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Can you provide a single problem where the right solution space is blockchain? Ive thought about this a good amount, and cannot come up with a single use case w

Can you provide a single problem where the right solution space is blockchain? Ive thought about this a good amount, and cannot come up with a single use case where current established centralized technology is not a better solution.

QuackingJimbo 8y ago
Seconding this request. Whenever I ask a crypto bull this question directly they just call me an idiot without providing any actual examples.
- zhoujianfu 8y ago
  Illegal stuff?
  - Waterluvian 8y ago
    This is where I've landed too. 1. Making money by trading fun bucks. 2. Anything where you need a currency but all the way better options aren't viable (crime).
    - tyre 8y ago
      For (2) one of the real values is being able to carry (practically) unlimited cash with you. Right now, USD in cash is capped at $100 notes to make it inconvenient to move large quantities. With crypto, you fly anywhere in the world with a private key in your luggage. That key could have $100 or $1,000,000,000. Thinking of international drug smuggling, one serious problem is moving all of the cash out of the country. Crypto solves that easily.
- rtpg 8y ago
  There is a legit use-case in micropayments with certain crypto implementations that don't share the blockchain's massive centralisation (what else do you call "every transaction has to be accepted on one shared append-only log"?), that would allow for offline P2P transactions if you have some trust. These cryptocurrency implementations along with some infrastructure would let you build a cheap low-cost micropayments system where you would just need to have some local trust. You could build out a federated payment network and build out infrastructure based on needs. All while avoiding the massive waste that comes from "everyone store every transaction ever" The problem of credit card companies and the like charging really high rates still affects a lot, and "Paypal, but federated" could help tackle this with some cryptocurrency concepts in the background. Though to be honest, I don't think this is going to happen. The communities are so focused on completely trust-free models that they don't see how they could build something extremely useful with way less cost and more utility by being more flexible on that point
  - QuackingJimbo 8y ago
    Interesting Why not just use the real Paypal?
    - icelancer 8y ago
      > Why not just use the real Paypal? Some of us are banned for no actual reason from Paypal. Some others, banks.
    - brian_cloutier 8y ago
      Paypal micropayments cost 5% + 5 cents. cryptocurrency micropayments could potentially be much smaller. What if you could pay per packet the wifi access point forwards for you? Or pay per watt some charger gives you? Maybe nanopayments is a better name for them.
      - QuackingJimbo 8y ago
        Re Paypal cost, is that micropayments to businesses? I just sent my friend $0.01 and it was free, with a linked bank account. Understood that the bank account payments take a while to settle but we're talking about micropayments so settlement time doesn't really matter Fair point about nanopayments. But what's the win? Why split up the cost per single watt or packet? No one cares about losing one cent per day due to rounding errors
        brian_cloutier 8y ago
        > But what's the win? Why split up the cost per single watt or packet? No one cares about losing one cent per day due to rounding errors Honestly with this question you've summed up most of my feelings about blockchains. Humanity feels like it's become more powerful in some very specific way. We have a new tool and we're trying to figure out what it's good for. I've pattern matched this to early reactions to the internet. Many of the critics pointed out that the internet didn't really make anything new possible, we could already quickly communicate with people across the world! But, it radically lowered the cost of that communication and put it into a format computers could use and that was enough to put companies like Blockbuster out of business. It's really hard to work backwards from a new tool to places it could successfully be applied. And if 10 years from now we haven't found a use for nanopayments I'll admit it was a silly idea, but it sure does seem interesting.
seibelj 8y ago
I have also thought about this a good amount, and the answer is any place you want a market. Markets are a very interesting thing, and when they exist all sorts of things happen, but especially real time price discovery. What digital assets enable are markets around digital goods. Software can be funded and operated using new tokens specifically for that project. I believe it can be one solution for financing and creating real gains from open source.
- googlemike 8y ago
  Agreed that markets are very interesting, and agreed that real time price discovery is a thing that happens in markets... But I still fail to see how blockchain is relevant here? A centralized system for managing supply and demand equilibrium through dynamic price changes seems like the best system here. I do not feel as though have answered my question - would you mind expanding on your answer?
