Firestarter wrote:That changes dramatically once we replace one side with "start-up business". Consider for example the new market for legal marijuana in Colorado: There were many new businesses opening up that could not setup any means of paying with anything else than cash because all the financial services just said no. Which goes hand in hand of course with your second point:
It's
still illegal federally, not-withstanding the current administration's recently published guidelines that say "we won't do anything, promise (unless it is 'Bad'TM, in which event you should have known better, and you are still in trouble)" The statutes are still on the books...
Firestarter wrote:And what if you found out that you cannot trust your government anymore? Look what's happened in Ukraine the last few weeks, and what the banks' reactions were.
How is BTC going to help me in that scenario?
Firestarter wrote:A market cannot exists completely without trust. But what Bitcoin made pretty clear is that you *can* have *transactions* without trust.
False. It only makes clear that transmission of payment can be verifiable and irrevocable.
I'm not sure what problem that is intended to solve. The problem with anonymous transactions, or transactions with untrusted parties, has
never been that you cannot verifiably and irreversibly put money in their hands.
Rather, the problem is what they do after that. Namely,
nothing. You can stream money into the void just as efficiently using Western Union.
In other words, how do you trust them to actually send you whatever it is you've bought? You've guaranteed and assured payment,
not receipt.
FireStarter wrote:You don't have to trust me, or any bank or payment provider, you just have to tell me where to send my BTC and you can wait for the network to confirm that I've sent it. Once it does, you have proof that you have your BTC, and I have proof that I sent it to you.
Yes. I have proof that I've spammed money into the void, which I could just as easily have done with Western Union. Yes, I have to "trust" Western Union, but why am I so insanely concerned about their (proven) ability to deliver as opposed to the person I've actually transacted with?
FireStarter wrote:As to why this is desirable: Why don't you ask the countless of small businesses and individuals that got screwed by Paypal how they would like a system where they don't have to trust a third party OR the customer?
By substituting a system where the person who actually sends money bears all the liability?
That's not a good idea.
You see, people getting goods and then reneging on payment is not only a very inefficient kind of fraud (because goods are definitionally less liquid than money), but it also incorporates a certain level of traceability: there is a real-world address.
Thus, you WANT to a have system where the person sending goods bears the majority of the liability. In fact,
that's why we have it. It's not a situation that exists for want of technology, it is a situation that exists because of the needs of society.
[quote=="superjawes"]Well the "problem" we were discussing implied an economy across currencies. If economies are actually integrated, then economic turmoil is going to affect multiple countries whether or not they share a currency.[/quote]
I'm with JBI. In fact:
JBI wrote:Different currencies and exchange rates exist for a reason. You can't unify currencies without also unifying economies. This is the trap the EU fell into with Greece -- Greece transitioned to the Euro, but their economy was never truly unified with the rest of the EU. The result has been chaos and economic collapse.
QFT!
A currency union is problematic because we tune the economy through monetary policy. If everyone has the same currency, everyone must have the same monetary policy. This causes issues even here in the US, but a (mostly) common socio-culture and relatively high-levels of intra-national migration help mitigate it to a certain extent.
FireStarter wrote:If Taro Aso means to say that this was the predictable end of Bitcoin, then he is mistaken. The Bitcoin network and economy is doing just fine without MtGox, and was doing just fine before when MtGox was basically dead to the USA anyway due to not allowing USD withdrawals.
You have a very strange definition of "fine." There isn't any BTC economy to speak of, even it's minimal forays in this country are immediately translated into USD (and as I said earlier in this thread, that might all be at the direct expense of foolish VCs).
FireStarter wrote:MtGox may not have had any paper trail, but Bitcoin most definitely has. In fact, it's "paper" trail is the foundation of the whole network. Also, it's not nearly impossible to recover BTC when it has changed hands, it's absolutely impossible. IMO Darren Hayes is very much right with his comments on MtGox, but they don't necessarily apply to Bitcoin as a whole.
A paper trail that is so easy to follow that the biggest exchange wasn't doing it correctly for months while getting robbed blind.
Currencies are more than systems of accounting. They must be current in the marketplace, that is, they must in commercial circulation. A currency that is not current is merely a chit.
Saying the system of chits is secure shouldn't reassure anyone very much...
