Well, if money were defined by thousands of lines of poorly written C++ code and you had to run the same (bug-for-bug compatible) C++ code to use your money, then sure, programmable.
Also, when the monetary policy needs to change, you need to take all the money offline for a stop-the-world updated coordinated over IRC or even Reddit.
And it's "money" only in the sense it's an artificially scarce resource/reward created for wasting electricity to find magic numbers. Not entirely stable in the long term (as we've seen with 2-5 recent proposals to "fix it" in the past few months).
Man, you wouldn't have believed what maintaining sendmail was like. You're new to the Internet. :) Though I agree that Bitcoin isn't money. If it were money, Michel Espinoza would have to go to jail. It's more like beaver pelts - a commodity
He must not have been around the internet in the 90s, kids nowadays have it easy, powerful+cheap hardware, great+highly diverse ecosystem of languages and tools, years and years of progressive improvement to everything from email to web to networks.
Many of the arguments made against bitcoin remind me of shit I heard in 90s against the web
But yeh the parent post is correct, the vitrol against bitcoin on HN is misplaced and downright strange, bitcoin is not perfect (neither was HTTP once upon a time) but as per article its evolving and improving and it sure as hell is interesting and innovative.
Anyways I probably will be downvoted, any time i get involved in Bitcoin threads its a if there is an army of paid downvoters whose boat and job bitcoin threatens, digital Luddites if you wish.
Money is "programmable money". It's like saying that a magic new protocol that inefficiently creates an emergent behavior that resembles the behavior of email is somehow better than just building a web service that does the job directly and efficiently.
Well, in a few ways bitcoin is to money what email is to messges: they allow moving those activities on to the internet in a decentralized way with no (technical) barriers to entry.
I suppose the decentralization comes with efficiency and simplicity costs in both cases. Maybe they are worth it if your values align with it.
Maybe entrepreneurial HN'ers would tend to not like decentralized systems, because there's less control and profitability.
But "permission" from other people is required, even on Bitcoin. Try spending more from an UXTO than the UXTO is actually worth and see how fast your suggested transaction is rejected by the rest of the nodes and miners in the Bitcoin network...
You need permission to use cash with someone's online infrastructure because the world is rife with bad actors.
A payment system isn't graded by "permissions", it is graded by how well it handles disputes. That is why in it's current state, the future-of-money-Bitcoin™ won't work for many, many people and isn't competitive. (even with multi-sig escrow)
So, if the world is rife with bad actors, why does cash work so well offline? You should consider that online systems are more risky, mostly due to their pull-based nature, which is why so many roadblocks exist in traditional Internet-based value routing systems. As for competitive, clearly you've never bought something with Bitcoin online.
> Permission required to participate in any electronic-fiat-money-transfer-system™ = mucho
Then make a better system which doesn't burn all of Ireland's electrical output to handle 2 transactions a second, to let people transfer fiat to each other. Maybe you can call it "Pal Pay".
"But then I'd have to follow regulations!! :("
But you'd have to with Bitcoin as well. Just ask Coinbase or Circle.
"Ah, but Bitcoin gives me the option to evade the law, unlike those assholes as Google or PayPal who need 'identification' and keep whining about 'money laundering'".
Perhaps, but you could build a system to track IOUs on Tor if you'd wanted and as long as your OPSEC wasn't as shitty as DPR's "my_crimes.txt" you could evade the law for awhile too.
As it stands those are mostly orthogonal concerns, although I do appreciate how nice it is for the Feds to be able to publicly view every transaction ever made in Bitcoin, something that couldn't be done on an off-blockchain system.
I know you're not seriously looking for an answer but meh...
