7 ms·

I have a better analogy: Bitcoin has the same sort of issues as TCP/IP. It's weird that people are expected to interact with it on the protocol level. I think

by cal5k 8y ago

I have a better analogy: Bitcoin has the same sort of issues as TCP/IP. It's weird that people are expected to interact with it on the protocol level. I think the term "cryptocurrency" is the "Big Data" of 2018. The term itself has been somewhat tarnished, but the underlying technology is super useful and will find its way into a lot of applications. And no, I don't mean "blockchain". I mean Bitcoin... it's rather nice as a business or individual to be able to send large amounts of money around the world without snaking through the nightmare that is international banking. Inherent in that idea is the notion that the coin itself has value independent of a particular application.

fyfy18 8y ago
Most of the issues with "international banking" are infact just issues with North American banks. I can transfer large sums of money around Europe and it will arrive in few days at the very latest. Within the same country transfers mostly arrive the same day (often it's under 1 hour), and sometimes that happens internationally too. Oh and I don't need to pay anything for that. A few years ago I was working in the Middle East, and before I moved back I transferred my savings from there (~€50k) back to Europe without any questions from either bank. I just did the transfer online, and it arrived in a few days. Now I'm working for a US company, and it took them a few weeks to setup paying me with their bank. It usually takes at least a week from when they tell the bank to pay me, until I receive the money in my account - to a USD account also in the US.
- short_sells_poo 8y ago
  > Most of the issues with "international banking" are infact just issues with North American banks. This. Whenever someone says that Cryptocurrencies solve money transfer problems, I look where they are based and 99% of the cases it is the US. In Europe, transferring money is the same internationally as it is nationally. Type in the IBAN and the name of the recipient and they get it the same day, or latest the next day. I made seven figure international payments that went through in 24 hours. This is not a technical problem that Cryptocurrencies are somehow uniquely placed to solve. Technically, a money transfer could take miliseconds - updating a couple of database rows. National payments in Europe at least are actually pretty much instant since they are now fully automated. International payments can take up to a day due to an actual human checking the correctness (and perhaps doing due diligence for money laundering).
  - cal5k 8y ago
    So? There's a huge amount of currency flowing to and from North America to Europe, Asia, etc. Just because the euro zone has standardized their banking system doesn't mean a) that America will ever do the same (cough the metric system cough), or b) that all movement of money across borders should be strictly the purview of banks. In Canada alone people send $23.3B/year back to their country of origin in the form of remittances (China, India, the Philippines, etc.). Historically they've been massively overcharged for the privilege of doing so because they're held captive to our oligopolistic banking system - sometimes upwards of 20% because they regularly send smaller amounts to minimize risk.
    - short_sells_poo 8y ago
      How does your point relate to the usefulness of Bitcoin? I highlighted that the quagmire of international payments is not a problem that Bitcoin can uniquely solve. It is not a technical problem at all! Bitcoin has nothing special about it that would allow these countries to make payments between each other smoother. That is apart from sidestepping the existing regulatory framework. It might have the beneficial side effect of competition, but that's not a virtue of Bitcoin as a concept. Perhaps the space is ripe for a new fintech startup that streamlines payments between these destinations.
      - cal5k 8y ago
