Very fair point. But unfortunately there are only two options: either you pick someone (a leader, a group, or an institution) to decide on something, or you go on a consensus based system where a much larger heterogeneous group of individuals fight for their opinions and might eventually destroy the system itself if consensus is not reached. I don't see any other options unfortunately. The one that we currently have - banks, credit cards, PayPal, etc.- is of the first type. Bitcoin is the first solid experiment of money of the second type so I look at it with great interest and I support it heavily. Yes, it might fail, but the blockchain concept is here to stay exactly like BitTorrent and voice over IP are still here even if they were opposed by big corporates. It will become mainstream and it will disrupt some other technologies making them obsolete. Anyway, Internet itself is not built on what it's right technologically (it's my field of competence, so you can trust me), but on what makes more sense politically and economically. But at the end it still works... And applications that were never imagined or even welcomed are now mainstream and have changed the world. Regarding voluntary contribution, I can just bring as an example Linux, which is now one of the most used (if not the most used) OS in datacenters. Regarding gold, oh yes, politician can make it freaking difficult to transport and transfer my unicorn value to someone else, but here you are much more knowledgeable than me so I won't provide any example.
Yes, it's obviously red hat. And yes, the blockchain is most likely headed the same way. However, it might become mutually beneficial, like in the Linux case, with commercial companies feeding back into the open source community.
Companies will, and are, building on blockchain tech but not on bitcoin. Private blockchain systems are anti the philosophy of bitcoin. Bitcoin is fine for libertarians and anarchists, but no corporate is going to rely on Chinese miners to secure their system. I first came across bitcoin when it was 1c (and yes, kick myself for not buying just $100 worth) and reading these debates on mises.org about whether it refuted the regression theorm of money. I thought about how it could be applied by Perth Mint but there was no way I could see getting approval to rely on distributed miners. That is where we are at now, with banks doing private blockchains or using Ripple but not bitcoin.
Yes, we can all agree with that, I guess. Regarding the dependency on China, it looks like it's kind of unavoidable in the current economy.
A private blockchain might as well be a private ledger - with little difference to the current server-client systems in place today... Bitcoin is still the best example of a fully functional blockchain - fully decentralized. The Chinese miner fears are irrational - even the miners need to play by the math/programming rules - and if they don't, they 'fork' off, and play in their own world. The Nodes which are also important, are distributed all over the world.
Not necessarily. The beauty of the blockchain is that it's a very resilient distributed ledger run and maintained by untrusted parties. Private companies are just trying to figure out a way to use this feature to their advantage. Imagine for example if a private payment network found a way to have their users run its private ledger instead of owning a huge networks of computers in datacenters around the world. Their cost of operating the payment network would be dramatically reduced by shifting computing power and bandwidth requirements to its users.
Bitcoin is spiking back upwards again today. Looks like the market doesn't care about a disgruntled ex-developers opinion after all
bitcoin classic appears to have been accepted by the big asian miners, the fork is expected 1st march all going well hence the price increase. ironically the acceptance seems to be motivated by the price drop rather than the best result for block sizes.
