Bitcoin is the new USENET

[True Federalist (진정한 연방 주의자)]

I just had a thought that while not particularly profound and not particularly accessible save to others of similar age, seems like the perfect analogy that explains both why bitcoin became as popular as it has and why it will never achieve its stated purposes.

Bitcoin is the new USENET. USENET was a non-centralized peer-to-peer message board system. What eventually killed it off was that while it was quite useful when the Internet connected a group of people with generally similar interests, once it became a means of connecting everybody, there was little interest in providing the servers that were essential to the function of USENET, and it was slow to use. The bitcoin miners that serve as the backbone of bitcoin are essentially equivalent to the USENET servers, but bitcoin by its very design will never be able to handle everyone using it as a payment mechanism. Once the cost of mining exceeds the benefits, bitcoin will collapse, just as USENET did. Note that USENET "survives" as a means of sharing porn and pirated software and videos, but the days when most Internet users were also USENET users is long gone and will never return.

That said, I think blockchain is likely to remain a viable technology going into the future, but as a means to provide a central server whose records can relatively easily be verified as being both accurate and free from tampering, not as part of a distributed hostless computing model.

[Benjamin Frank]

There was a discussion about usenet on this site recently.
https://talkelections.org/FORUM/index.php?topic=438786.0
1984 Election Usenet Discussions

[True Federalist (진정한 연방 주의자)]

There was a discussion about usenet on this site recently.
https://talkelections.org/FORUM/index.php?topic=438786.0
1984 Election Usenet Discussions

I used USENET, back in the day, but not for political discussion. It was good for an Internet with thousands of users, but not millions and certainly not billions.

[Sir Mohamed]

All cryptocurrencies should be outlawed and banned as payment option in my opinion. Currencies belong in the hands of the public and govt and not private companies.

[True Federalist (진정한 연방 주의자)]

All cryptocurrencies should be outlawed and banned as payment option in my opinion. Currencies belong in the hands of the public and govt and not private companies.

Clearly, you don't understand how bitcoin works. There is no one in control of that particular blockchain. At most one could ban purchases/sales of cryptocurrencies using the existing banking system, but there's no point save perhaps as an anti-money laundering measure. They don't present any systemic risk to the economy.

[gerritcole]

All cryptocurrencies should be outlawed and banned as payment option in my opinion. Currencies belong in the hands of the public and govt and not private companies.

Clearly, you don't understand how bitcoin works. There is no one in control of that particular blockchain. At most one could ban purchases/sales of cryptocurrencies using the existing banking system, but there's no point save perhaps as an anti-money laundering measure. They don't present any systemic risk to the economy.

They’re a risk to the environment

[True Federalist (진정한 연방 주의자)]

All cryptocurrencies should be outlawed and banned as payment option in my opinion. Currencies belong in the hands of the public and govt and not private companies.

Clearly, you don't understand how bitcoin works. There is no one in control of that particular blockchain. At most one could ban purchases/sales of cryptocurrencies using the existing banking system, but there's no point save perhaps as an anti-money laundering measure. They don't present any systemic risk to the economy.

They’re a risk to the environment

Agreed, but there's no effective way to ban them.