        It's a distributed protocol with wide adoption and enough liquidity to be easily traded anywhere in the world. That makes it great as a medium of common exchange... I can easily convert from Canadian Dollars to BTC in Canada, then convert from BTC to Pesos in the Philippines so long as there's enough liquidity on either end. Both parties still have to act within their respective legal frameworks, but it sidesteps the need to add even more parties into the mix, each of which take their own fees. International wire transfers are a great example of how opaque, slow and costly that can be. You can go customer -> Canadian Company -> Filipino company -> customer. The traditional way would be customer -> Canadian Company -> Canadian bank -> Intermediary bank(s) -> Filipino bank -> Filipino company -> Customer I'm simplifying somewhat... obviously banks are involved in any domestic fiat transfers, but they're not involved in international transmittal (which they usually charge quite a bit for).
- hartator 8y ago
  > I can transfer large sums of money around Europe and it will arrive in few days at the very latest. I can do the same in the US, except it’s instantaneous, not sure what you are talking about.
  - stevekemp 8y ago
    One surprise for me, as a European, is that in America people seem to regard bank account numbers as secret - I dwell on forums for landlords, etc, and people expect to collect cash/cheques from their tenants, rather than sharing bank details. Unrelated to your alleged speed, but another odd perception of the American banking systems. (Lots of other people in this thread seem to suggest you're an outlier; I don't know enough to guess either way.)
    - hartator 8y ago
      Your account number is on every checks. Checks are usually prefered because in the US you can cash them immediately and online. Of course, YMMV. I've experienced both the US bank system and the EU (France) bank system. Even if Americans are very critical of our banks, no fee (usually) for anything, reduced red tape, and credit cards that are on your side won me over. When you take account of cash back and interests on checking, you've usually a cash positive relationship with you bank. Good luck finding that in Europe.
- NicoJuicy 8y ago
  It's weird that slow banking is something that makes credit cards more useful. And credit card transfers earn more money ( just putting 1 and 2 together)
- justaguyhere 8y ago
  * infact just issues with North American banks.* Yup, same experience here. It takes at least 10 days to send a paltry 1000 USD for me and yes, there is a fee. The bank is probably making money on the exchange rate too, not sure. At one point, I was asked all kinds of documentation - passport etc. All this to send very small amounts of money (I don't remember sending more than 3K, 50K Euros without questions is amazing to me). Edit: Many comments here mention that Europe is way ahead of the US i the money transfer space. Can someone talk about why the US is lagging behind?
  - kingaillas 8y ago
    There's a pretty good Planet Money episode on this issue: https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2018/01/10/576879734/episode-489-the-invisible-plumbing-of-our-economy https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2018/01/10/576879734/epis...
- kmetan 8y ago
  >Most of the issues with "international banking" are infact just issues with North American banks. This is true only for transfers between and within Europe, north America and couple of exceptions in Asia. The world is bigger...
- vbezhenar 8y ago
  If I would receive $50k in Kazakhstan from foreign country, they will be put on hold for a few months for security investigations and I'll have to provide all the documents about that money before I could have them. And even then someone corrupted might invent something to steal them from me. I definitely don't trust banks for anything but pocket money.
CPLX 8y ago
I have a better analogy. Bitoin has the same issues as Flooz. It’s a more complicated and convoluted solution to a nonexistent problem. The only people who have problems with spending money the normal way that are serious enough to accept the horrible user experience and unreliability of bitcoin are those conducting illegal transactions or evading currency controls. The market has no reason to rise beyond that narrow use case despite mass speculation to the contrary.
- cal5k 8y ago
  That's just ill-informed. "If you don't accept the banking oligopoly you're clearly trying to launder money" is the kind of nonsense that tries to shut down legitimate concerns over self-determination. Money is an essential input to freedom. If you can't make an income, pay rent, buy food, pay for transportation, etc. you are not very free. I'd also go so far as to say that the right to transact anonymously should be part and parcel to a free society.
  - delecti 8y ago
