
Bitcoin's Shared Ledger Technology: Money's New Operating System - thedoctor
http://www.forbes.com/sites/laurashin/2015/09/09/bitcoins-shared-ledger-technology-moneys-new-operating-system/
======
vectorpush
Bitcoin and blockchain enthusiasts have been claiming that bitcoin (or
etherum) is going to take the world by storm _any day_ now, yet all I ever see
_anywhere_ are big claims (revolutionizing payments, disrupting remittance,
ending wars, freeing the people, destroying the banks etc, ad nauseam) with
very little substance and _lots_ of scams, frauds and dead-end ventures. Dark
markets, internet gambling and a handful of other novelty and niche
communities can extract genuine utility from bitcoin, and that should continue
into the foreseeable future, but the general population just has no use for
it. None. Despite all the hand wringing about having to endure the treachery
of big banks, pull style payments, and entering long credit card numbers,
bitcoin is still harder to use, even harder to keep secure, and without any
guarantees, assurances or consumer protections. Bitcoin is an interesting
novelty at best, and everyone knows it, even many bitcoin enthusiasts.

Now, in recent months, we're suddenly hit with a bevy of stories about big
name financial brands and famous VCs pouring cash and research into the
blockchain, and just like that, the goalposts have shifted. _This_ is what
we've all been waiting for; _this_ is what will _really_ bring bitcoin into
the mainstream, there _has_ to be something big here when you look at all the
colossal mountains of cash that have been dumped into the bitcoinverse... yet
somehow, we're still at a loss as to exactly how the "x but with blockchains"
formula is meant to revolutionize everything. If the 100 million dollar
investment into 21inc's vision of putting a bitcoin miner in every
refrigerator is any indication of what we're to expect from all this investor
cash, I think we can safely assume that what we're witnessing is simply the
hyperbolic bitcoin hype machine functioning within normal parameters.

Of course, I'm probably just an idiot who doesn't "get" bitcoin, it's pretty
difficult to understand, since even after all these years I just can't grasp
the amazing potential of bitcoin. What other explanation could there be?

~~~
Meekro
You're not an idiot -- the things you described are very real. I've heard
about tons of scams and quite a few dead-end ventures. The 21inc thing sounds
pretty bizarre to me as well, but there is more going on in the bitcoin world
than just that.

I'm involved with a VPS hosting company called ChunkHost, and we've accepted
bitcoin for many years. We're not criminals, and we don't tolerate criminals
on our network, and nonetheless bitcoin has served us well as a means of
payment. We've written on our blog[1] about how bitcoin payments are 20-30% of
our revenue.

Another interesting company is purse.io -- they let you get something like a
20% discount on your Amazon purchases by paying in bitcoin. coffee.foldapp.com
lets you get 20% off your Starbucks purchases by paying with bitcoin. Again,
this is not a scam -- I use it and it works. Don't you think this is a real
benefit that real people could appreciate?

I'm curious how long you've been following bitcoin. I've been interested in it
since 2009/2010, and have seen the goalposts move a great deal: every time a
goal is reached, the critics change it so they can declare bitcoin a failure.
First it was that "you can't buy anything for it," which was true until a
pizza was sold for 10,000 bitcoins in mid-2010.

Then it was "no store accepts it" \-- which was true until a few months later
when you could buy things like web hosting from tiny bitcoin-only companies.
Then it became "no large company will ever accept it." That remained true for
a while, but eventually Wordpress became the first large company to do so.
Others like Newegg, Overstock, and even Microsoft followed soon after. "Nobody
will ever pay with it" was another one, and that was shattered once those
companies started posting bitcoin revenue which, despite being a tiny share of
their overall revenue, showed that people were consistently spending their
coins.

I'm not saying that grandma will be buying gas with bitcoin anytime soon (or
ever) -- just that there is substance there: merchants accepting it, consumers
spending it, and interesting things like purse.io that couldn't exist without
it.

[1]
[https://chunkhost.com/blog/17%2Fbitcoin_revenue_in_2014](https://chunkhost.com/blog/17%2Fbitcoin_revenue_in_2014)

~~~
sn
We at prgmr.com started accepting bitcoin recently via bitpay, and I think
that a payment gateway like bitpay which allows you to accept bitcoin without
actually having to hold bitcoins at any point make a huge difference. In the
US, bitcoin counts as property which means you can have a capital gain or loss
when it is exchanged later, which can become an accounting headache.

