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> The whole point of cryptocurrency to avoid having to go through middlemen like Visa or even require banks. "Whole point" is speaking for a whole lot of peopl

> The whole point of cryptocurrency to avoid having to go through middlemen like Visa or even require banks. "Whole point" is speaking for a whole lot of people who may not share your views. Certainly circumventing banks was an important founding concept, but circumventing _central_ banks is arguably much closer to the goal. There's no reason why credit cards shouldn't exist denominated in Bitcoin -- they provide easy access for consumers to obtain unsecured credit. There's no reason why banks (even fractional reserve banks) shouldn't have accounts denominated in Bitcoin -- they provide an easy path for consumers to issue credit. Opinions may vary on this, but if Bitcoin (or another decentralized cryptocurrency) succeeds the way that people want, I don't see any way to _stop_ these things from happening. People are willing to pay interest on loans; other people want to earn low-risk interest on capital. The thing that will change is that hopefully without central banks consumers will have to realize that depositing money in banks is not risk-free. And hopefully society will learn this as well and we'll move out of the cronyism/free-money regime that we've been stuck in for the last hundred years or so.

nosuchthing 7y ago
Presumably people wouldn't want a cryptocurrency as plutocratic and centralized as Bitcoin has become. Some lessons were learned with BTC as an experiment, and as we can see there's evolution taking place and plenty of more advanced alternatives are making prior software like bitcoin obsolete. It's especially troubling how centralized the minting and mining has become. And it's easy to forget there's the problem with energy consumption related to the PoW algorithm eating almost 1% of the entire world's energy simply for an accounting database. The major reason you don't see payment processors dealing with cryptocurrencies is because the major usecase for most cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, Monereo, and Ethereum is money laundering. One important point: if we actually include all 7 billion people on the earth, most of whom have zero BTC or Ethereum, the Gini coefficient is essentially 0.99+. And if we just include all balances, we include many dust balances which would again put the Gini coefficient at 0.99+. Thus, we need some kind of threshold here. The imperfect threshold we picked was the Gini coefficient among accounts with ≥185 BTC per address, and ≥2477 ETH per address. So this is the distribution of ownership among the Bitcoin and Ethereum rich with $500k as of July 2017. In what kind of situation would a thresholded metric like this be interesting? Perhaps in a scenario similar to the ongoing IRS Coinbase issue, where the IRS is seeking information on all holders with balances >$20,000. Conceptualized in terms of an attack, a high Gini coefficient would mean that a government would only need to round up a few large holders in order to acquire a large percentage of outstanding cryptocurrency — and with it the ability to tank the price. With that said, two points. First, while one would not want a Gini coefficient of exactly 1.0 for BTC or ETH (as then only one person would have all of the digital currency, and no one would have an incentive to help boost the network), in practice it appears that a very high level of wealth centralization is still compatible with the operation of a decentralized protocol. Second, as we show below, we think the Nakamoto coefficient is a better metric than the Gini coefficient for measuring holder concentration in particular as it obviates the issue of arbitrarily choosing a threshold. ...However, the maximum Gini coefficient has one obvious issue: while a high value tracks with our intuitive notion of a “more centralized” system, the fact that each Gini coefficient is restricted to a 0–1 scale means that it does not directly measure the number of individuals or entities required to compromise a system. Specifically, for a given blockchain suppose you have a subsystem of exchanges with 1000 actors with a Gini coefficient of 0.8, and another subsystem of 10 miners with a Gini coefficient of 0.7. It may turn out that compromising only 3 miners rather than 57 exchanges may be sufficient to compromise this system, which would mean the maximum Gini coefficient would have pointed to exchanges rather than miners as the decentralization bottleneck. Conversely, if one considers “number of distinct countries with substantial mining capacity” an essential subsystem, then the minimum Nakamoto coefficient for Bitcoin would again be 1, as the compromise of China (in the sense of a Chinese government crackdown on mining) would result in >51% of mining being compromised. - Balaji S. Srinivasan (the CTO of Coinbase) - https://news.earn.com/quantifying-decentralization-e39db233c28e https://news.earn.com/quantifying-decentralization-e39db233c...
- andrewla 7y ago
  I'm not defending Bitcoin as the ultimate cryptocurrency; I think it's inarguable that it remains the most empirically successful so far. Whether that's first-mover advantage, network effects, a hardware-capable PoW function, or that it struck closer to the right balance of concerns, who knows? I don't agree that the energy consumption is a real concern because we don't have a comparison here for what other currencies cost. The cost seems like it should be fairly efficient because there are competing uses for energy. I'm not sure exactly what the quoted text is trying to say or how it is relevant. I guess towards the notion of "decentralization"? What I would say here is that the reality is that we don't know the gini coefficient of a single thing in the universe except goods that are extraordinarily scarce (like "Mona Lisa paintings"). The estimates for these things for real-world currencies are laughably bad; they are based on self-reported statistics and upsampling, and they rarely reflect the actual scarce good -- effectively M0 of a single currency, which is a number we don't even have for Bitcoin because exchanges represent aggregated possession rather than actual ownership. So my point here is that yes, maybe that Gini coefficient looks bad, but it's the first time that we've even had a moderately realistic look at what a Gini coefficient looks like. Maybe they all look like this -- maybe gold is .99+, maybe Dollars are .99+, maybe Euros are .99+, maybe cigarettes in prison are .99+? Nakomoto coefficient is even more immeasurable for anything but cryptocurrencies, and also disregards aggregated records of deposits.
  - woah 7y ago
    Bitcoin is not inarguably the most successful cryptocurrency. It has completely failed at its stated aim of facilitating payments, and cannot coordinate the necessary technical changes for that to be realistic. It has also failed as a platform for programmable money, since its programming language is almost impossible to work with, and once again, it has been unable to coordinate the necessary changes to implement a working language. What is “the most successful cryptocurrency”? I don’t know, but I would vote for one of those that set out as a development platform, and have successfully ignited a huge amount of experimentation on novel financial and organizational instruments (although their value may be unfounded).
    - 7y ago

