Bitcoin has failed. Could something similar possibly work?

[TiagoTiago]

Bitcoin has failed.

No. You has.

[Herodes]

I read the title of this thread:

Bitcoin has failed. Could something similar possibly work?

So, if Apple stock, or any other popular stock halved in value, the stock (ie. company) has failed?

If you look at this in a longer view.. Earlier this year, the btc traded against the usd dollar for 0.8 btc/usd. So, say we didn't have this "bubble" at 30ish, and we just had a steadily increase from 0.8 to 8, would bitcoin still be a failure?

Bitcoin in itself has not failed. Some services seems to have failed though. And that's bad in and of it self.

Your posts are always negative against bitcoin, although written rather profesionally usually. I do not know who are paying you, because you surely is not doing this on your own free time?

So bitcoin has increased tenfold in value since I first got involved somewhere in April this year, and that's a failure?

The only failure I can see around here, with all due respect Nagle, it's not bitcoin, but if you have a look in the mirror, you might have some more luck at spotting a failure. You bashing bitcoin is starting to get rather boring, I must say. Why don't you contribute to the community to make things better? It seems you have some ideas on your hand, and that you have a lot of free time as well.

[lemonginger]

Your premise is wrong. Bitcoin is just getting started. The problem, I think, is that too many thought it had already succeeded. These are merely growing pains. Could bitcoin still fail? Yes, in a number of ways, but on what grounds are you ready to call it so soon?

+1

If in another year there aren't any 3rd party solutions that have popped up to those problems (instant money xfer being a big one, and most easily taken care of) AND there is very little BTC volume then we can talk about failure.

First phase of bitcoin speculation may be over, by bitcoin as a cluster of projects is just getting started. Christ it takes longer than a few months to build a decent website, much less solid financial software

[newguy05]

Bitcoin may not have failed, but it did crash.  And the reason is very simple - there is no trusted exchange to trade bitcoins.   Every currency including bitcoins needs a liquid and trustworthy market to act as the secure middleman to match anonymous buyers/sellers.  Look at the list of frauds and hacks to the few and only exchanges for bitcoin in just the last couple months.  When people lose faith in the market to securely buy/sell/trade bitcoins, they lose faith in bitcoins.  And that's what is happening - why would you want to hold a bunch of assets with no intrinsic value that cannot be securely sold as needed?  answer: you dont.

We need a real secure exchange to be established by a legit company where people can safely trade and transfer bitcoin/money in and out, not a bunch of guys in their basement running some php scripts and/or committing frauds.  

[TheMalon]

At this point, we can write off Bitcoin as a failed experiment.

Actually the experiment is quite successful. We learned a lot from it and thats the purpose of an experiment...

[istar]

Bitcoin has not failed. Its just starting and will continue for years.

In a couple of years we will know.

Whats happening is that there are 7500 new coins each day. Some miners can mine these for free.
Meaning that a price of $14 is hard to keep up, since it needs huge new investments each day.

[brocktice]

Bitcoin has not failed. Its just starting and will continue for years.

In a couple of years we will know.

Whats happening is that there are 7500 new coins each day. Some miners can mine these for free.
Meaning that a price of $14 is hard to keep up, since it needs huge new investments each day.

Don't forget, the mybitcoin thieves are probably dumping what they stole, not a small amount.

[kokjo]

Bitcoin has not failed. Its just starting and will continue for years.

In a couple of years decades we will know.

Whats happening is that there are 7500 new coins each day. Some miners can mine these for free.
Meaning that a price of $14 is hard to keep up, since it needs huge new investments each day.

fixed!

[niemivh]

At this point, we can write off Bitcoin as a failed experiment. It's worth thinking about how a different distributed digital currency might be made workable. A few problems which have to be solved:

• Mutual mistrust between buyer and seller needs to be supported. This is the toughest problem. Right now, sending Bitcoins is not tied to receiving something in return, and is irrevocable.
• The double-spending check system has to be as least as fast as normal credit card processing. Waiting minutes for the block chain to update is unacceptable.
• Some price stability is needed. Value shouldn't change more than 1% per week, worst case. 1% per month would be better.
• A better way of launching the currency needs to be developed.

There's an approach to mutual mistrust that might work.  First, as with credit cards, there's a need for an "authorize" and a "capture" stage. In the "authorize" stage, A indicates that they intend to send value to B. This locks up the value from other use by A, and B receives a reliable confirmation that A has that value. In the "capture" stage, the value is actually transferred to B. A has to authorize the "capture". 

