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Are you asking me about the capabilities of the techology, or are you asking me to predict the future? I'm giving you the former. I don't know what Bitcoin wil

by pash 12y ago

Are you asking me about the capabilities of the techology, or are you asking me to predict the future? I'm giving you the former. I don't know what Bitcoin will look like in ten years. I do understand the technology and am interested in having a discussion about it. But on Hacker News, in threads like this one, a great many of the comments demonstrate fundamental technical misunderstandings or seem to regard Bitcoin as a mature ecosystem. So I think it's appropriate to try to dispel the ignorance and to emphasize that Bitcoin is actually a nascent technology, one that offers far more than the rudimentary sort of magic Internet money that we see today. Bitcoin is a base layer for permission-lite financial innovation in whatever direction the market demands. You can build all sorts of stuff on top of it. That means that if Bitcoin's still around in a decade, the ecosystem will likely look very different from today's. "Assume we will never have a ladder," you seem to be saying. Meanwhile, plenty of capable people are hard at work building ladders.

cpwright 12y ago
I find the fundamental disconnect to be that people are pushing the lower-cost transactions as a bit motivation for Bitcoin. The less enthusiastic point out all of the good anti-fraud infrastructure credit cards have from a consumer perspective. Then the proponents point out you can build that on Bitcoin, which is true; but it doesn't come for free, thus I expect mostly negating the transaction cost advantages that Bitcoin is potentially offering.
dangerlibrary 12y ago
I can give you a sense of the future: Bitcoin will become completely unusable because the blockchain is growing at an increasing rate. https://blockchain.info/charts/blocks-size?timespan=all&showDataPoints=false&daysAverageString=1&show_header=true&scale=0&address= https://blockchain.info/charts/blocks-size?timespan=all&show...

by pash 12y ago

cpwright 12y ago

I find the fundamental disconnect to be that people are pushing the lower-cost transactions as a bit motivation for Bitcoin. The less enthusiastic point out all of the good anti-fraud infrastructure credit cards have from a consumer perspective. Then the proponents point out you can build that on Bitcoin, which is true; but it doesn't come for free, thus I expect mostly negating the transaction cost advantages that Bitcoin is potentially offering.

dangerlibrary 12y ago

I can give you a sense of the future: Bitcoin will become completely unusable because the blockchain is growing at an increasing rate. https://blockchain.info/charts/blocks-size?timespan=all&showDataPoints=false&daysAverageString=1&show_header=true&scale=0&address= https://blockchain.info/charts/blocks-size?timespan=all&show...