This should be something that every creator who markets or sells products should learn. Consumers don't care how it works, it just has to be better than the solution before it. Appealing to how things ought to be moralistically doesn't work (for the vast majority of consumers). They just don't care, they want a solution to their problem.
I can’t remember who aid it originally, but there’s a great test you can give to any statement or idea. Just immediately ask “who cares?” The best product demos I’ve ever seen answer who cares in each part of the pitch. The worst ones just rattle off mumbo jumbo forever.
As I understand I need to do something that's pretty much exactly like opening a bank account, but transactions take forever, they cost money, and the currency is not accepted by any business I use, unlike my free credit card.
I have 55€ in my wallet and everyone on this continent knows what to do with it.
Sometimes you have to transfer money in and out of the country at war with it’s currency in free fall and capital controls in place. At times like that “normal” ways take about 30% of the sum as transactional overhead, while bitcoin doesn’t.
Sometimes “normal“ ways just don’t work normally. Sometimes your government is actively working against your ability to transfer your money for whatever reason — be it drug laws or capital controls or what not. Sometimes you enter account number into the “normal“ system and field just turns red for no reason at all. Sometimes you have your access to “normal“ system severely restricted because of your legal status and residency rights.
So yeah transferring money between Canada and US being resident of either of them and not doing anything funny — is not a use case for Bitcoin.
Seriously in reality the specifics of any sort of wild situation like the one you describe matter. Which countries? Which currency? Which kind of illegal behavior?
And (I ask out of ignorance) in this scenario you describe why would whatever group managing whatever bitcoin exchange or whatever is being used remain virtuous and not charge a 30% markup themselves?
That indeed is a bunch of real situations that have happened to me in 2014-2015 and some of that is still a thing. Check your privileges, sweet summer child.
Like seriously — for the first 30 years of my life it was outright illegal to have a bank account in a foreign country in my name. Not enforceable in practice, except I can’t make wires between two.
So 2014, fucking Russia is being Russia again, USD wired from foreign clients goes in... and is sold for UAH at government mandated rate. I sit in a third country, withdraw it through ATM. Guess what? It is converted back to USD at a market rate. Of course you can still bring cash or btc in and sell it at market rate plus some margin, but not 30 damn percent.
Sometimes it’s less dramatic and web interface of your bank doesn’t have regexp for IBAN format of destination country. Ridiculous but have happened as well, so I have proxied IBAN that starts with GB instead of UA and that always works.
Please don't do this here. It is needlessly condescending and insulting.
"Does this hypothetical situation you describe exist anywhere outside of the hypothetical situation posited by a character in a Neal Stephenson novel"
But, like, the classic "society could collapse" fear-and-doubt, doom-and-gloom, grab-the-gold-and-the-burner-laptop-and-the-ammo argument can be used for just about anything.
Heck, even when society actually is collapsing, the argument isn't actually that great an argument!
I'm not even arguing that cryptocurrency couldn't have value in the scenario you describe. Just that genuine, specific, examples are more compelling than generalized scenarios. Generally speaking ; )
For example, all of the more specific examples folks talk about below (Argentina, etc).
Plus the parent poster made fair points, based on my limited knowledge, about accountability issues with cryptocurrency. And trust. Especially for nontechnical folk, and even for technical folk. Even (especially!) when society is collapsing, there's always someone out to scam you ...
For arguments sake, if someone is in the scenario you describe, what are good initial resources for a nontechnical person? For instance, should I use something like a coinbase wallet?
https://www.reddit.com/r/BitcoinBeginners/comments/fdykz3/is...
Then again people who I talked to in 2014, were still a bit in denial till the start of school year and only then left the area directly affected by war.
My point is simple — you take the ability to access banking system for granted, when it’s far from universal. It’s also not as unrestricted and interconnected as bitcoin or internet itself. Sometimes you have a bank and a card, but your ability to transact is restricted. It doesn’t always mean that you sit in the basement hiding from daily artillery strike or wandering post-nuclear desert on a cool bike.
I guess I was more pointing out that right now it seems highly scenario-specific whether or not cryptocurrency can help in the way you described.
