Quote from: Impaler on February 12, 2014, 05:16:32 AM

The near frothing at the Mouth you see from BTC fanatics to this most basic of ideas shows why their is no hope for rational response or evolution of BTC protocol into something that could actually compete with the mainstream.

You are wrong, and you are being obtuse. Actually, the OP does not recognize the design principles behind Bitcoin. The responses are merely explaining the proper application of those design principles to the problem of transaction arbitration - e.g. arbitration goes on top of Bitcoin, not inside of it.

The way to make Bitcoin competitive as a payment network is for arbitration to be implemented on top of it. This will be more effective than baking arbitration inside of Bitcoin, because it will allow different countries / groups / applications to use systems or mechanisms uniquely suited to their tasks. Arbitration is quite different in mainland China compared to, say, the US.

Consider, for a moment, that Paypal will never win in mainland China. Two corporate / government -sponsored payment systems dominate mainland China - Alipay and Tenpay. But Bitcoin is doing pretty well in China. Bitcoin is completely international because it doesn't default to any authority and can therefore be relied upon by any entity in the world.