Bill Gates: Bitcoin Is 'Better Than Currency'

An anonymous reader sends this excerpt from Entrepreneur.com: After long remaining mostly mum on Bitcoin, Microsoft's legendary co-founder Bill Gates has spoken. At the Sibos 2014 financial-services industry conference in Boston, America's richest man just threw his weight behind the controversial cryptocash. Well, at least as a low-cost payments solution. ... "Bitcoin is exciting because it shows how cheap it can be," he told Erik Schatzker during a Bloomberg TV's Smart Street show interview yesterday (video). "Bitcoin is better than currency in that you don't have to be physically in the same place and, of course, for large transactions, currency can get pretty inconvenient." ... While he seems relatively bullish on how inexpensive transacting in Bitcoin can be, Gates isn't singing the praises of its anonymity. The billionaire alluded in an oblique, somewhat rambling fashion to some of the more nefarious anonymous uses associated with Bitcoin.

Comments

If Bill Gates likes it

[jd]

Then clearly there are problems.

Re:If Bill Gates likes it

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, I can see a huge rush of cognitive dissonance as the bitcoin crowd tries to get their collective heads around the idea of agreeing with Bill Gates

Re:If Bill Gates likes it

[ArcadeMan]

This might explain the recent crash in value.

Re:If Bill Gates likes it

[PRMan]

No, it's fine, but could he please buy 1,000,000 bitcoins, so the price can go back up for a while...

Re:If Bill Gates likes it

[ArcadeMan]

Ask him to also buy a few million Dogecoins at $1 each or something. I'd be almost rich!

Re:If Bill Gates likes it

[Burz]

Then clearly there are problems.

You say that in jest. But Gates did help invent the high-consumption culture we have today, or at least he brought it to computing. For much of his reign at Microsoft, the average lifespan of a PC was 3 years.

Bitcoin appears to have its own 'consumerist innovation' built-in, in that it takes escalating amounts of computing power (and therefore, resources) to 'mine' the currency and validate its transactions (which aren't even anonymous or proof against establishment meddling as many have claimed).

Re:If Bill Gates likes it

[ArcadeMan]

The average lifespan of early PCs has nothing to do with Bill Gates or Microsoft and all to do with the early giant steps in the advancements of technology.

Re:If Bill Gates likes it

[Teresita]

"640 thousand bitcoins oughta be enough for everybody!"

Re:If Bill Gates likes it

[Mister Liberty]

Indeed. I smell a rat too.

Re:If Bill Gates likes it

[codebonobo]

Bitcoin being pseudo-anonymous allows the user to select which wallets they want anonymous and which ones they want attached to their identity.

2 tools in bitcoin : stealth addresses and coinjoin allow for this.

These tools when used with Tor and a marketplace like Openbazaar or Darkmarket insure that you are practically as anomynous as you can get.

Re:If Bill Gates likes it

[Billly Gates]

The average lifespan of early PCs has nothing to do with Bill Gates or Microsoft and all to do with the early giant steps in the advancements of technology.

No but it sure as hell gave him a ton of money and hundreds of billions over the past few decades for MS to invest in new products.

Richest companies are ones where people need you and keep coming back over and over again such as Gillette, Chevron, McDonalds, etc. MS of today might be different as businesses and working professionals still need MS office and Windows to get the job done but not like in the past during the reign of Gates where it kept going obsolete over and over and he got a cut for each upgrade for Office and the OS.

Re:If Bill Gates likes it

[Billly Gates]

Gilette. The company that turned what could/should be a 10c product that solves the problem of shaving, into a $20 product that gets updated every so often with gimicks like vibrating handles and aloe vera strips. THAT is your example of a company that "people need and keep coming back to", and as a contract to Microsoft's profiting from obsolesence schedule.

You are the BIGGEST FUCKING MORON on the Internet.

Right and they are rich and you are not. Your point?

It is a product where people use them every other day. Money maker cash king.

Re:If Bill Gates likes it

[Billly Gates]

Yeah, I can see a huge rush of cognitive dissonance as the bitcoin crowd tries to get their collective heads around the idea of agreeing with Bill Gates

Outside of Slashdot there is no hatred towards Bill Gates or Microsoft. Hate how you took your unix market away in the 90's all you want, but he knows how to compete and make money and yes Bill Gates may not be a brilliant software engineer but he knows his stuff in terms of business.

