The "Bitcoin 2.0" phrase is a reference to the "web 2.0" phrase, not to a new protocol version of Bitcoin.
May have been obvious to some, I dunno, but it's worth noting that Bitcoin can do all of these things today, with zero changes to implementation or design.
Last I heard, Mastercoin is just a specification. It's too early to pretend it's going to work. I heard an interview w/ the author and it sounds like lots of talk and big dreams w/ no real technology to back it up. When asked how long it will take to release a working prototype, I think he said two weeks if he gets enough donations to quit his job. OK suuuure. You can find the interview on YouTube. It's almost comical.
As far as "Colored Coins" looks like the same scenario--just an idea for a protocol? Their video is vague, doesn't really explain anything. Bitcoins backed by car titles? Let me guess, a decentralized vault full of luxury cars nobody can drive? LOL. http://coloredcoins.org/about/our-team/
Mastercoin appears to have a working market, transaction explorer, and reportable capitalization (at coinmarketcap.com), so it seems your information out of date. (Mastercoin might be doomed for any number of reasons, but it seems to be past the point where it can be casually dismissed with hand-wavey 'sounds like all talk'/'comical' impressions.)
But none of that is new. A market for what? You mean an altcoin exchange? There's already websites where you can buy your own white-label exchange.
Mastercoin was supposed to be an application platform/protocol layer on top of the Bitcoin blockchain. Just one of the applications was supposed to be online gambling. Sounds like a red flag to me.
Anyone can create their own vanity altcoin--that part is not surprising to me. To build an application layer on top of the Bitcoin blockchain, in your spare time? Yes, sounds comical to me unless you're some Bill Gates superstar.
Basically, the benefit of the internet was that it was the first "open" telecommunications protocol (as opposed to telephone for example), which allows for permissionless innovation. Applications (i.e. Facebook) can be built on the internet without approval of any central party.
Bitcoin is an open protocol for "ownership." We're not even beginning to scratch the surface of what applications can be built upon it.
(chopped up for brevity:)
"Internet applications, such as email and the World Wide Web, are defined in protocols implemented on devices at the edges of the network, like servers and home computers, not in the guts of the network: routers, switches, hubs, and exchange points. The lower layers of the Internet can be completely oblivious to the specific applications that are in use; they just focus on getting packets of data to the right place.
...
If Sir Tim [Berners-Lee] had to explain to a telecom executive what hypertext was in 1990 before he could create the web, it may never have happened. If we had to rely on telecom companies to provide video calling, it would probably be more expensive and inferior to the video calling services we have today.
...
The permissionless innovation and devolution of power fostered by the Internet may be obvious, or nearly so, in retrospect, but not in advance. From Krugman’s perspective, perhaps, the Internet was just another medium for communication, of which we already had plenty. Why should it have been such a big deal?"
If you set up 10 Digital Ocean accounts ($50 / month) and mined some scrypt-based coin (optimized for CPU mining) and pointed all ten at a pool, that's only ~30khash/s. Your desktop PC probably has more than 30khash/s mining potential. D.O. is one of the few hosts that doesn't block mining and we'll see if that lasts. So 30khash/s is maybe 20 cents worth of altcoins/day minus fees to convert that into dollars. So you're already losing $44/month, hurting everyone on your hypervisor and difficulty is rising. And I think Litecoin was an attempt to make CPU mining more lucrative ;-)
I don't think this is really how things are going to work. In an ideal world, people would come up with a strong thesis that features of Bitcoin outweighs the cost, and only then would people take Bitcoin seriously. But the reality is that nobody really understands Bitcoin's role in the world economy well enough to evaluate such a thesis. There are tons of theses about how Bitcoin might be used. The only way to evaluate these theses is to implement them and see if they work.
So basically, we can't wait to see if the benefits outweigh the costs to start taking Bitcoin seriously. Bitcoin has to be taken seriously before we can weigh the benefits against the costs. There's just no way to evaluate whether decentralization is more beneficial than costly except to take the risk and try it.
