Quote from: coblee on August 17, 2011, 07:32:47 AM

Quote from: the joint on August 17, 2011, 07:20:44 AM

Quote from: coblee on August 17, 2011, 07:01:51 AM

Quote from: molecular on August 17, 2011, 06:55:42 AM

The Egg of Columbus comes to mind. That's why nobody else did it and people that saw it early had all kinds of objections... "An egg of Columbus or Columbus's egg refers to a brilliant idea or discovery that seems simple or easy after the fact." A million bitcoins is the least he deserves. His "invention" is worth more than that if in the end, we have free money.

+1

I totally agree. I hope he becomes the richest man on earth. What Satoshi was able to come up with on his own was truly remarkable.

In my opinion, only simple bartering remains the solution to all currency issues. It places importance primarily on the process of exchange, not on the products or a currency and thus facilitates healthy person-to-person communication. I think civilization had it right to begin with and then currency came along and jacked the whole thing up (e.g. paper money is not important to me, but it's important to everyone else, so THEN it becomes important to me and displaces my values. Bitcoin is no different).

And, it is also my opinion that the theory behind Bitcoin isn't that brilliant. The brilliance came from putting the pieces together (i.e. taking the theory, creating a mathematical analogue of it, representing that analogue in a computer program, and marketing it) and having the motivation to actually do it without knowing if it would catch on. I, along with many of you, also have many brilliant ideas but we simply don't try to fulfill them to their ends because we think they might fail. If they fail, it's a waste of our damn time. And I have objections to Bitcoin because I think it is weak in theory, but strong enough to 1.) Be better than traditional fiat currencies and 2.) Gain the respect of a significant number of people. It's a currency for the at-least moderately wealthy and computer literate. It is not a currency for the poor or the uneducated (I use uneducated in a very general sense here to represent those who will have trouble understanding it and would need to dedicate a very significant amount of time to do so).

Edit: Any idiot, no matter how dumb, can place their own value on a product they own and place their own value on a product they want. Thus, any idiot can barter and know whether or not they are happy with the exchange.

I disagree that Bitcoin is only for the computer literate. It's true that Today, if you were not computer literate, you may run into issues like losing wallets or mybitcoin fiasco. I believe in the near future, using bitcoins will be as easy as using cash and credit cards. Banks will come up with a safe and easy way for people to store bitcoins. And you will be able to use your smartphone to easily pay merchants and send money to people without needing to know how bitcoins work. For example, right now people use credit cards every day. How many of those understand how Visa charges merchants, how Visa confirms transactions, how chargeback works, or how fraud detection works. And we also use cash every day. How many understand why money is debt, how the Fed can just print money, or even that money can be created by writing a number on a computer without even printing out that money. So people will using bitcoins without having to understand block chains, elliptical cryptography, and hashing.

That's exactly my point. I think overall, it's a little better than what we have now. It's novel, but it still leaves us with many of the larger problems we still have that are the result of any distributive currency.