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Ask Amir Taaki About Bitcoin
"Bitcoin," says the project's website, "is a peer-to-peer currency. Peer-to-peer means that no central authority issues new money or tracks transactions." Wikipedia offers a readable explanation of the underlying technology. In (very) short, Bitcoin uses a distributed database and public key encryption to allow users to reassign ownership of units of Bitcoin currency (BTC), and does so in a way that can keep the user's identity private. Bitcoin isn't yet accepted the way credit cards are, but it's more than theoretical. You can buy (some) things with Bitcoin, and trade the currency itself.
Now, you can ask question about Bitcoin of Amir Taaki, a developer of client interfaces and stock trading software for Bitcoin, and owner and operator of trading exchange Britcoin.co.uk. Amir requests that questions focus not "so much on the mining (too many people get focused on that
when it's a minor aspect of Bitcoin) nor simple technical questions (people can
go find that info themselves on Wikipedia/the forums/sourcecode)," but rather on the harder-to-answer questions. Reading some of the related stories listed below may give you ideas on what those are. Standard Slashdot Interview rules apply: ask as many questions as you want, but please keep them to one per comment. Amir will get back with his answers.
There's one interesting thing about Bitcoin that I think most geeks haven't either understood or havent thinked about. Both stock and forex markets are secured against all kinds of foul play. Doing a pump and dump scheme or various other schemes isn't easy. With Forex the sheer amount of transactions and money changing hands makes it impossible and the law protects against such schemes with stocks. If stock markets flunctuate much they also close down automatically. Bitcoin doesn't offer any protection against this. Anyone with the know-how and cash can come in to play with the market. This makes Bitcoin seriously vulnerable to losing huge amounts of money. Last friday we saw probably the first such scheme taking place. Someone slowly build up the value of Bitcoin and on an instant cashed out lots of money. That lowered the overall value of Bitcoin significantly, which made others join it and sell it. Whoever was playing Bitcoin market probably was thinking he had now got Bitcoin to the most high value possible and decided to cash out. Many people lost significant amount of money.
This all works wonderfully for the people who have the financial understanding of markets and such schemes. Geeks generally do not. All they see is this program that they can use to make money with their hardware. They forget that all the traditional pump and dump schemes and others still apply. Actually not only do they apply, they're safe to pull of with Bitcoin because it's legal, the market is really vulnerable to it and most people using it do not understand what is happening. Those who trade stocks or forex generally have even some understanding of how the market works. Bitcoin users generally do not, as they're just normal users.
With BitCoin limited to a pre-determined amount and the difficulty of mining new BitCoins, it seems that this gives a huge advantage to people who got into BitCoin early and have already amassed a considerable amount of BitCoins. Is this true and, if so, do you think this disincentive will undermine BitCoin's ability to become more popular since the majority of the population will have to work so much harder to obtain the currency?
"Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos!"
Are there plans to deal with quantum computing, or with any of the algorithms used being compromised?
I understand that the hashes wouldn't be terribly devastating for Bitcoin -- worst case, I would think, you roll the entire network back to a snapshot of the transaction history before the first quantum computer started screwing stuff up, and start using a new hashing algorithm. It'd be very bad, but not catastrophic.
But for actual accounts, it looks like we rely on ECDSA -- and it looks like even if Bitcoin offers a quantum-ready algorithm, my wallet is still likely compromised unless I move everything to it before the first viable quantum computer. Still, there doesn't seem to be much noise about this other than a few forum posts, largely dismissed by saying things like "DWave is vaporware."
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
How much real money are you paying the Slashdot editors for the constant stream of stories about this worthless new "money"?
Good grief, yet another advertisement for bitcoin?
Enough, already!
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
My question is, what are your aspirations for the currency. Do you hope for it to be near-ubiquitous -- used by corner shops and mainstream merchants like Amazon? Or are you happy to see a parallel economy grow, as a niche thing? Or something else?
