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It is amazing how one word "COIN" added to this word has shaped everyone's thinking. Would we treat it the same if the guys behind it named it "Bitcard" or "Bit

It is amazing how one word "COIN" added to this word has shaped everyone's thinking. Would we treat it the same if the guys behind it named it "Bitcard" or "Bitpoint?" That one word is what set apparently most people to speak of it, and treat it as money. BC is nothing like Money. BC is a card trading game where the players make the cards, the difficulty to make cards increases , and the value of the cards is decided by the market. It's a fun geek game. Awesome. BC is everything money as we know it today is not. Money followed value creation (something made, something done). Bitcoin was created, valued at X, AND THEN looking for value to replace.

kordless 13y ago
Bitcoin has a funnel, just like any other business or technology platform. Branding is a form of marketing, and it's marketing's job to raise interest. This is the first tier of the funnel. Interest gives way to being able to understand how a given technology is important to us. This is the second tier. Next, those of us that fully understand how Bitcoin works begin to spread the word about how it's reliable and how it could possibly change the world. This is the third tier. As implied trust comes online for Bitcoin for the general population, it will move to wide-spread adoption. That's the fourth and final tier. We're still in the second tier, which means people are still asking "why should we care?" and vocalizing their fears about something they don't understand. With technology adoption rates increasing over the last year (due to the greater interconnects we have via the Internet) I'd suspect we'll see the start of the third tier in 3-6 months, tops. As fears give way to trust, we'll all settle into a routine with the technology by the end of the year.
- alttab 13y ago
  Optimistically. I'm awaiting more infrastructure before calling stage 3. We are still 2 years from that in my book. Still too much to learn.
brownbat 13y ago
> It is amazing how one word "COIN" added to this word has shaped everyone's thinking. Yeah, Bit-distributed-public-ledger doesn't have the same ring, but I feel like there are a million problems that can be solved with this technology that are barely being explored. Namecoin is one example, a distributed DNS system, but it feels like that's just scratching the surface of problems that require allocating sparse control over many decisionmakers.
- EGreg 13y ago
  Why is namecoin even useful?
  - my_username_is_ 13y ago
    Because you can circumvent the centralized authority of DNS registrars. Look at the Pirate Bay, who keeps having its domain names revoked by central authorities. Namecoin's ledger allows people to agree on who has what domain name without using a standard registrar
    - EGreg 13y ago
      But why do you need to sell a name like akqbajauwbzjxu7163jebej? Can't people simply claim names the same way they claim bitcoin wallets?
      - maxerickson 13y ago
        The goal of Namecoin is to manage meaningful names. I guess a service that provided free names like the one you made there might be an interesting addition.
        EGreg 13y ago
        In that case I don't get it... do I basically get a random name when I mine a namecoin? And then I try to buy names I actually want from someone who has the name I want? And if no one has the name yet then I have to wait until someone mines it?
        maxerickson 13y ago
        I don't know the details, but you do still mine coins into a wallet and all that stuff, there are just special types of transactions where you post a bit of data to the blockchain and that data is the domain name you want registered.
nickbauman 13y ago
Exactly this! Bitcoin is much more interesting as way of representing CREDIT, not MONEY. Credit is much older and much better way of representing of how humans make contracts with each other. Money is a sideline invention we did to make it possible to pay soldiers for fighting. (Soldiers are inherently bad credit risks because they kill and die for a living).
- cabalamat 13y ago
  > CREDIT, not MONEY What's the difference?
  - nickbauman 13y ago
    None, of course; except perception. People perceive money to be something of intrinsic value (Or that it _should_ be that. Krugman's complaint about arguing normative versus positive is at play here, for sure). People perceive credit as merely a record of a debt. The gold-standard freaks seem to not understand this non-difference. A large subset of folks who ideologically back Bitcoin also indulge in this fantasy.
  - lectrick 13y ago
    If I lend you 20 bucks (money), "credit" is the belief I have that I'm going to get it back from you.
zby 13y ago
"BC is nothing like Money" - care to explain this? What does it mean to be money? I like the definition that money is what we value not for its usefulness in itself - but because we speculate that we'll be able to exchange it for something useful. And bitcoin fits this definition perfectly.
ubernostrum 13y ago
Given how often Bitcoin is advertised, by its genuine proponents, specifically as a currency, this feels like an attempt to move the goalposts when someone points out that it doesn't do so hot at being a currency.
- aninhumer 13y ago
  It's almost as if there are different proponents with different reasons for supporting of Bitcoin...
ahquresh 13y ago
The fact that your comment is correct and wrong at the same time is what really raises red flags for me with regards to bitcoin. Let's look at what you find if you were somebody searching up bitcoin for the first time. You would eventually land on http://bitcoin.org/en/ http://bitcoin.org/en/. bitcoing.org describes bitcoin as open source P2P Money. It says "Bitcoin is an innovative payment network and a new kind of money". You go on Wikipedia and you get "Bitcoin is a peer-to-peer payment network and digital currency based on an open source[6] protocol, which makes use of a public transaction log". The creators and early adopters of Bitcoin clearly wanted it to be used as a currency and as money, but it is being done in an unconventional way, to say the least. Unfortunately, none of us seem to understand this so everyone thinks that if it is supposed to be money at its root, it should behave like money does. Bitcoin is such new and uncharted territory that most of us do not know what to expect. We are all wondering how these virtual coins are able to stand and hold value on the mere fact that people are exchanging them among one another for nothing other than speculating that they will benefit from the exchange in a future exchange (their really is no benefit you feel right away, such as their would be if you bought something with cash, as many places do not accept bitcoin). But at the same time, I feel that when money in the form of paper bills was first introduced, there had bound to be people wondering the same thing. After all, taking a step back, who would consider putting such value to pieces of paper that we do in today's day and age? At the end of the day, I see what Bitcoin is trying to be and would be real happy to see it get there, but I also see what people think it is, a glorified internet point, their ticket to wealth.
- mattm 13y ago
  > I feel that when money in the form of paper bills was first introduced, there had bound to be people wondering the same thing. After all, taking a step back, who would consider putting such value to pieces of paper that we do in today's day and age? The thing with paper money, at least recently, was that it originally started out as being tied to gold. Instead of having to carry around gold for exchange, you would exchange these pieces of papers which were the equivalent amount in gold. However, once the idea of paper money became so entrenched governments realised they could remove the actual backing without many people saying "Hey wait a minute. These pieces of paper are now worthless." If people had tried to introduce paper money originally without the gold backing, there's no way it would have caught on in the same way.

