bit¢oin$

but do u have an argument against it that isn't "ew people i don't like on twitter"?

― flopson, Wednesday, December 9, 2015 1:14 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

that post is mostly about how the story is crazy and its underlying libertarian ideology with passing reference to more technical reasons how bitcion is bad tho it does contain a lot more substance on that level than u r giving it credit for, i have written a lot itt and the other thread abt why i think bitcoin is bad u cn read if u want, and i guarantee u if 25% of all government backed money was stolen it wld represent a global crisis and likely collapse of our monetary systems, on top of which bitcion has no insurance mechanisms in place to protect ppl from theft like if yr bank account gets hacked the bank will refund the money or if yr cc gets stolen u dont pay for that which allows ppl to have confidence in using our banking system, the fact that bitcion doesnt have these mechanisms in place is actually one of its big selling points particularly amongst the entrepreneurial segment who often make a cutting out the middle man argument for why bitcoin/blockchain can be more efficient, but of course the middlemen while charging a fee are also providing a service

ok i will read this thread i'm sorry

let's not forget that egghead's company also gave millions of dollars to rap genius

― iatee, Wednesday, December 9, 2015 1:21 PM (3 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

as corny as the annotations are and as hateable as the founders are, genius is, kind of a good website?? *ducks under wall as brick flies over head* partic from a norm-internet perspective

I think bitcoin is very useful for ppl who need to do money laundering

― μpright mammal (mh), Wednesday, 9 December 2015 18:15 (14 minutes ago) Permalink

yeah or move money across borders, avoid taxes, etc. It's like diamonds you don't have to put in a suitcase.

flopson I usually appreciate your ilx contrarianism but I think you may have crossed a line

wld argue its not one of the better money laundering services considering every transaction is by nature public, the authorities just need to match a name to an account and theyve got u

ya i googled bitcoin laundering and it looks like lots of people got arrested for that

theres already a lot of great money laundering systems in place folks!

Andressen has two main points, which I think are strung together for terms of convenience.

The first is the idea that a secure, trust-oriented system of exchange is valuable for its lack of reliance on a "trusted authority" is useful -- no fees because it's a system of trust exchange, which I can in no way argue against. Ignore the "low fees" part though:

It’s not as much that the Bitcoin currency has some arbitrary value and then people are trading with it; it’s more that people can trade with Bitcoin (anywhere, everywhere, with no fraud and no or very low fees) and as a result it has value.

The second point is that fees and the lack of an international currency or unit of value is a hindrance to transactions. This is also very true! Our current banking transfer system is very broken, and relies on a bunch of outdated technology with limited trust and delays that are meant to somewhat mitigate that, but you still end up with tons of issues of liability, faked checks, transaction fees for payment processing, international trade fees.

Banks and credit card companies are finally getting around to addressing that issue through single-use codes generate by cards with chips in them, new financial companies that alleviate bank transfers by being trust providers (I have a few friends who work in that space), and bringing the infrastructure of financial trade up to modern-day standards instead of using hand-written slips of paper with magic ink on them.

At some point you need a trusted way to secure your things that are worth money. If you believe bitcoin has monetary value, the guy with the USB drive on him at all times is basically the equivalent of carrying all your savings around in a duffel bag wherever you go, with the caveat that all that value could disappear if you die and no one else has access to your encrypted files.

So you end up needing a trusted second party to do escrow for you, or set up a bitcoin payment terminal, or hold on to your keys in some way to ensure continuity of savings if anything happens to you. And we're back to having payment processors and banks.

Bitcoin is worth something as a unit of trust so its monetary value is based on:
- The idea that such a thing has an inherit worth due to scarcity and your ability to hold on to it
- Continuing real-life transactions where it's proven you can trade bitcoin for money, goods, or services

A handful of people tipping each other for witty comments on reddit or buying a few pieces of computer hardware isn't going to keep that second case going. But there are people who don't like traditional financial institutions who want to avoid traditional payment infrastructures who are willing to gamble in high-value transactions. And it's not because they want to avoid fees, it's because they want to stay under the radar.

the tension btw trying to prove yr some kind of new-millenium übermensch and build the infrastructure necessary for something like a widely usable currency is so fascinating. i think these ppl are too obsessed with autonomy to build things other than self-serving consumer products and all the failings of bitcoin uphold that. liberation through technology is some facile garbage really

otm

So you end up needing a trusted second party to do escrow for you, or set up a bitcoin payment terminal, or hold on to your keys in some way to ensure continuity of savings if anything happens to you. And we're back to having payment processors and banks.

otm

technology has probably already done 90% of the liberating it will do for us (until it annihilates us) whether or not bitcoin is part of the remaining 10%

proving ownership of large value assets right now is largely down to reliance on government and private infrastructure having electronic records, or in many places, a paper trail in a courthouse somewhere showing the chain of ownership of a house or business. having an actual key showing history and provenance would be good, but again, the authority to make such transfers would not be something your average homebuyer is going to do.