That's the normal case. The hard cases might work as follows:

• If A does an "authorize", and then does nothing, a "capture" automatically takes place after some number of days. So sellers don't have to nag buyers.
• If B cancels the capture, that's an agreed cancellation of the transaction, and the value becomes available to A again.
• If A does an "authorize" and later cancels before a "capture", the value becomes available to them again after some number of days. This is the tough case, and it puts B at risk of the buyer backing out after shipment of the product. To discourage backing out, when A does this, they are no longer anonymous to B, and B can publicize the cancellation, which affects A's reputation. Also, because cancellations aren't immediate, A's value is tied up for days, so they can't do this too often.

Discuss.

Don't bother.  People are unwilling to consider fatal flaws in the system.  This isn't a forum of logical, factually-interested intellectuals it is the Church of Bitcoin & Libertarianism.  Either praise its name or be labeled an apostate.

[niemivh]

At this point, we can write off Bitcoin as a failed experiment.

Actually the experiment is quite successful. We learned a lot from it and thats the purpose of an experiment...

Exactly.  For all those willing, they have had a lot to learn from this experiment.

[TYDIRocks]

lol OP doesn't know jack for shit.

[Ridi]

Don't bother.  People are unwilling to consider fatal flaws in the system.  This isn't a forum of logical, factually-interested intellectuals it is the Church of Bitcoin & Libertarianism.  Either praise its name or be labeled an apostate.

I don't see how you can logically deduce that a projects failure for not having strengths it never claimed to have.  I believe there has been intense discussions and current development in many, if not all, the aforementioned weaknesses well before this became a widespread issue.  This seems to indicate that the majority of the development community is working in the right direction as far as prioritizing the next round of features.

I can see plenty reason for Nagle not to have faith in the bitcoin project.  His fault is not speculation, or the forum he chose for speculation, but his insistence that his opinion is in fact, fact.

[walidzohair]

The bubble Scheme


Definition : A well known internet-double-your-money business model.

Requirements:
1) forum with 50 friend in.
2) your own new money system.
3) 100 Million USD to buy yourself first and raise prices 300% then sell off when all others start to buy in.
4) Some media coverage. (best if they are suspicious!!).
5) Wikipedia page to refer to.
6) self wiki,blog,helpdesk.


wolaaa! you got 30%+ of your money at least then disappear and let the media talk about the bubble.


Happy bitcoinig!!!.


note. I am a bitcoiner .. true one .. i was just talking about "others"

[vector76]

It's not very hard to securely run a virtual machine that could offer clock cycles from your CPU or GPU to some enterprise that needs them.

It is simple to secure a compute node against running malicious code, but not at all straightforward to secure a customer against a malicious compute node.  At least not without huge overhead.

A marketplace for 'compute cycle futures' is also subject to default risk if the compute node cashes out and never delivers, so they will have to be bonded (or something equivalent).

But despite these challenges, I think this would be a great direction.

[Technomage]

Silly premise. Bitcoin has not failed yet, instead it is in early stages. It's certainly possible that it will fail but nothing fundamental of that sort has happened yet. The "value crash" or the issues with E-wallets or the problems with exchanges and the stolen BTC etc. has done absolutely nothing but slowed down the progress of Bitcoin, it has not failed.

It's certainly true that there are issues and it's going to be a long road, but it's very far from failure at this point.

The community is still strong and the long term looks good. Here's a good article on the stages of Bitcoin, we're currently at the end of stage one (of 5). http://vermorel.com/journal/2011/8/3/bitcoin-thoughts-on-a-nascent-currency-system.html

[Technomage]

Next it is time for stage 2 and 3 which I hope the community is working on. I definitely am. Stage 1 is covered pretty much.

A word on the value crash as well, the price is still high compared to what it used to be last year. And it will continue to be. A true crash would be going back to $1-$2 which I think has absolutely no chance of happening unless something drastic happens to Bitcoin fundamentals. Currently the demand for cheap coins at the $5-$7 range is large and for below $5 it is absolutely massive.

As far as value goes we will be in for hard times for a while now, might even hit a new bottom before truly stabilizing and eventually rising. There has been so many issues with Bitcoin and still it's going relatively strong compared to long term average price so I think it's rather likely that the price will go up as those issues are slowly worked out and the stages 2 and 3 advance, as stated in the article I linked in my last post.

[RandyFolds]

At this point, we can write off Bitcoin as a failed experiment. It's worth thinking about how a different distributed digital currency might be made workable. A few problems which have to be solved:

• Mutual mistrust between buyer and seller needs to be supported. This is the toughest problem. Right now, sending Bitcoins is not tied to receiving something in return, and is irrevocable.
• The double-spending check system has to be as least as fast as normal credit card processing. Waiting minutes for the block chain to update is unacceptable.
• Some price stability is needed. Value shouldn't change more than 1% per week, worst case. 1% per month would be better.
• A better way of launching the currency needs to be developed.