kordless 13y ago

Bitcoin has a funnel, just like any other business or technology platform. Branding is a form of marketing, and it's marketing's job to raise interest. This is the first tier of the funnel. Interest gives way to being able to understand how a given technology is important to us. This is the second tier. Next, those of us that fully understand how Bitcoin works begin to spread the word about how it's reliable and how it could possibly change the world. This is the third tier. As implied trust comes online for Bitcoin for the general population, it will move to wide-spread adoption. That's the fourth and final tier. We're still in the second tier, which means people are still asking "why should we care?" and vocalizing their fears about something they don't understand. With technology adoption rates increasing over the last year (due to the greater interconnects we have via the Internet) I'd suspect we'll see the start of the third tier in 3-6 months, tops. As fears give way to trust, we'll all settle into a routine with the technology by the end of the year.

alttab 13y ago
Optimistically. I'm awaiting more infrastructure before calling stage 3. We are still 2 years from that in my book. Still too much to learn.

brownbat 13y ago

> It is amazing how one word "COIN" added to this word has shaped everyone's thinking. Yeah, Bit-distributed-public-ledger doesn't have the same ring, but I feel like there are a million problems that can be solved with this technology that are barely being explored. Namecoin is one example, a distributed DNS system, but it feels like that's just scratching the surface of problems that require allocating sparse control over many decisionmakers.

