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Comment by wildmusings | Hacker News Reader

I’m not sold on Bitcoin but I don’t agree with your definition of what it needs to be successful. There is no reason that actual bitcoin end-users need to deal directly in bitcoin. If Bitcoin were to ever become a major currency, a big if, there would be financial institutions (banks) issuing instruments (physical or digital notes) backed by real bitcoins held by those institutions. Real bitcoin transactions would be mostly performed between such institutions, or anyone else willing to pay the higher transaction fees. Most people would have their needs perfectly served by relying on bitcoin banks, at least for performing frequent transactions. Though they might very well seek to hold large sums directly in BTC.

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Bitcoin and The Blockchain are only useful when you absolutely can't trust anybody but yourself. Why would financial institutions need Bitcoin and its immense overhead when they all can use the law as a tool to ensure adequate trust? If they can trust each other at that level, all they need is a simple database.

In other words, "financial institutions" have no need for the blockchain.

Want proof? You think the NASDAQ uses anything more than a (fancy, probably very high priced, extremely robust) database to store its stuff? They deal with all kinds of people who are actively trying to fuck them over every day and every second. They have no need for the blockchain. Neither does any other "financial institution".

What if russia and china decide to start their own global trade system based on something. http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-12-02/russia-china-and-br... And they don't trust eachother because well why would they. Would they have a use for a global, distributed, trustless system to keep inventory?

This defeats the entire purpose of bitcoin. The goal is a decentralized currency that isn’t controlled by shady political interests, and can reasonably replace normal currency.

Why would you want Bank 2.0?

Bank 2.0 could also run its ledger of debts and credits on a public/easily auditable blockchain, and make a lot of guarantees that Bank 1.0 can't.

There will always be derivatives of underlying assets. Preventing that is not the “entire point” of bitcoin. Replacing the underlying asset, currently fiat currency, is the point.

No it doesn't. The purpose of Bitcoin is sound money.. A finite currency immune to governments' and central banks' desire to devalue currency for debt financing.

Bitcoin is more scarce and therefore better store of value than any fiat currency could ever be.

Do you not understand second layer solutions do not put your Bitcoin at risk? You commit to a payment channel which defaults to closing the channel according to original amounts when opened.. if the other party doesn't follow through. Again, your funds are not at risk so it's not like a bank, and there's no fractional reserve nor devaluing, so the SOV use case is preserved.

Not at all like current fiat money system.

You can certainly have fractional reserve banking in a Bitcoin financial system, just as we did under the gold standard. Banks would give you an incentive to deposit BTC with them (could be interest rates or lower transactions fees) and then lend out some percent of those deposits. Voila, FRB and money supply growth.

The bank would have no capital to lend at fractional reserve. It could not lend out 90% deposit value without getting run on, because there is no deposit insurance. There is no M1 money supply growth coming from the central bank. You would be buying a bond but also necessarily acknowledging the possibility of default, unlike today in the funny money world of perpetual debt money.

Fractional reserve banking predates deposit insurance by hundreds of years. All of what you say was also true about gold, which was of relatively static supply.

Well bitcoin fluctuates like crazy for one. It shouldn't cost me more than a dollar to make a transaction. Some exchanges charge upwards of $4/transaction now.

The vision was, you can have transactions of any value with very minimal fees. like less than 10 cents. People would have micro transactions for all sorts of things.

But what it has now become is a place to store your money. 10X growth in one year. And you can't trust your exchange to still be there when everyone tries to convert that 10X back to cash if the price were to take a dip.

I would love to see online marketplaces taking a flat fee in cents because they can bypass dumb credit card percentage based fees and can still be profitable because they are doing it at scale processing thousands of transactions a second on a digital currency

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