1.) A quick install you’re up and running, receive safecoin by farming (happens automatically, easy) become familiar with spending, buying, trading cryptocurrency without having risked any fiat (no fear) Have heard of bitcoin and now it’s not so hard to get involved. The mass adoption that has been hoped for occurs.
Or,
2.) bitcoin becomes irrelevant and dies like a big fat bloated blockchain dinosaur?
I don’t think bitcoin will die, there is so much infrastructure and business built around it. I mean even buying safecoin would require the user to buy bitcoin first before exchanging it into safecoin. Most people also don’t even care about transparency when using bitcoins, alot of people i think are finding it really useful.
There are already options for non-transparent coins such as bitshares-x which adds privacy layers for transacting, darkcoin and cryptonote coins.
Even though this business model would fail; they still went through with it until each penny was drained. Most of the businesses in bitcoin are meant to fail. And if that failing point is based on bitcoin being mass unadopted then that will be the exodus of bitcoin businesses.
gimmick coins of course.
The Bitcoin public ledger has great value. It can serve a bunch of publicly transparent functions aside from currency as well as accountable spending. Privacy is an effort with bitcoin and even then is not truly private.
But transparency on the SAFE network and with safecoin is difficult out of the box.
I think the two are complimentary and will prove to be more so.
Transactions that one wants to be public and accountable go on the bitcoin blockchain. Those that one prefers to be private will be in safecoin. Safecoin will facilitate more possible privacy for bitcoin but the transaction speed, automatic privacy and scalability of safecoin should ensure a stronger and deeper integration into daily life.
Those activities we associate with government and public corporations will more and more be forced into bitcoin transparency while individual’s private activities will tend toward the opacity of safecoin.
Thus speaketh the oracle.
This is true but in its current form, bitcoin is broken: energy efficiency, scalability and centralization risk. Question is whether it can be fixed, or if an alternative can meet this need.
I agree that Bitcoin is far from perfect and has some obstacles to overcome. It’s overcome a number of them so far and there’s enough vested in it that I think it will probably evolve to be able to persist. If not, something will replace it that has it’s public-transparency functions, I’m pretty sure.
The point is that safecoin itself shouldn’t cause the demise of bitcoin. Bitcoin will fail or not on it’s own merits because it performs a substantially different set of functions in different ways.
Some great analysis here! 
I have nothing to add.
3/ Bitcoin get’s hosted on the SAFEnetwork as a file and it’s function as a public ledger is utilized to ensure that all levels of Public Governance is accountable to it’s constituents. The blockchain uses Triple Entry/3D accounting, which ensures it cannot be gamed.
Thanks for 3 @chrisfostertv that is my hope as bitcoin plays an important role in my investment strategy.
Could an app be built that would do the same for safecoin? A ledger or QuickBooks type thing. Where a userid could opt in or out, make public or keep private. And, could it be made as secure?
Not sure, thats above my pay grade and when I said
Bitcoin get’s hosted on the SAFEnetwork as a file
I probably should have said:
A Blockchain (or similar 3D mechanism) get’s hosted on the SAFEnetwork as a file and it’s function as a public ledger is utilized to ensure that all levels of Public Governance is accountable to it’s constituents.
So if the actual Bitcoin Blockchain gets hosted on SAFE, then of course do all the alts and sidechains etc and the whole ecosystem would surely benefit from that added value.
An analogy of Bitcoin, gleaned from the talk in the video linked below:
The cost of securing the Bitcoin network (i.e miners) in 2014 is around 750 Million Dollars US$750,000,000
Bitcoin is a Company
Bitcoin owners (you) are the Shareholders
Bitcoin miners are Employees
Bitcoin shareholders are paying Bitcoin miners around US$2,000,000 a day to bring more Bitcoins into existence. But because of the costs incurred by miners in the process a big chunk of that US$2,000,000 is used to keep the bitcoin price stable.
So the shareholders are paying for the network via inflation, similar to how a company offers more shares and dilutes ownership.
So how much of that $2,000,000 a day could be saved by moving the mining mechanism onto SAFE and how much would SAFEcoin benefit?
As far as the non blockchain projects like Bitshares, Open Transactions etc it’s going to be interesting to see if they get on board early on.
It seems Ethereum are attempting to build their own distributed network for Storage, Communications and Contracts:
My impression is that safecoin aims to be the currency of SAFE and if it leaks into the larger economy, awesome, whereas bitcoin aims to be a currency of real life and if it doesn’t make it in real life then it’s a pointless failure. Am I wrong?
