[rishimoko]

> Bitcoin is basically useless except for illicit transactions

I'd never spend my bitcoins on drugs or gambling. That's what the rapidly devaluing dollar is for. Recall that the US dollar is Narco Currency #1 on the planet.

Bitcoins are useful as leverage due to their rapidly expanding (and sometimes deflating) value. I bought my first bitcoins for ~$3 two years ago and held them, even through the first spike and afterwards. I bought more btc at $5-12 as they were floating along last year.

I recently traded some of my btc for hard assets, gold and silver. I then sold some of the gold to a friend and bought more bitcoins.

Useless? No, Bitcoin is a very useful tool. It's the email of money.

[laumars]

> Bitcoin is a very useful tool. It's the email of money.

I hope not because email should have been replaced a decade ago (no native end-to-end nor encryption. Node-to-node encryption (eg SSL) isn't standard let along the default, no native support for binary objects and base64 MIME increases files sizes by ~30%, and the mess of plain text and half supported HTML across the plethora of clients make designing mailshots a complete nightmare so there should be some sub-standard of HTML that is both secure and universally supported.

[icebraining]

What exactly would be the point of native end-to-end encryption over PGP? The problem with email encryption is solving the authentication part, not the encryption itself.

[laumars]

    > What exactly would be the point of native end-to-end encryption over PGP?

Basically just universal compatibility with clients and ease of use.

It's a bit how you could have all your important Word documents in a password protected compressed archive. But having password protection and zip compression native in OOXML is more convenient for users and guarantees than anyone with an OOXML compatible office suite has support to open the same documents (baring authentication of course).

    > The problem with email encryption is solving the authentication part, not the encryption itself.

It's both. Emails are typically transmitted in clear text so having something having them encrypted by default is a huge step up. (a bit like how people should be moving away from FTP and using SFTP, or SSH instead of telnet).

[yaix]

> email should have been replaced a decade ago

Like HTTP should have been replaced by AOL, right?

[laumars]

No. And I resent the fact that you couldn't be bothered to read past my first sentence.

The e-mail protocol (and I'm talking about the entire stack, from SMTP to the client's handling) is old and really not best suited for the modern way we send documents and modern security concerns. Which was the crux of my point.

So I'm not talking about replacing the paradigm nor ownership, just it's the implementation.