13 ms·

Yeah, as much as I like the concept of bitcoin (and the blockchain), I don't see adoption becoming anything more than anecdotal. No interest rate, and you have

by tribaal 12y ago

Yeah, as much as I like the concept of bitcoin (and the blockchain), I don't see adoption becoming anything more than anecdotal. No interest rate, and you have to secure it yourself? No thanks. My "big bad bank" guarantees me at least a small interest in saving money, and if my card is stolen, I get a new one in 24 hours and all transactions are cancelled. I'm happy to pay some transaction fees ("extortion!") to get that kind of insurance. Bitcoin is the electronic version of "let's buy a lot of gold and stash it somewhere". EDIT: Burn karma, burn. Ah well.

hueving 12y ago
>Bitcoin is the electronic version of "let's buy a lot of gold and stash it somewhere". It's even worse than that because normal people at least have a decent idea of when their gold is secure. A non-techie just has to trust that the online bitcoin provider or author of the wallet is doing what he/she really says and in a secure fashion.
- tribaal 12y ago
  You're completely right.
- tlrobinson 12y ago
  Dedicated hardware wallets help to some extent, and they already exist and work (e.x. Trezor). It's hard for people to understand backups, security updates, "don't open that funny-cat-photos.exe file from your aunt", but easy to understand "if this device is lost or stolen, my money is gone" You have to trust the hardware (open source hardware/firmware will be an improvement), and verify addresses out of band (see https://medium.com/@octskyward/why-you-think-the-pki-sucks-b64cf5912aa7 https://medium.com/@octskyward/why-you-think-the-pki-sucks-b... for solutions), but otherwise you can safely use it on even a malware infested computer. As a bonus, it can be protected by a pin (with firmware-enforced rate limits). And backups of the seed can be made in case the hardware wallet is stolen/lost/destroyed. They can even be split up using Shamir's Secret Sharing. (Eventually mobile devices will be able to accomplish the same thing. You could imagine a more advanced version of Apple's "Secure Enclave" that presents the user with a UI (rendered by the Secure Enclave coprocessor) to authorize transactions)
- facepalm 12y ago
  Actually I find the problem of stashing gold very tricky. A bank vault seems like a bad idea because of the history when the government seized the gold and people weren't allowed to open their bank safes without a policeman. Hiding it at home seems risky because of burglaries. I haven't found a solution yet, that's why I don't own any gold. With bitcoin, at least I can spread the risk, like putting a part of the "secret" into a bank vault, hide part at home, at a friends house, whatever. The risk of a simultaneous burglary in two unrelated houses seems low.
  - hueving 12y ago
    Unless you had a virus on your computer when you generated the keys, in which case it doesn't matter.
    - tlrobinson 12y ago
      See my comment about hardware wallets: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8885114 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8885114 For the truly paranoid you could even generate your seed using coin flips or dice rolls... http://www.swansontec.com/bitcoin-dice.html http://www.swansontec.com/bitcoin-dice.html
    - facepalm 12y ago
      No that is relatively easy to circumvent by creating the keys offline. The cold storage key never needs to get in contact with the internet.
  - tribaal 12y ago
    That's exactly why I think it won't see more than marginal adoption. The benefits of bitcoin are outweight by having to secure your private key(s) yourself.
  - simonh 12y ago
    You can do exactly the same thing with gold, i.e. holding it in different banks in different regulatory districts. If your friend's house is burgled or burned down. The one advantage of Bitcoin in this respect is that you can back it up in case of disk failure, house burning down, etc.
olalonde 12y ago
Although Bitcoin is often marketed as such, it doesn't necessarily compete with banks. I personally see it as a currency which competes with other currencies. It's a bit like paper cash except that it can be stored digitally. I don't see what would prevent "big bad banks" (although unlikely) from adopting BTC as one of the many currencies they support and offer all the protections and services they offer with other currencies. This is actually the direction that Coinbase seems to be taking.
- shittyanalogy 12y ago
  It's not federally insured.
- tribaal 12y ago
  Banks can already transfer fund between themselves electronically and efficiently. And a bank account is exactly storing paper currency digitally. Again, I don't see what the innovation here is, except the technical aspects (the blockchain as a distributed system is very clever).
  - jsprogrammer 12y ago
    What do you mean 'a bank account is exactly storing paper currency digitally'?
    - sanswork 12y ago
      A bank account is numbers in a computer saying that you have $x. You have access to digital money which you can convert to paper money at a bank branch/ATM or one of their partners but until you do so you hold digital currency.
      - icebraining 12y ago
        No, you hold an IOU from the bank, which is not really the same.
  - olalonde 12y ago
frozenport 12y ago
