[nelsontodd]

With bitcoin, you are paying for security. I know if I send you a bitcoin transaction there is a high probability it won't be reverted in our lifetime, possibly ever. I'm not a maxi but these new projects don't have that guarantee yet; likely they never will.

[rhacker]

How many times has this been used in practice?

Like really - did your friend owe you $200 and you wanted to make sure he couldn't pay you something over square and then call his credit company and say his card was lost?

Like are you a shop online and you wanted to make sure ALL of your customers are paying in Bitcoin so they can't claim someone stole their card?

Are you a party to a lawsuit and the judge decided to oversee the other party pay you (the fictitious plaintiff in this scenario) $50000 with a check and you're worried he's calling his bank afterward and cancel the check?

None of these scenarios would be made better with Bitcoin:

Transaction costs

Some online stores ARE scams and it's better to have a real money trail - especially the ones involving bitcoin

The last scenario is easily solved because the judge would be able to provide much harsher realities for the check canceller.

From a practicality standpoint every time someone talks about irreversible transactions I just eyeroll at the actual logistics of that working in our world of 7B people.

[shuntress]

The fundamental purpose stated in the bitcoin whitepaper is to provide an electronic equivalent to physical cash.

The first line of the whitepaper[0] is "A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another"

In practice some "third" party (bank, paypal, square, venmo, etc) will still be involved in most transactions because of the scenarios you have described. But this would be because they are helpful and add value not because they are necessary.

[0] https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf

[mattwilsonn888]

Security is not usually the main use case of a service, but a necessary feature of one. Bitcoin can do many things, and its main use case right now is store of wealth, so with your examples you've demonstrated you don't understand its most basic function.

When you notice that multi billion dollar transactions of Bitcoin are made every blue moon you might not be scoffing at what its security protocol is providing it.

[BTCOG]

Exactly. Although I do want to add that money can be both money, and a store of value. Gold, being the main primary example.

[BTCOG]

Username doesn't check out with logic.

Do you mean to tell me you just cannot understand why some people want money with total finality to use with anonymous people across a network? I mean, at this point I have no argument with you I just can't understand your line of thinking. Cryptocurrency, or digital cash, digital money was an idea for a decade+ before Bitcoin finally solved the problem. It's an obvious money with many obvious use cases. Many thousands of folks around the world are using Bitcoin on a daily basis. It's like the phony fees story people spread about Bitcoin, while those of us using Bitcoin daily can send any amounts of money we like for payments to folks around the internet for a couple dollars.

Let me be totally blunt with you since you are acting clueless as to how people use money on the internets.

I pay people ALL THE TIME, in Bitcoin, for codebase work that they perform. I do not want banks involved, I do not want to know their real life identity, I do not want them to know my identity, etc. Therefore, do the work, I pay you. We have a Web-of-Trust (Something folks here in general just seem ENTIRELY clueless about) and we trust eachother just as far as the Web of Trust and our online chat history and trust level allows. Do people get ripped off at times with payments? Sure. You lost $50 bucks, or whatever. Maybe you'll learn not to trust that party again. It's very simple. You don't need to act clueless. It's money, and if you use it correctly it just works. It's not reversible. If I were paying someone who ran off with my cash, it's the same shit.

[Osiris]

The only reason proof of work is working for Bitcoin is because of the amount of hashing power put into it.

Nearly every other bitcoin fork can suffer a 50% attack because the network is sufficiently small that one can rent enough hashing power to attack it (see Bitcoin Gold).

Alternate coins absolutely need some other mechanism to secure their chain that doesn't require a critical mass.

[BTCOG]

This is precisely why those other chains are only imitators with no true value. The longest chain is bitcoin, and all the forks thereof are imitations that hold no value or network effect. This will always be the case when someone tries to fork Bitcoin rather than actually do some new cryptographic work.

[lmilcin]

This is repeatedly cited delusional conclusion.

The reality is that consensus only requires people to agree on something. It does not require burning tons of energy or military action.

