Bitcoin Forum

Due to Satoshi, Bitcoin is a peer to peer network. Removing mainly central banks and ord banks, payment processors, clearers...

Things are good and it works if you deal on the streets.

Most dont, we invented new middle men

1 Exchanges
2 Market Makers, Bots (doing arbitrage, narrow the spread, source liquidity)
3 Miner Factories
4 Wallets
 
These above we all have in use and we all have to pay somehow these middle men with bitcoin (4 are mostly free yet), but best we would get rid of them inventing / allowing competition like

1 > decentralized exchanges
2 > more bots
3 > more chip makers
4 > more userfriendly wallets

Think about
5 code business, services like Blockstream, Bloq, nChain,....

?

Anything more?  It's your money, your bitcoin. Get your finance straight and enable competition!

Even though satoshi was against middleman in payments, it doesn't mean that they are all bad or useless. This forum has many middleman in form of escrows to protect users from scams in ICO's, trading, jobs. With Bitcoin you can be 100% sure that when you send transaction, it will be received on the other end, meaning that Bitcoin is trustless, but there's no system that can in the same way enforce delivery from the other side of a bargain. This is why there are so many scams and why middleman are important. The biggest difference and advantage of Bitcoin is that middleman are optional, and it's entirely up to user to use them or not, unlike in fiat payment systems.

existence of centralized exchanges and how they work does not go against the nature of bitcoin and does not change anything about it being a peer to peer network without middle men.

(centralized) exchanged are good places to do high speed trading. decentralized exchanges does not (and i think can not) offer this.

It's pretty simple. Humans aren't programmed to do the things bitcoin wants to award them. They want someone else to do the hard work and go running to.

It's the human factor that'll wreck bitcoin as ever.

Bitcoins idea is not about killing the middle man but rather it is made to decentralized our financial resources. Decentralization means going away from banks which controls our money, interest and uses our money to earn income while not giving us the proper share. Bitcoin on the other hand enables us to monitor and have control over our asset and it is us who will enjoy the benefits or increase of value of our asset which is bitcoin. It is decentralized in a way that we make our own banks, we became our own banks. Middleman issue is very far from the main reason why bitcoin is made and thus we must not debate on it further.

For that to happen it requires time. There is a decentralized exchange like bitsquare (tho buyer need to have some amount of BTC to be able to buy). But as you said most exchanges are centralized - thats because it is easy for them to do and easy for the governments to look through details from the exchanges. Exchanges offer fast and easy way to get bitcoin, you can't do anything about them same goes for online wallet providers such as blockchain.info.

We can't influence much on the miner factories as that is how the network is run, it is kinda hard to change the protocol right now.If segwit gets activated we will still depend on some sort of centralized places.

I assume it was all about competition....

Trusted and reputable sites that are acting as a middleman and providing their service is good for the community, without their service, there would be a lot of scammers scamming away people bitcoins especially the new users that just come aboard to the crypto-currency scene, since bitcoin payment is irreversible, I would rather pay a small fees to sites providing a middleman service to guarantee I won't get scam by some scammers out there.   

I think I agree with you on this simply because the middle men we have now are not forced on us and at the same time we can choose to stay without them compared to the banks which you will be forced to open an account then they can control your money and you yourself but here, I can choose not to use exchange sites. I can choose not to use wallets in which nobody can stop me from doing. I think this is what Satoshi had in mind not to eradicate middlemen but rather wind down their influences.

Correct. By what inventing here ?

Any service not occur in a vacuum. If intermediaries exist it means that there is a steady demand for their services. As the price of bitcoin depends on demand and their pricing and quantity is regulated by the demand. You may not love them, but without their services it will be worse.

When last have you heard about someone paying for a service or product without going through some third party? Most of the merchants will

only accept your bitcoins, if you use a regulated third party. They are all too scared to accept bitcoins directly from users. The governments has

got their claws into third party services and are slowly destroying pseudo anonymity.  >:(

Sure. But what advice do you have for the miners (5)?

Bitcoin was made for a future where code is as universal as mathematics.

Only when you master code you can truly explore all the freedoms of Bitcoin.

This is like wanting to implement English as a global language when not everyone speaks it. There will be schools offering this service. There will be translators. There will be all kinds of services that will no longer be needed at some point in time.

It is a process we have to endure. Exchanges facilitate users by taking some risk for a fee. Wallets facilitate usage by giving code to those who don't understand it. It is a necessary step. If you yourself learn the necessary tools, you can enjoy real freedom. Because in Bitcoin you have a choice where to employ your value.

This is years ahead of its potential.

 

It is impossible to eliminate the middle man that is the way it works, but it can be minimized, of all of them I do not consider miners to be middleman, the problem with miners is they are a centralized force and will try to direct the network to to benefit their interests.

No, but it can come to a point at which there are so many middlemen which all have to agree what to do that it's basically impossible to screw around with your transactions or your funds.

For example, if there are thousands of different miners, the pools don't matter because people can just switch to whichever one suits them personally.

