Well drugs. As much as people want to dismiss drug culture because it's illegal (not necessarily meaning that it's immoral). Even if you dismiss the use case of drugs, it's hard to deny how successful these sites are at pioneering nearly p2p marketplaces compared to something like Amazon.
There is also the case of having a safe storage of funds. The seizures of bank accounts in Greece and the actions some governments are taking to stop capital flight speak to the use of bitcoin as a way of storing value.
Gambling is another huge use case. Anyone who has a lick of experience dealing with deposit/withdrawal from gambling services know how inconvenient it is to actually move money around.
Online sales are another use case. It's far easier to verify buyer information and funds. You also save the 10%+ in fees that you would pay using a service like ebay.
This is the biggest joke since the HSBC scandal broke. Feds dont care about real criminals laundering money. They just like it as a convenient scapegoat when it involves an enemy of the state.
Also the US is not the world power anymore. They have no authority to 'flag' any currency.
Wikipedia isnt gaming the system to make wikipedia relevant. Theyre not ramping up efforts to get inbound links from random blog websites. If anything this shows that RapGenius's numbers were hyper-inflated by SEO games rather than user relevance.
If someone hacks your netbanking details and sends the money before you realize it the bank most certainly not cover your losses. Debit card fraud transactions have a very short window to report. It's a good thing that you have a 4 digit pin because 4 digits is secure
Bitcoin allows a merchant to recognizing a transaction without considering fraud/KYC. I've sold items on a forum with an escrow moderator and paid 0% in fees. You just cant do that with paypal.
Everyone gets every message. There is no solution here to the data bloat problem. Other than that the project forks bitcoin to make a namecoin clone (distributed authorization), which I dont see the need for since a private key already identifies me.
The reason something like namecoin is to allow people to update their identity in the event the first identity was compromised/blocked.
> Let's make this a bit more concrete: assume eBay accepts BTC. I could sign up for a seller account, make some auction listings, once some people buy them, never ship the goods, and disappear.
This already is a problem on ebay. People post dishonest listings all the time and run with the cash. You have the additional problems of people buying goods with stolen cards or running up the price of an item with no intention of purchasing. With BTC you can verify that a bidder is able to pay for an item, and you can immediately hold the funds in escrow. There is no "overcharging" a Bitcoin account.
> As a consumer, the irreversability of BTC transactions is a bug, not a feature.
Bullshit. Credit card companies are paying people with their own fat. The 3% cashback that you get on purchases for gas and food comes from the profit theyre making on top of that. Many local stores give cash discounts when buying goods, and some refuse to accept cards because they are so expensive.
> It's only when certain financial instruments are built on top of Bitcoin that have the same kinds of consumer protection and regulatory compliance built in.
We dont need your middlemen. I dont need an account to hold my funds when I sell an item online. I dont want to give eBay, paypal, et al, a unilateral authority to withdraw from my bank accounts.
I used to believe that the reversibility of transactions was a major benefit of using cards, but it turns out that is really just a reversibility of liability.
Credit cards are an outdated tool. They pass plain text data about a user to authorize a transaction allowing hackers to pull something off like the Target hack. One of the advantages of bitcoin is the ability to digitally authorize a transaction that cannot be reused. In an online marketplace it's far far easier to accept bitcoins than credit cards because you have no fraud risk, which is a HUGE problem in online retail.
I expect a lot of online retail stores to start accepting bitcoin payments at large discounts to cash just for this reason.
Bitmessage is for any messaging system. You can broadcast (twitter), send private message (email), or start a channel (IRC). The key in bitmessage is that to send a message you have to do a POW according to the size of the message you are sending.
Even then you still have massive data bloat problems, which I dont see DHT alone solving.
What is the motivation of twister over bitmessage + namecoin. Namecoin is already a decentralized authorization/registration crypto network and bitmessage is a POW based P2P messaging system. The use of DHT seems novel, and it may be interesting to see if the bitmessage community had a reason not to use it.
I'm not trying to attack the idea. I just want to understand what novel work is being done here. Cheers.
As someone who went to Harvey Mudd I can attest that the program is very well designed. All Mudd students (CS/Eng/Math/Physics/Bio/Chem) are required to take some computer science courses. And theyve done a tremendous job at gearing those courses for people who have never coded in their life, and people who have been coding since they were 5.
> You're just making up a random fact to support your case, and leaving the burden on the reader to substantiate your claims, correct me if I'm wrong.
And the only fact supporting your case is a sentence from Facebook's Q3 report. Total active teen usage was stable while younger teens are dropping off. If you want to claim that Facebook was downplaying the extent of the problem then that's a very bold assertion. Hiding critical information such as that for investors is what get's executives in trouble. It's also why they bothered to share a piece of information that sent the share price tumbling 20% after an 18% jump.
The use case of Facebook is not messaging. It never has been. The use case of Facebook is their social graph. It's your online identity. It's being the lowest barrier of entry to use the internet.
My point still stands that Apple initially removed it when they released Apple Maps. Since messaging is part of Apple's core experience, it's very likely that they'll eventually update their iMessage app.
Snapchat is not unique. In fact, there are far bigger and more popular messaging apps around the world. They just dont get the attention that SnapChat does because it happens to be in California and in the US.
http://thenextweb.com/apps/2013/10/18/best-mobile-messaging-...
Apple creates an integrated snapchat. Removes snapchat from the apple store. It's not like they havent done that to other popular apps that they have the ability to replicate (google maps)
There is also the case of having a safe storage of funds. The seizures of bank accounts in Greece and the actions some governments are taking to stop capital flight speak to the use of bitcoin as a way of storing value.
Gambling is another huge use case. Anyone who has a lick of experience dealing with deposit/withdrawal from gambling services know how inconvenient it is to actually move money around.
Online sales are another use case. It's far easier to verify buyer information and funds. You also save the 10%+ in fees that you would pay using a service like ebay.