[Cryptography] What has Bitcoin achieved?

[ianG]

On 20/07/2014 07:21 am, grarpamp wrote:
> On Thu, Jul 17, 2014 at 4:02 PM, John Levine <johnl at iecc.com> wrote:
>>> But none of them will have the property that their currency is not
>>> under their control. Other than the obvious head start bitcoin has
>>> in the digital currency game, that is what bitcoin offers
>>> philosophically... freedom from control.
>>
>> I realize that's the theory, but in reality, there is a mining pool
>> that could easily grow to be more than half of all the miners, at
>> which point it could start ignoring blocks from outside the pool,
>> which would be to the benefit of people inside the pool.  So long as
>> the cost of joining the pool remained small, e.g., if you join you
>> still get 98% of the coins you mine, this looks to me like it would be
>> a stable situation, no matter how much outsiders complained about how
>> awful it was.
> 
> 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.


This is both true and false, in measures :)

There are *some people* who want this, and there are *many people* who
don't.  Those who've spent time analysing the market (aka marketing)
will know that the former is the minority and the latter is the
majority.  This is a well-studied feature of most markets, it's the core
of the concept of 'early adopters'.

The situation is that Bitcoin finds itself in the market of early
adopters, those who rebel and try new stuff.  The big question is how to
cross from the early adopters to mainstream.  And deal with the
time-honoured truth that the mainstream do not give more than
titillating lip service to the notion of freedom from central control.
Which is something that marketeers and early adopters alike often
mistake for confirmation of beliefs.

It's not personal.  It's just People, it is repetitive.



iang