>Bitcoin is the electronic version of "let's buy a lot of gold and stash it somewhere". It's even worse than that because gold is palpable can be used to make things.
- jasonisalive 12y ago
  Gold's value in industrial uses is a fraction of its market value, just like the value of a dollar bill for industrial uses (wallpapering, rendering to make paper, burning for heat etc etc) is a fraction of its market value too. Ultimately all currencies are overvalued because they represent the stored savings energy of all deferred purchases. One commodity must fulfil this function (allowing people to defer the completion of trades) and that commodity must be valued above its "inherent" value.
teekert 12y ago
I think it is expected that relatively new currencies have a turbulent period of a certain time. And as for interest, here in the Netherlands it is less than inflation so you loose money (interest on savings accounts is about 1%, inflation is between 1 and 2% over the past years). Bitcoin has or will have its niche, perhaps it will not be for your savings but sharing money with friends using a bitcoin wallet app is by far the most frictionless paying experience I ever had. I think you opinion is on the spot though... for now.
- rimantas 12y ago
  What are the factors which could make bitcoin less turbulent later? As for most frictionless exprience: you do not need new currency for that. My bank offers 'quick send' functionality in their app, basically you just enter amount and select whom to send money to, that's it. You don't even have to login.
  - teekert 12y ago
    Ok, I don't have this option, transferring between my own accounts is easy (requires a pin code) but transferring to someone else's account requires a separate device + your pinpas + your pincode + scanning the screen with this device + typing a generated code into the computer/smartphone. It would be more stable with more wide spread adoption, I'd guess if shops were to use it they'd en masse refuse to fluctuate/change prices every day, dampening the trade induced fluctuations.
  - jasonisalive 12y ago
    When/if Bitcoin becomes the world currency, it's price will stabilise to match the global desire to defer the completion of trades (i.e. the aggregate desire to purchase goods in the future). So you might expect to see it go up and down depending on very largescale worldwide trends about purchase timing.
- brazzy 12y ago
  Has there ever been a time and place where interest on savings accounts was above inflation? I rather doubt it.
adnam 12y ago
"I don't see adoption becoming anything more than anecdotal." Well the value of the whole blockchain is over $2.5Bn, so it's more than anecdotal. http://coinmarketcap.com/ http://coinmarketcap.com/
- Thomashuet 12y ago
  Can you find another mainstream currency whose value is not several orders bigger? $2.5Bn is anecdotal at the world scale.
- JoachimS 12y ago
  And Dogecoin has a value of 12 MUSD. A currency invented for the such wow. The value of BTC speaks more about people prepared to jump into anything that seems to be the next fast way of making money than the long term viability of it.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
  - dirtyaura 12y ago
    Huh? Usually it works the other way around. If you increase demand by buying a significant portion of Bitcoins, you INCREASE the price. And if you then don't sell that significant portion, you decrease the supply, which again INCREASES the price. For example, in the stock market, if there are rumours of hostile take over, the price of the particular stock rises. Think about e.g. Yahoo/Microsoft acquisition rumours.
- tribaal 12y ago
  2.5B is the price Microsoft paid for Minecraft. There is approximately 1.3 Trillion Dollars in paper/coin form, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York: http://www.newyorkfed.org/aboutthefed/fedpoint/fed01.html http://www.newyorkfed.org/aboutthefed/fedpoint/fed01.html, and that's just USD. So yeah, anecdotal.
  - gojock 12y ago
nickik 12y ago
Its very easy to imagen a case where you lend your bitcoins to some institution, the problem is that there is not yet any investment in the bitcoin system.
- EricBlair 12y ago
  Oh look, that already exists... https://btcjam.com https://btcjam.com https://www.bitbond.com https://www.bitbond.com https://bitlendingclub.com https://bitlendingclub.com and probably a dozen more. As for no investment in the bitcoin system... just something in the news about that everyday. And I thought the previous guy with his savings account paying 2% above inflation was funny.
  - nickik 12y ago
    I have not looked on the site, my point was really that it not a bitcoin problem but economic one.
honeybooboo123 12y ago
I don't own any bitcoins, but felt like pointing a couple of things out. Whatever shreds of interest your bank gives you will be way, way less than the inflation you're experiencing. In other words, your money's purchasing power keeps decreasing even if you're getting some interest on it, ie. you're losing your wealth. Bitcoin doesn't experience inflation like that, so it should be a better store of value than your fiat currency. I said "should" because bitcoin has been in a speculative bubble, and just came down even more. Right now it's still just a speculative asset, but it could serve as a stable currency. Your card is irrelevant. Transaction fees are not extortion. They're a massive skimming operation inflicted on the masses, because the masses have no choice but to eat them. Thank your state-maintained bank cartel for that.
