The hype was so strong that it is not easy to pull these people out the spell of the coin-talk. It gives a trance feeling making them believe that they just discovered some great secret open world that is not visible to others. This is a cult effect. It stops them from thinking or questioning further after they were amazed by a dose of tech stuff and then they look around the table and see that everyone is nodding their heads in trance. You naturally go with the flow. You forget that there is world outside the casino.
People even talk as if the government and taxes are even required. Fooled by the libertarian talk, people forgot to question the relevance of the new currency in the context of real world.
The real concerns are not in the technicalities or robustness of the cryptography or blockchain, but in their applicability to real-world contexts. Most of this hype talk doesn't even look at differences between asset and currency nor the interactions between real-world systems and crypto payments, which is the concern of several governments and banks.
Bitcoin will stay secure, pure, math beauty but will be unlawful for anything related to financial use.
People also buy into silly analogies such as saying that cash has the same regulatory issues and criminal use. This reasoning pushes some more people into trance, with no further thinking.
Remember folks - between government and bitcoin only one will survive. Not both. The script kids who love anonymity and hate any social control, are recruiting and marching huge number of innocent armies of poor blind-folded investors into an already lost battle.
Added to the confusion, there is a good amount pseudo-intellectuals, academics, analysts and celebrities who show off their ability to understand this great stuff. Look at how these great minds spoke of ICOs with such great language and motivational talks. It fell flat with one government banning it. And there is no reason why other governments would allow such stuff. All these great tech minds have gone into hiding now. Ether will disappear and Mr Vitalik will go offline to learn about how real world is different from tech. Not sure he had time to go to college anyway.
The traders are experts in riding the waves of volatility, but the retail investors will be punished for their greed.
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Why bitcoin fails.
Bitcoin is variously compared to currency (similar to dollar) and asset (similar to stocks, gold). There goes the first reason why bitcoin could fail. Lack of target. Currency and assets are entirely different concepts. By being unclear in terms of what it wants to be, bitcoin fails the first test on its usefulness.
What's the big deal? It can be both, eh? Nope. You can't buy groceries using your MSFT stocks, for example, withoout converting your stocks into fiat currency first. Assets are not directly transferable in exchange of other assets or commodities. So bitcoin is not an asset or stock or even commodity.
How about we say that it is a currency, then? Nope, no luck here too. For being a currency such as dollar, it should be possible to enforce limits on the size of the transactions. Fiat cash withdrawls can be limited, and even be tracked becasue banks are involved. Already nations are facing problems due to black money and some governments even implemented demonitization to discourage cash transactions. Bitcoin goes in the opposite direction - facilitating the untracked money movement in large amounts. So, no, it is not a better solution for the role of currency.
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What is a business activity?
A business activity is a multi-party context in which value (goods/services, money) is exchanged according to some rules agreed upon by the parties participating in the business activity. The rules could be very basic ones such as who parts with their value first in an exchange. For example, a rule could say that the consumer pays first and the merchant ships the product/services after receivng the payment. In the context of this rule, there is a trust-related risk involved. Some well-known intermediaries such as amazon, ebay, alibaba reduce this risk for the parties involved, by means of providing some guarantees tied to the reputation of the intermediary.
Removing such intermediaries requires providing similar guarantees and dispute resolution in both ways of the value exchange (goods/services and payments). Certain new payment systems based on crypto technologies seem to claim that they can provide these guarantees. The purpose of this article is to assess how far this claim can be realized.
The real-world part of the business
First, let's look into the real world value transfer, that is, delivery of goods and services. Smart contracts are blind to the real world becasue they need to be run inside a sand-boxed environment and can't pull some information from the real world by themselves. However some real-world entity can feed the information about real-world events. Which basically means that the smart cotracts have to trust these real-world entities for truth, relaibility and availability of such information about real-world happenings.
Those real world truth-tellers which are sometimes called as oracles, would naturally be the well-known trust-worthy, good-old intermediaries, or some trusted roles specific to the business contet, that can make guarantees about the truth in their reports, availability, reliability and cost-effectiveness. These guarantees are direclty linked to the reputaion of the intermediary.
So, we are back to trusting someone from real world for telling a smart contract about the real-world happenings, much the same as the good-old web applications and services.
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But we have IoT
Can IoT change this scenario? IoT is about enabling things to directly send the real-world information to network, and possibly receive commands too. Can the sensor-enabled things play the role of oracles? Only as long as the sensors and identity of the things are accessible and are not tamperd with. Given sufficient value of the goods/things, these tamperings might become risk-worthy for the wrong-doers. Still IoT can't tell if the goods and servicecs are deliverd in good condition or not. The idenity of the goods can't derived from the uniqueness of the goods, similar to hashing of the digital content, making the identities difficult to verify.
The other part of the business - the payments.
Payments can't be seperated from the delivery of goods/services, because rules of the business tie them up together - one depends on the other. This means that payemnts need to be visible to the same intermediary which makes guarantees about the delivery of goods/services. It boils down to keeping the intermediary involved in the both flows of the value exchange. Thus, the first promise of the crypto technologies, that of remiving the intermediaries is broken in the full business context.
But hope is not lost. In the context of payments between the intermediaries and business partners, it might appear that further intermediaries such as banks and credit card companies can be removed. After ruling out other areas, this is the only area remaining for delivering on the big promise of the crypto initiatives. Let's look into this.
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Back to intermediaries in payments
First, we need to understand the role being played by the existing intermediaries in payments. They not only enable transfer of money, but also provide privacy for transactions. Your competitors and general public will not know about your transactions. Also they provide controlled visibility to authorities for regulation purposes.
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Privacy
There are two pieces of information related to privacy in payments - 1) the links between real world identities of the parties involved and their digital identitiies (credit card numbers or crypto addresses), and 2) the details of the transaction itself (amount, timestamp etc).
And there are two kinds of external people related to privacy - 1) the general public that includes business competitors, and 2) the authorities who have responsibility in tackling issues related to AML and funding of illegal activies.
The payments intermediary need to provide guarantees that 1) there is no visibility for general public about your transactions and 2) controlled/limited visibility is provided to authorities on the need basis. This is the requirement of transactions.
But isn't it the same with cash transactins?
For this to be compared to cash payments, which also do not provide visibility to authorities, the single btc transactions should not be running in millions of dollars worth. Even cash paymnets worth that much in a single payment will require to be reported to authorities in any country.
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Bitcoin fails on visibility requirements
While bitcoin network provides the first guarantee (your transactions may be visible but not your identity), it fails miserably on the second guarantee. There is no controlled visibility provided to the authorities.
Thus bitcoin network fails in the second flow of value as well, in being a payment platform that can play well in the state-controlled context.
Then let's use them as stocks or commodities
It fails even here. Stocks and commodities can't be used as currency and that facilitates assessment of profit/loss based on their purchase price and selling price. However btc can be transferred through a payment, making it difficult to assess the earnings.
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Conclusion
So, bitcoin didn't remove the intermediaries or trust-related risk in real-world value exchange and in payments. It has only worsened the situation by not being able to link the transactions with real-world entities. It also has not provided better dispute resolution as smart contracts can't judge the real-world context without depending on inputs from real-world sources.
After ruling out the business transaction space, btc can look into being valuable in vintage/ornamental space such keeping it similar to vintage coins or old postal stamps etc which are in even more limited supply.
