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Great, so as long as we solve six of the major technical hurdles of the day, we can avoid the societal and technical dangers that BitCoin poses. What a pleasant
by ender7 13y ago
Great, so as long as we solve six of the major technical hurdles of the day, we can avoid the societal and technical dangers that BitCoin poses. What a pleasant ultimatum.
As you pose it, it's now a race between the darker aspects of BitCoin and our ability as a world society to check off the items on your wishlist. I don't disagree that those are all good things to have, but I don't see how holding a gun to everyone's head and demanding short-term solutions to long-term problems is going to accomplish anything. I don't see a world where we get there in time.
- VMG 13y agoCalm down, nobody holding a gun to anybodys head. The world wasn't ready for computers, the internet and cryptographically secure communication either, but we still managed. For a forum that supposedly loves "disruption" everybody seems to be really frightened when it actually happens.
- towski 13y agoYeah I thought we stopped arguing for 'civil society' 100 years ago, when we realized that it was a sham
- coldtea 13y ago>The world wasn't ready for computers, the internet and cryptographically secure communication either, but we still managed. For a forum that supposedly loves "disruption" everybody seems to be really frightened when it actually happens.* Amen, brother. I've also been preaching cold fusion and perpetual motion machines like forever, and nobody's listening to me either. They are not ready for it.
- jamesaguilar 13y agoI don't see it as a significant problem. Those hurdles only need to be crossed for folks using Bitcoin to do so safely. If they are not crossed, it's only Bitcoin users that are harmed. Since there is nothing to force anyone to use it, all possible harm arising from weaknesses in the underlying infrastructure is opt-in.
- Diederich 13y agoConsider a slightly different version: "As you pose it, it's not a race between the darker aspects of The Internet and our ability as a world society to check off the items on your wishlist."
- tolmasky 13y agoThese are not technical dangers that Bitcoin possesses, they are dangers that exist with or without Bitcoin when dealing with money online. Computer security didn't all of a sudden become important because BTC came into existence: most of OP's same arguments could be made against having online banking: * Online banking credentials are often stored in general-purpose personal computers running a wide variety of applications, managed by people who don't know how to secure a computer. * In contrast, people regularly give complete access to their computers (where they manage their online banking, etrade, etc) to complete strangers by willingly or unwillingly installing software created by such strangers. People have been being ripped off before BTC existed. The main difference with BTC is simply that a large amount of capital appeared very quickly in the hands of people that may not have been previously used to having a lot of money. If you imagine a hypothetical analogous scenario where .1% of online banking users suddenly saw their funds increase by 100x, and they didn't move those funds anywhere but instead continued treating them the same way, you could imagine them becoming fresh targets for malware or key loggers or phishing or what have you.
- DrewAllyn 13y agoThe difference between bitcoin and online banking is that your bank will protect you if you are a victim of fraud.
- fragsworth 13y agoRight. But this comes with the cost of having to wait several days to be able to transfer money, or having your account locked for triggering fraud detection, or extremely low interest payments on the profits the bank makes from loaning your money out. Bitcoin has none of those costs, but you have to take on all the risk of getting defrauded. For some, especially people who understand security, bitcoin seems like the better deal.
- tolmasky 13y agoYeah but that's not some fundamental property of fiat, there can be bitcoin banks that offer protection in exchange for fees/longer waits as well, USD cash doesn't magically have these properties, its a function of the services built on top of it. This is the point where most people would come in and say "How hypocritical! I thought the WHOLE point of bitcoin was instant transfer etc etc and now you've just reduced it to the same as USD". No, that is not the whole point of bitcoin. That's the whole point of bitcoin for some people. The real power of bitcoin is choice. Today if I want to do an instant transfer it is flat out impossible at certain times. I've been in situations where I needed to desperately get money to an individual past 8PM for an emergency and the feeling was absolutely debilitating having him on the phone and literally having no options because he had no Western Union next to him. I am happy to have tradeoffs, and sometimes choose less security. To me what is important is the experiment. Just like I wouldn't want to try to make ONE company by trying to pontificate what the perfect P/E ratio should be, but instead am happy to have lots of companies and allowing experimentation and evolution with different monetization strategies, so to I feel that a world of many different freely available currencies would be far more useful in determining good monetary theory than writing tons of papers and then committing our ONE currency to it for decades.