- tribaal 12y ago
  > Your card is irrelevant. My card is very relevant. If someone steals it, they can use it but it doesn't impact me in any way except having to wait for the new card to come. If someone steals my bitcoins, it means they have a copy of my private key, and there is nothing I can do about it. Zich. Nada. Transaction fees pay for this insurance (among other things, but still).
  - leni536 12y ago
    You can have multiple wallets though. You can have a really secured wallet, maybe signed with a smart card (is it possible? If yes then it's pretty much impossible to steal, unless someone steals it physically.) and have a less secure wallet on your smartphone. Your smartphone plays the role of a "regular wallet" and you only have minimal amounts on it (like what you need for daily purchases).
    - tribaal 12y ago
      That's where my original comment of "I don't see adoption becoming anything more than anecdotal" comes from :) I don't think the benefits of bitcoin outweight having to maintain (multiple) private key's security.
    - 12y ago
sgt101 12y ago
One bitcoin application that is reasonable is as a transferable karma token.
- olalonde 12y ago
  > a transferable karma token That's arguably the definition of money.
bigbugbag 12y ago
You may be mistaken here, the day your bank disappear all your deposits and interests disappear with it. You probably this cannot happen which is what people believe until it happened to them, and this happened all around the world. In Europe a 2013 law is now in effect which basically states no more bank bail-outs, from now on it will be bail-ins. In other words if a bank fails it will use its customer's deposits to cover its debt.
- hueving 12y ago
  Not in the US. If a bank fails, the FDIC will insure each account for 200 or 400k (can't remember which).
  - bigbugbag 12y ago
    I'm not sure how this contradicts what I said, isn't FDIC an insurance company set up to act when your bank disappear with your money you had there ? What if your bank is not a member of FDIC ? It's sort of what the European Union has with those bail ins, deposits are guaranteed up to 100k but this comes from inside the bank, first from shareholders and creditors then larger accounts. Makes sense that the public should not have to pay for the failure of a private banking entity.
    - Jtsummers 12y ago
      > What if your bank is not a member of FDIC ? Then don't do business with that bank. The vast majority of banks and credit unions in the US offer insured accounts. If yours doesn't you should move your money elsewhere. The FDIC insurance is $250k per insured-account-type per institution. That is, if I have a checking and a retirement account with one bank I'm insured for a total of up to $500k. Anything exceeding that needs to be in another account type or another bank to be insured. Most investment accounts aren't insured, but some brokerage accounts are (you'll get that info when you talk to your bank) but the investments themselves (naturally) are not, just the value of any non-invested cash. The cost (in the US) is put upon the banks to pay for this insurance. It's just a federally created insurance agency. Barring a major collapse across many (most?) banks, it should have enough stored up over the years to cover the cost without requiring financing from the federal government. In theory, you can have private insurance (I believe these do exist) for your bank, but I'm not sure how common this is in the US. Like most insurance schemes, the more participants the more affordable it is. It'd be a tough market for someone else to break into.
TheDong 12y ago
It's worse than that. To me, the biggest flaw of bitcoin is that you have to constantly spend energy on it (as in computation power / burn coal) for it to remain viable. As soon as enough people get tired of throwing away money at their miners someone can pull a 51% attack, so everyone must put more energy into their miners to protect their investment... forever. Over time the amount of energy wasted by bitcoin could become stupendously dumb. We could be using our spare processor cycles to fold proteins or aid in numerous other research, and yet we're using it to allow people to send bits of data to each other without a need for centralized trust. Compare that to the centralized bank where you have a single centralized trusted source which allows transferring money from one person to another to take no more energy than a modest server and some backups -- far less than the power consumption of a single GPU miner. The above problem also won't get better. Even after you're no longer mining for new coins, you must keep up the mining volume to protect existing coins and allow transactions to occur at all. I personally find the above to be a fundamental problem with the "proof of work" solution. Sure, on paper you've solved the General's problem, but the reality is that you're throwing massive amounts of energy out the window. Because of that, I think this proof's place should have been to remain on paper.
- brazzy 12y ago
  Do you have any idea how much energy, work and time is being spent on the infrastructure of regular currencies? Minting, ATMs, secure transport, brank branches, all kind of mainframe dinosaurs running 40 year old COBOL code? Even if scaled up to global usage, I very much doubt Bitcoin mining would be worse.
