<div dir="ltr"><div class="gmail_extra"><div class="gmail_quote"><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"><div class="">You're still being unfair to bitcoin. Not everyone who uses bitcoins will<br>
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be dishonest. The dishonest 5% hashing power is not going to be used in<br>
100% of any given merchants transactions.<br></blockquote><div><br></div><div>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.</div>
<div><br></div><div>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.</div>
<div><br></div><div>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.</div>
<div><br></div><div>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.</div>
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