I've actually created a service (B2B) which requires bitcoin as I need atomicity, which bitcoin delivers perfectly (as long as I wait for N confirmations, it's pretty certain that I now _own_ the bitcoins). This is where PayPal fails, people can get refunds, chargebacks from credit card providers & PayPal can limit/suspend your account without notice (which they are famous for doing). I'm not a pro/anti bitcoin evangalist but I'm just throwing out there an example of what "programmable money" actually means. Bank transfers work well for non-refundable payments as well but most banks don't offer an API so bitcoins is the best alternative for my use case.
Other advantages over PayPal are the OP codes and multisig which are a powerful thing for programmers to use. Bitcoin is great for merchants/developers but it has many disadvantages for customers.
I guess PayPal, Square, Venmo, and all banks suck too, because they also don't let you increase value out of thin air? Shouldn't preventing unauthorized money creation or theft be like design requirement #1 for any financial system?! This comment sounds like complete trolling, or maybe I'm misreading.
My point is that when you say that system X is superior because of unique feature Y, that "unique" feature should actually be unique.
Bitcoin is a system with rules just as much as any other financial system, so the point that was made about "not needing permission" is factually wrong.
It seems trollish to define "permission" by whether a system allows its own rules to be broken. I'd argue there can be no such systems because it's contradictory, so saying Bitcoin is not such a system is meaningless.
I'll grant you that Bitcoin requires more "permission" than "none", in the form of licenses and tax reporting in many usecases, as well as technical things like nobody having guaranteed permission to have their transaction processed (even if it follows all published rules.)
The rules are published in open-source code, and you don't have to "sign up" to submit transactions or follow the blockchain, or contract with any entity exclusively in control of the network. Maybe we're not adequately describing the unique quality, but it seems obvious to me that there's a big qualitative difference between e.g., Bitcoin and ACH. You can say it's not worth-it, useful, or interesting in your opinion, but what other financial system publishes all nominal rules and is governed by a self-regulating network that is 99% likely to let anyone do anything permitted by said rules?
I may also be overly optimistic about how long consensus will last, or how "fair" the system is in practice. Still, over the last few years, I'd say Bitcoin has been a uniquely open financial system.
Programming applications on incumbent financial systems requires : bonding, licensing, regulatory certifications, insurance, etc. That's the permission being referenced.
> I've never understood Hacker New's (majority) vitriol towards Bitcoin.
Perhaps it's because a forum full of software programmers who aren't mesmerized by the technical merits of the insanely overhyped bitcoin software are exhausted from being told that they just don't understand why this software is the future of money that will disrupt finance and liberate the masses from the tyranny of banking. I think every programmer can agree that bitcoin is a unique and interesting technical feat and even a pretty impressive demonstration of what software can achieve, but any concessions to bitcoin's technical merit seems to invite absurd levels of over-the-top evangelism that grates against any patience for bitcoin is a technical topic.
With all that stated, I still think the GP's comment is unnecessarily condescending and doesn't add anything constructive to the conversation.
Its proponents push it as a currency without a government to rule it, and that's fair, but it does have its economic assumptions baked into the code itself. And if it became widespread, there'd be no way for people to vote on making changes to those economic assumptions. They're baked into the code, and into the network.
Something that could potentially govern people's lives (i.e. a new kind of currency) that they have no say at all in operating? I'm not comfortable with that; the general arc of history has been to give people more power in the political and economic realms, and this is definitely a step back from that.
> Something that could potentially govern people's lives (i.e. a new kind of currency) that they have no say at all in operating?
Aren't you talking about the USD here? How do you have any say at all in what the Federal Reserve decides?
Bitcoin, on the other hand, is open source. If it doesn't work for you, at least you can fork it and change it, or use another cryptocurrency just as easily (and many people have).
Do you think Venezuelans like that their currency inflation will be more than 200% this year? But hey, their currency is democratic so by definition it must be good and everybody should use it, right?
And yes, it is indeed possible to directly vote on Bitcoin policy changes (not that it's necessarily a good idea). Just take a look at some of the proposals about the on-going block size increase discussion.