  - throwawayaway 12y ago
    https://blockchain.info/charts/hash-rate https://blockchain.info/charts/hash-rate the hash rate doesn't grow on trees. why the hell would you doubt it would be worse? it does 7 transactions per second. http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2013/12/03/fascinating-number-bitcoin-mining-uses-15-millions-worth-of-electricity-every-day/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2013/12/03/fascinati... here's on estimate: Bitcoin Mining Uses $15 Million's Worth Of Electricity Every Day
EricBlair 12y ago
I don't think you see many things. Like just how widely Bitcoin has already become. Just yesterday I read about 10,000 Spanish atms being converted to bitcoin. "No interest rate" Why would there be? There's no risk. There isn't a government of Bitcoinlandia with a debt and deficit(s) it needs to finance. Whatever currency you're holding now isn't paying you a real rate of interest. Your stupidity is clearly of the American variety so those US dollars you buy your gmo foodstuffs with has lost 96-98% of it's value the past 41/42 years. Why do you think a Coke no longer cost nickel? When you deposit money in a bank, you're loaning them your money. It's no longer yours and when they run into trouble with their trillions in deriatives, guess whose on the hook for it? Why you, unsecured creditor. http://www.economicpolicyjournal.com/2014/11/warning-bank-deposits-will-soon-no.html?m=1 http://www.economicpolicyjournal.com/2014/11/warning-bank-de... "and you have to secure it yourself?" Yeah and that ass you were born with, eventually you'll have to wipe it yourself because mom won't be around forever. Clearly it isn't for you. "Bitcoin is the electronic version of "let's buy a lot of gold and stash it somewhere"." Do you have any idea how well one would have done the past decade had they 'stashed' some gold? It's hard to believe people like you actually exist. I'm looking for some sarcasm but all am seeing is a statist shill. Your taking some sort of perverse thrill in other people losing money speaks to your low character.
- crucialfelix 12y ago
  Could you present your counterarguments without resorting to childish insults ? It really detracts from your argument.
- throwawaymaroon 12y ago
  ...witness the bitterness of a fanatic struggling when his deity is humiliated, lashing out with helpless rage.
- akinder 12y ago
  Go back to /r/bitcoin, libetard. Articles like this make me giggle, love seeing you dipshits get your ass handed to you time and time again because of your BS "currency"
- passfree 12y ago
throwawaybit 12y ago
There's one use of bitcoins, it's a great currency to avoid paying taxes which compensates for the loss of small interests (not saying I'm doing this, but I'm quite sure that some of the users use it for exactly this reason)
- tribaal 12y ago
  Well, that is a compelling argument I guess... Bonus points for being honest about it (a rarity) :)
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
moe 12y ago
Bitcoin is the electronic version of "let's buy a lot of gold and stash it somewhere". It's also the electronic version of: Be able to move that gold around the globe near instantly, without a middleman, at almost zero cost. And some other quite neat things. While these features may seem "anecdotical" for many people in the western world, there's also a large number of people in poorer countries for whom e.g. the fees on long distance transactions or not being able to get a bank account are a very real problems.
- mikkom 12y ago
  > Be able to move that gold around the globe near instantly The biggest advantage of gold is that it's value is relatively stable and has been used as a valuable metal since ancient times. That's quite the opposite of Bitcoin actually.
  - chuckkir 12y ago
    Did you ever consider why gold has value? It's just shiny metal. Other than jewelry and some electronics uses, no one needs it. At one point it was useful to make coins (for fiat currencies) because it was rare, but now it's just valuable because "it always has been."
- pliny 12y ago
  Near instant is a bit (a lot?) misleading, it takes on average about 10 minutes to have a transaction confirmed, sometimes much more.
  - tribaal 12y ago
    Well, 10 minutes is still much better than the several days needed to clear an international transfer :)
    - sanswork 12y ago
      If it takes your bank several days to clear an international transfer you need to switch banks not systems.
mrfusion 12y ago
I think if bitcoin dies out, we'll be like that civilization that discovered the wheel but only used it in childrens toys.
oco101 12y ago
There are already amazing solutions there in the cryptocurency that gives you interested on your money and has a stable value and much more. The vision behind Bitcoin changed the word this vision give us all hope, but the fact is Bitcoin today has many problems. Instead of trying to fix those things and keep the vision that Bitcoin implemented,alive We try to defend Bitcoin no matter how obvious are its flaws... You can't even mention other blockchain solution you gonna get killed by bitcoin fanboys. We are stuck still defending AltaVista against Google is really sad ... Until this will stop, Bitcoin will continue to fail and drag with it the whole blokchain industry, but it only a matter of time because what's important it the vision that Satoshi gave us NOT who's gonna deliver on it...

