Quote from: keystroke on April 21, 2016, 10:16:33 AM

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

Distributed ledger technology is a necessary component of bitcoin but not the main invention, which is a trust-no-one global currency...

Yup, haters trying to flip the narrative and fools following as usual. Look back on cypherpunk writings from the 90s. The goal was a trust-no-one private global currency. The blockchain is the technology which enables that, and a brilliant invention, but the blockchain itself wasn't the goal. The haters aren't sure what to do so they painted this blockchain picture which is intellectually pretty bankrupt and doomed to failure but experiencing some rather pathetic malinvestment at the moment. I guess it might be buying them time to a certain extent and acting as one more transfer of wealth from the hands of the uninformed. Such is the way of the world.

An important question to ask is whether or not the world really wants a trustless digital currency or whether it's just a few technophiles. Cash is trustless as well but there's a reason people don't store their cash under their mattress. If your house catches on fire you can go broke. If you get Goxxed or Cryptcyed you can just as easily go broke as well. That's a HUGE problem.

I think the problem that many bitcoin maximalists make is they're really making a philosophical argument rather than a technological one. Our financial systems and the legal protections that enshroud them have evolved over millennia. Yes bitcoin is trustless (mostly), yes it's peer to peer, yes it solves double-spending, and it goes on. But at the end of the day, if there's no recourse if your private key gets stolen or your exchange gets hacked/steals your bitcoin then it's not a SAFE store of value. That doesn't mean that bitcoin doesn't have it's place, but it does mean that it doesn't have a place within the mainstream economy. Any safeguards that would be put in place within the bitcoin universe would require some degree of identity sharing/unmasking which sort of defeats the whole purpose.

Bitcoin is the first successful iteration of a technology that eventually will remake the world, it just doesn't solve a problem that MOST people have. It solves a problem that bitcoin maximalists have.