The reason we first started really thinking seriously about bitcoin was
because existing customers weren't able to get very many US dollars anymore
due to economic restrictions in their home country, and without offering
bitcoin they couldn't pay us. As long as these sorts of economic constraints
exist, there will be a market for bitcoin.

~~~
hollerith
Economic restriction imposed by the government of the home country or imposed
by Western governments?

------
natrius
The "shared ledger" analogy for blockchains is limiting. If you want to
understand the potential applications, you should stop using it in your
thinking.

Blockchains give us _publicly writable databases_. Such a thing never existed
before. A blockchain has one or more programs that define what can be written
to the public database. Bitcoin's program is mostly about distributing the 21
million coins to miners and preventing users from sending more bitcoins than
they own.

A blockchain's program can manage any data, though. There are so many human
interactions that are governed by private databases—that used to be the only
way to do it. The sea change you are about to witness is those interactions
transitioning to public databases. Everything will be rebuilt, especially
where companies are charging for those interactions, like Uber and Airbnb.

Applications will be able to read from and write to all of the public
databases, and they will all use the same cryptographic identities for
seamless integration. Every application can trivially have payments built in.
Or ride hailing. Or package shipping.

Network effects are public goods, and we now have the technology to provide
them in a public manner. Go build something.

~~~
TheDong
It gives you a publicly writable database that is only secured by people
desiring to throw away large sums of computation in an environmentally
unfriendly manner.

Writes are also slow (10 mins...) and requires relatively high bandwidth and
space to be used securely.

There's no reason that AirBnb or Uber would want their database to be public,
slower, and broken as soon as people lose interest in splitting up mining.

In fact, the more valuable stuff goes on a block chain, the more people will
want to break it in order to be able to manipulate that information.

It's neat how the generals problem can work when the blockchain is for money.
If it weren't for money, then why would people have an incentive to throw
computation at it? To secure their AirBnb trip? If it's only AirBnb that has
such an incentive, then suddenly it's a massively expensive enterprise to do
so compared to running a normal distributed database that they control
read/writes to.

~~~
natrius
Blockchains can be built without 10 minute block times or wasteful proof-of-
work for mining. You can just pick people the users trust to make blocks or
use proof-of-stake mining.

Blockchains are harder to break than most corporate databases.

Reading up on Ethereum will answer most of your questions.

~~~
TheDong
If your "blockchain" doesn't have a proof-of-work beyond trusted people,
that's hardly different than a company publishing their database full of
signed transactions.

I'm aware that 10 minutes is a configurable number, but there's a reason it's
as high as it is.

I'm also familiar with Ethereum, and I still don't see it as better than a
company-run database for anything like uber/airbnb/etc with a central company
behind it.

> Blockchains are harder to break than most corporate databases.

Strange, Google and Amazon and many other sites have done just fine with
databases (though there are exceptions like Ashley Madison etc) while there
have already been real double-spends with the bitcoin Blockchain and numerous
other issues.

Proportional to usage, I'd say bitcoin has proven to be terrible compared to
databases.

So yeah, citation needed.

Additionally, if you change your mining to be "people users trust", your
security is now equivalent to corporate database security -- a lead pipe to
the head to get a password in.

~~~
natrius
_> I'm also familiar with Ethereum, and I still don't see it as better than a
company-run database for anything like uber/airbnb/etc with a central company
behind it._

It's better because no one is taking a cut off of the transactions that the
network enables. No one has to approve a new application that uses the
network, so every application can build on top of the network. The people own
the network, not companies.

This isn't just better, it's better to the degree that the Internet was better
than private networks. That difference was world changing, and this one will
be too.

 _> Additionally, if you change your mining to be "people users trust", your
security is now equivalent to corporate database security -- a lead pipe to
the head to get a password in._

Blockchains have programs that validate transactions. You'd have to get every
validator to incorporate a fraudulent transaction. Hacking three financial
institutions at the same time, for example, is pretty hard. Ten is even
harder.

