Most of the mining is now done in large data centres packed with ASIC miners. Ban it, seize the equipment and the government can immediately begin a 51% attack. Shut down the exchanges leaving only peer to peer exchanges, but now your local exchanger has the legal status of a drug dealer and all the sketchyness that comes with it.
No doubt there will be protocol changes to blacklist the government miners, a cat and mouse game will ensure. Bitcoin will survive, but it will be a tiny fraction of its previous size.
I've been working on a Bitcoin card over the past twelve months so I have had a lot of time to think about the benefits and drawbacks of using Bitcoins for everyday transactions and I completely agree with you, no compelling advantage.
Besides the obvious problem of the volatile exchange rate there is just no trust in any of the Bitcoin institutions, if I can't trust anyone else to manage my Bitcoins I need to do it myself. I can do that, but it takes time and effort to maintain secure systems. The real kicker is if something goes wrong, its my problem. If someone hacks my netbanking details the bank will cover my losses.
So what does Bitcoin offer? it opens up transactions that would have otherwise been too risky. Irreversible electronic transactions are Bitcoins niche. However that fact makes it very difficult to acquire Bitcoins with reversible payment methods. This slows down the process of entering and exiting the Bitcoin market leaving you vulnerable to the volatile exchange rate.
I really want Bitcoin to succeed but at this stage there is no way I would use Bitcoin for a transaction unless it was the only option.
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.
Software! Every time I poke around the code of any sufficiently complex piece of software I find myself overwhelmed with the endless levels of abstraction. One benefit of plateauing hardware performance will be the slowing of the hardware churn. As innovation slows we will hopefully converge on optimal units of computation and interfaces.
As diversity decreases it will be much easier to write libraries that talk directly to the metal, protocols that write directly to the interfaces and applications that run completely isolated at native speed.
Without the towers of abstraction it is much easier to reason about the data structures of your input and output and design optimal algorithms. If we ever do come to this point there will be a renaissance in the field of computer science field.
Maybe. Much of the history of computer science is the layering of abstractions. Indeed, the transition to multi-core hasn't been the disaster that many feared because various abstractions (game engines, rendering engines, Hadoop, etc.) abstract parallelism in important ways where that parallelism is actually needed.
I have had no issues with them, was about 48 hours after signing up to get my first Bitcoins. Supports 24 hour bank transfers or 1 hour cash deposits if you need them fast.
Using Apples definition of Retina 140dpi is Retina quality when viewing from approximately 60cm. That is about how far I sit from my screen, 140 would definitely be great.
Around Singapore surprised me as well. Reading a few reports they mostly robbing the crews valuables, I guess you wouldn't really have anywhere to take a hijacked ship in that area.
