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The Future of Cryptocurrencies
kierny writes "Today, Bitcoin, tomorrow, the dollar? Former Central Intelligence Agency CTO Gus Hunt says governments will learn from today's crypto currencies and use them to fashion future government-protected monetary systems. But along the way, expect first-movers such as Bitcoin to fall, in a repeat of the fate of AltaVista, Napster, and other early innovators. But the prospect of fashioning a better, more stable crypto currency system — and the likelihood that Bitcoin may one day burn — is good news for anyone who cares about crypto currencies, as well as the future and reliability of our monetary systems."
Napster:Itunes::Bitcoin:Dogecoin?
Tell me again how crypto-currencies being "future government-protected monetary systems" is good news?
Its not so bad as long as you can keep the fear from your mind.
I do not see any reason why the BTC protocol itself could not be adapted and adopted with some kind of backing. It really does open up some really good options when it comes to moving tokens around and the push oriented payments could do wonder for combating CC fraud.
No shit, the idea of unregulated currency just screams, hey, I want to steal YOUR money, please give it to me, you will get to use some "money" for a short time, but I will steal your money.
Why don't we just use sea shells or blades of grass as currency at this point? It's no different. Crypto-currency has no value, never has, never will. Those dealing in it, are just dumb and don't value their own money.
In fact, a lot of people are counting on it to fail so that it makes room for all the other currencies.
All of the other ones use a much better system that makes it more stable and fair. (well, most other ones even)
Once bitcoin falls (if it falls), all of these other coins will instantly boom as the bitcoin group jumps to all the other mid-tier coins like Litecoin. (well, previously mid-tier, it is more like low-mid-tier given that trade price explosion the other year)
If one thing is certain though, it will not die. People will pay for services using any method they can. (including literally giving people used panties)
Even if it goes underground, the floodgates are open and a whole universe is flowing though it with the force of a big bang.
Anything that makes it easy to transfer funds to anyone in the world without going through PayPal is a good thing.
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
There's certainly much the government and official banking system can learn from transactions in crypto-currencies. And actually the government backed implementation can be better. Bitcoin suffers from the problem that a transaction can take some to to become certain, as two or more block chains fight it out for fitness, before being reconciled. This only happens because of the goal of avoiding a single point of authority. A government backed system can always have a blessed block-chain. And can thus have transactions finalised almost instantly.
Because no black market is a bad thing, of course. If the market has demand for hired killers, for example, obviously they should exist.
(The is/should fallacy of free marketism is legitimately scary to me)
I've made similar comments to those who've waved negative news articles about bitcoin in my face. The interesting thing about all this is; it was never about "Bitcoin", it was about the concept of cryptocurrency, driven by the revolutionary ability to create digital scarcity. You'd better believe though, that if governments get involved, the whole idea of a publically viewable global transaction ledger (i.e. blockchain.info) will never see the light of day.
The thing is about cryptocurrencies, they also hone the attacks that can be done against them.
Precedents are being set with BitCoin which make it easy to go and arrest people using the currency's successor, similar to how laws against one designer drug are easily adapter to another making it a banned substance in hours to days by the DEA.
For example, if a currency needs 51% of the clients out there for enforcement, a bad guy can make a botnet to add millions to billions of nodes to sway things to his/her favor. Or, if it is a large mining operation, take it and another over to corner the currency and change how it operates.
The opposition and attacks on cryptocurrencies will only get better, and opponents have two methods of attack, both technological (hacking), but through the legal system.
A good example of scoffing at opposition and having it backfire is the Great Firewall of China. At first it was a joke. Now the technology is good enough that China can intercept forums postings done through https connections in flight (due to owning CAs that are trusted in their country's Web browsers), change the text and have the changed posting end up on the site. Works almost the same as Phorm, except intercepts and changes outgoing traffic.
Consumer protection. The possibility that when you are ripped off by wallet-services, exchanges or hackers poking around your hard disk, there is a legal authority you can go to, who may be able to get you your money back and deal with the criminals.
Those dealing in it, are just dumb and don't value their own money.
That depends on which side of the "I want to steal your money" you're on.
Cryptocurrencies with no intermediaries can't become popular till we fix internet/personal devices security. If the intermediary is the government or banks then you are more or less in the same situation than with dollars, and if are thirdy party you will have the same problems that with bitcoin now, either they run/dissapear with your money or get hacked and stolen.
the genuine trademark of a new clear options momkind of civilization. crooked little finger pointing is obsoletely useless now http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=fiat%20currency&sm=3
I have money. I do not trust Bit Coin or any other Crypto currency.
Go ahead and call me stupid or a "Luddite", the fact of the matter is that _I_ do not trust these currency mediums.
So, fuck you.
Crypto-currency has no value, never has, never will. Those dealing in it, are just dumb and don't value their own money.
It does have value, it just is (perhaps unintuitively) not direct value. For example, there is a market for cronuts. One could have a 'market' that trades merely on the value of cronuts. They become worth one thing for food, and another for currency. Take out the food part... you have bitcoin. See?
Why don't we just use sea shells or blades of grass as currency at this point? It's no different.
Now you're getting it!
Suppose Bitcoin went the way of Napster. This would mean the currency might become worth less and less. People would, over time, abandon wallets and there would simply be fewer known Bitcoins to be found. Many will have simply been irrevocably deleted. At some point, wouldn't this scarcity prevent the value from dropping further?