~~~
Jasper_
That's a nice pipe dream. Unfortunately, it's not how Bitcoin has played out
in the real world. The Bitcoin network has unfortunately not been owned by the
people, but instead dominated by Chinese miners with ASICs. The current low-
ball estimate based on public numbers is that Chinese miners account for ~70%
of the hashrate -- see
[https://blockchain.info/pools](https://blockchain.info/pools)

As the database gets larger and larger, less and less people can afford the
disk space, bandwidth, and electricity, and they will be pushed out by people
who can. The current scalability of Bitcoin, with its absolutely miniscule
userbase, and incredibly high miner count, can barely scrape past 3
transactions per second. Attempts at trying to fix this have absolutely
fractured the community. See BIP101 / BitcoinXT and the resulting blowout,
especially on the /r/bitcoin subreddit.

The security of Bitcoin is abysmal. There are major mining pools that don't
even bother to validate the incoming transactions, since validating was slower
than not validating, and more blocks means more money --
[https://bitcoin.org/en/alert/2015-07-04-spv-
mining](https://bitcoin.org/en/alert/2015-07-04-spv-mining)

Oh, how are these BTC miners getting money? BitPay's statistics say that $76
million, a disproportionate majority of their payouts, go to miners:
[http://d.ibtimes.co.uk/en/full/1433561/bitcoin-merchants-
mai...](http://d.ibtimes.co.uk/en/full/1433561/bitcoin-merchants-mainstream-
bitpay-cryptocurrency.jpg)

So Bitcoin seems to be a vehicle for Chinese BTC miners to trade cheap
electricity for VC money. Up until everything bursts, at least.

It's also worth mentioning that if anybody was able to get these miners to
collude, they could completely crash it if they wanted to. Bitcoin's security
is largely based on no one entity having a majority of the network's power.

Etherum has all of the same problems and none of the solutions. The official
FAQ even says that we're going to see a tilted hashrate arms race ("AMD GPUs
will be 'faster' than similarly priced NVIDIA GPUs") --
[https://forum.ethereum.org/discussion/197/how-to-help-
secure...](https://forum.ethereum.org/discussion/197/how-to-help-secure-the-
ethereum-network-faq)

~~~
Animats
_" Bitcoin seems to be a vehicle for Chinese BTC miners to trade cheap
electricity for VC money."_

I suspect that some of the Chinese BTC mining is simply a way to convert yuan
to dollars. That's hard to do from inside China, because the People's Bank of
China imposes currency controls.

Back in 2013, it was possible to buy Bitcoin with yuan transferred through the
banking system within China and sell it outside China for dollars. That's what
cause the big run-up in Bitcoin to over $1000. Then the PBOC clamped down,
which caused the big drop in Bitcoin to around $250.

Bitcoin mining, though, is viewed as manufacturing and export under Chinese
law. Those activities are encouraged, and subsidies may be available for
construction and power. The Bitcoins can be sold outside China for dollars or
euros. So, even if the mining just breaks even, it has utility for the owners
of the mining operations.

~~~
chillydawg
I'm not sure how flooding the market with bitcoin trying to buy USD would
drive the USD price of bitcoin up. I think you have something backwards here.

~~~
Animats
It has nothing to do with driving the price of Bitcoin up. It just turns yuan
into dollars or euros, which is otherwise quite difficult.

------
kolbe
One of two things: I either do not understand Wall Street's obsession with
blockchainesque technologies, or Wall Street's obsession with it is totally
emblematic of their buzzword-obsessed technology-ignorant groupthink that
fried the tech industry in the late 90's.

I'm seeing companies like this pop up all over the place. Blythe Masters's new
venture[1], which made the cover of this month's Bloomberg Business, seems to
be the pinnacle.

Bitcoin technologies solved some very important problems in the creation of
currencies: double spending, decentralization, cost distribution, &c. These
are not problems that need to be solved in securities trading. One company
running on one platform doesn't have a double spendng problem.
Decentralization is irrelevant. And cost is no issue.

Yes, the securities trading industry is wrought with disgusting
inefficiencies, and technology should play a central role in becoming more
efficient, but I do not see how shoehorning in blockchain tech helps in any
way. If keeping track of ownership and transfer of securities is such a
cumbersome process, make a company that keeps track of ownership and transfer
of securities. Use computers. Use web interfaces. Make transactions publicly
viewable. Create robust contract definitions. Remove paper trails. Hire
programmers. Pay AWS. But I have no clue how they think blockchain technology
adds to any solution here.

I don't know. Someone please explain.

[1] [http://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2015-09-01/blythe-
mas...](http://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2015-09-01/blythe-masters-
tells-banks-the-blockchain-changes-everything)

~~~
natrius
People pay Nasdaq to make their trades reliable and safe.

