Quote from: Ben on January 02, 2013, 01:36 amQuote from: unkn0wn_ on November 17, 2012, 04:05 amEven to a certain extent, Gold has no intrinsic value. We don't need gold for our own survival. It's only valuable in a post-scarcity economy as a novelty (and with some manufacturing uses).Gold does have intrinsic value, even if it were to go out of fashion for jewelry, and other reserves would be available for currency systems. A fairly large amount of gold is used in industry, particularly electronics, and there doesn't seem to be much of a replacement available as its use continues even with record gold prices.As for bitcoin: I see its major drawback in the very slow transaction speed. For that reason alone it can be surpassed by another cryptocurrency that does have the possibility of fast verification. Simply put, bitcoin cannot be used to pay for your groceries unless you were willing to wait an hour or more for the transaction to clear, a system that clears within seconds could. Also, that could be used for online purchases with a smaller lag between ordering the payment and the payee receiving final confirmation of the transaction, yielding a faster process. It is not impossible that bitcoin will overcome these limitations however, and if it does. will be here to stay. Decentralized systems need not be -this- slow: look at the dht implementation in bittorrent to get an idea. Surely its not instant, but at least that clears within the minute with its present user base, and can be faster when the user base grows. It's my understanding that the transfer can be detected almost instantly. If you run bitcoin-qt and watch as you send coins to an address in your wallet, it pops up with a little notification very quickly. The problem is that the transfer can't be even partially guaranteed until a miner solves a block, at which point they transmit that solution to the network and the transaction is forever immortalized in the blockchain within that new solved block. Or if it becomes an orphaned block, I'm not really sure how that works... but the basic concept is the same I think. The thing is that nobody wants to risk the transaction not being guaranteed with automated systems. That doesn't mean you *can't* risk it if you want to. Just that nobody else is willing to with automated payments when it could be exploited to bleed them dry in a very short period of time, likely before anybody even noticed what was happening.The network auto-calibrates so that a block is solved once every 10 minutes, give or take. 3 verifications is considered pretty solid, so an average of 30 minutes to "almost" guarantee a transaction. That's not as high as 60, but your point is well taken. I suppose it could become a standard agreement anywhere that accepts bitcoins -- something scrawled next to the "bounced checks will be charged..." or something if they accept personal checks: "any transaction that is not ultimately confirmed will be charged a 5 BTC penalty on top of payment owed." Or something.Of course with bitcoins the government can't take them away, so I'm not sure how you'd actually enforce that even in court... but I'm sure it would end up more desirable to just pay the damn people than hold on to the coins.Now that I think about it... this is exactly the reason credit scores exist. Visa (or whatever) is vouching for you when you use your credit card. Same thing could work for bitcoins really.