Bill Gates likes bitcoin and even Apple's NFC payments because in 3rd world countries getting payments and transactions are unreachable with transactions costs compared to countries like the US. Explain how BOA would want to do business with someone who only makes $15 a day when they require a $300 savings account etc.

Bitcoin goes around the banks that is oppressing 3rd world nations

Re:If Bill Gates likes it

[itzly]

He only bought 640k, claiming that this is enough.

Re: If Bill Gates likes it

[ArcadeMan]

When Microsoft does the same thing as Apple, they're copying.
When Apple does the same thing as Xerox, they're stealing.

Trying to re-write history much?

Re:If Bill Gates likes it

[spire3661]

WE hate him for NON-petty reasons. He set back computing by DECADES, almost missed the internet, but yeah, hes a fucking genius. Bill Gates was smart and lucky, which he used to be a complete and utter toolbag. No one should laud him, ever.

Re:If Bill Gates likes it

[elgatozorbas]

Wish I could joint, but only have tails.

Re:If Bill Gates likes it

[Billly Gates]

I hated him too in my youth.

Now since I am older I see things differently. You can think Intel for the crappy intel 8086 instruction sets and lack of things like VM support, multitasking, and protected memory, which forced MS to make crappy operating systems and compatible with that crappy system mixed with techno luddities who were forced to switch to computers and didn't know better created the mess of the past.

If the original IBM pc was a motorolla 68000 things would be different.

Keep in mind superior operating systems like VMS, MVS, and Unix required exotic cpu architectures that were expensive too. MS eventually caught around but business users who do not mind crappy insecure software (Look at IE 6) really held things back and forced MS to keep NT out of mainstream for a full decade.

Things finally are caught up but still has tons of buggage. Gates did the whole pay him whether the OS is his or not which started this mess and prevented OS/2.

Re: If Bill Gates likes it

[ArcadeMan]

And yet people keep saying that Apple "stole" the GUI from Xerox. Steve Jobs saw the value of the GUI and the mouse, the guys at Xerox had no clue about the potential of both.

Re:If Bill Gates likes it

[unixisc]

Or they can build a bitcoin mining app for Windows Phone, and have Lumias and other such phones mining bitcoins whenever they're idle and being charged.

Re: If Bill Gates likes it

[tlhIngan]

And yet people keep saying that Apple "stole" the GUI from Xerox. Steve Jobs saw the value of the GUI and the mouse, the guys at Xerox had no clue about the potential of both.

Apple "paid" Zerox for the GUI, though. They gave them a bunch of Apple stock as payment. Now, the Xerox guys just decided to dump them, but that's more their loss than anything.

Of course, it was only until they actually tried to do things did they realize the Alto GUI's was pretty much useless (it didn't have overlapping windows!). So Apple paid Xerox for the idea, even though Wozniak in the end ended up doing the whole GUI.

Re:If Bill Gates likes it

[tlhIngan]

Now since I am older I see things differently. You can think Intel for the crappy intel 8086 instruction sets and lack of things like VM support, multitasking, and protected memory, which forced MS to make crappy operating systems and compatible with that crappy system mixed with techno luddities who were forced to switch to computers and didn't know better created the mess of the past.

Actually, the Intel processors weren't the problem, it was that everything used DOS.

The 386 was just fine and dandy and Windows itself made use of a lot of its features including virtualized x86 mode. In fact, Windows in Enhanced mode did a bunch of icky stuff - it sucked DOS' brains dry to figure out what files were open and all that, passed that information into the Windows kernel, which then hosted DOS in a v86 instance. (all DOS apps you launch from Windows are hosted in similar circumstances as well).

Of course, the problem was it was a nasty combination of code - the enhanced kernel was 32-bit to get all these features, but most of the programs it ran were 16-bit Windows programs (and Windows wouldn't get a 32-bit runtime until later - Windows NT which spawned the Win32 API, a subset of which was ported to Windows 3.x as Win32s).

And Windows did have protected mode. It's just that a lot of the crap Windows had to do in order to work meant it didn't work too well.

Hell, think of it this way - Linux ran on a 386, the same one required for Windows enhanced mode. Yet Linux got all the memory protection and preemptive multitasking going while Windows was still cooperatively multitasked.

Windows was the problem, not Intel.

Hell, OS/2 ran on the same hardware.

Currency or cash ?

