Quote from: CoinCube on February 24, 2014, 05:52:34 AM

Quote from: AnonyMint on February 24, 2014, 03:03:20 AM

Quote from: CoinCube on February 24, 2014, 02:06:17 AM

Fiat's advantages include reversible transactions with the ability to go to the court system in the event of fraud or theft.

Multi-party signature in Bitcoin and contracts in Ethereum allow for escrow and reversible transactions. The court system is orthogonal to which currency is used.

Perhaps but any transaction that might needs court intervention will need to be done in a non-anonymous way. Also at least for the immediate future the courts are likely to take fiat claims more seriously. I would argue that this is a current advantage of fiat although technology and case law in the court system may undermine this advantage over time.

Parties to a crypto-currency transaction can reveal their identities if they choose to. That can be stipulated in (even) a (decentralized) contract. It is also possible to envision civil courts making decisions based on the facts without identities of who did them.

I don't see any sustainable advantage, rather just a lack of understanding and development of the feature set in crypto-currencies at this time.

Quote from: CoinCube on February 24, 2014, 05:52:34 AM

Quote from: AnonyMint on February 24, 2014, 03:03:20 AM

Quote from: CoinCube on February 24, 2014, 02:06:17 AM

Physically it is a comparatively a cheap system to run without the high cost of a proof of work system.

Not true. We have to pay for all the bloated government, VISA fees, and debt that central banking sustains. Proof-of-work is much less expensive.

Correct but that is only our present condition. In theory without all the bloated government, VISA fees, and debt (stripped of all the fat) the actual technical cost to run a lean centralized fiat currency is (theoretically) cheaper then a decentralized cryptocurrency. I will concede that this condition is nothing like the world we live in today. The point I am making here is that in theory fiat may become cost competitive again in the (probably distant) future once the waste is stripped from the system. I will clarify the OP in this area.

Emphatically disagree.

The Communists always argue ideologically that it is more efficient to not have competition. However reality has proven their ideology to be more inefficient than decentralized competition.

Have you compared the uptime and reliability of a Microsoft server versus a Linux server. The Bazaar (decentralized, open source) model trumps the Cathedral (top-down, closed source) model for large scale systems. I wrote about this having the only known positive scaling law of software engineering. Only vertical markets such as finely tuned graphical software has so far resisted the Bazaar model.

On the issue of positive scaling laws, here follows some more links to read in addition to the one above:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=365141.msg4896314#msg4896314
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=365141.msg4906024#msg4906024
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=365141.msg4906694#msg4906694
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=365141.msg4926212#msg4926212

I will repeat again, that I see the death of the nation-state ahead. The decentralized technology makes the nation-state irrelevant and in fact all the nation-states are very corrupt because THEY MUST BE. Decentralization technology terminates their lease on raison d'état.

Quote from: CoinCube on February 24, 2014, 05:52:34 AM

Quote from: AnonyMint on February 24, 2014, 03:03:20 AM

Quote from: CoinCube on February 24, 2014, 02:06:17 AM

Transaction times must also be slower than those of a fiat system.

I believe there can be a technical solution to make them fast enough (as in seconds).

No one to my knowledge had developed such a solution. Until they do the statement stands on its merits.

I have described technically how to do it.