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I don't see the irony. The point is that Bitcoin has introduced an actual "digital cash" currency without institutional/governmental middlemen. That institutio

• oblio 6y ago
  What's "digital cash" in this context? What does it offer extra compared to regular cash and online payments?
  • zik 6y ago
    With cash you can hand it to another person in payment. With conventional digital payments you request a trusted intermediary (your bank) to transfer that value to them. What if you don't trust banks but still want to be able to pay people? Bitcoin was born in the Global Financial Crisis when the world was discovering the massive scam which the financial services industry had perpetrated, causing the whole problem. People wanted a way to do transactions without having to trust institutions which demonstrably couldn't be trusted. Hence Bitcoin which acts like digital cash with no trusted intermediary.
  • hombre_fatal 6y ago
    Well, take the upsides of cash (e.g. don't need to open a bank, prove residence, etc.) and now add the ability to exchange it digitally without the pointless gatekeeping of large corporations like Paypal.
    • rjurney 6y ago
      Who will be the largest Bitcoin vendor because they are trusted.
      • seibelj 6y ago
        But they won’t be the only vendor. There is no license required that gives them a monopoly on bitcoin. If they serve a market segment, great! Others will use something else. Bitcoin is entirely open - it’s a protocol.
        • rjurney 6y ago
          So is EDI used by banks with other currencies. I am old enough to have used it :)
      • hombre_fatal 6y ago
        That's fine. Bitcoin adoption by these institutions makes it easier for people to receive it who don't actually want to hold it. Still, note that you don't need Paypal to move Bitcoin.
  • exclusiv 6y ago
    Exactly. And barring an unlikely collapse, cash/dollar isn't going to fluctuate much at all in value. So... a feature. At this point, bitcoin is a competitor to gold as an asset store. Maybe it will be more like a currency at some point. But there's a long way to go and a lot of forces against it for that to occur.
    • radiator 6y ago
      Just pointing out; there exist also those who consider the possibility of a collapse of cash/dollar more likely than your estimate.
      • oblio 6y ago
        There exist those who predict the collapse of everything. That's not a valid answer. Who are they? How many are they? What insight do they have that we don't have? Is this chance higher than the possibility of collapse for Bitcoin?
        • exclusiv 6y ago
          Seriously. Will it do the equivalent of being ~20k then go to 3k. Then come back to 29k? Highly unlikely. As much as people want to predict a collapse, you can't store a ton of money safely outside of Treasuries.
  • Anon1096 6y ago
    Theoretically companies like Mindgeek who have been kicked off of the VISA/Mastercard duopoly, would be able to use Bitcoin as a censorship-resistant way to accept online payment. There's additional benefits as mentioned earlier like not needing to comply with KYC laws. Of course, as Bitcoin currently stands, it's difficult for this to come to fruition because most holders are speculators rather than people interested in using it as currency.
    • overscore 6y ago
      > There's additional benefits as mentioned earlier like not needing to comply with KYC laws. Why would Bitcoin transactions be exempt from KYC?
      • Spoom 6y ago
        Because the fact that it's (in theory) anonymous means that most people think that it also cannot be regulated by laws. People just don't outright say that though because it might sound like enabling fraud, tax evasion, and other unsavory activities was the point.
    • oblio 6y ago
      > There's additional benefits as mentioned earlier like not needing to comply with KYC laws. In many situations lack of KYC is a bug, not a feature.
      • ur-whale 6y ago
        >In many situations lack of KYC is a bug, not a feature. Some people seem to be actually believe that. You just happen to be one of them.
        • oblio 6y ago
          How do you track money laundering? Not everyone doing it is a virtuous rebel Fighing The Powah. A lot of them are just plain old crooks or other kinds of criminals.
• JacksonGariety 6y ago
  Don't all currencies work that way?
  • hombre_fatal 6y ago
    How do you send USD to someone digitally?
    • exclusiv 6y ago
      A lot of ways. And the banks reconcile the cash movement behind the scenes. As I understand it, in a simple example, if you send $1k to someone. And someone at their bank sends $1k to someone at your bank, there's nothing that the banks need to do other than record it.
