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2012-02-15 15:08:02
I dream of a decentralized Facebook knock-off (e.g. diaspora*, etc.) with a Bitcoin client built in, making currency transmission as simple as tossing a dollar to a friend to buy a cup of coffee. Perhaps even at a coffee shop with patrons casually swapping US$ and BTC as they play chess or read.
We go through this discussion every single time a Bitcoin article appears on Slashdot. Bitcoin is guaranteed to fail in the long run:
It is a digital cash system in which the tokens cannot be refreshed; this is known in crypto research community to imply that the tokens must grow linearly in the number of transactions. Bitcoin attempts to hide this fact in its architecture, but if Bitcoin is secure then the computation resources needed to continue using Bitcoin will grow over time. Worse, as more people use Bitcoin, the growth rate will accelerate because of the increased number of transactions. If Bitcoin was used at anything close to the number of dollar transactions that happen every day, the technical limitations of Bitcoin would kill it off within a week's time.
Useful digital cash systems involve a central issuing authority like a bank or government, that can accept old tokens and produce "fresh" tokens of equal value. Having such a central authority is not a bad thing:
The demand for Bitcoin will never exceed the demand for national currencies. Using the USA as an example, people who live in America must pay taxes -- taxes on income, taxes on property, sometimes taxes on purchases they make, and so forth. The government only accepts tax payments that are made in dollars, and yes, you have to pay taxes on transactions that do not involve dollars, such as barter or having a Bitcoin salary. Every year, hundreds of millions of Americans must pay their taxes, and if they were all using Bitcoin for everything, they would all simultaneously try to trade their Bitcoins for dollars to cover their tax debt. While this frequently happens with other currencies -- people paid in pounds sterling will try to make a similar trade -- all national currencies are demanded by some nation's citizens for a similar purpose, unlike Bitcoin, which nobody is legally obligated to use.
It is a good thing that nobody is obligated to use BItcoin to pay their debts, because:
Bitcoin is a deflationary currency -- there is a fixed maximum number of Bitcoins that can exist. If you had a long-term debt to repay in Bitcoins, it would be harder to make payments as time went on, because Bitcoins would become harder to find (assuming that the Bitcoin economy continues to grow, which I already noted is an unlikely event). You would be a fool to ever incur a Bitcoin debt for this very reason. Unfortunately for Bitcoin, credit is a necessary component of any economy; this has been a fact of life for so long that it not only predates paper currency, but paper itself.
So there you have it.
Tradehill was probably the best-run Bitcoin exchange. They didn't steal customer funds, like some of the other defunct Bitcoin services. [betabeat.com] They didn't go down much. They didn't have a monthly crisis [thebitcoinsun.com] like Mt. Gox. (formerly Magic, the Gathering Online Exchange. Really.) If Tradehill does in fact return all customer funds, at least they shut down honestly.
A basic problem with Bitcoin is that the ability to irrevocably transfer funds to anonymous parties is the scammer's dream. Bitcoin is thus a scammer magnet. Just about every known financial scam was replicated in the tiny Bitcoin world, from fake banks [globalstandardbank.com] to fake stock exchanges [glbse.com] to Ponzi schemes. [bitponzi.net]