Years from now, we'll likely be using some form of crypto/digital currency. Bitcoin will at least be an interesting historical note. Suppose my grandson steps forth with a digital wallet containing some bitcoin. Wouldn't that be worth something simply because it is rare and of historical interest?
I've always wondered whether Bitcoin actually originated with the CIA, NSA, or Federal Reserve (or analogous agencies in other countries), or maybe a major bank.
I mean, it's a brilliant kind of experiment. Let it loose in the wild and see how it behaves, as a prelude to adopting an official, government backed version, using the lessons learned from Bitcoin. It's the kind of thing you want to have in the wild, to see what people do with it, before adopting something in an ad-hoc and flawed way (like credit cards..).
1^2=1; (-1)^2=1; 1^2=(-1)^2; 1=-1; 1=0.
Governments and the elites have long had access to and will always have access to professional killers, the only difference is the volume of transactions that will be conducted and their targets.
that is what I have been saying for quite a while.
... then why does it suffer attacks? Things that are without value are just ignored.
Right, Marx called money a "collective delusion", there's no real difference between seashells and green slips of paper and digits in a computer somewhere.
However the issue with crypto-currencies is that they apparently have the explicit goal of enabling illegal behavior, tax avoidance, etc. So it should be no surprise that the Bitcoin community is mostly a bunch of criminals and a bunch of marks.
If it is run by the government, it will be regulated. FTA: ...people's embrace of Bitcoin. "The concept is great, [but] the execution has a couple of things -- the deflationary currency, there's no central bank to be able to regulate the amount of coins that are in there... that would be good to have in there," Hardy said.
Some people die at 25 and aren't buried until 75. -Benjamin Franklin
So... people are investing time and effort in stealing valueless stuff?
> However the issue with crypto-currencies is that they apparently have the explicit goal of enabling illegal behavior, tax avoidance, etc.
You misspelled "removing electronic transfers from centralized control."
Tell me again how crypto-currencies being "future government-protected monetary systems" is good news?
Actually, I want to know why bitcoin wouldn't be government protected. Trading bitcoins for some good or service would just be a type of barter exchange. So unless what is being purchased is illegal, then the law, police and courts would still apply to handle situations like fraud and theft.
What we've learned so far from Bitcoin:
It may be popular to slam bitcoins right now but the fact is after all these scandals they're still incredibly valuable with a lot of forward momentum. This is a very new technology and its going to go through growing pains. Its interesting that 'anonymous' money is such a two edged sword. One the one hand people want it because they're worried about the government stealing their money yet the very fact its anonymous makes it a ripe target for theft. You need to protect your bitcoins! Hopefully people are realizing that doesn't mean storing them in a perl hack website in another country.
You're right. Correctly stated:
If there is demand for hired killers, the market exists.
Demand for and supply of a good is that market, it becomes a 'black' market when the good is made illegal. 'Should' only enters the equation when determining if the market is 'black' or not. Anarchists really just want to do away with a meaningless label. Indeed, even 'market' itselves is just a proxy term for 'people exchanging things'.
On a side note, "The is/should fallacy of free marketism" is a strawman.
You failed to engage the implicit argument of noblebeast that states cannot be trusted to manage a currency that they can create by fiat, and offered no evidence that your criticisms of cryptocurrencies do not apply equally to state currencies. But then, spouting unsupported assertions is characteristic of trolls, so I guess my replying means you can chalk up a success.
Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.
AltaVista was merely one search engine in a pool of many.. Yahoo, Hotbot, and Lycos were all around at the time and they did not all fail.
Napster only failed because the government/court system took them down. If it weren't for Napster being forced to close up its business, there were no indications that people were leaving it. Napster was a disruption in the industry and major players moved in unison to take it down.
A direct contrast to this comparison is TCP/IP. Since the creating of TCP/IP, there have been numerous (arguably better) protocols. However, the whole Internet runs on TCP/IP and it does not look to be going away any time soon. Like most new technologies, I would guess that the first virtual currency to be widely adopted would be the virtual currency that becomes the standard. Any new currency has a huge uphill battle in trying to become more mainstream than Bitcoin at this point.
Bitcoin is designed so that governments or other entities cannot take it down. The fact that governments, corporations, or single powerful individuals cannot control it is a feature - not a flaw. Gus Hunt, along with every other powerful well-established individual, would naturally be against the adoption of Bitcoin. But, saying to expect it to fail looks more like wishful thinking on their part.
--- We need more Ron Paul!
The only crypto currency is one which is not traceable. interchangeable, and infinitely divisible - gold or silver or similar. Anything backed by the whim of the government can be tracked, or revoked by the same government.
