Silly story, but the implications are interesting.
Next natural disaster with global media coverage, banners and tents with giant, video broadcast-friendly "Donate Here" QR codes will sound like a good idea.
Which means that someone (or more likely, several ones) will quickly make scam replicas and ruin it for everyone.
I remain deeply skeptical of QR codes as a user interface.
It's easier to trick someone into scanning the wrong QR code than it is to trick someone into sending money to the wrong url, email address, phone number, etc.
As a confused Belgian, what is meant by "Unlike traditional bank accounts, where you would never share your account number on national television, Bitcoin public addresses are secure"? Giving out your account number in Belgium is pretty secure, nobody can do anything with it beyond putting money on it.
What's different in the USA? What extra info are you handing out by giving your account number beyond "this is a 'bank address' that you can use to send me money"?
This is probably similar to "automatische incasso" which probably is also possible in Belgium. But note that an automatic incasso can be reversed, you just have to be aware that it's happening.
The German equivalent is called ELV/Lastschrift and allows you to retrieve money from a bank account, but the owner can revoke that within a few weeks.
Japan also has a system to automatically withdraw money from someone elses account, eg for rent, but requires the account owner to authorize the other account first. does germany not have that step?
This looks like the Bitcoin version of the GoldenPalace casino buying the Virgin Mary grilled cheese sandwich for $28,000. The majority of the donations were probably designed to attract attention and therefore help market Bitcoin.
I'm not sure how you could look at HN and think it's anything but zealous about Bitcoins. You'd have to have some deep and powerful victimization complex.
I only ever see comments like yours on Bitcoin articles. Most every other article, HN is even more negative, and everyone goes along with it, but as soon as it's about Bitcoin, "How dare you say those things!" It's almost as if you've convinced yourself of Bitcoin to the point of not being able to handle anyone questioning it. Your mind just can't comprehend why anyone would not hold the same view as you.
Hah, I see the same negativity in most HN comments, not just Bitcoin articles. The community is a cesspool of snide remarks, put downs and overbearing pseudo-intellectualism. Most days I've stopped reading comments entirely.
I think Reddit.com/r/Bitcoin is zealous about Bitcoins, not HN. And you know what? I prefer it. At least people there seem happy, unlike here.
No there's always a few posters that can't stop themselves from referencing tulips or pyramids. And humans remember unpleasant things better in the short term. So there you have it, the GP isn't irrational, but possibly hasn't done a statistical survey.
HN encourages people to comment for karma without much regard to whether they have anything to say of consequence. I wouldn't have written this if I could downvote.
I love how whenever a new technology comes out the amount of applications are never fully apparent.
When I first heard of bitcoin back in 2010 I thought it was a cool concept, but sending money to unknown people across the world? That never crossed my mind.
Now that I think about it, we do it all the time in the forms of charities. Tsunami victims on the other side of the world, a fund is set up to help them out, and most people might say, I'll chip in a dollar, but I can't be fucked to find out how, and sending a dollar is hard anyway. Then mobile phone operators started offering SMS payments, and people had a simple solution.
With cryptocurrency this solution is even easier. It wasn't until it actually happened that this clicked for me.
Consider telephone for example, initially it was used to talk to other people over a long distance, but it was thanks to that concept of sending information down a wire that made it possible today to eg. look at a live webcam on the other side of the world right now.
Imagine telling someone 200 years ago that you could talk/see a person on the other side of the world in real time. Remember, phones didn't exist, motion picture was unheard of etc.
They would think you are mad.
It would be as unbelievable as saying today you can use buy a Rolex watch made in Europe online and it would be teleported to your desk.
But who knows, maybe this will be possible in the future.
And maybe in retrospect it would have been obvious.
Bitcoin unfortunately makes this feat very difficult to verify. We will never truly know how much of that $24,000 the poster controlled in the first place.
That is the implication. He got sent very large sums of Bitcoin, you would expect that he'd just get a bunch of small ones, but he got 2-3 large ones ($5,000 a piece).
1) Have 5+ BTC
2) Recognize a QR code on a TV broadcast
3) Think to pause the tv broadcast, decode the QR code and send BTC
4) Completely unaware of the 1000s of news articles and broadcasts about the soaring value of BTC
Maybe he sent it to himself, maybe someone else was just very generous, but no one purposefully sent 5BTC without knowing it was valuable.
"I made it with a vanity generator on an offline computer. I have the public and private key. No software is currently managing the wallet and its not online anywhere."
Next natural disaster with global media coverage, banners and tents with giant, video broadcast-friendly "Donate Here" QR codes will sound like a good idea.
Which means that someone (or more likely, several ones) will quickly make scam replicas and ruin it for everyone.
I remain deeply skeptical of QR codes as a user interface.