3 ms·

> To me, it all seems another gold craze, stoked not only by the usual crowd of techno-babblers keen on latching on the latest buzzword, but also by certified w

by cs702 9y ago

> To me, it all seems another gold craze, stoked not only by the usual crowd of techno-babblers keen on latching on the latest buzzword, but also by certified wingnuts from the long-discredited hyper-libertarian Austrian school of economics, kept buoyant by half-baked comparisons to "unreliable" "paper money" (which is nevertheless very effectively backed by the government's universal tendency to require said paper money for taxes, not to mention the inconvenient fact that if societal trust erodes sufficiently for paper money to lose its value, it’s highly unlikely an arbitrary string of ones and zeros in an arbitrary hard disk somewhere would fare much better), spotty comparisons of current economic system to few exceptions where hyperinflation was allowed to run rampant, and perhaps most of all, by simple wishes that the persons currently propping up the belief in blockchains will not be the last ones who are blinded by the latest buzzword and get-rich-quick scheme. There are also people like me: * I agree with the OP that there are a lot of techno-babblers keen on latching on the latest buzzword. * I agree with the OP that there are many certified wingnuts who belong to the discredited Austrian school of economics. * I agree with the OP that comparisons to "unreliable paper money" are half-baked at best. Yet, I also see the point of Bitcoin. I view Bitcoin partly as a supranational store-of-value, transaction platform, and distributed social network: its survival and usage do not depend on any particular country. The only other "money-like" asset I know which is commonly viewed as supranational is gold, which has been used to store value and conduct transactions for at least 6,000 years.[a] These uses of Gold have lasted 25x longer than the age of the US, 12x longer than the life of the Roman empire, and 2x longer than the combined age of China and all its predecessors. Gold has outlasted all monetary systems devised by humankind so far. It's a barbarous relic, yes, but one that has survived "everything humankind has thrown at it" so far. The Bitcoin network seems to have that same "survives everything humankind can throw at it" quality. [a] https://www.ft.com/content/5604c5cc-d1b3-11e1-badb-00144feabdc0 https://www.ft.com/content/5604c5cc-d1b3-11e1-badb-00144feab...

sotdan 9y ago
So it solves a use-case that's already solved by gold?
- jsutton 9y ago
  Can you ensure the safety and security of all of your gold at all times? Can you send that gold to someone else across the world quickly and securely?
ordinaryradical 9y ago
Yes, except that gold will still be around with or without the state of computing radically changing. So I wonder if the incentive structure will continue to uphold the validity of the ledger for such a timescale. Or if we’re going to discover things about computing, cryptography, and data representation that will leave bitcoin and others vulnerable to unforeseen attacks or degradations. A physical good can continue in the absence of a civilization to support it—virtual goods are tethered to the long-term viability of their protocols and the computing infrastructure which represents them. My suspcicion is that the long-term security of any cryptographic protocol is always approaching zero and that the field is still new enough that we have not yet developed 1000-year, let alone 100-year, protocols.
- cs702 9y ago
  Yes, that makes sense. My expectation is that the Bitcoin protocol will be forced to evolve over time, in fits and starts -- like all open-source projects.

by cs702 9y ago

sotdan 9y ago

So it solves a use-case that's already solved by gold?

jsutton 9y ago
Can you ensure the safety and security of all of your gold at all times? Can you send that gold to someone else across the world quickly and securely?

ordinaryradical 9y ago

Yes, except that gold will still be around with or without the state of computing radically changing. So I wonder if the incentive structure will continue to uphold the validity of the ledger for such a timescale. Or if we’re going to discover things about computing, cryptography, and data representation that will leave bitcoin and others vulnerable to unforeseen attacks or degradations. A physical good can continue in the absence of a civilization to support it—virtual goods are tethered to the long-term viability of their protocols and the computing infrastructure which represents them. My suspcicion is that the long-term security of any cryptographic protocol is always approaching zero and that the field is still new enough that we have not yet developed 1000-year, let alone 100-year, protocols.

cs702 9y ago
Yes, that makes sense. My expectation is that the Bitcoin protocol will be forced to evolve over time, in fits and starts -- like all open-source projects.