Why do you think Iran was laughing all the way to the (gold) bank when we kicked them out of the SWIFT wire network? Now they can trade oil for gold bars and the gold bars for uranium, and there's no tracing it.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
bitcoin isn't the Napster of currency...that's part of the scam!
the **system** of generating "bitcoins" is novel for sure, but as implemented it looks like the whole thing was a scam...part of the scam, of course, is to get people to take it seriously...
that's why drug dealers have 'front' operations!
they were tapping into the 'l33t h@x0r' crowd
BTC is an 'alternative currency' in today's financial world, but really it's just an algorythm that allocates resources based on parameters
what makes BTC a currency is the act of trading it...it's comparable to trading a nug of weed for a beer
anything traded is 'currency'...BTC is an algorythm for allocating resources in a closed exchange community
Napster mediated file transfers anonymously...BTC is not the mediation, it is the thing being traded...MtGOX is the mediator
so MtGox::Napster
Thank you Dave Raggett
1. Start your own cryptocurrency
2. Make the world use it (Implementation: ???)
3. Profit!
Granted, it was much the same with Bitcoin but there everybody was pooling their work and pulling in the same direction, so either Bitcoins would fly or cryptocurrencies would crash and burn. What does 100 copycat currencies run by people who figured the best way to get in early is to start a new currency get you? It reminds me of the guy who in the dotcom boom made a 1000x1000 pixel page of pure ads and sold space at $1/pixel. He made almost a million dollars because it became a "thing" to see, creating money out of thin air. Of course afterwards there were tons of DIY kits and whatever to set up your own page, naturally they all bombed. Who'd really watch a copycat page with nothing but ads? These "altcoins" are the same kind of halo hype, my guess is most if not all of these will be worth $0 in five years.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Which only demonstrates the author's entire lack of knowledge on Bitcoin, geez, how many times must it be said that Bitcoin is 'not deflationary', crypto-currencies aren't physical items already! And we do not WANT a 'central bank' controlling it.
This whole MitGox debacle is entirely misunderstood from what I can tell. Who the hell thought it was a great idea to GIVE an 'untrusted & unknown' company their Bitcoins to hold for them! That's like walking up to a new 'bank' that opens in your neighborhood & handing them a brick of gold you have for 'safe keeping', than going back the week after & finding out they disappeared!
Addressing those issues sounds like a neat idea. Best of all, if you really want to, you can do all that stuff today with Bitcoin, through use of contracts, only sending money to agencies that can prove they've posted a bond (i.e. sent money to to someone you have decided that you trust, such as a government), etc. Whenever you need the extra security, you pay for it, just like everyone always does with dollars. The difference is that when you don't need those things, with Bitcoin you can opt out (or rather, it doesn't automatically opt you in).
You can build regulated structures out of unregulated primitives. I'm not anti-Python; I'm just sayin' that sometimes a little C can be very useful. Not every program needs garbage collection.
"Believe me!" -- Donald Trump
A black market is a pretty essential thing if you are opposed to tyranny, including the tyranny of the majority.
Every time I see/hear someone mention "[X] has no value!" I feel like I have to remind them of the subjectivity of value. Robert Heinlein, I feel, provided the best interpretation:
"Value" has no meaning other than in relationship to living beings. The value of a thing is always relative to a particular person, is completely personal and different in quantity for each living human—"market value" is a fiction, merely a rough guess at the average of personal values, all of which must be quantitatively different or trade would be impossible. [...] This very personal relationship, "value", has two factors for a human being: first, what he can do with a thing, its use to him and second, what he must do to get it, its cost to him."i/>
-Lt. Col. Jean V. Dubois (Ret.), pp. 93-94 [Starship Troopers]
Properly run, established, and backed crypto-dollars could be an acceptable replacement for banks to hold and transfer funds. With a central authority transfers could be rolled back, and appropriate monetary policy established, or enforced. It beat the heck out of the banks that just move gold from one vault to another at the end of the night. You could esstially tie crypto-dollars to US issued bonds that the Fed Purchases. For example one 100 dollar bond could be represented by one crypto-dollar. It would just be on the banking network, and never go over the internet at all. It would eliminate a large amount of the physical hoops we currently use. Properly done it could replace, or enhance the existing Clearing House Interbank Payments System we currently have.
Last I checked ripping someone's bitcoin wallet off is just as illegal as taking their physical on filled with fiat.
As long as they're deflationary, cryptocurrencies will never be used as conventional currency. Deflationary currency rewards hoarding, which takes it out of circulation, which causes something else to be used as currency.
For a historical example, look at gold-backed currency in the US after the civil war and the Fourth Coinage Act. A nice, hard, deflationary money and largely ignored in favor of marginal reserve bank notes that frequently turned out to be worth no more than the printing. And yet by and large the later drove out the former for the purposes of actually doing business. That deflationary money was in fact so disfavored that William Jennings Bryan got within a stone's throw of the Whitehouse basically running a single issue campaign against it.
It's hard to imagine anyone who has experienced long term deflationary money wants to ever see it again. It's just that most of the people who've had that experience in the US are dead or so close as not to matter.
Bitcoin has no chargeback mechanism. Once your transaction is gone, it's gone, regardless of whether it was really you who did it. Unlike the conventional banking system.
Last I checked ripping someone's bitcoin wallet off is just as illegal as taking their physical on filled with fiat.
Oh really? And how exactly did you check that? Where's the law that mentions bitcoins? As an intangible string of binary information, we can't simply treat it as property unless the law says so.
Where's the person that's been convicted for stealing bitcoins? For sure there's been people done for drug trafficking and money laundering, who've incidentally used bitcoin as part of the transaction. But where's the convictions for bitcoin theft? There's been millions of bitcoins stolen, so we should expect some prosecutions were it an established crime.
There have been a lot of projections on what would happen if even 50% of all bitcoins were stolen and 95% of exchanges were destroyed. Bitcoins still wouldn't go away. If 1/3 of the countries in the world thoroughly blocked bitcoin, it would still survive. If 99% of miners stopped minig, it wouldn't even have an effect and would simply attract new miners. Bitcoin basically can't die under any circumstances except a badly handled complete protocol meltdown.