      • hombre_fatal 6y ago
        That you brought up banking is precisely my point. Imagine if you needed a bank account to give someone $100 cash. Or to spend a few bucks at a street hotdog vendor. Most people take it for granted that they need a bank to do anything, and they don't really consider how powerless they are over their own money. Like how it's illegal to carry too much cash (and it can simply be taken away). And how your bank can impose arbitrary restrictions against you like rejecting transactions and freezing your account. I've lost various bank accounts over the years as a permanent traveler. I'm banned from Paypal. I want to be able to send $100 cash digitally with the operational minimalism of giving someone $100 cash in person. I want some control over my money even when I want to exchange it digitally.
        • viraptor 6y ago
          > Like how it's illegal to carry too much cash Which country is that? It's not illegal anywhere I know of.
          • gruez 6y ago
            He's probably talking about the horror stories of people getting their cash/assets seized via civil forfeiture. eg. https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2018/09/01/police-seized-couples-cash-they-couldnt-get-it-back-until-they-went-public/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2018/09/01/police-seiz...
• pvg 6y ago
  The intent was 'actual digital cash', the result was 'instrument for speculation, money laundering and other fraud' which is entirely dependent on actual real money (and its institutions). Whether one finds that ironic or not is a matter of taste but it's clearly not exactly what the goal of "digital cash" was supposed to be.
  • hombre_fatal 6y ago
    That's just the reality of cash, no less in digital form, so it would be naive to think Bitcoin wouldn't inherit the same uses of USD (speculation, money laundering, fraud). It's just not very damning. Though I'm sure various people in the government/Visa would love to ban USD cash with the same demonization.
    • nwienert 6y ago
      Not the reality of cash as cash doesn’t change value like Bitcoin (in either direction), it’s also usually not scarce, and always much easier to use.
      • StavrosK 6y ago
        The dollar doesn't change value like Bitcoin, not cash as a whole.
        • sunshinerag 6y ago
          oh yes it does, it has crashed more than 2000% vs Bitcoin in a decade.
          • bluedevil2k 6y ago
            That’s completely wrong. You would never say “the US dollar has crashed compared to Microsoft stock“. That’s a dumb comparison to compare a currency to an investment. The dollar has been mostly stable the past 10 years. A gallon of milk is still around $3.50
• Glyptodon 6y ago
  Ah, yes, physical currency doesn't have institutional/governmental middlemen because private regulated banks aren't the government. /s
  • hombre_fatal 6y ago
    Try to make a concrete point without encumbering it with sarcasm. I don't want to guess at what you mean and then have a meta discussion over whether I correctly interpreted your point.
• phkahler 6y ago
  >> The point is that Bitcoin has introduced an actual "digital cash" currency without institutional/governmental middlemen. The emergent cartel of miners becomes that.
  • beaner 6y ago
    If you think this, you don't understand Bitcoin.
    • xapata 6y ago
      Or maybe the other way around. Don't just assert. Explain. From the article: > The whole idea of proof-of-work mining is broken the instant hardware comes out which is specialized for mining and useless for general computation because at that point the need to have compute power for other purposes is absolutely irrelevant in having any effect on mining, and there ceases to be any force that causes mining to be distributed around the world. It becomes a "race to the bottom" to find where people can get the cheapest electricity, and then mining anywhere else - anywhere the government tries to make sure ordinary people actually get the benefit from electricity bought for tax money, for example - becomes first pointless, then a net loss. It's the same story as some countries not having good quality coffee, avocados, quinoa, etc. because the export-quality goods are priced out of widespread domestic consumption. With electricity production and distribution being a natural monopoly (and therefore typically regulated by the government), blockchain can't escape the realities of foreign exchange rates and government control.
      • beaner 6y ago
        Miners have no ability to retract or redirect transactions. And to exclude them would require 100% collusion. Miners as "middlemen" doesn't make sense. Edit: Your comment was edited after I made this one. I see no relation between the quote from the article and how miners are supposed to be middlemen.
        • xapata 6y ago
• addicted 6y ago
  No one treats Bitcoin as a currency. It’s treated as an investment vehicle. And the reason behind that is obvious. Something whose value may double in a month or whose value may halve within weeks is a terrible currency. If I expect it’s value to increase then I would be a fool to spend it. If I expect it’s value to drop I would be a fool to accept it. Cryptocurrencies are anything but currencies.
