Quote from: wheatstone on May 24, 2013, 11:36:44 PM

A) I fundamentally disagree with you about the properties of the currently most-widely-used mechanism of payment (cards), particularly with respect to anonymity / privacy.
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Starting with A... Card payments today expose an inordinate amount of information to numerous parties who are permitted to sell this information to anyone with only scant protections (or none at all if they can get consumers' "informed consent", depending on jurisdiction). The card issuer and payment processor have access to your entire purchase history (including individual items, when and where they were bought, etc.), you full name, your address, and more. This can all be avoided with a properly configured bitcoin payment process.

What the hell are you talking about? When did I ever even imply in the slightest that card payments today in any way preserve any anonymity at all? When did I even mention any feature of current card payments? I fully agree with what you just said about them, but are you actually trying to say that i said otherwise, or even raised any issue about it at all?

Quote from: wheatstone on May 24, 2013, 11:36:44 PM

And B... In a country where 75% of point-of-sales transactions occur with a card, why would a digital need or want a physical, "inert" carrier of value? It's completely unrealistic and completely unnecessary. It's just not something that will ever gain wide adoption and you've given no argument as to why it would other than a historical predilection for carrying "cash". The current statistics on PoS transactions disproves your argument. In fact, the only logical argument is that the historical "mass use" has been whatever mechanism is the most convenient with whatever technology is available (weights, measures, stamps, seals, printing presses, card readers, etc). Seen in a historical perspective, "cash" is being replaced faster than any other mode of payment.

All currencies, state fiat, crypto, even gold to a large extent, are "digital" today. The fact that a currency is "digital" doesn't subtract from any real demand that they have a useful physical or virtual representation. I disagree that a physical or virtual representation of crypto is unrealistic or completely unnecessary, especially if the only reasoning is just because it is "digital". I go so far to say that physicality or a virtual representation of physicality is a sorely missed component of any purely digitial currency.

I use the term "virtual" to mean accounting entries of notes or receipts issued on reserves.

If you can't be convinced that the historical usefulness of physical and virtual money and the current usefulness of physical and virtual money is not an indicator of the future usefulness of physical and virtual money, then I'm not sure what else to say, but I will try one last way.

Think of crypto as any other reserve specie of value such as precious metal or grain for example. If it is in any way difficult or even slightly inconvenient to transfer or exchange the value stored in these things with other things, then a market will spring up to make it easier, because an easier way will be in demand. Notes issued on reserves comes from this exact market, no matter what the reserve type. Crypto is no different than gold or grain in the respect that transacting in receipts issued on the reserve affords more conveniences (and anonymity in the case of crypto) that transacting in the specie itself. The market will produce this.

The 75% of transactions that you speak of being done on cards are simply digital transactions of receipts issued on reserves. They are the incrementing and decrementing of digital accounting entries of these notes. This digital accounting still can afford the benefits that transacting in the crypto specie itself can not, even anonymity if done correctly. Transactions of receipts, virtual or physical, is not being replaced, nor will it be replaced.

Quote from: wheatstone on May 24, 2013, 11:36:44 PM

Off-chain bitcoin payments are going to be an increasingly used payment mechanism if only because it addresses two issues with bitcoin payments: anonymity and confirmation time.

These off-chain transactions are going to be digital in nature, not through the exchange of inert notes (the construction of which is completely infeasible and impractical).

Honestly, i'm not sure about how "off-chain transactions" work. I've heard them being referred to before, but i'm not sure how they work exactly. Some details would be great. I can't understand how they are done without requiring an external instrument such as a note, or in this case, a virtual note.