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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?
by jlgreco 14y 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 14y agoBitcoin 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 14y agoSo "sane" means "able to predict the future with absolute confidence." I guess my lack of certainty makes me insane.
- rubinelli 14y agoA 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 14y agoCentralisation 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 14y agoThe 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 14y agoA 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 14y 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 14y agoI 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 14y agoThe 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.