Quote from: Medusah on Today at 09:47:45 PM

Quote from: legiteum on Today at 07:54:03 PM

The laws haven't changed in the last 14 years and they aren't going to change in the next 140

. Bitcoin was designed intentionally to be slow and expensive e.g. PoW. If it was easy/fast/cheap to create a node and certify transactions, the paradigm would fail.

At this point, it seems like you're simply trolling. The fact that laws haven't changed over the past decade doesn't mean they won't change in the next decade, or even in the next century... By the way, Proof-of-Work does not relate to the network's speed.

I don't know about "trolling", but do you think the speed of light will change in the future? I'm personally banking on that staying the same for as long I am alive, at least

.

And by "network" here I mean the infrastructure supporting Bitcoin, not the interconnect specifically.

Quote from: legiteum on Today at 09:22:42 PM

Because you can't reverse a PayPal transaction, either.

Absolutely not true. Paypal transactions are reversible: https://www.paypal.com/us/brc/article/bank-reversals-guide.

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Yes, but it's not reversible within their infrastructure. Another payment service using blockchain would have the same exact thing. In other words, if you paid in Bitcoin for something you bought from an online retailer and they were unable to deliver it, they would have a procedure for "reversing the transaction" which would entail another Bitcoin transaction. This is not functionally different than PayPal, a credit card, or anything else.

And again, if you want to switch the topic to the internal infrastructure, PayPal is absolutely not "erasing the transaction from existence" when they refund a transaction, the data is absolutely there, stored approximately forever, just like a block in the Bitcoin blockchain is. There are many other ways to securely ensure the permanence of data besides the way Bitcoin does it, or with a blockchain architecture. Indeed, a centralized blockchain or one with relatively few nodes would be far more dangerous than any typical regulated US financial institution.

And of course Bitcoin itself could potentially (however unlikely) be taken over by China so I would surmise that Bitcoin is significantly less safe than say PayPal as well (although for my own purposes I would easily trust them both).