by tribaal 12y ago

hueving 12y ago

>Bitcoin is the electronic version of "let's buy a lot of gold and stash it somewhere". It's even worse than that because normal people at least have a decent idea of when their gold is secure. A non-techie just has to trust that the online bitcoin provider or author of the wallet is doing what he/she really says and in a secure fashion.

tribaal 12y ago
You're completely right.
tlrobinson 12y ago
Dedicated hardware wallets help to some extent, and they already exist and work (e.x. Trezor). It's hard for people to understand backups, security updates, "don't open that funny-cat-photos.exe file from your aunt", but easy to understand "if this device is lost or stolen, my money is gone" You have to trust the hardware (open source hardware/firmware will be an improvement), and verify addresses out of band (see https://medium.com/@octskyward/why-you-think-the-pki-sucks-b64cf5912aa7 https://medium.com/@octskyward/why-you-think-the-pki-sucks-b... for solutions), but otherwise you can safely use it on even a malware infested computer. As a bonus, it can be protected by a pin (with firmware-enforced rate limits). And backups of the seed can be made in case the hardware wallet is stolen/lost/destroyed. They can even be split up using Shamir's Secret Sharing. (Eventually mobile devices will be able to accomplish the same thing. You could imagine a more advanced version of Apple's "Secure Enclave" that presents the user with a UI (rendered by the Secure Enclave coprocessor) to authorize transactions)
facepalm 12y ago
Actually I find the problem of stashing gold very tricky. A bank vault seems like a bad idea because of the history when the government seized the gold and people weren't allowed to open their bank safes without a policeman. Hiding it at home seems risky because of burglaries. I haven't found a solution yet, that's why I don't own any gold. With bitcoin, at least I can spread the risk, like putting a part of the "secret" into a bank vault, hide part at home, at a friends house, whatever. The risk of a simultaneous burglary in two unrelated houses seems low.
- hueving 12y ago
  Unless you had a virus on your computer when you generated the keys, in which case it doesn't matter.
  - tlrobinson 12y ago
    See my comment about hardware wallets: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8885114 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8885114 For the truly paranoid you could even generate your seed using coin flips or dice rolls... http://www.swansontec.com/bitcoin-dice.html http://www.swansontec.com/bitcoin-dice.html
  - facepalm 12y ago
    No that is relatively easy to circumvent by creating the keys offline. The cold storage key never needs to get in contact with the internet.
- tribaal 12y ago
  That's exactly why I think it won't see more than marginal adoption. The benefits of bitcoin are outweight by having to secure your private key(s) yourself.
- simonh 12y ago
  You can do exactly the same thing with gold, i.e. holding it in different banks in different regulatory districts. If your friend's house is burgled or burned down. The one advantage of Bitcoin in this respect is that you can back it up in case of disk failure, house burning down, etc.

olalonde 12y ago

Although Bitcoin is often marketed as such, it doesn't necessarily compete with banks. I personally see it as a currency which competes with other currencies. It's a bit like paper cash except that it can be stored digitally. I don't see what would prevent "big bad banks" (although unlikely) from adopting BTC as one of the many currencies they support and offer all the protections and services they offer with other currencies. This is actually the direction that Coinbase seems to be taking.

shittyanalogy 12y ago
It's not federally insured.
tribaal 12y ago
Banks can already transfer fund between themselves electronically and efficiently. And a bank account is exactly storing paper currency digitally. Again, I don't see what the innovation here is, except the technical aspects (the blockchain as a distributed system is very clever).
- jsprogrammer 12y ago
  What do you mean 'a bank account is exactly storing paper currency digitally'?
  - sanswork 12y ago
    A bank account is numbers in a computer saying that you have $x. You have access to digital money which you can convert to paper money at a bank branch/ATM or one of their partners but until you do so you hold digital currency.
    - icebraining 12y ago
      No, you hold an IOU from the bank, which is not really the same.
- olalonde 12y ago

frozenport 12y ago

>Bitcoin is the electronic version of "let's buy a lot of gold and stash it somewhere". It's even worse than that because gold is palpable can be used to make things.

