First, please understand where I am coming from: I am a longtime DD listener, and started following PFA as soon as you created it. I have probably listened to every one of your +EV shows on DD. Some of the episodes where you would talk about online poker and give advice, I would listen when you spoke about issues where I was an expert to hear if we had the same opinions. I agreed with you so often it was bizarre. There were a surprising number of nuances to points you made which told me you really knew what you were talking about. When you and Micon split, I was on Team Druff. You had much more presence on the show than Micon. I felt I knew you but didn't know Micon. I was pissed at Micon. However, the 1 issue where I have completely disagreed with you is bitcoins.
Bitcoin advantages: (i have copied and edited these)
http://bitcoinmedia.com/bulleted-advantages/
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=60049.0Decentralised and free from control
- No regulations: while the advantages of decentralization might not seem at first apparent, consider that a decentralized structure constitutes an incorruptible medium. This is the first time we have such technology.
government cant seize your bitcoins
Always running
- No bank holidays, no weekend breaks. Bitcoin is running. As long as the internet is up somewhere in the world, bitcoin is running.
International
- Bitcoin has no borders. It does not discriminate against or classify or limit its users based on location or citizenship.
No/low fees
-I can at this very moment send thousands of dollars anywhere in the world at no cost. on a recent DD episode Micon said Seals has done >26000 deposits/withdraws at a total cost of about $30
New privacy model
-Bitcoin provides anonymity with merchant sites. Only when trading platforms (exchanges) are presented with a warrant or the user willingly provides his or her identification can one’s personal information be accessed.
Transparent system
-Bitcoin is 100% transparent. While users need not disclose which bitcoin wallet is theirs, every transaction ever made in the system is public record allowing for an open world.
its also open source
Divisible
-A bitcoin is divisible to 8 decimal places and in the future perhaps more. Microtransactions are truly a possibility. In this way bitcoin is not only advancing modern methods but creating potentially new markets which may have drastic impact on society. (media, internet culture, crowd sourcing, donating)
Secure
-Playstation being hacked resulted in 77 million compromised accounts, that is more than 1% of the entire planet. Had your credit card details been stolen, a malicious hacker could withdraw money from your account. If you paid in bitcoins, this would be an impossibility. Sure there are services with fraud protection, but these are subsidized by the commercial gains from the client.
-Bitcoin uses the latest encryption technology. While underdeveloped merchant sites may not be safe, you would not blame visa or mastercard if you put your card number of an unsafe site. The actual bitcoin protocol is very safe. Before it is compromised, our societal infrastructure would collapse due to it being built on weaker systems.
Fast transfers
-Irregardless of geographical distance, you have a payment go through in under an hour. No longer are we at the mercy of week long payments or waiting weeks because of banking inefficiencies. Anybody who has travelled can attest to the nightmare of the finance system across borders.
i've done a few cashouts on Seals. never took more than an hour or 2 to get my coins
No chargebacks
-Selling digital goods is currently not possible due to friendly fraud. Bitcoin does not have chargebacks and friendly fraud is impossible.
Environmentally friendly / efficient
-Market driven infrastructure ensures cost savings as participants are forced to compete through the algorithmic adjustment. People find more efficient ways to process transactions due to financial incentive from the system. This drives power usage right down.
#2 – Borderless
When I say “borderless” when speaking of Bitcoin, I mean so in the most powerful way: Bitcoins can be secretly transported anywhere in the world instantly for free. Contrast this with gold or fiat money, which is almost impossible to get out of the country incognito.
Ever tried walking through customs with massive piles of cash or gold bars? Somehow I doubt it’s going to work. With Bitcoin, however, you can walk through the metal detector and get a full pat down etc., and walk right to your gate without hassle, despite having millions of dollars of Bitcoins on your truecrypt-protected flash drive – it’s that easy.
While in the past difficult and expensive international diversification was absolutely essential for anyone serious about keeping their wealth and themselves safe from a potentially oppressive government at home, Bitcoin is the ultimate offshore bank, literally bringing ultra-cheap international diversification to the masses right in their own living rooms!
#3 – No Inflation
Inflation is the great wealth tax, the invisible arm of government that can reach into your pocket and steal any day or night, without your direct knowledge, simply by devaluing the currency. You may feel you’re protected by investing in “hard assets” such as gold, but in reality, those assets are going to be taxed relative to the base monetary unit, which is usually being debased. In other words, although the gold price may keep up with inflation, you are forced to pay a phantom capital gains on it — so it doesn’t really keep up, and that’s not even taking into account storage fees.
