The Future of Cryptocurrencies 221
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."
Crypto-coin advocates = anarchists or libertarians (Score:3)
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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)
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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.
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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)
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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.
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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.
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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!
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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
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Yes, but some illegal things are bad. Is this a hard proposition? Like slaves. Slavery should never ever be tolerated.
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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.
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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 rat
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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 n
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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.
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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
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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 g
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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".
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> 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 holdi
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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.
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"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 whe
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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.
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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.
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Imagine how great Bitcoin would be if the Quantitative Easing by unaccountable bureaucrats were built into the protocol!
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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
Valueless? (Score:5, Insightful)
"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]
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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:
For the time being, the market has proven that they are worth something, by assigning a value to them on the exchanges.
If they are worthless, then by definition, nobody wants to pay anything for them.
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I don't know if you are being funny, or completely misunderstood the book.
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... 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 c
We can hope. (Score:2)
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Because anyone with that level of resources and authority would not be amenable to spreading of the wealth and letting the dirty unwashed masses mine it at the ground level.
Colored coins (Score:2)
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,
Good (Score:3)
Anything that makes it easy to transfer funds to anyone in the world without going through PayPal is a good thing.
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Of course the problems with PayPal have been down to too little regulation, not too much. What do you get when you remove most of the regulation from PayPal? Mt Gox.
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I was talking mostly about the high PayPal fees. Never had a trouble with PayPal myself, then again I think they're more regulated in Canada.
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Anything that makes it easy to transfer funds to anyone in the world without going through PayPal is a good thing.
Right now, someone in the Department of Homeland Security is calling you a Terrorist.
That's how Governments traditionally feel about the easy flow of currencies across borders.
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If it's government-controlled currencies just like Bitcoins, they'll be easy to track. I'm against delays, high fees and troubles. I don't care if big brother USA knows that I bought a small stepper motor from Hong Kong, there's already a trace of that on eBay itself. But the credit card company takes a cut, eBay takes a cut, PayPal takes a cut. A small 5.00$ motor ends up costing me nearly 6.00$ instead of 5.05$
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The problem is that it has to be something that doesn't make it easy for a hacker to transfer all my funds to himself, with no recourse from me. With crypto currencies, I have to trust my computer security well more than I currently trust the computer security's state of the art. And even if that works, I'd still need recourse to deal with merchant fraud.
Either way, cryptocurrencies do not really solve the problem.
More secure transactions (Score:2)
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 t
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really? are you sure? becasue the world it's made up of just YOU. it's made up of a lot a people who will take everything from you and manipulate the market against you.
You, and every libertarian. really need top read up on the history of finance pre regulation.
Bingo (Score:2)
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based on..what? I can find out everything going on with the dollar. Why would bitcoin be different?
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Creating scarcity sounds like a baron homesteading a piece of land and telling the peasants that they now have to answer to him.
Once again the language used betrays the Internet Libertarians as neo-feudalists.
Precondition (Score:2)
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The current monetary has no security beyond the criminal justice system.
Today, anyone who can get a photograph of one of your checks clear enough to read the routing and account numbers can forge a check on your account and deposit the funds to their account, entirely using their cell phone, without ever setting foot inside the territorial U.S.
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They must get to you somehow. Widespread use of criptocurrencies mean that with social engineering, fake/trojaned apps or even using nsa backdoors your wallet is exposed for all the world. Social engineering is a powerful tool [coindesk.com] with bitcoin stealing trojans. Things are not so easy with bank accounts, even with all the problems they have, and of course, not with cash.
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The problem is unregulated exchanges, and the regulation of exchanges as well. That seems like it will be a key weakness in the Cryptocurrency system until there are more avenues of directly spending them for physical goods and essential services than currently exists.
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I've wondered about having part of a cryptocurrency be a way to have a mechanism for insurance. That way, if/when coins are stolen, there is a way to obtain new ones. Of course, this would have to be carefully made/watched due to fraud ("gee, I had those coins all along in a backup wallet...")
The biggest issue with cryptocurrencies is the fact that they cannot rely on a single trusted third party or parties. This is the new ground. Conventional systems like PayPal, Amazon Wallet, etc. have a "trusted" p
Bitcoin as a government experiment (Score:2)
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 cred
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Scathingly brilliant, sir.