[alexhs]

Bitcoin is better than currency in that you don't have to be physically in the same place

Apparently Bill Gates can't distinguish currency from cash...

Re:Currency or cash ?

[fahrbot-bot]

Bitcoin is better than currency in that you don't have to be physically in the same place

Apparently Bill Gates can't distinguish currency from cash...

Or a credit card, which, I believe, has many "not physically in the same place" uses.

Re:this is a prelude to all people being microchip

[ArcadeMan]

I don't want to be Microchip'ped, I want to be Atmel'ed!

Talk is cheap

[mariox19]

Let him put his money where his mouth is. Are all of his cash holdings in BitCoin?

Re:Talk is cheap

[shutdown -p now]

Given that he's promoting it as a payment method rather than currency, you're asking the wrong question. A better question is, when Gates & Melinda Foundation will start accepting donations in BTC?

Bill Gates: Bitcoin Is 'Better Than Currency

[The Grim Reefer]

I'm sure those who lost their Bitcoin in the Mt. Gox mess back in February may feel a little differently.

Re:Bill Gates: Bitcoin Is 'Better Than Currency

[BasilBrush]

They put there cash under somebody else's mattress and are complaining they were robbed?

Hey, they were libertarians. They didn't believe they needed their bank to be government regulated.

Re:Bill Gates: Bitcoin Is 'Better Than Currency

[codebonobo]

Most anarchists and libertarians understood bitcoin is p2p and both warned and laughed at those who stored their bitcoins in Mt-Gox. Mt-Gox was mainly used by either the less technical savvy, or daytrade investor types who kept their money in an exchange because they wanted to profit from volatility. Many of us still use exchanges but immediately withdraw the coins upon purchase and store them in mult-sig cold storage.

Re:Bill Gates: Bitcoin Is 'Better Than Currency

[squiggleslash]

The revisionism within the Bitcoin community about Mt. Gox is astounding. The truth is that the Bitcoin "establishment", as it was, was generally pro-Mt. Gox, and indeed some parts of the system continued to promote Mt. Gox long after the company went insolvent. . Probably the most notorious example was Blockchain.info (Archive.org has a gap of archives between December and July before anyone comments, but the fact I was able to make this tweet should confirm this image was current back in March.)

The scale of the Mt. Gox disaster was a failure of the system, of the consensus driven establishment that set up and supported Bitcoins. By both refusing to accept the need for some form of regulatory environment, voluntary or by legislative fiat, and the deliberate herding of newcomers to that company, the system showed itself to have major flaws.

Moreover though, it showed flaws that the community is unwilling to address, preferring instead to either use sophistry - from arguments that Bitcoin is independent of the environment it trades in, to the pretense that you can't trust US banks to manage your dollars because banks in Sierra Leone that trade in dollars aren't regulated - or just plain pretending what happened didn't happen, the "Oh, I knew Mt. Gox was going to be a problem six months before it went bust* and nobody was recommending it and everyone's always said keep your money in your own wallet and..." argument.

BTW, that asterisk next to the word bust? Funny thing: people really do make that argument, but Mt. Gox, while not bankrupt six months before it went bankrupt (well, duh), had by that point made it hard for people to take money out of their accounts. Most of Mt. Gox's victims are likely people who were customers before anyone "noticed something was wrong". But Blockchain.info was recommending them anyway.

Yes, some libertarians laughed at those who stored money at Mt. Gox. They did it after it became too late to do anything about it. There's always a group of self-described libertarians who laugh at victims of business failures. I've never understood why.

Re:Bill Gates: Bitcoin Is 'Better Than Currency

[codebonobo]

Yes, some anarchists and libertarians did use Mt-gox and were fooled by Mark. - Roger Ver is a prominent example - https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Despite this, just do a search for warning posts from many members on sites like bitcointalk to see how many people were warning others about Mt-Gox well into advance. The amount of warnings posts and time stretched on for a couple of years because Mt Gox had a history of horrible customer service and being hacked.

Bitcoin has a very diverse group of users with many different political backgrounds. Many anarchists tend to be the paranoid type, thus were much more likely not to jump through all the KYC steps Mt-Gox required or trusted anyone with their private keys.

I understand its popular to label most Bitcoin users as libertarian/anarchists, but nothing could be further from the truth. At most you have a third of users leaning that direction at the moment and rapidly decreasing.

