Bitcoin Forum

"SomePgmr writes with a story about an online gambling site operating planning to use Bitcoin to sidestep U.S. regulations effectively banning online gambling"

http://slashdot.org/story/13/01/10/2147224/online-gambling-site-bets-on-bitcoin-to-avoid-us-laws

Why are there so many bitcoin haters on slashdot?  I don't understand.

Probably because they see it as a greater fool type setup. As long as there us a greater fool out there willing to buy your bitcoins the scheme continues. They tend to think this will eventually end.

And honestly... Their opinion is pretty darn valid. It has a significant chance to happen. If steady progress is not made bitcoin will end up being a niche use case for what we see today. Gambling and drugs and speculation. With a tiny use case of products and services from techy type folks.

There will always be people like me who will always be reluctant to accept any currency for which we don't even know what is the total amount in existence.

The greater fool is the one who accepts to keep such a currency for any significative amount of time.  So unless you are poor and thus have no savings whatsoever, you want to keep stuff that are not constantly devaluated.   Bitcoin is undoubtly one of these stuff.

Based on the comments, it's volatility and lack of adoption. Meaning they're still right if Bitcoin ever becomes widespread, since the problems they pointed out have been addressed.

Bear in mind that for all the armchair economists on Slashdot... they still use that insane groupthink-o-matic comment karma system.

Makes me think of a word I learned today, in the last Vsauce vid (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IGK2KprU-To):  cyberbalkanization.

Though I understand the need to avoid being overwhelmed by insignificant or silly comments, the karma system really sucks as it only makes you talk with people who think  more or less like you.   Kind of miss the point of talking with people.

What you are saying borders on the far fringe. It is quite dramatic.
The us dollar will be around a lot longer then we will be alive. Anyone with money invests it and hopes to exceed the inflation rate. Say 10% per year as a fine goal. They diversify also.
There are hedges one can use besides bitcoin that are many times more trusted. Gold, property, desirable objects, etc..
Bitcoin being one of them has yet to be proven. Time has to pass to show if that is true. For now it is rampant speculation. To consider it anything else just demonstrates you have blinders on, very naive, or have drank the koolaid from jamestown.

I am here.. So i also see something in bitcoin. I just do not preach the gospel according to satoshi. It has possibilities but it has a very very long ways to go.

Before bitcoin, I bought some gold because I did not trust the national currency for holding any value.  It was not just because of the long history of gold as a storage for value (after all, it's easy to notice how the price of gold had a slow but very real decrease from the 80s to the end of the 90s).  If I bought some gold, it's because I knew that at least, it's not something central banks can print like crazy.

For bitcoin, it's the same.  Indeed no-one can know if bitcoin will hold its economic value in the long term.  You are totally right about that.  But I don't need such an empiric argument.  All I need is to run a version of the bitcoin software where the total amount of bitcoins is written in the code.

One bitcoin will always be a twenty-one millionth of the total amount of bitcoins.  That's what I mean when I say it can not be devaluated.  It's a fact written in the code.  It does not need the proof of time to be considered true.

What in a museum?

There was a thread just yesterday I think about "How many bitcoins do you have invested?" which makes no sense but belies the same fallacy as this snippet. You don't 'invest' dollars when you invest, you get rid of them for something better. Everyone smart is always looking to get rid of their dollars because they are shit value.

I see what you mean now. You like that quality about bitcoin.

I know what you are trying to say.

You say get rid.. i say invest. To me that demonstrates you and i differ when it comes to the status quo. When you say the dollar
sucks, omg, buy bitcoin, most people just roll their eyes. It really does not help when most people realize we will all be dead and the
US dollar will still be the goto currency for the world in overall trust and when crap hits the fan. I know you disagree with me but i think  my opinion is not in
the minority while yours is.

Whenever you invest into something that is not FED notes or USD-denominated bonds, you get rid of your dollars.  It's as simple as that and it is not just rhetoric.

Using rid in this case is your way of being derogatory. Saying invest implies the same thing except one has an expectation of a result or a profit.

I got rid of my dollars to buy a dividend paying stock that each year the company gets rid of their excess dollars and pays me a certain amount per share.

