Well drugs. As much as people want to dismiss drug culture because it's illegal (not necessarily meaning that it's immoral). Even if you dismiss the use case of drugs, it's hard to deny how successful these sites are at pioneering nearly p2p marketplaces compared to something like Amazon.
There is also the case of having a safe storage of funds. The seizures of bank accounts in Greece and the actions some governments are taking to stop capital flight speak to the use of bitcoin as a way of storing value.
Gambling is another huge use case. Anyone who has a lick of experience dealing with deposit/withdrawal from gambling services know how inconvenient it is to actually move money around.
Online sales are another use case. It's far easier to verify buyer information and funds. You also save the 10%+ in fees that you would pay using a service like ebay.
> Online sales are another use case. It's far easier to verify buyer information and funds. You also save the 10%+ in fees that you would pay using a service like ebay.
Do you mean using the blockchain as an escrow service? True, but that's not "bitcoin the currency", it's the blockchain.
The rest of the use cases run a huge regulatory risk.
You can't just take away the pre-built directives as they are a core module of "vanilla Angular" as stated on the front page of the API docs. From controllers (ngController), to models (ngModel), to looping (ngRepeat), to the actual app itself (ngApp), directives are fundamental to using Angular. Taking away core directives would be like taking away selectors from jQuery, or models from backbone; without them, the framework is pretty much useless.
Marionette is terrible. The code is a mess: prototypes defined within instances [0]. Uninformed use of design patterns: controllers are what, just namespaces? [1] Unmodular internals, almost like globals [2].
Marionette is a solid framework. It has everything you need to build fast, and clean: regions (which were a great step in the right direction and will be improved in V2), composite/collection views, layouts... the basics are there for you to work with how you would like.
You've made three points which I can't see much fault with. Why the hate?
I'm sorry but [0] and [1] are complete non-issues and I'm not sure I fully understand your point with [3].
The code is very far from terrible. Go look at Marionette's source on github - you'll find it's extremely easy to understand and reason about. Now try and do the same with Angular or Ember...
This is the biggest joke since the HSBC scandal broke. Feds dont care about real criminals laundering money. They just like it as a convenient scapegoat when it involves an enemy of the state.
Also the US is not the world power anymore. They have no authority to 'flag' any currency.
Wikipedia isnt gaming the system to make wikipedia relevant. Theyre not ramping up efforts to get inbound links from random blog websites. If anything this shows that RapGenius's numbers were hyper-inflated by SEO games rather than user relevance.
If someone hacks your netbanking details and sends the money before you realize it the bank most certainly not cover your losses. Debit card fraud transactions have a very short window to report. It's a good thing that you have a 4 digit pin because 4 digits is secure
Bitcoin allows a merchant to recognizing a transaction without considering fraud/KYC. I've sold items on a forum with an escrow moderator and paid 0% in fees. You just cant do that with paypal.
The debit card is definitely the weak link, I should get into a habit of minimising its balance. The internet banking is a lot better, they do guarantee it and have two factor authentication.
Good to hear you using Bitcoins for something other than dark markets, we should try to brainstorm other niches where Bitcoin has an edge. I think taxi drivers might warm to it, they definitely hate credit cards.
Conversely it's illegal to take money which wasn't intended to be sent to you.
Let's say you accidentally type in the wrong BSB (which my father actually did once) and it happens to line up with an account number in that bank (fortunately for him it did not). Even if you send say, $150,000 to that person....it's not legal for that person to accept it. Nor spend it.
See, while they could claim to have spent a portion of it unknowingly the courts would probably view that as fair, they couldn't go "hey I'm rich!" and buy a house that they would be allowed to keep.
I mean, you might not get all the 150k back in the end, but they would definitely not be keeping any of it. And through this process, you'd generally find your bank would be fairly enthusiastic about getting that money back, since as long as it's not on their ledgers they can't lend against it.
Everyone gets every message. There is no solution here to the data bloat problem. Other than that the project forks bitcoin to make a namecoin clone (distributed authorization), which I dont see the need for since a private key already identifies me.