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before adopting something in an ad-hoc and flawed way
Like a National Healthcare portal?
What we've learned from Bitcoin (Score:5, Informative)
What we've learned so far from Bitcoin:
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Re:What we've learned from Bitcoin (Score:5, Interesting)
IMO, this will be the ultimate nail in the coffin for Bitcoin, or any other cryptocurrency that relies on a single blockchain. Bitcoin advocates wax eloquently about the beauty of the BTC transaction verification system, but it has always struck me as profoundly stupid. It's as if someone said, "Hey, let's create a giant Excel spreadsheet, and have everyone in the world record their financial transactions on that one spreadsheet. Plus, your transactions won't be confirmed until a majority of people verify your math. Brilliant!"
No, it's stupid. If I want to buy a hot dog in New York, why should that matter to a guy who wants to buy a newspaper in Los Angeles? Why does my financial transaction have to be intertwined with his while we both queue up on the same blockchain? It is absolutely one of the most profoundly inefficient ways of spending money that anyone could have possibly invented.
Or put it this way: the BTC network can handle about 604,800 transactions a day. Assuming the average person buys or sells something with BTC an average of 5 times a day, that means the network hits its limit with 120,960 users ... worldwide. And this is the financial system that is supposedly going to replace all fiat currencies? It's laughable.
Of course, Bitcoin supporters will claim that the network can always be scaled up in speed. But what they don't point out is how quickly bandwidth and disk space requirements will explode if this happens. For example, scaling the network up to 2000 transactions per second would result in a Bitcoin node downloading about 1 MB per second. No big deal, until you realize that means each node will need about 2.6 TB of bandwidth each month, and that's just to handle the needs of 10% of the population of the United States, assuming 5 transactions per person per day.
The numbers don't make sense, and never will. Modern economies are far too complex to operate in the serial fashion that a blockchain mandates. Bitcoin will never be more than a niche player in the world financial system.
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No, it's stupid. If I want to buy a hot dog in New York, why should that matter to a guy who wants to buy a newspaper in Los Angeles? Why does my financial transaction have to be intertwined with his while we both queue up on the same blockchain?
That's not unique to cryptocurrencies with blockchains. Any private digital currency (including and especially those used in MMORPGs) has to deal with the same problem, of making sure that transactions are ordered correctly, that money is still available in an account, etc. In that sense, they all have the problem of the network having to know about both transactions.
It even affects the real-world clearing of bank transactions, which is why people always complain about the lag between when they get their
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Or put it this way: the BTC network can handle about 604,800 transactions a day.
No.... the maximum block size can easily be expanded to 100MB, which will allow the chain to expand by approximately 14,399GB per day, or 49,151,923.200 transactions per day. It's just a software update. The arbitrarily limit of 1MB is only an arbitrary limit selected to protect against spam attacks; it can be changed.
Clients don't need to download the entire blockchain; only the headers need to be retained to ver
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Did you read the entire post? Do a software update, and you still need the blocks to be sent and received. And while all clients do not need the entire blockchain, while you still have a single one, you will have problems. In architectural terms, a blockchain behaves like a single, tightly synchronized queue. There are good reasons for doing that: It's not as if the people designing the system are incompetent. However, the design decisions that make sure that no coin is spent twice make scaling very ineffic
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each node will need about 2.6 TB of bandwidth each month, and that's just to handle the needs of 10% of the population of the United States, assuming 5 transactions per person per day.
2.6TB is insignificant -- it's at an average cost of about $1 a month on the average web hosting plan.
2.6TB per Month = about 8.4 Megabits sustained 24x7.
In a world where the average medium sized ecommerce site pulls sustained multiple Gigabits 24x7.
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Accountants LOVE the idea that every coin you spend is traceable.
A BitCoin like crypto currency is likely in the offing as a supplement to cash and bank transactions
Backed by the full faith and credit of the US it is likely to be one of MANY co-existing currencies. (Just like we have now! [on paper.])
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Accountants LOVE the idea that every coin you spend is traceable.
Except the 'accounting' can become fully automatic now, with a verifiable trail.... many low-level accountants might be out of a job; if Bitcoin were to truly replace fiat.