I always chuckle when I read yet another pundit claim that Bitcoin is going to fail because it's not government-backed. A significant part of current Bitcoin userbase are libertarian-minded folk who believe (and with very good reason) that a goverment-backed currency equals a currency that's constantly meddled with by said government, so having a government-backed crypto currency is precisely what they DO NOT WANT. Not having central banks fuck about with the money supply and the lack of need for banking institutions are features, not bugs.
Especially interesting is 2nd generation coins such as Counterparty, Mastercoin and the like, building new services on top of the existing Bitcoin blockchain. Great overview in this post: http://www.ofnumbers.com/2014/...
Yeah, I know just how tyrannical it is that you can't buy custom-shot child porn, or stolen human livers. (some things are illegal for a reason, beyond just sticking it to the little guy)
Best of all, if you really want to, you can do all that stuff today with Bitcoin, through use of contracts, only sending money to agencies that can prove they've posted a bond (i.e. sent money to to someone you have decided that you trust, such as a government), etc. Whenever you need the extra security, you pay for it, just like everyone always does with dollars. The difference is that when you don't need those things, with Bitcoin you can opt out (or rather, it doesn't automatically opt you in).
A reiteration of a common but naive libertarian argument. Citizens shouldn't need to check the status of each company they do business with. That would be too much work for individual in the real world to ever do it. Rather citizens should know that whenever they do transactions in their own country with companies that are known to the government, that they are covered by a common set of protections. Then they only need to take the extra steps of checking that you mention on those rare occasions when they need to send money abroad.
You can build regulated structures out of unregulated primitives.
Experience says you can't. And Bitcoin certainly isn't regulated.
On a side note, "The is/should fallacy of free marketism" is a strawman.
I entirely disagree. It's a serious problem, if you're concerned about human beings.
Stop driving up the price of video cards you bastards!
"Actually, I want to know why bitcoin wouldn't be government protected. Trading bitcoins for some good or service would just be a type of barter exchange. So unless what is being purchased is illegal, then the law, police and courts would still apply to handle situations like fraud and theft."
Bitcoin *IS* protected, approximately as much as cash is protected. That is to say, laws against fraud and the like still apply.
The problem (as the government sees it) is that also like cash, Bitcoin is anonymous. And the government doesn't like anonymous cash flows. It sees that as a threat.
Which is why, of course, everybody else sees a "government-sponsored" cryptocurrency as a threat. You can bet your ass they would try to make sure they had tabs on who spent exactly how much, exactly where and when.
And if that happens, you can kiss your freedom goodby.
Name someone who says that hired killers, child pornographers, and other scum should exist as desirable entities.
Is it not possible that a regulated organ market could actually reduce organ theft? It would certainly save many lives: http://online.wsj.com/news/art...
Its not so bad as long as you can keep the fear from your mind.
Governments tend to not be the ones controlling currencies (even though they really *should* be.)
It's the central banks. For an example of this, see the consortium of privately owned and controlled banks that make up the United States Federal Reserve. "Governments" don't call the shots. They just play along and act like they're actually in charge, when in truth they're just middle management.
Most of the comments in here seem to be pretty negative concerning the potential future of cryptocurrencies. "PCs can't be trusted to store money" "I have no faith in the system" and so on.
Yes, this is all new tech and it'll take a while for mass adoption, but bitcoin isn't going anywhere. This is the kind of futuristic technology that has been envisioned since the early days of the computer. It'll happen. Credit card systems are significantly more vulnerable than the bitcoin protocol could ever be.
Unregulated by a single government does not mean anonymous. You can trace the block chains.
Even with government regulated currency, banks fund terrorism, politicians have their super pacs, and the dollar just isn't what it used to be: https://www.google.com/search?...
Where in Satoshi's white paper does it talk about illegal behaviour, tax avoidance, etc?
Its not so bad as long as you can keep the fear from your mind.
The only way Bitcoin will fail is if it implodes for internal reasons. Assuming it doesn't fall apart due to something catastrophic, Metcalfe's Law ensures that it will remain the primary cryptocurrency.
Prohibiting goods increases their scarcity, and thus their value. Pushing goods underground means that the only people who deal in those goods are those who can afford to do so and get away with it. Namely: organized crime syndicates, who do much worse than merely sell the illegal goods to people. Tell me again how that's for the good of humanity?
Its not so bad as long as you can keep the fear from your mind.
You don't need new law for the same old thing "on a computer". It's illegal to steal anything, virtual or otherwise. How illegal depends on the value, and jurisdiction may be particularly muddy here.
There's no need for the law to "mention bitcoins", that's a distraction, but law enforcement is only going to go after complicated cross-jurisdictional thefts when the value is high and the evidence is clear. We might not see prosecutions because bitcoin isn't taken seriously, or because the hackers simply got away with it.
OTOH, we've already seen lawsuits.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
It's illegal to steal anything, virtual or otherwise.
So you're claiming that there is such a thing as software theft, as opposed to copyright infringement then?
You don't need a new law for anything tangible. But bitcoin isn't a tangible thing. It's a protocol. It needs a law or precedent before we can say whether there is such as thing as stealing "bitcoins".