The reason something like namecoin is to allow people to update their identity in the event the first identity was compromised/blocked.
This is not true. Followers are established by connecting to bittorrent swarms. From the paper: "The last network is a collection of possibly disjoint “swarms” of followers, based on the Bittorrent protocol, which can be used for efficient near-instant notification delivery to many users."
Furthermore, not all clients need to store and reseed all messages they receive. More seeders is obviously better for network health, but it's not always a reasonable option. The paper suggests that clients can choose to be "achivists" which means that they keep messages and seed them to others (so it's optional). Clients like mobile phones could easily disable this behavior.
Also Twister can't use Namecoin because the incentives are wrong. In Namecoin, miners get to create domains. It would be horrible if only Twister miners could make accounts. Instead they get to make promoted posts, so it has to be a separate implementation.
I used to believe that the reversibility of transactions was a major benefit of using cards, but it turns out that is really just a reversibility of liability.
Credit cards are an outdated tool. They pass plain text data about a user to authorize a transaction allowing hackers to pull something off like the Target hack. One of the advantages of bitcoin is the ability to digitally authorize a transaction that cannot be reused. In an online marketplace it's far far easier to accept bitcoins than credit cards because you have no fraud risk, which is a HUGE problem in online retail.
I expect a lot of online retail stores to start accepting bitcoin payments at large discounts to cash just for this reason.
> In an online marketplace it's far far easier to accept bitcoins than credit cards because you have no fraud risk, which is a HUGE problem in online retail.
I'm not sure how you are getting this. Bitcoin is absolutely susceptible to various forms of fraud. Let's make this a bit more concrete: assume eBay accepts BTC. I could sign up for a seller account, make some auction listings, once some people buy them, never ship the goods, and disappear. I could set up a fake seller account, list some fake items, and then also make a fake buyer account, purchase the fake goods with my fake buyer account from my fake seller account, report that everything went well, and now I've laundered some money. That kind of activity can cripple a business.
As a consumer, the irreversability of BTC transactions is a bug, not a feature. You only need to look at the incredible amount of fraud that's happened in the Dogecoin community to see how fraudulent activity can be rampant, and can harm consumer confidence. Consumers expect the ability to be able to initiate a chargeback when fraudulent activity happens. You can't do that with just plain old BTC. When I was home over the holidays, the local TV station ran a story about how you should be using credit cards rather than debit cards to purchase things online, specifically because the credit cards' chargeback policies are often better. "With a credit card, you'll have the money taken off your statement, but with a debit card, it could take over two weeks to get your money back." etc.
Bitcoin is digital cash. Online stores don't allow you to mail them an envelope with $20 inside, because that would be kind of ridiculous for all parties involved. It's only when certain financial instruments are built on top of Bitcoin that have the same kinds of consumer protection and regulatory compliance built in.
> Let's make this a bit more concrete: assume eBay accepts BTC. I could sign up for a seller account, make some auction listings, once some people buy them, never ship the goods, and disappear.
This already is a problem on ebay. People post dishonest listings all the time and run with the cash. You have the additional problems of people buying goods with stolen cards or running up the price of an item with no intention of purchasing. With BTC you can verify that a bidder is able to pay for an item, and you can immediately hold the funds in escrow. There is no "overcharging" a Bitcoin account.
> As a consumer, the irreversability of BTC transactions is a bug, not a feature.
Bullshit. Credit card companies are paying people with their own fat. The 3% cashback that you get on purchases for gas and food comes from the profit theyre making on top of that. Many local stores give cash discounts when buying goods, and some refuse to accept cards because they are so expensive.
> It's only when certain financial instruments are built on top of Bitcoin that have the same kinds of consumer protection and regulatory compliance built in.
We dont need your middlemen. I dont need an account to hold my funds when I sell an item online. I dont want to give eBay, paypal, et al, a unilateral authority to withdraw from my bank accounts.
Agree with everything you said. Credit cards have useful consumer protections baked in. What happens when you look at it from the merchant's perspective? Lets say someone buys something from me with a card, I ship it out, but then it turns out the card was stolen. Who takes the loss? The merchant or the credit card company? I guess what I'm trying to figure out is whether or not the irreversibility of a transaction might be a good thing for merchants dealing with fraudulent buyers.
