[Aqueous]

"In fact, if you strip away its technological trappings -- the encryption, the peer-to-peer networks -- and Bitcoin closely resembles these earlier private efforts."

In other words if you strip away everything that makes BitCoin different and unique from its predecessors, BitCoin looks the same as its predecessors.

[fragsworth]

Hardly anyone gets Bitcoin, yet. But I am pretty sure that they will, eventually. It takes a long time, even for smart people, to really figure it out.

[tlrobinson]

Agreed. I've seen very few Bitcoin skeptics who have demonstrated deep technical understanding of Bitcoin and it's potential beyond a simple currency. If they exist I'd love to hear about them.

[glesica]

Some might argue that the same could be said of Bitcoin cheerleaders and deep economic understanding of money...

[jowiar]

And I've seen likewise from Bitcoin proponents. As far as I can tell, “Belief in Bitcoins” is the technolibertarian equivalent of “disbelief in evolution”.

I can see plenty of good arguments for non-physical currency. Bitcoin seems to combine the downsides of the Gold Standard and the Euro, though. Deflationary currency is a bad idea. Giving up control of one's currency is a bad idea.

[tlrobinson]

Oh I agree most Bitcoin proponents don't have a good understanding. Don't listen to them either. But I can point to several who do understand it extremely well (e.x. Andreas Antonopoulos https://twitter.com/aantonop is one, Chris Dixon seems to be another)

[hbags]

I'm such a person. I've been active with BTC, I've mined and traded (both to a nice personal profit), but I think BTC is a loser. I invested in BTC the same way I invested in one-hit wonders like Zynga: very temporarily.

Perhaps we can ask each other some questions:

My first question: BTC is designed with very limited bandwidth for transactions (right now it can only do 7 transactions per second). Is there an actual solution in place to deal with this? All I ever see is hand-waving about how the limits could be raised or eliminated, though that appears that it would create a problem with block chain size and bandwidth.

Is there a proposal someplace that actually addresses BTC's current lack of capacity that doesn't just create a rather massive bandwidth and storage problem?

[tlrobinson]

One possibility is to use off-chain transactions between networks of nodes that occasionally settle on the actual blockchain: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=152334.0;all

This also has the advantage of instant and micro transactions with minimal fees, while retaining most of the properties of Bitcoin itself (decentralized, trustless, irreversible)

[fsiefken]

If I read the pertaining article correctly then the tps issue is solvable within the practical bounds of the internet, bitcoin development, home connections and bitcoin use cases. For proposals to solve this read: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Scalability - I personally wouldn't consider this a show stopper. Are there specific reasons why you think it might?

[hbags]

If I'm understanding that correctly, every node would experience peak traffic of around 50mbps, and constant traffic of at least 10mpbs. It's not clear to me what happens when you have nodes that lag (and that would certainly be a common occurrence at those levels of traffic).

Beyond that, I found their choice of reference level of traffic oddly low given the stated ambitions of most serious BTC proponents.

[yoyo1999]

Bitcoin is targeted to those whom educated but not smart; Whom lacks a real opportunity in life.

[azakai]

Yes, but the point of view of the article is that from the perspective of national governments, it is similar. Hence they will try to kill it as they killed previous currencies that competed with the government monopoly-issued money.

I agree that bitcoin might be harder to kill due to those technological aspects, that does feel like it was not sufficiently addressed in the article.

[logicallee]

I thought the sentence was clear. For example, if you strip away the mobile, network-connected, and technological aspects of a mobile phone away, you are left with nothing: there's no centuries-old parallel for such a communications device. With bitcoin, apparently there is.

[salient]

Messages by carrier pigeon? Sounds pretty "mobile" to me.

I think the point is Bitcoin is revolutionary in many ways than just being a digital currency. It's also P2P, and these type of technologies seem very hard to shut down by governments, after reaching critical mass. There are probably a lot of things governments could do to slow it down, but I'm not sure they could kill it.

[jowiar]

But the problem is that, among all the things Bitcoin is trying to be, one of them is a currency. A pseudonymous decentralized p2p payment system is a reasonable idea, but since every transaction takes place in a currency with bad fundamentals as a currency, it's not a particularly good implementation of that idea.

[foley]

I see the term critical mass being used a lot within the Bitcoin community. What's your opinion on what would constitute critical mass?