Doesn't it depend on the amount of money you're dealing with, what you may or may not need to do with said money in the near-future, your own technical competence/facility, and perhaps even the current state of cryptocurrency itself?
You just need to be in a situation where the law prohibits, or somehow restricts or severely taxes, the money transfer itself, or the use of that money to procure something you need.
WikiLeaks may have amassed more than $46 million in Bitcoin based on the number of coins held by its known wallet address. https://bitcoinist.com/wikileaks-has-received-more-than-46-m...
Sometimes crypto is the only way of sending/receiving money from other countries reliably and cheaply.
Other countries are much worse, Venezuela for instance has destroyed the value of their money, so bad that people use it wallpaper.
I heard there was a similar problem in Egypt, no idea if and how it was solved.
It beggars belief that someone would so callously call the situation in these countries 'hypothetical'. Please, inform yourself about the war and strife that is occurring outside your own bubble. Its very important that we in the West stop ignoring the plight of the people our military industrial complex is targeting with their weapons.
Bitcoin has held things together in many such places.
Also: Russia.
User adamsea is informing himself, that's why he's asking a question here.
Just because people are starving behind economic blockades and sanctions and mafia hell, doesn't mean they don't RTFM.
(Oh, and you can use BTC on the street, all over the world.)
Bitcoin users are a tiny, tiny percentage of "anyone".
Shouldn't we amend that statement to be "You can use bitcoin to buy anything which is being sold by some other bitcoin user?" ;)
Which sure, is potentially anything/anyone, but will obviously vary on circumstances.
They: What is this?
Me: Money.
They: No, bring money.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012%E2%80%932013_Cypriot_fina...
Bitcoin was the backstop that saved my ass when I went to SE Asia and none of my first-class Australian or US bank cards would let me get cash.
In the US perhaps. In at least one other country however...
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-47553048
https://www.somagnews.com/bitcoin-becomes-the-dominant-curre...
So in my view, it's pretty nice as an alternative to holding gold. Gold can be nice as well of course, but it's difficult to transport. If you keep gold in your home, at some point someone might break into your home and steal your gold. You could pay some company to store your gold, but perhaps in times of crises a government might step in and claim some of your gold.
Crypto currencies can be easily held in a digital wallet or people can even just memorise the keys to their wallet in their brain. It's hard for governments to control crypto currencies and I'm sure some of the wealthiest people in the world now keep a certain small percentage of their wealth in cryptos as well as a hedge against fiat currencies, stock market crashes, etc...
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[0]: https://news.bitcoin.com/venezuela-bitcoin-use-hyperinflatio...
[1]: https://www.financemagnates.com/cryptocurrency/the-impact-of...
Not really. If I want a bank account I need to fill out a page of paperwork requiring my name, address, social security number, citizenship information, income, occupation, date of birth, scans of various pieces of ID and/or other documents. Compare this to bitcoin where you only need to install an app, and new identities can be generated on-demand. It's true that trying to buy/sell bitcoins via an exchange will subject you to AML requirements, but in-person transactions won't.
>transactions take forever, they cost money [...] unlike my free credit card.
The cost and time it takes is mostly a function of how much demand is there for blockchain space. During periods of high transaction volume, you'll either have to pay high fees or wait a long time. You can see in this chart https://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/#0,30d that there are periods of very high transaction fees (the yellow peaks correspond to a $3 fee for a typical transaction), but also periods with low transaction fees (the parts with blue troughs correspond to a $0.12 fee for a typical transaction). People in a hurry pay more and people who can wait pay less. It's a classic microeconomics.
Credit cards aren't free either. The cost (around 2-3% in the US) is borne by the merchant. Cash has fees for handling, transportation, and storage. "Free" bank transfers (eg. vemo, SEPA) are typically restricted to consumers, are often part of a bigger banking package, which have fees or minimum balance requirements.
Nobody does bitcoin transactions in person, at least not in America and not anyone I know. I have several bitcoins and the only way to use them is through an exchange like coinbase, who require the same identity documents that a bank does.
You could argue “but you just have to find vendors who accept bitcoin!” But with 3 bitcoin I won’t find enough vendors to spend it on.