In that sense, Bitcoin isn't really that different from any other new financial idea. Either you invest in a thesis or you don't, and if you invest, then either you make money or you lose money. You can make educated guesses on which theses are correct, but ultimately you can only prove or disprove a new financial idea by taking it seriously enough to try it.
People are already taking Bitcoiners seriously to the tune of billions of dollars, so I think we'll see results from this experiment. Whether the results of the experiment will be positive or negative, I don't know.
My point wasn't about bitcoin but about people posting their thoughts on bitcoin. If someone is going to try to get people rallied behind decentralized X, a good place to start is to offer practical reasons why that would be a better scenario than the status quo. Tell me why in the future I would want to take my retirement account out of my bank and deposit it into the decentralized ether. If I screw up that process, I lose my retirement account. Introduce a third party to help me with the process and you're on the road back to centralization. The same types of arguments can be made for other "this is serious business" use case for bitcoin.
Can the blockchain replace Twitter? Yeah maybe. But to compare overturning Twitter to overturning the NYSE shows a lack of proportionality and understanding of why things are the way they are in finance.
We don't need to define the benefits of privacy and decentralization at all. We need to only offer them. Those who value decentralization and privacy will use what we offer. Those who dislike the outcome of a uncontrollable, decentralized world will have to exert a great amount of force and control to stop us.
Bitcoin does not offer any form of privacy as a direct result of being decentralized. In many ways bitcoins are a huge step back from a privacy perspective simply because private people can follow all transactions.
I keep hearing this "bitcoin isn't privacy/anonymous". That may be true if you consider bitcoin by itself but I think it's important to look at the whole landscape of crypto-currencies. Consider the following:
I buy a bitcoin, I send it to BTC-e.com and sell it for $800. Now I have an $800 USD balance on my account. I wait for 4 days then buy Litecoin and send it to my offline wallet.
Now, how would you track that? Note in my HN profile I have a BTC & LTC address that I've done exactly that with more than once. I would love for someone to show me the blockchain transactions that prove that's what happened. Alos note, this is pretty much how the SheepMarketPlace thieves got away. Some guy tracing the bitcoins until it was revealed that he was just following a BTC-e.com's internal operations address. Also note that you don't need to give BTC-e.com anymore more info than a valid email-address. Just get your coins from some other place like mining or whatever, send them to the deposit-address given to you on BTC-e.com.
For people not familar with bitcoin, consider this real-world example. I steal a $100 bill from your wallet but you have a paper-thin tracking device inside it. So you watch it physically move around in the world. Now, if I go to an Airport and exchange the $100 for 89 EURO... you've lost track of the original thief. The thief still is holding the funds he gained from the theft and you're just following a $100 around in the Airport exchange system that may end up anywhere. You know where the $100 bill is but you'll never find the thief. Mix this with stuff like localbitcoins.com(equivalent of just finding a random person on the street that will exchange currency) and you'd have a pretty tough time finding out exactly how the original person spent the funds.
Since the exchanges know who you are they can fill in those gaps. BTC-e is a bit of an anomaly; at some point I expect them to either adopt KYC or be hounded out of business.
Ah, that's true. If BTC-e.com cooperates with authorities then the gap can be closed. But regular people can't force BTC-e.con to disclose that info. Also worth noting that, at least in my situation, BTC-e.com doesn't have my bank info. All they have on me is a working email address and the IP address I log in from. Only coinbase.com truly _knows_ who I am since they have my bank & e-trade account.
I guess nothing is completely out of the reach of authorities if they really wanna get you, but it's a bit more difficult with crypto-currency than just looking at your bank account history. Now, if every unregulated exchange turns into a bureaucracy-controlled entity then I guess they're no longer much better than a bank.
Well, which is better: the illusion of privacy (which you can do nothing to further secure), or the known fact that you have no privacy in an environment where you can take steps to protect yourself?
