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BaurusdB8 karma

Have you 'studied' the economy of GTA Online? If so, what's your opinion on the changing online UX by introducing new units of currency by Rockstar meant as a "sorry our service sucked"-package?

BaurusdB3 karma

The primary use of Bitcoin is its use as a medium of exchange.

BaurusdB3 karma

These companies just have an incentive to make them less hackable

I'd argue they don't. Obviously it needs to be 'secure enough', but with chargebacks and insurance, they don't really seem to care too much about robustness. If they did, I'd think they'd change the way credit card works, since it's been proven countless of times how insecure they are. This is just too costly, so they just leave room for a better form of payment (i.e. Bitcoin) to grow.

What do you mean by "unhackable"? If a user uses a weak password, his coins could get stolen. If a user uses weak entropy when generating an address, his coins could get stolen. But again, these are not 'faults' of Bitcoin, the protocol. An undiscovered flaw with the protocol could exist, but we obviously don't know of one (yet?).

An entity could get 51% and do a degree of damage, but Bitcoin would not be 'hacked'. The reaction of the market, however, will be the detrimental issue here, rendering the value of 1 BTC near-zero.

BaurusdB3 karma

but it seems that people have had their bitcoins lost or stolen

That's because people aren't storing their private keys in a secure way, it has nothing to do with Bitcoin as a protocol.

Companies like Visa and Mastercard have a clear monetary incentive to make their services unhackable.

Their services are not 'unhackable'. In fact, credit cards are one of the most insecure ways of transferring money online.

BaurusdB2 karma

Should you be interested, usability is indeed the key concern as far as I'm concerned.

Bitcoin's usability is currently being compared to E-mail in the early stages of its development. Mails could only be sent to IP addresses and IIRC, within the same service. Currently, a Bitcoin address is a seemingly random string of characters preceded by usually a 1 or 3, which isn't really all that user-friendly. Luckily, this is being heavily looked into.