>You could argue “but you just have to find vendors who accept bitcoin!” But with 3 bitcoin I won’t find enough vendors to spend it on.
There are also bitcoin-for-gift-card stores, which vastly expands your vendor options.
In EU, regulation caps interchange fees at 0.2% of the transaction value for debit cards and at 0.3% for credit cards.
> "Free" bank transfers (eg. vemo, SEPA) are typically restricted to consumers, are often part of a bigger banking package, which have fees or minimum balance requirement
A bank that i use has free SEPA transfers, no montly fees and negligible minimum balance reqirements, both for consumer and business accounts.
but I think you do. You find a seller who is willing to accept the currency you're using, and you use whatever interface to the bitcoin network you've chosen to do "send x money to y identifier". No different to a regular EFT.
You identified the exact problems. It's not that bitcoin transfers are some weird foreign concept, it's that they take forever, have high fees and aren't accepted universally.
The major users of bitcoin as an actual currency rather than a speculative vehicle are places that can't use the more convenient forms of currency. Guaranteed they'd rather use USD if they could.
Well that's a non-starter. If I wanted to buy a beer with bitcoin right now, I'd probably end up drinking tap water.
However if you wanted to purchase "illegal" drugs online you'd be hard pressed to find anyone who will accept your USD.
Same for Bitcoin, you install a wallet app and use it. It's actually much easier than opening a bank account.
> Meanwhile normal people without a serious networking/distributed systems background will not really grasp what they are doing
They won't grasp what they're doing on their bank account without a serious economic/financial/law background either.
I saw Bitcoin project on GitHub's artic code vault[1] and advertised heavily. But I couldn't find libbitorrent on it besides it being hosted on GitHub as well. Is this because the project owner hasn't enabled it or is there some other reason behind it?
That said, unfortunately, short of a large nation state, or collection of banks also allowing exchange/transactions, I don't think it will ever take off. Even then, transaction times as you mention are not fast, and often are controlled by a limited number of organizations.
What the technology does offer, is a means for multiple parties that don't trust each other to proceed with a transaction. This is often where "smart contracts" come into play, and also why banks are considering a cryptocurrency system(s) for inter-bank exchanges.
In the end, those that win will largely be the incumbents imho.
I setup bitcoin on a few machines really early on... and had a couple coins... but I had no way to "use" them and it was just costing electricity at the time... I deleted it all and didn't look back until they cleared $20k a coin. Kind of wish I at least saved a zip file of the wallets somewhere. Though if I'd kept mining, may have been worth something.
That doesn't make it useless for someone else, who might for example live in Argentina.
The day you want to hire someone who wants their payment in Bitcoin for some reason, that's when you'll have use for it.
You don't have to go anywhere, you don't have to provide any kind of ID or documentation, you don't have to wait around for a free salesperson.
> but transactions take forever
Bitcoin transactions are instantaneous. Look up "settlement cycle" if you want to make a direct comparison. Bitcoin final settlement usually takes about an hour, compared to anywhere from several days to several months for traditional payment. Credit card settlement is usually 60-90 days.
> they cost money
It costs less than a dollar to move ~any amount of money anywhere in the world with ~1hr settlement. A credit card usually costs something like $0.25 + 3%.
> the currency is not accepted by any business I use... I have 55€ in my wallet and everyone on this continent knows what to do with it.
I have AU$80 in my wallet and I'm pretty sure no one on your continent would take it.
In fact, last time I traveled to SE Asia none of my debit cards worked for cash withdrawal and the only way I was able to get cash was with a Bitcoin ATM. So it worked very well for me!
You can already purchase Reddit MOONS from the r/cryptocurrency subreddit here: http://xmoon.exchange/
So do stamps, coins, Star Wars figurines in original packaging, baseball cards, yada yada.
At least you can look at those other things while you possess them.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-crypto-currencies-africa-...
Adoption will establish itself in Africa, S.America, Asia first.. and then it will compete head on with traditional western banking services.
There's great progress being made, but we'll not get there during 2020.
The largely obviates the need for any domain knowledge.
