п»ї Charlie Stross wants Bitcoin to die in a fire : Bitcoin

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Stross discussion has been archived. This is a rebuttal by morons Score: I'ts not that we aren't listening, it's that you don't understand macro economics and let your ignorance and ego usd a nonsense. Bitcoin needs up to 3. Surely you could write better malware bitcoin that Cryptolocker. The industries already work with charles standard money. This really pisses me off.

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In other circumstances they would be fiddling with a fucking illegal currency that has no fucking value outside of your fucking world. I don't agree with ALL of his points. ALL transactions are public which means it's really easy to start profiling people. If you've got actual logic, then I'm all ears. The more power you have, the more you can take away from others "borrow". If you can only see what's right in front of you, you can't see what's coming. The idea of a crypto currency is an interesting one, but Bitcoin is very poorly implemented from an economic standpoint, if nothing else.

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What's stross to hate? On the other side, if you owe money, deflation is a big problem. But Bitcoin have my doubts about a currency with a fixed number of tokens of value. Anyone wanting to rebut the carbon footprint of cryptocurrency should invite the other party to stand usd a running armoured car that's being used to deliver cash to an ATM. I don't care about the exchange charles it's an infant market.

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A Rebuttal To Charles Stross About Bitcoin - Slashdot

He thinks Tue, 26 Dec Why I want Bitcoin to die in a fire. I want Bitcoin to die in a fire: One of the speculative authors who influenced me was Charles Stross. Accelerando and Glasshouse are two of the best sci-fi books of all time. His mind- bending worlds push the limits of what's possible in fiction. Unfortunately, when it comes to Bitcoin he seems to have very little imagination. It turns out, White and I share similar tastes in science fiction, of all things.

Charles Stross , popular author and blogger, summed up the situation nicely. Running afoul of the IRS, however, is merely the focus of the latest news. Dollars would start to become scarce. People would hoard them. In practice, no government would EVER do this deliberately. Because it would result in a deflationary spiral that would be economic suicide. Instead, most adopt a policy of moderate inflation for the reasons I outlined in my original post.

Sometimes it gets out of control for random economic reasons or because governments can't rein in spending. Note that hyperinflation generally is not caused by governments printing money to pay debts in their own currency ; it is generally caused when governments owe money in another currency , and as they print more, the value of the local currency plummets in relation to other international currencies, forcing an inflationary spiral to pay debt.

That's a fundamental difference, though governments can still be stupid enough to ruin economies if they try. Anyhow, the primary point you've failed to understand is that a precious metal standard does not prevent currency inflation nor government running the "press" to make more money , as can be learned from reading any history. When governments run out of gold, it's not like everyone throws up their hands and says "Oh well, gold is a scarce resource, and we're out!

No -- first governments switch to less precious metals, historically silver was important, but in the ancient world, currencies were even issued in things like giant iron "coins" which corroded , just to keep up the spending. But the next step is seigniorage [wikipedia. In good economic times, this may work okay.

In bad economic times, it too can lead to an inflationary spiral. You can believe all you want in some "magical" powers of a gold standard, but people will always find ways to screw up things economically with currencies, particularly if things get dire enough. Using gold or any other scarce -- but ultimately small-valued -- item won't fix that.

The moment you convert actual "wealth" in useful goods food, textiles for clothing, essential tools and weapons, etc. All the government needs to do to make it worthless is to ask the NSA to mine with their resources for a while. That would quickly make the government the richest in terms of Bitcoin, and therefore gain even more power!

The halving of the price followed the first time a government mentioned BitCoin As such mentions become more frequent, the effects will gradually stop being as dramatic. Personally, I still prefer gold — because it is useful by itself: And most people find gold beautiful, whereas it takes a peculiar mind to appreciate. The moment they shut down the silk road site, the entire Bitcoin money supply plus five bucks will get you a cup of coffee at Starbucks.

Your Bitcoin will be worth exactly zero, as you'll have no way to cash them in. Bitcoin is the most amazing thing happening in the world today. It is the internet revolution now taking on the finance industry after conquering the media industry. Your wording really makes you look like a BitCoiner. Which is why you don't understand the Bitcoin "hate". Bitcoin is hardly the most amazing thing happening today nor is it any sort of revolution that has to do with the internet.

Bitcoin is trying to solve a problem in the way that a person tries to solve a problem when they've taken in too much alcohol. It's a supposed way to provide seemless transfer of money at a low cost. The problem with that is that, it's highly in-efficient. The amount of energy.

