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You're wrong, it's not easy, the value is not in the code, it's in the network, and no one has shown they can replicate the power of the bitcoin network. All a

You're wrong, it's not easy, the value is not in the code, it's in the network, and no one has shown they can replicate the power of the bitcoin network. All alt coins combined are but a fraction of bitcoin. Also, early investors always get rewarded disproportionately, that's compensation for taking the risk, it's not something wrong, it's something right; they should be rewarded for giving you a peer to peer distributed payment system that's better than western union and better than credit cards for online use.

acdha 13y ago
> You're wrong, it's not easy, the value is not in the code, it's in the network What is that network, though? It's a few stores which accept many forms of payment and a bunch of people who use a little bitcoin but not for anything vital. Every party involved can switch to a new system in minutes and these days it's very fast to bootstrap networks using mobile devices and existing social networks. The reason the alt coins haven't seen rapid uptake is that most of the speculation is happening in Bitcoin while everyone waits to see whether the concept will get significant mainstream acceptance If Apple, Google, Facebook, Amazon, PayPal, etc. launched a payment system it'd have more users than Bitcoin on the day it launched. If someone like Square did it, they'd have more stores accepting payment by multiple orders of magnitude and far more credibility in the business community with a proven track record on things like support and fraud prevention. > Also, early investors always get rewarded disproportionately, that's compensation for taking the risk Again, you're talking about Bitcoin like it's a stock — which is exactly the problem, because people have different requirements for currencies than stocks. In particular, holding a stock waiting for the value to go up is fine for a company but disastrous for a currency.
- gnaritas 13y ago
  > It's a few stores which accept many forms of payment and a bunch of people who use a little bitcoin but not for anything vital. You clearly don't yet understand Bitcoin. No, the network is all the people mining Bitcoin with ASIC's that create the security necessary to prevent double spends. Pretty much everything else you said is wrong. > If Apple, Google, Facebook, Amazon, PayPal, etc. launched a payment system it'd have more users than Bitcoin on the day it launched. Irrelevant, users don't create the security necessary to prevent doubles spends; miners do. Quite simply, you need to study more, you don't understand distributed crypto-currency yet. You think it's easy to replace bitcoin with an alt coin, you have no idea what you're talking about.
  - acdha 13y ago
    > Pretty much everything else you said is wrong. and yet you're unable to explain why, although you can repeat the same insult repeatedly in the hopes that repetition will make it true. Telling…
    - gnaritas 13y ago
      I didn't insult you anywhere and I did tell you why you were wrong; you have a misunderstanding of where the value comes from and you need to learn what makes a coin secure.
      - acdha 13y ago
        You went off on a pedantic tangent: from the perspective of anyone interested in using a payment system, the network they care about is the network of people who they can exchange things with. What you're talking about is like arguing that people use US currency because of the special paper used to print dollars – it's an important implementation detail but not something a normal user thinks much about. Whether it's something like Bitcoin's distributed ledger, trusted third parties or a central record keeping system just isn't a detail the average user cares about as long as they can buy a cup of coffee when they want to. If something shiny comes along, the only questions will be “how much will it cost?” and “who accepts it?” This brings up two areas where Bitcoin's system is a threat to its growth: the huge blockchain increasingly stymies mobile or poorly connected participants and the requirement that miners acknowledge transactions adds latency to the transaction time which will be a challenge for speed-oriented businesses.
