[coryl]

The author seems to expect that the changes created by cryptocurrency should be visible immediately. It is a lack of patience, and lack of understanding that changing deeply rooted systems and behaviors takes time.

People have never managed software where if you lost your "password", your money was gone forever. They never had to keep a 12-24 word recovery phrase. They've never sent money to addresses that look like hash strings. Their money value was never this volatile (in some countries anyway) and never this complicated to use (understanding and waiting for block confirmations, looking up transactions in the blockchain explorer).

That's why Coinbase exists, to obfuscate these complexities, to sell security as a service. The cryptography behind cryptocurrencies allows you to basically be your own bank vault; this is not intuitive to people.

The fundamentals for Satoshi's vision have been laid out, the rest of the implementation details will come in time.

[wott]

> People have never managed software where if you lost your "password", your money was gone forever. They never had to keep a 12-24 word recovery phrase. They've never sent money to addresses that look like hash strings. Their money value was never this volatile (in some countries anyway) and never this complicated to use (understanding and waiting for block confirmations, looking up transactions in the blockchain explorer).

Well yeah, nobody in his sane mind would have designed such an unpractical system. It took a bunch of out of touch, fresh out of school computer scientists to reach such nonsense.

[coryl]

I doubt that blockchain was invented by a fresh out of school computer science graduate. The breadth and depth of technical complexity (even if just the white paper) that blockchain covers requires time and experience to accumulate.

[oculusthrift]

more likely an out of touch phd professor (or team of them)

[curuinor]

What, then, exactly is the difference between your scenario and Coinbase being the bank?

[eberkund]

That is a good analogy, if you choose to you can use a bank (or Coinbase) but you also have the option of doing everything in cash or managing your own Bitcoin wallet. Prior to cryptocurrency if you wanted to quickly send money around the world without going through a bank or other financial institutions you were out of luck.

[_red]

Coinbase can't print money.

[colorint]

Banks can't print money either, and this isn't some "ackshually it's the Mint" thing: banks have the power to create debt. But this isn't special, because you and I also have the power to create debt. What makes a bank special is that debt is its business (so most of its operation concerns the management of debt), and much of its debt can be called on demand, and so we call banks' debts to us demand deposits.

Fractional reserve is just a particular kind of regulation placed on banks' creation of debt, and it usually isn't the most important one. The practical limit of banks is that they have to be able to extinguish their debts (which we call withdrawal), including being able to transfer them to other banks in exchange for cash (which we call clearing), at the whim of the creditors (you and me).

The problems with banks are the problems with debt generally, but that's much trickier than some glib remarks about monetary policy.

[cdancette]

You can't really create debt with money that you don't have, as the banks do.

You can't make 1000$ appear on my bank account and say " you now have a debt of 1000$ to me". You need to give me physical money. But bank can create this money they don't have.

[jcranmer]

The bank isn't creating that money. When you deposit $1000 in a bank account, you lose that $1000 and gain 1000 FunnyMonies instead. The bank can then turn around and give that $1000 to someone else. At the end of the day, there's only $1000 running around.

What makes it look different is that we treat 1000 FunnyMonies as if it were $1000. So instead of saying "there's $1000 and 1000 FunnyMonies" we say "there's $2000, oh look, the bank created money." But it hasn't, and when the difference really matters, and the bank doesn't have the ability to give you back $1000 for your 1000 FunnyMonies, that's when bad things happen.

[cdancette]

Absolutely not. The bank can lend those 1000$ to several people.

I think it can lend it up to 10 times the money it has in its vault (not sure about the exact amount)

[spookthesunset]

MtGox printed money. Lots of exchanges probably do but since they are unregulated and completely opaque you’ll never know for sure.

[coryl]

Technically they can try, by selling users coin in a fractional reserve model. This is probably already being done by some exchanges.

But that's a problem regarding legal regulation.

[659087]

Bitfinex can, though.