Of course you say in how it's run. The people who run the fed get swapped out every so often, and we get to vote on the person who decides on their replacements.
Do you, personally, get to say who's in and who's out? No, of course not, your vote gets weighed up against all the millions of other voters in picking these people.
People often say "oh you have no power" and then, I guess, abstain from voting in order to make it absolutely true. But that's not it at all--we have lots of power, we have the power to persuade, talk amongst our friends and relations, convert others to our ideas, and voting's just the final test of how successful we were.
Politics doesn't start at the voting booth--nor does it end there. That's just one milestone along the democratic highway.
But compared to bitcoin? Where the average person could never plausibly voice an opinion at all? That's not democracy, and the only reason you like it at all, I'm guessing, is because you fancy yourself one of the people that could submit patches.
As for your last remark, let me know when bitcoin policy decisions show up in the voter's pamphlet. Then we'll have a democratic currency with it.
No, you're right. Democracy IS the best way to run a currency. Let's run our companies as democracies too, that's certainly a good idea! This way everybody has a say in what Microsoft and Oracle do. Oh wait, that's a terrible idea.
You see, if you don't like bitcoin you don't have to use it. You can use any alternative currency or cryptocurrency. The same way that if you don't like your Internet provider you can use a different one. But if I don't like my government or my government's currency, I'm stuck with it whether I like it or not (unless I emigrate, which can be a huge barrier). How is that better? Democracy is NOT the be-all end-all way of making decisions, it is an extremely mediocre way of doing it, in fact. Do I really have to enumerate all the ways in which free competition is a much better system than corruptible, manipulable, easily persuadable majority voting?
So you're opposed to the people's ability to self-govern. That's fine. That's a position that puts you on the wrong side of history, but ok.
As for changing out your government's currency, of course you're not stuck with it--propose something better and do the leg-work to persuade everyone that Wizemanbucks are the right way to go. In time, with enough of a national coalition supporting you, you'll be able to build the political organizations to encourage people to vote for Wizemanbucks. Keep at it, and if people really do like your ideas, you'll have a new currency, just to your liking.
Trying to sneak it in, or tell people they're not fit for self-rule? Man, that fell out of style a long, long time ago.
I'm perfectly fine with self-governing and self-ruling, I'm just not fine with a group of people governing and imposing their rules on the others. If you or a group of people want their own currency with their own rules that's fine with me, just don't force me to use it if I don't want it (in the same way that I'm not forcing anyone to use bitcoin).
I could be on the wrong side of history, but I don't care that much about it anyway, I'd rather think about the future than the past :)
Maybe I'm not understanding your thought process, but are you saying that if you were born several centuries ago, you'd never even want to have democracy because it went out of style after ancient Greece and the tendency was for rulers to be Kings (i.e. you'd be on the wrong side of history if you wanted democracy instead of a monarchy)? How is being on the wrong side of history a good argument?
If you want to convince me, give me a good argument about why the majority of people in my city/state/country knows what's best for me, better than me... :)
(By analogy, if we were living a few centuries ago, I'd be asking you why you think a King or their blood family would know what's best for me, better than me).
Stored Value has historically had this property. By removing the risk of a majority consensus from having the potential to change your stored value, you then acquire security in that value. Gold would be the prototypical example here. There is no enforceable law in any country that can govern its properties or supply. As such, the risk of storing your value in gold is low.
More like digital gold. This in that it has a arbitrary fixed amount, and if the storage unit holding the "coins" gets lost that amount is forever reduced.
All in all, it is the perfect fuel for speculation and hoarding. Neither is something you want with a day to day main street trading currency.
Also, when the monetary policy needs to change, you need to take all the money offline for a stop-the-world updated coordinated over IRC or even Reddit.
And it's "money" only in the sense it's an artificially scarce resource/reward created for wasting electricity to find magic numbers. Not entirely stable in the long term (as we've seen with 2-5 recent proposals to "fix it" in the past few months).