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> No, it was about finance right from the start, says so right there in the title of the paper ("cash"). I agree with you that Bitcoin was originally conceived

by dsacco 9y ago

> No, it was about finance right from the start, says so right there in the title of the paper ("cash"). I agree with you that Bitcoin was originally conceived to solve digital cash problems (like double spending). But I think the parent's point (which I also agree with) is that the actual utility of modern blockchains, regardless of original intentions, is in strong fault-tolerant systems. By any reasonable standard, Bitcoin itself has not matured into a strong currency usable for day to day cash payments. It has extremely high volatility, slow transaction verification and very high transaction fees. I think it's good that it was developed (it inspired a lot of follow-up R&D), and you can make a case for it as a store of value, but it's not really suitable as a payments platform whatsoever. But that failure doesn't diminish its main contribution, which is thermodynamically guaranteed cryptographic resilience and fault tolerance.

xkarga00 9y ago
I think that the area where you want fault-tolerance the most is decentralized cash. If you are going to take control of your money you better do it in a fault-tolerant system. Many people don't care about it today but there are those who do. That's why cryptocurrency is the real killer app for blockchain, like it or not. To your comments re bitcoin, it sounds to me like somebody complaining that Internet is slow back in the 90s/00s. EDIT: I am not pontificating in favor of bitcoin. It's just that the technology is still immature but there is a lot of great and promising work happening today.
- dsacco 9y ago
  > I think that the area where you want fault-tolerance the most is decentralized cash. ...Really? That's one application, sure, but I hardly think it compares to the generalizable usage of cryptographic fault-tolerance assurance in distributed systems. I would consider the elimination of trusted third parties in more well-established and widely used cryptographic protocols (like CAa) or improvements to e.g. NTP node fault-tolerance to be more presently and practically useful than decentralized payments (in particular, because blockchains are much more useful for the former examples than the latter in the present day). > Many people don't care about it today but there are those who do. That's why cryptocurrency is the real killer app for blockchain, like it or not. I don't have an emotional investment in what use case becomes the most successful for blockchains in perpetuity, so it isn't a matter of "liking" or "not liking" any particular application. Rather, I'm speaking in terms of present facts, and purposely not making any points about the future. Sure, people could become passionate en masse about seizing control of their assets in a decentralized, trustless, permissionless, etc systems. I'm not discounting that possibility. But in the present case, blockchains exhibit far more utility for resolving hard problems in domains of computer science than they do for cryptocurrencies. > To your comments re bitcoin, it sounds to me like somebody complaining that Internet is slow back in the 90s/00s. I never considered the internet slow in either of those decades because it was all I knew. More to the point, I think you mistake me for someone who is bearish on cryptocurrencies or blockchains in general - I'm emphatically not. I just think that Bitcoin is not going to be the actual winner for that use case, and regardless of future innovations, it is pretty clearly not succeeding now, either, for the reasons I've already outlined.
- wgerard 9y ago
  > To your comments re bitcoin, it sounds to me like somebody complaining that Internet is slow back in the 90s/00s. To their point though, dial-up modems are (by and large) a relic of the past and have been replaced by better (i.e. faster) methods of internet access.
  - feriancek 9y ago
    We still use TCP! The way we access the (internet) network has changed, but the network still works in the same way.
bavell 9y ago
> extremely high volatility Definitely > Slow transaction verification Depends on your definition of slow. The fact that I can send hundreds of thousands of USD across the world in about an hour seems to beat any other method easily available to me. > very high transaction fees A month or two ago, sure - TX congestion had driven up fees to ridiculous levels. Now that the congestion has cleared, I can once again send hundreds of thousands of USD across the world for less than a dollar.
- GenericsMotors 9y ago
  > A month or two ago, sure - TX congestion had driven up fees to ridiculous levels. Now that the congestion has cleared, I can once again send hundreds of thousands of USD across the world for less than a dollar. Congestion has only cleared because the transaction volume has fallen to a two-year low: https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/transactions-btc-sma3.html https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/transactions-btc-sma3.h... The bubble is deflating, in case you haven't noticed.

by dsacco 9y ago

xkarga00 9y ago

I think that the area where you want fault-tolerance the most is decentralized cash. If you are going to take control of your money you better do it in a fault-tolerant system. Many people don't care about it today but there are those who do. That's why cryptocurrency is the real killer app for blockchain, like it or not. To your comments re bitcoin, it sounds to me like somebody complaining that Internet is slow back in the 90s/00s. EDIT: I am not pontificating in favor of bitcoin. It's just that the technology is still immature but there is a lot of great and promising work happening today.

dsacco 9y ago
> I think that the area where you want fault-tolerance the most is decentralized cash. ...Really? That's one application, sure, but I hardly think it compares to the generalizable usage of cryptographic fault-tolerance assurance in distributed systems. I would consider the elimination of trusted third parties in more well-established and widely used cryptographic protocols (like CAa) or improvements to e.g. NTP node fault-tolerance to be more presently and practically useful than decentralized payments (in particular, because blockchains are much more useful for the former examples than the latter in the present day). > Many people don't care about it today but there are those who do. That's why cryptocurrency is the real killer app for blockchain, like it or not. I don't have an emotional investment in what use case becomes the most successful for blockchains in perpetuity, so it isn't a matter of "liking" or "not liking" any particular application. Rather, I'm speaking in terms of present facts, and purposely not making any points about the future. Sure, people could become passionate en masse about seizing control of their assets in a decentralized, trustless, permissionless, etc systems. I'm not discounting that possibility. But in the present case, blockchains exhibit far more utility for resolving hard problems in domains of computer science than they do for cryptocurrencies. > To your comments re bitcoin, it sounds to me like somebody complaining that Internet is slow back in the 90s/00s. I never considered the internet slow in either of those decades because it was all I knew. More to the point, I think you mistake me for someone who is bearish on cryptocurrencies or blockchains in general - I'm emphatically not. I just think that Bitcoin is not going to be the actual winner for that use case, and regardless of future innovations, it is pretty clearly not succeeding now, either, for the reasons I've already outlined.
wgerard 9y ago
> To your comments re bitcoin, it sounds to me like somebody complaining that Internet is slow back in the 90s/00s. To their point though, dial-up modems are (by and large) a relic of the past and have been replaced by better (i.e. faster) methods of internet access.
- feriancek 9y ago
  We still use TCP! The way we access the (internet) network has changed, but the network still works in the same way.

bavell 9y ago

> extremely high volatility Definitely > Slow transaction verification Depends on your definition of slow. The fact that I can send hundreds of thousands of USD across the world in about an hour seems to beat any other method easily available to me. > very high transaction fees A month or two ago, sure - TX congestion had driven up fees to ridiculous levels. Now that the congestion has cleared, I can once again send hundreds of thousands of USD across the world for less than a dollar.

GenericsMotors 9y ago
> A month or two ago, sure - TX congestion had driven up fees to ridiculous levels. Now that the congestion has cleared, I can once again send hundreds of thousands of USD across the world for less than a dollar. Congestion has only cleared because the transaction volume has fallen to a two-year low: https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/transactions-btc-sma3.html https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/transactions-btc-sma3.h... The bubble is deflating, in case you haven't noticed.