[nly]

Everyone doing P2P transfer and bypassing traditional banking institutions is a powerful idea... but ultimately everyone needs to agree on a single medium of exchange, otherwise efficient market pricing is too hard.

And it's debatable whether fiat will ever whither and die. The Government will ultimately have to endorse a currency for tax purposes, and they'll always seek to control the inflationary environment so they can maintain a workable budget and keep public services afloat.

Just a century ago or so, banking was only for large corporations. Commoners and small businesses all used cash and exchanging bits of valuable metal was the norm. I mean, believe it or not, we had good reasons to abandon that simpler system in the first place. Things are better now. Markets are more efficient.

[fragmede]

> but ultimately everyone needs to agree on a single medium of exchange, otherwise efficient market pricing is too hard.

This is one place that there is something interesting in the crypto space, but because it's so "inside baseball"/esoteric, it doesn't usually get any mention on skeptic's forums. Given asset A and asset B, given individual A with asset A, B with asset B, and C who wants to trade their asset A for B, how do you get all three to come together and make it all work. The fact that there must be exchanges is obvious, what's less obvious is how they actually work, how individuals A and B incentivized to participate, and what sort of payment they get out of it. Well, that's one of the not-entirely-trivial usages of smart contracts I've seen, where A and B get a payout and C gets what they want, but with more than 3 individuals involved. It's not actually important to anyone outside of the crypto space but it's interesting to take a look at the implementation details for the curious.

[meowkit]

Automated Market Makers (AMM) and Liquidity Staking/Providers are terms for what you have described.

[samhw]

Yes, I’m a strong believer in cryptocurrency, but I don’t believe any current cryptocurrency will be the one that changes the world. They deserve praise - some of them - for laying groundwork, but I tend to believe that the world-changing crypto will have to behave more like Moxie Marlinspike described in his recent essay: i.e. truly building on cryptography as the source of trust, not distributed consensus among servers.

The transaction processing mechanism will also have to radically change, and be detached from the mechanism for generating money (even if you believe the two should be proportional, to strictly couple them is an impracticable engineering failure).

As for Bitcoin, aside from the flaws in Satoshi’s scheme itself, the current Bitcoin system has suffered from focussing on its unexpected popularity as a store of value, which popularity has meant it’s incredibly volatile and thus useless as a medium of exchange or unit of account. Of course the slow processing as a result of the mining mechanism is also a major hurdle.

I hope something better will come about soon. I know that it won’t come from the world of people who suddenly idolise Bitcoin because of the cult around it. It’ll come from the people who were capable of reading the original paper and seeing its potential even before it was in the news - that’s a tiny subset of crypto enthusiasts, but I hope they stay motivated.

(Final thing: it’s ‘wither’, not ‘whither’. ‘Whither’ means ‘from where’.)

[DennisP]

> otherwise efficient market pricing is too hard

Oh I don't know, everybody's carrying around an internet-connected computer in their pocket, it can't be that hard to show current prices in a variety of currencies. But if it is too hard, then stablecoins backed by on-chain assets are another option.

Fwiw, Ohio accepts tax payments in Bitcoin: https://www.forbes.com/sites/kellyphillipserb/2018/11/26/ohi...

[thelastgallon]

> Fwiw, Ohio accepts tax payments in Bitcoin:

Ohio businesses can no longer use Bitcoin to pay taxes. Don’t worry, though. Sprague went on to say that in the 10 months since OhioCrypto.com launched, less than 10 businesses have chosen to pay their taxes in Bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies. No one is really going to miss it. [1]

https://thenextweb.com/news/ohio-suspends-bitcoin-tax-paymen...

[bufferoverflow]

> everyone needs to agree on a single medium of exchange

No, everyone does not. You can easily exchange the coins you don't like for the coins you do. It's that simple.

[CRConrad]

Yeah, sure it's that simple. Hey, isn't this all about decentralising power, everyone being their own bank? So let's be really decentralised: Everyone should of course be their own central bank ("Fed"), and issue their own "coin".

So when I want to buy something from or sell something to you, I'm gonna say that a MyCoin is worth ten YouCoin; you'll presumably try to claim the opposite.

How "simple" is that?

[donmcronald]

It’s a taxable event in Canada AFAIK, so I wouldn’t call it simple.