pkrfce9;381924 wroteso pokerstars is threatened because a few pros want to start a site with low rake? i think you are negating the value of the network effect. this is a facebook vs myspace kind of thing.
or are they threatened because jurisdictions won't allow their citizens to participate? wouldn't that impact these new guys, too?
how does bitcoin make these guys more competitive?
My full explanation would be difficult to believe at this point, but I can say we are heading for a decentralized business model for the game. First we will see an explosion of different poker site projects each offering a hybrid of today's model and the decentralized model. The significance is in decentralized poker there are no servers needed, no staff, no legal fees, no regulation fees and so on. Just like bitcoin, poker can run on its own network owned and operated by nothing but the community that uses it. We are little ways from this but we are already seeing projects on the go.
So one site will offer 5% rake, and shortly after a clone will appear with say 4%. As poker players get smarter (which the general field is), this will become a very significant factor in which games they choose to support.
Stars and other big sites will have difficultly adjusting to this change because their "network" is not scalable in this manner, they cannot keep up with the granular change these sites will offer.
Those that wish to adhere to regulations can, and bitcoin regulations in this sense are tending to be favorable in most of the significant parts of the world (completely legal in Canada for example.)
Players will soon demand that sites store players money on an observable block chain so their money can always be accounted for. Governments and players alike will appreciate this. Sites that don't do this, won't be trusted anymore.
i don't get the whole crytpo love.
* there is no intrinsic value. (you could say the same about fiat money but there are reasonable arguments against that) you could just invest your money in the next pokemon cards.
I think you make a valid point about collectables, and in fact it was exactly that quiltiy of currency Nick Szabo pointed out in "shelling out"
Shelling Out: The Origins of Money | Satoshi Nakamoto Institute I encourage everyone to read the paper as it is quite interesting. A small history of money in relation to the Americas pre and post Columbus with a very important solution to the Kula ring.
I am of the opinion this is the essay Nash is referring to in the opening line of ideal money (plus adam smiths welath of nations). The essay is important to understanding bitcoin which to me means that it was the missing link in our economic history that was needed to extrapolate the concept. It also has suggestion about how we might view early man (Neanderthal etc.)
More importantly though, gold, and fiat, do not really have intrinsic value, which always seems funny that people like to point out bitcoin has none. Bitcoin sucks its value from the inefficiency of our markets it absorbs and solves, it is like a virus that is smaller than other currencies and it can work its way to places that other's cant. This has the effect of bridging different aspects of our economy we never though possible, and this brings value to the world as a whole while simultaneously creating a channel for this value.
Basically everything we covet gold or fiat for, bitcoin can clone and do better (way better) and more.
* there is no secure way to store it (wallets get lost/stolen, hard drives fail, passwords are forgotten, PCs get hacked, 'banks' get hacked, some 'banks' are scammers)
I'm not sure how you could think this is different than money, and what's truer to say is that your money is never "safe" in anyway of these ways and bitcoin can have any level of safety one choose. Forgotten passwords can be protected in many ways, but most important is that again, bitcoin is far more secure than fiat, ask Argentina their government confiscated their bank accounts.
* it is NOT anonymous. it is about as traceable as credit card payments.
well I think its quite alot less traceable actually, but there are many crypto coins that are completely anonymous, and one just needs to transfer into them and out to break the path of transactions.
* i don't get no rebates on transactions like i do with my capital one!
Yes but I think we are not accounting for the 20% interest plus other hidden fess such as POS with the machine. Bitcoin transactions cost far less than any credit card network could hope to provide, this will put pressure on them in the short term and dissolve them in the long term. But new projects come out every day that will offer a superior product to your credit card.
* it is open to a lot of scams without a middleman like paypal to ensure delivery of goods.
just think of bitcoin paypal then ;)
* in the not too distant future, the encryption will be hacked. if that guy is smart, he'll keep quiet about it, preferring riches over showing people how 'smart' he is
This part I wanted to get to and hope you read. It's simply not true and this is what we will find is actually a religious belief we never knew we had. We are used to these kinds of things being "too good to be true", but the "magic" of bitcoin or the reason people are fanatic about it, is because it really is that good.
In order to hack bitcoin you don't just hack a program, you have to have more computing power than 51% of the bitcoin network, and that means you are fighting with the entire community that wants to keep it up and running. Currently the power is something like 2500 time 500 supercomputers. There is not enough computing power in the world to hack the network, other than the network itself!
The solution is actually in this letter from nash to the nsa in 1955
https://www.nsa.gov/public_info/_files/nash_letters/nash_letters1.pdf
Its quite simple, the size of the encryption or level is adjust to the network attacking it, effectively rendering it un decryptable. In 1955 to present day, the governments would hunt you down for this knowledge. We are lucky it got out.
V. Buterin the 20 year old kid from around your area who is going to rock the world with ethereum, explained that even a quantum computer (which we don't have) can't crack bitcoin.
If we follow the game of economy though, we can see bitcoins purpose (in the grand scheme of the creator of man), is to creative incentive to crack it by use of quantum computing. There is now incredible economic drive for man and governments to create a quantum computer, and I think we will see this very shortly as bitcoin starts to really take hold in our global civilization. But of course by then everyone will have so much wealth, it won't be one of those end of the world things, but the beginning of a new era.
* i could go on but i don't feel like putting any more time into this :)
but you'll probably get rich investing in it. just like buying and selling bre-x, nortel or rim at the right time.
Please do go on, i like hearing from grounded view points because I'm obviously too immersed in the material.
But imagine for example everyone saving 1 cent on 1 transaction in the world on one day, in the context that there actual was less waste and so the value stays in the economy. That value gets reinvested to create more efficiency, which creates and saves more value.
This is happening on a mass scale, and there will be some resistance friction and lag....but it turns out all these issues in the world were waiting to be solved by a universal currency. The issue always was that no government could create such a currency.
I also read a post with the same initials as the bitcoin's creators pseudonym suggesting that the "brics" network could invest 250 million in bitcoin and create a financial network that could create a perfect couterpoint to SWIFT. There has been mega economic wars and suppression that the general people have no idea exists, brics taking on bitcoin as their network would create and economy statelmate between the world to biggest superpowers (divided by swift and non swift) overnight.
Bitcoin was presented to the public as a gimmick to get it to the point where the network could not be hacked by any superpower in the world, now that it is there, we have it....we win.