[zizek23]

Bitcoin can't die as it never succeeded. All the disingenuous claims made by early adopters have fallen through. Decentralization, control, anonymity, easy transactions, transactions costs, currency? How can something that has no use have value?

Proponents continue to build castles and waste electricity hoping people bite so they can profit. But the game is over.

Money is a social tool based on consensus, and today democracy and accountability, that has evolved with human societies however imperfect it may be. At least societies can exercise some control over governments.

Why would anyone give up this hard won rule of law and accountability to private individuals operating out of self interest peddling illusions about some imaginary 'freedom'?

[mirimir]

> How can something that has no use have value?

It works well enough for me. I do stuff for people. They pay me in Bitcoin. I lease servers and stuff. And pay Bitcoin. All of that can be as anonymous as I like. So yeah, it works for me.

> Proponents continue to build castles and waste electricity hoping people bite so they can profit.

Sure, some investors do. Me, I wish that they'd find something else to screw up. If it weren't for all the damn miners, we could still mine on our own devices.

> Money is a social tool based on consensus, and today democracy and accountability, that has evolved with human societies however imperfect it may be.

So you say. I don't see any obvious connection between money and democracy or accountability. Money is what people use in trade. Trade is a private matter.

> Why would anyone give up this hard won rule of law and accountability to private individuals operating out of self interest peddling illusions about some imaginary 'freedom'?

So authoritarian jerks can't mess with them?

[dreit1]

Because this supposed "law and accountability" led to things like the 2008 financial crisis. Didn't seem like there was much accountability then, so why should I trust that money supply? I know exactly what is going to happen to the bitcoin money supply, it's written in the code. Furthermore, hard forks prove that if you don't like the network, then you can leave and retain value. You can't leave the dollar without geographically moving to another location

[ckastner]

> Because this supposed "law and accountability" led to things like the 2008 financial crisis. Didn't seem like there was much accountability then, so why should I trust that money supply?

As someone working in the financial industry, the amount of regulations, internal audits, external audits, reporting requirements, etc. that financial institutions have to comply with is truly staggering.

Sure, they 2008 financial crisis demonstrated that all of this was no silver bullet, but I still consider that system many orders of magnitude more trustworthy than a system that allowed for the shit-show that was MTGOX, and other failed exchanges.

[dreit1]

I've hear a lot has changed in terms of regulation since 2008. However we shouldn't compare Mt.Gox to BTC, Gox was a centralized institution, so the failure was with it, not with bitcoin. If the people had held their bitcoin privately, which is arguably the "correct" way to hold bitcoin, they would have been fine.

Bitcoin itself is completely auditable in transparent. The system will behave exactly as the code is written.

[chx]

Trust... someone typed in instead of copy pasting an Ethereum address, made a typo and lost five figures.

[marcosscriven]

Addresses have a checksum for just that reason. It would be remarkably difficult to acccidentally mistype an address that had happened to have the correct checksum, and also be a valid address.

[chx]

https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/4yru3h/scared_and...

tl;dr: Neither Ethereum nor Bitcoin have address checksums on the protocol level (remember this HN thread here is about trust) but by now all Bitcoin clients decided to implement it. In this case, the exchange used an Ethereum client which didn't.