It's not that hard to understand I hear so much hype about it, it's almost as bad as the never-ending election coverage I have to suffer through for 18 months before the elections. I know about it, am not interested, and would rather not see reminders about it every-fucking time I blink.

A world changing innovation that will revolutionize currency and break our dependence on evil national governments and usher in a new era The fact that such a badly broken system is what's going to be equated with all cryptocurrency by the public and the media shatters any hopes I have of actually seeing a meaningful adoption of purely digital, non-government backed currency transactions for the foreseeable future.

We are literally on the verge of an era where the technology exists to break governments of their iron grasp on currency and therefore the world's economies , but instead of seeing that happen, I get to read a bunch of stories about this technologically brilliant ponzi scheme that's going to poison public opinion against that happening.

And all so some lucky fucks who aren't me can get rich on the Bitcoin bubble. What's not to hate? Don't hate me because I paid attention to the first story I read on Slashdot about bitcoin, 2. I was paying attention, and you weren't.

I didn't pay attention when one of my co-workers told me about this software company that was going public - Microsoft. Well, I have learned since then. I made money on some dotcom boom stocks, I lost on some others, but on the whole came out ahead. Despite the article's claim that economists constantly argue over everything and thus know nothing which is incredible ignorance on its own , the case for fiat currency is pretty good [typepad.

But the discussion here is being driven by Libertarians, who A love abstract reasoning and hypothetical examples, and B are obsessed with the fantasy that people everywhere are conspiring to s. Over the last few months, we've been averaging a little more than 1 Bitcoin story every 2 days. Please - please, stop accepting every submission that has the word Bitcoin in it. At this point, I'd almost like them to start covering the Presidential Election. Well, if any of the candidates decide to accept campaign donations in bitcoin, you'll get your wish.

There should be an algorithm to make it progressively more difficult to create each Bitcoin story, with reviewers getting paid a small amount of karma for each submission they proc-- aarrgggh, doing it again!

The only point to holding a currency is if you expect it to rise against some other currency. I take it you've never heard of the concept of saving money in order to purchase things or for 'rainy day' expenses?

It's a really nice feeling to know I could pay cash for a new car today if I wanted to, or could pay to put a new roof on my house tomorrow if it were necessary. Not everyone lives off credit cards or believes in making monthly payments to the bank for the rest of their lives.

Practically no one except criminals hold significant amounts of currency to purchase things. Instead the currency is invested, at least in a bank account. BitCoin is different in that it is entirely practical to keep extremely large amounts of it entirely outside the economy. You just cannot do that with cash, except if you are Scrooge McDuck. I'm no economist, but isn't that backwards? Most currencies are inflationary, meaning that it takes more of them every year to buy the same junk as last.

People thus want to spend their money on real stuff more quickly so they can get full value out of their money. In a deflationary cycle, it takes less money over time to buy the same amount of stuff -- this is the same as saying that the currency's value rises over time and in essence, it makes everything cheaper the longer you wait.

The nicest thing you can say about bitcoin is that it is disruptive and the disruptions have the possibility of not being exceptionally painful. If you think about the primary advantage of bitcoin, making anonymous electronic transactions that are much harder to trace, you have to think it's not going to be good.

Then you look and see the first killer app for bitcoin was the silkroad? It really isn't going to surprise that this t. Bitcoin is more of a hybrid system than a true deflationary system. The gold standard is considered deflationary and Bitcoin is often seen as the digital equivalent of gold. Gold has a limited supply, so it is scarce, just like a digital currency. But real gold can only be subdivided so far.

Bitcoin has no such limitations. Its current limitation is eight decimal places. The protocol is designed to be upgradeable, so if we ever need to divide it further we can. The problem with a deflationary system is not one of divisibility. The problem with a deflationary system is that the value of a given amount of currency is basically guaranteed to increase over time, as the total amount of possible currency has a hard limit-- by design , in Bitcoin's case.

Unless human civilization starts becoming less valuable as a whole which is BAD , this is basically inevitable. That you can chop your Bitcoins up into Nanobitcoins doesn't change the fact that the currency will simply continue to increase in real value. That's like saying you can make a ten-ton boulder less heavy by crushing it into pebbles.

That this is advanced as a serious counterargument to deflation should tell you everything you need to know about the author s of this piece.

If you read posts from many Bitcoin supporters, you will discover that they actually believe that deflation is a good thing. They think that deflation will make the money in their piggy bank worth more, and thus they like it. They have a poor understanding of the overall economic impact so they believe it would be positive. They also tend to conflate the ideas of saving and hoarding so while Bitcoin encourages the latter, they believe that's the same thing as the former.

