Quote from: pawel7777 on March 07, 2018, 12:39:14 PM

Quote from: ktabb on March 06, 2018, 10:31:18 PM

Quote from: pawel7777 on March 06, 2018, 12:49:40 PM

Quote from: ktabb on March 06, 2018, 11:21:07 AM

The benefit of decentralization is not nearly large enough to outweigh the massive costs.

What does this even mean? How do you determine the value of decentralisation and what's its fair cost? Why do people (miners?) bear those costs then?

It means that the only "pro" of crypto over, for example, Visa or Mastercard or Venmo or any other means of transferring money/value is the fact that it is decentralized. You don't have to trust anyone, whereas with Venmo, you're giving a company control of your funds. The cost of crypto vs these systems is that it is WAYYYY slower, not scalable, more expensive in many cases, and requires the use of a massive network that consumes stupid amounts of energy even when it is less than 1% of the size it would need to achieve the dream of replacing fiat currency. It's just not worth it.

You haven't answered the question. How do you determine the value of benefit of decentralisation? If the high costs are not justified, what's the fair cost?
Average Joe may not be valuing decentralisation too high, but it's a different story for WikiLeaks (and alike), who had all their bank accounts frozen, or for individuals/businesses from Cyprus (EU member state, not some Banana Republic), who had seen their money just taken away from them, or for citizens of shithole countries with high risk of hyperinflation - you get the gist.
Other than exchanging physical goods (incl. cash), cryptocurrencies are the only way to transfer value in trustless, censorship-free, borderless manner. How do you put a value on that to say whether costs are justified or too high?

As for speed/costs - cryptos are performing pretty good. Bitcoin seems slow compared to other cryptos, but txs are irreversible and settled in average of 10 mins - this is huge advantage over the traditional means. Credit card purchases are rather expensive (especially for small merchants), buyers' could think they're free, but they're not - merchants pay the fees (and pass the costs to the buyers via increased product price, which also reflect costs of fraudulent chargebacks).

I just made a purchase on Aliexpress, my first payment attempt failed for an unknown reason, tried different card - it went through. Now I only have to wait 1 day for them to verify my payment. Wow, how fast and convenient. I'd be happy to pay even $15 fee just to use BTC if they had such option.

What are you talking about? That concept doesn't make any sense. Decentralization is a concept, not an asset. It doesn't have a quantitative value. If that is really what you are asking then your question has no answer.

I had never even heard of Aliexpress but the problem you are describing is most likely not an issue with the credit card. Either way, your evidence is completely anecdotal. The last bitcoin transaction I made took 8 days and cost $40.

Speed/cost may be performing better for crypto recently, but 10 minutes is still WAY too slow. If I go into a store to buy something, I'm not going to wait 10 minutes for the payment to process. Furthermore, the costs for bitcoin transactions are higher than credit card costs to vendors for reasonably small transactions. This problem will only become larger as mining becomes more difficult and fees rise. For bitcoin to be worth anything, it needs to be able to scale to thousands of times its current size, and it is running into major hurdles way before even coming remotely close to that point.

Quote from: pawel7777 on March 07, 2018, 12:39:14 PM

Quote from: ktabb on March 06, 2018, 10:31:18 PM

Quote from: pawel7777 on March 06, 2018, 12:49:40 PM

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Wrong. You only need tokens for decentralised, trustless, anyone-can-participate blockchains. You can have 'private', tokenless blockchains run by authorised nodes.

Actually it is right and you pretty much just admitted it. A centralized and non-trustless blockchain like the one you are describing is completely pointless. You are better off using a database, which would be WAY faster and WAY fewer computational resources.

Private blockchains don't require high computational power (mining hashpower) at all. If it's pointless then why the hell is Swift (and others) spending presumably a fortune to explore/implement blockchain tech? They don't know any better? You want to email them and educate them on the issue?

Your argument is that private blockchains must be valuable otherwise people wouldn't be spending money and looking into it. That argument is horribly flawed. Go read the last few Snapchat earnings reports and tell me that Snapchat Spectacles are valuable. They spent a ton of money on it and then gave up when it fell flat on its face.

One reason I can give you for many companies to be looking into blockchain is that simply saying the word "blockchain" in public will cause a company's stock price to go flying to stupidly high levels. Look at Long Island Blockchain, formerly Long Island Iced Tea. They are an iced tea distributer based on long island and their business has NOTHING to do with blockchain. They announced that they would look into blockchain technology and changed their name, and all of a sudden their stock price surges to wildly irrational levels.

And just to add, the bottom line really is that more and more crypto can be created infinitely, and none of them ever have any intrinsic value (yes, the USD DOES have intrinsic value). The crypto space is infinitely inflationary for this reason, and IMO will eventually fail. It is only getting so much attention because it is new and people made a lot of money. This is not anything remotely like the internet.