completely reverses that and is extremely geared towards use of centralised parties. It's as if we built solar panels to generate electricity with which we heat up our oceans, causing ice caps to melt and global warming to occur. It's a bit of a joke. We're now all valuing a system, above other systems, for its unique decentralised properties, while subsequently throwing that out the window, yet still expecting this system to be uniquely valuable. We're all introducing trust into a trustless system, and paying intermediaries and middlemen a cut in the process. That's fine for other investments, e.g. productive assets that are valuable for other reasons. But it's not fine for an investment into something that's valuable because it's trustless, decentralised and disintermediating. There's some nuance I'm leaving out of course, you can argue against this post, but by and large you can't ignore this massive disconnect between bitcoin's value proposition and bitcoin's reality. Nor can you argue anymore, like we used to, that it's just a phase. If anything, there's less and less regard for personally run wallets, personal nodes, personal mining, personal transactions, and an increase in use of centralised parties, with centralised wallet providers, cloud and company mining, transaction processors etc.
  - jameskegel 9y ago
    That’s an overly reductive way of looking at it. That being said, I’m sorry you didn’t have a good experience with it, and hopefully some day the process can be seemless.
  - raiyu 9y ago
    I think you captured this notion quite well and I think it's very interesting that for a decentralized system people have immediately given up on that so called benefit because it wasn't as easy to use as a trusted intermediary. Then the whole angle of "trusted" is complex due to the parties that you are entrusting and the number of issues that they have suffered. So then you look at banks and say ok, interesting, perhaps I haven't quite noticed the seamless ease of use layer that they provide, that I have undervalued simply because it's been a fact of life for so long it becomes invisible until you deal with the exact opposite.
seanalltogether 9y ago
I remember reading somewhere that even satoshi acknowledged that larger services providers would take over in time, that it was infeasible to expect every user in the economy to run a full node and participate in transactions at the block level.
mrep 9y ago
That's because the writer did not understand/ignored scaling problems.
Cthulhu_ 9y ago
You can still be your own bank if you want, but it's much more convenient to have a centralized exchange to find other people willing to buy / sell.
- raducu 9y ago
  You can still convert all you wealth to gold and carry it around, but it's just more convenient to use something called bank notes. The disadvantage is you have to trust the bank, or coinbase or whatever -- you know, the actual reason bitcoin was invented in the first place.

by shiado 9y ago

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

skybrian 9y ago

It's not so much that they don't understand, but rather that they don't care. People can buy Bitcoin for fun or to try to make money without believing in the ideology that was originally used to justify it.

raducu 9y ago
I think that's a clear sign of bubble -- I'll just buy this thing because it will just appreciate forever.
IkmoIkmo 9y ago
Which is why I got out of bitcoin. There's literally nothing special about bitcoin, apart from its decentralised nature. Other than that, it's just a big ledger. No different from virtually any other database. It's special because it's decentralised. The way people use bitcoin however, completely reverses that and is extremely geared towards use of centralised parties. It's as if we built solar panels to generate electricity with which we heat up our oceans, causing ice caps to melt and global warming to occur. It's a bit of a joke. We're now all valuing a system, above other systems, for its unique decentralised properties, while subsequently throwing that out the window, yet still expecting this system to be uniquely valuable. We're all introducing trust into a trustless system, and paying intermediaries and middlemen a cut in the process. That's fine for other investments, e.g. productive assets that are valuable for other reasons. But it's not fine for an investment into something that's valuable because it's trustless, decentralised and disintermediating. There's some nuance I'm leaving out of course, you can argue against this post, but by and large you can't ignore this massive disconnect between bitcoin's value proposition and bitcoin's reality. Nor can you argue anymore, like we used to, that it's just a phase. If anything, there's less and less regard for personally run wallets, personal nodes, personal mining, personal transactions, and an increase in use of centralised parties, with centralised wallet providers, cloud and company mining, transaction processors etc.
- jameskegel 9y ago
  That’s an overly reductive way of looking at it. That being said, I’m sorry you didn’t have a good experience with it, and hopefully some day the process can be seemless.
- raiyu 9y ago
  I think you captured this notion quite well and I think it's very interesting that for a decentralized system people have immediately given up on that so called benefit because it wasn't as easy to use as a trusted intermediary. Then the whole angle of "trusted" is complex due to the parties that you are entrusting and the number of issues that they have suffered. So then you look at banks and say ok, interesting, perhaps I haven't quite noticed the seamless ease of use layer that they provide, that I have undervalued simply because it's been a fact of life for so long it becomes invisible until you deal with the exact opposite.

seanalltogether 9y ago

I remember reading somewhere that even satoshi acknowledged that larger services providers would take over in time, that it was infeasible to expect every user in the economy to run a full node and participate in transactions at the block level.

mrep 9y ago

That's because the writer did not understand/ignored scaling problems.

Cthulhu_ 9y ago

You can still be your own bank if you want, but it's much more convenient to have a centralized exchange to find other people willing to buy / sell.

raducu 9y ago
You can still convert all you wealth to gold and carry it around, but it's just more convenient to use something called bank notes. The disadvantage is you have to trust the bank, or coinbase or whatever -- you know, the actual reason bitcoin was invented in the first place.