Microsoft accepts Bitcoin

Lodewijk andré de la porte l at odewijk.nl
Fri Dec 12 05:28:21 PST 2014


I think Bitcoin going big like this was inevitable and not actually a good
thing. The distribution of Bitcoin is horrible. Really, really, really
horrible. Its also what drives and makes inevitable the adoption of
Bitcoin: simply put, there is a marketing budget.

Sadly the alternatives lack adoptation and technical merit. Basically the
future of finance is less humane (Bitcoin is hard currency) and more unfair
(Bitcoin is unfairly distributed). It is also not, in practice,
distributed. There is far too few parties in control of the miners that
work on the blockchain, and there's no reason for that to change. Bitcoin
policy hell is also real, very little will ever be able to change in
Bitcoin world. If it does it will make business sense and not reduce "early
investor advantage".

I'd like to add that Bitcoin is not as interesting as advertised.
Blockchains are a clever hack to achieve global consensus, but in order to
achieve a security level that takes X currency units to reverse around X
currency units have to be burned. Burning currency is undesirable. Only
currency successfully burned by trusted/not-untrusted/uncollaborating
parties counts towards the security level.

So:
 * Distribution is terrible, which causes unstoppable success
 * Is less humane and more capable, causing assorted dangers but also being
more pure (in a currency sense)
 * Can be substituted very easily by something else

I don't really mind Bitcoin becoming successful even though it's imperfect;
it's still an entirely higher/better league than banks. I do mind there
being no talk of why Bitcoin sucks. Because no matter how awesome it is, it
really does suck.
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