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Comment by bhouston | Hacker News Reader

> The real world demand for decentralized digital currency is still questionable in my mind.

This is a key point. I believe that general people do not care about decentralized currency, what they want are easy payment solutions. If bitcoin doesn't provide easy payment solutions that are cheap, convenient, works everywhere, then it will be beat by something that does provide that.

Even if you could with huge engineering effort slowly move Bitcoin to cheap, easy, everywhere, it is likely going to be beat by non-decentralized solutions because those non-decentralized solutions are cheaper to create, deploy and maintain -- also easier to monetize.

I think that the future is to companies like Stripe, ApplePay -- technologies which focus on customer capture via ease of use and many options and being agnostic towards the underlying technologies.

Bitcoin is neat, just like Gnutella was, but being neat doesn't correlate with commercial success.

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What I want is to be able to easily pay for things, but also without having to trust an intermediary who takes a percentage off the top.

The ultimate reason why I have a bank account is so that my employers can deposit their payroll into it. And since my money is already there, I pay my bills and expenses from it.

I fully expect my bank to narc on me to the feds at every turn, and screw me hard if I ever have a real problem with them. I expect them to nickel-and-dime me with fees. I expect them to introduce seemingly arbitrary delays and paperwork requirements for their own convenience. I expect them to offer rates on deposits that cannot keep up with inflation and charge rates on loans and credit that would make even the serenest of divine avatars flip tables. And if the turds ever hit the turbines, I expect that making a trip to the nearest bank branch office would be the least useful thing I could possibly do.

I don't really have a lot of confidence in Bitcoin, but the bar they need to pass with respect to trust is ridiculously low--set there by the banking system. Where they fail is definitely convenience.

If my employer offered to make payroll in Bitcoin, and if my local utilities, gas stations, and grocery stores accepted payment in Bitcoin, I would be using it already.

But all those places prefer to trust human bankers rather than crypto algorithms running in a distributed computing network. I don't see that changing any time soon. If anything, an alt-currency backed by an alliance of megaretailers like Walmart, Target, and Amazon would have to crack that nut first. To drive adoption, there has to be support at the point-of-sale terminals.

Also that there's almost no reason to want to make truly anonymous purchases. Because it implies legality to the activity in question (otherwise why are you paying for it?)

And if it is illegal just because the actual money is somewhat anonymous (which Bitcoin isn't, really) doesn't mean that the change in material wealth is unnoticeable.

Is your point that Bitcoin is an anarchist currency for buying drugs, and nothing else? That it can't possibly have value outside of online payments?

"BTC" is just the unit of account powering the blockchain. You can use a blockchain to make almost any form of digitized information into a public good. Case in point: https://www.blockscan.com/asset

The blockchain is the ultimate distributed database. No other distributed database works without a third party controlling and administering it. This is critically important for all kinds of financial markets, because otherwise the entity in control of the DB is able to manipulate outcomes, hide data, and play games with insider information, and yes this is really happening: http://deepcapture.com

And why does a purely online-only, digital content provider need your home address to send you a video file, anyway? What about a server host? Gaming platform? The credit card paradigm is obsolete for a huge amount of premium digital content. This isn't to say the US dollar is obsolete, because you can represent dollars, or euros, or gold, whatever, as auxiliary currency units on top of the Bitcoin blockchain, although you'd still need to own BTC to send it around, for many this is BTC's primary form of inherent value.

Finally, it's impossible for many people in developing nations to engage in online commerce at all, because their banking system is utter crap. Billions of people the world over are underserved by the banking system, or don't have access to a bank account.

> Also that there's almost no reason to want to make truly anonymous purchases.

That's just silly. You can certainly think of things people have a legal right to do that they still wouldn't want any record of. If you're paying for an abortion it's perfectly reasonable to want the payment to be truly anonymous. The same goes for other types of medical treatment, any purchases of an embarrassing nature, donations to politically charged organizations like Planned Parenthood, charity by people who believe altruism is only satisfied when the donation absolutely cannot be attributed, etc. There is also the simple metadata concern that giving anyone a record of everything ever purchased by you (and everyone else) could be used against you or for evil purposes generally.

The ability to make anonymous payments has been the norm since money has existed. Cash is anonymous. It's only the last few decades with the rise of electronic payments that tracking them all has even been possible, and there is no law of the universe that says we have to accept the loss of privacy.

> Also that there's almost no reason to want to make truly anonymous purchases. Because it implies legality to the activity in question (otherwise why are you paying for it?)

I think most people would welcome a shift to more anonymous transactions, but they're not willing to give up the advantages they get from tracking. When my purchase is tracked by a the seller, I get volume and loyalty discounts and easy returns. When my purchase is tracked by a credit card company, I get the ability to dispute payments and better manage cash flow. Most people and businesses aren't willing to give up those conveniences for anonymity.

General people don't care about gold either, and yet it's such a great store of value that even central banks use it.

But they used to.

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