“Bitcoin is better than currency in that you don’t have to be physically in the same place and, of course, for large transactions, currency can get pretty inconvenient.”
Yes, bitcoin has some specific traits that are superior to carrying wads of cash. Much like many other forms of digital exchange. This is not really news.
Yes, this is a horribly misleading title (from the article itself). "x is better than y [at a subset of things]" could be misused in so many ways.
It's tempting to completely ignore the article after seeing such a blatant distortion. However, there is some interesting stuff here.
> "Bitcoin is better than currency in that you don’t have to be physically in the same place and, of course, for large transactions, currency can get pretty inconvenient."
So the first feature is already covered by any bank, or Paypal, or numerous other services. I don't understand the second, though...at what point does it become cost prohibitive to make large transactions? Gates is dealing with a totally different level of money than anyone here, so he must have some insight.
> “The customers we’re talking about aren’t trying to be anonymous,” he told Schatzker. “They’re willing to be known, so Bitcoin technology is key and you can add to it or you could build a similar technology where there’s enough attribution where people feel comfortable that this is nothing to do with terrorism or any type of money laundering.”
It sounds like Gates is talking about a system either used as the protocol between financial institutions or something akin to Paypal, without any anonymity. At this point I'm not sure what Bitcoin is doing better than a number of existing services, and if the ledger is public, then privacy is completely out the window (due to Gates suggesting that even the pseudoanonymity in Bitcoin is undesirable). At least with bank transactions I know only my bank and maybe the government can know my purchases. I don't want the whole world having access to that data.
> So the first feature is already covered by any bank, or Paypal, or numerous other services
The point being that the power is in the hands of individuals, you needn't rely on services (though reality is most will rely on services like Circle or Coinbase)
And since bitcoin is mostly unregulated, we get to deal with fun things like exchanges manipulating the market in order to inflate the price of bitcoin, as Mt. Gox did. Worse, every honest exchange will be manipulated too, because a fluctuation at one exchange will always affect every other. The net effect is that we have transferred power from regulated markets whose regulation is enforced by governments to private businesses that manipulate the market.
I don't know how the stock market has dealt with these issues. What if someone were to set up a stock exchange in a country without laws that prohibit market manipulation? Would manipulation at that exchange affect every other exchange, as a bitcoin exchange would? How would traders in America or Europe detect and respond to that manipulation? Surely this is a problem that has already been addressed for the stock market, so maybe bitcoin could use the same solution. (That seems difficult without regulation, but maybe whatever solution the stock market uses could work for bitcoin too.)
Totally! I hate queuing in the bank to manage my account (and of course only open at the time when I'm working too). I hate that Paypal only lets me withdraw to single bank (out of like 50...) here in Taiwan because they misinterpret and misrepresent Taiwanese law (so I have to go and open an account). I hate that it takes days to handle a transfer because of the trust and verification involved. I hate that for some of the places you need particular OS or particular software to do banking (Windows and ActiveX for most banks here if they even have an online banking system, and I'm on Linux), so most often I have to actually walk to an ATM and do my business there (when they are working...).
There are a lot of bitcoin haters out there. I personally could not ever go back exclusively to the old ways. I love that finance is in my own hand!
By the way, this makes me much more generous as well! (I've donated much more via bitcoin directly to people I wanted to support than I'd ever done via fiat: too much hustle, too big cut by others, and they also have their independence and choices of cashing the coins out if they need, or use whatever they want to manage it).
It's more that there is no required middleman. Bitcoin supports having n of x sorts of payment schemes where a third party(ies) have to agree to the transfer before it is released.
Yes, bitcoin has some specific traits that are superior to carrying wads of cash. Much like many other forms of digital exchange. This is not really news.