bitcoin is kind of silly as a day-to-day instrument of transaction because of its inherent scarcity, ensuring a constant rate of inflation even if it's used by the same people continuously

tl;dr if you thought the gold standard was bad, bitcoin is backed on the ability for it to be used for illegal commerce

one thing that interesting is bitcion is an open standard that the creators have actually managed to get directly rich off of

"the first practical solution to a longstanding problem in computer science called the Byzantine Generals Problem"

so much wrong with this sentence, from a technical standpoint.

explain?

one thing that interesting is bitcion is an open standard that the creators have actually managed to get directly rich off of

yeah but that one guy died w/ poop and bulletholes everywhere, seemingly in poverty, and the other one just got raided so who knows. it will be interesting to learn why they didn't actually seem to take/use the money.

brings us back to my original point: what a crazy story!

the one guy did use some of the money to found bitbusinesses fwiw

this is also why the idea of a "partial bitcoin" is completely bogus to me. you either have a bitcoin, or you don't. if you give someone a "partial bitcoin" you are relying on a second party, who actually holds a place in the blockchain, to reallocate value between you and someone else. there is absolutely nothing to stop them from saying "you never had anything" to you! you're putting your complete trust in that authority. and some of those authorities have had names like "magic the gathering online exchange"

the creators _may_ have gotten rich or will get rich, but again, it's predicated on an ability to trade bitcoin for cash or other things of value. remember:
- it's a "currency" based on scarcity
- your ownership is completely predicated on keeping some pieces of data safe

if they cashed out to someone else who is going to sit on it, then it probably wouldn't be a big hit to the system. if they cashed out by selling to a large number of people, then you'd have a huge deflation wave as there's no stabilizing force. i might be botching my economics there, but the ability to cash out is only possible if you can get someone to pay you the market rate.

fwiw i dont think bitcoins are bad, just a dead end.

technology has probably already done 90% of the liberating it will do for us

i mean... this is making me think abt zuckerbro proudly telling everyone he is donating his fortune to making humans better or w/e. the myth of man as autonomous actor in history &c &c. if anyone is writing abt this stuff srsly i wld like to read it - i feel like most takes on techbro culture are routinely dismissive or reductive or overly focused on technical stuff rather than like a big picture take

the two main cases for a large-scale cashout would be someone with a ton of cash who wants to set up a bitcoin bank (Marc Andreessen this is your big chance buddy!), or someone who wants to transfer a loooot of money under the radar, regularly, who also wants to keep the value afloat (do you like drugs?)

one wld think they cld cash out single digits millions a year w/o driving the price down too far

except that everyone is watching that one wallet and there might be some bizarre bitculture panic lol

technology has probably already done 90% of the liberating it will do for us

idk man I work in a field where scientific work that formerly took a ton of land and a bunch of seasonal workers (and was 60% effective) now takes a 40'x40' plot and a handful of employees and is over 90% effective, lots of gains yet to be made

yeah i personally think technology prob still has a ways to go

now if we cld just get to work on distributing the liberation a little a little more equitably

those seasonal workers need a universal basic income imo

yup

My favorite Krugman bitcoin takedown

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/04/12/adam-smith-hates-bitcoin/

silicon valley dudes and bitcoin, it's basically

sv: "there needs to be a trust-based ledger away from governments!"

"oh, who is going to handle being intermediaries and make handle this ledger?"

sv: "my libertarian-minded business is very trustworthy"

It’s not as much that the Bitcoin currency has some arbitrary value and then people are trading with it; it’s more that people can trade with Bitcoin (anywhere, everywhere, with no fraud and no or very low fees) and as a result it has value.

I know this is going back a lot of posts but this is so incredibly untrue right now, there are HUGE amounts of fraud and there are tons of fees

biggest/simplest argument vs BTC becoming a viable anything - it does not scale. currently the protocol handles about 3 transactions a second and there's no way to increase that without forking the chain and if you look at the recent block size debacle there's no way to get 51% of miners to agree on anything.

the krug is anti bitcoin?! i have a big ditch to dig myself out of haha

technology has probably already done 90% of the liberating it will do for us

i mean... this is making me think abt zuckerbro proudly telling everyone he is donating his fortune to making humans better or w/e. the myth of man as autonomous actor in history &c &c. if anyone is writing abt this stuff srsly i wld like to read it - i feel like most takes on techbro culture are routinely dismissive or reductive or overly focused on technical stuff rather than like a big picture take

― LEGIT (Lamp), Wednesday, December 9, 2015 1:57 PM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i just meant in the obvious way, like a shovel "liberates" you from toiling in the dirt with your bare hands, a tractor liberates you from using a damn shovel, someone with tuberculosis who takes penicylin is "liberated" from dying, etc

technology has sparse revolutions and in between the revolutions has diminishing returns. the next revolution is either this crispy medical shit or we invent robots that enslave us either way i'm down

biggest/simplest argument vs BTC becoming a viable anything - it does not scale. currently the protocol handles about 3 transactions a second and there's no way to increase that without forking the chain and if you look at the recent block size debacle there's no way to get 51% of miners to agree on anything.