As far as Bitcoin ‘the currency’ it might be seen as a failure if the price dropped dramatically via a downward spiral of owner/miner confidence and a lot of fiat investment in infrastructure could be at risk. I always think of the coins that Satoshi holds as an elephant in the room…no-one knows the identity, what if those coins were dumped on the market, would that cause a spiral loss in confidence.
…but the protocol it’self will be around for a long time to come I’d say.
When you buy ‘Bitcoin’ your buying an address on a public ledger. That ledger is very useful and there appears to be features built into the protocol that have not been exploited as yet…so I cant see the fiat price of bitcoin going to zero. But the issue of needing $2,000,000 a day to keep the mining/security of Bitcoin rolling is pretty staggering.
Bitcoin at $500-$1000 is quite amazing as a pure speculative play by the buyers, but is required given the overheads to secure it. Were also starting to see people that are preferring crypto for payment of wages, maybe because of the perception it gives a better return than fiat sitting in a bank.
I could envisage SAFEcoin piggy backing on Bitcoin’s ATM/ POS infrastructure if needed down the track.
Yeah, the Bitcoin protocol is a different matter than Bitcon specifically, that’s true. The point I was making was more about safecoin though. It’s got a use baked in. Bitcoin or gold or fiat currency are valuable because people agree they are. Gold has some less important actual uses, and physical cash can be burned to heat your house or whatever, but safecoin ultimately derives its existence from the fact that two or a million or a billion internet hosts are talking to each other in a protocol that relies on it algorithmically. That’s the point where I’m trying to see if I understand or have newbie misconceptions.
Would you believe I only now realized my hundred trillion dollar bill userpic is relevant? I don’t have it as a political or economic statement about fiat currency/bitcoin/safecoin/whatever. I just thought it was funny. Heh.
Bitcoin is not broken. The energy used by maintaining the blockchain is nothing compared to the value of the blockchain, and the computing power securing the Bitcoin network is impressive to say the least. I see no reason to “down” Bitcoin in order to support MaidSafe.
I don’t claim any expertise, but…
I totally see that if the masses switch onto to the SAFE network and away from the WWW…
…and Safecoin (with its no-wait transactions, and is COMPLETELY untrackable / anonymous by default) is just there for them, waiting to be used…
People will start accepting it for wayyyy more goods and services than Bitcoin has ever been used for… And possibly, for EVERYTHING.
It is truly built to be the most heavily used, secure, global currency we have ever seen.
I have no doubt it will take over currency, as long as everything here with MaidSafe is implemented correctly.
They say the internet is growing from connecting only 2 billion people in 2012 to 5 billion in 2020 (imagine all the poor kids and families in Africa / India / China with smartphones these days) and this is a true currency that can facilitate this completely new economic scene.
Bitcoin, with its ever-growing blockchain, lame @$$ wait times for transactions (I HATE THAT!!! WHY SHOULD I WAIT 10 MINUTES AT THE CHECKOUT LINE FOR MY PAYMENT TO CLEAR?!?!??!!) etc., simply isn’t built for where we are heading.
Safecoin, on the other hand, is.
David Irvine is so very far thinking, i can’t even begin to believe it.
Maybe Bitcoin will stay around as a cool decentralized way to handle titles, ownership and other things I don’t really understand,
But safecoin could totally wreck it, currency-wise.
It’s simply built to be the best monetary tool for this day in age, with the global state of today, and of tomorrow
This is only true, if there was mass adoption of Bitcoin and the cost to maintain the network was fixed at let’s say 20 billion bucks worth of hardware to maintain the blockchain; and the use of bitcoin transactions were to be like 10 trillion globally. Otherwise the net cost of bitcoin is net loss, if it costs 10 trillion to use 10 trillion that’s crap and should be shut down a long time ago. Then again… it would still be better than our current system of 1 quadrillion in reserve to maintain 10 trillion in transaction.
The reason person ignored bitcoin for a long time is because for example; the market cap when a person first heard of bitcoin was 30 million USD. At that time this person’s buying power was 3 million USD at NYSE; if they got involved with their whole line and intended to earn profits; Person’d be able to drive the price of bitcoin… literally any which way. Up or Down. Person wouldn’t even have a chance to spend even probably 10% of my buying power.
Even today the same 3 million USD in liquidity will cause intense fluctuations in the price of bitcoin. With 3 million I traded Citigroup shares which cost at the time 4 dollars, and they had a Daily volume of 2 billion shares… thats 8 billion bucks in transaction… and it required that much transaction volume to handle a 3 million usd position at that took place at least 10 times a day. If you want really trading; you need Bitcoins market cap moved each day. What bitcoin is at even today is peeeenutttsssss LOL.
Bitcoin is a good prototyping environment. That’s all.
Interesting comments, sounds like you walk the talk…cheers
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Agree. Let’s be realistic.