Quote from: knightcoin on March 05, 2014, 10:49:51 PM

you just need a public key, you can print it out if you like ... anyone can go to the blockchain and say .. yep I can see you go it .. do you have a private key? then you just need to sign a message with a private key to prove that you control the bitcoins ..

With no machines (ie. miners) to process your transactions, you have only a piece of paper with a QR code. No one will accept that as payment. Bitcoin does nothing as a protocol in a vacuum. It has to exist inside of a computer in the real world to be useful.

Cash on the other hand, requires nothing additional but itself. You hand me product, I hand you cash, we are done. The downside of cash is that it does require proximity or trusted courier, (ie. banks).

Bitcoin solves the proximity and courier problems by bringing computers and networks into the equation. We can't then ignore them and only believe the protocol is the security of bitcoin. The network is the currency as much as the protocol.

We seem to further confuse the situation by pointing fingers and saying it's someone else's problem to solve. For the adoption of bitcoin the protocol, this is everyone's problem. The only answer can't be "Don't trust bad people with your BTC." We have to trust services with our BTC temporarily to do business in a lot of case. We've seen some supposed pillar services of the community famously blow up or implode over the years not to mention the last few weeks.

As banks are the infrastructure fiat/cash lives in; computers and networks are the infrastructures digital currency lives in. Everything that cryptographic trust is built on assumes the hardware it is running on can be trusted (and by proxy the owners). It has been proven time and again this isn't always the case. Systems are compromised all the time. Whether it be outside from a hacker or from internal theft.

Currently cash and banks don't suffer to the same extent from these problems. They use the same internet we do, so it can't be just technology. Your checking account balance doesn't disappear overnight with no paper trail as has happened time and again to customers of various bitcoin services and exchanges. Banking is so heavily regulated, the money leaves a trail wherever it goes. Where did all of the Flexcoin funds go?

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