What they fail to realize is that deflation is something that would benefit the rich and the very most and harm the poor the very most. The more money you have, and the less debt you have, the better deflation would be for you. If you've got a massive bank account, more than you need for the rest of your life, deflation is great.

You keep all your money in cash, spend it only as you need, and the remaining money gets worth more. You don't need to invest it or take any risk, just keeping cash increases your value. On the other side, if you owe money, deflation is a big problem. A loan becomes increasingly difficult to pay back as your nominal payment stays the same, but the real value that you are having to pay out increases. It works to keep you poor and to make it more difficult for you to ever become financially self-sufficient.

Really what it comes down to is many Bitcoin supporters just have a very poor understanding of economics. They don't understand the downsides of Bitcoin, because they actually believe many of them to the upsides. Really, Bitcoin is a dream for the rich robber barons. They would love something outside of any government regulation, something that works to make the rich richer, something where there's no recourse if they take money from you, no chargeback that kind of thing.

It really isn't something that the rest of us should be that interested in seeing. The idea of a crypto currency is an interesting one, but Bitcoin is very poorly implemented from an economic standpoint, if nothing else.

Bitcoin has fundamental utility, just like Internet companies did in before the crash, except its price includes manic speculation. I don't want bitcoin to die, nor did I want those Internet companies to die. They all had utility, but manic speculation killed them. Speculation didn't kill them, or even rampant speculation. Manic speculation killed them, speculation without any justification except emotion, herd mentality, or what have you. Your dream has been partially answered: The only use for Bitcoin other than gambling is immediate money transfers that do not need to be anonymous.

But I can do those with my credit card already, and at far lower risk. There is only ONE fact you should consider when thinking about the reality behind Bitcoin.

My money is in Euro and Swiss Francs. The USD is not essential. Touting Bitcoin as a replacement is pure FUD though, written by a true believer with a very small analytical capability. Or by somebody that want to push the clout in order to defraud them a bit more. There may be more comments in this discussion. Without JavaScript enabled, you might want to turn on Classic Discussion System in your preferences instead.

In a five year period we can get one superb programming language. Only we can't control when the five year period will begin. Sign up for the Slashdot Daily Newsletter! New submitter buddha writes "Over the holidays we discussed a story from SF author Charles Stross called ' Why I Want Bitcoin to Die in a Fire ,' just as Bitcoin's price collapsed on news of the Chinese government's cautious approach to the fledgling internet currency.

This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted. Bitcoin is vulernable to government manipulation Score: Share twitter facebook linkedin. Bitcoin is vulernable to government manipulatio Score: Parent Share twitter facebook linkedin. Who pays for that large chunk of 3. You are right though, New Zealand is the place to be. I know how bitcoin works, but I'm missing a couple elements: Bitcoin is not vulnerable Score: You can't get transactions "off the chain" because then I can double-spent a bitcoin.

And you'll have to add a "change of ownership" transaction in the global chain eventually. So both parties A and B have to use the same ban And of course, this ledger then would have to be regulated and policed - you don't want your money disappear if the ledger decides to pack stuff and move into a nice tropical country without extradition treaty with the US. Oh, and of course this ledger would be able to "borrow" your money for a little while.

Since you won't be able to access it while it's on the deposit account. And at this point, there are no advantages to using bitcoins versus regular currencies. It is kinda like how pure capitalist and pure communist systems become indistinguishable over time as natural pressures moved them into certain patterns. The modern system developed over time for various reasons, and one can already see those same pressures shaping active areas of BTC into the same patterns.

Financial institutions did not just appear one day after a bunch of people sat down and said 'hey, I know what we need, we need this horribly complicated and corrupt systems because we hate p. He creates the fiction world and as much of its history, natural science, and society as suits his purpose.

He can produce a socialist utopia or a Galt's Gulch, whichever serves his story -- or his biases. As for the science fiction fan's supposed knowledge of nature, I'd be suspicious of it. While it's true that sci-fi fans often have familiarity with physical science and technology that exceeds the general public, that's hardly a ringing endorsement.

In my writing group, I recently critiqued a manuscript in which Shiite terrorists, working under a Wahhabist imam, build a lithium deuteride super-warhead and launch it on an ICBM into equatorial orbit to cause world-wide destruction of electronic equipment via EMP. When I pointed this out, the author's reaction was "It doesn't matter.

All he really needs is the set-up for his post-apocalyptic adventure, and it could just as well be magic and pixie dust as EMP and lithium deuteride. But I feel that as far as you explain anything, that explanation ought to hold water.

