12-04-2013, 11:57 AM
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So Fucking Banned
Join Date: Jan 2005
Posts: 3,716
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I read a good analogy about Bitcoin the other day, it wenst a little like this:
Quote:
A comparison with the Internet can help illustrate why people are excited about Bitcoin. In the late 1980s, the Internet wasn't a very impressive online service. It was expensive to join, complicated to use, and it featured text-based applications like e-mail and message boards that weren't obviously better than commercial online services like Compuserve, Prodigy and AOL.
But the Internet had an advantage that commercial online services did not: Its open architecture meant that anyone was free to create new online services. In 1990, a programmer named Tim Berners-Lee created a new Internet application called the World Wide Web that offered advanced features like graphics and hyperlinks. And within a few years, thousands of people had begun building Web sites on top of this new platform. Startups like Yahoo, eBay and Hotmail began to build sophisticated Web-based services. Within a few years, the Internet had vastly more content and services than the companies that ran AOL or Prodigy could hope to produce.
Bitcoin is the world's first completely open payment network, and it could spark the same type of bottom-up innovation. Mainstream electronic payment networks like Visa and Mastercard are managed by incumbent banks. If you want to interoperate with them ? to become a merchant, open a bank of your own or develop a new payment technology ? you have to convince these banks that you're credit-worthy, that your business plan makes sense, and that you will comply with their policies and procedures. That limits who can innovate and what kinds of business models they can try. In contrast, the Bitcoin network works like the Internet: There are no restrictions on who can join or what kinds of applications they can build.
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