jasonisalive 12y ago
Gold's value in industrial uses is a fraction of its market value, just like the value of a dollar bill for industrial uses (wallpapering, rendering to make paper, burning for heat etc etc) is a fraction of its market value too. Ultimately all currencies are overvalued because they represent the stored savings energy of all deferred purchases. One commodity must fulfil this function (allowing people to defer the completion of trades) and that commodity must be valued above its "inherent" value.

teekert 12y ago

I think it is expected that relatively new currencies have a turbulent period of a certain time. And as for interest, here in the Netherlands it is less than inflation so you loose money (interest on savings accounts is about 1%, inflation is between 1 and 2% over the past years). Bitcoin has or will have its niche, perhaps it will not be for your savings but sharing money with friends using a bitcoin wallet app is by far the most frictionless paying experience I ever had. I think you opinion is on the spot though... for now.

rimantas 12y ago
What are the factors which could make bitcoin less turbulent later? As for most frictionless exprience: you do not need new currency for that. My bank offers 'quick send' functionality in their app, basically you just enter amount and select whom to send money to, that's it. You don't even have to login.
- teekert 12y ago
  Ok, I don't have this option, transferring between my own accounts is easy (requires a pin code) but transferring to someone else's account requires a separate device + your pinpas + your pincode + scanning the screen with this device + typing a generated code into the computer/smartphone. It would be more stable with more wide spread adoption, I'd guess if shops were to use it they'd en masse refuse to fluctuate/change prices every day, dampening the trade induced fluctuations.
- jasonisalive 12y ago
  When/if Bitcoin becomes the world currency, it's price will stabilise to match the global desire to defer the completion of trades (i.e. the aggregate desire to purchase goods in the future). So you might expect to see it go up and down depending on very largescale worldwide trends about purchase timing.
brazzy 12y ago
Has there ever been a time and place where interest on savings accounts was above inflation? I rather doubt it.

adnam 12y ago

"I don't see adoption becoming anything more than anecdotal." Well the value of the whole blockchain is over $2.5Bn, so it's more than anecdotal. http://coinmarketcap.com/ http://coinmarketcap.com/

Thomashuet 12y ago
Can you find another mainstream currency whose value is not several orders bigger? $2.5Bn is anecdotal at the world scale.
JoachimS 12y ago
And Dogecoin has a value of 12 MUSD. A currency invented for the such wow. The value of BTC speaks more about people prepared to jump into anything that seems to be the next fast way of making money than the long term viability of it.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
- dirtyaura 12y ago
  Huh? Usually it works the other way around. If you increase demand by buying a significant portion of Bitcoins, you INCREASE the price. And if you then don't sell that significant portion, you decrease the supply, which again INCREASES the price. For example, in the stock market, if there are rumours of hostile take over, the price of the particular stock rises. Think about e.g. Yahoo/Microsoft acquisition rumours.
tribaal 12y ago
2.5B is the price Microsoft paid for Minecraft. There is approximately 1.3 Trillion Dollars in paper/coin form, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York: http://www.newyorkfed.org/aboutthefed/fedpoint/fed01.html http://www.newyorkfed.org/aboutthefed/fedpoint/fed01.html, and that's just USD. So yeah, anecdotal.
- gojock 12y ago

nickik 12y ago

Its very easy to imagen a case where you lend your bitcoins to some institution, the problem is that there is not yet any investment in the bitcoin system.

EricBlair 12y ago
Oh look, that already exists... https://btcjam.com https://btcjam.com https://www.bitbond.com https://www.bitbond.com https://bitlendingclub.com https://bitlendingclub.com and probably a dozen more. As for no investment in the bitcoin system... just something in the news about that everyday. And I thought the previous guy with his savings account paying 2% above inflation was funny.
- nickik 12y ago
  I have not looked on the site, my point was really that it not a bitcoin problem but economic one.

honeybooboo123 12y ago

I don't own any bitcoins, but felt like pointing a couple of things out. Whatever shreds of interest your bank gives you will be way, way less than the inflation you're experiencing. In other words, your money's purchasing power keeps decreasing even if you're getting some interest on it, ie. you're losing your wealth. Bitcoin doesn't experience inflation like that, so it should be a better store of value than your fiat currency. I said "should" because bitcoin has been in a speculative bubble, and just came down even more. Right now it's still just a speculative asset, but it could serve as a stable currency. Your card is irrelevant. Transaction fees are not extortion. They're a massive skimming operation inflicted on the masses, because the masses have no choice but to eat them. Thank your state-maintained bank cartel for that.