Since no one reads the friggn article

[SpankiMonki]

Here's what Gates actually said:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DyAufA2lWn0

I read his comment as: "the [pseudo] anonymity of virtual currency technology is what's holding it back". And since there's little context provided in the FA or the vid, I'm going to go ahead and assume Gates' comments referred to virtual currencies in general - not just bitcoin.

Of course,

[MouseTheLuckyDog]

Now that virtual currencies are getting some traction, Gates waqnts to jump in so he can get credit for being an early backer.

Re:Of course,

[ArcadeMan]

That would fit the usual Microsoft-style definition of "early".

Re:Of course,

[ILongForDarkness]

Well to be fair being early and out of business is still worse than being "early" and a multibillion dollar company.

Why mine?

[gwolf]

OK, mining adds an incentive into solving the puzzle to get enough units of the currency available. BUT OTOH, why should most people invest in mining, particularly when it is not worth its cost anymore? A currency is acquired through labor (or selling stuff) and is exchanged for stuff (or paying for labor). People don't need to generate new bitcoin units, just to use them.

Re:Why mine?

[itzly]

Ordinary people shouldn't invest in mining. It's only profitable for a few big places, with the lowest $/Hash ratio.

If he put his money where his mouth is...

[gwolf]

Then nobody would be able to listen to him anymore.

Re:If he put his money where his mouth is...

[penguinoid]

The Aztecs put their money where their mouth is, and it didn't turn out too well for them. They had a saying, "You can eat money. It's delicious."

Re:640 k Satoshis..

[ArcadeMan]

My point is that you can make a Bitcoin transaction for ZERO SATOSHI if you're willing to wait for the confirmation.

Celebrities and IQ ...

[CaptainDork]

... are not always a positive correlation.

Screw Bill.

What does DiCaprio think?

No, wait ...

Paris Hilton.

Re:Celebrities and IQ ...

[CaptainDork]

Bill Gates is an asshole. He's a very poor communicator and a rip-off artist.

He's got so much money that he's deemed himself qualified to decide who needs his excess wealth.

There's a reason why he's a billionaire: He charged too fucking much.

Wealth != sudden enlightenment.

He's useless as tits on a boar hog.

Economist talking ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Does he has a degree in economics, specializing in money and banking ?

Re:Economist talking ?

[Anonymous Coward]

No he doesn't. And that's probably a good reason to listen to his opinions. :)

Or do you really want to hear from an accredited economist such as Alan Greenspan or Ben Bernanke, the guys who couldn't see the dot-com or housing bubbles?

Re:Economist talking ?

[shutdown -p now]

No, but he made, what, some $100 billion dollars in personal fortune through his business? I'd say that makes him more qualified to judge this than your average economist.

Electroic transactions

[tomhath]

FTFA:

financial transactions will eventually “be digital, universal and almost free.”

Not so much an endorsement of cryptocurrency as an opinion that physical currency is obsolete. Until security gets a whole lot better I'll continue to carry small amounts of cash when I go out. Of course Gates probably hasn't used any cash in decades.

Re:Electroic transactions

[codebonobo]

If you understand bitcoin how to secure your private keys you will realize that it is much more secure than cash. If my cell phone was stolen I would still have my bitcoins and it would be practically impossible for thieves to use them unlike your wallet filled with cash. I have almost no risk of hackers or thieves stealing my offline multisig wallet either.

Bitcoin's problem right now is mainly the steep learning curve but more hardware wallets are beginning to roll out so users can be more secure without being a security expert.

These have already hit the market:

http://www.bitcointrezor.com/ http://www.hardbit.cn/ http://btchip.com/

This is being released this month-

https://mycelium.com/entropy

And this will shortly follow along with other products- https://mycelium.com/bitcoinca...

Re:Electroic transactions

[David_Hart]

FTFA:

financial transactions will eventually “be digital, universal and almost free.”

Not so much an endorsement of cryptocurrency as an opinion that physical currency is obsolete. Until security gets a whole lot better I'll continue to carry small amounts of cash when I go out. Of course Gates probably hasn't used any cash in decades.

Physical currency will become obsolete when either digital currency can't be tracked or having physical currency is considered a crime, which is coming....

As it is, there have been recent cases in the southern US where people have been stopped on the highway by police, found to have more than $200 in cash, and have had it confiscated on suspicion of being used for the drug trade without any trial, evidence, or judicial process. So, if you plan on buying a used car or boat, don't bring cash with you or you could have it seized by the police...

