Topic: The Royal Canadian Mint just announced a new alternative to BitCoin - page 5. (Read 19978 times)

Toot, toot ... mighty fine sounding horn you got there ... and what exactly are you saying because you have been involved with some of the biggest software disaster's ever you can recognise Bitcoin as one?

You know I don't really care what you think, believe, know, or think you believe you know but let's just say you don't strike me as a Satoshi .... sooo ... saying stuff like below just smells like a big bunch sour grapes ... or I don't know what.

This wouldn't be the first time someone here has implied or suggested I should STFU unless I have a better idea, it's such a gamma minus response. BTW I have the money I deserve, more than I ever set out to accumulate, I'm what you call set for life.

As the development work goes, I spent the first 15 years of my career as a software developer, architect, and development team manager, I can appreciate it for what it is more than most people.

It is axiomatic that software is the most labor intensive disposable product in human history. For example, consider this train wreck which I watched from an uncomfortably close distance but was delighted to have absolutely no responsibility for. Around 1997, a certain Fortune 500 bank launched a huge system development project that was to be greater than any sliced bread the world had ever seen before. The project was continuously infested with people who were not makers or builders or engineers or even accountants, they were hand waving career hoppers focused only on looking good for their next promotion. There were hundreds of people dedicated to the effort, including a couple hundred software developers and other technical specialists.

Five years and $500 million later, I found myself sitting in a meeting called by the most senior vice president in the firm to decide the fate of a system that was so woefully inadequate that you couldn't even say it any more, it was a given. I was there to offer my opinions and did my level best to come up with salvage opportunities. As it turns out, the desired goal was agreement to take the whole thing out for a nice drive in the country, shoot it twice in the head, and bury it in an unmarked grave, and that's exactly what happened. The good news was that this abysmal failure, the biggest I've ever seen, never made it's way to the front page of the Wall Street Journal. That wasn't just good news, it was the single most important consideration, throwing away $500 million dollars on a clown show was no big deal at all.

You wanna hear another horror story? I have two more just like that one but not as costly, under $100 million, where the outcome was to chuck it all and start over.

It is the lot of every software developer to at some point cast their finest pearls before swine only to see them ground under cloven hooves. It can be a tough thing to accept and and even harder to let go of, but, as Britney Spears so sagely taught us all, "it is what it is".

1) Subscribe to me? Pish, I'm as full of crap as anyone, but even a blind squirrel can find a nut once in a while

2) I think bitcoin is such a interesting phenomenon in so many ways, but I do have perceptions that make it difficult for me to get on board with everything that comes with it. My 30 year career in various financial services like brokerage, insurance and banking doesn't mean I'm the enemy, just that I may have another frame of reference from something I've seen before. In fact, I admire efforts like Dwolla that are attempting to cut the take of my former employers

My operations are 100% open source linux. I dig open source deep and heavy, man, it's produces state of the art software of high quality better than any other process I've ever seen I even released a little freeware app in the early 1990s. I recall having a firm enthusiastically pick it up and start using it ( it was a disk optimizer for the old OS/2 HPFS file system ) and they had the hardest time accepting that I wasn't in a position to maintain and enhance it but I was more than happy to give away the source code.

Thanks for the kind words. Who knows, one of these days I might find another nut I can share.

1) Nicely put and accurate. Can I subscribe to your posts somehow?

2) It is a volunteer project with no central source of funding or leadership. Monetary incentive to develop useful applications is extremely limited. Charitable incentives are supposed to substitute for this. I made a suggestion about how to fix these problems by the way.
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/unregulated-corporation-cryptocurrency-75029 However, I don't think that the lack of funding, professionalism, and central direction is widely perceived to be a problem around here.

To me it looks like an experiment on post-dollar global currency:

Frankly Bitcoin has a lot of obstacles to becoming a widespread payment system.  The largest, price volatility, has only in the last month or so begun to be solved.  The second largest, threat of failure, required the last six months in order to brush aside.  Things like implementation cost and ease-of-use will take time to work out.  The barrier to entry is fairly large.

The collection of businesses that sprang up around Bitcoin over the last year are only a small hint of what is to come.  It is somewhat early still.  Linux took a decade to enter mainstream consciousness, and another five years to reach widespread use.  Today it dominates a few niche areas.  Bitcoin may end up being similar.  Remember, while Linux only had to battle a few aging UNIX vendors, Bitcoin is literally challenging a system with limitless resources at its disposal.

Pretty negative view on all the dev. work that has gone on .... just what have you done to further buying your precious MintChip ice-cream with your phone? (sounds kind of irrelevant to me in the big scheme but if that's what twists your knobs ... )

Did you see there is a tenative iPhone app for Bitcoin ... ?

https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/iphone-ios-bitcoin-wallet-is-here-from-blockchaininfo-75673

Discussing interesting topics is not mutually exclusive to "inspiring folk who want to buy ice-creams using their phone" .... but I'm not going to go out of my way. You'll get the money you deserve methinks.

I love the lack of focus I see here. Take all the obsolescent 19th century economic theories you can find, hell, even throw in Marxism, and they aren't enough to make bitcoin a successful payment system, they are quite simply irrelevant to that goal. So often when the topic of a competing payment system comes up here, discussion descends into still another circle jerk around these irrelevancies.

It's evident that this "odd assortment of uber-geeks, anarchists, libertarians, scammers and forex traders"¹ have little to offer or to inspire folks who would just like to pay for an ice cream cone using their phone, nor to folks who would just like to sell one that way. What I have seen instead is a loss of momentum towards using bitcoins for normal everyday aboveground transactions since 3rd quarter 2011.

