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A comment on Bitcoin Gold Hit by Double Spend Attack, Exchanges Lose Millions. Parent comment

Re:Bitcoin Gold Hit by Double Spend Attack, Exchanges Lose M... by gamblor956 on Wednesday May 23, 2018 @06:23PM (#17138938)
Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies require even more trust than normal currency. With a normal currency transaction, you need only trust at most 2 other entities entities: your counterpart to the transaction and the government issuing the currency.

With a blockchain, you still need to trust the counterparty, but now you also need to trust that the coders have properly designed and programmed the system, and that the miners either don't have the power to corrupt the system or aren't corrupt, and you need to trust whatever exchange you use to get into and out of the cryptocurrency.

Plus, you've added in a significant amount of time--at a minimum 20x the time with Bitcoin and significant transaction fees that as a practical matter have exceeded card interchange fees by 2x or more for the past 3 years straight.

Your right about their being more variables...with cryptocurrency.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Bitcoin Gold Hit by Double Spend Attack, Exchanges Lose M... by drb91 on Wednesday May 23, 2018 @06:33PM (#17139032)
I think there are fundamentally different ways we're talking about trust: you "only" need to trust a government, you "only" need to trust a bank, vs trusting a certain proportion of miners to be following the same bitcoin specs you are, as well as trusting that people will value it tomorrow. Both of bitcoin and government-issued currency requires trust, and building that trust is fundamentally difficult, depending on your needs, and comes with tradeoffs. It seems like you're only acknowledging one end of these tradeoffs.

One obvious tradeoff you're not considering is that of a criminal getting its assets frozen, for instance. There are less black and white situations where you might prefer bitcoin as well, if you have a little imagination. If you could address that, I'd probably appreciate your comments more.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Bitcoin Gold Hit by Double Spend Attack, Exchanges Lose M... by bronson on Wednesday May 23, 2018 @07:19PM (#17139376)
Let's not use HN as a place to enumerate cryptocoin variables? You can find plenty of that discussion elsewhere.
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Re:Bitcoin Gold Hit by Double Spend Attack, Exchanges Lose M... by marcosdumay on Wednesday May 23, 2018 @08:44PM (#17139925)
And you need to trust that your government won't take the currency away. There is no escaping from this one.
[ Parent | on HN ]