OTOH, we've already seen lawsuits.
Lawsuits can be issued for anything, regardless of the law. A written law, or convictions under an existing one are the only things that could show that there's a crime of "stealing bitcoins".
I literally can not think of a single way that making sure bad things are only available to a few is better than bad things being available to everybody!
> Bitcoin has no chargeback mechanism.
You are wrong about this. There is a built-in escrow function that returns payment to the sender if the conditions of the transaction are not met. Bank card charge-backs are mostly limited to 60 days, and assumes the conditions are met if there is no objection within that time. In addition to the built-in function, people can use escrow services who hold funds until the sender is satisfied. In turn, escrow services can make arrangements with merchants about holding time and amounts.
The thing about bank cards is you are paying for the charge back feature whether you need it or not. Bitcoin makes extra services "a la carte" - you don't have to pay for the ones you don't need.
Illegal != bad
Its not so bad as long as you can keep the fear from your mind.
This is already possible with something called "colored coins". Instead of the tokens themselves having value, they represent ownership of other things, like a share of stock or an ounce of gold. They can still be traded online, and divided into smaller parts, but additionally the holder of the colored coin can redeem them for the underlying asset. The "colors" terminology comes from each color being a different asset class. These yellow coins are backed by gold, these green ones are backed by dollars, etc. They can be freely mixed on a single block chain, as long as you have a way to tell the colors apart from each other.
You don't need new law for the same old thing "on a computer". It's illegal to steal anything, virtual or otherwise. How illegal depends on the value, and jurisdiction may be particularly muddy here.
There's no need for the law to "mention bitcoins", that's a distraction, but law enforcement is only going to go after complicated cross-jurisdictional thefts when the value is high and the evidence is clear. We might not see prosecutions because bitcoin isn't taken seriously, or because the hackers simply got away with it.
OTOH, we've already seen lawsuits.
The method of stealing bitcoins is materially different from any other form of property.
To steal a bitcoin from you I need a copy of your wallet (this is similar but distinct from copyright violation), then I use that information to remove the utility from your copy (this is similar but distinct from vandalism), resulting in you being deprived of the ability o spend the bitcoin I "stole" (this is similar but distinct from theft).
... they apparently have the explicit goal of enabling illegal behavior, tax avoidance, etc.
Citation please? Yeah, didn't think so.
Of course, I have no idea where you live, so I don't know what is considered illegal in your jurisdiction. There are plenty of legitimate uses of cryptos that are not fulfilled by existing monetary systems. Why do you think dispensary owners are starting to use BTC in Colorado as payment for goods? They're sick of being targeted by criminals because they carry massive amounts of cash on their person since they are unable to accept plastic cards.
I fully expect some crypto to eventually become ubiquitous just as Facebook has (poor Myspace ... ) I don't see it being BTC or à or really anything that currently exists. I think there are simply too many impractical flaws that will prevent people like merchants/business owners from deciding to accept BTC or Ã. Ultimately you're going to have all these new processors come around and say, "for only 1%, we can convert your BTC revenues into USD and deposit to your business' checking account. As things continue, 1% becomes 1.5%, then 2%, then we are back to paying the same transactions fees the plastic card companies want and one of the biggest draws of crypto (from a merchant perspective) is now obsolete.
Someone flopped a steamer in the gene pool.
Do you decide for yourself what is bad for you, or are you content to let others decide on your behalf?
“When goods cannot cross borders, soldiers will” - Frederic Bastiat
Prove anything by multiplying Huge Number times Tiny Number
Imagine how great Bitcoin would be if the Quantitative Easing by unaccountable bureaucrats were built into the protocol!
Prove anything by multiplying Huge Number times Tiny Number
You failed to engage the implicit argument of noblebeast that states cannot be trusted to manage a currency that they can create by fiat
The biggest problem with Fiat currencies is not so much that they are originally created by Fiat. It's that the banks with the help of the government can change the rules later and print more bills, through fractional reserve, whenever they would like to do so.
With cryptocurrencies The rules are mathematically decided --- the creators of the protocol cannot arbitrarily change the rules later and start printing more coins at a quantity/rate not agreed to when the protocol was created. The rules can only change with agreement of the users of the currency.
And on the flip side you can now go to jail for a drawing of Lisa Simpson in an S&M outfit and thanks to their not being any way to make money many who would need a liver and kidney who aren't rich (and can bribe their way to the top like Steve jobs did) will die.
the problem is laws and common sense almost never go together and laws WILL be abused, look at the kids doing time for taking pics of their own bodies and sexting them to their SO. Do I trust BTC? Not really but frankly I trust the governments of the world to make just laws even less.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
I expect that introducing politics ("properly run") will only hinder adoption. Perhaps that will be offset by other factors.
Yes, but some illegal things are bad. Is this a hard proposition? Like slaves. Slavery should never ever be tolerated.
I don't disagree. We have a duty as a democracy to reign in our abuses, and we do a poor job of it. But pretending a black market that enables the bad just to allow the morally ambiguous isn't a panacea.
Experience shows that government-regulated structures have their own issues. And when you have trouble with the regulating body, you can pick a better one. Oh, wait. No you can't.
Mining is pretty much only on AMD graphics cards which nobody in their right mind uses for real graphics. I don't think the two are related. Its probably more due to the number of people playing video games on their PCs.
