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Anyone who thinks Bitcoin is the future of money is insane.

• jlgreco 13y ago
  Suppose I say that I think that bitcoin is the future of currency in the same way that the Benz Patent Motorwagen was the future of personal transportation?
  • UVB-76 13y ago
    Bitcoin has no place in the future of currency. The future of currency is digital, but it's not peer-to-peer. It's just an international organisation with a big centralised database. You might not like it, but watch it unfold.
    • baddox 13y ago
      So "sane" means "able to predict the future with absolute confidence." I guess my lack of certainty makes me insane.
    • rubinelli 13y ago
      A single point of failure for a global currency sounds like an awful idea to me. A federated model, in which each main node has to go through a rigorous appraisal before it joins its peers, and they continuously "trust but verify" each other, is a much more palatable option.
      • UVB-76 13y ago
        Centralisation is the endgame. All transactions will be logged, and all will be instantly reversible in the unlikely event of some kind of security breach. Money laundering will be impossible, and there'll be no incentive to hack other people's accounts because all thefts will be reversible (even if the thief then went on to transfer said currency to third parties)
        • rubinelli 13y ago
          The question is, who gets the key to the vault? Who can say a transaction was fraudulent? Who will you give the authority to freeze all your digital assets, pending further investigation? Amazon? Google? Paypal?
          • UVB-76 13y ago
            A non-governmental international organisation à la the United Nations or the World Bank. Of course, we're talking about the long-term here. In the next 5-10 years similar systems will be implemented by individual nations. International cooperation will take much longer.
        • illuminate 13y ago
          "there'll be no incentive to hack other people's accounts because all thefts will be reversible" There'll always be an incentive to hack others' accounts.
    • jlgreco 13y ago
      I guess I'd say: You may not like distributed crypto-currencies, but watch them emerge anyway. Long term, actual long term, centralized currencies will not scale. They simply will not be able to.
    • rdl 13y ago
      The model I'd like to see is large numbers of currencies, where each currency can be centralized, but either double-entry ledger OR tokens (or, blinded tokens). Handle the risk-sharing, coercion protection, etc. by having enough currencies that shutting down one doesn't hurt the others, and design systems to exchange currencies at transaction time, as well as maintaining portfolios in arbitrary mixtures.
• alan_cx 13y ago
  I see bitcoin as an experiment. There for I would say any one making a prediction one way or the other is insane.
  • new299 13y ago
    As do the developers I think. It is a really entertaining and interesting experiment though. :)
    • rubinelli 13y ago
      Well, if you start an experiment trying to prove something instead of learning, you are actually running a demonstration, not an experiment. :)
      • new299 13y ago
        ex·per·i·ment /ikˈsperəmənt/ Noun A scientific procedure undertaken to make a discovery, test a hypothesis, or demonstrate a known fact.
        • rubinelli 13y ago
          Touche.
          • new299 13y ago
            This is kind of an interesting quote from Gavin Andresen on the whole experiment thing: Gavin Andresen, the 46-year-old lead software developer for the Bitcoin project, is eager to find the answer. "I'm hoping to learn," he says, whether "a nongovernmental global currency" is possible. "Can you get from where we are to the vision of billions of people all over the world using Bitcoin just like they use any other currency? That's the grand experiment." http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323809304578429142650304564.html?mod=rss_opinion_main http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142412788732380930457842...
• mackwic 13y ago
  Please argue on why or shut up. The fact is you don't know anymore than us if govs will shut down the endpoints with "real world", or if BTC will succeed to create its own ecosystem and reach the point where it don't need dollars anymore. All we can do is argue and convince ourselves if BTC is a good bet or a disastrous bet. Something you obviously can't if you threat everyone insane.
  • UVB-76 13y ago
    It doesn't matter if governments decide to shut it down or not. Bitcoin is not the future of currency. It will never be widely adopted. It's as simple as that. I'd bet my entire Bitcoin wallet on it, but mercifully I don't have one.
    • mackwic 13y ago
      Widely is not needed. The Future, that's conceptual, not factual. In order to become "the future of money", it only need one or two big organization using BTC, a derived one, or their own virtual currency, or to survive to direct organized attacks the day it will obstruct some important people. In the same way of erlang, ocaml and haskell, seen as futuristic languages, BTC /can/ be a futuristic money.
      • UVB-76 13y ago
        "Continue to exist in the future" != "The future"
    • drivebyacct2 13y ago
      >I'd bet my entire Bitcoin wallet on it, but mercifully I don't have one. Of course you don't, you're talking out your ass. Go troll somewhere else. Yeah, there's that false sense of superiority that makes no sense and makes you a completely troll --- It'd be such a shame for you to have a Bitcoin wallet, huh? Especially since they take milliseconds to generate, cost nothing, require virtually no effort. Oh wait, you're probably just another person who is jealous because they think they missed their get-rich opportunity and are mad because they don't understand what Bitcoin actually is or how it works.
• drivebyacct2 13y ago
  With all that good logic and reasoning, who could possibly disagree with you?