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by lmm 3711 days ago
> Bitcoin has the capability to be the great equalizer, not just across economic bands but also across country borders.

That's backwards. Bitcoin is directly controlled by the owners of property (miners), in proportion to how much they own.
1 comments
EdHominem 3710 days ago
That'd be a proof-of-stake coin. They exist. You're thinking of in proportion to their percentage of the network mining power. Which for a pool (cartel?) can be sizable.

But that it is more akin to controlling the post-office than controlling the bank. People can be inconvenienced but not stolen from (except in certain cases with confederates of the post-master) and those can be guarded against more easily than avoiding phishing email from "your bank".

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lmm 3706 days ago
> those can be guarded against more easily than avoiding phishing email from "your bank".

What risk measure are you using there, and what ease measure? E.g. waiting for 6 blocks for transactions to settle (best practice AIUI) would be a serious inconvenience when e.g. paying at a restaurant.

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EdHominem 3705 days ago
You expect a restaurant customer to perform a double-spend for their dinner bill? One confirmation is enough for, roughly, anything worth less than the block reward. When you sell luxury cars you may want to wait a bit longer.

Mostly, attacks on the protocol itself (instead of your android wallet, etc) require significant mining effort and usually waste it effort by making the block incompatible with the global network (the double spend). When the cost of the item, divided by the number of blocks the merchant waits, is greater than the block reward divided by your likelihood of finding enough consecutive blocks to cheat - it may be worth it to try.

Specifically for food - you're supposed to mention coupons and traveller's cheques at the start of the meal, giving the restaurant time to prepare. The confirmation time (one, or maybe two blocks) could be handled the same way - pay a bit early.

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lmm 3705 days ago
One or two blocks is 10 or 20 minutes, no? That's not going to make you popular. Maybe bitcoin can replace coupons and travellers' cheques, but that's not a very big market compared to cash and cards.
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EdHominem 3705 days ago
You say that like I failed my sales pitch. The restaurant was your example, and I'm not trying to get you to use Bitcoin.

fwiw, I have paid btc in a restaurant and it was seamless because they didn't bother waiting for any confirmations because they had our faces on camera... Fraud is fraud so they weren't worried. Flash the QR, scan the QR, check the numbers, hit okay, done. 20s for me, and maybe another 20s for the merchant.

But yeah, some stores don't take credit, some don't take cash. All depends on their workflow if seconds matter.

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lmm 3704 days ago
> You say that like I failed my sales pitch. The restaurant was your example, and I'm not trying to get you to use Bitcoin.

I object to the claim that it's easier to guard against a hostile bitcoin network than against phishing emails. It may be possible to use bitcoin safely for some use cases, but it's more effort than avoiding phishing emails.

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