Here’s what you don’t know:
https://www.google.com/search?q=things+you+can+buy+with+bitcoins
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Bitcoin wallets are huge targets for hackers. Most of the advice I’ve heard is to manage your own keys, and treat them the way you would a physical item that’s worth what they are worth. I’d bet apple doesn’t have anyone’s best interests at heart other than their own, but if they get people to stop using online wallets, that’s probably going to do more good than bad.
Did you seriously just post a link to you googling “things you can buy with bitcoins”?
Obviously it’s possible to buy things with bitcoins, but unless the government is trying to stop you from buying something it’s more convenient to just use regular currency.
Personally I like some value stability with my currency.
I’ve seen more than one story of people losing hundreds of dollars when they decided to do a factory reset of their phone, and they don’t have backups because they’re dumb.
I mean…honestly…if you have something that can be used as money and represents hundreds of USD in real life, why oh why would you keep it all on your phone?
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There are quite a few countries out there where their currencies are currently not stable in the slightest. Not everyone is as fortunate as you and me to be well off living in a Western country using one of the three strongest currencies in the world.
Nevertheless, even our currencies are not exactly stable but on a slow, downward decline of value.
Of course bitcoin is currently extremely volatile but that is merely a side-effect of a ‘currency’ (quotations used because it’s more than a currency) in its infancy. The exchange rate to fiat currencies will stabilise given time. Nevertheless, the only “risk” you assume when spending your bitcoin for products is that maybe you could have waited for a better deal. At the time of sale, you still pay exactly the same as the person who is buying for the same goods in fiat.
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And right now, Mt Gox is not permitting any transfers of any kind…
But I am sure that this can’t be because they have run orf wiv ze monay. Thats the sort of thing a government might do. Nobody would ever imagine that a bunch of pseudonymous libertarians preaching the value of self interest would actually grab the cash and do a runner. nooooo.
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That financial cottage industry never ceases to amaze me.
Thanks for the condescension, just what this discussion needed!
Nevertheless, I’ll take the time to refute your examples:
First, remittances: nobody has actually used Bitcoins for this purpose, it’s just some Bitcoin enthusiasts looking for applications. Their main problem is that the kind of people unable to find a better way than Western Union and it’s ilk to get money to their relatives are also the kind of people unlikely to be tech-savvy enough to use Bitcoin. A secondary problem is that in the impoverished areas that receive these remittances, there isn’t really anything you can buy with Bitcoin, so upon receipt they have to transfer Bitcoin right back to their ordinary currency. Basically, there are easier ways to send money overseas than by inventing a whole new currency.
Next, buying from online retailers: this is the closest you come to a decent justification, but the problem is that Bitcoin comes with it’s own security risks - most importantly that unlike with a credit card you have no recourse to get back any money stolen in the form of Bitcoins.
Finally, ‘owning your money.’ This on the other hand is the argument I find most absurd. What risk could you possibly be talking about? Assuming you’re living in the first world, your chances of losing money you’ve deposited in a bank are essentially zero. Deposits are insured - even in the financial crisis with banks collapsing left and right nobody lost their deposits. Contrast that to Bitcoins, which have shown themselves to be incredibly volatile, and have neither the intrinsic value nor the backing of a government necessary to ensure that they don’t just go ‘poof’ one day. They’re more of an investment, which might work out well and make you a profit, or might go lose money or go bust. Volatile investments have their place, but not as a store of value.
Oi, that went a little longer than I planned. Anyway, be nicer to people on the internet, and don’t put all your money into Bitcoin.
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“To be fair, there isn’t really any point of Bitcoin outside of criminal activity.”
That is the comment you started with, and what I responded to. It is not about all the utilities I described already being widely used, or compatible even with your personal choices, preferences or viewpoints. The point is that painting bitcoin as only being useful for criminal activity is entirely shortsighted and does nothing more than unnecessarily putting a legitimate technology in a bad light.