Your bank offers the illusion of privacy. Sure, a random person can't just walk up and see your balance. But a teller can pull up your account and look around. Sysadmins can certainly see your money pop up in server logs. A particularly motivated individual might even be able to pull data from disk images or memory if they were so inclined, so how safe is that information really?
I'd argue that knowing everything is public is better. It motivates people to come up with solutions like Zerocoin and CoinJoin.
You can turn this around quickly. Which is better, the actual tangible privacy your bank gives you despite its theoretical "illusion" of security, or the theoretical privacy of bitcoin which in practice is hard to maintain yourself?
Following the transactions quickly breaks down. Almost every transaction is actually 2 transactions, one to a new address that you still control by your wallet and one to the payee's address. If you really think it is trackable I'll challenge you to track my purchases as a test.
As for decentralization vs centralization. If banks asked me to sign up with my public key and didn't ask for my name or address or identification number, then sure. But the fact is that they do. The fact is that they are infiltrated by the NSA, et al. A direct result of decentralization is the absolute need for privacy, otherwise the system breaks down.
People have published papers on breaking bitcoin anonymity. It wasn't trivial, but over a long period of time they could identify people with decent probability of being correct.
Decentralization in itself do not have a cost. When this architecture is applied to some concrete case it may have cost it even be wrong.
For example one can argue that if Europe had been kept under a central authority since Charlemagne, Europeans would have suffered much less wars, and maybe would have had less need to bring war and colonization worldwide.
But for a currency, distribution of goods, communication, etc decentralization is probably better, i.e. have more value than its implementation cost.
I must say that was a fairly well written article. The author really seemed to know his stuff. I never could fully wrap my head around protoshares from other writeups I had read, but this all made perfect sense. Even to my groggy morning mind.
I just love this:
Education/Experience
Some College at Virginia Commonwealth University, 4 Years Experience as a Full-Time Freelance Writer, 4-Star Author at TextBroker, 10,000+ Articles and Blog Posts on the Internet
The author alluded to some non-currency related applications of Bitcoin, i.e., a decentralized eBay.
Given the way Bitcoin and variants have been used so far, it's always been so exchange of some monetary value (i.e., shares, assets, funds, currencies, etc.). I'm having a really hard time picturing how Bitcoin can be applied in a non-monetary context.
I am working on a browser that uses colored coins for domain name resolution and BitTorrent Sync for content distribution, you can find it here: https://github.com/jminardi/syncnet
smart idea, i have two questions:
* why not use namecoin for dns resulution instead of colored coins?
* i thought bittorrent sync wasn't open source
A decade ago there was talk of decentralized web sites through p2p technologies. IBM was working on such a web server. There is of course FreeNet, but it needs a gateway to access pages from the internet.
> why not use namecoin for dns resulution instead of colored coins?
Colored Coins seems more interesting to me, no other reason than that. It wouldn't be hard to swap in namecoin though.
> i thought bittorrent sync wasn't open source
You are correct, it isn't However they present a very basic API that I believe some open source clone could replicate. As soon as that happens I plan on dropping it in as a replacement. But for now BitTorrent Sync works well enough.
I actually think Bitcoin could help poorer people more than it can the rich.
For example, if you've ever been a poor college student, you know that banking fees can be very onerous. (Buy a $2 coffee with too little in your account; boom $40 overdraft.)
But you're forced to use a bank because it's really hard to get by in the world without one. (It's hard to receive money and impossible to spend it online or send it to a friend without the risk of carrying around cash.) Bitcoin could solve those problems for the poor.
Bitcoin carries all the risk of cash and more; a bitcoin mugger would be able to get your life's savings rather than just what you have in your wallet.
Regulations against predatory lending will be much harder to enforce with bitcoin, which will hurt the poor.
Many people compare bitcoin to gold. Look at who trades/pays/saves in gold today. It's not the poor.
Actually, I read a book a while back by someone who was in Argentina when it crashed. He said people were using small lengths of gold chain as currency.