Six months of at best sitting dead in the water is a long time, enough to give the competition a significant lead, particularly given the competition does not carry the reputation risk of bitcoin and is focused on the payment system application rather than fears of econopocalypse, zombie uprisings, or having nothing to take with you when you die 

All that said, bitcoin has been successful in three areas:
1. Speculation
2. Money laundering
3. Contraband trading e.g. Silk Road

IMO, it rather looks like bitcoin is headed towards the magical status of being an object lesson in "Be careful about what you ask for, you may get it". If you can't have the success you want, you may have to settle for the success you actually have.


1. Naomi O'Leary, "Bitcoin, the City traders' anarchic new toy"
    http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/04/01/traders-bitcoin-idUSL6E8ET5K620120401

mintchip: the evolution of currency
bitcoin: the future of money

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As bleak as that graph looks, It could actually be much worse. All it would take is an atomic WW3 to send those lines straight down.  No one like to talk about it, but this planet is just about used up (assuming current trends). There are no more lands to discover and the population is exponentially growing. Enjoy it while you can.
Click only if you have a strong stomach -->http://www.worldometers.info/world-population/
[/derail]

What is the number for the Ministry of Eugenics?

Apparently "non-asshats" advocate inflationary theft in order to subsidize consumerism.

[derail]

Actually a picture of Paul Krugman blowing up a car is an apt analogy.  The guy is a walking broken-window fallacy.  Isn't Syria next on the list of countries to be invaded in order to continue the debt-fueled ponzi of finite-fossil-resource-consumption?  So, Paul Krugman blowing up Syria in the name of debt-financed military Keynesianism, genius.  I wonder if the CIA wrote that script as well.

Personally I think anyone with an ounce of clue and two pennies to rub together (not Canadians soon lol) should rather take a look at some confirmed predictions of real science, as opposed to the Keynesian-voodoo-bullshit promoted by charlatans such as Krugman, to see just which system (realism or populist money-printing) is more "efficient" in the long run.  I think you'd find that they all end up at the same spot, just as the laws of physics dictate.  One gets there with poverty and starvation and debt-servitude and industrial collapse and massive die-offs, while the other at least attempts to avoid all of that by refusing to kowtow to populist imprudence.


http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2012-04/new-research-tracks-40-year-old-prediction-world-economy-will-collapse-2030

[/derail]

I love that in order to not be an asshat I have to advocate coercion. 

I have no doubt the short-term adoption of something like MintChip would be faster than Bitcoin. It's sponsored by the State and placed in a nice digestible package for the serfs. But I care not about the short term - I care about the long term narrative of monies, and that's why Bitcoin interests me a great deal, and MintChip less so. To solve real problems one needs to fix the foundation of the problem - and that foundation is fiat currency.

The serfs may digest MintChip more readily, but I have little doubt as to the nutritional content of that consumption.

Correct.
To compete with Bitcoin, any new virtual currency needs to open its sources first.

Not opening sources immediately means that we cannot trust the currency creator. The conclusion is that this is another fiat money produced by another government, but this time it looks that they want to create a fully digital currency.

However it will be a lot of fun to observe as they get reverse engineered by hackers/cryptographers around the world and fail.

The protocol would seem to indicate that is the case.  The chip stores an irrevocable keypair.  The chip signs tx with private key which can be verified by other uses with the public key.  The chip decryments the value on spends and increases value on payments. 

Still the underlying problem still exists.  The attack vector is to remove private key(s) from the chip.  Once you do that you can forget payment tx which can't be detected by the other party.  Essentially print money out of thin air.  All the profit of counterfeiting without all the physical printing overhead.

You obviously have never been to the DMV.

Still it likely will have lower fees that Paypal.  Paypal is just abusing its monopoly posistion.  If anything MintChip is theoretically more of a competitor to Paypal than Bitcoin.  If MintChip is successful and has lower fees than Paypal then Paypal may need to lower fees.

It all depends on how much fraud MintChip has to ammortize.  Given those chips WILL be broken I wonder how much the first widespread organized attack will cost them.  Every dubious "secret of a chip" system in the past has been broken I doubt this will be any different.

Note: I ignored your usually Bitcoin bashing.  Just not worth responding to.

This is no threat to bitcoin. I have been told on IRC that I am straying into speculation territory, so take this with a grain of salt.

- http://mintchipchallenge.com/rules

Not only do they not publish a protocol specification or source code: they prohibit third parties form doing the same. That (IMO) can mean only one thing: Security relies on "Copy Protection" Built into the SD card. In this case, CPRM with device revocation.

If CPRM has not been cracked already, it is probably because nobody actually uses it. This initiative will make cracking profitable. If it is true they are trying to use "copy protection" to prevent double-spending, this project has failed before it has even started by trying to fight the law of entropy. Maybe that is why they keep introducing draconian copyright legislation: the future of fiat relies on it.

The person on IRC informs me that the SD standard supports things other than block devices. These may be real "smart cards" in a micro-SD form-factor.

That's likely true, but it would need to be pretty fucking inefficient to need paypal like fees to support itself. I don't see that level of inefficiency as likely. Bitcoin itself is already extremely fat, bloated, and inefficient by design.

Most services provided by the govt ARE inefficient.  They have no profit motive, no need for lower costs.   Like any govt agency it will become fat, bloated, and inefficient.  

This is run by the government... thus the discussion of regulated monopoly. It wouldn't be good gov't policy to have high fees like paypal. The gov't can just tax people if they want money. Why would they choose to get revenue in an inefficient way?