tribaal 12y ago
> Your card is irrelevant. My card is very relevant. If someone steals it, they can use it but it doesn't impact me in any way except having to wait for the new card to come. If someone steals my bitcoins, it means they have a copy of my private key, and there is nothing I can do about it. Zich. Nada. Transaction fees pay for this insurance (among other things, but still).
- leni536 12y ago
  You can have multiple wallets though. You can have a really secured wallet, maybe signed with a smart card (is it possible? If yes then it's pretty much impossible to steal, unless someone steals it physically.) and have a less secure wallet on your smartphone. Your smartphone plays the role of a "regular wallet" and you only have minimal amounts on it (like what you need for daily purchases).
  - tribaal 12y ago
    That's where my original comment of "I don't see adoption becoming anything more than anecdotal" comes from :) I don't think the benefits of bitcoin outweight having to maintain (multiple) private key's security.
  - 12y ago

sgt101 12y ago

One bitcoin application that is reasonable is as a transferable karma token.

olalonde 12y ago
> a transferable karma token That's arguably the definition of money.

bigbugbag 12y ago

You may be mistaken here, the day your bank disappear all your deposits and interests disappear with it. You probably this cannot happen which is what people believe until it happened to them, and this happened all around the world. In Europe a 2013 law is now in effect which basically states no more bank bail-outs, from now on it will be bail-ins. In other words if a bank fails it will use its customer's deposits to cover its debt.

hueving 12y ago
Not in the US. If a bank fails, the FDIC will insure each account for 200 or 400k (can't remember which).
- bigbugbag 12y ago
  I'm not sure how this contradicts what I said, isn't FDIC an insurance company set up to act when your bank disappear with your money you had there ? What if your bank is not a member of FDIC ? It's sort of what the European Union has with those bail ins, deposits are guaranteed up to 100k but this comes from inside the bank, first from shareholders and creditors then larger accounts. Makes sense that the public should not have to pay for the failure of a private banking entity.
  - Jtsummers 12y ago
    > What if your bank is not a member of FDIC ? Then don't do business with that bank. The vast majority of banks and credit unions in the US offer insured accounts. If yours doesn't you should move your money elsewhere. The FDIC insurance is $250k per insured-account-type per institution. That is, if I have a checking and a retirement account with one bank I'm insured for a total of up to $500k. Anything exceeding that needs to be in another account type or another bank to be insured. Most investment accounts aren't insured, but some brokerage accounts are (you'll get that info when you talk to your bank) but the investments themselves (naturally) are not, just the value of any non-invested cash. The cost (in the US) is put upon the banks to pay for this insurance. It's just a federally created insurance agency. Barring a major collapse across many (most?) banks, it should have enough stored up over the years to cover the cost without requiring financing from the federal government. In theory, you can have private insurance (I believe these do exist) for your bank, but I'm not sure how common this is in the US. Like most insurance schemes, the more participants the more affordable it is. It'd be a tough market for someone else to break into.

TheDong 12y ago

It's worse than that. To me, the biggest flaw of bitcoin is that you have to constantly spend energy on it (as in computation power / burn coal) for it to remain viable. As soon as enough people get tired of throwing away money at their miners someone can pull a 51% attack, so everyone must put more energy into their miners to protect their investment... forever. Over time the amount of energy wasted by bitcoin could become stupendously dumb. We could be using our spare processor cycles to fold proteins or aid in numerous other research, and yet we're using it to allow people to send bits of data to each other without a need for centralized trust. Compare that to the centralized bank where you have a single centralized trusted source which allows transferring money from one person to another to take no more energy than a modest server and some backups -- far less than the power consumption of a single GPU miner. The above problem also won't get better. Even after you're no longer mining for new coins, you must keep up the mining volume to protect existing coins and allow transactions to occur at all. I personally find the above to be a fundamental problem with the "proof of work" solution. Sure, on paper you've solved the General's problem, but the reality is that you're throwing massive amounts of energy out the window. Because of that, I think this proof's place should have been to remain on paper.

brazzy 12y ago
Do you have any idea how much energy, work and time is being spent on the infrastructure of regular currencies? Minting, ATMs, secure transport, brank branches, all kind of mainframe dinosaurs running 40 year old COBOL code? Even if scaled up to global usage, I very much doubt Bitcoin mining would be worse.
- throwawayaway 12y ago
  https://blockchain.info/charts/hash-rate https://blockchain.info/charts/hash-rate the hash rate doesn't grow on trees. why the hell would you doubt it would be worse? it does 7 transactions per second. http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2013/12/03/fascinating-number-bitcoin-mining-uses-15-millions-worth-of-electricity-every-day/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2013/12/03/fascinati... here's on estimate: Bitcoin Mining Uses $15 Million's Worth Of Electricity Every Day

