I don't know why this should be unpopular, except among people who see the Internet as a new Wild West. The basic advantage of Bitcoin, that its controlled by an algorithm rather than a central bank, exists whether or not financial regulations apply to Bitcoin. Does it destroy the utility of a crypto currency for exchanges and processors to be required to detect e.g. money laundering?
It's the wild west, except not a single person ever died from it. It's a communications network. I'm all for treating it as the wild-west, self regulating thing it is.
Nobody has died in the Internet, but money has been stolen and commerce has been interfered with, and that was one of the major drivers behind the taming of the Wild West. Stage coach robberies and train holdups.
I'm assuming the reason somebody downvoted you is the implicit assumption that saving fat cat bankers from middle class teenagers justifies turning the Internet into cable TV. I want to make the other point.
You're claiming it was about commerce rather than loss of life and then using examples where there was often loss of life.
That is the characterization, isn't it? Middle class teenagers versus fat cat bankers. But in reality it's often middle class teenagers or even organized Russian criminals against gullible old people who are susceptible to pishing tricks. 140 years ago, you might as well have been talking about middle class guys versus fat cat railroad companies.
There was often loss of life during train robberies, but the economic disruption was a major component. People knew Jesse James for all the trains he robbed, not the people he killed.
"The Bitcoin protocol allows two parties to transact without any outside interference"
...other than the entire Bitcoin network, right? When last I checked the design of Bitcoin called for transactions to be checked by other Bitcoin users and then broadcast to the entire network. That is about as far as one can get from a two party transaction.
If you want real two party transactions, you probably want this sort of thing:
the network doesn't interfere, they do nothing to the transactions. They are there to act as a safe-guard against double spending, among others, by "validating" them.
I don't think it's dead. I think a lot of people romanticize things like Bitcoin as being part of a world that's lawless relative to the real one. And as hackers, it's one where the lack of order favors them, just as the lack of order in the Wild West favored those with the most horses and guns.
I'm not sure that analogy plays out well for hackers in the long term. Ultimately, the wild west was not won by cowboys with some horses and guns, but large-scale ranchers with title to hundreds of thousands of acres. The cowboys may still have movies made about them, but the likes of King Ranch came out on top economically.
I believe it is more correct to think of cowboys along the terms of freelancers and lifestyle business folks... people who don't need massive success, just freedom from having to be at a highly structured job from 9-5.
Or at least that is the idea that I get from the many I know or have met.
In that sense, the larger market "winners" like the king ranch aren't really a factor, except as their presence begins to foment regulations that must apply to every single person and begin to restructure the world into one where it is increasingly difficult to live outside of a corporate structure.... ie. they fence off formerly commonly held land.
Yeah, there are some fairly lawless places on Earth today and you don't see many people (other than rdl) moving there to make their fortune. People subconsciously prefer the rule of law but it's cool to romanticize Bitcoin data havens and whatnot.
Nope. A casual perusal of Hacker News and reddit will show this mentality is very much alive, and that people believe this is the only way the internet should be. Free, international waters where anything goes and there shouldn't be any government involvement.
