| > At some point to run a business you have to participate in the economy. The way you do that is be getting things you can use to trade for other things. Usually we use money as a way to simplify this. I'm not sure how familiar you are with bitcoin, but you can buy real stuff with it. It is quite well integrated into the normal economy at this point, considering how young it is. But of course it is not as popular as credit cards yet. > How do you extract value from the bitcoin ecosystem, until there are enough people willing to exchange good for bitcoin, like food, clothing, and shelter? You can buy food, shelter, and clothing with bitcoin. Spend some time around /r/bitcoin and you will see these opportunities. How many places could you use a credit card when they were only 6 years old? > I think that's just proving my point. There would only be a few people participating as full nodes because it's complicated, putting the entire network at risk of a bad actor. A p2p network where anyone can run a node seems strictly better than a central organization to me with respect to "bad actors". When reddit, Inc. makes a decision the users agree with right now, they can't overturn admin decisions. It would be far easier to do so with a decentralized reddit. > That's great but how do I find the content I don't agree with? I'm not really sure - most of the time you probably wouldn't know, so there would be times when you unintentionally hosted something you disagreed with. One way to solve that is to simply not host content at all, and only download. > Who would flag it? Can I trust them? This is the general problem of reputation, trust, authentication, and naming all in one. I think this project should aim to solve these problems sufficiently well to make things work effectively, and not solve them 100%. For instance, flagging could work by having a buddies list, and trusting their flags, and maybe their buddies' flags. That would be partially effective and better than nothing, but not perfect either. We would iterate and improve the flagging system with time. |
I'm quite familiar with it, but you really can't survive off bitcoin alone. There just aren't enough vendors taking it, but more importantly, this is because it is hard for vendors to price items since it so rapidly fluctuates. Bitcoin is also tax disadvantaged because it's classified by the IRS as an asset not as currency, so you get taxed every time you transact bit coin and it has "changed value" relative to the dollar. Can you image trying to do business with dollars if you had to pay tax every time it's value changed compared to the Euro?
> You can buy food, shelter, and clothing with bitcoin. Spend some time around /r/bitcoin and you will see these opportunities. How many places could you use a credit card when they were only 6 years old?
Food and clothes yes (although very limited choices). Shelter? I'm not familiar with anyone who takes bitcoin in exchange for a place to sleep.
You compare it to credit cards, but that isn't really an apt comparison because credit cards just represented dollars in another form.
> A p2p network where anyone can run a node seems strictly better than a central organization to me with respect to "bad actors". When reddit, Inc. makes a decision the users agree with right now, they can't overturn admin decisions. It would be far easier to do so with a decentralized reddit.
But then you get chaos and a fractured ecosystem. I would say that's worse.
> I'm not really sure - most of the time you probably wouldn't know, so there would be times when you unintentionally hosted something you disagreed with.
It's not the stuff I disagree with that's the problem, it's the stuff that's illegal -- ie. my government doesn't agree with.
> This is the general problem of reputation, trust, authentication, and naming all in one. I think this project should aim to solve these problems sufficiently well to make things work effectively,
I'm not even sure what to say here. I know this is HN, but this XKCD explains it perfectly: http://xkcd.com/1425/ (It's the one about making the computer recognize a bird)