Quote from: cmbartley on April 21, 2016, 04:57:43 AM

Quote from: marcus_of_augustus on April 21, 2016, 02:15:45 AM

you and many others who think like you do not understand ... bitcoin is not a competitor to the existing financial industry, it totally subsumes it.

Bitcoin users are doing things that traditional finance is not even dreaming of yet. Bitcoiners are getting ahead and making a quantum leap in efficiency versus economic actors bogged down in the legacy system. Bitcoin will be adopted because of competitive pressures, those pressures will not be felt by the mainstream for a long time because their competitors are not even on the same platform. Bitcoin is filling in the niches and edge cases that existing systems don't even recognise or provide services for. By the time mainstream legacy currency users start feeling competitive economic pressures from bitcoin users it will be too late, their business models will be so outdated they will have zero time to catch-up because if their competitors are using bitcoin effectively in such a way as to out-compete them, and they are not, they are already toast.

Think about the Internet users, the early ones, they were getting ahead doing things in ways that no-one dreamed of but made them orders of magnitude more efficient (after they invested in a learning curve, modems, installing browsers, etc) ... many businesses only went online because they had to (it was adopt or perish). Right now it is tech savvy bitcoiners who are making the early knowledge investments to use an admittedly clunky system but by doing so they can avail themselves of bitcoins myriad of efficiencies, particularly with cross-border and private commerce.

Just can't believe how guys like this Transferwise CEO can be so blind to the competitive threat he is facing, knowing everything we know now about technology adoption characteristics and curves. He's toast. Send me his lunch over now and I'll get it over with.

Replace "bitcoin" with "distributed ledger" and I mostly agree. Distributed ledger technology is like the invention of search engines. Bitcoin is Alta Vista, first of a kind but unlikely to the be the winner in this space.

Ok, you're really misinformed ... what you just said is bordering on not-worth-replying-to-ridiculous but I'll give it a go because you seem earnest.

Distributed ledger technology is a necessary component of bitcoin but not the main invention, which is a trust-no-one global currency with embedded automated programmable contract adjudication settlement system. The protocol that achieves this magic is much more akin to TCP/IP, not a layer 3 search engine app (how did you get so mixed up??), the protocol has the tradeable cryptographic asset hard-wired into the protocol to achieve all this wonderful trustlessness, dismissing the tradeable asset (or the global p2p network) as analogous to a layer 3 search engine app is just silliness, marketing-wonk speak gone haywire.

tl;dr You just compared TCP/IP to Alta Vista, sigh.