Prisoner's dilemma is only a thing if you consider finite games, ie. played for your immediate benefit. If you consider an infinite game (for example the good and survival of humanity in perpetuity), it can be clearly shown that there is better solution and it is for people to grow up and just agree on a protocol that does not require burning energy or military action.

Do you think people will cheat each other given chance? That may be true when there is good chance of not getting punished for it. But if you ever lived in a small community where people rely on each other for survival (ie. infinite game), you would notice people will not cheat each other when they know they will have to rely on the community until death.

[BTCOG]

People will ALWAYS cheat others given the chance, and especially when facing very little online repercussions. I am not sure who you were replying to here. I do live in a small community, I have relied on a few others for survival, and I have been both stolen from, and price gouged due to others who would try to make skin off my back. I assume you've got less real life experience in these matters. I live on the basis of trusting nobody else but a very select few and being very self sufficient and reliant. I grow hundreds of pounds of my own vegetables, for instance, and I would seldom ever buy vegetables from a store throughout the season. Least of all, my trust in government. Most who initially got into bitcoin very early on did so for libertarian values towards government and monetary systems. I can really assure you that most of us who got into Bitcoin in 2010 did NOT do so because we initially thought we were getting lucratively rich or having thoughts we were selling assets to folks for a higher price just to get out. No, we got into Bitcoin because we see USD fiat paper as trash cash that is ever losing value and is backed by nothing but a phony government system. Used to keep people poor, used for financial control.

[lmilcin]

I am sorry for you.

Now, what you experience isn't necessity.

Think why you decided to write you only trust "select few"? Aren't these the people you plan on interacting with for a long time like family, friends or coworkers?

That's because when you plan to work with somebody for a long time, your game changes from finite to infinite. It suddenly makes other than altruistic sense to invest actual resources into fostering the relationship and avoid damaging this relationship by cheating.

[anoncake]

This is called projection. You assume people cannot be trusted because you cannot.

[BTCOG]

This is neither projection, nor a deflection due to myself not being trustworthy and I find it strange that one would jump first to this. No, it's situational due to life experience lived. People can and do take advantage of systems, which is more to the point of what drew libertarians to Bitcoin. Now move along.

[jfk13]

Security perhaps (if you're sufficiently careful how you use it), but I would have thought stability was also pretty important if you're thinking in terms of lifetimes. Bitcoin doesn't show much sign of offering that.

[BTCOG]

Ethereum and Litecoin for example are far, far less secure than Bitcoin. The centralization of ETH will continue to increase, and mining hardware for Scrypt for Litecoin is nearly non existent in comparison.

[jetpackjoe]

Proof of stake crypto currencies are just as secure.

[deweller]

Proof of stake is a different security model. It may work but it has not been proven in a $1 trillion high stakes environment yet.

[bouncycastle]

They work under the same assumption as PoW - that the majority of those participating in consensus will be honest.

PoS also offers something PoW does not: absolute finality, https://medium.com/mechanism-labs/finality-in-blockchain-con...

Additionally, PoS attackers can have their stake slashed, so they may never attack again. However, you can't slash PoW attackers, once attacked, they will just keep on coming back (no matter how many times you change the hashing algorithm)

[yunvme]

And you need to bootstrap your PoS system by enriching a bunch of insiders so that they can validate your transactions. PoS systems are unfit for being the decentralized digital store of value. Bitcoin has the most fair launch any cryptocurrency can ever have. There is no alternative for Bitcoin's use case.

[bouncycastle]

PoS systems can be bootstraped by PoW, so no problem there.

Bitcoin did not have a fair launch either, there was a lot of information asymmetry between the project insiders and the public. Satoshi's stealth-mine of ~1 million BTC for example.

[qertoip]

No, if Bitcoin was PoS, Mt Gox would bail themselves out and govern Bitcoin to this day. Early on, Mt Gox was responsible for over 80% of all economic activity on the Bitcoin network, and was by far the dominant holder of coins.

[nelsontodd]

This has yet to be shown.