Reliable and safe trades can now be done by a swarm of computers running free
software, and they only charge a tiny margin over the costs of bandwidth,
energy and storage.

How is Wall Street supposed to make money now? They're all trying to find out,
and they all need to be the first. Financial profits will be much smaller, and
the slow movers will have a smaller slice of a smaller pie.

~~~
TheDong
> only charge a tiny margin over the costs of bandwidth, energy and storage.

The margin charged in terms of energy is _massive_. The bitcoin network can't
handle many TPS because each transaction needs significant computational work
to secure it.

On the other hand, if I trust my database I can do the tiny work to write it,
make sure I've got consensus among my DB nodes it's written, and be done with
it.

I'd say that bitcoin so far has neither been reliable nor safe. Hell, if you
look at MtGox alone, I bet a higher percent of bitcoin users were impacted
than the total number of USD users who have experienced any kind of fraud.

In addition, there was the Nth "stress test" last week which crashed nodes and
delayed transactions for hours... yeah, great tiny margin and reliability...

~~~
brighton36
That's not even a little true. The transaction requires little/no work
whatsoever. The miners require precisely as much work as there is speculative
value for bitcoin. If Bitcoin were worth $10,000 per bitcoin - the energy
burned per transaction would be 40 times higher. But that is not to say that
the transaction itself required this expense.

Mt Gox had as much to do with bitcoin as it did to do with http. I wouldn't
argue with you that centralized databases are way more efficient than
blockchains (hence why _some_ nodes went down), but you simply don't
understand the basics of what's going on with bitcoin.

~~~
TheDong
The transaction has to be included in a block. That requires proof of work.

As you say, the energy burned should be proportional to the value of bitcoin;
if I have 100 BTC then I have a vested interest in mining outside of gaining
new BTC -- I also want to protect the BTC&transactions I have from attacks.

The argument that it's okay to spend that amount of money securing that amount
of money, however, is nonsensical.

Transactions in traditional databases do take almost no work. There's no
thousands of computers computing and discarding hashes just to be able to add
and subtract some numbers.

I'll acknowledge that MtGox isn't a good thing to reference here, but the fact
of the matter is that bitcoin is rife with things that a regular man would
call "unreliability".

I don't appreciate that you immediately condescend that I don't understand
anything to do with bitcoin when your response has little substance.

Your response is basically "transactions don't require that energy is burned
but energy is burned for transactions" and you have the gall to say I don't
understand anything?

~~~
brighton36
Your claim was that there was a 'cost per transaction'. This is easily proved
false when you examine the number of transactions in a block. If there were a
cost per transaction, some blocks would cost less to produce than others
(and/or returning varying rewards to miners. 2. the cost per transaction is
directly relative to the price per bitcoin.

As for traditional databases,they are almost always more efficient - I think
many of these bitcoin companies are absurd.

As for your pennies reference, I simply don't understand why the cost of a
penny is at all relevant. At best, Bitcoin isn't "real" money, and even if it
were, I don't know what seniorage costs add to this discussion.

The unreliability of bitcoin may be worth discussing, but that's tangential to
your original post. Thus far, I think it's done pretty well in that department
considering how new and exotic this technology is.

Your hubris on matters that you clearly don't understand justifies my
response, which IMO was fair, balanced, and respectful. Don't rephrase my
response unless you wish to misrepresent them, my words stand alone and don't
need a tldr.

------
EGreg
Why do blockchains need proof of work at all? It seems that this is only to
solve the Byzantine Generals problem, not to prevent spam or something like
that (which HashCash used).

Given a network where every node eventually communicates with every other
node, a vector clock is enough. You can simply have append-only trees! This
data structure is ideally suited for distributed applications.

In a smaller network, question about double-spend is simply solved by having a
MAJORITY of parties report that they've seen a certain precondition at time A
(ie Person X has Y coins) before any subsequent transaction is considered
validated.

