2012-12-10 BitInstant's GenesisBlock - The Controversy of Bankhood

[evoorhees]

Written in response to the controversy surrounding Paymium's bank announcement last week.

http://blog.bitinstant.com/blog/2012/12/10/the-controversy-of-bankhood.html

[knight22]

For Bitcoin to succeed, bridges must be built with the traditional financial system, so that individuals can move back and forth between Bitcoinworld and the normal world. As this gets easier and easier, and people (of all kinds, not just those ideologically motivated) grow comfortable with Bitcoin, it will gradually replace those legacy systems, and perhaps, if this experiment succeeds, those old systems will start crumbling and falling apart, as individuals gradually chose the superior Bitcoin system instead of them.

But this is a process, and can never happen if Bitcoin remains isolated from the normal financial world. A life boat can never save anyone if it does not first go pick up the survivors.

Thanks for sharing this great quote

[davout]

For Bitcoin to succeed, bridges must be built with the traditional financial system, so that individuals can move back and forth between Bitcoinworld and the normal world. As this gets easier and easier, and people (of all kinds, not just those ideologically motivated) grow comfortable with Bitcoin, it will gradually replace those legacy systems, and perhaps, if this experiment succeeds, those old systems will start crumbling and falling apart, as individuals gradually chose the superior Bitcoin system instead of them.

But this is a process, and can never happen if Bitcoin remains isolated from the normal financial world. A life boat can never save anyone if it does not first go pick up the survivors.

Thanks for sharing this great quote from Daniel Stuckey

No that was Erik's comment on Stuckey's article.
You should go read it, make your own opinion about it, I had a good laugh.

Also Erik, your article just nails it.

[knight22]

No that was Erik's comment on Stuckey's article.

ooops! corrected

[evoorhees]

For Bitcoin to succeed, bridges must be built with the traditional financial system, so that individuals can move back and forth between Bitcoinworld and the normal world. As this gets easier and easier, and people (of all kinds, not just those ideologically motivated) grow comfortable with Bitcoin, it will gradually replace those legacy systems, and perhaps, if this experiment succeeds, those old systems will start crumbling and falling apart, as individuals gradually chose the superior Bitcoin system instead of them.

But this is a process, and can never happen if Bitcoin remains isolated from the normal financial world. A life boat can never save anyone if it does not first go pick up the survivors.

Thanks for sharing this great quote from Daniel Stuckey

No that was Erik's comment on Stuckey's article.
You should go read it, make your own opinion about it, I had a good laugh.

Also Erik, your article just nails it.

Thought you'd like it Davout

[davout]

Thought you'd like it Davout

I'll confess a slight bias, I'll watch with the other reactions with interest

[Red Emerald]

Great writing as always, evoorhees!

[jgarzik]

+1 good stuff, shared to my feeds.

In general, bitcoin is just a tool, and there is nothing wrong with some bitcoin users choosing to associate with the legacy banking industry.

Seeing as how 90%+ of the planet is tied into the "legacy" banking system in some way, if we want to convert people to using bitcoin, interfacing makes a lot of sense.

[n8rwJeTt8TrrLKPa55eU]

+1 good stuff, shared to my feeds.

In general, bitcoin is just a tool, and there is nothing wrong with some bitcoin users choosing to associate with the legacy banking industry.

Seeing as how 90%+ of the planet is tied into the "legacy" banking system in some way, if we want to convert people to using bitcoin, interfacing makes a lot of sense.

Yep, software industry is identical analogy.  For dislodging entrenched products in an mature space, backwards compatibility is a must-have feature.  Bitcoin-Central is simply providing an opt-in service for people who are not yet ready (or able) to earn and spend exclusively in Bitcoin.  Which is the majority of individuals on the planet at the moment.

I'm sure everyone here, myself included, would love to abandon legacy banking altogether and deal exclusively in Bitcoin.  But that's a bit like wanting to use GUIs exclusively in the 1973 just because you'd seen a Xerox Alto and recognized its superiority to everything else.  The Bitcoin infrastructure and ecosystem needs to grow and mature substantially before anyone can commit to living in a Bitcoin-only universe.  Until then, backwards compatibility is a necessary evil.  It's only a problem if it's mandatory, which clearly isn't the case here: the protocol is unchanged, and the p2p local exchanges are all still up and running.

And, as people pointed out in the other thread, any threat to anonymity from these kinds of integration services is inconsequential versus the big gaping privacy hole which Satoshi unfortunately left open. Anyone truly concerned about increased traceability should be lobbying for the protocol and client to support mixing natively (and by default) for every transaction.

[FreeMoney]

Very nice, evo!

[Dusty]

Thanks for your detailed article Evo, I find it right to the point.
I'm usually 100% with Jon but this time I think he is wrong.
Big time.