Bitcoin, both due to its anonymous nature and hard cap in coin issuance, is much more practical for protecting large amounts of wealth from the ravages of inflation than any other medium. One could argue gold can do this if you store it yourself and sell it secretly for cash when you wish to spend it, it’s very hard to do this for many obvious reasons (acid tests, divisibility difficulty, transportation, etc.), and neigh impossible for very large sums.
Finally, Bitcoin may even prove to have some resistance from the adoption of fractional reserve banking, since one of the main purposes of banking (making it easy to store and transport wealth) has been taken over by the Bitcoin protocol, so it probably means less capital available for FRB and thus less overall credit expansion in the Bitcoin market (this would also mean a more stable Bitcoin-based economy… but we’re getting off track here.. )
might be more accurate to say the supply was predetermined:
#4 – No taxes or regulatory overhead
Think of all the sky-high costs associated with doing business in a fiat money system: income taxes, payroll taxes, regulatory costs, compliance personnel, legal fees, accountant fees, estate taxes, gift taxes, sales taxes.. the list literally goes on and on and on. Have you ever thought of what happens to a dollar as it circulates through the economy? Every time a transaction happens, the government gets a big piece of that dollar — so it doesn’t take very many transactions for that dollar to make it way completely back to the government.
Taxes and regulatory bodies are like a giant vacuum cleaner, sucking wealth from productive people and giving it out to parasites. Productive people are impoverished while big bankers,* lobbyists, bureaucrats, and lazy government employees live high off the hog. It means less money to build out productive capital infrastructure, less people doing real productive work, less money available for legitimate charity, and lower standards of living for everyone. Since Bitcoin is anonymous, taxes suddenly become voluntary — and thus, a better world.
#5 – Freedom to spend your own damn money!
What do Visa, Mastercard, PayPal, and pretty much all the big banks have in common? They all block you from giving donations to WikiLeaks! Now, whether you approve of WikiLeaks or not is a personal decision ( you can probably guess that I love them ), but that’s the point — it’s YOUR choice. By restricting what you can spend your money on, the current financial system is overriding your decisions and controlling you. Use Bitcoin, and spend your money freely.
Points you have made against bitcoin:
- who's the guy who started it? you dont even know his identity?
Satoshi Nakamoto is his pseudonym. It is probably a good thing that his real identity is not known. So now there is nobody the government can go after to put the bitcoin creator in prison. Druff, are you suggesting bitcoin code is sub par since we dont know the creators name? Because the bitcoin code has been reviewed by top security professionals who commented at blackhat/defcon that it was very well done.
- "if i ran a poker site so many people would turn me in quickly"
This is the dumbest excuse I have ever heard. How come no one has turned Micon in then? How much money would I have to pay you to turn in Micon? The truth is there is nothing you could do to get Micon in trouble for his involvement with Seals.
- government could shut down bitcoin so fast
This is completely false. Bitcoin is decentralized. The government would have to shut down the internet. A perfect example of how you are wrong is piracy/file sharing. The government was able to stop Napster and Kazaa because they were centralized. But torrenting/piracy/file sharing is decentralized and unstoppable. Even if they shut down 1 pirate site, another opens its door. E-Gold was shut down by arresting 1 guy. Bitcoin will not be shut down because it is decentralized.
Questions for you:
- Do you think Seals will be shut down?
- Do you think I should sell my bitcoins?
- Would you be against US facing poker sites offering bitcoin deposits/withdraws?
- if a poker site like Merge, Bovada, or ACR offered bitcoin withdraws in less than a day, would you continue to wait months for wires/checks/WU or would you get bitcoins?
- do you realize that if i sent you $1000 worth of bitcoins, you could nearly instantly convert them to USD if you so hate bitcoin?
- How much money would you like to bet on government shutting down bitcoin?
- do you think cryptocurrencies are a fad?
Cryptocurrency is the next evolution in money. Bitcoin is to dollars what email is to snail mail. Bitcoin is currently the gold of cryptocurrencies. It is entirely possible that a new cryptocurrency emerges and surpasses bitcoin. That would be more likely than government "shutting down" bitcoin. And there are many other cryptocurrencies already. Druff, I honestly wonder if you are really against bitcoin. Perhaps you don't have enough understanding of how bitcoin really works, or perhaps it has to do with the Micon split. But it makes no sense to me that somebody like you is against bitcoin. You're a poker player that lived thru Black Friday who is definitely computer literate. The points you make against bitcoin are so baseless and not on par with the Druff I thought I knew. The advantages of bitcoin should be apparent to any intelligent person, but especially to poker players like you.
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Originally Posted by Dan Druff