    You're arguing an is with an ought. People ought to be able to to transact anonymously and without any middle-men. In reality, most people are only willing to put up with the inconveniences of bitcoin because it lets them side-step the law.
    - Smokinator 8y ago
      No-coiner spotted. Bitcoin is much easier to use than your credit card. Download a wallet. Hit receive. Message me. I'll send you some Bitcoin just because I feel sorry for you.
- pjkundert 8y ago
  Wow, no... I'm just a computer consultant trying to get paid. Bank payments to/from the US is an absolute, unmitigated train-wreck. Even with the spectacular deficiencies of the Bitcoin/Ethereum user experience, it is already a vast improvement over the Bank transfer debacle. The next generation of Cryptocurrencies (that solve most of the complexity/risk of creating, securing, managing and recovering public/private keys) and improve the transaction thruput and cost by 4+ orders of magnitude? These are going to kick the banks to curb.
xkcd-sucks 8y ago
A closer analogy might be credit card transactions, it's a protocol that tons of people use on a daily basis but the complexity has been wrapped up into a product offered by a several companies
just_one_time_ 8y ago
Bitcoin, BTC was taken over by a team lead by Adam Back and Greg Maxwell. With near $100 M in funding they have the set goal of making it as hard as possible for users and in fact push for higher and higher fees on the BTC network. Bitcoin, BCH, forked before Adam Back and his troll team took over the GitHub repo, so BCH is closer to bitcoin than BTC.
xiphias2 8y ago
I would say Bitcoin has the same issues as TCP/IP in 1984. It's just 10 years old. Developers know what to do (Eltoo, Schnorr signatures, better multisig for hardware wallets, watchtowers, better routing, AMP, Lightning support for exchanges), but implemention speed is limited, and just simply adding more developers or even complaining about lack of UX won't make it faster. Also people with Bitcoin don't accept the ,,move fast and break things'' mantra, because it's money. I like the cautious speed of development, it helps build my trust in Bitcoin.
appsonify 8y ago
> underlying technology is super useful and will find its way into a lot of applications. I can't think of any other use cases other than illegal black markets.
jcfrei 8y ago
> send large amounts of money around the world without snaking through the nightmare that is international banking This has little to do with technology but with regulation. If you think bitcoin can solve this then you either envision a future where these regulations don't apply (in some sort of technologically independent anarchistic society) or you expect bitcoin to cause a reduction in the high regulation surrounding international asset transfers - which is very unlikely, regulators around the world are pushing for more stringent AML policies. This is where a blockchain (the technology) could actually come in handy. If every asset is tokenized and controllable through some smart contract (and every transfer needs to be authorized by the responsible financial regulator) then such a system would make any kind of international asset transfer much more frictionless. But of course this runs contrary to the idea of most current crypto currencies (whose proponents mostly hope for the aforementioned scenario).
foobiekr 8y ago
I don't understand the TCP analogy. TCP is incredibly straightforward and scales from a knowledge-required level of almost nothing to very advanced usage like paying attention to ECN markings. Most of the layers above TCP have, over the last 20+ years, had many many problems that related directly to people not wanting to understand TCP, from RMI and similar RPC schemes to things like BEEP/BXXP where the head-of-line blocking problem somehow surprised people. In the end people working with technologies do need to understand their semantics. I don't mean you should be able to write a competent TCP implementation from scratch, but you do need to understand how the protocol layer makes itself an issue in every layer above it in practice.
Smokinator 8y ago
sigh Why do people feel the need to comment on subjects of which they are glaringly ignorant. There are hundreds of Bitcoin wallets. They're extremely easy to use. Try one. I'll send you $20 worth of Bitcoin that I paid $2 for a few years ago. Hang on to it for a couple years, and it will be worth $200. Bitcoin is literally going to save the world during the next economic crisis, and anybody with two functional neurons will have at least a little bit to prepare for that contingency.

