[sheldonth]

Patio11, I have much respect for your work and _love_ reading your email digests, but your comments of late about Bitcoin have such a decidedly negative slant that they become hard to digest at face value.

Yes of course businesses built around the Bitcoin protocol will melt down occasionally, as many businesses do within the course of operation -- but don't you see how your attempt to conflate Bitcoin businesses (Exchanges, specifically) with a discussion about the new model of trust employed by the p2p network is probably a bit deceptive?

Yes, Bitcoin is scarce and therefore commands a market price. Commanding a market price has some qualities that suck. One of them is that you have to deposit assets in a market to keep an order book to discover a price. This is fallible. But it has nothing to do with how we (the human race) have discovered a way to create a scarce and transferrable peer to peer asset over the internet. Perhaps you should stop and consider how you can personally deconstruct some of the negative bias you have against Bitcoin in your public discussions of such.

Much love.

[Edited for grammer]

[Hieroglyph]

> Commanding a market price has some qualities that suck. One of them is that you have to deposit assets in a market to keep an order book to discover a price.

You don't _have_ to trust a counterparty with your money for price discovery. Take Counterparty for example: a P2P derivatives and stock market using Bitcoin as the transport layer [ǂ]. It enables trustless betting on anything from asset prices, to weather events, to Superbowl results [ɵ]. Two companies have already issued publicly tradeable shares [ɸ].

Data feeds are a public, competitive market:

    Order: give 55.0 XCP for 0.5 BTC in 11 blocks, with a provided fee of 0.0001 BTC and a required fee of 0.005 BTC (bcf02fb66565d984a136fc55e1085f5cc782e8630dcfdbe9bbddb3312beb8f2c) [valid]

    Broadcast: ‘Block Hash (0000000000000…cdbe902b4698e) Even/Odd’ = 2.0 from 15cdAQmmBrz1BEVtipaQ1dVHtTwmfcxzw5 at 2014-02-20T20:00:03-08:00 with a fee of 0.1% (7bd292f02c41740150b2ed2e7cf739566c900092e892e4a3a5d7dd142c00df8b) [valid]

    Broadcast: ‘CoinDesk BPI USD’ = 555.26 from 1CeQHd59TFKWQzsWYDXc9NDX2ooMSRpiqi at 2014-02-20T22:00:03-08:00 with a fee of 0.1% (65c7162d69664008e4e0fe3be9122fb02c3e98901cd975d6d179e85a945fd916) [valid]

[ǂ]: https://counterparty.co

[ɵ]: http://blockscan.com/tx.aspx?q=3155

[ɸ]: http://blockscan.com/assetInfo.aspx?q=MPTSTOCK

[ɸ]: http://blockscan.com/assetInfo.aspx?q=SFMSTOCK

[unclebucknasty]

I think what patio11 is saying (and I agree) is that too much is being made of the ideals behind the Bitcoin protocol and paradigm, but it doesn't really translate when met with the hard test of practical reality.

I noted your argument, along with many others on the GP's sub-thread which make this very distinction between Bitcoin as a concept and Bitcoin as an actual thing. In so doing, you suggest that failure to make the distinction is misleading and you align yourselves with the idealistic praise heaped on by the original article.

But, I would agree with patio11's insinuation: i.e. that the real fallacy is in this praise. It's misleading, because at some point, the protocol must be implemented in the real world, consisting of exchanges, wallet services, payment services, etc. These are all points where bad actors can attach. To say, "well, that's not the Bitcoin protocol" is to point out a meaningless distinction. When you find a way around these implementation limitations, then it matters.

TL;DR: as implemented, Bitcoin in practice solves exactly none of the problems espoused by the article. We need look no further than real-world events to see this.

[unclebucknasty]

I challenge whomever downvoted me to refute at least the tl;dr in my comment.