
Bitcoin Is Not as Secure, Unregulated, or Lucrative as You Might Think - sravfeyn
http://www.wired.com/opinion/2013/05/lets-cut-through-the-bitcoin-hype/
======
UnoriginalGuy
This is an opinion piece. Which is to say don't go in expecting to either
learn something new or even to expect a single coherent theme to emerge.

It is just a bunch of random pieces of information spliced in with random
pieces of information specifically about bitcoins, throw in a link-baity
title, and that is this article.

~~~
dakami
Also it's an opinion piece because I don't work for Wired.

~~~
dfc
Dont take anything here personally.

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kzrdude
> A pallet of $100 bills that disappears in Iraq is a socialized loss against
> everyone who holds dollars.

What? That was tax money. Further, a true destruction of those bills would not
be a loss, it would be a gain to everyone else with dollars.

~~~
dakami
(Author here)

It disappears in Iraq. What, you think they're gonna burn it for warmth? Those
bucks are coming back.

~~~
hollerith
OK, but doesn't that make it neutral rather than a loss against people who
hold dollars?

(I am an admirer of your work and writing BTW.)

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ancarda
>After all, the internet runs on a foundation of buggy technologies, and it
survives.

How the Internet is buggy?

~~~
zanny
No IP protocol level security (that is widely adopted, IPsec) a top down
distribution of addresses. Tacked on mutant growth to fix systemic issues
(DNS, NAT, etc). HTML-internet specifically, html is a document markup used
for applications and javascript is a browser extension language turned
Internet assembly.

Maybe more than anything, people abuse what the Internet is for. Hospitals
running their patient records over devices on the public Internet (that are
almost certainly full of exploitable security holes on some port, which is
probably an Internet "bug" in how easy it is to just barrage all the ports on
a machine to find some exploitable application if they aren't proactive with
managing the security).

~~~
UnoriginalGuy
Can you go into more detail on why you feel HTML is broken?

I would have agreed with you back when IE 6 was still a "thing." But these
days with strict XHTML, CSS, for appearance/layout, and JS for logic we seem
to actually be at a very good place for moving forward.

I'd even go as far as to say that XHTML/CSS and JS do a better job separating
responsibilities than many programming frameworks I've used do.

Do I think they're perfect? No. In fact I hate typeless languages like JS. But
it is "good enough."

~~~
api
Everything is good enough. An evolutionary biology professor said this once,
and it struck me as deep wisdom:

"life doesn't work perfectly, it just works."

You could say life works better than dead.

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tomelders
> Bitcoin’s got its issues. But it is not competing with perfection.

Possibly the most salient and eloquent quote I've ever heard regarding
bitcoin.

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general_failure
This article is as incoherent as it gets. Money is 'buggy'!? Seriously!!?

~~~
dakami
If you have a technology (Money) and it doesn't work, it's buggy. You've never
had your credit card declined?

~~~
general_failure
So what is not buggy in this world ?

I can write about anything and call it buggy. Monsoons are buggy since don't
arrive on time. Nile is buggy because it floods. Electricity is buggy because
it has shock risk. Water is buggy because it can harbor mosquitoes.

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zanny
> There’s only a few parties that turn bitcoin (which teleports) into dollars
> (which buy stuff).

They are unnecessary if vendors directly accept bitcoin, at which point you
can have your wallet, you can be connected to arbitrary nodes in the network,
and you can spend the money from that wallet in transactions with any other
wallet and verify against only ~8 nodes in the network to verify with
reasonable certainty.

> It’s all fiat.

This is very true, and a lot of people ignore it. Props to the article for
making a deal of it. Gold is not worth a thousandth its current market value
if people didn't treat it as a scarce shiny valuable and instead treated it as
a good conductor or flaky metal.

~~~
daniel-cussen
> Gold is not worth a thousandth its current market value if people didn't
> treat it as a scarce shiny valuable and instead treated it as a good
> conductor or flaky metal.

That's a stretch. If it were not valuable monetarily, its price would be
similar to other difficult-to-extract, heavy metals with a long list of unique
properties, like Iridium or Rhenium, neither monetary, and both around $400 an
ounce.

~~~
dakami
What's the global supply differential of Gold to Iridium?

~~~
saalweachter
I would also object to gold being difficult to extract.

Gold is relatively scarce, but about 3-10 times more common in the crust (by
ppm on Wikipedia) than Iridium, Rhodium or Rhenium. Production of gold was 55
times higher than Rhenium. I don't know if this because of demand or
difficulty of extraction. Rhenium is priced at $142/Troy ounce.

~~~
daniel-cussen
The $400 figure was the last time I checked--it's a very illiquid market and I
remember publicly accessible prices being delayed by months. But rhenium is
extracted as a molybdenum impurity, itself an impurity in copper. Most (90%)
of it comes from Chile, and the price reflects supply and demand, really. I
don't know what the supply elasticity is like, but I suppose suppliers could
buy back old copper or molybdenum to purify it if the price warranted it. And
because it's an exotic metal, none of the production is artisanal. Gold, on
the other hand, has about 25% artisanal production, because mankind has been
mining it for thousands of years and the extraction process is simple and well
known.

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mcantelon
Makes me think of Wired's cover story "The Web is Dead".

<http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/08/ff_webrip/>

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UVB-76
Anyone who thinks Bitcoin is the future of money is insane.

~~~
jlgreco
Suppose I say that I think that bitcoin is the future of currency in the same
way that the Benz Patent Motorwagen was the future of personal transportation?

~~~
UVB-76
Bitcoin has no place in the future of currency.

The future of currency is digital, but it's not peer-to-peer. It's just an
international organisation with a big centralised database. You might not like
it, but watch it unfold.

~~~
rubinelli
A single point of failure for a global currency sounds like an awful idea to
me. A federated model, in which each main node has to go through a rigorous
appraisal before it joins its peers, and they continuously "trust but verify"
each other, is a much more palatable option.

~~~
UVB-76
Centralisation is the endgame. All transactions will be logged, and all will
be instantly reversible in the unlikely event of some kind of security breach.

Money laundering will be impossible, and there'll be no incentive to hack
other people's accounts because all thefts will be reversible (even if the
thief then went on to transfer said currency to third parties)

~~~
rubinelli
The question is, who gets the key to the vault? Who can say a transaction was
fraudulent? Who will you give the authority to freeze all your digital assets,
pending further investigation? Amazon? Google? Paypal?

~~~
UVB-76
A non-governmental international organisation à la the United Nations or the
World Bank.

Of course, we're talking about the long-term here. In the next 5-10 years
similar systems will be implemented by individual nations. International
cooperation will take much longer.