The thing about scientific literacy is that it isn't knowledge of a bunch of random, disconnected facts e. Basic fact-finding and simple computation. The link to Fourier's gangrene on Wikipedia is totally unnecessary, and the article includes an image that is decidedly not safe for work. If pictures of parts of the human body presented for education are a problem, you're in the wrong society.

You'd have to convince all bitcoin users to use the new algorithm. Hard sell getting them to devalue their own money. Pretty easy bait, really. The thing about BTC is that unless a state or states takes over administration of the code it can still be open, just subject to more rigorous change control then the will of the majority of people running a BTC transaction host will win out.

Sure, those holding bitcoin with no interest in mining could start up hosts to "win" the. This article has been flying around for the past couple of days, and it's so riddled with misconceptions and pure falsehoods about Bitcoin that this guy should be laughed out of his job. You know what has a carbon footprint from hell? The whole payments industry, and industry that could go away overnight if retailers, service industry, and wholesalers switched to digital currency.

Anti-malware software simply hasn't caught up yet, but sucking someone's power for pure financial profit sure is better than sucking someone's power to barrage others with email.

Sure, there's still evil here, but Bitcoin itself is not the problem: Bitcoin's lack of regulation is not a Bitcoin deficiency, but rather a legal one. Blame government for treating Bitcoin as a commodity instead of as a currency, subject to the same laws as cash.

Oh, wait, it basically is subject to the same laws as cash, except it's a whole lot easier to carry and the government can't create more of it out of thin air which is a good thing, if you want your money to have the same or better purchasing power tomorrow as it did today.

At least he didn't give the argument "There isn't enough Bitcoin to go around. There's 21 quadrillion units of Bitcoin That's enough for satoshis per person on the planet , and it would be very easy to convince miners to further subdivide it. This author reads like the worst kind of Keynesian: You mean the system that is processing many, many orders of magnitude more transactions that bitcoin?

So many that bitcoin as it currently exists couldn't even begin to handle them without major overhaul? Bitcoin is tiny, and is already wasting massive resources during meaningless busywork. If it was expended to that size, it would be far, far larger and even more wasteful. It's hilarious how its proponents have zero sense of perspective about their favourite little toy.

The amount of mining done is irrelevant to transaction loads, it essentially controls the risk ratios for any given specific transaction that might be reversed. You get the same level of security for the same amount of mining regardless of whether that mining protects , transactions or 10 million. I actually do have a sense of perspective, as blockchain growth is a frequent discussion topic among protocolists such as myself. It's a legitimate problem and it's something that is slowly working toward being solved with the advent of SPV clients and decentralized clients.

To say that Bitcoin will never be able to cope with the velocity and volume of transactions is to underestimate the technical ability of the entirety of the open source community, because Bitcoin is open to contributions from everyone, not some secluded banking group or government agency with selfish motives. You also fail to account for Garzik's Theory, which states that a modification to the set of base facts limits, hash algorithms, etc.

I mention Primecoin because it is doing something "externally useful" with its hashing, and that is to find prime numbers. So the above poster doesn't even know Charles Stross is a writer - that's a pretty HUGE sign that they didn't read the thing that is being suggested as full of holes.

I just don't get that people don'd understand that bitcoin is divisible to something like 7 decimal places or is it 8? Oh, wait, it basically is subject to the same laws as cash, except it's a whole lot easier to carry and the government can't create more of it out of thin air which is a good thing,.

No government in the world does that anymore! It couldn't keep up! I've never heard a compelling rebuttal that doesn't completely ignore the history of metallic standards. Hoarding a currency is natural when its purchasing power is increasing and there's nothing worth spending it on. Deflation makes people wiser spenders. Businesses and governments don't like this because they need cash flowing, and would rather devalue the currency to incent spending than produce products that people really want enough to spend their money.

We may have a philosophical difference here, so there's not a whole lot of point in going on at length. If the purchasing power is increasing by more than the risk-adjusted return on investment for all the things you might spend it on, then it's never worth it. Let me give an example: It is easy to find investments whose risk-adjusted rates of return exceed that e.

And the key thing about all of these is that they're investments, not commodities -- i. Therefore, much less investment gets done i. Since Bitcoin is deflationary, it makes more sense to stockpile or hoard it than to spend it. That is also what makes it more like a commodity than a currency. But what is the point of stockpiling something if you never intend to use it? You're making the same argument as waiting until next year to buy a computer because it will be cheaper, but for some reason people buy computers anyway.

At some point the holder of Bitcoins will value whatever can be bought with those Bitcoins more than the Bitcoins and a. So you're saying massive widespread adoption of bitcoin would eliminate the need for the gigantic hashing network that bitcoin requires, a network that supposedly dwarfs the computational capacity of all top supercomputers in the world combined?

