Why would any merchant – online or in the real world – want to accept Bitcoin as payment, given the currently small number of consumers who want to pay with it? My partner Chris Dixon recently gave this example:
“Let’s say you sell electronics online. Profit margins in those businesses are usually under 5 percent, which means conventional 2.5 percent payment fees consume half the margin. That’s money that could be reinvested in the business, passed back to consumers or taxed by the government. Of all of those choices, handing 2.5 percent to banks to move bits around the Internet is the worst possible choice. Another challenge merchants have with payments is accepting international payments. If you are wondering why your favorite product or service isn’t available in your country, the answer is often payments.”
In addition, merchants are highly attracted to Bitcoin because it eliminates the risk of credit card fraud. This is the form of fraud that motivates so many criminals to put so much work into stealing personal customer information and credit card numbers.
Since Bitcoin is a digital bearer instrument, the receiver of a payment does not get any information from the sender that can be used to steal money from the sender in the future, either by that merchant or by a criminal who steals that information from the merchant.
Credit card fraud is such a big deal for merchants, credit card processors and banks that online fraud detection systems are hair-trigger wired to stop transactions that look even slightly suspicious, whether or not they are actually fraudulent. As a result, many online merchants are forced to turn away 5 to 10 percent of incoming orders that they could take without fear if the customers were paying with Bitcoin, where such fraud would not be possible. Since these are orders that were coming in already, they are inherently the highest margin orders a merchant can get, and so being able to take them will drastically increase many merchants’ profit margins.
A third fascinating use case for Bitcoin is micropayments, or ultrasmall payments. Micropayments have never been feasible, despite 20 years of attempts, because it is not cost effective to run small payments (think $1 and below, down to pennies or fractions of a penny) through the existing credit/debit and banking systems. The fee structure of those systems makes that nonviable.
All of a sudden, with Bitcoin, that’s trivially easy. Bitcoins have the nifty property of infinite divisibility: currently down to eight decimal places after the dot, but more in the future. So you can specify an arbitrarily small amount of money, like a thousandth of a penny, and send it to anyone in the world for free or near-free.
Think about content monetization, for example. One reason media businesses such as newspapers struggle to charge for content is because they need to charge either all (pay the entire subscription fee for all the content) or nothing (which then results in all those terrible banner ads everywhere on the web). All of a sudden, with Bitcoin, there is an economically viable way to charge arbitrarily small amounts of money per article, or per section, or per hour, or per video play, or per archive access, or per news alert.
I ask him to regard me as a dummy, and to give me the longer version.
We can understand bitcoin and blockchain in four steps, he says. “One, cash. When A gives a dollar bill to B, he’s transferring a physical object. B has it, and A no longer does. There’s implicit scarcity in the physical world.”
Step 2 supposes that we treat the serial numbers on those Federal Reserve bills as “a form of naive digital cash. Then A emails those numbers to B. Now B has a copy. But A still has a copy!” So if those serial numbers were treated as cash, A can “double-spend” the numbers by sending them to another party, C. This, Mr. Srinivasan says, is the fundamental issue with digital cash: “the double-spend problem. How do we introduce scarcity into the digital system?”
The way we resolved this problem before bitcoin, Mr. Srinivasan explains in his third step, “was through the use of centralized institutions called banks. Whenever you use PayPal or a similar technology to send money from A to B digitally, the bank is trusted to debit A and credit B.” This, he says, is how “scarcity” is introduced into a digital system; but it is “inelegant, from a computer-science perspective, to have a central, trusted node in any networking topology”—a word my dictionary defines, in this context, as being the way in which constituent parts are interrelated or arranged.
Mr. Srinivasan doesn’t care for this arrangement: “There are downsides to implicitly trusting banks, as the 2008 financial crisis showed.” So rather than require a bank to approve transactions, “Bitcoin figured out how to split this power across many different transaction approvers, called ‘miners.’ ” They “compete to approve transactions and integrate them into the so-called blockchain. Every time they integrate a new block of transactions into the blockchain, they receive a ‘block reward’ and are entitled to print digital currency.” The key point, he says, is that any computer could, in theory, approve transactions, and no single computer could block transactions.
