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Comment by jordigh | Hacker News Reader

Is this as big as it seems to me? This seems huge. Is it huge? I can't tell. Should I be excited? I am.

Now if only I could make it easier for people to pay me in bitcoins for small freelance work...

Can you accept Coinbase payments?

That's the thing here: Coinbase is just another payment processor. Most businesses are used to having to accept "some extra payment processor".

Since you get to do some sort of announcement, which more most companies means you get to be in the news in a semi-positive way, why not? It's risk free for them - or at least only as risky as their ability to sue Coinbase for missed payments.

> Can you accept Coinbase payments?

I don't need help for accepting bitcoins. I trust bitcoins themselves, I consider them a real currency, not something that has to be immediately exchanged for centralised currency. So I'm fine just accepting them without an intermediary. My hope is that as bitcoins get more popular, businesses like Coinbase will seem less important.

Instead, I need help getting bitcoins from all the people out there who have no idea how to get bitcoins.

> My hope is that as bitcoins get more popular, businesses like Coinbase will seem less important.

> Instead, I need help getting bitcoins from all the people out there who have no idea how to get bitcoins.

If these two sentences don't sum up BTC I don't know what does.

I would contend that though you are at the tail end of the curve that doesn't need an intermediary, many of your customers are likely to need/desire an intermediary to facilitate for the people you mention, with no idea how to get bitcoins.

Regardless of whether you, I, or HN hates Coinbase or loves Coinbase, they provide a layer of accessibility to an otherwise intimidating ecosystem.

> I would contend that though you are at the tail end of the curve that doesn't need an intermediary

If you want to do away with intermediaries, what Bitcoin needs is a large ecosystem, such that my BTC never needs to be converted to USD to be useful - I want to be able to be paid in BTC, then to be able to exchange that same BTC for food. The food vendor in turn needs to be able to exchange that BTC for, say, a car.

For that to happen, Bitcoin needs a critical mass of adopters. Unfortunately, the Bitcoin feature of capping the number of total BTCs in circulation means that the number of BTC users will always be limited.

Bitcoins are very divisible. As more and more people use Bitcoins, the coins become worth more and people can simply trade smaller and smaller pieces of them. The limited supply doesn't limit the number of users.

They do have a division limit though. One satoshi is only four orders of magnitude smaller than a penny (US).

EDIT: answered my own question

The blockchain describes stakes in a conceptual ledger. The current limitations on divisibility are easy to change in the future. 21 million is arbitrary and meaningless.

> The current limitations on divisibility are easy to change in the future.

Not true.

> 21 million is arbitrary and meaningless.

Also not true.

Changing either of those things requires a hard fork of the network and a majority consensus among the miners globally which is in no way "easy to do".

It's easy to do if it will increase miner wealth, which a more useful currency will do.

Disagree with that all you want. My point is that it's possible. Speculating about the likelihood of it succeeding doesn't seem worthwhile to me.

Call it easy all you like, you're still incorrect.

the number of BTC users will always be limited

Mmh.. mathematically true, but practically? First consider that block awards will continue being generated until roughly the year 2100 and probably up to another half decade on top of that.

Empires have crumbled in less time..

Secondly, remember that 1BTC is divisible down to 8 decimal places. There's no reason that .00000001BTC (aka 1 Satoshi) couldn't become the base unit of transaction.

If this were to happen (say with a client update), that would mean, once the block awards cease generating in a hundred years or so, and all 24,000,000 BTC are mined, that would mean there's (24M * 10^8) 24 quintillion individual units of currency in the world.

There will never be even 21 million of BTC. Pretty close to 21M, but it won't get there. Also, 99,99% of block rewards will be distributed before 2040. The next 60 years till 2100 blocks will only reward a few satoshis each, except for transaction fees.

There will never be even 21 million of BTC.

Why not? As I understand the algorithm, the decay rate of block awards is pretty much a constant, understood thing.

Suing a startup company with no tangible assets is not much of an insurance. How much does it cost for the biggest travel company in the world to set their systems to accept bitcoins, pass a contract through lawyers, train support, etc? I'd say at least as much as the value of appearing in the news.

So IMHO Expedia sow the huge value of the BitCoin payment system.

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