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by jboggan
3209 days ago
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It's not a better alternative to fiat, and here's my best anecdote why: A few years ago I was in SV trying to network and raise money for the crypto options and futures exchange I had just built. I ended up being invited to a "Bitcoin poker" game at a Google exec's house up in the hills with other Bitcoin entrepreneurs, including Charlie Lee (founder of Litecoin and at the time chief engineer at Coinbase). We were playing Texas Hold 'em with a buy in of I think 100mBTC and feeling very revolutionary for having a poker game with no cash on hand. Except the buy in took about half an hour. The exec's home was way up in the hills and half of us got very poor cell reception. Those of us using Coinbase (including Charlie Lee I recall) couldn't send our transactions to the pot address because we couldn't receive our 2FA text messages from Coinbase (which cascaded in after we left that night). After a lot of lunacy including running around in the backyard and driveway looking for a spot of coverage, we finally settled on a system of handwritten IOU notes, and most people had to buy in twice and have an appointed stranger promise to send them BTC later. I would argue that there were few people savvier than our group when it came to Bitcoin, and we were having this experience? I realized I was maybe a little too immersed in the hype to see where Bitcoin was falling short in usability. |
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Ironically, this is not too different from how the financial industry solved the problem of having trouble moving large quantities of precious metals. Lots and lots of IOU notes. Eventually, the IOU notes were so ubiquitous that the underlying precious metals could be dispensed with entirely, and we got fiat.