Flutterby™! : The resolution of the Bitcoin experiment

The resolution of the Bitcoin experiment

2016-01-18 17:22:48.316623+00 by Dan Lyke 3 comments

I lurk on a couple of mailing lists where people who haven't thought much about identity regularly propose "the blockchain" as a solution to identity problems. And, of course, I've also scoffed at Bitcoin, not for the concept, but because it's too unstable to work as a currency rather than a speculative investment vehicle, and because transactions don't complete fast enough to make it a reasonable payment vehicle. And that's only gotten worse recently.

Anyway, Larry pointed to this article on why the current path of Bitcoin is going a direction that makes it less usable: Mike Hearn: The resolution of the Bitcoin experiment

Later addendum: I'm as up for the point and laugh at Bitcoin as anyone, but here's a counter: Point-by-Point Response To Mike Hearn’s Final Bitcoin Post.

[ related topics: Weblogs Work, productivity and environment Currency Economics ]

comments in ascending chronological order (reverse):

#Comment Re: The resolution of the Bitcoin experiment made: 2016-01-19 18:16:55.857155+00 by: Ben Williams

You might be interested in Bram Cohen's response. I don't have a horse in this race but I find the debates fascinating.

#Comment Re: The resolution of the Bitcoin experiment made: 2016-01-19 18:42:55.387492+00 by: Dan Lyke

Yeah, I'd love a decent virtual currency, but I'm skeptical on Bitcoin and love to read the debates. Bram Cohen's response is... well... kind of dismissive without getting technical enough to suggest to me that he understands it as deeply as Mike Hearn went into. It's like "yeah, Mike was wrong, you should trust me on this".

And he definitely doesn't address the fears I've heard before that as soon as one party or coalition can control 50% of the mining, they can shut out any other miners...

#Comment Re: The resolution of the Bitcoin experiment made: 2016-01-19 20:56:09.962716+00 by: Dan Lyke

I like this refutation of the original: https://fixingtao.com/2016/01/...=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer

Add your own comment:

(If anyone ever actually uses Webmention/indie-action to post here, please email me)

Format with:

(You should probably use "Text" mode: URLs will be mostly recognized and linked, _underscore quoted_ text is looked up in a glossary, _underscore quoted_ (http://xyz.pdq) becomes a link, without the link in the parenthesis it becomes a <cite> tag. All <cite>ed text will point to the Flutterby knowledge base. Two enters (ie: a blank line) gets you a new paragraph, special treatment for paragraphs that are manually indented or start with "#" (as in "#include" or "#!/usr/bin/perl"), "/* " or ">" (as in a quoted message) or look like lists, or within a paragraph you can use a number of HTML tags:

p, img, br, hr, a, sub, sup, tt, i, b, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, cite, em, strong, code, samp, kbd, pre, blockquote, address, ol, dl, ul, dt, dd, li, dir, menu, table, tr, td, th

Comment policy

We will not edit your comments. However, we may delete your comments, or cause them to be hidden behind another link, if we feel they detract from the conversation. Commercial plugs are fine, if they are relevant to the conversation, and if you don't try to pretend to be a consumer. Annoying endorsements will be deleted if you're lucky, if you're not a whole bunch of people smarter and more articulate than you will ridicule you, and we will leave such ridicule in place.

Flutterby™ is a trademark claimed by

Dan Lyke

for the web publications at www.flutterby.com and www.flutterby.net.