Re:Electroic transactions

[lgw]

Canada actually issued a "traveler warning" to people coming to the US about how our corrupt cops would just steal any cash they had.

Re:Electroic transactions

[SuricouRaven]

I'd think it far too risky to store more than a little spending money on something so insecure as a cellphone. With bitcoin, it falls to the user to make sure their coins are secure against accident or theft - just like with cash. Lots of people lost their coins to dead hard drives because they didn't make proper backups.

Re:Electroic transactions

[codebonobo]

Correct, but backups are not needed with deterministic wallets, the backup is the initial seed. Users should either just store spending cash or use a hotwallet solution on their cell phone to protect against users who don't copy down their determinist seed on wallet creation or get a virus.

Re:Electroic transactions

[david_thornley]

You do realize that your "if" leaves out about 99% of the population, of course. I know how secure my cash is. I can store money safely long-term by putting it into a bank account. If my credit card is misused, I'm not responsible. You try getting the average person to (a) understand how to keep a wallet safely (safe from losing it, and safe from having the bitcoin stolen), and (b) why they should go through that to handle their money.

Re:Electroic transactions

[msc.buff]

These links were very informative and helpful. Your at +5 already so have a Virtual High Five...:)

Re:Electroic transactions

[codebonobo]

Your statements were equally valid for either the internet or credit cards when they first became available. I agree with you bitcoin isn't ready for the mainstream consumer; this will change quicker than most people realize. Already, I prefer paying with Bitcoin and can execute transactions quicker and less expensive than with my credit card.

Once Hardware wallets are refined, prepare for a future where everyone carries one on their keychain.

Re:Electroic transactions

[david_thornley]

I remember people knowing how to use credit cards. Any problems were unrelated to actually using one. The internet was usable with a pretty basic understanding. That brought a lot of problems with it, but hardly fatal ones. Bitcoin provides an easy way for a careless person to lose all their money quickly, unlike previous financial systems.

How do you execute Bitcoin purchases faster and less expensively than a credit card? My credit card purchases take a few seconds, taking a few percent of the money in question. Who provides instant block verification for 3%, sufficient to call the transaction verified?

I'll take his word for it.

[cyberjock1980]

There's an old Chinese proverb that reads "A wise man will always take his own advice!"

So Bill Gates has owns how many millons/billions of dollars in Bitcoins?

Re:640 k Satoshis..

[Pentium100]

It doesn't cost 25BTC to mine the block. Mining the block generates brand new 25BTC. Transaction fees are added to that, so the miner receives slightly more than 25BTC.

Mining from a tree

[gwolf]

That gives whole new twist to "money does not grow on trees". It did. And yes, some people surely prefered to use their bit of land for money-mining than for having an extra guest room.

Less savvy?

[dbIII]

Meanwhile the rest of us laugh at not just the MTGOX losers but the lot of you taken in by the pyramid scam with a hidden founder at the top of the pyramid. If you are so savvy and an anarchist who likes the label libertarian, then how come you haven't noticed that each bitcoin contains a tracking trail that makes it of less use to anarchists or libertarians than real cash where it's very difficult to track? It's almost as if it was invented to provide a panopticon into financial transactions.

Re:Less savvy?

[codebonobo]

Bitcoin is an open source protocol, with over 60% of the source code already re-written since created; Satoshi's identity is unnecessary. Being pseudo-anonymous simply means the end user ultimately decides which wallets he wants public and completely transparent and which they want private. Stealth addresses and coinjoin used with TOR allow us to be as anonymous as it gets.

P.s... I never suggested I "like" the label libertarian and please look up the definition of a pyramid scheme.

Re:Less savvy?

[itzly]

Real cash is easy to track. Most bills don't travel very far between each time they are taken from an ATM and deposited back at a bank. At both of those points, you can link the serial number of the bill to the identity of the person. Also, you have to be physically present to exchange cash, which opens you up to even more surveillance options, as well as limiting where you can practically spend your cash.

Re: Less savvy?

