Again, it doesnât have too, you can build such things on top. It is a solid foundation to create all kinds of financial applications on top of it. Far more efficient that anything the legacy systems are capable off.
For example, if you want to have this kind of protection you obviously need a third-party involved anyway that will be the arbitrator. There will be a market for companies that offers that service and then you pay for it if you think a transaction needs that kind of insurance.
Maybe part of it can even be implemented as a smart contract that holds the funds for a period of time so the third-party arbitrator only gets involved if the customer signals a claim. This would make the whole process extremely efficient and transparent for all parties involved.
Things like that are already starting to appear in DeFi applications.
Well then, keep enjoying the boot who is crushing you with undemocratic, technocratic, elitist management of the money supply in order to protect you from the mean, mean-y criminals!
All the statists and enemy of freedom on this planet donât have to fear as long as leash-lovers like you are around, thatâs for sure.
In anyway, talk is cheap, we will see if you are right or wrong. Me, I predict that indeed the governments and central banks will try to regulate the tech, but they will fail, simply because blocking the tech is akin to blocking the internet, the same way you canât really stop the spreading of some books (what happened in the Soviet block during the Cold War shows that). Best they can do is introduce their own version of it, and of course it wonât hold against blockchains powered by free innovation.
And thatâs exactly what the ECB is already doing lol, I saw Christinne Lagarde talks about Cryptos, and she is touting the exact same arguments you are using lol, âThink of the children!!â (She actually used that one, Iâm not even joking), âFor your Safety!!â.
And just like her, you are old in your thinking and on the way to be obsolete.
Search engine already controls what you can see, and countries already manipulated search engines. They dont need to switch off the Internet, only to convert enough people so you can look like a mad person trying to say something different.
It always a bit like comedy when those banksters accuse crypto of those things, without any prove or actual numbers backed by evidence. Meanwhile their banks and they themselves are constantly making press for committing the crimes they accuse crypto of.
There are enough ways how people can hide their wealth or how you can launder money, crypto isnât needed for that to exist. Itâs also kinda dumb to commit such a crime on a system where every single transaction is public and they get you the second you leave any clue about your identity.
You can. But the point you keep refusing to acknowledge is that once you add the things required for widespread adoption of bitcoin to be even theoretically possible you end up with a system that has all of the things you hate about the conventional financial system: transaction fees, delays in processing transactions, the need to trust third-party payment processors, etc. Except the inherent (and deliberate) inefficiency of bitcoinâs infrastructure will make bitcoin non-competitive in any situation where people care about cost. So congratulations, you just reinvented a Paypal clone with 10 times the transaction fees.
Oh look, a 16 year old who just discovered anarchism and Ayn Rand for the first time.
Meanwhile in the real world âfreedomâ is not some kind of absolute good that must be prioritized above all else. Freedom to speak without the secret police murdering you is important, freedom to die from drinking contaminated water is not.
To be fair, if you want to do anything useful with bitcoin youâre going to have to tie it to your offline identity at some point. Youâll have to ship a package to an address, convert bitcoin into real currency that goes into a bank account, etc. Itâs only really anonymous in the sense that the police have better things to do with their resources. Why put in a bunch of effort to de-anonymize a bitcoin purchase when you can stop a random black person for âdriving suspiciouslyâ and civil asset forfeiture yourself a nice increase for the police departmentâs budget?
Exactly. Buying illegal drugs on the internet? Not worth it for the police. Funding a terrorist organization? Now itâs worth tracing all of the transactions. But I suspect that most of bitcoinâs âtoo small a crime to careâ anonymity is also the case for transactions with normal currency unless you do something blatantly stupid to attract attention.
And yet all of this is done on a computer with who-knows what hardware and software vulnerabilities, then sent through the internet? Wait, the internet? Surely we arenât going to say the internet is uncompromised.
Again, Lightning Network, which is the layer on Bitcoin that is actually used for daily transactions for regular users has completely neglect-able fees, sub cent, and does not suffer from the inefficiency of the main layer. The main layer is inefficient for a reason.
The difference to the Lightning Network and Paypal is that one is a walled garden, a closed solution of a company, while the other is an open source network everyone can use to build on that is completely decentralized with actual p2p payments. âJust another Paypalâ is a bit like pointing at the internet and saying âjust another network AOL or Compuserve (the walled dial-up networks the offered, not what they are today)â.
If the underlying payment system is an open and public network I donât have to rely on any of those services if I donât need them. An open system will also guarantee that there is a free market for those services and not the quasi monopolistic crap we have today.
This is the key point of it all. Bitcoinâs anonymity relies on the fact that there are unregulated exchanges (with sufficient transaction volume to obscure the records) outside of the reach of the police. Thatâs a fine assumption if you bought $10 worth of pot on the internet, it starts to get a lot less so if youâre involved in something serious enough that you have to consider the threat of a pseudo-legal CIA raid seizing all records from the exchange. Or, if bitcoin becomes widely accepted, of that exchange being covered by normal anti-laundering rules.
And that inefficiency is going to get passed on somewhere. If the lightning network layer has all of the transaction volume then the lightning network will have to pay for the infrastructure it runs on. Nobody is throwing vast amounts of money at operating bitcoin infrastructure purely out of altruism.