One thing that concerns me is the fixed maximum number of bitcoins. Lets say people acquire bitcoins, but the amount isn't enough to worry about, so they never use them, or perhaps their computer crashes and they don't have a backup. My understanding is that these bitcoins are permanently lost from the economy of bitcoins. Over time, the total supply would begin to dwindle, presumably pushing up the value of those that remain, until people become frustrated at the small supply and are motivated to move to a new system, then bitcoin is abandoned. In the real world this happens with dollar bills, but the government can compensate for this by creating more. Is this issue addressed in some fashion.
Convince me it's not a Ponzi scheme.
The BitCoin ecosystem is composed of very flaky entities. The biggest "exchange", Mt. Gox, seems to be one person reachable only on IRC. They're a depository institution, and people have substantial balances with them. Not only are they not regulated, they don't even seem to have a business address.
The "exchanges" all seem to transfer funds in and out through even flakier services, like Liberty Reserve (somewhere in Costa Rica) and Dwolla (run out of a hackerspace in Des Moines). Neither is registered as a money transfer agency. What we're not seeing is some bank in Switzerland or Luxembourg, handling Bitcoins.
All these organizations are acting as depository institutions without a license to do so. None of them guarantees contractually that they will pay out funds within a set time. All are uninsured and unaudited. Most of them seem to be having some problems delivering cash lately now that there's been a crash in Bitcoins.
On top of this, the whole Bitcoin system is set up like a Ponzi scheme, where there's an advantage to getting in early.
It's probably already too late to get in, and it may be too late to get out.
1. Create new "currency"
2. Make new "currency" progressively harder to acquire as time goes on
3. Get new people to buy into the "currency"
4. Sell off your easily gained currency holdings to new adopters
5. Profit!
Hey guys, I found Step 4!
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
My question: Why would any merchant IN THEIR RIGHT MIND want to deal with Bitcoin? With the insane USD-to-Bitcoin exchange-rate gyrations happening lately, why would any serious retailer even bother, when the value of Bitcoin vs. USD could change by 50% or more in just a few hours?
What about the lack of inflation?
It's long known that economic growth is severely stunted without some measure of inflation. Adopting bitcoins for the global economy would mean that policymakers lose control on money supply, and while there are advantages in this, disadvantages far outweigh them. Additionally, adopting a global currency standard will deny governments ability to influence currency rates robbing them of yet another way to control the economy.
Is there any plan to solve this? Maybe a system of independent bitcoin 'roots' operated by governments would help?
Here's my question:
Do you ever regret not having had access to some economic expertise when you set this up, in order to prevent deflation, and possibly even create a working Bitcoin economy? Or has your initial investment already paid off so much that you have no regrets whatsoever?
I don't know what the optimum curve for the increase in the BitCoin supply would have been, but an asymptotic curve isn't it. They were not thinking very well at all. The asymptotic curve limits the total size of the "BitCoin economy" because of guaranteed massive deflation if the economy increases in size at all. This renders it quite useless as a viable currency. (The current value of all currency in circulation is currently far too small to be viable, and the deflation required to get the BitCoin economy to a size where it would be a viable currency is far too high, leading to hoarding that would exacerbate the problem.) At the very least, it should have at least leveled out to a linear slope to account for increase in gross economic output.
So yes, this is a tulip craze, and I wish Slashdot would stop wasting their time on these things. (I also have serious doubts about scalability... once you start subdividing the BitC's down to make them usefully liquid, the amount of tracking required quickly becomes ridiculous and makes BitC's no more non-trackable than my Visa card due to issues with data and bandwidth portability.)
It's sort of an interesting idea, and the concept of a non-trackable currency is an interesting one which raises far-reaching economic and social questions, but this particular currency isn't going to answer them.
The BitCoin system has guaranteed deflation because lost hashes disppear from the monetary system forever. (Lost, destroyed or hoarded US currency can be replaced by the Federal reserve with a few keystrokes.) In addition, the current total value of the BitCoin currency (expessed in any normal monetary unit you'd care to name) is far too small to be a viable currency. It would have to deflate by several thousand percent to be any more than a niche currency. Since no one would volunteer to be the victims of such deflation, BitC's are doomed to irrelevancy.