EGreg 13y ago
Why is namecoin even useful?
- my_username_is_ 13y ago
  Because you can circumvent the centralized authority of DNS registrars. Look at the Pirate Bay, who keeps having its domain names revoked by central authorities. Namecoin's ledger allows people to agree on who has what domain name without using a standard registrar
  - EGreg 13y ago
    But why do you need to sell a name like akqbajauwbzjxu7163jebej? Can't people simply claim names the same way they claim bitcoin wallets?
    - maxerickson 13y ago
      The goal of Namecoin is to manage meaningful names. I guess a service that provided free names like the one you made there might be an interesting addition.
      - EGreg 13y ago
        In that case I don't get it... do I basically get a random name when I mine a namecoin? And then I try to buy names I actually want from someone who has the name I want? And if no one has the name yet then I have to wait until someone mines it?
        maxerickson 13y ago
        I don't know the details, but you do still mine coins into a wallet and all that stuff, there are just special types of transactions where you post a bit of data to the blockchain and that data is the domain name you want registered.

nickbauman 13y ago

Exactly this! Bitcoin is much more interesting as way of representing CREDIT, not MONEY. Credit is much older and much better way of representing of how humans make contracts with each other. Money is a sideline invention we did to make it possible to pay soldiers for fighting. (Soldiers are inherently bad credit risks because they kill and die for a living).

cabalamat 13y ago
> CREDIT, not MONEY What's the difference?
- nickbauman 13y ago
  None, of course; except perception. People perceive money to be something of intrinsic value (Or that it _should_ be that. Krugman's complaint about arguing normative versus positive is at play here, for sure). People perceive credit as merely a record of a debt. The gold-standard freaks seem to not understand this non-difference. A large subset of folks who ideologically back Bitcoin also indulge in this fantasy.
- lectrick 13y ago
  If I lend you 20 bucks (money), "credit" is the belief I have that I'm going to get it back from you.

zby 13y ago

"BC is nothing like Money" - care to explain this? What does it mean to be money? I like the definition that money is what we value not for its usefulness in itself - but because we speculate that we'll be able to exchange it for something useful. And bitcoin fits this definition perfectly.

ubernostrum 13y ago

Given how often Bitcoin is advertised, by its genuine proponents, specifically as a currency, this feels like an attempt to move the goalposts when someone points out that it doesn't do so hot at being a currency.

aninhumer 13y ago
It's almost as if there are different proponents with different reasons for supporting of Bitcoin...

ahquresh 13y ago

The fact that your comment is correct and wrong at the same time is what really raises red flags for me with regards to bitcoin. Let's look at what you find if you were somebody searching up bitcoin for the first time. You would eventually land on http://bitcoin.org/en/ http://bitcoin.org/en/. bitcoing.org describes bitcoin as open source P2P Money. It says "Bitcoin is an innovative payment network and a new kind of money". You go on Wikipedia and you get "Bitcoin is a peer-to-peer payment network and digital currency based on an open source[6] protocol, which makes use of a public transaction log". The creators and early adopters of Bitcoin clearly wanted it to be used as a currency and as money, but it is being done in an unconventional way, to say the least. Unfortunately, none of us seem to understand this so everyone thinks that if it is supposed to be money at its root, it should behave like money does. Bitcoin is such new and uncharted territory that most of us do not know what to expect. We are all wondering how these virtual coins are able to stand and hold value on the mere fact that people are exchanging them among one another for nothing other than speculating that they will benefit from the exchange in a future exchange (their really is no benefit you feel right away, such as their would be if you bought something with cash, as many places do not accept bitcoin). But at the same time, I feel that when money in the form of paper bills was first introduced, there had bound to be people wondering the same thing. After all, taking a step back, who would consider putting such value to pieces of paper that we do in today's day and age? At the end of the day, I see what Bitcoin is trying to be and would be real happy to see it get there, but I also see what people think it is, a glorified internet point, their ticket to wealth.

mattm 13y ago
> I feel that when money in the form of paper bills was first introduced, there had bound to be people wondering the same thing. After all, taking a step back, who would consider putting such value to pieces of paper that we do in today's day and age? The thing with paper money, at least recently, was that it originally started out as being tied to gold. Instead of having to carry around gold for exchange, you would exchange these pieces of papers which were the equivalent amount in gold. However, once the idea of paper money became so entrenched governments realised they could remove the actual backing without many people saying "Hey wait a minute. These pieces of paper are now worthless." If people had tried to introduce paper money originally without the gold backing, there's no way it would have caught on in the same way.