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The distributed, eventually-consistent blockchain anchored by mining works and is quite robust against attack. Nobody has yet successfully attacked the basic Bitcoin system and stolen money. So the low level technology appears to be secure.
There are a couple of unlikely scenarios where an attack could work, but newer coins also stop even those possibilities.
Irrevocable, remote, anonymous transactions are the con man's dream. Especially when they're assocated with a whole community of suckers who think anonymous anarchy is a good idea. The scam level in the Bitcoin world is huge. Over half the exchanges have gone under, and that was before Mt. Gox. Bitcoin-oriented "stocks" and "Ponzis" have an even worse record.
Poorly run operations fail. That shouldn't come as a surprise. And con men always prefer cash, which bitcoin basically acts like. When you buy something with bitcoin it's like wiring someone money. Once it's in their hands, there isn't a whole lot you can do about it if you get scammed. That's why for large transactions people will use a certified escrowing service.
Never send money (bitcoi
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Bitcoin has grown immensely in the last year.
Yet volatility is just as high as ever.
People keep saying that more users and more value will drive down volatility, but this is only ever wishful thinking. Reality does not bear this claim out.
anonymous money is a two edged sword (Score:2)
Expect it to fall our flourish? (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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As far as Napster goes, the government hastened i
specie (Score:2)
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.
The latest get rich quick scheme (Score:2)
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
that will never happen (Score:2)
pundits keep on getting this wrong (Score:2)
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 in
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No money is government backed.
If you have (own, semi own) a Finca on Mallorca and need to pay $1,000 a month to pay it off, your government does nothing if the "exchange rate" drops by a factor of ten.
Either you still can pay the mow $10,000 ... or your Finca (whichs value has mot changed a little bit) is gone to the bank.
Generation 2.0 cryptocoins (Score:2)
Re:Is that so? (Score:4, Insightful)
Except iTunes 1.0 didn't come out until the same year Napster was shut down.
I didn't support iPod's until after Napster was gone too. (probably because iPod's didn't exist then)
so:
Napster -> iTunes, Bitcoins -> something that doesn't exist yet, not Dogecoin. Dogs don't need currency.
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Heavycoin?
Re:Is that so? (Score:5, Funny)
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Buy 1 iCoin for $2, but when spending, 1 iCoin = $1.
Can only buy in blocks of 500.
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Ah so just like Microsoft points?
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Except iTunes 1.0 didn't come out until the same year Napster was shut down.
I would say Napster -> Bittorrent
eGold -> Bitcoin
Napster was a centralized protocol, so it was vulnerable to a lawsuit against the company that ran it. Bittorrent with the distributed hash table was a distributed protocol that succeeded Napster. So far, nobody's managed to shutdown Bittorrent.
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OK then...
milliCent->Ditigal Gold currencies (eGold, e-Buillion [wikipedia.org])->Liberty Reserve Dollars-> NetBill [psu.edu]->Bitcoin
BTC != Napster (Score:3)
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
Re:BTC != Napster (Score:5, Informative)
I take mild offense to the OP insinuating that Napster "fell". It didn't fall, it was torn down by the claws of the RIAA who didn't have the foresight to even recognize this would be the future of media distribution.
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That would be the reason it fell.
And it was Dr. DRE and Metallica that sued them.
Then record companies through the RIAA. Don't forget that. IT's the record companies you should direct your ire, not RIAA.
Not to imply RIAA is innocent, but they rep[resent clients any of whom could have opted out of the lawsuit.
Lets remember Napster was making a lot of money through the illegal distribution of copyrighted material.
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Which is why Bitcoin is modeled more after bit-torrent than Napster.
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Just like sovereign governments are using THEIR claws to rip apart bitcoin?
Re:BTC != Napster (Score:5, Informative)
> anything traded is 'currency'..
No, something generally accepted in the market as an intermediary is a currency. Direct trade (some of my stack of lumber for a dinner) is called "barter". Barter has the difficulty called "a coincidence of wants". You need people who both want what the other person has to trade. A currency simplifies this difficulty, in that I can trade my lumber for currency, then later find someone making dinner, and trade my currency for that. I don't have to find someone who wants my lumber AND is making dinner.
