alt Hacker Newswell actually, you could build a network on top of that (expensive) database... hmm... it's kind of starting to sound like SWIFT.
but you have: no rollbacks, no refunds, no governance to stop bad actors you do gain: immunity from government decisions, theft by state and independence
as unpopular as it might sound like, bitcoin is great for criminals, yes you could say "who decides what is a criminal", well let's make this simple: people who murder and steal.
edit: by "murder and steal" I generally mean something that is "lawfully and/or morally disallowed"
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1) I mean, also great for anyone who sells stuff on places like Craigslist, where the recommendation is to take cash? Taking the standpoint "the consumer is always always correct and refunds should be trivial" sort of works for larger companies that can amortize scams, but you enable a different form of crime (fraud) by adding that feature to small-scale transactions. Hell: many of the modern payment rails you now have to use to buy stuff from vendors at fairs don't have user-accessible refund mechanisms, including Zelle.
2) To the extent to which you really want those features, they are no different than any other in their ability to be built on top of a decentralized database, but now can be done in a way where the rules can be open and anyone can experiment: as an example, you could put your funds into a smart contract that only can transfer money to other people through an escrow mechanism which holds onto the funds for a net-30 period and pays a small fee to the protocol; you then could have the people who own the protocol governance token (and would receive the fees) vote on members to sit on a refund arbitration council (which needs to be somewhat fair or people will stop using the network, crashing the fees they are paid, aligning the incentives in a similar manner to a centralized business doing the same).
> let's make this simple: people who murder and steal.
So many Western governments and their elected officials? The US? Israel?
What about the people in international waters Trump keeps bombing and calling drug criminals? I'm so confused about how you're able to make the delineation of those who "murder and steal" to mean criminals, given that such a distinction puts the government square in the spotlight, and many of the people whom they spend relatively insane amount of resources to target target: drug users/pushers, political activists, immigrants, etc.
Distributed ledgers are good for... targeted activists, people who don't want the government to have the power to arbitrarily weaken their buying power, people seeking safe drugs and medicines, just about anyone needing to be anonymous, and regular people who don't need to justify their economic transactions or risk their wealth being diluted. This "criminals" angle is just farcical, ignorant, and also very tired... you're not the first to suggest it.
> bitcoin is great for criminals
Never understood this soundbite, and I used to be a criminal. Bitcoin is horrible because literally everything is tracked, with minor benefits compared to just dealing with cash or still the best, using the banks you know who look to the side when you need to clean your cash.
The tricky part remains to wash the money, and bitcoin doesn't make that easier, it makes that part harder. But "Bitcoin is great for criminals" is a nice little signal that the person echoing that soundbite probably don't actually know what they're talking about.