39 karma · joined October 17, 2011
Good to hear you using Bitcoins for something other than dark markets, we should try to brainstorm other niches where Bitcoin has an edge. I think taxi drivers might warm to it, they definitely hate credit cards.
No doubt there will be protocol changes to blacklist the government miners, a cat and mouse game will ensure. Bitcoin will survive, but it will be a tiny fraction of its previous size.
Besides the obvious problem of the volatile exchange rate there is just no trust in any of the Bitcoin institutions, if I can't trust anyone else to manage my Bitcoins I need to do it myself. I can do that, but it takes time and effort to maintain secure systems. The real kicker is if something goes wrong, its my problem. If someone hacks my netbanking details the bank will cover my losses.
So what does Bitcoin offer? it opens up transactions that would have otherwise been too risky. Irreversible electronic transactions are Bitcoins niche. However that fact makes it very difficult to acquire Bitcoins with reversible payment methods. This slows down the process of entering and exiting the Bitcoin market leaving you vulnerable to the volatile exchange rate.
I really want Bitcoin to succeed but at this stage there is no way I would use Bitcoin for a transaction unless it was the only option.
As diversity decreases it will be much easier to write libraries that talk directly to the metal, protocols that write directly to the interfaces and applications that run completely isolated at native speed.
Without the towers of abstraction it is much easier to reason about the data structures of your input and output and design optimal algorithms. If we ever do come to this point there will be a renaissance in the field of computer science field.
I have had no issues with them, was about 48 hours after signing up to get my first Bitcoins. Supports 24 hour bank transfers or 1 hour cash deposits if you need them fast.
Prototype works, but lets just say it needs a lot more work. Not sure whether to continue with, for anything like this to have any adoption by retailers the entire Bitcoin community needs to get behind one standard. That is the Bitcoin Payment Protocol[2] which is incompatible with my approach. The Bitcoin Payment Protocol will with the new Android 4.4 changes.
1. https://bitplastic.com/ 2. https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/BIP_0070
The lack of fancy compositing and animation effects gave these high resolutions devices comparable performance to their standard resolution counterparts.
Definitely dangerous but I see a lot of potential in the technology with the possibility of true retina quality resolution.
It's not the comparison that's sad, letting it define your worth is.
It's something I struggle with, almost 30 still struggling through my degree and working on minor projects. But personally when I look back a few years painfully grinding through life addicted to meth it makes today's small successes feel like a billion dollars.
Just as with buying drugs face to face you have to trust that the dealer is not malicious, is there a risk? definitely. But just as in the real world law enforcement have little interest in wasting their time on buyers.
I imagine the DPR was logging in via VPN just to get some kind of consistent access to the site, even with I'm sure there were many times where the servers were unresponsive even to him.
The decrease in information directly decreases the regulators negotiating power, leading to greater regulatory capture.
Would this be more than regulatory capture caused by the revolving door? I don't know - but it does swing both ways.