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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
the bitcoin system would require only trivial mods to do remove the privacy and track the "who" as well as the "what".
That's not how it works. First and foremost, the creation of public addresses can be done entirely offline, without connecting to the Internet and without any information leaving RAM. I can request money to be sent to one of these addresses and only the person sending it knows that it belongs to me as there is no other record of its existence. An infinite number of such addresses could be created and there is no way to tie them directly to me.
Secondly, any such non-trivial changes to the network would require nearly everyone on the network to agree, which is EXTREMELY unlikely given Bitcoin's user base and ideology.
1 - Ten minutes max, usually.
2 - Not true, there are several wallet tools now that don't hold the blockchain locally.
I think your comments are fair, but not entirely accurate any more;
I agree with them to a degree, and have raised those issues a number of times in the #bitcoin IRC channel on freenode;
The response to 1) is well, sure, transaction confirmations are not instant. So what? Neither are credit-card transactions. They can take days, even weeks to confirm. The banks agree to go with instant-confirmation based on probability. In a real-world implementation of bitcoin, I suspect that people would accept small transactions without 6 confirms. In fact, in a real-world implementation, I think most stores could do a lot worse than go down the "Starbucks" route; you have an automated payment app on your phone (or accessible via the web, or via a payment machine at the counter that uses your card number etc.). This "starbucks" account is filled by bitcoin, by you, at home. Or in store etc. but the point being that you fill it before you need it, 9 times out of 10. Ergo that reduces the need for instant confirms. Since it's only a small amount of cash in your Starbucks account, it mitigates the worries over hyperinflation & governmental interference that running all your finances in this way would raise.
2) Not every device needs a full copy of the database now. They have thin-use clients. I'm not sure on the exact specifics of how it does it, but I know it's supported, and will become "the norm" for most domestic users; I believe the main such desktop app is called "Electrum". The network as a whole isn't endangered as long as a fair number of clients continue to use the whole block chain apps. And a lot of people will. But on your iPhone or whatever, sure, thin-client, instant usage, no waiting on downloading the block chain.
Really, the way to get BTC into common, physical-world use, is to go down the accounts system aka "starbucks". A lot of retail chains are already set up for such a system, small retailers can easily roll their own thanks to the likes of OpenTransaction, and it makes it very easy to get btc into common usage without the worries over physical terminals, having to accept low confirm levels or make customers wait for ages etc.