Bitcoin is just a soap opera that keeps on giving... it's fantastic how much credibility something can keep loosing and loosing.
However, every time someone has interacted with the Bitcoin community and dealt with the assholes telling them "you just don't get it! this is the new economy!", it makes that someone smile a little bit each time there's bad news.
Green U.S. money? At least, at the end of the election cycle, I can cast a vote for someone who will appoint a Fed chair I like. There's some tenuous link from the decision-makers back to me, an American voter.
The bitcoin people? They just said "here it is, oh and also we call all the shots, kthxbye". What if there's some feature of the new power structure I don't like? Where can I seek redress? Ask a bitcoin advocate, and what you get is crickets.
A new power structure should be more inclusive of people's voices, not less.
So, in this case, I welcome the failure.
With Bitcoin, you can "cast your vote" for what software the network is running too; you buy a miner and contribute to a mining pool that agrees with your philosophies. Of course, unlike a federal election (or maybe not...), more capital => more votes.
The core developers really don't have any power beyond that given to them by individual miners and mining investors.
Maybe if you said "every year on March 1st, everyone shuts down their client and chooses a new one" and there were several well-maintained clients that had different policy choices encoded into them for people to "vote" with, then we'd be a little closer to a democratic power-in-the-hands-of-the-people kind of thing.
But as it is right now? No, there's no voting, nor democratic power-sharing, in Bitcoin.
Being able to change one's vote at any time regarding any issue seems preferable to everyone sitting powerless for four years at a time in between scheduled elections.
I'm not even addressing what the OP was telling you, that you don't vote and that the "votes" are all in the hands of a few people.
But, even if everyone was entitled to a vote, being able to change it anytime they like would make a for a very, very poor government system.
I can only imagine, 1st long term project the government had that didn't give you short term profit you would change your vote.
P.S.: Interestingly enough is exactly what is happening in Bitcoin right now: long term sustainability calls for changes to the block size, but short term profit calls for it to remain the same, so the few miners that control the network just go for the short term profit.
I don't disagree. But you can hardly call it "undemocratic".
The reality is that just an handful of people can vote in this system, the ones that control all the mining. All other people are left using a system in which they have no say.
That's a classical textbook Plutocracy and completely un-democratic.
Increasing blocksize is actually a negative, because it lets people continue sending low-value transactions that they wouldn't actually pay for. It externalizes their costs to the entire network, making verification harder, etc.
When the required fee makes your current uses of btc unprofitable, either send larger amounts at a time or use a sidechain, etc. The fee is a DoS-prevention mechanism.
I'm saying, bitcoin isn't "power to the people," that it is anti-democratic by design, and you and the other guy here are trying to dodge and ignore that with language games about "the market decides" and irrelevant stuff about how politicians lie.
I get it, bitcoin is your chance to be one of the people "in the know" as it were, one of the powerful ones, and you don't want to give that up. Please spare us the rhetoric about how it's for our own good, though.
All I can do is choose which client to run. You have all the power I do. That anyone does.
Also, with bitcoin, all interaction is completely voluntary. There are no legal tender laws or taxation propping up the value of the currency.
> So, in this case, I welcome the failure.
I wouldn't hold your breath. Bitcoin has been through many incidents that are far worse than this, and it's only come out stronger for it.
And you and the other guy are illustrating really well what I mean about the bitcoiner anti-democratic point of view.
Running a piece of software isn't voting, and isn't "power to the people," but you guys get so stuck up on this wordplay about how running the software is the real, authentic "voting" that you really kinda miss the boat there.
So, well done with that.
Who calls for the vote? Who counts them? Who is allowed to vote? Who isn't? Who proposes ideas for a vote?
When the pool of people who understand what Bitcoin is gets totally overwhelmed by people who don't, what keeps really stupid decisions from being made?
When people vote for something that isn't already coded, who is responsible for coding it?
In fact, the status quo is that your opinion and vote for that person is ignored. I'm reminded of the Princeton/Northwestern study suggested Congress passes laws that run contrary to the will of the people ~90% of the time.
So what's the value in your tenuous link when inputs are sent straight to /dev/null
https://scholar.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/mgilens/fi...