There's an approach to mutual mistrust that might work.  First, as with credit cards, there's a need for an "authorize" and a "capture" stage. In the "authorize" stage, A indicates that they intend to send value to B. This locks up the value from other use by A, and B receives a reliable confirmation that A has that value. In the "capture" stage, the value is actually transferred to B. A has to authorize the "capture". 

That's the normal case. The hard cases might work as follows:

• If A does an "authorize", and then does nothing, a "capture" automatically takes place after some number of days. So sellers don't have to nag buyers.
• If B cancels the capture, that's an agreed cancellation of the transaction, and the value becomes available to A again.
• If A does an "authorize" and later cancels before a "capture", the value becomes available to them again after some number of days. This is the tough case, and it puts B at risk of the buyer backing out after shipment of the product. To discourage backing out, when A does this, they are no longer anonymous to B, and B can publicize the cancellation, which affects A's reputation. Also, because cancellations aren't immediate, A's value is tied up for days, so they can't do this too often.

Discuss.

Cars are a failure because they don't fly.

/thread

[BitterTea]

Mutual mistrust between buyer and seller needs to be supported. This is the toughest problem. Right now, sending Bitcoins is not tied to receiving something in return, and is irrevocable.

Use a trust network to ensure the people you're trading with are already trustworthy. Use an escrow or arbitration service to protect yourself from disputes. One doesn't exist? Sounds like an opportunity for profit.

The double-spending check system has to be as least as fast as normal credit card processing. Waiting minutes for the block chain to update is unacceptable.

Use a centralized payment processor for large value instant transactions. Accept payment without confirmations (listening for double spends for a short time) for small value items.

Some price stability is needed. Value shouldn't change more than 1% per week, worst case. 1% per month would be better.

Stability comes with volume. Arbitrarily fixing exchange rates does not work.

A better way of launching the currency needs to be developed.

What?

There's an approach to mutual mistrust that might work.  First, as with credit cards, there's a need for an "authorize" and a "capture" stage. In the "authorize" stage, A indicates that they intend to send value to B. This locks up the value from other use by A, and B receives a reliable confirmation that A has that value. In the "capture" stage, the value is actually transferred to B. A has to authorize the "capture".

How do you know that the block in which the authorization resides is not going to get rewritten by a double spending attack? You have to wait for the same number of blocks in either case...

[fitty]

The USD value of Bitcoin has nothing to do with the currency, how many people are using it, or it's success or failure.

No one prices goods or services based on Bitcoins. They price it based on USD, EUR, CHF then convert it to Bitcoins ON THE FLY. There's lots of apis that will auto update Bitcoin prices for your goods.

What does that mean? If someone sells a $50 bong it does not matter if BTC is $2 or BTC is $20. It's the same thing. Buyer goes and buys $50 worth of Bitcoins, sends them to seller. If that's 2 bitcoins or 25 bitcoins it doesn't change anything. The real strength of BTC is people using it as a currency, not leeching off it trying to make a quick buck.

Funny how no one from the silk road is on here crying about prices. One of the biggest underground sites powered by bitcoins, yet they're not here crying and whining at the price volatility. Because it doesn't matter to them in the end. BTC could be $2 and the silk road will keep on trucking as well as it did when BTC was $20.

There's a lot of miners, speculators, day traders who lament the good ole days and feel the need to hang out on the forum reminding everyone. The good ole days when a select few raped the community for profit. No one cares that a group of 800 hardcore miners are now making less money per day. Boo fucking hoo. The good ole are people using Bitcoin as a currency. Those days are now and it's getting even better.

Sorry playing the BTC exchange didn't make you rich, go move onto gold bullion. BTC is just fine and will chug right along regardless of the price.

[qbg]

Mutual mistrust between buyer and seller needs to be supported. This is the toughest problem. Right now, sending Bitcoins is not tied to receiving something in return, and is irrevocable.

This is cryptographically solved in Bitcoin by use of a trusted third party.  However, it is not widely implemented yet. (see: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Contracts)

The double-spending check system has to be as least as fast as normal credit card processing. Waiting minutes for the block chain to update is unacceptable.

This can be solved by having the coins come from a trusted source.

Some price stability is needed. Value shouldn't change more than 1% per week, worst case. 1% per month would be better.

Any new currency not tacked to an existing one will suffer this; I don't consider it an issue.

A better way of launching the currency needs to be developed.

What do you mean by this?