EFF Stops Accepting Bitcoin, Regifts All Donations 391
Gendou writes "The EFF issued a statement that it will no longer accept Bitcoin donations, has not used any of the donations, and will transfer all past donations to The Bitcoin Faucet. See also additional and forum threads."
Re:No surprises here (Score:5, Insightful)
The news here is that they were foolish enough to accept them in the first place. I had no idea that their judgment was that bad.
Re:No surprises here (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, the implementation was pretty sound. Nobody has cracked the Bitcoin blockchain transfer protocol. Some websites dealing with the stuff got hacked, but that happens all the time. It's the idea that sucked. Satoshi got the crypto right but fucked up the human element, economics.
Re:No surprises here (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:No surprises here (Score:4, Insightful)
Foolish to accept them? They might not be worth much of anything but if someone offers you a bitcoin what exactly is the harm in accepting it? I suppose the EFF might have taken bitcoin from a few people who might otherwise have given dollars, but in the grand scheme of things I doubt they lost out on much if anything.
Re:Currency not accepted is currency no more? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:No surprises here (Score:5, Insightful)
Less money than what? Than nothing? Than no money you have with your assets frozen as bitcoin? Would they get less for selling it than by giving it to "the tap"?
Say, EFF tomorrow receives a donation of one trillion Mozambique dollars. Should they exchange it to USD as soon as possible or worry that selling them all now may earn them less money?
If EFF sets the policy: "sell ASAP at current price" then there is no worry. They are not a currency trade company, they are a charity. They can freely treat Bitcoin as "donation of other goods" and it's their duty to keep the assets in a safe form, not to speculate and wait for best offer for unsafe/volatile goods.
Re:No surprises here (Score:3, Insightful)
Aluminum cans have other uses besides exchange for money.
Aluminum cans can be used as tools for cutting, scooping, of course holding things and many other things I don't have on the top of my head.
Monopoly money and Pokeman cards can be used to play the games they came from, so they have value on their own.
Bitcoin has absolutely no use other than as a fiat currency.
The fact that they took bitcoins in the first place puts serious doubts into my mind about the understanding of technology at the EFF. Typically its clear they have a clue, however this is one of those moves that makes you wonder. Well not this one, this one makes sense. It was the accepting them in the first place part that boggles my mind.
Re:No surprises here (Score:3, Insightful)
Then add in the fact that there are already money laundering and dope dealing going on with i
You mean exactly like with the real, traditional, cold hard cash?
Re:No surprises here (Score:5, Insightful)
Here is a fun fact.... the same can happen to the Euro and US dollar. All fake currency suffers from this potential.Hell the Federal Reserve is printing money so fast that the US dollar is going to go flat almost as fast...
GO back to coins made of real copper, nickel, silver and gold. suddenly the currency regains it's value and cant be destroyed..... Unless someone perfects alchemy and turns lead into gold or synthesizes gold.
For the naysayers complaining about carrying coins... do you realize how much a 1 troy oz gold coin is worth?
What intrinsic value do precious metals have that makes them so valuable? Many of them can be made into shiny jewelry, which has some value; there's also some value for use in electronics and other products. Apart from that, the only value they have - just like any other piece of property, physical or otherwise - is their desirability to others.
I don't care for shiny jewelry, and I have no intention of manufacturing products that would use precious metals. Therefore, the only value those metals have to me is their scarcity and the fact that others find them useful. How is this different than the paper money I have in my wallet?
I have no problem with your decision that precious metals are a safer currency for you than USDs or Euros. I fail to understand, however, how government-issued money is a "fake currency". My USDs are accepted in trade for all the products and services I desire, meeting the only criterion - ability to be freely traded - necessary to fulfill its role as a "real" currency.
Any form of currency - USD, Bitcoins, precious metals, seashells, etc. - is simply a shortcut to enable trade without the hassles of bartering. I agree that governments aren't always stable, but neither are commodities markets. Perhaps the USD is about to collapse - but the gold bubble could also pop at any minute. If you want to avoid any currency with the possibility of instability, go back to bartering. Alternatively, trade in your preferred currency with the realization that it is not a panacea.
Re:Bitcoin ended up as a pyramid scheme (Score:5, Insightful)
Haha, good one.
The promoters knew - it's in the design (Score:1, Insightful)
Everything you say is basically right, with one exception: The promoters must have known all along (or should have known - point 1 however suggests they knew or were very very lucky in their choice of algorithm)
1. The growth curve for bitcoins was chosen to be increasing in exponential difficulty. Even if they wanted a maximum number of bitcoins (which they argue for dubious economic reasons) They could have chosen any curve - straight line, S-curved, etc., they deliberately chose a growth function which maximizes the return for early investors.
2. The bitcoin software is nearly useless for actual commerce. It's just about good enough for a speculation market place - but would break if any significant amount of goods were being bought or sold in bitcoin. But the promoters don't care!
(i) Transactions take hours to complete - and no solution is proposed for this
(ii) Every client records every transaction in the network. This is a huge file already, barely practical to download with no real commerce just speculation -- and this file would grow proportionally to actual usage. There is supposedly a proposed solution which reduces this file size somewhat, but it's still huge, and it still grows in proportion to usage. So that's no solution - especially since this proposed solution is not actually being implemented anyway.
3. The size of the bitcoin economy is always quoted as being the number of bitcoins multiplied by the price of the last bitcoin sold.
That's not how you calculate an economy's size!
That's how you calculate the value of an asset, such as gold, or pork bellys.
Nobody would calculate the size of the US economy for example this way - the number of USDs in circulation, etc. You can calculate a real economy's size by looking at goods bought and sold.... but bitcoin promoters don't care about that, especially since virtually nothing is bought or sold in bitcoin..
Re:No surprises here (Score:5, Insightful)
Bitcoin has absolutely no use other than as a fiat currency.
Bitcoins are not a fiat currency. A fiat currency, as should be obvious from its name, has its value set by fiat (decree). No one is decreeing that bitcoins have value, any more than anyone decrees that monopoly money has value. It's fashionable for libertarians to use the word 'fiat' to mean 'worthless', but the two words are not interchangeable.