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.

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

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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

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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/
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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

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.

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://bt.irlbtc.com/view/75029.0 However, I don't think that the lack of funding, professionalism, and central direction is widely perceived to be a problem around here.

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".

Why can't we have something as cool as Square's new payment by phone.  No swiping cards and not scanning QR codes.

https://squareup.com/pay-with-square

ROTFLMFAO! THAT'S some feeble shit indeed. You are clearly confused as your limited knowledge and circular mental processes are not my shortcomings.

As regards Satoshi, the abandonment of public ownership for this 1.0 effort by a couple of Irish guys who worked in Japan or whoever they are does suggest that they do in fact know more than you or I about what bitcoin is and isn't. Good of you to bring this up.

Oh, and BTW, you can blow me any time, little girl, taking shit from inferior assholes like you just cracks me up, I can do it all day long. It's rather like the neighbor's chihuahua growling through the fence, all the time never knowing what a fine football he would make.

You may go back to being a loser now, you have plenty of company on this board.

The fact that the core software development follows the open source model is not the big problem.

The problem is that bitcoin-related commercial ventures are left up to small-scale entrepreneurs. Any small-scale entrepreneur thinking about a commercial venture can see that a) the current market is miniscule. No profit worth speaking about is available. b) the future market may be big and profitable. However, there is no reason to expect that getting involved now will be that helpful in accessing this potential future market (which probably won't exist in any case).

The logical response to this is to buy some bitcoin and wait for someone else to make bitcoin succeed. If everyone waits simultaneously, then bitcoin fails. That is what is happening.

To get the ball rolling, you need to have an agency which is heavily invested in bitcoin (say to the tune of ten million USD) to spearhead and fund projects. They would have an incentive to do something professional because they could gain from currency appreciation. This needs to happen in order to get to the future where bitcoin can be big and profitable.

If an agency like this isn't created, bitcoin will continue to consist of hobby businesses. The profits from these businesses are so slim that even when they attract a reasonable amount of interest, the business owners often fail to maintain them. You certainly don't see them upgrading and becoming professional. That makes sense. There is no reason to invest money right now when there is no money to be made right now.