"Those that start by burning books, will end by burning men."
my understanding is that a rough estimate pegs the number of outstanding dollars in the world as 10-15% (??) of the total supply of dollars because it holds its value quite well (sort of, right?)
If the US ever decided to go to a crypto-currency, perhaps to defeat counterfeiters or perhaps piss off some other country (China?) you'd either get an enormous influx of dollars into the world's system, causing significant inflation.
Just a random thought.
-
Of course, most of the atrocities in history, and almost none of the advances, have been committed by people "concerned about human beings."
> anything traded is 'currency'..
No....In theory, anything at all can become a currency, but in reality only a few items become the currency of a given community...
Yes...that's **exactly what I said**...minus some linguistic nitpicks on your part
We agree...your definition and mine are not in conflict...and even if they were it is irrelevant to my point about BTC not being like Napster.
Thank you Dave Raggett
The black market often brings goods in demand to people where the government blocks them. During many war times, they were the only way people got around rations to get food and luxuries in a decent supply.
Drugs are often a black market. Yet, by and large marijuana is harmless, legal alcohol is not.
Markets have existed before governments rose. Markets are not scary, they are what make us inherently human. The exchange.
Your fearmongering is rather sad. Yes, criminal acts are possible. That doesn't come from the nature of the exchange, it comes from human nature.
Or weed.
We used to do that. Now ask yourself why, since the 19th century, we decided that government regulation instead of contracts was a better solution?
"I know I will be modded down for this": where's the option '-1, Asking for it'?
"Beyond Bitcoin, which has the world's largest virtual currency market capitalization (nearly $8 billion), there are at least 100 other crypto currencies, ranging from Ripple ($1.4 billion) and Litecoin ($453 million) -- also at the high end -- to Deutsche eMark ($106,000) and Grumpycoin ($88,000) at the low end." FTFA
The problem is people are seeing the smoke and mirrors - Bitcoins are ""capitilized"" instead of seeing the fire - it's the fiat money which is losing all credibility and value. There may always be elites at the top with most of the money and if they're not clever they at least know what their clever scientific minions need to build their machines of the future - resources, particularly rare and valuable, useful resources like gold or to a less extent silver. They care not for your bit coins and nor will anyone else in the near distant future I think.
It's version number 2.
I call it '$hit oin'.
It's a craptocurrency, but one based on alimentary, time-tested economic principles, real old-stool. IANAL, but it rests on a strong fecal foundation, with minimal risk of law sewage.
I've said many times that Bitcoins, arguably the most recognizable name in cryptocurrency, are a scam. The whole method of mining or generating the fractions and units of these currencies seems murky to me, and the way their trade and transactions are carried out, from my point of view, are creepy at best.
But I find something else in the technolgy behind those trades and transcations that, if focused a bit differently and applied to other endeavours might be more useful. As I understand it, only one person may have a particular fraction or full unit of BTC (to keep using it as the example) at any given time, much like a physical coin. If I give one of my coins to someone else, they'll have it, I won't.
What if instead of using this technology as a currency we used it as digital goods themselves? like digital music or games or whatnot.... I don't know, but it might make it easier to settle or find some middle ground the argument of digital distribution and aftermarket sales. If they make only so many digital copies of one product, like they did for each "run" of a boxed/shrink-wrapped product, each with their own single indentifiable non-repudiable totally secure ID, people would be able to fully transfer their own digital copy to someone else, and blah blah blah, first sale doctrine blah blah blah, profit!
"expect first-movers such as Bitcoin to fall,"
I'm still waiting as this has been said EVERY YEAR since Bitcoin has been created.
And also ones that breathe.
One you will REALLY like (firewall rules table vs. monitoring HERE and other spots online)...
APK
P.S.=> Reply to me in email - I truly *think* (heck, I KNOW) you'll LOVE this one... apk
http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=4885825&cid=46474817
APK
P.S.=> Going to watch you fumble like the TROLLING IDIOT you are, being unable to disprove my points in favor of custom hosts files, yet again... lol!
... apk
How about zero, unless you can provide some argument to show it isn't. The number of possible BTC is known and finite, and the potential amount in circulation goes down (if a wallet is lost, there go the BTC, and a BTC wallet is lost far more easily than, say, gold). The economy is normally expanding, if slowly. That means that, if BTC were the normal currency, any given BTC would gain value by just sitting there. That is deflation.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
BTC can be created through fractional reserve banking. I deposit 1000 X into a bank account. The bank lends 900 of these to somebody else. That person now has 900 X, and I still have 1000 X. Doesn't matter what X is, maybe dollars or bitcoins.
That, by the way, is how banks make money. Do you want to eliminate banks entirely?
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
OK, you yourself can decide that being murdered is bad for you. I disagree; should I then murder you or pay somebody else? I don't think murder for hire should be legal. (Note: soldiers are not normally murderers for hire, as they operate in a much different legal and moral environment. A soldier that goes freelance can become one.)
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
There are bad laws, yes, and there always will be.
Steve Jobs did not bribe his way to the top. He found the optimal place to live and moved there until he got his transplant. Anybody with savings could do the same thing. (He also had the ability to get to other transplant centers fast, which the average person could not do, but that was secondary.) The fact that not everybody has the money and/or insurance for a transplant is a failure of the US health care system, as opposed to laws limiting the transplants.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Yes, hired killers are only illegal, certainly not bad.
