I watched a documentation on it the other day and I’m beginning to get pretty fascinated by it. If you’re working on something in the space let me know. Might be fun to collaborate on something.
Last time I heard the Bitcoin was in a lot of technical and non-technical troubles.
Patrick McKenzie summed it up as:
Later he elaborated on the lack of guarantees for transactions (until some 10 minutes later) and some other stuff that made bitcoin a dead horse for me personally. Not that I ever believed in it anyway.
haha I know that patio11 is a huge opponent of bitcoin. I’m a massive nube when it comes to bitcoin/blockchain, but I’m intrigued.
As much as I love patio11, I’m a bit more swayed by the millions of bitcoin users and hundreds of millions of investment pouring into the space than by his arguments to date.
He had a more detailed explanation somewhere, may be even on this forum, but I do not remember where.
The largest showstopper for me was the fact that a transaction that you consider, well, ACID, can be made invalid within 10 minutes, given enough computational power. I.e. if you have 50%+1 of all mining power, you’re able to split the signing path into two, where in your path the transaction never happen. Since you have the majority, your blockchain eventually wins, and the transaction is lost.
I cannot deal with a system that allows for retroactive changes of transaction history.
The storage requirements for signed transactions are just impractical, too.
Actually, I’m pretty happy with CCs, wire transfers and all that – except may be the costs. I was hoping Bitcoin affects the transfer rates, but it failed to do that so far.
As for millions of users and investments – it is normal for a bubble.
Well, 10 years from now we can circle back to this thread and one of us will get to say a big fat “told you so” 
For now I’m less interested in discussing the merits. I’m kind of intrigued and just looking to see whether there happens to be anyone else that is.
There are thousands of fairly smart people working in the space - just curious whether any of them happen to be here. 
Depending on your market the single biggest factor to consider should probably be user adoption. If you are looking b2b it’s probably approaching zero for almost any market. For b2c you might find pockets where there might be some size of possible users who are using Bitcoin.
Nah, the smartest ones have already gone with the Mt.Gox’s $400M+ in bitcoins.
It indeed was a cool tech idea. But by all means, you still have time to jump on the bandwagon. Just do not invest your life savings. 
I get asked a lot if people can pay for my books/courses using Bitcoins (and some of them turn argumentative when I say no, to the point where I now block anyone who talks about bitcoins).
My answer is: Until my landlord, the grocery store, my petrol pump, all start taking bitcoins, I’m out, thanks.
There are plenty of smart people in investment banking, and look where that got us
@rfctr touche
Yes that’s a good point. I hadn’t really thought about that. I’m generally a huge fan of b2b. Here’s a list of applications for reference. Though one of the applications that I’m kind of interested in is software licensing for module purchases, which is b2b. Coming from the Magento space, I know that extension abuse is a bit of an issue.
It’s probably much too ambitious of a project for me but something that seems kind of interesting.
Another idea I have that isn’t very interesting technically but might have a lot of impact would simply be to somehow get involved in trying to grow user adoption. I’m also kind of interested in helping out people in poorer countries (done a few kiva loans, etc.), and it seems like there’s a ton of potential there to help people. I’m not really sure what it would look like but that seems like it might be one of the better areas one could spend there time.
I agree with you that user adoption is the key to whether or not bitcoin is going to grow to be truly mainstream and accomplish the societal goals that it sets out to accomplish.
That seems a bit extreme. I haven’t used many bitcoin exchanges myself personally but based on the research that I’ve been doing recently, it seems to me that it’s trivial and quite frictionless to convert bitcoin to fiat currency within seconds/minutes. So it’s not like you would have to hold the bitcoin for months/years and use it in order to pay your landlord and your grocery store in order.
In fact you would probably be making even more money on the bitcoin transaction than on a regular stripe transaction b/c the fees are lower.
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Any any rate, I’m beginning to get the very distinct sense that the bootstrapper crowd here is pretty anti-bitcoin, which is fine - everyone’s entitled to their opinion and you very well may be right!
I’ll give up my hopes on finding a project buddy here Thanks for the feedback anyways. Cheers.
I disagree. The key to adoption is to make it a legal payment tool. In China it is prohibited for business to use it, in Russia it is qualified as a “surrogate currency” (and those are prohibited).
Sovereign governments are not going to let their citizens to get entangled with something they cannot regulate. This is a road to civil unrest.
US? Yeah, they permit it. Let’s wait for a Mt.Gox-scale disaster on US soil, however.
The question is not how easy it is, but why a landlord would go through that step at all?
Why would I, for that matter? To save transaction fees? But I get conversion fees, I get to spend time doing the conversion, and I have the crazy bitcoin rate fluctuations that makes me feel like I’m not holding a currency, but a HFT stock.
Nah, thank you. I’m old, I’m fat, I love to have a peace of mind, even if it costs a few percent in transaction fees.
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