No, you've gotten countless answers: "Nowhere."
In the same way you can't reverse a transaction, you can't have a vote. It doesn't work that way.
> A new power structure should be more inclusive of people's voices, not less.
You've had a voice. We've seen your posts about how you're so ignored because nobody is writing a patch to release more coins. It's been heard, but it's a bad idea. If you like that type of currency, use your government's.
> Basically, what bugs me about bitcoin is that legitimate critiques are always brushed off with really absurd replies.
Have you posted any legitimate critiques? I haven't seen any...
> Or the deflationary economics of the system itself, and those aren't good either.
Yeah, that's an example. You don't know the system or the goals so how could you have valid comments, let alone legitimate criticism?
With Bitcoin, you just...don't use Bitcoin. If you're invested at the point somebody does something you don't like, sell off. Presumably the ones on top are heavily invested themselves and will feel a massive sell off in their bottom line.
All that said, the different power structure I was talking about is one where nobody has that kind of power to begin with. That there is somebody at the top at all is a failure, IMO.
* The Economist
* BBC
* Gavin Andresen (unless he was hacked)
It's logical to think that when a core dev of something as sensible as bitcoin get's hacked and you can't trust the code anymore, it takes a really big chunk of credibility from bitcoin.
Gavin is one of many core devs, and Bitcoin good enough security procedures to survive a dev's machine being hacked.
sensible (en) - vernünftig (de)
sensitive (en) - sensibel (de)> ...to point out the fallacy of relying on teleological arguments for God's existence. Some use the phrase to refer to a form of the argument from ignorance fallacy.
In The Netherlands, you can order takeaway food at practically any restaurant with bitcoin. Overnight, this was the biggest expansion in the acceptance of Bitcoin to date.
Whatever your opinion is about bitcoin, it absolutely does not reflect the current reality, where Bitcoin is seen more and more as a serious alternative for payments.
Regardless of whether or not you think it's overhyped, it's a really really cool experiment in economics and cryptography.
I mean you have the combination of an open source community, libertarians, and a shitload of money. The outcome is pretty obvious.
Very debatable and yet to be proven in any real way. Lots of things have "potential" but bitcoin seems to consistently fail at actually doing anything. Doubtful it will ever solve any problems outside its current scope of use.
For security "nerds", which hn is full of, it's a veritable holy grail of technological security.
Stands to reason that the majority of issues Bitcoin has appears to be human, not technological. Since the technology works so well, bad actors appear to be targeting human vectors of attack- create controversy where there is none, drive wedges between key players, sow dissent among community (a day doesn't go by that r/bitcoin doesn't complain about vote manipulation).
Bitcoin's biggest security threat lies in it's governance, especially if there are subversive elements in its community. BTC leadership has to get their house in order.
You can claim that Bitcoin is going down the toilet all you like, but by all metrics relevant to its purpose (namely value and popularity) it's doing extremely well.
Perhaps your mistake is that you only notice when something that could be construed as negative happens around Bitcoin. Such things are usually more entertaining than the relatively mundane improvements and victories that occur on a regular basis.
In addition most banks are privately insured against fraud.
I've dealt with an 8k fraudulent charge on my card before. The bank investigated, sent over a sworn affidavit to sign, and they refunded my money in less than 24 hours.
I had a $20 error charge on my card and it took a month for the refund. This is with the vendor stating in writing it was their error. I no longer bank there.
This only applies to personal accounts, not business accounts.
There is a reason why scammers work so hard to find someone to "cash checks" or "withdraw funds" or do that kind of nonsense. Electronically stealing funds is easy. Keeping those funds is hard.
Eh. Tell that to the Greeks. And it happened for much less than "civilization failing".
> all the hacking, skimming and fraud
Sure, I was impacted by that. A while back, I noticed some movie tickets charged to my card in Australia. I called my bank, disputed the charges, they reversed them and sent me a new credit card. Took...maybe 20 minutes of my time? Max?
And from this I'm meant to learn I can't trust the current system? Honest question: Why?
Humans are folly but the technology speaks for itself.