What is also beautiful about appending to a TREE instead of a ledger is that
you can have subsets of the network which care about a particular subtree. You
don't need everyone to store everything!

~~~
TheDong
Proof of Work does disincentive spam a little because you can only spam as
quickly as the network can incorporate transactions (6tps iirc) due to the
slow nature of the network. If the network were more efficient and used vector
clocks, you could spam much more efficiently too.

If the majority of parties can decide such things without a proof of work,
then a single person can just create a large number of accounts and own the
network. You need to avoid the problem of fake accounts somehow. Proof of Work
does that and you don't propose a solution.

~~~
brighton36
Miner fees mediate spam, not the transaction count. (which btw is likely to be
enormously higher than 6tps)

~~~
TheDong
[https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Scalability#Scalability_targets](https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Scalability#Scalability_targets)

> Today the Bitcoin network is restricted to a sustained rate of 7 tps due to
> the bitcoin protocol restricting block sizes to 1MB.

I've heard the number from other sources as being 6 or 7 before too,
particularly after the scale tests I believe.

I know there's the blocksize increase debate which will make this comment
inaccurate soon.

Also, I believe that a 0 fee transaction will still get processed _eventually_
and, since such a thing is valid, it's not going to stop spam entirely, just
slow it a lot.

~~~
brighton36
There are numerous proposals on the table to scale past 7tps. The reason that
they aren't implemented yet is because it hasn't been needed.

------
laurashin
Hi, I'm the writer who wrote this story. Someone on Twitter alerted me to the
conversation. Thanks, Paul Pajo! I didn't get to read the whole thread as I am
heading out on a flight today but I just wanted to say that I am coming out
with a story tomorrow morning Eastern Time that addresses some (though not
all) of the initial question. This is the Forbes page where you can watch for
the story.
[http://www.forbes.com/sites/laurashin/](http://www.forbes.com/sites/laurashin/)

One thing I will mention quickly is that the main thrust of my story is that
Wall Street is interested in using it to make their own processes more
efficient. In a developer economies, because or existing systems work so well,
we will have a slower road to consumer adoption than developing economies
will. One of the sidebars to the story goes into this a little bit. Plane is
pushing back from the gate, so I have to go. But I hope hats helpful.

------
sigma2015
> Express now collect 1% to 3% of domestic credit and debit transactions,
> generating more than $70 billion a year in fees in the U.S. market alone.
> “That’s a tax on all payments,” says Wedbush analyst Luria. _With Bitcoin
> that goes practically to zero._

There are and will be also tx fees for Bitcoin.

> Here’s how primitive the infrastructure is now: The Bitcoin blockchain can
> currently handle 7 transactions a second

That's not an infrastracture issue but an intentional limitation by design.

[[http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/855/what-keeps-
th...](http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/855/what-keeps-the-average-
block-time-at-10-minutes)]

------
kordless
It's unfortunate this is basically (another) piece on the funding that
chain.com recently landed. The article itself has about zip in the way of new
content related to blockchain technologies.

------
j_lev
> By early 2014 the three had $4 million in seed funding and had narrowed
> their focus to Bitcoin apps. But they found that the software tools they
> needed to build those apps didn’t exist and pivoted to building the tools
> themselves.

> ON A MONDAY MORNING seven Chain.com employees sit in a circle on their Aeron
> chairs plotting the week’s plan of attack for various projects. The shoptalk
> is a jargon-fest of “open assets,” “confirmation time,” “UI,” “sidechains,”
> “federated chains” and, of course, “coins.” Khosla Ventures’ Rabois, the
> company’s lead VC investor, says he backed Chain.com because it had a
> nucleus of “10X engineers,” which he defines as “engineers who have the
> output and insight that’s ten times better than a regularly good engineer.”
> Elite groups like these, he says, are essential to build tools “so more
> regular engineers can build applications” for blockchain.

In The Industry, how common is investing $4 million in a company before they
have even "narrowed their focus to Bitcoin apps," based on the unproven
potential of the founders? What am I missing?

------
laurashin
This is my followup story, which answers some of the questions about how we'll
end up using Bitcoin, and how people in developing economies will likely deal
with it more directly than people in developed economies -- at least at first:
[http://www.forbes.com/sites/laurashin/2015/09/14/bitcoin-
blo...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/laurashin/2015/09/14/bitcoin-blockchain-
technology-in-financial-services-how-the-disruption-will-play-out/)

------
Ologn
For all the bubble talk...if there is any sign of a bubble, it is Bitcoin.
Bitcoins are completely worthless, they have no value. The price action shows
it - they are currently bouncing between $230 and $235, six months ago that
was $260, and one year ago it was $400. It is headed to $0.