As for the rest, you keep confusing market and regulatory issues with technological ones. Clever software engineering canât solve problems like the need to have temporary transaction holds for fraud protection. Or the fact that insurance against fraud requires transaction fees to cover the cost of the losses. The things you hate about conventional payment systems arenât the way they are because nobody has figured out a way to write better software, they are that way because the market demand and regulatory issues that bitcoin will have to comply with to gain mainstream adoption require it.
Iâm running a bitcoin node with a lightning node on a raspberry pi. And that is a full validating node, that isnât really required. The hardware requirements for a regular node are extremely low, it runs on a smartphone. That is literally all that is required to transact with others.
The base layer still works as it is. It is a secure store of value where Lightning allocates liquidity. Itâs not inefficient, it literally turns energy into security. It is the most secure store of value ever built by humans. It is not super fast and only has one function, but it does this extremely well and it allows for applications like Lightning to build on this secure foundation.
No, but businesses offering that service on top of the payment network can. It would be extremely easy to offer such a service for transactions that require that level of protection. Just because the money network is trust-less doesnât mean we canât have trust based business relations on top that canât be solved by technology. This could be something like this: I get an invoice from a company, because I want insurance I send it to an insurance provider who pays the bill on my behalf and sends me a bill with the amount of the bill + fee. If I have a valid claim that provider then has to cover. This could be any company, doesnât matter.
Today there are only two realistic options. You have either VISA or Mastercard. They are both proprietary networks controlled by companies that are pretty aware of their power to leech as much out of the system as possible. The Lightning network replaces that with a free and open source decentralized peer2peer network where every business using it plays on the same level.
There is no leech in the middle with insane fees on every transaction even if I donât care for fraud protection. If I pay for my food in a restaurant, there is no need for it yet they still charge those fees. I can pay the restaurant directly electronically, without anyone else being involved.
It is far more efficient and accessible ( I donât need a bank account ) than anything currently in use. And that is only about one reason why it will win.
That and the collective infrastructure that bitcoin runs on. Your single node isnât worth anything without all of those ASIC farms converting an entire country worth of electricity into waste heat. And on some level someone is going to have to pay for all of that infrastructure.
It is the most secure store of value ever built by humans.
Um, no, it isnât even close. Once again youâre failing to grasp the concept that there is more to a system than the software running it. Bitcoin may have a lot of bits of entropy for its encryption algorithm but itâs also a pure software system with nothing to back it up if a flaw is found. Or excessive volatility. Or market failures. Or simply a stolen wallet key. Contrast this with, say, my US dollars in a bank account where I have fraud protection guarantees, FDIC insurance against the bank itself failing, and one of the worldâs most powerful economic and political entities setting policy to protect the value of that currency.
This could be something like this: I get an invoice from a company, because I want insurance I send it to an insurance provider who pays the bill on my behalf and sends me a bill with the amount of the bill + fee.
Congratulations, you just reinvented the credit card. The insurance provider will charge at least the same fee that Paypal/credit cards/etc charge for processing the transaction and the seller will have to wait the same 30 days (or whatever it is) for the transaction to finalize and the funds to be released. This is what you stubbornly refuse to understand: once you add all of these features to bitcoin youâre left with a service that has all of the things you hate about Paypal except with higher fees to cover its much less efficient infrastructure.
If I pay for my food in a restaurant, there is no need for it yet they still charge those fees.
Yes, because thatâs how insurance works. Do you have any idea how expensive fraud protection insurance would be if it was only purchased for high-risk transactions? That business model might not have a significant transaction fee on buying dinner, but have fun paying a 50% transaction fee on every online purchase.
PS: if you want to remove the third parties at a restaurant just pay (and tip!) with cash.
Lets say the amount of bitcoin is finite and more people would want it (believing the hype), the value of it is not changing, what is changing is amount of goods people are willing to give for it.
If the future belongs to one of the things that will evolve from it, a hard fork, the switch may be as sudden as bitcoin rise to fame if people will follow emotion and reason, but it will be also a demise of bitcoin and all people who ever decided to exchange all their wealth for itâŚ
The exchange rate will be all that matters, but that will be terrible I imagine, not in favor of cryptocurrency that is going away.
BTW, do you know what really was valuable always, but never valued as it should be valued?
People.
What If the govs will make systems awarding citizens with points that could be then exchanged for services? Everyone not compliant will be excluded from services. Systems dont have to be compatible with any cryptocurrency, only with your behavior. In my corporation it is actually a bit like that already, but people just get more money if behaving accordingly to inside rules.
What makes you think people are valuable? Robots and computers can already do almost everything better than people. The only real need for people are in places where automated solutions are still too expensive.
But people make robots, and robots and machines work only so good as people who make them, or operate them, or program them.
We dont yet have an AI singularity yet, that would be more wise and better than humans who created it, so it would be possible for it to upgrade itself into infinity, if its even possible.
Also People could make it so they are irrevocably needed and connected to this construct, and serve as one of the things needed for it to operate at full capacity.
You need only a very few people to keep the machines going. All the richest people, with the most power, are the ones that benefit from automation and would prefer to keep their human employees to a minimum.
But production is not everything, and computers would have to get human grade brains and bodies that would be good for all other things, not only those leading to production of more things that will be thrown away when used up.
Of course in the most technoutopist of utopias the humans are not needed anyway for machines to function on their own, but would people want that themselves?
Give up your place in the universe for your creation, it already exists. People make babies and then die.
Can a machine that have mind capabilities of human, can it be considered an offspring?