Mr. Srinivasan concedes it’s “a big claim” to say the blockchain is the most consequential technology since the internet. “The internet is programmable information. The blockchain is programmable scarcity.” He elaborates: “All of these previously disparate things—from physical mail to television to music to movies to telephony—basically got turned into packets of information and got remixed by the internet. Plus things that we normally didn’t even think of as information—your Fitbit , your steps, your Facebook settings—became programmable.” It’s fair to say, he continues, “that the internet and all things downstream—search engines, social networks, ride sharing, and so on—have basically been the technological story of the last 25 years.”
The blockchain is the next phase, Mr. Srinivasan says with some zest. “With the blockchain, everything that was scarce now becomes programmable. That means cash, commodities, currencies, stocks, bonds—everything in finance is going to be transformed, and aspects of finance baked into everything else.” By way of example, Mr. Srinivasan suggests that there could be “a spot market for the cost of storing one megabyte on 1,000 remote computers.” He then offers a slogan for the new age: “If you deal with information, you need the internet. If you deal with money, you need to deal with blockchains.”
Hermione Granger: Some cryptocurrencies require you to wait while mysterious wizards called “miners” run hundreds of billions of magical maths spells, called a proof of work, to make sure no one is tampering with the block chain. One block appears roughly every ten minutes and a transaction needs to have been included in a block at least six deep to be settled. If we had settled this transaction with one of those cryptocurrencies, Mr. Ollivander couldn’t be sure we had paid him for about an hour, although that is just an approximation based on probabilistic reasoning and observed features of the protocol rather than anything deterministic.
Harry Potter: That sounds dreadfully inconvenient.
Hermione Granger: And it would be, but Stellarmus doesn’t use a proof of work system, it uses an iterative consensus algorithm, so confirmations are almost instant — closer to “a slow remote API request” than anything involving a blockchain. No mining happens and there is no duplicative work performed worldwide in the hopes of getting seigniorage.
Defense Professor: Right, and no currency network will ever, ever be more adopted than my network. Currency is the strongest network effects business.
Harry Potter: Err, Professor, don’t the Muggles’ currencies count as a network, too? I mean, you can send them by computer, and they have individual buildings which are worth more than all cryptocurrencies put together. In addition to that being, um, disproof by counterexample, even if the networks effect argument were true, wouldn’t that have been an insurmountable barrier against the success of your own network, which you appear to think is succeeding?
Defense Professor: Pah, the Ministry of Magic. Quite possibly the only thing I trust less than a goblin. While we’re on the subject of trust, Granger, why don’t you explain to the boys here what “trusting the network” means?
Hermione Granger: So in any distributed system you need some way to get everyone on the same page about what reality is right now. Consistency, availability, partition tolerance: pick any two. The Defense Professor’s cryptocurrency does this in a trustless fashion — no matter how many peers lie to you, as long as there is at least one peer who is truthful, you learn the true (consistent) state of reality.
Defense Professor: The truth will set you free.
Hermione Granger: Unless, of course, sufficient miners conspire against you, in which case they can retroactively overwrite reality at will. You have to trust them not to do that.
Harry Potter: I’m not feeling like anything is happening.
Defense Professor: Give me an hour or so to wait for confirmations and then this is totally on.
Have I mentioned that I don’t like Bitcoin? I don’t like Bitcoin. I’ve been working on a one-stop-shop explanation of why I don’t like Bitcoin, but haven’t posted it yet. Check back here on the blog if it interests you.
While I don’t like Bitcoin, I tried to be fair to the technical reality of it. To the best of my knowledge, no character in the above story ever tells a direct lie.
Do I like Stellar? Too early to tell. I haven’t really dug into it as an engineering artifact. The embryonic ecosystem does not yet have any tangible economic value. (And the Bitcoin ecosystem? *whistles*) Suffice it to say that at the moment it looks like a very interesting proposal for something that may some day be a toy, and some people I trust believe the toy may eventually be more than a toy, but I have no particular reason to believe or disbelieve that that will be the case yet.