9 ms·

What are the fundamental flaws you're talking about? (I assume throughput but I'll wait for your reply). What do you mean by saying people fell for "this"? I a

• lottin 5y ago
  > What are the fundamental flaws you're talking about? For a payments system, the fact that all transactions are final is pretty bad. I'd say this, by itself, makes the system unusable in the real world.
  • danboarder 5y ago
    Except that transactions are not final, your scenario is exactly what crypto is great at, there are many ways you can set up an escrow for any transaction to protect multiple parties, for example by using a multisig wallet (1). (1) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multisignature https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multisignature
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  • doomroot 5y ago
    You can build a system of reversible transactions on bitcoin or any other currency (people already have). It’s impossible to do the inverse in a non reversible system.
    • acjohnson55 5y ago
      We have non reversible payments already. It's called wiring money. People generally avoid using it unless absolutely necessary, because it's expensive (much like bitcoin) and most of the time, it's not what you want.
      • deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
      • arcticbull 5y ago
        The depository institutions themselves don't actually pay much at all - FedWires are about $0.033 to the DI. Some DIs offer domestic wires free of charge like my bank does. SWIFT international wires do cost the DI more, but not several orders of magnitude more. I don't happen to know that number off hand. Some retail banks charge a lot for wires because they can - people don't use them frequently (as to your point its not what people want most of the time) and usually only for bigger purchases so the fee matters less. However, if this is something you do more often, banks offer steep, steep discounts over sticker.
      • md_ 5y ago
        Wiring money isn’t a great analogy. In the US it’s expensive for consumers just because banks can charge a lot for it, but ACH isn’t really more or less reversible (I.e., both are, to a degree) and is free. Conversely, in SEPA, wire transfers are free/inexpensive and in my experience people routinely use them for consumer payments.
  • craftinator 5y ago
    I get the feeling that the underpinnings of your argument points are based on not being very familiar or well read with the technology around Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, especially Ethereum. Your coming at it from an end user or armchair quarterback point of view, not someone who actually does development in that space; if you did, you'd know that one of the reasons Ethereum was created was to provide a digital escrow mechanism, and has been around for over 5 years. So no, your example isn't based on reality.
    • ashtonkem 5y ago
      > Your coming at it from an end user or armchair quarterback point of view, not someone who actually does development in that space The slow transition away from “mass adoption soon!” is extremely entertaining to me. Why, pray tell, for a currency would developers matter more than end users?
      • chrisco255 5y ago
        https://www.paypal.com/us/webapps/mpp/crypto https://www.paypal.com/us/webapps/mpp/crypto
  • ajkdhcb2 5y ago
    I observe the exact opposite: people do not like accepting the risk of payments that can be reversed because the buyer does a chargeback scam, or used a hacked paypal account. Multisig escrow is also better in every way if people want to involve a third party in case of a dispute
    • lottin 5y ago
      Right, the thing is if I want to involve a third party (and I definitely want that), I wouldn't use a decentralised system to begin with, because decentralised means inherently inefficient and therefore expensive.
      • arcticbull 5y ago
        Especially since you have to trust a third person anyways and once you're trusting anyone, you lose all the blockchain guarantees.
        • ajkdhcb2 5y ago
          False. The third party can't take the money, it can only be given to the receiver or back to the sender. That's how multisig works.
          • arcticbull 5y ago
            Correct, you have to trust the extra signer to make a good faith representation of what happened in reality. That makes the transaction inherently trustful.
      • Paradigma11 5y ago
        Sure its inefficient. For example the complete Tezos network uses around 10kW of power while a centralized solution might only 1kW. Relevance: None.
        • ashtonkem 5y ago
  • arbol 5y ago
    Payments don't need to be final. You could use a contract that implements arbitration logic.
    • ashtonkem 5y ago
      Yeah, but why would anyone want to do that when credit cards already exist?
      • arbol 5y ago
        Eventually it should be a sensible choice. The goal is for crypto (not bitcoin) to be more economically sensible to run credit card style infrastructure. Clearly, this is not currently true but I expect it will improve to the point where most services use some aspect of crypto because it makes sense economically.
        • lottin 5y ago
          I think you're mistaken. Cryptocurrencies are anarcho-capitalist money. They're not economical or user friendly because that would mean they cannot be decentralised. Anarcho-capitalists are okay with that because for them their ideology is more important than practicality but the general public will never adopt a payments system that is more expensive and less practical than the alternatives.
          • arbol 5y ago
            I'm not expecting the average person to adopt a crypto payments system any time soon. Currency is only one aspect. B2B will come first. There are already a large number of crypto projects partnering with existing businesses to address real problems. I don't see a minority ideology standing in the way of this.
            • lottin 5y ago
              They have been trying to sell blockchain technology to businesses for a long time. Nothing has come out of it despite millions spent in r&d and marketing.