  • option 6y ago
    I grew up in Ukraine where my parents were earning and spending hryvna (local currency, high inflation) while saving in USD (much more stable). And a big value prop in favor of US dollar was its immunity to local country’s politics. Bitcoin has a potential to serve as that kind of saving “currency” a lot of people actually need.
    • deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    • tekkk 6y ago
      Not to burst your bubble but assets with extreme volatility, like bitcoin, are not suitable for saving purposes. Investment maybe, but not saving. I assume "saving" purpose in this case means that it withholds its value while being easily liquidable. If you on the other hand have a long saving window so you can tolerate huge swings in the price of the bitcoin (or other cryptocurrency) then the question arises why not diversify your investments like regular people and buy ETFs or other assets? Maybe buying ETFs is harder than buying bitcoins, but in general the idea is (I assume) the same. However, what I feel most people are allured by with bitcoin is its random price movements where out of nowhere its price surges up and creates a total hysteria in the market. I myself heavily dislike assets which price is mainly driven by emotional rationale and while bitcoin's idea may be good, I would not suggest anyone to put their savings in bitcoin. It would seem to encourage people to treat markets with magical thinking where the prices are set by otherworldly powers and not as tied to the revenue stream that is generated by the said asset.
      • 6y ago
• idlewords 6y ago
  Every Bitcoin transaction is crawling with industrial and governmental middlemen, often with the latter trying to arrest the former for stealing all your money.
• chemmail 6y ago
  That is a good way of thinking about it. "The Internet of Money" is a very good way of labeling it. The internet protocols itself and it's openess are very foundational like bitcoin. Everything we use today is built on top of that. BTC is really just the brand right now. Moving forward we will see if BTC is Yahoo/Myspace and who will be the Google/Amazon of this new sector.
  • vulturalcptlst 6y ago
    No, this is the incorrect way of thinking of it. It's more like TCP/IP than businesses built on top of the protocol.
  • IfOnlyYouKnew 6y ago
    I prefer "The US dollar without democratic institutions"
• sunshinerag 6y ago
  Amen
• xapata 6y ago
  Since Bitcoin transactions are enabled only by spending electricity, isn't the whole system dependent on utility companies, which are either in part or in whole extensions of the government?
  • gruez 6y ago
    If you want to be reductionist, you can argue that since almost all of the world's land, people, resources, and equipment are under the control of some government, it's hard for anything to be independent of them.
    • xapata 6y ago
      I don't think that's reductionist. I think that's a reasonable statement. It is indeed hard for anything to be independent of government control, except perhaps in failed states. Which is sort-of the definition of a failed state.
    • majewsky 6y ago
      Well, yeah. Why else would Elon want a Mars colony so badly?
  • zik 6y ago
    If electricity became less available the mining rate of Bitcoin would automatically adjust to the scarcity of available computation - it's not like there's a specified amount of electricity that has to be used per transaction.
    • xapata 6y ago
      It's less about steady-state global availability than burst capacity. What if the People's Liberation Army decides that temporary control of the Bitcoin network is a valuable capability?
• gorgonzola88 6y ago
  I think the point is human biology. To date humans have not figured out a society that avoids such barnacles. These technologies are style and no substance to the masses. Propped up by fetishists and speculators.
• PaulHoule 6y ago
  Bitcoin is the digital version of those huge coins people had on Easter Island. Had the Easter Islanders invented fractional reserve banking they might have taken over the world instead of England.
• adventured 6y ago
  Bitcoin isn't going to be a currency. It's a digital store of value. It will never be anything other than that. People may build new currencies on top of it in the near future. As the volatility fades from Bitcoin over time and it becomes extraordinarily boring (ie quite stable), some small nations will experiment with linking their fiat to Bitcoin for stability (seems laughable today, it won't be in a decade).
• amelius 6y ago
  You missed the last part of TFA: > The more scalable the network becomes, the more centralized it becomes, until ultimately a "scalable" cryptocurrency would be doing things exactly the same way as a credit card processor.