Seriously? Who talks that way?

I do.  I buy stocks to get rid of my euros.   Seriously.

Also, honestly I'm not a native English speaker and I just don't know how to say "get rid of" with a more neutral tone.

But I see your point and it is valid.

I feel the same way.  Seeing nontrivial cash balances at my bank or brokerage makes me uncomfortable in the extreme with idiots/crooks like Draghi or Bernanke at the helm.  I quickly try to find somewhere else to put them.  In the past that might have been precious metals, but nowadays...

Bitcoin is proving extremely useful as a "parking space".  As its stability and liquidity have drastically improved over the past year, it's rapidly becoming my favorite way of holding idle cash.

My guess ...

https://i.imgur.com/HqojD.jpg

My alternate theory is that the percentage of intelligent people on slashdot is actually very low.  For a while this was hidden because the few true experts outshined the mobs of non thinkers.  Some time ago slashdot hit that tipping point where it kinda became pointless.

If you browse the comments on that post with a threshold of 4 or 5 instead of reading everything, it is mostly bitcoin love. Browsing at 0, 1, or 2 on Slashdot any more most comments on nearly all posts are going to be FUD, Schilling, or fanboism. I try not to let my reading threshold drop below 4 unless I have mod points.

There are no facts written above with which I was not already very familiar - and have even explained to others quite a lot.  Yet for me a penny dropped with what you just said in the last two sentences.

I do believe Bitcoin has vulnerabilities that leaves it open to an immense technological attack (51% or co-ordinated internet-disrupting etc.) but assuming that doesn't happen I now understand that time, competing crypto-currencies, rising value against USD/EUR/GBP really do not matter providing you and I (and a few others) value the fact of its inbuilt-invariable scarcity - and that we have the means of verifiably transfering it to one another.  The increasing in network hashing power, increasingly distributed mining, more full nodes running, increased 'legitimate' use including in developing nations (increasing the political cost of attacking it) etc. will with time both decrease the odds of a technological attack and increase its value relative to gov't issued currencies but I have as of this moment, thanks to your post, a renewed appreciation of the value of Bitcoin today, right now, irrespective of everything else.  Greatly appreciated :)

This criticism from Slashdot is ironic, since they're the same collection of future-thinking geniuses that panned the first iPod.

I'm not particularly worried that they don't "get" bitcoin right now. Some do, and you can tell who they are. The rest, they'll keep crapping on the idea until it is at their doorstep, knocking to be allowed in.

Actually Bitcoin would be wildly successful if it were able to capture the entire gambling + drug market, worldwide. That's a 100B+ annual revenue market. Bitcoin would be able to compete pretty much head on with minor currencies such as JPY/AUD/CAD.

Would you prefer :

"I sold my dollars to buy a dividend paying stock that each year the company gets rid of their excess dollars and pays me a certain amount per share."

It's the same thing anyway. The idea is to limit your fiat holdings.

I've been reading and posting to Slashdot for over a decade. I've posted thousands of comments there over the years. Several of them are on that story (I am the real mike) and got modded up to +5.

Heck, many Bitcoiners were introduced to the project through Slashdot.

Pan it all you want, but that site is a mirror of the tech world. I encounter the same comments and concerns from technical, educated people about Bitcoin all the time. So instead of trashing its moderation system (which actually works quite well), go dive in and learn how to tackle the arguments raised.

Hacker News reader are far less likely to make stupid comment about bitcoin.

I think the underlying frustration here is not with the fact that it is Slashdot per se, but the commenters there should honestly know better than to raise questions that have already been answered in the bitcoin wiki or even by reading the whitepaper.

I would expect someone who frequents a site with the tagline "News for nerds, stuff that matters", wouldn't be above doing some basic research on what they're trying to talk about. I've been browsing Slashdot for a while too, perhaps not as long, but you're correct - it is a mirror of the tech world - as it exists today.

And that mirror is showing some disturbing trends. Younger tech workers come in with a "Too long; didn't read" mindset and start spouting off whatever half-formed hypothesis is rattling around their skull. While it is a slashdot hallmark to not read the parent post and start commenting away, most of the time in the past these comments came from people who actually KNEW THEIR MATERIAL, so they could get away with it.