There are countless uses for bitcoin beyond criminal activity, and I gave only a few of the many examples one could think of. Whether they fit within your world view or whether a lot of people already use it for those reasons does not matter within that context.
(btw, for the record - I’m a new user so had to create another account for just this post as I’d reached my 3 post limit in this thread, but wanted to reply to this still. I also deleted a post made earlier in this thread because I stupidly assumed that deleting one post would allow me to create another, but that didn’t work…)
I’m only pointing out that what you said isn’t correct. You said “the only point of Bitcoin is to do things that at least some governments are trying to criminalize”, which is completely not true (evidence in the google results). As for the convenience of using regular currency, there are cases where it’s difficult or expensive to turn your local currency in for something of value that you want, and bitcoin makes it easy and cheap to achieve that goal. TOR is not explicitly criminal, filesharing isn’t and bitcoin isn’t. There are many legal and valid uses for all these technologies, and it’s silly for someone like Apple to mother us into thinking otherwise. It’s just another reason I’m making the leap over to Android soon. Not because I do or even want to use bitcoin, but because I want to be able to do what I want to do with my technology.
Looks like boingboing rewrote the intro to the article, making it clear that it was a guest op-ed and the person in question’s connections to the company and the app. Much better now.
Nothing you said in any way diminishes the point he made.
There is really no point to Bitcoin other than drugs, kiddie porn or money laundering. There are other things you can buy but there is no way that BitCoin is a superior payment system for you as a buyer. It takes an hour before you can be sure the money has cleared.
The only real advantage is that there is no way to unwind a transaction. Which is also a big disadvantage if someone has stolen the coins from you. There are still those guys tumbling the quarter billion dollars allegedly stolen from the sheep marketplace.
Rather amusing to see the folk at sheep complaining about the lack of police interest in the heist as well. What was it that the people were going there to buy again?
You could always use Tide detergent instead.
Let’s make Tide illegal! Hey! Hey, everybody! Proctor & Gamble makes a product that’s used to buy crack! Can you believe it? Proctor & Gamble facilitates buying drugs without cash! Why should Proctor & Gamble be able to sell this stuff without being regulated, since it’s being used to buy crack?
I’m not buying it. Yes, you can use Bitcoin for illegal things. However, you can use a car for illegal things. You can use a shovel for illegal things. You can use gift cards to launder money. Should we make gift cards illegal?
You can use Bitcoin for legal things. But no, if you have something go wrong, you probably aren’t going to get a lot of help from law enforcement. For an interesting twist, though, IIRC the FBI has promised to return people’s money after the Silk Road investigation. Meaning they’ve publicly acknowledged that Bitcoins have worth as money.
But thank you for making us all aware that Overstock is in the drug trade. And I’m sure Richard Branson will be glad to hear that Boing Boing’s readership thinks he’s a drug kingpin. Or pedophile.
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The problem is almost certainly that Apple wasn’t getting a cut of the electro-tulips stored in the wallets.
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" While it is likely that Apple lacks the internal strategic sophistication to see bitcoin as a threat…"
What’s this assertion based on? Apple don’t strike me as a gaggle of Cletuses.
I probably shouldn’t bother but assuming you have an open mind and are not merely trying to flame, I’ll go into more detail on those points that Jake_Stevens made, just so people like yourself might understand why they are moot.
“First, remittances: nobody has actually used Bitcoins for this purpose, it’s just some Bitcoin enthusiasts looking for applications.”
To say that nobody has actually used something in a certain way is similar to making up facts out of thin air. I would have agreed if it was stated that this type of usage for bitcoin isn’t exactly mainstream yet, but it’s only a matter of time as global bitcoin adoption, understanding and innovation grows before this is done more widely. Bitcoin allows people from anywhere in the world to send money to each other directly, paying zero or nearly no fees, and without a middleman. There is no other ‘currency’ or payment system that allows this, apart from other cryptos of course.
