The "network" exists virtually on top of physical devices that contain gold.
The same can easily be said about silicon. Moreso, in fact.
Should we make Silicon our money?
If you're going to talk about what made gold MONEY, bitcoin does all of those things better.
Lukep is the pretty much the biggest ignoramous on wickedfire at this point.
That was fast. Just one post and not even directed at me, congrats on your achievement.
Just remember when bitcoins become actual money worth tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars per coin, this "ignoramous" was advising you to grab some back when they were under $50 each.
/ignore
If you really believe that you might want to read up on how
gold and
silver are actually used in our everyday lives and compare that to how
bitcoin is used.
I do believe it, but of course I'll admit that bitcoin has not reached that potential yet. Give it a decade bro...
Bitcoin is exactly where the web was back in 1990. Back then we had Bulletin boards and AOL, but every single thing you used back then was a tiny, minuscule subset of one particular function of connectivity.
Http had not been seen yet. There was no internet browser yet. You could barely make use of the web, and your dad thought it was just a passing fad. Still, the infrastructure was being laid and people around the globe were talking to each other.
Web browsers were the '
killer app' of the internet. We're not sure yet to be honest what the killer app is going to be of bitcoin; there seem to be limitless possibilities.
To me, it's the invincibility of free speech that is most exciting. I'd hand over all my bitcoins this minute to whomever could guarantee that the blockchain remains unspoiled by all future world governments... But Satoshi appears to have already done the job.
Ok, so you can encode arbitrary data in the bitcoin blockchain.
You can encode arbitrary data in matter as well (without random people with lots of silicon telling you otherwise).
And bullets can blow that matter away easily.
Without bitcoin, it's still possible to transmit and store arbritrary data around the world. I am doing it right now. Maybe a widespread network specifically designed for storing more than 20 bytes at a time would be a better idea (quit outting matt).
Be a programmer and look further ahead at the code's promise Matt.
I actually have a question luke. What happens if / when BTC reaches $10k/coin? That simple 0.001 BTC fee that gets attached to every transaction is going to be $10. So I have to spend $15 to pay for something that costs $5? That's no good.
Yes, they've already got plans to lower the mining fee on a set schedule with the price of bitcoin. I believe it'll happen soon in fact, probably once bitcoin hits $1k. This will never really be a problem... Satoshi was a stone cold genius.
How long before exchanges start using mBTC as a standard unit instead of one btc? It is approaching $1k and you already see a lot of fractional buy and sell orders. I think, not long before that happens..
Exchanges probably won't ever do that... It'd be confusing.
Wallets and merchants of course will need to do that every 3 more Zeros.
In fact there's a thread on bitcointalk now about skipping millibit and jumping straight to microbit because this growth rate is too high.