Now its just regurgitated trolling with no real examination of the underlying principles outlined in the technical references for bitcoin. Questions that have been answered over and over keep coming up - because nobody there does any research on it. Despite the small handful that "get" it, they are overwhelmed by the people who are dog-piling on just to have a good old internet smackdown.

Asking critical questions about bitcoin isn't the issue, I welcome those, because they take time and articulation to even pose - and equally dextrous responses to counter. That isn't happening here. Its just the usual - "We didn't bother reading all that whitepaper stuff, LOL - hey, its backed by nothing, what about deflation, some dude hacked an exchange so you can print bitcoins right?" stream of complete simpleton sewage.

Sorry, but Slashdot has become another internet echo-chamber like yahoo trading forums. I'll read a headline and check out stories, but the comments are not worth sifting through for that one gem in the muddy river of LOLs.

The white paper does not address any economic topics, and the website is useless, so it's not surprising these things come up repeatedly.

I find your reply disturbing, as I took you at face value to have at least put in the work necessary to understand bitcoin at the protocol level.

The white paper explains how the blockchain works, proof-of-work and propogation delays inherent in peer-to-peer networks of any non-trivial size. That would answer how bitcoin can't be counterfeited on a whim, among other considerations - and that is useless?

Economic topics are covered here, among other things:

Bitcoin Wiki - https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Myths - all of these answers are useless?

I'm unclear on what you're defending - lack of applying knowledge, or just Slashdot's particular aggregation of ignorance?

I still think competing crypto-currencies could be a dealbreaker for bitcoin.  But it would have to have a serious advantage over bitcoins, not just another "please-make-me-rich-fast" bitcoin clone.  Moreover, the longer bitcoin stays the biggest game in crypto-town, the better established it gets, the higher the barrier for switching from bitcoin to another currency.  It would have to be that much better in order to abandon bitcoins.

My understanding of Bitcoin is fine, thanks. Are you disputing my claim? Where in Satoshis paper is economics addressed?


I said the website is useless, not that page specifically.

Let's see how a casual reader might approach learning about Bitcoin. Bear in mind, they are not very motivated, maybe they figure they have five minutes to take a quick look at this thing they heard about.

Go to bitcoin.org. Click "learn about Bitcoin". That sounds reasonable, doesn't it? See some entirely superficial and nerdy information that is hard to understand, like what does "Double spending is prevented using a block chain" mean? Maybe, they spot the "Bitcoin Wiki" link in the top right corner - not that it's very easy to see. Click it. Get dumped into an un-organized index of all topics with the Technical category applied. Stop.

How about another attempt?

Go to bitcoin.org. Maybe spot the link that says, rather mysteriously, "We use coins! Start here". This is a statement, not a description of what you might find there. OK, so we click and arrive at the site. Click questions/answers. This is better. The 2nd-to-top question on the economics section is "Does hoarding really hurt Bitcoin" But the answer is a, again, a wall of text that superficially might appear to be an official answer of the project, but in reality is just a random opinion from David Schwarz/Joel Katz. It's not a badly thought out argument or opinion, but it's got some very deeply questionable things in it, and the answer doesn't provide any references or citations. For instance it tries to claim that hoarding is usually bad and studies have shown it's bad, but Bitcoin is special.

Actually, "hoarding" or what you may call deflation has been shown in studies to be uncorrelated with depression. That's a critical, key point that should be top and center with a link to the study itself. But there's no mention anywhere to be found.

Finding the myths page requires a lot of clicking around disorganized and unprofessional looking websites. But even if you manage to find the Bitcoin Myths page, the question addressing deflation (which is one of the most common topics you see raised) is buried in question 17, which simply links to the deflationary spiral page, which is enormous and doesn't provide any explanation that fits into a 5 minute browsing session.

Welcome to open source software ..... struggle to understand how you think it would be different. At this point, it is all voluntary effort, except for Gavin A. as I understand it.

The level of documentation fits exactly with the people who have been exposed to bitcoin and felt motivated to wiki, by definition almost. When others arrive they bring it to their acceptable level I'd imagine. If you want professional start a bounty, pay someone maybe?