I don't think I have much of a problem with others deciding for me that hired killers are bad for me.
Escrow is not the same thing as chargeback. Chargeback can protect you when your credit card or banking details are stolen and used by someone else. Escrow cannot, BECAUSE of the very optionality you mention, criminals will not use escrow services. And if they did, they'd probably only pay out to them, not you.
The thing about bank cards is you are paying for the charge back feature whether you need it or not.
Actually the merchant pays for it. At least where I come from credit card usage is free, provided you pay off the statement each month. Charges only come from interest after the first month, not for chargeback services.
Now you might say that that puts the price up, but you pay the same whether you buy on a CC or cash.
Now ask yourself why we decided, since the mid-late 20th century, that it had been a bad idea, and reversed it.
That happened across the spectrum, not even just for money. In Slashdot's favorite topic (no, not cars!), people are constantly going on about how copyright's terms got replaced by EULAs and even when there isn't a EULA, the legality of various actions is determined by "authorization" (by non-government entities), and I recently heard of something called "soft law" where the government is sort of involved in things and sort of not, all without having to bother with that old "Congress" nonsense.
As for money, I know people routinely make decisions about whether to use debit cards or credit cards based on chargeback predictions, where even debit card dollars are different than cash dollars in certain ways, and then some people are seriously into various "rewards programs" (or frequent flyer miles, or whatever) where they "earn" company currency that they spend (instead of dollars) on highly-restricted availability markets, whereas some other people actually convert dollars to company currencies, that they spend on files from Microsoft or Apple. (And I'm just scratching the surface on all the variants of company currencies.)
The idea that all money should be the same and have the same rules, might not be as old as my 19th century attitude, but it's old enough to label you as quaint and hopelessly out of date. And strangely, my 19th century view is more contemporary than yours. (I guess we do things in cycles. Laugh at me in 2060 when "neo-civil law" is the thing on everyone's lips.)
What happened is that we all disagree what the rules should be. So we agreed on one thing: we'll all go our seperate ways, sometimes as a conscious decision, sometimes with a whip at our backs, and sometimes by trickery. And yes, you (probably) agreed to also, every time you use one of these various cash alternatives. Bitcoin is just one more among the dozens, except interestingly, with the least amount of corrupt and co-opted baggage (so far).
"Believe me!" -- Donald Trump
Experience shows that government-regulated structures have their own issues.
Sure. But not as bad as unregulated ones, such as pyramid schemes, protection rackets and bitcoin.
And when you have trouble with the regulating body, you can pick a better one. Oh, wait. No you can't.
Democracy tends to be a coarsely granulated thing. No you can't choose every single thing, but you do get a say on the full package.
But you're criticising based on not being able to chose from several somethings when bitcoin doesn't even provide one such something.
If you're going to make that argument, then please don't bring the real world into it, because in the real world, figuring out whom to trust and whom not to, is something everyone already does.
I'm not really saying we shouldn't have a common set of protections; nobody is going to say "I'm pro-fraud." But we really do disagree on how low the bar can be, what risks (and expenses to insure against risks) are acceptable, and so on. And in the real world, everything is about risks, not absolute protections. One company uses a VISA merchant account, another just has a paypal account. Who are you to say one of them is wrong to accept Paypal's offer (or that both are wrong, since the company should just be waiting for checks (or cash) in the mail)?
People don't even know what the common set of rules is. I just assumed it was illegal for credit card companies to sell to third parties, information about what products I buy, but no. Go next door in one direction, and you'll find someone who is astonished that I could be so naive. Go next door from there, and you'll find someone else who still doesn't know, and is equally astonished for for the opposite reason.
Every time you see a piece of paper with a shitload of fine print, you are looking at direct evidence that nobody is satisfied that the lines are in the right places, and everyone is doing something about it, by sending out that fine print or by continuing to do business with the people who sent it to them.
You've had some unique experiences, then. Dollars themselves used to built out of less-regulated gold. Western Union, credit cards, and other more complicated (and more "rulesey") things were built out of dollars. Paypal, complete with its frustrating freezes (suddenly labeled "over-regulation" or "private regulation" by those burned), was built on credit cards and bank accounts. Your experience doesn't include any of this? (Or to call up my previous analogy, CPython and its wonderful garbage collection, is built atop C.)
Exactly. It's not, and it probably won't ever be (unless governments persuade people to adopt some blockchain policy changes). Yet, in the news today, Singapore says it intends to regulate Bitcoin exchanges within their jurisdiction. That's what I mean about building regulated things upon unregulated primatives. You might not understand Bitcoin, but if a government were to tell you that a particular Bitcoin escrow had that government's full faith and backing, then you might be willing to use that escrow, even if the funds were stored as Bitcoin. At the same time, there would be people out there, possibly having fun with Bitcoin and doing business with each other using that currency, without ever using that exchange and getting themselves stuck in the regulations.
Just like what happens with dollars.
"Believe me!" -- Donald Trump
If you're going to make that argument, then please don't bring the real world into it, because in the real world, figuring out whom to trust and whom not to, is something everyone already does.
Were that true, Mt Gox wouldn't have been in business.
Dollars themselves used to built out of less-regulated gold.
There was nothing unregulated about it. In a free market the price of gold and silver would move relative to each other. And the price of the dollar versus other currencies such as the Spanish Dollar and the Pound Sterling. Yet in the early days each of these were set by US law to a fixed exchange rate.
