[Cryptography] What has Bitcoin achieved?

grarpamp grarpamp at gmail.com
Thu Jul 17 00:35:47 PDT 2014


On Wed, Jul 16, 2014 at 6:41 PM,  <dan at geer.org> wrote:
> http://www.cnbc.com/id/101841875
> Breyer also predicted big things for digital currencies.
>
> He said the leader in the field may not end up being bitcoin, which
> is the most prominent name now but has faced price volatility, theft
> and scandal over the past year. Other providers will emerge.
>
> "I have zero doubt in the next five to seven years that we will see
> at least half a dozen multibillion dollar digital currency companies,"
> he said.

All currencies and property exhibit volatility, scandal and theft.
It is a laugh to suggest otherwise, especially for anything 'new'.
And of course there will be new digital currency 'companies'. Let's
just call them what they will be, large central banks and govt's.

But none of them will have the property that their currency is not
under their control. Other than the obivous head start bitcoin has
in the digital currency game, that is what bitcoin offers
philosophically... freedom from control. No company can or will
offer that with their currency. And people are choosing freedom to
the tune of roughly $100M moved per day [1] when they could just
as easily use the current centralized digital currencies of
CC/ACH/wire. If bitcoin itself ends up not scaling well enough, or
being anonymous enough, or resistant enough to centralization...
another decentral digital currency will do better and take its place.

The only real question is, will a decentralized currency such as
bitcoin beat the centralizers in the race to global adoption by the
masses? And similarly to reach point of no return adoption before
centralizers realize it's too late to say no?

You really don't want to let big central things emerge (here
$trillion-dollar corps), bad things always happen with that.

[1]
http://bitcoincharts.com/bitcoin/
http://blockchain.info/charts
http://www.coindesk.com/



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