But you can't send cash over the internet.
Do people who are in to Bitcoin think intermediaries solely exist to extract value from transactions? There's actually a service being provided.
The internet IS NOT neutral. Never has been, never will be.
Regarding the first point: To my understating, as a Ex-Bitcoiner, the whole point is a massive distrust in financial institutions + the idea that the whole hierarchy of banks and clients seems superfluous, and could be done away with. Insted of giving up your responsibilities that you get by having money, you take them into your own hand, leaving banks and the similar with nothing left to do.
Now it will obviously make no sense to use bitcoin like Dollar/Pound/Euro+bank, because it isn't made for that. Currently (as far as I know) there are some internal struggles between the "core developers" because of this fact. For-Profit companies like CoinBase and BitPay would like to expand their market at the cost of the distributed network, while others say the whole point of the network would be lost by giving in to them.
Trust is a social problem and simply cannot be solved via technology because the infrastructure that technology is built on cannot be neutral... we live on a planet with limited resources. If your master plan includes chopping down the tree that holds your treehouse... sounds pretty terrible. Look at international politics to see what "neutrality" in the real world looks like. It's just power dynamics that are outside our control. Is that really what we want out of our financial system?
You see the same thing in the eth community thinking they can use "code" to solve the problem of trust. You can't. Lawyers have been trying for millenia. Bitcoiners are going to need a much more compelling reason/feature than they do now if they want any sort of widescale-adoption (and beyond that, to avoid being smashed when the illegal activities that take place on the network force someone to care)
heck, you can transfer huge piles of cash with paper checks, which cost around 75¢ around here, try to beat those kind of fees...
Though not competitively, which was the point being made in the article.
I don't think Bitcoin is made at will out of thin air like flat currency routinely is. You can still argue that this is not a problem with flat currency itself, but the problem is, unlike Bitcoin, the laws regarding printing and production of flat currency are not governed by hard-to-break math.
I don't like X, I love X.
Your distrust of human nature has caused you to double-down on trusting human nature. Those elaborate systems to counter human nature are built on, get this, more human nature.
> the future of the financial system be controlled by an "algorithm" that is built on a technology (non-quantum crypto) that could be dead in less than 50 years?
Well, it's only one coin, with one algorithm, and people are pricing that into its value. But show me a better system. Not even the USD has a 50-year guarantee. Not only are your dollars likely worth 10% of their current value in fifty years, but there's an even chance that something has wiped their value out completely.
You're just irrationally afraid of crypto risk and irrationally accepting of human risk.
> Why should I sign up
Oh, I see your issue... Don't worry, nobody wants your permission any more than they do with USD. You don't need to, and can't, do anything.
This is not to say that our current batch of social institutions are even as trustworthy as TCP, just that it is possible to build institutions that are, and that we have a lot more experience as a civilization with debugging social institutions than we do debugging software. Thus, I do not think it is paradoxical to lean on social institutions to reign in raw human nature.
Not even remotely. Everyone is China is acutely aware that the government can print their money into oblivion. That's why they're rushing to dump it into anything. Hundreds of millions have been through this in other countries in recent years.
> Piggybacking on the electrical grid to turn "fairness" into "how much electricity you can afford"
Piggybacking doesn't mean what you think it does.
> How is that fair?
Fair doesn't apply in the world. It's hard to cheat and thus predictable and that's all it needs to be.
fwiw, fiat isn't fair either. Nobody came by to give me my share...
I see no reason why an arbitrary rate is better than a rate chosen to minimize inflation and deflation.
Bitcoin basically is a fiat currency, except no government forces people to use it.
It's not about the rate, but about the EXACT rules being agreed upon up front by the MAJORITY of the network and actually enforced by a proven algorithm, rather than people's conscience alone.
smh
This is a gross oversimplification of how the vast majority of central banks(ie: the ones that matter) handle their fiat currency. In theory, yes, they could just print money, in practice, they don't "just print money".
There's nothing they can do that gets rid of your bitcoin though. That's the "math" point. As long as they're on the main chain the rules (expressible as math) prevent arbitrary creation or destruction of coins.
In either case it's not relevant to the article.