Generally speaking, the merchant takes the loss. It would be a good thing for the merchant, except then, they wouldn't have any buyers. I know I wouldn't use a financial instrument structured like that, especially when there's a plethora of ones where I don't hold that liability.
M-of-N transactions solve most of the trust problems with online marketplaces without having to cede total authority to the escrow service. If you want to favor the buyer in disputes a la paypal, that's easy, but the worst thing that can happen in the case of a false positive (from the seller's perspective) is the loss of a single transaction, rather than having an entire account frozen.
M of N is useful, yes. All I'm saying is that reversibility is an important part of online transactions, and you need _some_ kind of mechanism here to facilitate trust.
> In an online marketplace it's far far easier to accept bitcoins than credit cards because you have no fraud risk, which is a HUGE problem in online retail.
I currently work for a large online marketplace. A very typical fraud scenario (maybe the most common) is someone collecting payment for an item that they don't actually possess. This would only be harder to deal with and correct if the payment were disbursed to an anonymous seller in bitcoins.
So now the online marketplace has to run an escrow service as well. If they're going to do that, why not run an escrow service for credit card transactions? You pay the marketplace, the seller ships the goods, you confirm that you got them (or the seller proves that the shipment took place), and then the marketplace pays the seller. I don't see how Bitcoin really provides any innovation that isn't already available in this particular situation.
If it's not a core competency (although for certain marketplaces, it may be), you can use a 3rd party escrow.
You're already effectively using an escrow service when you provide a Credit Card payment option; you just don't get to choose who provides the service, you can't unbundle it from a larger product offering, you have very little control over it, it doesn't work well for certain types of goods & services, and it's built on top of a pull payment network instead of a push payment network.
I agree that un-bundling the escrow from the rest of the stack would be a good thing. However, I think it is important to keep in mind that replacing credit cards with something less effective (for whatever definition of "effective" matters) than credit cards isn't a true replacement.
The way I am thinking about it is sort of like those threads on HN where someone says "You can create a Dropbox clone in N lines of X and an external hard drive". That's NOT a Dropbox "clone", but rather something that could be used to replace Dropbox for some people some of the time. It would take much, much more to replace Dropbox, and maybe someone will get it right someday. Same goes for Bitcoin, it's fine to think of alternative financial networks (awesome, in fact, I hate banks!) but it's important not to get ahead of ourselves.
I would argue in this case that Bitcoin is likely to be more effective in a huge number of cases, not less effective.
I agree with the first part of your second paragraph, but I don't necessarily think it's going to apply here for any places where we see Bitcoin in wide deployment.
I disagree, because I don't think Bitcoin is a very good currency, and even if it had the potential to be a good currency at some point in the past, that potential has been destroyed by speculative hoarding and a mining arms race. The linked-to article makes clear that it isn't necessarily "Bitcoin" that is promising, but the end-run around the financial services industry that it is trail-blazing for everyone else. I agree with this sentiment, and really I had never considered it the way he stated it. However, if you see Bitcoin itself, as a currency, differently, then it makes sense we would disagree on its worth as a replacement for credit cards.
As an online retailer, what do you do if someone reports fraud? Shrug your shoulders and tell them they should have been more careful with their wallet?
If Bitcoin == cash, what does a storefront do if someone comes to them and says "my stolen cash was used to buy items here"? Usually nothing, yes? Is that what we're saying is the burden of responsibility for an online store with Bitcoin?
That's a significant reason why many people do not use cash for all their purchases. The consumer protection of credit cards is one of their primary benefits. Bitcoin takes away all of those protections.
But the fees are a lot lower and it doesn't mean that those protections can't be added back on on a different layer. You can also do a lot more with Bitcoin than with CCs.
Magnetic stripes are outdated, but smartcards fix that problem.
Reversable transactions moves the onus of security to the people who can really do something about it. A consumer can only chose "purchase or do not purchase", whereas a merchant can elect to use (for example) more secure payment methods and stronger identity verification.