by cal5k 8y ago

fyfy18 8y ago

Most of the issues with "international banking" are infact just issues with North American banks. I can transfer large sums of money around Europe and it will arrive in few days at the very latest. Within the same country transfers mostly arrive the same day (often it's under 1 hour), and sometimes that happens internationally too. Oh and I don't need to pay anything for that. A few years ago I was working in the Middle East, and before I moved back I transferred my savings from there (~€50k) back to Europe without any questions from either bank. I just did the transfer online, and it arrived in a few days. Now I'm working for a US company, and it took them a few weeks to setup paying me with their bank. It usually takes at least a week from when they tell the bank to pay me, until I receive the money in my account - to a USD account also in the US.

short_sells_poo 8y ago
> Most of the issues with "international banking" are infact just issues with North American banks. This. Whenever someone says that Cryptocurrencies solve money transfer problems, I look where they are based and 99% of the cases it is the US. In Europe, transferring money is the same internationally as it is nationally. Type in the IBAN and the name of the recipient and they get it the same day, or latest the next day. I made seven figure international payments that went through in 24 hours. This is not a technical problem that Cryptocurrencies are somehow uniquely placed to solve. Technically, a money transfer could take miliseconds - updating a couple of database rows. National payments in Europe at least are actually pretty much instant since they are now fully automated. International payments can take up to a day due to an actual human checking the correctness (and perhaps doing due diligence for money laundering).
- cal5k 8y ago
  So? There's a huge amount of currency flowing to and from North America to Europe, Asia, etc. Just because the euro zone has standardized their banking system doesn't mean a) that America will ever do the same (cough the metric system cough), or b) that all movement of money across borders should be strictly the purview of banks. In Canada alone people send $23.3B/year back to their country of origin in the form of remittances (China, India, the Philippines, etc.). Historically they've been massively overcharged for the privilege of doing so because they're held captive to our oligopolistic banking system - sometimes upwards of 20% because they regularly send smaller amounts to minimize risk.
  - short_sells_poo 8y ago
    How does your point relate to the usefulness of Bitcoin? I highlighted that the quagmire of international payments is not a problem that Bitcoin can uniquely solve. It is not a technical problem at all! Bitcoin has nothing special about it that would allow these countries to make payments between each other smoother. That is apart from sidestepping the existing regulatory framework. It might have the beneficial side effect of competition, but that's not a virtue of Bitcoin as a concept. Perhaps the space is ripe for a new fintech startup that streamlines payments between these destinations.
    - cal5k 8y ago
      It's a distributed protocol with wide adoption and enough liquidity to be easily traded anywhere in the world. That makes it great as a medium of common exchange... I can easily convert from Canadian Dollars to BTC in Canada, then convert from BTC to Pesos in the Philippines so long as there's enough liquidity on either end. Both parties still have to act within their respective legal frameworks, but it sidesteps the need to add even more parties into the mix, each of which take their own fees. International wire transfers are a great example of how opaque, slow and costly that can be. You can go customer -> Canadian Company -> Filipino company -> customer. The traditional way would be customer -> Canadian Company -> Canadian bank -> Intermediary bank(s) -> Filipino bank -> Filipino company -> Customer I'm simplifying somewhat... obviously banks are involved in any domestic fiat transfers, but they're not involved in international transmittal (which they usually charge quite a bit for).
hartator 8y ago
> I can transfer large sums of money around Europe and it will arrive in few days at the very latest. I can do the same in the US, except it’s instantaneous, not sure what you are talking about.
- stevekemp 8y ago
  One surprise for me, as a European, is that in America people seem to regard bank account numbers as secret - I dwell on forums for landlords, etc, and people expect to collect cash/cheques from their tenants, rather than sharing bank details. Unrelated to your alleged speed, but another odd perception of the American banking systems. (Lots of other people in this thread seem to suggest you're an outlier; I don't know enough to guess either way.)
  - hartator 8y ago
    Your account number is on every checks. Checks are usually prefered because in the US you can cash them immediately and online. Of course, YMMV. I've experienced both the US bank system and the EU (France) bank system. Even if Americans are very critical of our banks, no fee (usually) for anything, reduced red tape, and credit cards that are on your side won me over. When you take account of cash back and interests on checking, you've usually a cash positive relationship with you bank. Good luck finding that in Europe.
NicoJuicy 8y ago
It's weird that slow banking is something that makes credit cards more useful. And credit card transfers earn more money ( just putting 1 and 2 together)
justaguyhere 8y ago
* infact just issues with North American banks.* Yup, same experience here. It takes at least 10 days to send a paltry 1000 USD for me and yes, there is a fee. The bank is probably making money on the exchange rate too, not sure. At one point, I was asked all kinds of documentation - passport etc. All this to send very small amounts of money (I don't remember sending more than 3K, 50K Euros without questions is amazing to me). Edit: Many comments here mention that Europe is way ahead of the US i the money transfer space. Can someone talk about why the US is lagging behind?
- kingaillas 8y ago
  There's a pretty good Planet Money episode on this issue: https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2018/01/10/576879734/episode-489-the-invisible-plumbing-of-our-economy https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2018/01/10/576879734/epis...
kmetan 8y ago
>Most of the issues with "international banking" are infact just issues with North American banks. This is true only for transfers between and within Europe, north America and couple of exceptions in Asia. The world is bigger...
vbezhenar 8y ago
If I would receive $50k in Kazakhstan from foreign country, they will be put on hold for a few months for security investigations and I'll have to provide all the documents about that money before I could have them. And even then someone corrupted might invent something to steal them from me. I definitely don't trust banks for anything but pocket money.