Who cares? Anyone who feels like their purchasing power isn't where it should be is either underpaid, or a victim of central banks diluting their dollars with printing.
So, nobody in the EU or North America, then.
In the US, stocks are 187.8% market cap to GDP.
But please, tell us more about how there's no inflation.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/cyprus-bank-account-tax-put...
(Also, the grandparent post perhaps should have given some context to the statement "Lightning made scaling possible", such as the fact that Bitcoin originally supported 32 MB blocks of transactions, before being "temporarily" limited to 1 MB. Alternative blockchains have managed without this artificial restriction, and without relying on complicated second-layer "solutions" like Lightning.)
European leaders wanted to limit the size of the rescue loans — which are backed by European taxpayers — to €10 billion. Leaders were also reluctant to bail out Russian depositors whose funds may be the result of tax evasion, crime or money laundering.
Additionally, there are sanctions in place since the 2014 Crimean crisis.
https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2019/01/10/cyprus-no-longer-m...
I distinctly remember being a teenager and learning how bittorrent worked, thinking it's the coolest thing I'd heard of and laboriously explaining how it worked to a friend that sounded interested. At the end of the explanation he asked "So how do you download music with it?"
And I realized all he cared about was using it to pirate music.
It's really easy for programmers to get lost in how cool some code or technology is and lose sight of how the rest of the world views it.
I’ve given my friends the spiel about how cool it is that I can use the EM spectrum to send my voice through the air to the other side of town. And how other people have put up repeaters which mean my voice can actually go a lot further than that —- maybe across the country!
And their response? “Sure, but I can already do that on my phone”
After losing a lot of my curiosity the past few years, it’s coming back and my confidence is growing and I want to explore various fields and technologies deeper [and for the first time].
Do you think people don’t know about this beautiful stuff because inventions and products have become overly corporatized and use intellectual property and patents, which stifles curiosity?
I can’t help but dream of a fully open source world where we don’t dominate each other by keeping information about the inner workings of things artificially scarce like we do today - as evidenced by Aaron Swartz, Library Genesis, corporate fight back against right to repair etc.
Story of my fucking life.
I share it occasionally with friends to remind them of this. Computers are just tools. The really interesting question is what those tools can do for us.
Most developers, and therefore most projects, get stuck somewhere in the middle area, where there is enough skill to create features, but no direction or vision for those features, other than a basic template based on other software.
Often, the project will be called "minimal" to excuse having few features, but only a few projects adhere to a genuine restriction like SLOC limits or eliminating dependencies.
Appeals to commerce as the goal often have a further narrowing effect of making one anxious with thoughts like "project must moonshot on day 1", but then you look at Bittorrent, an all-time software success, and it's like, no, this probably wasn't ever going to create the next Microsoft. Funds were raised to have a Bittorrent company, but the market success it had was always modest at best. And yet it did and still does represent an idea that people can believe in.
The actual thing that I see every great project do, whether it's defined artistically or not, is to define up-front some themes and principles that you believe cohere well, and then direct the specific elements around deeply studying and exploring them. This can manifest as a corporate mission statement, or as an artist's manifesto, or an academic research subject. In final form, it generally manifests as "do one thing exceptionally well", since if you have a very clear idea of the goal, you can direct all your energy upon it. But in the intermediate stages it is still trial and error to learn what fits the theme best, what the actual success metrics are.
The thing is, if you have coherence in the abstract, it's way easier to explain the reason for being: "This is just a manifestation of the principles". Being easy to explain in turn makes it marketable without resorting to sales tricks. And because it deals with general concepts it taps into a breadth of appeal that can't be found just by looking at any one feature. So adhering to principle sets you up for success in a general sense.
In the case of Bittorrent they should know a little bit about how it works before they start pirating software, music or movies using it, however.
The other big thing was seeding the already downloaded bits while downloading the rest and making this behavior very hard to disable. This combined with ratio systems of the various trackers ensured that people played nice and gave back as much as they took.
The downside was the elimination of the long tail very niche content that you could find on DC++ while browsing individual people's messy but unique collections.
Setting the precedent that media companies can seize domain names and force ISPs to block access to search engines if they don't like some of the search results (while ruining the lives of the people running those search engines) is arguably a high price to pay for this improved search service.