There is no reason we cannot have credit card like things that do not pass plain text authorization. I believe some places have already switched to useing smart cards which leverage cryptography to proved identification without revealing the secret. I'm not sure exactly what crypto is used in practice, but as a proof of concept you can imagine this being done with normal public key chryptography.
The only reason is that credit card companies haven't implemented such a system.
I'm actually shocked that we've been able to use our current pull payments system for so long without more problems than we've currently seen.
One innovation I did like (which I only saw when I was using Bank of America) was a feature that allowed you to create new, internet-only, credit card numbers on the fly with a self-chosen credit limit that was tied to your checking account. I would have loved to see this implemented in a physical card so that you could just use a different cc# for each separate transaction and only authorize it (in perpetuity) for the exact amount of the transaction.
What is the motivation of twister over bitmessage + namecoin. Namecoin is already a decentralized authorization/registration crypto network and bitmessage is a POW based P2P messaging system. The use of DHT seems novel, and it may be interesting to see if the bitmessage community had a reason not to use it.
I'm not trying to attack the idea. I just want to understand what novel work is being done here. Cheers.
For starters, I'd probably use this over Bitmessage for the easier to use UI alone. This one also seems to be a little more focused on public messages, too. It looks like a fully decentralized version of Twitter, which could be more appealing to some people.
Bitmessage is for any messaging system. You can broadcast (twitter), send private message (email), or start a channel (IRC). The key in bitmessage is that to send a message you have to do a POW according to the size of the message you are sending.
Even then you still have massive data bloat problems, which I dont see DHT alone solving.
Reading Bitmessage broadcasts requires following the user, so you can't see replies if you're not subscribed to the replying user. Twister feels more like Twitter, including searching, hashtags, etc.
Though I guess you could leverage BM's protocol and infrastructure to do that too (broadcasts are public you'd just have to filter the noise).
The few times I installed bitmessage to see what it looked like it escaped me I could actually broadcast messages à la twitter. Might check out that part of the package in the coming future. Thanks for pointing it out.
As someone who went to Harvey Mudd I can attest that the program is very well designed. All Mudd students (CS/Eng/Math/Physics/Bio/Chem) are required to take some computer science courses. And theyve done a tremendous job at gearing those courses for people who have never coded in their life, and people who have been coding since they were 5.
I know this is bad, but financial institutions haven't exactly been reliable, honest, faultless or good, particularly the last few years. My own experiences have been bad, but the world still hasn't pulled out of the hole that the financial industry dug, so I'm pretty well off and lucky if I'm compare myself to the average. I'd suggest a different standard to hold this company to.
Having spent some time in financial institutions, I can only agree with lastlogin's point. It's important to remember that there are many such mistakes in large financial institutions every day.
If I could post on yc and quickly get a response from my bank, I'd be a happy customer.
One time I had almost 1 million extra dollars show up in my Waterhouse Brokerage account. I thought, "huh, that's interesting." It disappeared 4 days later.
Yup, it wasn't as much, but I magically had 10k show up after I made a deposit through a bank teller that stayed there for 2 weeks before finally disappearing.
My father withdrew cash from an ATM a while back, he got less than he asked for but had the asked for amount deducted from his account. He complained. The manager of the bank nodded knowingly when he complained. He wasn't believed. He was told that at the end of the month they would do a stocktake and see. Some months later it was credited back. This is about the best of my bad banking stories. The time our deposit for a house got lost was stressful several years of hard hard saving vanished during a transaction.
I suppose that even with this, bitcoin banks still appear to be far more reputable establishments at the moment than say, either RBS or the Co-op, unless Rob Ford has founded one recently.
There is also the case of having a safe storage of funds. The seizures of bank accounts in Greece and the actions some governments are taking to stop capital flight speak to the use of bitcoin as a way of storing value.
Gambling is another huge use case. Anyone who has a lick of experience dealing with deposit/withdrawal from gambling services know how inconvenient it is to actually move money around.
Online sales are another use case. It's far easier to verify buyer information and funds. You also save the 10%+ in fees that you would pay using a service like ebay.