Or are you saying that the payments industry currently requires even more computational capacity than this? Or are you saying you have no idea what you're talking about? Lack of inherit value in the currency was another complaint, wasn't it? I liked the comment [antipope.

Your relatives probably don't wan't you to spend all day smoking pot and playing video games; in some cases they will over-estimate just how much of a bad thing that is. Pretty much every libertarian position can be understood in that frame of restrictive but benevolent authority being the root of all 'real' problems.

It's a rare parent who literally tortures their kids, so torture is, at best, not a 'real' issue, not a priority. But many make them do stuff for their health, so mandatory health insurance is a big deal. Pretty much no parents kill their child with drones, many read their diaries. So to libertarians, Bitcoin is like wages from a fast food job as opposed to an allowance; lets you buy what you want without someone else having a veto.

Only money that doesn't judge you can be considered entirely yours I liked that comment too, because it told me that the writer's viewpoint can be dismissed immediately, saving me time. If you've got actual logic, then I'm all ears. If all you've got is a petty grudge, then I'll catch you later -- meaning never. I thought the whole purpose of currency is as a store of value. It's not an effective store if the amount of that store's unit count can be varied at will the way it is with Federal Reserve money.

And how is it different from the gold standard? Sure, mining gold gets harder as the supply runs out too. In which case Bitcoin fails massively as a store of value. Bitcoin - at this stage - is suitable only as an instrument of speculation. It's also a commodity. There is nothing to stop someone else from starting their own currency, just as there was nothing to stop BtC from appearing out of nowhere its own line of "value".

What's good for the goose is good for the gander. This is the real fundamental flaw in all unregulated fiat currencies. Fiat currencies are worth something because , by law, there is a governed amount of money and no other competing monies which themselves are not also so governed.

With Bitcoin, not so much. The exodus to "other" Bitcoiny type currencies hasn't happened yet, but there's no reason to think it won't and ever reason to think it will. Every time there are arguments made like this I remember something I read in the late 90s.

It was a scholarly book by a broadcaster I believe it was about HD TV that had a section about why Internet video wasn't going to take off. It stated things like "postage stamp-sized video," jumpyness, bad audio The flaw in the argument comes in the unspoken assumption that what they are looking at is a final version.

I personally don't think bitcoin will ever "replace" monetary systems across the world and there is a lot of reasons to hope that it doesn't, but a lot of these arguments make the assumption that no adjustments will ever be made and the ideas and tech. The problem was not Quicktime and Mpeg.

Mpeg has always supported all the way up to Xp Mpeg2 Was designed for this, Mpeg1 was designed to support up to X the full video resolution of it's time. First of all, BitCoin is not anonymous. Once mining dies out which also solves a lot of his other qualms , you need to trade bitcoins some way. You have to exchange your real money to bitcoins. ALL transactions are public which means it's really easy to start profiling people.

In the future it's probably easier to trace a person's bitcoin transactions than normal ones. I hate being a grammar nazi but, this Stross guy being a writer, I think it's warranted. Lack of mastery in his own craft makes me distrust his research a bit, even if it's a bit of an ad hominem on my part. I think his point -- though not as well written as you might expect from a guy whose job it is to work with words -- is that Bitcoin would allow those markets to flourish as their transactions would be untraceable.

Central banking is designed to only make a very very small number of people insanely wealthy and powerful. Only power hungry scumbags bent on world domination would be against this. It's not a good thing. If bitcoin truly does threaten TPTB, they can and will squash it. Yes, I know there will also be criminals using it for Silk Road, money laundering, and tax evasion, but as a legitimate currency, it will be dead. Libertarians love it because it pushes the same buttons as their gold fetish and it doesn't look like a "Fiat currency".

One, any currency is a fiat currency. People have to agree to use it, be it beads, dollars, bitcoins or polished turds. Just because you have a problem with libertarian views I do on some , does not mean an insulting argument is valid or appropriate.

Mining BtC has a carbon footprint from hell as they get more computationally expensive to generate, electricity consumption soars;. Bitcoin mining software is now being distributed as malware because using someone else's computer to mine BitCoins is easier than buying a farm of your own mining hardware;.

It is always easier to steal someones wallet than work for it. There will always be those that try to do just that. Bitcoin's utter lack of regulation permits really hideous markets to emerge, in commodities like assassination and drugs and child pornography;. This one really gets my goat. These markets whether hideous or not , exist already, regardless of the currency. It doesn't matter if you by crack with blowjobs or acid with BTC, the market is there.


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