Uploading became a privilege, something that normal average people don't do. Earlier people ripped their own CDs, DVDs, magazine scans, digitized their VHS, recorded shows with their TV card etc. and shared these files. I don't know anybody who has ever created a torrent themselves. Everybody just downloads and seeds the pre-packaged stuff from the centralized sites, much like the walled garden philosophy of app stores.
But your experiences sound like what goes on in the public trackers. It's reasonable that folks who go to Pirate Bay to get their TV shows are not going to be as engaged as those who go to TVV, MS, or MTV. There's also the security risks of letting untrusted users upload files that may get consumed by thousands of people in the first hour.
In private trackers, I have often found that uploading is encouraged, going so far as to provide very detailed guides in their wikis showing how to rip the media, prepare the torrent, and upload it to the tracker. If a better quality version can be uploaded to trump the previous version, that is also encouraged. Learning, quality, and appreciation are cornerstones of the private tracker ecosystem, in my experience.
For that, you want Direct Connect [0]. As a one sentence pitch: IRC for file sharing ;)
A few years ago I was very interested in IPFS but once I learned about the limitations it was pretty much not suitable for me. If you really insist on using IPFS then your best bet would be to have a central tracker host an IPNS based site and publish its database index as a series of json files. The javascript client will then have to query the index on its own in the browser.
The alternative would be to download the entire database and create a local index. In theory that's not a bad idea but over time your database will grow to several gigabytes. That's not comparable to just going to whatever site exist today and submitting a search term but it could be highly resilient.
The fundamental problem is that untrusted nodes can't provide search services. It's possible that they end up redirecting you to a fake listing. Blockchain style consensus doesn't work for something that requires responses immediately like a search engine.
Also bittorrent trackers are slightly more complicated than just a file store
The main reward for torrent uploaders is fame, would that translate well in IPFS?
Bittorrent only became that level of magical for me when the DHT got factored in some time later and magnet links became workable.
The other time was Bitcoin.
I’m a big fan of lack of centralized/coordination/tracker nodes.
Back when people left things downloading for days, there were severe shortages of people willing to upload, and tit-for-tat encouraged uploading, solving the issue.
Crypto currencies owe a lot of their successes to the pioneers behind technologies that also power bit torrent.
- Patricia-Merkle Trees proven in DC++
- DHT proven in eMule Kademlia
The block header has the merkle root of all transactions that are a part of that block. The witness merkle root is stored in the coinbase transaction (if the miner is segwit enabled).
And proof of work is done for the block header, which includes all these merkle roots.
If light SPV clients weren't a consideration, we could just concatenate all txids together and use the hash of that in the block header instead of a merkle root, and get the same effect.
What merkle trees give you is an efficient way to prove that a certain txid is committed to within a block, without the verifier having to fetch the full list of txids. Instead, he just needs a valid merkle path from the txid to the root, which is much smaller to communicate and to store.
For a full node that has the full list of txids regardless, this is basically meaningless. Full nodes don't (ever) verify merkle inclusion proofs, only that the merkle root in the header matches the full list of block txids.
I would still consider Satoshi's invention to be an incredible breakthrough even if he didn't consider light SPV clients since day one and only described the full node operation mode, therefore I don't consider SPV to be a core component of the Bitcoin breakthrough.
(And also, we know today that SPV is not as great as it was once hoped to be. It puts users at the whims of the miners, with XT/Classic/Unlimited/S2X/BCash being marvelous examples of how that can go terribly wrong. The fraud proof concept that Satoshi described in the whitepaper as part of the SPV model (under the name "alerts") was discovered to not actually be workable due to the data withhold problem, giving this model much weaker security guarantees. And privacy is totally and utterly broken in traditional SPV -- though Neutrino is making good progress on that front.)
<shesek> does bitcoin core ever verify merkle inclusion proofs? (I assume not, it only verifies that the merkle root matches the set of txids. but maybe I'm missing some other ways its being used?)
