Bitcoin sucks. No, seriously. Mining is so energy hungry, that the whole system has to have been conceived by a bunch of climate change deniers (which might even be true). The clients look like the wet dreams of calcified COBOL programmers. And even worse: voodoo chart analysts are already refocusing from NYSE data to MtGox exegesis.
Bitcoin is great. No, seriously. If you don’t believe me, ask Marc Andreesen (he who did put a nice face on the webs, so that everybody can use it). Now he thinks, that Bitcoin matters and wrote everything up in a must read New York Times OpEd (which true Bitcoin enthusiast are already nitpickingly try to dissect).
It matters, because …
… Bitcoin gives us, for the first time, a way for one Internet user to transfer a unique piece of digital property to another Internet user, such that the transfer is guaranteed to be safe and secure, everyone knows that the transfer has taken place, and nobody can challenge the legitimacy of the transfer. The consequences of this breakthrough are hard to overstate.
This may sound a bit unwieldy. But, as he says: The consequences of this breakthrough are hard to overstate.
Let me repeat this one more time:
The consequences of this breakthrough are hard to overstate.
This may sound a bit strange, if you look at the most popular crypto currency use cases of today, currency and asset. But, as stated before: there are so many more things you can do with a distributed crypto ledger.
Bitcoin is a lot of things. But definitely not perfect (see above). So how about looking for competing technologies? Depending on the use case, Litecoin seems to have some advantages over Bitcoin – and already a quite sizeable followership. nxt claims eco-friendly mining, because of its 100% proof of stake (PoS) mechanism versus the proof of work (PoW) mechanism other coins are based on. The upcoming Ethereum plans to overtake Bitcoin as a platform by offering a sufficiently powerful Turing-complete scripting language on top of all things crypto. Says Ethereum:
Up until this point, most innovation in advanced applications such as domain and identity registration, user-issued currencies, smart property, smart contracts, and decentralized exchange has been highly fragmented, and implementing any of these technologies has required creating an entire meta-protocol layer or even a specialized blockchain. Theoretically, however, each and every one of these innovations and more can potentially be made hundreds of times easier to implement, and easier to scale, if only there was a stronger foundational layer with a powerful scripting language for all of these protocols to build upon.
Of course, there are some strong arguments to build your application on top of the Bitcoin platform as well. The ColoredCoins guys explain:
An alternate cryptocurrency could be specifically designed to transport colored coin values. However, Bitcoin has the largest hashing pools, which means Bitcoin is more secure and reliable. An alternate cryptocurrency would have very hard time providing the secure and stable distributed computational network that Bitcoin provides.
So many pros and cons. What would Andreesen do? I asked him a slightly leading question.
And that’s his clear and concise answer:
https://twitter.com/pmarca/status/425885940054106114
The power of Bitcoin lies in the network. Not just the physical network (which is already pretty impressive by itself). But the network of people involved. It’s not the tech specs of Bitcoin you have to beat. It’s the mindshare, the user base, the developers working on new stuff, the entrepreneurs finding new use cases.
And looking at some of the newly minted altcoins, all scepsis seems mostly valid. Pump and dump scams trying to attract altcoin-forex investments into cloned currencies of rather dubious value compete against more serious contenders with silly names like Dogecoin and potential gamechangers like the aforementioned Ethereum.
Of course Andreesen knows just too well, that sheer dumb numbers can easily kill any more aptly contender: the browser wars were decided by Internet Explorer’s preinstalled Windows masses, not Netscape’s superior technology. So he goes now by George Santayana Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it (and surfs the Bitcoin wave).
Not all metaphors are created Turing-complete. IE may have killed Netscape. But the three browser musketeers Firefox, Chrome, and Safari finally pruned the mighty Richelieu of HTML. And only if you’re a teensy weens altcoin, the mighty incumbent is BIG Bitcoin. For everything else, there’s VISA and MasterCard.
gert.is 