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by jboggan
4267 days ago
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There's a big difference between an "ordinary ATM" machine and the NCR/Diebold machines that the large American banks deploy. Sure, you can get a Hyosung/Triton/Wincor/$whatever machine and it will technically function for the usual customer operations . . . but I would never order those machines if I were in a purchasing capacity because of physical security concerns. I've worked with enough damaged/compromised machines to see what is physically possible in a very short amount of time, and the cheaper machines aren't worth it. I've found you get what you pay for in the ATM world when it comes to hardware. Software is another story altogether, but there's no cheap and easy solution for physical security. The bad thing about Bitcoin ATMs is that they have the same physical security problems but an extra set of information security problems, with none of the established and well tested solutions that have existed in the banking world for 30 years. Forget Bitcoin ATMs for consumers - if you want to actually make money you should build a regular banking ATM network that uses Bitcoin/altcoins in the background for transaction processing. That would actually disrupt the industry and allow you to undercut the other networks' pricing models. |
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How exactly is this cost-based "disruption" supposed to work when Bitcoin and friends are outrageously expensive per transaction?
One of the funniest things about the entire Bitcoin movement is the way that self-styled experts babble on and on about how amazing a technical revolution cryptocurrency is, despite clearly not understanding the first thing about cryptocurrency technology. Bitcoin is an experimental attempt to solve the classic Byzantine Generals' Problem, which can be boiled down to "how can a public transaction ledger maintained by its own users (with no central authority) be resistant to attack by bad actors". The Bitcoin "solution" to this problem is, in essence, for each node on the network to provably waste energy in an exceedingly flagrant way, in hopes that the costs of taking over the network are too high for any individual bad actor.
Well guess what, my friend? That means Bitcoin ends up chewing ridiculous amounts of energy doing no useful work on the desired end product of the system -- the ledger of transactions. Trust-based systems (you know, the kind deployed by, say, a bank, which would like to believe it can run its own system) do not need to waste energy, because they aren't built on deliberately wasting energy.
Bitcoin only makes sense if you are fanatically dedicated to the notion that Gibsonian dystopias (wherein the collapse of public institutions requires development of cryptocurrency) are either inevitable or desirable. It certainly isn't going to disrupt the existing system by being more cost- or energy-efficient. It isn't, it can't be, and that's by design. (Since Nakamoto couldn't figure out a less-bad way of solving Byzantine Generals.)