        gnaritas 13y ago
        > from the perspective of anyone interested in using a payment system, the network they care about is the network of people who they can exchange things with No it isn't; the network they must care about is the network that actually works and allows them to securely exchange things. > What you're talking about is like arguing that people use US currency because of the special paper used to print dollars If you think that's like what I'm saying then you aren't listening to what I'm saying. > Whether it's something like Bitcoin's distributed ledger, trusted third parties or a central record keeping system just isn't a detail the average user cares about as long as they can buy a cup of coffee when they want to. Which they can't do unless the network is secure and double spends aren't possible. And we're not talking about a cup of coffee, we're talking about an Internet payment protocol for transferring wealth trustlessly online. > This brings up two areas where Bitcoin's system is a threat to its growth: the huge blockchain increasingly stymies mobile or poorly connected participants Red herring, you don't need to download the blockchain to use the currency. > and the requirement that miners acknowledge transactions adds latency to the transaction time which will be a challenge for speed-oriented businesses Bitcoin isn't built for speed-oriented businesses, it's built for Internet commerce. That it doesn't suit a domain it's not intended for really doesn't matter.
maxerickson 13y ago
Visa has a better user story than bitcoin and they barely even bother to secure their network. Credit cards are easy to use and not all that bothersome when someone misuses them (this sounds dismissive; I do realize that it sucks to be the person on the receiving end of cc fraud, but in terms of fraud dollar / dollar spent they do pretty well). Anyway, can a well secured bitcoin network keep up with a Visa that is paying attention and actually trying to compete on price?
- gnaritas 13y ago
  Credit cards are not easy to use for users or for merchants; especially for merchants who have to conform to PCI requirements. They are extremely bothersome when fraud becomes an issue, require trust in the merchant and loss of personal information, charge-backs are very hard on merchants and they would much prefer not playing this game at all. Merchants accept cards because they have to, not because they want to, they despise the fees associated with them and the inherent fraud and risk of doing business with them. So no, Visa doesn't have a better story than Bitcoin. Credit cards are quite simply the wrong solution to online money, they pull instead of push and are rampant with fraud and risk. Bitcoin fixes all of that.
  - maxerickson 13y ago
    I hope it isn't controversial that Bitcoin still has the occasional issue with risk and fraud. Anyway, let's resolve this in 5 or 10 years when hindsight lets one of us point and laugh, instead of arguing opinions in circles.
    - gnaritas 13y ago
      Bitcoin has different kinds of risk, i.e. the risk of having your coin stolen. That's a much better and easier to manage risk than the risk of having someone keep making charges to your card because of an inherently flawed pull based system. Or the risk of having to give every vendor you deal with your personal information and card number. The risk of trusting that those vendors have good security practices.