  • hellbannedguy 5y ago
    It's bad now, but in the future it might be great? With technology getting faster, I regret not mining a few coins. I even bought the sound cards? A life if regrets because I didn't follow my gut feelings, or let people sway my decisions? (Would I invest in Bitcoin now. Hell no, but years ago yes. It will deflate, along with NTF's, and the stock market soon.)
    • heterodoxxed 5y ago
      | It's bad now, but in the future it might be great? Not be able to reverse transaction is not a feature, it's a fundamental flaw. There is absolutely no advantage to the consumer or the producer to have all transactions immediately permanent. The rest of your comment reveals your bias: You don't really care about it working technologically, you just wish you had made money on it.
  • noxer 5y ago
    Its called "settlement" when its final. You probably dont need that ever or dont even know there is a difference between a payment and settlement but financial systems do know the difference very well. They just hide it from the end user. Settlement is the actually difficult part the rest is just moving numbers around. After all fiat is mostly digital. And BTW no we dont need bitcoin for this at all its depreciated tech. But other DLT can be very usefully. There is a reason CBDCs are a huge topic in global finance.
  • chrisco255 5y ago
    This is how cash and gold worked for thousands of years.
    • Macha 5y ago
      But not for the last couple thousand, thanks to legal systems, or before that "running fraudsters out of town"
      • chrisco255 5y ago
        That is how cash still works to this day. It's not about fraud or not fraud: it's about settlement finality. If you hand over cash to someone for a transaction, you have no guarantees you'll ever get that cash back in the event of a dispute. This is how crypto works.
        • loulouxiv 5y ago
          Well with cash you know at least the face of the person you hand it to, and can run after him if you realize the traded bought is not as expected.
    • ashtonkem 5y ago
      Which is why consumers enthusiastically abandoned them for credit the moment they could. Purposefully going backwards is both silly, and something you’ll never convince the average consumer to do.
      • justupvoting 5y ago
        Folks didn't 'enthusiastically abandon' sound money for credit (or even the early IOUs which were a sort of primitive cash) the moment they could. You're retconning a bit there. Folks were extremely reluctant for a long time on account of all the schemes and fraud. Sound familiar? That's just what humans do to each other. New tech is always like this when there are gains to be made. Some folks look at the trend that central banks have been on and the creep of financial surveillance and think purposefully going backward in some areas isn't silly at all. In the end, it's software you don't have to use. Nobody is forcing anyone to opt in, right (you know, like the credit bureaus who in America force you to opt in if you intend to... I dunno, participate in the economy in a meaningful way)?
  • darkerside 5y ago
    You can use Ethereum to build contracts that look a lot like settlement execution, to my limited understanding
    • ashtonkem 5y ago
      Oracle problem; the ETH blockchain can only speak authoritatively to things on its own chain, for anything else you need to trust a central authority to feed in information about the outside world, ruining the point. This is why a lot of what happens on that chain is just creating ICO tokens and placing bets on various on-chain things, rather than any meaningful off chain financial transactions.
      • chrisco255 5y ago
        The oracle problem is a solved problem: https://chain.link/ https://chain.link/ And no, your comment on Ethereum is about 4 years outdated.
        • SubiculumCode 5y ago
          You respond with fact, and so they turn your comment gray. This discussions moderation is legitimately the worst I've ever seen on HN.
  • h0nd 5y ago
    Can be solved with reverse payments (yes, there are things to consider!). That a transaction is final is not a flaw but one of the main features.
• heurist 5y ago
  I'm confused about why Bitcoin is being discussed in the past tense when both usage and price have both grown significantly over the last year. Is it already dead? Could have fooled me.
  • eli 5y ago
    Usage in what sense? Beanie Babies once commanded a high price but they too were never a good payments system. Many people are certainly buying in to crypto with the intent of selling it later at a profit. But that’s unrelated from its utility.
    • heurist 5y ago
      Sure. They'll sell at the peak and buy at the bottom because it's a well known 4 year cycle programmed into the protocol. If the price is expected to appreciate 5-10x from any other asset in the market every 4 years that's a bet you should make, even if the timing of the peak and trough is hard to see. But the price floor increases over time as the trade becomes better known globally and the lottery odds expand. Eventually there is so much noise it all evens out and becomes a generally smooth slide into a stable store of value. It's network science and game theory that I personally consider much smarter than anything I could create (having deployed technology built on network science in exchange for money in the financial sector). And much more democratic than is possible in the traditional financial world. Frankly, the longer I study this the more impressed I am. Usage as in number of network participants. People investing time, energy, risk into the system. Miners, traders, validators, second layer operators. Similar to members of facebook, servers in the internet. Price as in market price. And I'm only talking Bitcoin here.
      • darkerside 5y ago
        > it's a well known 4 year cycle programmed into the protocol First I've heard of this. Do you have more information?
        • lhl 5y ago