[zajd]

I find it amusing that you consider the internet "on your own" like there isn't a gigantic investment being made into that infrastructure that even enables bitcoin in the first place.

Do people who are in to Bitcoin think intermediaries solely exist to extract value from transactions? There's actually a service being provided.

[nicky0]

The internet (at least theoretically) a neutral infrastructure though. Bitcoin is just an application like email, the web or IM.

[zajd]

Well let me be the first to invite bitcoiners to rejoin us back in reality where the internet isn't. If the entire argument of the bitcoin community is "providing an alternative to fiat currency" and they can't, what's even the point?

The internet IS NOT neutral. Never has been, never will be.

[daptaq]

Could you elaborate ob your last point?

Regarding the first point: To my understating, as a Ex-Bitcoiner, the whole point is a massive distrust in financial institutions + the idea that the whole hierarchy of banks and clients seems superfluous, and could be done away with. Insted of giving up your responsibilities that you get by having money, you take them into your own hand, leaving banks and the similar with nothing left to do.

Now it will obviously make no sense to use bitcoin like Dollar/Pound/Euro+bank, because it isn't made for that. Currently (as far as I know) there are some internal struggles between the "core developers" because of this fact. For-Profit companies like CoinBase and BitPay would like to expand their market at the cost of the distributed network, while others say the whole point of the network would be lost by giving in to them.

[zajd]

It's more or less that all value created from Bitcoin only exists because of the fiat currency systems in place today. It's not like banks hold your money for days when transferring for no reason.

Trust is a social problem and simply cannot be solved via technology because the infrastructure that technology is built on cannot be neutral... we live on a planet with limited resources. If your master plan includes chopping down the tree that holds your treehouse... sounds pretty terrible. Look at international politics to see what "neutrality" in the real world looks like. It's just power dynamics that are outside our control. Is that really what we want out of our financial system?

You see the same thing in the eth community thinking they can use "code" to solve the problem of trust. You can't. Lawyers have been trying for millenia. Bitcoiners are going to need a much more compelling reason/feature than they do now if they want any sort of widescale-adoption (and beyond that, to avoid being smashed when the illegal activities that take place on the network force someone to care)

[nicky0]

Because fiat currency is never used for anything illegal.

[zajd]

Spoiler alert, that's why they track how it's spent and where it's sent to. Turns out that "anonymous transactions" thing opens up a whole giant can of black market worms.

[rndmind]

The argument here is that the protocol itself is independent and can run on the internet like bittorrent, IRC, SMTP, XMPP etc. This is not about the physical laws and resources governing the internet.

[zajd]

The protocol cannot be separated from the physical infrastructure required to carry it out. Until Bitcoin separates from the internet itself and shows it can actually fund the infrastructure required to maintain it... don't see what the pull is.

[bertiewhykovich]

Have you tried torrenting anything recently?

[bertiewhykovich]

The point being, of course, that it's gotten fairly difficult. It's all very well and good to treat the Internet as an abstraction, but those "physical laws and resources" are critically important for any service that wants to be useful in the real world -- where physical laws and resources are very important.