acdha 13y ago

> You're wrong, it's not easy, the value is not in the code, it's in the network What is that network, though? It's a few stores which accept many forms of payment and a bunch of people who use a little bitcoin but not for anything vital. Every party involved can switch to a new system in minutes and these days it's very fast to bootstrap networks using mobile devices and existing social networks. The reason the alt coins haven't seen rapid uptake is that most of the speculation is happening in Bitcoin while everyone waits to see whether the concept will get significant mainstream acceptance If Apple, Google, Facebook, Amazon, PayPal, etc. launched a payment system it'd have more users than Bitcoin on the day it launched. If someone like Square did it, they'd have more stores accepting payment by multiple orders of magnitude and far more credibility in the business community with a proven track record on things like support and fraud prevention. > Also, early investors always get rewarded disproportionately, that's compensation for taking the risk Again, you're talking about Bitcoin like it's a stock — which is exactly the problem, because people have different requirements for currencies than stocks. In particular, holding a stock waiting for the value to go up is fine for a company but disastrous for a currency.

gnaritas 13y ago
> It's a few stores which accept many forms of payment and a bunch of people who use a little bitcoin but not for anything vital. You clearly don't yet understand Bitcoin. No, the network is all the people mining Bitcoin with ASIC's that create the security necessary to prevent double spends. Pretty much everything else you said is wrong. > If Apple, Google, Facebook, Amazon, PayPal, etc. launched a payment system it'd have more users than Bitcoin on the day it launched. Irrelevant, users don't create the security necessary to prevent doubles spends; miners do. Quite simply, you need to study more, you don't understand distributed crypto-currency yet. You think it's easy to replace bitcoin with an alt coin, you have no idea what you're talking about.
- acdha 13y ago
  > Pretty much everything else you said is wrong. and yet you're unable to explain why, although you can repeat the same insult repeatedly in the hopes that repetition will make it true. Telling…
  - gnaritas 13y ago
    I didn't insult you anywhere and I did tell you why you were wrong; you have a misunderstanding of where the value comes from and you need to learn what makes a coin secure.
    - acdha 13y ago
      You went off on a pedantic tangent: from the perspective of anyone interested in using a payment system, the network they care about is the network of people who they can exchange things with. What you're talking about is like arguing that people use US currency because of the special paper used to print dollars – it's an important implementation detail but not something a normal user thinks much about. Whether it's something like Bitcoin's distributed ledger, trusted third parties or a central record keeping system just isn't a detail the average user cares about as long as they can buy a cup of coffee when they want to. If something shiny comes along, the only questions will be “how much will it cost?” and “who accepts it?” This brings up two areas where Bitcoin's system is a threat to its growth: the huge blockchain increasingly stymies mobile or poorly connected participants and the requirement that miners acknowledge transactions adds latency to the transaction time which will be a challenge for speed-oriented businesses.
      - gnaritas 13y ago
        > from the perspective of anyone interested in using a payment system, the network they care about is the network of people who they can exchange things with No it isn't; the network they must care about is the network that actually works and allows them to securely exchange things. > What you're talking about is like arguing that people use US currency because of the special paper used to print dollars If you think that's like what I'm saying then you aren't listening to what I'm saying. > Whether it's something like Bitcoin's distributed ledger, trusted third parties or a central record keeping system just isn't a detail the average user cares about as long as they can buy a cup of coffee when they want to. Which they can't do unless the network is secure and double spends aren't possible. And we're not talking about a cup of coffee, we're talking about an Internet payment protocol for transferring wealth trustlessly online. > This brings up two areas where Bitcoin's system is a threat to its growth: the huge blockchain increasingly stymies mobile or poorly connected participants Red herring, you don't need to download the blockchain to use the currency. > and the requirement that miners acknowledge transactions adds latency to the transaction time which will be a challenge for speed-oriented businesses Bitcoin isn't built for speed-oriented businesses, it's built for Internet commerce. That it doesn't suit a domain it's not intended for really doesn't matter.

maxerickson 13y ago

Visa has a better user story than bitcoin and they barely even bother to secure their network. Credit cards are easy to use and not all that bothersome when someone misuses them (this sounds dismissive; I do realize that it sucks to be the person on the receiving end of cc fraud, but in terms of fraud dollar / dollar spent they do pretty well). Anyway, can a well secured bitcoin network keep up with a Visa that is paying attention and actually trying to compete on price?

gnaritas 13y ago
Credit cards are not easy to use for users or for merchants; especially for merchants who have to conform to PCI requirements. They are extremely bothersome when fraud becomes an issue, require trust in the merchant and loss of personal information, charge-backs are very hard on merchants and they would much prefer not playing this game at all. Merchants accept cards because they have to, not because they want to, they despise the fees associated with them and the inherent fraud and risk of doing business with them. So no, Visa doesn't have a better story than Bitcoin. Credit cards are quite simply the wrong solution to online money, they pull instead of push and are rampant with fraud and risk. Bitcoin fixes all of that.
- maxerickson 13y ago
  I hope it isn't controversial that Bitcoin still has the occasional issue with risk and fraud. Anyway, let's resolve this in 5 or 10 years when hindsight lets one of us point and laugh, instead of arguing opinions in circles.
  - gnaritas 13y ago
    Bitcoin has different kinds of risk, i.e. the risk of having your coin stolen. That's a much better and easier to manage risk than the risk of having someone keep making charges to your card because of an inherently flawed pull based system. Or the risk of having to give every vendor you deal with your personal information and card number. The risk of trusting that those vendors have good security practices.