  - seibelj 8y ago
    Blockchain allows you to run certain types of programs in a purely decentralized manner. You can create a smart contract and allow anyone to use it, and pay for its operation, forever into the future without maintaining any infrastructure. The user pays. The use cases are novel and not necessarily directly applicable to current problems, just as the Internet was novel and required entrepreneurs to invent new business models. But let’s imagine you created a new protocol for email. You decide that all emails in the new protocol require the use of a token. You are now incentivizing early users to bootstrap, improve, develop, and promote the protocol. What was previously unfundable is now profitable. I’m only scratching the surface, but with some imagination you can see how “not crazy” this is.
    - epanchin 8y ago
      Much easier to charge users using their own credit cards. Don’t see what crypto is solving here? In your email example, what is the advantage to you over charging a subscription? How do you create ongoing revenue?
troquerre 8y ago
Handshake.org decentralizes the root zone and obsoletes certificate authorities. Basically, it lets you register new TLDs that are censorship-resistant, seizure-resistant, and tamper-proof.
- jasonvorhe 8y ago
  At the expense of no one getting do your site because they don't use a custom DNS server?
  - monsterbash506 8y ago
    Opera and Brave are integrating ENS (ethereum name service) into the browser so you can resolve .eth domains. There is no fundamental reason why this couldn't happen for handshake (cool project btw).
  - troquerre 7y ago
    The alternative is having your domain shut down for “sensitive” content in pretty much any country outside of the US and Canada.
3mtj20 8y ago
why not payments...which is what bitcoin was founded to do (though perhaps has moved too much into store of value territory)
- deleted 8y ago
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- RhodesianHunter 8y ago
  AFAICT none of the blockchain tech has the ability to scale to the volume of something like Visa due to it's decentralized nature.
  - 3mtj20 8y ago
    There are some solutions like lightning network. Also, no one is saying that blockchain in its current state solves all problem better than what we have now. What matters, and why some people would bet on certain blockchains/tokens/projects/etc is the belief that there are certain projects that have real potential to disrupt a big incumbent like Visa.
  - josephg 8y ago
    I'm not convinced that there are essential technical reasons stopping decentralized systems from scaling into the 10Ktps range that we would need to compete with VISA. We would have to make a few changes though - we couldn't send all transactions to all nodes - instead we'd need a tree of confirming networks or something. And we might need a 2PC protocol for transactions. (Eg first I send money and generate a hash. Once thats been confirmed you can commit a receive money message. Or something like that). But I acknowledge that the burden of proof is on me here. And I'm not convinced its worth doing - I agree that there aren't many good use cases for this.
- rococode 8y ago
  As with other blockchain techs, the question I have for this is: is using bitcoin for payments superior enough to replace current payment systems (credit cards, PayPal, bank transfers)? My gut feeling on this is no, having used it with some frequency over the past 7 or 8 years, and I've yet to hear a really convincing argument about why Bitcoin is so much better.
garmaine 8y ago
Anywhere where there is no trusted intermediary, or their fees are too expensive. (And yes that’s a much smaller space than the block chain hype machine makes it out to be, but it is something tangible.)
- QuackingJimbo 8y ago
  > Anywhere where there is no trusted intermediary, or their fees are too expensive Such as......?
  - garmaine 8y ago
    Extremely common in international transactions, to name one space I work in.
    - icelancer 8y ago
      Not sure why you are being downvoted, this is a very obvious use case for large sums of money transferred internationally, especially in certain jurisdictions.
elliekelly 8y ago
When it comes to laundering money and ponzi scheming cryptocurrency is second to none in terms of cost, risk & speed. Edit: Strugglinng to type on my phone.
- QuackingJimbo 8y ago
  You got me there. I am in the 99th percentile of crypto bears but I myself have used Bitcoin very effectively to buy illegal drugs, buy illegal steroids, and bet on sports illegally. Bitcoin is truly second to none in these domains.
  - 3mtj20 8y ago
    If you're doing those things because you think your transactions are anonymous...you're putting yourself at risk. Bitcoin is not private, like at all.
- seibelj 8y ago
  You are 100% wrong! Traditional banks have order of magnitude more fraud than crypto, and the nature of blockchain makes it extremely easy for analysts to trace money laundering with little effort. Google “chainalysis”
Mirioron 8y ago
Transferring money from one country to another. It might seem easy right now, but if Visa or MasterCard ban you or your recipient, or their region, or country then it becomes much harder.