― frogbs, Wednesday, December 9, 2015 4:20 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

lol holy shit, had no idea about stuff at this level of detail but that makes it 10x more hilarious that anyone thinks this can become a currency.

this article is pretty good
http://brokenlibrarian.org/bitcoin/

8) So could Bitcoin ever be a real currency?

No, for one simple reason. Bitcoin does not scale. The network is very specifically designed to process a very limited number of transactions in each block, and each block by definition takes about ten minutes to process, regardless of how powerful the Bitcoin verification network is. The more popular that Bitcoin becomes, the slower it will be for every single transaction to get processed. The claim that Bitcoin is "instant" is demonstrably false.

(It is also not "free", because while adding a transaction fee to your Bitcoin transaction is technically optional, without a fee it is unlikely that your transaction will be verified any time soon. Fees are a de facto requirement to get your transactions processed.)

More importantly, the blockchain size is increasing rapidly. The blockchain file is currently many gigabytes in size, and the entire chain must be downloaded in order to mine or verify your own transactions. (Or to track somebody else's transactions: see the part about anonymity above.) You can use a third-party service to store and transfer your Bitcoins, but these services have historically tended to get hacked or just suddenly vanish, taking all your internet funny-money with it.

If Bitcoin actually became popular as a currency and not just as a speculative commodity, the blockchain would swell to an absurd and unmanageable size. Visa (for example) maintains multi-terabyte (at least) databases of financial transactions; now imagine if everybody who wanted to safely use a Visa card had to have a copy of all that data (including lists of everybody else's transactions).

9) Wait, does that mean that every advantage that people claim Bitcoin has is not actually true?

Yes. It's not anonymous, it's not free, it's not instant, and it's not convenient. It's extremely difficult to make money on it, mining is useless, and it's literally impossible that it will ever go into widespread use. Unless you have an ideological stake in the concept of Bitcoin (or want to buy drugs and/or child porn), there is literally no reason to get involved in it.

There's actually one thing that Bitcoin supporters claim about Bitcoin which is true: it has no chargebacks. Bitcoin transactions are irreversible. Whether this is actually an advantage or not probably depends on whether you've ever been ripped off before. If you haven't, then getting involved in Bitcoin is probably a good way to fix that.

"the first practical solution to a longstanding problem in computer science called the Byzantine Generals Problem"

so much wrong with this sentence, from a technical standpoint.

― big WHOIS aka the nameserver (s.clover), Wednesday, December 9, 2015 1:46 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

explain?

― flopson, Wednesday, December 9, 2015 1:50 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

basically bg is a big famous class of problems of a certain sort in computer science that have to do with distributed systems, and lots of solutions for different problems have been developed over lots and lots of years, many of which are "practical" and used in important aspects of work, like managing distributed clusters. a "distributed ledger" is only really semi-related to the classic family of bg problems, and bitcoin was one of the first to tackle that -- but it was fundamentally about recognizing a new _class_ of problem rather than a new solution to a longstanding known problem. (and the utility of a distributed ledger is what is sort of growing in popularity more broadly -- i think that those concepts will become more widespread and common even as bitcoin itself ends up sort of fading away).

This all changed as Bitcoin was discovered by three types of people. First, there were the internet libertarian types who liked the idea of a currency that was not controlled by a government. For them, Bitcoin represented an ideology. Second, there were people who wanted to use Bitcoin as a semi-anonymous international currency for illegal transactions, such as drugs, weapons, or illicit pornography, as well as a possible method for laundering money. For them, Bitcoin represented safety from the law. Third, there were people who viewed Bitcoin as a method to get rich by getting in on the ground floor of a new kind of money. These people saw Bitcoin as an investment.

--

almost everyone fucking w bitcoin is doing it for ideological reasons, the rest are in it to buy drugs online which is a bad idea btw, then there are a handful of thinkfluencers/investors w free associative dreams of the blockchain dancing in their heads

:]

buying a few drugs online seems like a bad use case, maybe buying a few hundred kilos of cocaine it is more practical

drugs deals are all about relationships dont go online

can we talk more about the aussiee

yes

oi m8

the mixture of bragging / trying to hide his identity reminds me of walt in mid-series breaking bad

http://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/s--ZZP8RDuV--/gmoyhqntwlvt1uzbu6fp.png

lol

http://i.imgur.com/MkB4Jim.gif

the guy gets outed as a bitcoin founder then hours later the police raid his home and say its unrelated

he's kind of a candidate for People who have obviously written their own Wikipedia entry, S/D C/D

imo the best way to think about a bitcoin is that it's equivalent to like having a level 80 character in diablo ii (pre expansion pack) or a complete unique set or real stones of jordan, that you could only get through hours and hours of grinding n you could sell on eBay for money but only to the extent there were other diablo ii players who wanted them

a bitcoin is basically like a whirlwind barbarian and can get nerfed at any moment