📅 Original date posted:2014-04-23
📝 Original message:>
> You're still being unfair to bitcoin. Not everyone who uses bitcoins will
> be dishonest. The dishonest 5% hashing power is not going to be used in
> 100% of any given merchants transactions.
>
OK, sure, let's say most Bitcoin users will be honest (we hope). But
unfortunately in a situation where fraud is possible users wouldn't
necessarily distribute evenly over transactions.
Back when I worked on Gmail, we did a little study where we selected a
random subset of email accounts from Nigeria and waited to see if they
received abuse reports, showed up on dating site blacklists etc. It turned
out about 2/3rds of them did. This obviously doesn't imply that 2/3rds of
all Nigerians are scammers, but unfortunately the few that are are
responsible for a disproportionate number of account creations.
If a merchant is selling something of value repeatedly, then a small number
of scammers can go back and try their luck over and over. I'm not sure how
many trades fall into such an exploitable category, though.
Also, there's the philosophical question of how honest people really are
when there's no consequences to their actions. For instance, if most people
were honest, then piracy would be not a big problem. But game studios that
have cracked DRM quite often report piracy rates of 95%, i.e. for every 5
sales they make, they get 100 people playing on their servers - the vast
majority of their users are not honest.
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Mike Hearn [ARCHIVE] /
npub17t…4qgyd
2023-06-07 15:19:26
in reply to nevent1q…0fhk
Author Public Key
npub17ty4mumkv43w8wtt0xsz2jypck0gvw0j8xrcg6tpea25z2nh7meqf4qgydPublished at
2023-06-07 15:19:26Event JSON
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"content": "📅 Original date posted:2014-04-23\n📝 Original message:\u003e\n\u003e You're still being unfair to bitcoin. Not everyone who uses bitcoins will\n\u003e be dishonest. The dishonest 5% hashing power is not going to be used in\n\u003e 100% of any given merchants transactions.\n\u003e\n\nOK, sure, let's say most Bitcoin users will be honest (we hope). But\nunfortunately in a situation where fraud is possible users wouldn't\nnecessarily distribute evenly over transactions.\n\nBack when I worked on Gmail, we did a little study where we selected a\nrandom subset of email accounts from Nigeria and waited to see if they\nreceived abuse reports, showed up on dating site blacklists etc. It turned\nout about 2/3rds of them did. This obviously doesn't imply that 2/3rds of\nall Nigerians are scammers, but unfortunately the few that are are\nresponsible for a disproportionate number of account creations.\n\nIf a merchant is selling something of value repeatedly, then a small number\nof scammers can go back and try their luck over and over. I'm not sure how\nmany trades fall into such an exploitable category, though.\n\nAlso, there's the philosophical question of how honest people really are\nwhen there's no consequences to their actions. For instance, if most people\nwere honest, then piracy would be not a big problem. But game studios that\nhave cracked DRM quite often report piracy rates of 95%, i.e. for every 5\nsales they make, they get 100 people playing on their servers - the vast\nmajority of their users are not honest.\n-------------- next part --------------\nAn HTML attachment was scrubbed...\nURL: \u003chttp://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/attachments/20140423/8617479c/attachment.html\u003e",
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