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Bitcoin's Success With Investors Alienates Earliest Adopters
holy_calamity writes "Digital currency Bitcoin is gaining acceptance with mainstream venture capitalists, reports Technology Review, but at the price of its famed anonymity and ability to operate without central authority. Technology investors have now ploughed millions of dollars into a handful of Bitcoin-based payments and financial companies that are careful to follow financial regulations and don't offer anonymity. That's causing tensions in the community of Bitcoin enthusiasts, some of whom feel their currency's success has involved abandoning its most important features."
did not see this coming then you must be new here...
I don't understand, how are they removing the anonimity of Bitcoin? They aren't changing how the algorithms work I assume?
"I liked Bitcoin before it was cool. It's too mainstream now"
also, no "free as in beer" and no "quality goes in before the name goes on." the news knocked me right off my unicorn, and I am so embarassed...
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
...I've got a bridge somewhere that needs to be sold that you might be interested in.
Bitcoin does irrefutability (i.e. the ability to prove that a transaction occurred, and occurred only once). I can thus prove that I do, in fact, own all Bitcoin I possess.
It never has been anonymous. There are characteristics that make it more difficult to trace the payer, but the protocol and implementation have never been configured (or designed) to be a strongly anonymous technology.
There are always four sides to every story: your side, their side, the truth, and what really happened.
Loss of anonymity and regulation happens to anything that becomes large enough to be noticed.
Priest: "Universe from nothing, no laws of physics, sped up time"+ huge discrepancies. Creationism? No. Big Bang Theory
Is selling out to the highest bidder. How dare they.
Bitcoin is and always will be just as anonymous as it was promised. No one EVER said exchanging Bitcoin for other currencies would be an identity protected venture. In fact it's always been assumed by anyone with any brains at all that Bitcoin is only anonymous as long as you keep it Bitcoin and don't trade it for any hard goods or currency.
There have always been regulatory requirements that make transaction tracking easy for government when you convert to currency or goods. And this has ALWAYS been BitCoins greatest weakness because at the end of the day the currency is only as valuable as it's ability to exchange it for goods. That exchange will never be anonymous.
For a currency to be useful it has to be trusted. Unfortunately it would appear that after a certain critical mass is reached the people using it also want the other people using it to be trust able. Not easy to do whilst remaining anonymous.
Silence is a state of mime.
The whole idea that you could create money by having your computer crack at a cryptographic algorithm is ridiculous, but so too is the fact that some professions earn so much more than others, that those professions form unions (oops! I mean 'professional associations') that limit supply of their professionals, or that during the GFC the Fed could pull billions of dollars from out of their ass and give it to banks who could then earn themselves interest off that. Bitcoin may be a bubble, but so is the entire stockmarket where you have computers buying and dumping stock microseconds later without any idea what is being traded. Hey did you know the big investment banks pay a premium so they connect their computers closer to the exchange's computers? As soon as they detect buys on a certain stock, they start grabbing massive amounts of it on the assumption others will follow and they can dump it microseconds later? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-frequency_trading Please tell me how this is good for the economy and sensible investment?
Bitcoin may have its problems and speculators are really bad for anything, but so called 'real money' is just as bad and maybe worse.
why do i have this suspicion that the whole bitcoin is some elaborate, very drawn out, convoluted, mutated version of a pyramid scheme?
You tell me why... because I don't see it. No referrals, no downlines, none of that telltale pyramid stuff.
First they were worth squat, then there was all kinds of marketing hype, the value skyrocketed as a result, and then bam...it crashes. A lucky few got in before the marketing (knowing it was coming) and bailed out while it was spiked. To me that more closely represents a pump & dump.
Bitcoin has never been anonymous. There is a public record of transactions. You have to rely on a separate mixing service, which almost nobody does.
Most important, though, is this: very few people actually want to use Bitcoin. Most view it as a way to make an electronic transfer of government-backed fiat currencies, so they rely on services that do the Bitcoin transfers for them and exchange Bitcoin currency for fiat currency. Those services are going to comply with the law and require things like identification. To put it another way, cash is anonymous too -- but large numbers of people use credit and debit cards, which are not anonymous.
Palm trees and 8
it's a little bit of both.
there are tons of unaccounted for bitcoins harvested in the early days they will not reenter the market until
a) the market is large enough to not crash when whoever is sitting on them cashes out
or
b) whoever is sitting on them needs the money badly enough not to care.
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
The regulatory agencies that control the major banks won't permit overt laundering schemes that are within the reach of any but the most sophisticated bankers.
That said, f' them. By all means, allow bitcoin to become whatever it is going to become. But the technology that built it can be made again and again and again.
Set up another bitcoin currency. And this time learn from the mistakes. We might have to proxy the money into and out of the system through cash. That is... no electronic deposits or withdrawals. Rather, use cash. Cash is by its nature opaque. Set up accounts like pre paid debit cards. The cash in the system but no names. Only ID codes linked to the money but not to people.
This will shield the next system behind the legitimacy of physical currency itself. Physical currency won't go away. The governments say they don't like it because its hard to trace but there are many purchases they make that are intentionally murky. Remember the giant bricks of cash sent to Iraq? Literally pallets of 100 dollar bills stacked and shrink wrapped. Why did they do that? Think we couldn't have come up with an electronic and documented system? We chose not to do that. And think the big banks are entirely upfront about all the money that flows through their systems? Most of it is tracked and documented. But some of it is intentionally obfuscated. Go to Switzerland or Luxemburg and you'll find whole industries based on the practice.
All Bitcoins would do is let the middle class have access to the same financial toys afforded to the very rich.
I believe in the freedom of money. I understand that controlling money makes law enforcement easier. You can track what people are doing by following money. But you could say the same thing about putting cameras in people's homes or tapping every phone in the country.
I have the right to privacy. And while many will disagree with me, I will respond that they can TRY to stick cameras down my throat to see what I ate for breakfast but I won't make it easy for them.
We can be free. If even 1 percent of the economy flows through these systems it will break the control the government has on us.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.