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«why not cut out the middlemen and be the only parasite in the loop?» Observation: this is precisely what cryptocurrencies do. No middleman. Users transact dir
by mrb 7y ago
«why not cut out the middlemen and be the only parasite in the loop?»
Observation: this is precisely what cryptocurrencies do. No middleman. Users transact directly with each other.
- retube 7y ago> No middleman except for a handful of giant server farms in china
- mrb 7y agoMiners don't have middlemen powers. They can't censor your transactions like a true middleman could. Even if 9 out of 10 miners colluded to censor you, all you need is 1 out of the 10 to be honest, and your transactions would still go through.
- rchaud 7y agoBut the biggest actors in crypto are the exchanges, literally the middlemen between buyers and sellers. The volume of trade with crypto as a medium of exchange is dwarfed by the amounts changing hands via the exchanges.
- mrb 7y agoYou may need an exchange once to acquire crypto (and even then, not really, you could buy crypto from an individual, or mine it, or just take a payment in crypto...) but once you're "in the system" so to speak, you can pay and receive crypto without ever having to deal with exchanges anymore.
- __MatrixMan__ 7y agoI've made this observation too. We spend a lot of time trying to achieve consensus with our neighbor parasites about the status of a transaction (slice the pie n ways, perhaps your database says that m of those n got paid, but mine says that m-1 got paid...), but if it were on a public blockchain there would be nothing to dispute.