- QuackingJimbo 8y ago
  Just don't get banned by Visa or Mastercard
  - icelancer 8y ago
    Oh, simple enough.
- elliekelly 8y ago
  Every instance of international money transfer being more difficult via Visa/MasterCard than Cryptocurrency is by design. When you hear about a government issuing new “sanctions on North Korea”, for example, those sanctions are implemented by making it prohibitively difficult to effect transactions with North Korea.
baddox 8y ago
I think the centralized solutions are certainly better for the people who have no major issues with the centralized solutions. That’s nearly a tautology, of course. But it’s pretty reasonable to consider there may be many people and use cases that do not work with the centralized solutions, even if those work great for you and for everyone you know.
- peteretep 8y ago
  > consider there may be many people and use cases that do not work with the centralized solutions The comment you’re replying to is actively soliciting examples of those
  - baddox 8y ago
    Yes, and my point is that being unable to come up with examples based on personal experience is not very convincing evidence that no examples exist.
    - peteretep 8y ago
      https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell%27s_teapot https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell%27s_teapot
RexetBlell 8y ago
Game items like weapons and shields in an RPG game. Imagine if there is a global database of such items and different game developers build different games around it. So you could use your items in different games. What centralized entity would you trust to run and maintain this database? What if this centralied goes bankrupt and shuts down the servers? If you are a small game developer, you are screwed. Even if it's Google, you still can't be certain that Google will not shut down the project and turn off the database like it has with certain projects in the past. A public open blockchain is a neutral database that it would be reasonable for many small game developers to use for this purpose without fearing that it will get shut down, or the rules would be changed.
- kalleboo 8y ago
  > to use for this purpose without fearing that it will get shut down, or the rules would be changed. Looking at the hard forks in existing cryptocurrencies I wouldn't trust the rules to not change
  - RexetBlell 8y ago
    Making it hard to change the rules is one of the value propositions of decentralized blockchains. Hard forks are pretty rare and when do happen, they are contentious the original chain survives (for example Ethereum Classic). Compare this to a centralized entity like Blizzard changing rules in World of Warcraft. Wouldn't you agree that it's much much easier for Blizzard to change the rules in their game, than to change the rules of a blockchain by hard forking?
    - zacharycohn 8y ago
      But Blizzard doesn't change the rules willy nilly just to screw with you. They change it for balance or in-game economy reasons.
- learc83 8y ago
  As a game designer (on the side) I definitely wouldn't want to give up control of balancing my game to some third party item creator. Items balance is too game specific for this to work unless you're just taking the name and some general type and implementing your own take on it, in which case I don't see much point.
hboon 8y ago
Creating frictionless markets which players can more easily enter without a gatekeeper (e.g. a monopoly). The trick is to tokenize and write smart contracts representing the entities and relationships. It's a long way to go before achieving this, but we'll get there. Hopefully.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
mightybyte 8y ago
One problem that I think blockchains could be well suited for is the storage of police evidence. Not physical evidence of course, but anything that could be turned into data. There was a scene in the show Billions where U.S. prosecutors tampered with evidence in the from of notes taken while interviewing persons of interest. Since blockchains are at their core a tamper-proof append-only data store, if those notes had been stored in a blockchain that evidence tampering would have been impossible. Any time the stakes are high enough a centralized technology can become vulnerable to people being bribed, etc. Note that my use of the term "blockchain" here isn't limited to public blockchains. You most likely wouldn't want to store police evidence publicly on a blockchain like Ethereum. You'd want that to be private, but there do exist private blockchain consensus algorithms like BFT that do have the same tamper-proof properties without requiring a public proof of work network.
- deleted 8y ago
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- deleted 8y ago
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- peteretep 8y ago
  Why does this need a blockchain rather than being simply cryptographic signing?