The fact that it is niche does not mean that people do not use it (or will never) to send money to their family abroad, instead of using Western Union. Wider adoption comes as innovation grows: soon you will be able to send and receive bitcoin with sms using any phone. As you surely know, mobile phones (not smartphones) are widely used in Africa as payment systems and accessing financial services. But even beyond that point, there’s already examples of innovation to make this whole idea more convenient and scalable: http://www.businessweek.com/news/2013-11-28/bitcoin-service-targets-kenya-remittances-with-cut-rate-fees-1.
“Next, buying from online retailers: this is the closest you come to a decent justification, but the problem is that Bitcoin comes with it’s own security risks”
There is a risk yes - if you send your money to someone you had no reason to actually trust, they can take it and run with it. It is like cash. Don’t think for a second though that a reputable retailer will use this to steal your money. It won’t make sense to their bottom line to start stealing from their customers. A scam site will still be a scam site though yes, if you pay with or without bitcoin does not change that fact.
People will get burned by being careless with their money if they use bitcoin. It might take some time for reckless people to realise that they must take responsibility for their money. It will be up to people to decide for themselves what they find more convenient. However the bitcoin protocol itself will likely see innovation that make payments even more secure, for instance by introducing escrow services.
And the immense plus side will always be that nobody can actually copy your credentials and steal your money or identity that way. Bitcoin is much more secure and harder to steal or defraud than credit cards are - if used properly (i.e. not stored on some online wallet). There is the upside to merchants as well: instead of paying 3% in fees for credit card transactions, they can pass on those savings to their customer, or increase their own profitability.
“Finally, ‘owning your money.’ This on the other hand is the argument I find most absurd. What risk could you possibly be talking about?”
Of course, for a lot of people it is easier to just trust a bank and carry on as normal, ignoring the signals around them that slowly, banks are becoming insolvent. You can call this radical but that’s beyond the point. The point was that there is utility to bitcoin adopters, which is to have a choice in how they handle and store their money. It gives them the opportunity to be in full control and ownership of their money. Whether that is important to yourself or not does not make it any less of a huge attraction to people with different views of the world. Remember, we are discussing here why there are (countless) more uses to bitcoin than doing illegal activities…
“Contrast that to Bitcoins, which have shown themselves to be incredibly volatile, and have neither the intrinsic value nor the backing of a government necessary to ensure that they don’t just go ‘poof’ one day.”
Bitcoin does not need the backing of any central authority or institution to lend it “intrinsic value”, that is exactly the entire point of it. It is distributed trust, decentralised trust - it is trust handled and maintained by an algorithm, not by policies of a select few people in control.
Bitcoin’s price is predictably volatile at this early stage as adoption grows and speculation is rampant. This will smooth out and stabilise over time. It is impossible for the value to go to zero, because even at $1 valuation it will still have use to someone in the world. Regardless of the volatility though, in the long term, all bitcoin has done is going up in value, not crash and die or permanently deflate in value. Whether you believe it is set to continue doing that for a while to come, or not, is a different discussion. However, stating that it can ‘just go poof’ one day is as shortsighted as saying that only criminals have a use for it.
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I have watched the Secret Service shut down a series of successors, e-Gold, Gold Age, Liberty Reserve. They don’t care if the system could in theory be used for a legitimate use. Those uses are covered perfectly well by existing systems.
They already have the law on their side. They have started arresting people for running bitcoin exchanges. MtGox is currently down. Hmmm.
Well said. It does amaze me that so many see the decentralized nature of bitcoin as simply a means for pedophiles and drug addicts, and seem blind to the value of a world wide, digital currency untethered to governments or huge institutions, and the irrefutable utility of making “free” digital payments from everywhere (with at least equal security to equivalent methods) for those in countries without access to stable, non-restricted or accessible banking.
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Look at all the shills and sockpuppets who registered today just to comment on how brilliant bitcoin is and how you should buy some. For something that struggles with mainstream legitimacy it sure feels more like a penny stock scam than a legitimate “currency.”