The gold standard simply put confidence in currencies by guaranteeing that the government had something to back it's paper promissory notes. That doesn't mean the money was unregulated. Quite the contrary.
Wait, you're seriously arguing that the deregulation of the financial sector in the latter half of the 20th century was a good thing?
I give up, you're another libertard.
"I know I will be modded down for this": where's the option '-1, Asking for it'?
I deposit 1000 X into a bank account. The bank lends 900 of these to somebody else.
This doesn't work, as soon as you need to withdraw 101 BTC to your Bitcoin wallet, and the 900 BTC loaned was already deposited to the Borrower's Bitcoin wallet.
With fiat currency, the fed always has more money to lend the bank, since the federal reserve is allowed to write checks from their $0 account. So if you deposit $1000 US in the bank, your bank lends out your $900 US, and you need to withdraw $250 US.
Your bank can always give you your $101, as long as they follow the fed's rules and have at least 1/10 the deposit for $ loaned out, because they can borrow $1 from the federal reserve at the currently near 0% interest on reserve funds, etc.
Just because a black market enables the trade of things which should be illegal doesn't mean it doesn't enable the trade of things which should not be.
There could be nothing like Wikileaks without a black market.
No, you are focusing on irrelevant mechanics. What you stole is the VALUE. This is no different than if you stole my paypal balance and there are a number of other laws which apply beyond simple theft because of the unauthorized use of my computer.
And you'd pay the same amount less in either CC or cash without it. Since the average person never or nearly never is able to use the chargeback mechanism on a CC and most who do are lying and claiming unauthorized use (since you do NOT qualify for a Chargeback if you are unhappy with a purchase) we are almost universally worse off for it existing.
Bitcoin is not software but of course there is theft. But that has nothing to do with copyright infringement being theft. If I steal your office cd it's theft. That has absolutely no bearing on the fact that torrenting your copy of office is NOT theft.
Mt Gox is a great example! Ok, so I mis-spoke when I said everybody already does it. I meant everybody already knows they should, and a majority of people do it. Most people wouldn't do business with Mt Gox, and the few who did, either got an "oops" reminder or had to shrug and admit they had been taking great risks.
You've got to remember that especially over the last year, a shitload of people involved in Bitcoin (and especially the people you hear about in the media) had been thinking of Bitcoin as a speculative investment, not as a type of money. They're the same kind of get-rich-quick-without-doing-anything people that were "day trading" a decade ago. They either knew they taking risks when they worked with companies like Mt Gox, or they were fools.
I'm amazed that people think Mt Gox somehow shows a failure in Bitcoin (or as some weird exception to all the same money-related common sense that people normally expect to see in other people and themselves). You've got this thing in its total infancy, going through its recent speculation bubble, and this is as bad as it gets?!
The especially funny thing about Mt Gox is that if they had been a dollars-euros exchange and the same thing had happened (where they disappeared with a bunch of peoples' dollars and euros) I wonder which currency people would blame it on. Was it dollar's fault, or was it euro's fault? (I just know that people who'd say "It was neither a dollar or euro problem; fools will be fools and sometimes they get burned," would be called anarchists or libertards.)
"Believe me!" -- Donald Trump
Since the average person never or nearly never is able to use the chargeback mechanism on a CC and most who do are lying and claiming unauthorized use
Two claims that you have no evidence for.
since you do NOT qualify for a Chargeback if you are unhappy with a purchase
Well of course not. Chargebacks are intended for fraud, not fickleness.
I specifically spoke about intangible things, so the CD is irrelevant.
Both software and bitcoin are streams of bits. You are categorically stating that taking one is theft and the other isn't. Yet you provide no reasoning nor evidence for that.
The especially funny thing about Mt Gox is that if they had been a dollars-euros exchange and the same thing had happened (where they disappeared with a bunch of peoples' dollars and euros) I wonder which currency people would blame it on.
Were it a dollars-euros exchange, it would have been regulated.
Bitcoin is not subject to, artificially limited by, nor of value due to copyright. You are not stealing bitcoin, you are stealing the value that bitcoin represents. That value is not some abstract hypothetical potential profit loss but a fairly easy (within a reasonable margin for exchange variation) to quantify amount of spending power in any currency in the world.
If I steal your credit card number (and bitcoin is ultimately nothing more than a secret number that allows you to unlock a persons money and spend it) and then buy something with it I've stolen pretty much the same thing. A number that allows me buy goods using a system that operates entirely on streams of bits.
If I hack your bank account and transfer the money out, that money also is a stream of bits. The same of your paypal account.
These things are unique and set up in such a way that the value, just like an individual tangible CD, can only be possessed by one person.
Software does not actually belong to the guy who holds a copyright in the case of copyright violation the software actually belongs to the guy sharing it and violating the copyright. You can steal a copyright, you can't steal the software. If you copy the software, you both now have copies and nothing is lost from the source. Software that is shared becomes no less functional no matter how much it is shared, software can be possessed by every person and they will all have the same thing with the same intrinsic value.
That's a very self serving dichotomy you are suggesting there.
Oh yes, you've made a very compelling argument to support your assertion that I've suggested a dichotomy... oh wait, nvm. You simply made the unsupported assertion.
You're the one who's saying these are completely different things. If you think that's not a dichotomy, you need to consult a dictionary.