  - monson 8y ago
    Securely signing a cryptographic message with a provable timestamp still requires a trusted third party, as far as I know. A trusted third party can be corrupted.[1] Writing data on a decentralized blockchain inherently provides a secure timestamp that cannot be modified without being noticed. Not to mention the extreme costs involved with trying to rewrite a blockchain's history. [2] I disagree with the parent comment on one thing-- I would much rather trust a public blockchain with a respectable hashrate over a private blockchain. You could simply store a salted hash of the data on the public blockchain, and still keep the actual evidence private. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trusted_third_party https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trusted_third_party [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trusted_timestamping https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trusted_timestamping
dcosson 8y ago
IMO the original use case of just Bitcoin is still by far the most compelling. A non-inflationary store of value not unlike gold, but it can be transferred for a very low cost anywhere in the world in minutes. I think the same arguments that come up about privacy can also apply to currency - I'm not doing anything illegal, why I do I care if I'm being monitored? or I'm not buying anything illegal, why do I care if banks and payment processors can block transactions? It's nice to have an alternative and be able to do things outside of that system just in case. I don't, however, really understand the fanatics that want every cup of coffee they buy to use crypto. I definitely don't see any practical benefit to that.
- peteretep 8y ago
  Why don’t you think companies can inflate the crypto money supply in the same way that they inflate the fiat money supply?
  - icelancer 8y ago
    I don't understand this question. Why do you think Bitcoin is inflatable as such?
    - peteretep 8y ago
      Because I don't see any reason why Bitcoin can't be a fractional-reserve asset.
      - zby 8y ago
        You can have fractional-reserve only because the public cannot see any difference between money from M0 and M1. In crypto the public uses M0 directly. For now at least. There are some M1 constructs - at MtGox there were 'codes' redeemable for bitcoins, but they are not transferable between exchanges.
        peteretep 8y ago
guessy 8y ago
Unseizable money.
- rblatz 8y ago
  It may not be easily seizable, and with the right security practices it may be nearly impossible to seize directly. But governments could announce certain coins are not spendable and enforce that on companies or people subject to their jurisdiction. Prosecuting anyone who accepted one of those coins with a crime.
  - RexetBlell 8y ago
    Which is why privacy technology is being implemented in blockchains like ZCash, Monero and Ethereum.
  - Sargos 8y ago
    Those types of tyrannical governments already have people operating in black markets. Crypto doesn't really change that it just makes the bad government's job harder which the vast majority of the world would agree is a good thing. The people of Sudan, Syria, Turkey, and the Phillipines among others are grateful that cryptocurrencies give them an option of having freedom.
kwikiel 8y ago
Blockchains are essentially paperclip optimiser machines. For bitcoin - paperclips are PoW hashrate. The network rewards people that contribute to it's growth. It doesn't care about people and people values - it's like a new kind of living organism that uses people as substrate to exist
rblatz 8y ago
I’ve thought that a potential use of blockchain would be proof of ownership of certain digital items such as an mp3 or an e-book. Such a system could allow you to move purchases between devices and apps, and prevent vendor lock-in.
rbreve 8y ago
Censorship free apps and content
eouw0o83hf 8y ago
Real estate, particularly with regards to ownership and property title. Ownership of a property is a difficult concept to prove, and there is an enormous industry of title insurance which exists to dig through the records and insure a purchase against unknown claims against the property. A public ledger would make property title/ownership simple and knowable. Overall I think blockchain technology is incredibly over-hyped, but does have some suitable applications, particularly where public records are involved.
- travisjungroth 8y ago
  I've heard this argument, and I don't see how it works. It relies on trusting the information put onto a blockchain.
  - eouw0o83hf 8y ago
    It most definitely does require a base trust - however that's not an argument against the solution, just a challenge to implementation. We implicitly trust a tremendous amount of digitized information because we trust its sources - for instance, digital banking works because we trust banks to only log verified transactions to our account. Sourcing that information is absolutely very difficult, but it doesn't mean it can't or shouldn't be done.
    - travisjungroth 8y ago
      Requiring trust is absolutely an argument against the solution. Once you're willing to trust someone, you may as well use a database and a contract.
- defen 8y ago
  > A public ledger would make property title/ownership simple and knowable. Only if all the property records are already in the ledger, right? If I buy a house via blockchain, someone can still come along and say their great-aunt should have inherited it 80 years ago, before blockchain records existed. So you still need title companies.
geomark 8y ago
US expat trying to receive money overseas. US banks won't serve you unless you have a US address. Many lie and say it is illegal. The usual work-around is to establish some kind of US address through a relative or friend. Still ends up being costly and slow to do transfers. Some startups have tried to address it but it is still not very good. Coinbase like to claim they have solved this issue but it is total BS because they won't let you purchase BTC on their platform without a state ID. Useless for an expat who moved overseas long ago. But if I need to be paid by someone in another country who can buy BTC then that is usually the best solution for me. It is a small market so not a driver in the crytocurrency space.
