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Bitcoin's Value is Decentralization
- dublinclontarf 15y agoDistributed DNS is something that's being tried with namecoinds, not really taking off I think.
- enki 15y agoauthor here: the cool part is that it's theoretically possible now. i have no idea whether it'll take off. what do you think, are there gonna be sufficient incentives in the future to decentralize certain services?
- _Lemon_ 15y ago> what do you think, are there gonna be sufficient incentives in the future to decentralize certain services? You bring a very good point, one that I hadn't considered at all. Although I'm not sure, I think the "work from at least 50% of honest nodes" is an issue. The more demand you have to create work for decentralised services, the more you split and weaken said services. For example, if x is a major player with 33% of workin one decentralised system, they are more likely to have > 50% in smaller systems. So they would have power in smaller systems being able to usurp them at will. One way around this would be to have a lot of players in each system, such that it would only be realistic to have a few % at a time (each). However, this again would most likely be undermined by any state actors who would ultimately be able to produce much more than anyone could if they wanted.
- evanrmurphy 15y agoGood thread on BitCoin-style distributed DNS: http://forum.bitcoin.org/?topic=1790.0 http://forum.bitcoin.org/?topic=1790.0
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- wibblenut 15y agoDNS is distributed, so I think you meant to say decentralised? But I'm baffled as to why anybody would want to use it? For it to become useful we'd need to go to the extraordinary lengths of replacing substantial infrastructure, at a very great cost - to replace proven technology that scales extremely well? And it wouldn't surprise me if Harold Camping was mining Bitcoins on the church computer. The end is nigh!
- weavejester 15y agoThe DNS system is cached, but ultimately only has 13 roots. Additionally, governments can decide to cut off organisations they consider to be undesirable, and legislation like PROTECT IP would give similar power to private corporations as well. Some might therefore consider it desirable to have a DNS system outside of this control to compliment the existing system.
- drivebyacct2 15y agoWasn't this obvious? Wasn't this what everyone was saying when others were discussing the size of the economy and the size of transactions it could handle and threats from the government... It's the first time people can actually truly freely trade without fear of monitoring or tracking. Of course that's its value.
- mattmanser 15y agoHuh? What was the author smoking when he wrote this as I want some!
- jerf 15y agoThe question isn't "Is BitCoin's value non-zero?" As a general critic, I freely say up front, yes, it's interesting and has some non-zero value. I won't even say I'm "admitting" it, because it was never my contention otherwise. But merely establishing that there is some aspect with a non-zero value isn't interesting. The question is, do the positives outweigh the negatives, and if so, do they outweigh them enough to fulfill the stated goals? You can make anything look great by considering only the positives, you can make anything look terrible by only considering the negatives. The question at hand is about the balance, not whether BitCoin has any positives at all.
- enki 15y agoFully agree with your sentiment. Not trying to argue Bitcoin will succeed. But it's very clear that it is interesting. It essentially solved globally consistent distributed naming and non-web-of-trust PKI on the side, and almost no one noticed.
- llimllib 15y agoI would say it sovled* gobally consistent distributed naming. Where the asterisk means that it has not yet stood the test of time. It seems like a solution, but none of us should be quite sure yet that it actually works as advertised.
- vladd 15y agoI think you're confusing the Bitcoins' value with the value provided by the open source code implementation which has been open sourced. The code can be forked and used to power another coin system, let's call it Webcoin, which will have the same properties. The cryptographic, decentralized and uniqueness properties are therefore a value of the code. The value of Bitcoin is related to this specific implementation, i.e. the marketing that caused people to put their money in this specific fork of the code and permitted early adopters to cash in. At some point in the future, a country might choose to use the code to power its own currency system and to back it with the economic activity performed within (which is taxed via taxation). That would give intrinsic value to the coins; today Bitcoins is just marketing implemented on top of a well-written open source decentralized code-base.
- _delirium 15y agoThis doesn't really follow: > Bitcoins have intrinsic value if they enable desirable interactions that are not possible without them. Yes, any fiat currency has the 'intrinsic' value of enabling some kinds of interactions that are not possible without them. For example, hard-to-counterfeit pieces of paper have an intrinsic value. The problem is that such things are often substitutable: the real value of most paper currencies comes, circularly, from the fact that we've decided to settle on this set of hard-to-counterfeit pieces of paper, not a different one. That's why it's fiat currency, because its value as currency fundamentally derives from the fact that people have agreed to use it as currency. The same applies for Bitcoin; the general idea could be a good one, but Bitcoin is not the only possible implementation. If we settle on this implementation over others (perhaps because it was first), it is for reasons closer to fiat money than for reasons advocated by "hard money" proponents that they have value.
- jzila 15y agoI agree with you, but I think the spirit of the article is to acknowledge the value of bitcoin as a technical solution to a problem we thought was simply unsolvable. It probably shouldn't have gone into the economic value of bitcoin specifically, since it doesn't address most of the economic arguments against bitcoins.
- RockyMcNuts 15y agocan't help wondering how much of gold's value is derived from the fact that, circularly, people think it has value. or for that matter, any human activity's.
- Steko 15y agoGiven recent events I take it we're no longer emphasizing stability and security as features of bitcoin. I jest, clearly decentralization is the new killer feature. Money quote: "Bitcoin makes it feasible to pay for internet relays that anonymize or reroute traffic - that is, it makes it easier to remove central control and fight censorship" And who doesn't want to fight censorship amirite? Surely there are no negative repercussions to letting people reroute traffic anonymously.
- bdhe 15y agoGiven recent events I take it we're no longer emphasizing stability and security as features of bitcoin. I understand where such a snarky statement comes from, but let's take a step back. Bitcoin has generate such enormous debate because it is not clear to anyone---security researchers, economists, or otherwise---what Bitcoin entails. It has some desirable properties, some undesirable properties, and has, imho, made people think a lot about the concept of fiat currency and how to go about extending the advantages paper currency has to the "digital domain" (and I use that phrase loosely). I think it is great that lot of people are looking at Bitcoin in many different angles and since this is the first of its kind, I am sure people and society (including governments) will learn from pitfalls (security, economics or otherwise) to build a better system tomorrow. So let's not attack people who are trying to explore what Bitcoin gives us and what it doesn't.
- sbov 15y agoTheir method of decentralization seems pretty costly though, and that cost will not abate over time, since the costliness is what makes it work. If widely adopted, I don't look forward to the day when a large percentage of all computing resources in the world is spent meaninglessly churning bits in the name of a decentralized system.
- DavidSJ 15y agoTheir method of decentralization seems pretty costly though, and that cost will not abate over time, since the costliness is what makes it work. If widely adopted, I don't look forward to the day when a large percentage of all computing resources in the world is spent meaninglessly churning bits in the name of a decentralized system. Every market has friction and costs associated with its security. This is fundamentally no different than a bank hiring a security guard. If someone comes up with a solution to this problem which lacks this cost, it would of course be preferable, but no one has yet done so.
- RockyMcNuts 15y agoSo... if I want to settle a $40b transaction, like a big merger, in <24h with bitcoins, assuming the level of fragmentation you could expect if bitcoins became ubiquitous in everyday transactions, what kind of server farm are we talking about?
- DavidSJ 15y agoIt could take years before the block chain is long enough to dissuade a double-spend attempt for a transaction that large, where you have a single party single-handedly accounting for a significant fraction of spending on the network. So for a single $40b transaction, perhaps bitcoin is infeasible (or at least must be combined with traditional mechanisms like reputation, courts, etc.), but for a million independent $40k transactions, they can all be confirmed in a matter of hours for only a few hundred thousand dollars worth of computation, total.
- nhaehnle 15y ago