For a currency to be useful as an intermediary, enough people have to accept it in trade. In theory, anything at all can become a currency, but in reality only a few items become the currency of a given community because of the network effect. Whatever is most used tends to get used even more. Which items gain early acceptance depends on their features: inherent usefulness, durability, portability, fungibility, divisibility, scarcity, and others. Fish are useful, but not very durable or portable. Cattle are also useful, and reasonably durable, and portable because they are self-mobile, and in fact cattle were used as an early currency. But they are not fungible (not all identical units), and not very divisible until you eat them, so other kinds of currency with better features replaced them. Sand meets many of the features of a currency, except scarcity - there's not much point in trading for your sand, when I can go get my own. Gold is better in that respect - it's not easy to go get your own, so if you want some, it's easier to trade for it.
Gold is useful (you can attract women with it), and has all the other features except divisibility for small amounts, and portability for large amounts, so for a long time it was the best currency.
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True. Now bitcoin is the best currency. But that's not it's day job. By day it does yeoman's work as a p2p transaction protocol which preserves a transparent global general ledger.
I think any successor to bitcoin will build on top of the bitcoin network. It's the worlds largest supercomputer. You'd have to be an idiot to throw away the worlds largest supercomputer.
I like to keep my savings in the most secure storage vehicle which current technology allows. A successor to bitcoin will need to be just a
Re:BTC != Napster (Score:4, Interesting)
very few built the bit coin mining network. it was all just hackers throwing cpu power at it. however it is to the point where it is no longer cost effective to throw CPU power at it as the # of coins you get is worth less than the power to run them.
The problem of bit coin isn't whether or not it is useful but of it breaking down.
There are 44 quadrillion potential bit coins(21 million to the 8th power), but at the rate at which they are being permanently lost is just as staggering. every time someone loses 1 coin due to a lost password, bad hard drive etc, you really lose 8 potential coins. Real world currencies don't have to deal with "bit rot" (pun unintentional) You lose the combo to a physical vault there are other ways of opening it. even if the physical cash is destroyed you can always print more to replace.
Once a bit coin is gone. it is gone forever. Lastly we are already having to do transactions in milibits. what do we call .0000001 of a bit coin? Bit coin value has to go up in order to compensate for the inflation of number of coins and % of coins . however that means today's laptop at 1 BTC is worth .5 BTC tomorrow. People are already getting annoyed by such things. Purchase a product for 1 bit coin and two months later that one bit coin is worth 10 times what it was. Bitcoin might be a transactional currency, but it won't ever be a stable one. it's very design prevents such a situation from lasting more than a couple of years.
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iTunes was hardly a first mover
So, while AltaVista, Napster and Friendster may be in the first mover categories of their respective industries, iTunes falls into the same space as Google and Facebook... who all built upon and capitalised on the missteps of the early pioneers in their respective industries.
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That's what he said, you know.
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I didn't believe dogecoin was real at first. I thought it was a weird front of some anti-bitcoin group that took to a very annoying way of mocking its opponent. I didn't find out it was real until I was reading some user stories of scammers, and hackers in the "Dogecoin network" and people griping about how they had made their way over from something called Litecoin. Things are already moving too fast for me, in my twenties...
On a more serious note, ripple looks interesting [wikipedia.org].
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I didn't believe dogecoin was real at first.
It's hardly real now.
http://dogedir.com/ [dogedir.com]
None of these are "real" businesses, and it's still about 11 doge to the penny.
Sure, I get that BitCoin started that way, but I'll eat my hat if doge (the worst meme ever) ever grows beyond a circle-jerk of \b\tards.
I imagine there's some sort of 3rd party coin to cash payment processor out there that takes Doge, so, again, I recognize it's "real" in that regard, but, doge is a joke by design.
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dogecoin - too much of a joke
litecoin - neutral sounding name, might do okay
ripple - another good neutral sounding name
A lot of the others have names that are either too geeky (primecoin) or reek of "against all authoriy" like ones with "counter" in the name or are too close to existing trademarks "mastercoin" (vs Mastercard).
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Until there worth as much as those beenie babies people still think they can get money for on ebay.
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Deflationary currencies encourage saving until people realize they have "enough", and decide to buy something, or lots of somethings.
Inflationary currencies have their own problems.
Rothbard does a great job explaining how supply and demand for cash balances equilibrate the price of goods and services. Money is a good like any other.
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