Mining farms will always be a problem with cryptocurrencies that allow mining.  ETH has mining farms too, just with GPUs.

The middlemen, even though its the thought of the Satoshi to eradicate them but I still feel they have done more good than harm to the industry to have necessitated their eradication. In the sense, these bodies have equally promote a platform for users, in the case of exchange site, they provide a platform like we have in forex of stock market in the most simplest way possible. Wallets have provided a platform to save the newbies of the technicalities of understanding how it works and thereby make the transition into the crypto-world seems easy. These are part of the advantages they have offered to us.

Sure, my killing should rather be corrected into competing. Killing might be a final result.

Decentralizing everything couldn't be achieved by just Satoshi is their lifetime. He gave us the Blockchain and the rest is for us to figure out. If you don't like the new middlemen then don't use them! There are ways to avoid all of these.


Not if it's open source and decentralized.

The Bitcoin 'open' source is getting more complex now and so we introduce more and more middlemen.

Who can read the SW stuff and trust it  ?

> We need to depend on few experts - getting fewer with increased code / protocol complexity

Same is for block size. Big blocks are simple - small complex block + 2nd la(w)er stuff is highly complex -> this is clearly leading us into middle men and central authority dependence.

Just found these guys here

http://www.marketwired.com/press-release/datablink-introduces-a-new-bitcoin-transaction-security-solution-2227237.htm

Yes - right now we depend on some miner pools, but this is pure Satoshi Bitcoin Design , far far better as the other option incoming now!

Moreover, bitcoin has been *designed* to centralize, with remunerated proof of work as the decision takers.  Even though it was said (and maybe initially believed) that this was going to work against power concentration, it does the opposite, as we've seen: a few people took the decision to change bitcoin, by flipping bits on their pools.

Indeed, bitcoin is looking more and more like a human organisation, with power struggles, kings, fights, and layered hierarchical structures.  The Vitalik trick of power by complexity has also been pushed nicely (and ALL reasons given to push segwit are false arguments, from scaling, to cheap off chain transactions, to the importance of non mining nodes.... - there's only one good argument, that is that segwit eliminates one bug from the bitcoin protocol, which is transaction malleability; but there are so many other bugs in bitcoin that all this hassle for this single bug is ridiculous).

And exactly mostly un-needed fixing transaction malleability will now invite next level middle men - happy Christmas !

How many posts are needed to make sheep learn or can they only learn the hard way ?

You may be right, exchanges, wallets, miners etc may seem like middle men. Excluding exchanges, it is still better than using banks, you don't have to use any of these except the miners . You can always use bitcoin core, and determine your own fees for transactions and avoid web wallets.

What advice do they need? Miners should sell their coins directly to people and not through exchanges linked to all these

privacy killer regulations. {KYC/AML} I am not saying that these exchanges should seize to exist, but all these regulations

are killing people's financial privacy. Use exchanges as trading platforms and transfer your coins out of these exchanges and

sell them on the street.  ;)

When I come to BCT, I have the impression to be at a church, where there is a religion that counts over reason, and where group think is more important than logical arguments.  This is a pity, because fragile anarchist concepts (like science was in Galileo's time) need people with strong, logical, independent thinking skills, and not a religious herd that likes to crucify those that do not believe in their declared Truths, because falsehoods, no matter how much you believe in them, turn out, well, to be false.

There are some very good ideas in bitcoin.  But there are some very bad ones to it too.  The idea itself of a "freedom money" made me like it.  But by looking at how it behaved, and by thinking about why it behaved that way, I realized over time that it also contains extremely BAD ideas and concepts - even if these ideas are admired by a lot of bitcoiners.  I now think that bitcoin spoiled a unique opportunity to invent a true freedom money, and is in fact, by its design mistakes, making it HARDER rather than EASIER to invent a true freedom money.  In other words, I think bitcoin, by its design flaws, has killed essentially the hope of making a freedom money it pretended to become.  Some with conspiracy thoughts think that was done on purpose - I think it is sheer "stupidity" although that's too harsh of a judgement: Satoshi WAS a bright guy, but he did screw up.

However, what has been done recently to bitcoin, is even worse, and leads it even more to the path of a freedom killer than it was.

The lightning style transaction system is PERFECTLY fitted for turning exchanges in global clearing houses.   They turn them from a somewhat undesired side effect of crypto (the economies of scale in trading fiat for crypto have killed the individuals market like localbitcoins), into the central hubs of transactions.  It completes the institutionalisation of what was a badly designed decentralized token transaction system. 

Middlemen?

I haven't used an exchange for over 3 years, and I'm not using a web wallet, but Electrum. So there's no middleman anymore to me.

Well But we cannot completely do away with the exchanges as most of them facilitate trading between cryptocurrencies and fiat currencies. They also help exchange bitcoins into fiat and vice versa.

Ok, that is sth I did not think of but a very legit point.
I was rather thinking of miner's need to BUY their software from...
 :o