The smell of scam is all over it. The inventor hides his identity. Bitcoin
companies are awash in scams and criminal charges - Mt. Gox, Butterfly Labs
etc.

The Bitcoin hype machine can't answer one simple question - why do Bitcoins
have any value? They can't give a rational answer to this. You can get a
Florida real estate swamp land sales shop, or MLM organization running for a
little while, but eventually it folds.

I'm glad to see that two people who have had a long, long history of observing
financial markets agree with me - Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger. They've
been around long enough to see every snake oil scam under the planet. That's
why Munger says Bitcoins are "rat poison" and Buffett expressed similar
sentiments.

Incidentally, I knew this when Bitcoin was $460 and even mentioned it on HN (
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6753545](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6753545)
). Those who listened to me saved themselves from losing half their
investment. Soon enough I will be pointing to this post when it halves again
to $115-$118.

~~~
joeyspn
> The Bitcoin hype machine can't answer one simple question - why do Bitcoins
> have any value? They can't give a rational answer to this.

The answer is simple:

Because there's enough number of people that agrees to use it as commodity
money and medium of exchange.

~~~
Ologn
That's a tautological answer. When a Bitcoin was worth over 4 times its
present value a number of months ago, the same answer could be given - "it's
worth that because people will pay for that".

I can give a rational answer for why commodities like apples have value, or a
gallon of gasoline, or a table, or a shirt. Even houses in 2007 real estate
development projects in the outskirts of Sacramento have a rational (if at one
time overblown) value. There is no rational explanation why a hashed number
called a Bitcoin has any value. A bar of gold had value 4000 years ago, it has
value today, and if the concept of commodity value exists 4000 years from now,
it will have value then.

As I said, I pointed all of this out on HN before Bitcoins lost half of their
value. I'm quite confident they will be halved again from their present value,
and eventually hit $0. They're worthless hashes. Your explanation for why they
have value would not have me comfortable as someone holding onto such
commodities. Warren Buffett and Charlie ("Bitcoins are rat poison") Munger
agree with me.

~~~
CuriousSkeptic
Things don't have value on their own. They have value to someone in some
context. Your Apple has value to a hungry person because it can be eaten, it
has value to an apple producer, or merchant, because it can be sold, and it
has value to a truck driver because it needs transporting. It's not an
intrinsic property of the apple. It is entirely a result of the plans and
hopes of those individuals who deals with the apple.

You can of course counter that all value is derived from the hunger of the
apple eater, why else would the driver, merchant and producer bother?

And that's where something like Bitcoin could enter the picture. It establish
value in the other direction. It has value to the apple eater because it can
be used to buy an apple, to the truck driver because it buys fuel, to the
merchant because it buys more apples, and to the producer because it buys a
well earned vacation trip.

The intrinsic properties of being of a fixed supply, securely transferable,
highly divisible and cheap to store and move around makes it useful as an
intermediate token of value exchanged.

That said, I do think the high volatility of Bitcoin takes away much of is
usefulness as a currency. In this regard it's to much like gold. A future
replacement should probably have an elastic supply like the credit based
currencies we are used to dealing with.

~~~
Ologn
> And that's where something like Bitcoin could enter the picture. It
> establish value in the other direction. It has value to the apple eater
> because it can be used to buy an apple

Right...but this can be said about any commodity. If I own a new iPhone, or a
bar of gold, or what have you, it won't take me long to sell those and buy
apples. But iPhones, gold etc. have inherent value and use, Bitcoin has no use
value.

> fixed supply most commodities

> highly divisible, cheap to store some commodities have these
> properties...like precious metals

> securely transferable fortunes are wired from bank to bank around the world
> every day

Gold is a useful commodity. For wiring, for filling teeth, for other purposes.
It is also durable, divisible, uniform, portable, and all those things which
make a commodity useful as a currency. Bitcoins are not a useful commodity,
they are a hash number ultimately. When the game of musical chairs ends,
people flock to commodities that have had value for thousands of years, like
gold. They have inherent usefulness and value. Bitcoins don't.

