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BitInstant CEO Says World Operates "On an Inferior Monetary System"
hypnosec writes "BitInstant's CEO Charlie Shrem and Erik Voorhees were invited to speak about virtual currency at the NACHA (the North American Payments Association) Annual Global Payments Forum held in Rio de Janeiro. At the conference the duo stated that the world operates 'on an inferior monetary system'. One of the more interesting parts of the whole forum was how Bitcoin as a currency and transaction system "works within current legal frameworks." A presentation by Senior Legal Counsel to the Federal Reserve titled: 'The Implications of Dodd-Frank Section 1073' sheds light on requirements that need to be fulfilled by "Remittance Payment Company" (RPC) guidelines. This law requires such companies to disclose a lot of information about money transactions. This is where Bitcoin as a currency and system collide head-on with the law."
person A trying to sell product X, says all other products are inferior to his product
My credit card has pending transactions for days sometimes.
http://soylentnews.org/~tibman
1) For low-value transactions (say, $50), 0 confirmations is usually fine. For higher value transactions, 1 confirmation (average of 10 minutes, sometimes more) is pretty good. If you're buying a car or a house, waiting an hour or two for more transactions is reasonable. You'd spend at least that time on paperwork.
2) There are several thin clients now that do NOT require the full blockchain. For example, MultiBit, Electrum, Blockchain.info, various cell phone clients... the implementation depends on the client, but there's more than one way to tackle the size problem.
So all the folks running the exchanges and other hacked services, if indeed they were hacked and not just subject to fraud by the owners, were all fools who hadn't taken 10 minutes to learn basic security?
Face it, whatever the security of the protocol, the record of the bitcoin community and the services run by said community is deservedly in the gutter.
So basically, what you're saying is that a monetary system used almost exclusively for illegal transactions was designed to keep criminals from being caught, and the existing users would not like it if it was possible to catch the criminals. Interesting.
Not just interesting. Wonderful.
You could characterize the use of cash exactly the same way. I like paying cash. It would be nice if I could pay cash over the intertubes. If Bitcoin does (the equivalent of) that, lots of people are going to like it for lots of reasons, some nice and some not so nice.
Just like cash.