Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46883755

Points: 5

# Comments: 0

https://www.coreboot.org/

https://libreboot.org/

> A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution.

> Commerce on the Internet has come to rely almost exclusively on financial institutions serving as trusted third parties to process electronic payments. While the system works well enough for most transactions, it still suffers from the inherent weaknesses of the trust based model. Completely non-reversible transactions are not really possible, since financial institutions cannot avoid mediating disputes. The cost of mediation increases transaction costs, limiting the minimum practical transaction size and cutting off the possibility for small casual transactions, and there is a broader cost in the loss of ability to make non-reversible payments for non-reversible services. With the possibility of reversal, the need for trust spreads. Merchants must be wary of their customers, hassling them for more information than they would otherwise need. A certain percentage of fraud is accepted as unavoidable. These costs and payment uncertainties can be avoided in person by using physical currency, but no mechanism exists to make payments over a communications channel without a trusted party.

> What is needed is an electronic payment system based on cryptographic proof instead of trust, allowing any two willing parties to transact directly with each other without the need for a trusted third party. Transactions that are computationally impractical to reverse would protect sellers from fraud, and routine escrow mechanisms could easily be implemented to protect buyers. In this paper, we propose a solution to the double-spending problem using a peer-to-peer distributed timestamp server to generate computational proof of the chronological order of transactions. The system is secure as long as honest nodes collectively control more CPU power than any cooperating group of attacker nodes.

[0] https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf

Bitcoin code is open-source. How do you prevent someone from using open-source?

You can do all that today, although it requires some learning and setup, but at least in the US it's totally doable.

I know of Joel Valenzuela who is an evangelist about paying everything with decentralized cryptocurrencies:

https://descentr.net/

The interesting thing about cryptocurrencies is using them directly, i.e. when users have their own wallets under their full control. Then it's magical when you make a transaction to somebody and think that nobody is censoring, filtering, moderating or rejecting it in any way. Oh and no PII either.

Edit: typo.

I will contact them to try to get them to support GrapheneOS, but I will not be holding my breath. I uninstalled it in the meantime and use my computer. If they ever require the app I would likely switch to a different bank.

Same can be said about climate change. Sure they worry and complain, but when pointing out concrete measures they can take, basically nobody does.

Complaining is easy.

There will be curation and specialization. Previously ignored niches now will be economically profitable. It will be a Renaissance of creativity, and millions of jobs will be created.

Regarding volatility I agree that it's currently an issue, but not an insurmountable problem in my opinion:

1. Payment gateways can offer automatic asset conversion to minimize volatility risk for payment takers. This means I could pay in whichever cryptocurrency the payment gateway would take and the receiver would get whatever currency they have set up in their account. They might want to keep some currencies and convert others, so the payment gateway could offer an option to decide that, and in which amounts (e.g. "keep 10% of each BTC payment, convert the rest to USD").

2. Price volatility should reduce as a cryptocurrency is more widely used. In the alternate universe where BTC scaled to be larger than all credit card networks combined its price could be more stable than many fiat currencies.

[0] https://blog.vermorel.com/journal/2017/12/17/terabyte-blocks...

What I strongly disagree with is that a Bitcoin with bigger blocks and hence larger transaction capacity is inherently less valuable. That is an unfair comparison because Bitcoin Cash, when the split happened in Aug 2017, could have been recognized as Bitcoin by the ecosystem, but it wasn't, and Bitcoin Core retained the BTC ticker. Because of that Bitcoin Cash had to start adoption from the beginning, losing Bitcoin's established network effects.

My original argument was that if Bitcoin had increased its blocksize before 2016 as Satoshi Nakamoto originally intended [1], then the Bitcoin Cash split wouldn't have happened, Bitcoin adoption would have continued growing (remember that back in the day big players like Microsoft, Dell, Steam and Newegg started accepting Bitcoin payments) and miners would progressively see more of their rewards coming from transaction fees and less from the block rewards.

This last point is one of the big problems with BTC right now: the network security will decrease in the face of dwindling block rewards unless transaction fees rise. I argue that Bitcoin was always supposed to scale in number of transactions, so the aggregate of transaction fees, even if individually inexpensive (roughly 1 cent), would become larger than the block reward. In other words: the block reward was just an economic incentive to kick-start the Bitcoin network, to attract miners that would secure it, but the transaction volume was meant to keep increasing to replace it.

[0] https://bitcoincash.org/

[1] https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1347.msg15366#msg153...

Therefore Bitcoin could scale to handle millions of transactions per second with a sublinear increase in electricity spent. [0]

[0] http://blog.vermorel.com/journal/2017/12/17/terabyte-blocks-...