<story><title>Bitcoin is none of the things it was supposed to be</title><url>https://theoutline.com/post/2592/bitcoin-is-none-of-the-things-it-was-supposed-to-be</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>_red</author><text>Coinbase can&amp;#x27;t print money.</text></item><item><author>curuinor</author><text>What, then, exactly is the difference between your scenario and Coinbase being the bank?</text></item><item><author>coryl</author><text>The author seems to expect that the changes created by cryptocurrency should be visible immediately. It is a lack of patience, and lack of understanding that changing deeply rooted systems and behaviors takes time.&lt;p&gt;People have never managed software where if you lost your &amp;quot;password&amp;quot;, your money was gone forever. They never had to keep a 12-24 word recovery phrase. They&amp;#x27;ve never sent money to addresses that look like hash strings. Their money value was never this volatile (in some countries anyway) and never this complicated to use (understanding and waiting for block confirmations, looking up transactions in the blockchain explorer).&lt;p&gt;That&amp;#x27;s why Coinbase exists, to obfuscate these complexities, to sell security as a service. The cryptography behind cryptocurrencies allows you to basically be your own bank vault; this is not intuitive to people.&lt;p&gt;The fundamentals for Satoshi&amp;#x27;s vision have been laid out, the rest of the implementation details will come in time.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>colorint</author><text>Banks can&amp;#x27;t print money either, and this isn&amp;#x27;t some &amp;quot;ackshually it&amp;#x27;s the Mint&amp;quot; thing: banks have the power to create debt. But this isn&amp;#x27;t special, because you and I also have the power to create debt. What makes a bank special is that debt is its business (so most of its operation concerns the management of debt), and much of its debt can be called on demand, and so we call banks&amp;#x27; debts to us demand deposits.&lt;p&gt;Fractional reserve is just a particular kind of regulation placed on banks&amp;#x27; creation of debt, and it usually isn&amp;#x27;t the most important one. The practical limit of banks is that they have to be able to extinguish their debts (which we call withdrawal), including being able to transfer them to other banks in exchange for cash (which we call clearing), at the whim of the creditors (you and me).&lt;p&gt;The problems with banks are the problems with debt generally, but that&amp;#x27;s much trickier than some glib remarks about monetary policy.</text></comment>
<story><title>Bitcoin is none of the things it was supposed to be</title><url>https://theoutline.com/post/2592/bitcoin-is-none-of-the-things-it-was-supposed-to-be</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>_red</author><text>Coinbase can&amp;#x27;t print money.</text></item><item><author>curuinor</author><text>What, then, exactly is the difference between your scenario and Coinbase being the bank?</text></item><item><author>coryl</author><text>The author seems to expect that the changes created by cryptocurrency should be visible immediately. It is a lack of patience, and lack of understanding that changing deeply rooted systems and behaviors takes time.&lt;p&gt;People have never managed software where if you lost your &amp;quot;password&amp;quot;, your money was gone forever. They never had to keep a 12-24 word recovery phrase. They&amp;#x27;ve never sent money to addresses that look like hash strings. Their money value was never this volatile (in some countries anyway) and never this complicated to use (understanding and waiting for block confirmations, looking up transactions in the blockchain explorer).&lt;p&gt;That&amp;#x27;s why Coinbase exists, to obfuscate these complexities, to sell security as a service. The cryptography behind cryptocurrencies allows you to basically be your own bank vault; this is not intuitive to people.&lt;p&gt;The fundamentals for Satoshi&amp;#x27;s vision have been laid out, the rest of the implementation details will come in time.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>spookthesunset</author><text>MtGox printed money.  Lots of exchanges probably do but since they are unregulated and completely opaque you’ll never know for sure.</text></comment>