CPLX 8y ago

I have a better analogy. Bitoin has the same issues as Flooz. It’s a more complicated and convoluted solution to a nonexistent problem. The only people who have problems with spending money the normal way that are serious enough to accept the horrible user experience and unreliability of bitcoin are those conducting illegal transactions or evading currency controls. The market has no reason to rise beyond that narrow use case despite mass speculation to the contrary.

cal5k 8y ago
That's just ill-informed. "If you don't accept the banking oligopoly you're clearly trying to launder money" is the kind of nonsense that tries to shut down legitimate concerns over self-determination. Money is an essential input to freedom. If you can't make an income, pay rent, buy food, pay for transportation, etc. you are not very free. I'd also go so far as to say that the right to transact anonymously should be part and parcel to a free society.
- delecti 8y ago
  You're arguing an is with an ought. People ought to be able to to transact anonymously and without any middle-men. In reality, most people are only willing to put up with the inconveniences of bitcoin because it lets them side-step the law.
  - Smokinator 8y ago
    No-coiner spotted. Bitcoin is much easier to use than your credit card. Download a wallet. Hit receive. Message me. I'll send you some Bitcoin just because I feel sorry for you.
pjkundert 8y ago
Wow, no... I'm just a computer consultant trying to get paid. Bank payments to/from the US is an absolute, unmitigated train-wreck. Even with the spectacular deficiencies of the Bitcoin/Ethereum user experience, it is already a vast improvement over the Bank transfer debacle. The next generation of Cryptocurrencies (that solve most of the complexity/risk of creating, securing, managing and recovering public/private keys) and improve the transaction thruput and cost by 4+ orders of magnitude? These are going to kick the banks to curb.

xkcd-sucks 8y ago

A closer analogy might be credit card transactions, it's a protocol that tons of people use on a daily basis but the complexity has been wrapped up into a product offered by a several companies

just_one_time_ 8y ago

Bitcoin, BTC was taken over by a team lead by Adam Back and Greg Maxwell. With near $100 M in funding they have the set goal of making it as hard as possible for users and in fact push for higher and higher fees on the BTC network. Bitcoin, BCH, forked before Adam Back and his troll team took over the GitHub repo, so BCH is closer to bitcoin than BTC.

xiphias2 8y ago

I would say Bitcoin has the same issues as TCP/IP in 1984. It's just 10 years old. Developers know what to do (Eltoo, Schnorr signatures, better multisig for hardware wallets, watchtowers, better routing, AMP, Lightning support for exchanges), but implemention speed is limited, and just simply adding more developers or even complaining about lack of UX won't make it faster. Also people with Bitcoin don't accept the ,,move fast and break things'' mantra, because it's money. I like the cautious speed of development, it helps build my trust in Bitcoin.

appsonify 8y ago

> underlying technology is super useful and will find its way into a lot of applications. I can't think of any other use cases other than illegal black markets.

jcfrei 8y ago

> send large amounts of money around the world without snaking through the nightmare that is international banking This has little to do with technology but with regulation. If you think bitcoin can solve this then you either envision a future where these regulations don't apply (in some sort of technologically independent anarchistic society) or you expect bitcoin to cause a reduction in the high regulation surrounding international asset transfers - which is very unlikely, regulators around the world are pushing for more stringent AML policies. This is where a blockchain (the technology) could actually come in handy. If every asset is tokenized and controllable through some smart contract (and every transfer needs to be authorized by the responsible financial regulator) then such a system would make any kind of international asset transfer much more frictionless. But of course this runs contrary to the idea of most current crypto currencies (whose proponents mostly hope for the aforementioned scenario).

foobiekr 8y ago

I don't understand the TCP analogy. TCP is incredibly straightforward and scales from a knowledge-required level of almost nothing to very advanced usage like paying attention to ECN markings. Most of the layers above TCP have, over the last 20+ years, had many many problems that related directly to people not wanting to understand TCP, from RMI and similar RPC schemes to things like BEEP/BXXP where the head-of-line blocking problem somehow surprised people. In the end people working with technologies do need to understand their semantics. I don't mean you should be able to write a competent TCP implementation from scratch, but you do need to understand how the protocol layer makes itself an issue in every layer above it in practice.

Smokinator 8y ago

sigh Why do people feel the need to comment on subjects of which they are glaringly ignorant. There are hundreds of Bitcoin wallets. They're extremely easy to use. Try one. I'll send you $20 worth of Bitcoin that I paid $2 for a few years ago. Hang on to it for a couple years, and it will be worth $200. Bitcoin is literally going to save the world during the next economic crisis, and anybody with two functional neurons will have at least a little bit to prepare for that contingency.