EricBlair 12y ago

I don't think you see many things. Like just how widely Bitcoin has already become. Just yesterday I read about 10,000 Spanish atms being converted to bitcoin. "No interest rate" Why would there be? There's no risk. There isn't a government of Bitcoinlandia with a debt and deficit(s) it needs to finance. Whatever currency you're holding now isn't paying you a real rate of interest. Your stupidity is clearly of the American variety so those US dollars you buy your gmo foodstuffs with has lost 96-98% of it's value the past 41/42 years. Why do you think a Coke no longer cost nickel? When you deposit money in a bank, you're loaning them your money. It's no longer yours and when they run into trouble with their trillions in deriatives, guess whose on the hook for it? Why you, unsecured creditor. http://www.economicpolicyjournal.com/2014/11/warning-bank-deposits-will-soon-no.html?m=1 http://www.economicpolicyjournal.com/2014/11/warning-bank-de... "and you have to secure it yourself?" Yeah and that ass you were born with, eventually you'll have to wipe it yourself because mom won't be around forever. Clearly it isn't for you. "Bitcoin is the electronic version of "let's buy a lot of gold and stash it somewhere"." Do you have any idea how well one would have done the past decade had they 'stashed' some gold? It's hard to believe people like you actually exist. I'm looking for some sarcasm but all am seeing is a statist shill. Your taking some sort of perverse thrill in other people losing money speaks to your low character.

crucialfelix 12y ago
Could you present your counterarguments without resorting to childish insults ? It really detracts from your argument.
throwawaymaroon 12y ago
...witness the bitterness of a fanatic struggling when his deity is humiliated, lashing out with helpless rage.
akinder 12y ago
Go back to /r/bitcoin, libetard. Articles like this make me giggle, love seeing you dipshits get your ass handed to you time and time again because of your BS "currency"
passfree 12y ago

throwawaybit 12y ago

There's one use of bitcoins, it's a great currency to avoid paying taxes which compensates for the loss of small interests (not saying I'm doing this, but I'm quite sure that some of the users use it for exactly this reason)

tribaal 12y ago
Well, that is a compelling argument I guess... Bonus points for being honest about it (a rarity) :)

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

moe 12y ago

Bitcoin is the electronic version of "let's buy a lot of gold and stash it somewhere". It's also the electronic version of: Be able to move that gold around the globe near instantly, without a middleman, at almost zero cost. And some other quite neat things. While these features may seem "anecdotical" for many people in the western world, there's also a large number of people in poorer countries for whom e.g. the fees on long distance transactions or not being able to get a bank account are a very real problems.

mikkom 12y ago
> Be able to move that gold around the globe near instantly The biggest advantage of gold is that it's value is relatively stable and has been used as a valuable metal since ancient times. That's quite the opposite of Bitcoin actually.
- chuckkir 12y ago
  Did you ever consider why gold has value? It's just shiny metal. Other than jewelry and some electronics uses, no one needs it. At one point it was useful to make coins (for fiat currencies) because it was rare, but now it's just valuable because "it always has been."
pliny 12y ago
Near instant is a bit (a lot?) misleading, it takes on average about 10 minutes to have a transaction confirmed, sometimes much more.
- tribaal 12y ago
  Well, 10 minutes is still much better than the several days needed to clear an international transfer :)
  - sanswork 12y ago
    If it takes your bank several days to clear an international transfer you need to switch banks not systems.

mrfusion 12y ago

I think if bitcoin dies out, we'll be like that civilization that discovered the wheel but only used it in childrens toys.

oco101 12y ago

There are already amazing solutions there in the cryptocurency that gives you interested on your money and has a stable value and much more. The vision behind Bitcoin changed the word this vision give us all hope, but the fact is Bitcoin today has many problems. Instead of trying to fix those things and keep the vision that Bitcoin implemented,alive We try to defend Bitcoin no matter how obvious are its flaws... You can't even mention other blockchain solution you gonna get killed by bitcoin fanboys. We are stuck still defending AltaVista against Google is really sad ... Until this will stop, Bitcoin will continue to fail and drag with it the whole blokchain industry, but it only a matter of time because what's important it the vision that Satoshi gave us NOT who's gonna deliver on it...