On 07/10/2015 04:25 AM, ksenia bellman wrote:
on the topic of Bitcoin philosophical musings and pressures:
There unusually a lot of btc discussion on the list lately: technical (the fork), philosophical and practical.
On the philosophical/political side: btc is great, I like it, I use it, but, come on, we all know that by design (increasing difficulty of the chain and proof-of-work system) btc is determined to be a space race. Before you can maintain the network with simple hardware, and get btc for it, now you have to be a mining rig. We know that btc is good for P2P financial transactions, but the first important question now is: How do you earn bitcoin? (as an individual, you can't mine, if you are not a programmer or a designer, how do you earn btc?) It becomes less and less of a question how do you spend btc, but still, unless I mined a lot in the past or bought it for cash, where do I get it?
Yes, mining by individuals hasn't been feasible for some years. And there aren't that many ways (so far) to earn Bitcoin. So most users will need to buy Bitcoin. If anonymity doesn't matter much, that's generally not very hard. <SNIP>