[Cryptography] What has Bitcoin achieved?

tpb-crypto at laposte.net tpb-crypto at laposte.net
Fri Jun 6 12:00:17 EDT 2014


> Message du 06/06/14 00:18
> De : "John Levine" 
>
> >> 1. Bitcoin payments are irreversible.
> >> 2. Bitcoin's value is unmanaged.
> >> 3. Bitcoin payments are somewhat more anonymous.
> >> 4. Bitcoin payments are, for now at least, very cheap.
> >> 
> >> Everyone agrees that #4 is an improvement, but for most people, #3 is
> >> indifferent and #1 and #2 are actively worse. It is not a bug that my
> >> credit card transactions can under some circumstances be reversed, and
> >> it is not a bug that central banks manage currency values to avoid
> >> large fluctuations. 
> >> 
> >
> >Numbers 1 and 4 are tightly coupled, it is cheap exactly because it is irreversible. If you
> >don't have the cost of executing reversions, neither the infrastructure to do it, that makes
> >Bitcoin-like systems as a whole cheaper.
> 
> Executing reversions is easy -- you have some entity (the "bank") that
> can publish undo entries into the block chain when it has reason to do
> so. The hard part is the non-crypto part of running the bank in a way
> that is sufficiently trustworthy that people are willing to accept its
> decisions.
> 

Maybe you are referring to the act of executing the reversion, but it implies lots of responsibilities and infrastructural cost, those things ain't easy.

> >I dare say we would be better off without transaction reversions, because in the end
> >reversions give people a false sense of security that makes them irresponsible and demands a
> >huge infrastructure to deal with it. The only ones gaining from it are those charging to
> >execute the service itself.
> 
> I believe that you feel that way, but it's quite clear that most
> people don't, since approximately nobody pays for stuff from a wallet
> full of cash. (Do you? If not, why not?)
> 

I do, in my country don't use plastic money much, but we aren't parameter to the rest of the world, either.

> Crypto nerds often have a tendency to conclude that the reason the
> latest wonderful crypto-based scheme isn't successful is that people
> are too stupid to appreciate it. This is rarely a productive line of
> argument.
> 

Quite the contrary, I think Bitcoin is very successful exactly because of a few things like cheap transactions. When people start to demand reversibility, cheap transactions disappear.

I hope Bitcoin will not be transformed in another credit card system. So, people that want reversibility use one, people that want cheap transactions use the other. There is a place for everyone in this world, as long as banks and government don't push too hard to kill digital currencies.

In that case it will be a war much bigger than paypal takedowns, SOPA or anything that you have seen from the internet until now.


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