<sipa> i don't think anything verifies them
<sipa> shesek: they don't even ever receive any
<sipa> though they were an essential part of BIP37 [related to light SPV clients]
<phantomcircuit> shesek, for a full node theres no real difference between receiving a merkle tree and a hash of a list
<sipa> yeah, for a full-blocks-only bitcoin like protocol, the "merkle root" stored in the block header could just be a flat hash of all txids
There are some alternative cryptosystem designs that do take blocks in "losing chains" into consideration using a DAG structure, like GHOST and its successor SPECTRE (by Aviv Zohar et. al). Ethereum also has a concept of "uncle blocks", which are rewarded and contribute to chain selection.
That's pretty much the definition of "rebase" and again, that's a functionality of the algorithm on top of the data structure (Proof of Work) not the data structure. The raw data structure is still a merkle tree even if in practice the algorithm suggests to people there is only one rebased trunk. But even that isn't entirely true in practice because there are still multiple rebased "branches" among the Bitcoin forks such as Bitcoin Classic, Bitcoin Gold, etc. All of those are branches that share the same conceptual merkle tree. Even if they aren't "Bitcoin" that's more of an algorithmic and political distinction at that point, not a technical one by means of data structure. It's not the data structure that makes it a chain, it's the algorithm and the politics, hence why I think blockchain is a misnomer for the data structure itself.
A merkle tree is a very specific type of hash tree, which Bitcoin only uses for transactions and not for blocks. Merkle proofs are used to prove that a txid exists within the root hash committed in the header block. What would be the reason to organize blocks into a merkle tree? What would that let you prove?
See this SE question for more information on how Bitcoin uses merkle trees: https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/69018/merkle-roo...
> here are still multiple rebased "branches" among the Bitcoin forks such as Bitcoin Classic, Bitcoin Gold, etc. All of those are branches that share...
Bitcoin, BCash and BGold each have incompatible rule sets; A full node will only accept chains that are valid according to its own local set of rules (embedded in it software), so chains of different coins will not even be considered for chain selection, regardless of the proof-of-work backing them. They just don't exists from the full node's PoV. Validity of blocks/transactions comes first, everything else is second.
It is the software I download for free that is the most reliable IME. Spending more money does not make today's consumer computers any more valuable. And that's how it should be. The price of hardware (and software) should continue to fall.
Quite a few projects are using P2P, machine learning, Kubernetes, No-Sql or block-chain not because the project actually requires scalability, decentralization, advanced data analysis or responsive big data, but because somebody got excited and refused to accept that it was a waste of time and money to do so.
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/04/21/dont-let-architect...
> Your typical architecture astronaut will take a fact like “Napster is a peer-to-peer service for downloading music” and ignore everything but the architecture, thinking it’s interesting because it’s peer to peer, completely missing the point that it’s interesting because you can type the name of a song and listen to it right away.
> [...]
> If Napster wasn’t peer-to-peer but it did let you type the name of a song and then listen to it, it would have been just as popular.
I like how the data expiration is set as an intentional feature.
A few years ago, that was precisely their marketing pitch.
I wanted to try Aether, but I avoid Snap as much as possible
What about the trackers?
BT only worked for new popular stuff.
Bitcoin is kinda like San Francisco. They decided to stick with the current block size and that made any use case other than buying bitcoin to speculate very expensive.
It is kind of a selling point with regards to what most people actually use it for. If not P2P the movie / record industries would shut down the servers.
It works not in the sense that there is a white paper that should work. Not in the sense that there are a few company-made swarms hosted on industrial servers that keep everyone up and alive, so that the thing gives the impression the 'P2P' network does work. Not in the sense that there is a very-well oiled marketing machinery talking about Web 3.0 that allows its founder to go on TechCrunch and talk about the upcoming distributed paradise.
Bittorrent works in the way you install it into your computer and it does something for you. And for that alone, it has my immense respect and attention.
It's a tool that doesn't pitch that it's a P2P tool - it doesn't try to convince you with sob stories about how using P2P helps fight against the big bad evil web. Instead, you use it because it's genuinely the best at what it does: it being P2P is not a selling point, it's just how it happens to work, and that is exactly what it should be.
That is something all P2P developers should aspire towards.
[0] Aether P2P: https://getaether.net