- phillc73 8y ago
  > US expat trying to receive money overseas. US banks won't serve you unless you have a US address. I admit to knowing almost nothing about the US banking system, but is it really true that one can't make an electronic transfer using an IBAN (International Bank Account Number)? I live in Austria and just paid a number of invoices, through online banking, to bank account holders in France, Czechia, Slovenia and the UK. All I needed was their IBAN.
  - geomark 8y ago
    Of course you can make an electronic transfer, as long as you can manage to keep a bank account open at a US bank. But don't let them find out you are living overseas or they will close it.
- seanmcdirmid 8y ago
  As long as you have social security number, some banks will do it at least. I chose HSBC USA because I was living in China and they were super used to that.
- StreamBright 8y ago
  This is why we have Transferwise, Revolut, N26 and a bunch of others.
  - 8y ago
nradov 8y ago
Synaptic Health Alliance has a good use case for using blockchain technology to share a directory of healthcare providers across multiple organizations while avoiding the free rider problem. https://www.synaptichealthalliance.com https://www.synaptichealthalliance.com
- luckydata 8y ago
  Why do you need a blockchain to do that?
  - nradov 8y ago
    What other architecture would you recommend? There's no single entity which can be trusted to maintain a centralized database.
    - luckydata 8y ago
      I challenge that requirement. Why no single entity can be trusted? It's like saying the banking system doesn't work because no single entity can be trusted with maintaining a database of transactions. That's self evidently false.
      - nradov 8y ago
        Which single entity can be trusted? None beyond the US federal government exists today, and they don't want to do the job. I suppose in theory all of the industry players could get together and establish a joint venture or nonprofit company specifically for the purpose of creating and maintaining an accurate database of provider contact information. But that seems a lot more complex.
        luckydata 8y ago
        Doesn't seem that complex to me. Insurance companies kinda do that already. It's not a technology issue, otherwise Google or Microsoft would have figured it out already, it's a governance and legal issue. Blockchain doesn't seem to be bringing to the table anything valuable in this case.
zacharycohn 8y ago
Department of Homeland Security published this handy flowchart which NIST republished: https://imgur.com/a/RlUj9Ed https://imgur.com/a/RlUj9Ed I have found it to be very useful during these conversations.
brian_cloutier 8y ago
My favorite examples both involve markets: (for the sake of convenience I'll talk about these two products as if they already exist and work. They don't.) 1. Althea (https://althea.org/ https://althea.org/) is incentivized mesh networking. Currently, mesh networking is an under-provisioned public good. It's a public good because how would you even pay for it? If you want to provide bandwidth to some mesh network you need to spin up your router and then form some sort of business arrangement with all the other routers in range. If you want to consume bandwidth from some mesh network you must first form a business relationship with every router you'll be using. With a protocol such as Althea all you have to do is start your router and set a price in $/byte . Your router broadcasts that price, and assuming the price is competitive packets will start to be forwarded and you'll start to receive payments. With Althea all of these business relationships I described before are still formed! However, they exist in the form of standardized smart contracts which are cheap and quick to create. Like in all liquid markets, there's no negotiation over terms. While incentivized mesh networking is theoretically possible without a blockchain, the transaction costs are so high that I'm not aware of any deployments. The blockchainless answer for reducing transaction costs seems to be: create some central entity which everyone signs up for. It collects information on who routed packets through who and collects and distributes payments accordingly. The blockchain answer gives you: - no intermediary who takes 20% just for matchmaking - an easy way of paying other parties - no need to sign up or register for anything. You're just communicating with your peers! 2. Filecoin is distributed file storage much like Amazon's S3. Currently, there are only a couple suppliers (Google, Amazon, Microsoft, etc) who store your files. They have some healthy competition and economies of scale which bring your price down but supply is still rather limited: mostly because there's no standardized "file storage contract". Also, they seem to enjoy premium pricing, even with all those economies of scale they manage to be most expensive options. Backblaze and some company called Wasabi are much cheaper for what appears to be the same service. Can you really trust them though? My data is important. I'll put it into S3 just to be sure. The Filecoin network goes through some crazy steps to prove that providers are actually storing the files they claim to be storing and actually replicating them the number of times they claim to be replicating them. This lets you trust any supplier on the network and turns object storage into a commodity. Filecoin also has the same blockchain benefit of requiring little registration. Do you have a desktop computer with a 2 TB hard drive, even though you're only using a few hundred GB of it? Start the Filecoin daemon and wait, after some time passes you'll have money. This 0-registration is a level of UX which blockchains cannot currently provide but in principle they could. However, it's something that would be very difficult for any central service to provide. And again, the file storage becomes a commodity without any intermediate market-maker taking x%. The blockchain acts as that market-maker.
