| At the risk of being reprimanded by the man himself, here is the tweet storm in text: https://twitter.com/patio11/status/583696870704152576
1/I follow Bitcoin like some people follow Nascar crashes. Some quick thoughts in tweetstorm format: https://twitter.com/patio11/status/583697092306014208
2/ It is an open secret in the Bitcoin community that merchants who adopt it see virtually no meaningful transaction volume. https://twitter.com/patio11/status/583697371378257920
3/ Western Union spends roughly 1/2 of revenue on local offices by both ends of the transactions. Bitcoin remittances don't solve this. https://twitter.com/patio11/status/583697585719746560
4/ Bitcoin presently costs on the order of $6.5k per megabyte of data added to the block chain. https://twitter.com/patio11/status/583697812438691841
5/ The entire market cap of Bitcoin as of 4/1/2015 is a fee paid to someone for work already done between 2009 and 4/1/2015. https://twitter.com/patio11/status/583698553614143488
6/ Most advantages of Bitcoin which matter are captured by, and improved upon by, a LAMP app which simply holds account balances. https://twitter.com/patio11/status/583699554563784704
7/ Bitcoin's Internet cheering squad is a spontaneously organized boiler room. This is Bitcoin's #1 engineering and marketing achievement. https://twitter.com/patio11/status/583699782624911361
8/ The cheering squad improves upon techniques used to make Ross Perot and Rand Paul seem like serious contenders for the US presidency. https://twitter.com/patio11/status/583700634764910592
9/ Bitcoin is not a protocol in any meaningful sense of word. It is a single C++ codebase that you have to be bug-for-bug compatible with. https://twitter.com/patio11/status/583701008754147329
10/ Bitcoin's disaster recovery plan is a) get a cabal of people together in IRC, b) shut down the entire payment network, c) sort things. https://twitter.com/patio11/status/583701441866371073
11/ No, seriously, the decentralized nobody-needs-to-trust-anybody payments network was shut down by an IRC channel's consensus for 8 hrs. https://twitter.com/patio11/status/583702513469104128
12/ Time between Bitcoin blocks is not guaranteed (follows a Poisson distribution). Sometimes all pending transactions just stop for a while https://twitter.com/patio11/status/583702865098604544
13/ The media following Bitcoin, both enthusiast press and tech rags, are so incompetent at their jobs that it beggars belief. https://twitter.com/patio11/status/583703396231716864
14/ One example of many: a single phone call or letter in Japanese would have sufficed to verify that Mt. Gox was insolvent in summer 2013. https://twitter.com/patio11/status/583706966553276417
15/ A good portion of geek enthusiasm for Bitcoins comes from the fact that it is programmable money. But: Money is also programmable money. https://twitter.com/patio11/status/583707625210060800
16/ This concludes my mini-rant on Bitcoin. I have a longer, more technical rant but will do it some other time. It would have been good to put a disclaimer in there that the rant applies only to the currency aspect of Bitcoin, and not the Bitcoin Protocol. |
>> Bitcoin is not a protocol in any meaningful sense of word. It is a single C++ codebase that you have to be bug-for-bug compatible with.
I don't want to discuss what a protocol is and if Bitcoin is a real protocol or not. But it's important to notice that it's more sensible to bugs/unspecified/unexpected results than normal software.
If Chrome is not bug-compatible with IE6, you can complain, mark one of them as unsupported, make two versions of your page, peek the common denominator, ...
The same happens with MicrosoftWord and OpenOficeWrite, the different implementations of LaTeX, email support of Unicode characters, C/C++ compilers, Python/PyPy/IronPython/Jython, ...
With Bitcoin, each bug difference is a hard fork waiting to happen.