[Cryptography] What has Bitcoin achieved?

[John Levine]

This is wandering away from crypto, so this will be my last round.

>Thing is, having seen the possibilities, people actually *want*
>this freedom from central control, in a bad way, and they're willing
>to act to get it. They also realize that if they, and the entire
>community, don't act together to maintain the decentralization they
>have... then it's over. That's why ghash.io (the largest pool) just
>announced that they will not exceed 40%. Down from 55% to 32% now...

That's not surprising.  Bitcoin is a speculative asset, and at this
point the Bitcoin fans have a shared interest in keeping its price up.
The story that nobody's in charge is one of the things that makes
people want to buy it, so, well, sure.  In the admittedly unlikely
event that there are enough contracts or debts denominated in Bitcoin
that there were significant non-speculative demand, things could
change.  Also, were such a thing in the works, I wouldn't count on the
people involved publicly broadcasting their intentions on Twitter.


>Some seriously big players don't seem to have any problem with BTC...
>http://www.coindesk.com/computer-giant-dell-now-accepts-bitcoin/

This is what's technically known as "marketing BS".  Dell accepts
dollars.  They have a deal with Coinbase in which Coinbase takes the
risk of raising dollars by selling Bitcoins in return for a commission
hidden in the bitcoin price.  This is pretty much the same as saying
that Dell takes Hungarian forints because you can pay with a Hungarian
debit card, and Mastercard takes the risk of selling the forints.

Coinbase seems reasonably well capitalized for a small company, but if
there's another collapse in the Bitcoin market and they don't drop
their buy price fast enough, or unload their bitcoin inventory fast
enough, they could collapse like many of their predecessors and fail
to pay their dollar debts to, say, Dell.

Like I said, I think Bitcoin is an interesting proof of concept, and
the distributed notary idea seems likely to be useful for something,
but it's never going to replace real money.

R's,
John