nosuchthing 7y ago

Presumably people wouldn't want a cryptocurrency as plutocratic and centralized as Bitcoin has become. Some lessons were learned with BTC as an experiment, and as we can see there's evolution taking place and plenty of more advanced alternatives are making prior software like bitcoin obsolete. It's especially troubling how centralized the minting and mining has become. And it's easy to forget there's the problem with energy consumption related to the PoW algorithm eating almost 1% of the entire world's energy simply for an accounting database. The major reason you don't see payment processors dealing with cryptocurrencies is because the major usecase for most cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, Monereo, and Ethereum is money laundering. One important point: if we actually include all 7 billion people on the earth, most of whom have zero BTC or Ethereum, the Gini coefficient is essentially 0.99+. And if we just include all balances, we include many dust balances which would again put the Gini coefficient at 0.99+. Thus, we need some kind of threshold here. The imperfect threshold we picked was the Gini coefficient among accounts with ≥185 BTC per address, and ≥2477 ETH per address. So this is the distribution of ownership among the Bitcoin and Ethereum rich with $500k as of July 2017. In what kind of situation would a thresholded metric like this be interesting? Perhaps in a scenario similar to the ongoing IRS Coinbase issue, where the IRS is seeking information on all holders with balances >$20,000. Conceptualized in terms of an attack, a high Gini coefficient would mean that a government would only need to round up a few large holders in order to acquire a large percentage of outstanding cryptocurrency — and with it the ability to tank the price. With that said, two points. First, while one would not want a Gini coefficient of exactly 1.0 for BTC or ETH (as then only one person would have all of the digital currency, and no one would have an incentive to help boost the network), in practice it appears that a very high level of wealth centralization is still compatible with the operation of a decentralized protocol. Second, as we show below, we think the Nakamoto coefficient is a better metric than the Gini coefficient for measuring holder concentration in particular as it obviates the issue of arbitrarily choosing a threshold. ...However, the maximum Gini coefficient has one obvious issue: while a high value tracks with our intuitive notion of a “more centralized” system, the fact that each Gini coefficient is restricted to a 0–1 scale means that it does not directly measure the number of individuals or entities required to compromise a system. Specifically, for a given blockchain suppose you have a subsystem of exchanges with 1000 actors with a Gini coefficient of 0.8, and another subsystem of 10 miners with a Gini coefficient of 0.7. It may turn out that compromising only 3 miners rather than 57 exchanges may be sufficient to compromise this system, which would mean the maximum Gini coefficient would have pointed to exchanges rather than miners as the decentralization bottleneck. Conversely, if one considers “number of distinct countries with substantial mining capacity” an essential subsystem, then the minimum Nakamoto coefficient for Bitcoin would again be 1, as the compromise of China (in the sense of a Chinese government crackdown on mining) would result in >51% of mining being compromised. - Balaji S. Srinivasan (the CTO of Coinbase) - https://news.earn.com/quantifying-decentralization-e39db233c28e https://news.earn.com/quantifying-decentralization-e39db233c...

andrewla 7y ago
I'm not defending Bitcoin as the ultimate cryptocurrency; I think it's inarguable that it remains the most empirically successful so far. Whether that's first-mover advantage, network effects, a hardware-capable PoW function, or that it struck closer to the right balance of concerns, who knows? I don't agree that the energy consumption is a real concern because we don't have a comparison here for what other currencies cost. The cost seems like it should be fairly efficient because there are competing uses for energy. I'm not sure exactly what the quoted text is trying to say or how it is relevant. I guess towards the notion of "decentralization"? What I would say here is that the reality is that we don't know the gini coefficient of a single thing in the universe except goods that are extraordinarily scarce (like "Mona Lisa paintings"). The estimates for these things for real-world currencies are laughably bad; they are based on self-reported statistics and upsampling, and they rarely reflect the actual scarce good -- effectively M0 of a single currency, which is a number we don't even have for Bitcoin because exchanges represent aggregated possession rather than actual ownership. So my point here is that yes, maybe that Gini coefficient looks bad, but it's the first time that we've even had a moderately realistic look at what a Gini coefficient looks like. Maybe they all look like this -- maybe gold is .99+, maybe Dollars are .99+, maybe Euros are .99+, maybe cigarettes in prison are .99+? Nakomoto coefficient is even more immeasurable for anything but cryptocurrencies, and also disregards aggregated records of deposits.
- woah 7y ago
  Bitcoin is not inarguably the most successful cryptocurrency. It has completely failed at its stated aim of facilitating payments, and cannot coordinate the necessary technical changes for that to be realistic. It has also failed as a platform for programmable money, since its programming language is almost impossible to work with, and once again, it has been unable to coordinate the necessary changes to implement a working language. What is “the most successful cryptocurrency”? I don’t know, but I would vote for one of those that set out as a development platform, and have successfully ignited a huge amount of experimentation on novel financial and organizational instruments (although their value may be unfounded).
  - 7y ago