Regarding bitcoin muggers, that would be quite difficult if you take elementary security measures. Your life savings don't go in your phone wallet, they go in a paper wallet that you keep in a safe deposit box.
Enforcing lending regulations is easy: don't follow the regulations, don't expect any help from the state if the borrower decides not to pay you back.
> Actually, I read a book a while back by someone who was in Argentina when it crashed. He said people were using small lengths of gold chain as currency.
Well sure, when you don't have access to a reliable consumer banking system everyone, including the poor, falls back on gold (or cigarettes or the like). Do you have evidence that the crash hit the rich harder than it hit the poor? Because my expectation would be just the opposite.
> Your life savings don't go in your phone wallet, they go in a paper wallet that you keep in a safe deposit box.
Well, I guess you can make it as safe as cash by giving it all the inconvenience of cash. I doubt people are going to switch to a payment mechanism that's less convenient than today's credit cards though.
> Enforcing lending regulations is easy: don't follow the regulations, don't expect any help from the state if the borrower decides not to pay you back.
Which just means those lenders adopt, uh, extra-legal measures.
Being able to track the movement of money, reverse fraudulent transactions, freeze accounts and so on is a major weapon against organized crime. Bitcoin makes it easier to run such crime, and it's the poor who will suffer the most as a result.
Things like m of n transactions will make this harder than it sounds. Ultimately, bitcoin will end up safer than cash or bank accounts. And there won't be risk of a "bail-in."
I actually think Bitcoin could help poorer people more than it can the rich.
It already is capable of doing that. If cryptocurrencies do nothing but put Western Union out of the foreign remittance business, they will save billions of dollars for people to whom that kind of money still means something.
Yeah, so, a poor college student can't have a bank account but he can have a computer ($200) and internet connection ($10/m) to get started with these coins.
Well, how does a poor college student get his first coin? or a satoshi? Oh right, a computer, a wallet, maybe a bank account and an exchange platform account. No? Go find someone sells coins offline? lol, with what? Cash? Oh, that poor student... He just transfered 10 grands into bitcoins yesterday, today, it worths 12 grands, tomorrow worths 8. No worry, a poor student doesn't care.
Any coin that needs an internet connection means a huge ignorance of 2/3 of world population and infrastructures (which are controlled by the goverments). I don't want to live in that kind of world/system.
The premined coins have already made the bitcoin world unfair, how can any one keep saying bitcoin is the future and doing good things for the poor? I guess because those coins made wealth redistribution much easier than ever.
Cellphones are very common in third-world countries. If a currency works on a cheap smartphone, most of the world's poor will be able to use it before long.
Not to quibble, but 'poor college student' is a statistical oxymoron. I do agree though that cryptocurrencies offer great promise for 3rd-world economies and is a democratizing influence.
If someone has less than $100 in their bank account and they aren't making small purchases in cash, I'm not sure there is any mechanism that is going to help them. They need to do some combination of increasing their income and doing without coffee.
(It is super easy to budget with cash...)
Edit: Just to clarify, in the parenthetical, I mean 'budget' in the sense of 'stick to spending what you have', not 'plan out what to purchase'.
Things online are often much cheaper (not to mention quicker) than buying in person though. Save ~10% and risk overdraft or pay more of your scarce funds is a shitty tradeoff for anyone.
I am not suggesting current monetary system works. I am only saying Bitcoin is not the solution. Digital currencies? Yes. Bitcoin - nope. There is a clear unfair advantage for early adopters - very much like how the English came into the America and laid out property laws and took swarms of land. How is this any different?
So this is basically trying to fix the problem that bit coin just does not scale very well.
Instead of using Colored Coins, I could just as well use dogecoin.
btw, are there nice shibe that could help me get started with some doge? DUCHVurpx2s7s3VnXWFtcvodRatoEL2ccv
May have been obvious to some, I dunno, but it's worth noting that Bitcoin can do all of these things today, with zero changes to implementation or design.