[itzly]

These aren't very practical suggestions. Try getting a paycheck in quarters, carrying them around, and spending them without anybody complaining (and remembering who you are). In the second case, even if you can find a good source of $100 bills, and you can convince the coffee shop owner to take it, you'll get 4 twenty dollar bills as change. Now if you spend 2 or more of those in the same transaction, someone could deduce that it must be have been the person that came in with the hundred dollar bill. In the meantime, the fact that you're handling $100 bills makes you extra suspicious.

Re: Less savvy?

[codebonobo]

Bitcoin and OpenBazaar anonymity is not an extreme position, all of what you fear can already be done with cash. It is merely about keeping the status quo that has existed for the last ~4k years with physical currency. The lack of privacy is something relatively new. The extreme position is to go along with totalitarian ideals that centralized entities should control and know exactly how all money is spent.

Only because governments aren't issuing digital

[VTBlue]

Bitcoin's value as a payment system isn't really novel. Tommorow if the governement chose to excercise it's authority, it could make bitcoin obsolete by making all currency digital and providing free transaction services via the credit/debit/postal systems. Credit cards would still exist, but debit cards would die, and the credit card industry would be collapse to a fraction of what it is today. Economy would also be better off because business would retain an extra 2-3%, which wouldn't goto Wall Street.

Re:Only because governments aren't issuing digital

[codebonobo]

We fully expect that governments will eventually fork our code and create a competing "govcoin" that is both popular and useful. This coin would likely be an inflationary proof or stake or inflationary DPoS variety. Bitcoin will retain certain key differences which will make it useful being that it has a fixed money supply and is a Proof of Work currency that is sovereign outside of governments. Even if every country made Bitcoin illegal(unlikely), Bitcoin has a bright future fulfilling an important role for the black and grey markets which is bigger than the white-market worldwide.

Travel warning for Canadians ...

[golodh]

What you mean is this: http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/a... Good informal advice too. A look at the mechanism at work is provided here: http://www.washingtonpost.com/...

Bill Gates...

[VAXcat]

...I've seen what his work is like - not all that interested in his opinions...

Re:Bill Gates...

[david_thornley]

He did a pretty darn good BASIC interpreter. I don't know what you're complaining about.

Cognitive dissonance

[garote]

"its popular to label most Bitcoin users as libertarian/anarchists, but nothing could be further from the truth. At most you have a third of users leaning that direction"

What a strange statement.
You might need to examine your understanding of the phrase "nothing could be further from the truth".

Also, why do you assert this fraction is "rapidly decreasing"? Online surveys somewhere? A gut feeling?

Re:Cognitive dissonance

[codebonobo]

To understand the context of my statement, you need to understand the origins of crypto-currencies and the cipher-punks who created this technology. Investors and other users came into the Bitcoin ecosystem later. I do admit my statement is a bit of an exaggeration because there are, per capita, higher percentages of anarchists involved in bitcoin than the general population but these numbers have dropped from ~90% down to around ~30 %. This a a rough estimate I measure from speaking with thousands of bitcoin users over the years, indeed anecdotal, but with a decent sample size.

Re:Cognitive dissonance

[garote]

Hmm... So are cipher-punks anarchists? Or did BitCoin attract that astounding percentage of anarchists later for some reason?

Re:Cognitive dissonance

[codebonobo]

Yes, most cipher/cypher-punks fall into some spectrum of anarchism and more specifically are typically Crypto-anarchists. Here is a list of prominent ones https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... if you wanted to individually research their politics.

Anyone, any organization, or politics is free to use and benefit from crypto-currencies, in this sense Bitcoin is politically nuetral . Both the designers politics and the intrinsic design structure remains anarchistic in nature, however. There is no majority consensus algorithm within Bitcoin where the majority can impose rules over a minority of the community. Even if one person disagrees they have a choice to hardfork the chain and carry on normally with the ease of simple non-action in resistance to any change they disagree with.

Bitcoin

[TheMadClicker]

Ah, I have a simple question. How can you access you wealth in bitcoin if we have, for an example, a strong EMP, knocking most of the worlds computers, including yours. I think I'll stick with a known comodity, silver or gold. Seriously, where would bitcoin be without computers?

Re:640 k Satoshis..

[david_thornley]

And I can make a credit card transaction in much less than a minute, with what is usually a fairly small fee for the card issuer. I can make a cash transaction even faster, especially if I've got exact change. In both cases, I can then walk away and do other stuff because the transaction is complete.

In some cases, this matters. In others, it doesn't. However, having to wait to complete a transaction is never good and can be very inconvenient.