aaronbrethorst 8y ago
fleecing rubes and money laundering.
zby 8y ago
Gold but for the internet. I.e. value store that is digital and government independent. It is kind of fringe niche - but I think it will stay.
quickthrower2 8y ago
A means of financial exchange for countries with hyperinflation.
sumshetty 8y ago
I think people look at only payments and all the media hype is around payments. A lot of things with M2M communications, be it microgrids, industrial IoT networks, self driving cars that can manage payments and invoicing themselves, blockchain networks can be very effective. Fetch.ai was an interesting project that came out. Data marketplaces are interesting, checkout numeraire and ocean network Having non fungible assets on the internet currently is an impossibility, say having a special gun in fortnite that no one else can have. This may not appeal to everyone but I know a lot of gamers who would treat these as assets. I’m not sure but I don’t think any service on the Internet today can guarantee that only one copy of a digital piece of information exists, Blockchain’s can. Current internet infrastructure depends on us trusting one organisation to manage critical infrastructure and I don’t think that’s really the optimum way for anything. Governance and management of networks was something we've never thought of, but some of the best experiment in governance are running in the crypto world. I do think networks like Google and Facebook were something people never imagined, and the capitalistic model clearly rewards the builders asymmetrically. A network like Google or Facebook was built by its users and is still being built by its users. SV has propagated this stupid ideology that 10 upstarts were able to build a network that powerful and all the credit should go to them. I'm not sure what the solution to this is, but I do think users should receive a fraction of the value the networks make. And blockchains make it possible to build networks like this. Steem is an interesting experiment but hasn't gained much steam. BAT is a great experiment that could change the direction of the internet. I'm not sure if their model would work, but I do think its an experiment that must happen. The future of the internet is at stake with the ad driven cess pool that it has become. In terms on energy inefficiency, this has been a problem people have acknowledged and have been trying to solve, I think we’re less than 2 years away from a breakthrough in PoS which would make PoW redundant. Either way, I think people obsess over payments too much. I'd obsess more over how this is the first time in the history of mankind we don't need a third party to supply trust. There is no trust premium on services, which can upend multiple services, finance being the obvious one but I think it's much larger than finance. I do think that there is a lot of noise in this space and its hard for anyone rationally observing to get a clear perspective on what's going on. I could go on all day and maybe even write a scifi fantasy but yeah, there's a lot of people working towards building the future, sadly its a small fraction compared to the number of people speculating and creating noise.
rorykoehler 8y ago
https://www.idpass.org/ https://www.idpass.org/
devit 8y ago
Transactions that are in violation of the law (evading capital controls, buying illegal goods, money laundering) and are not done in person. Also, replacing trust in centralized banks with trust in mostly-centralized crypto software developers and mostly-centralized majority of miners.
stale2002 8y ago
Censorship resistant financial transactions. It is much more difficult to censor crypto payments than it is to censor credit card, paypal, or bank transactions. Crypto payments being censored just isn't something that is happening, even though crypto has been around for 10 years. The evidence proves that it is more difficult to censor.
- notyourday 8y ago
  Only in a separate digital realm that never touches the rest of the world. In the rest of the world there are laws that are enforced by force and no amount of math is going to prevent a SWAT team from dragging a crypto punk into a slammer.
  - stale2002 8y ago
    Censorship is something that can be done by both the government, and private companies. It is something that happens with or without a court order, to people who have broken zero laws. Yes, the government often censors perfectly legal financial transactions, to people who aren't criminals. And crypto makes such censorship against people who have broken zero laws, much more difficult. It makes it no longer as easy as just calling up a bank, or a couple credit card companies, and telling them to cancel all of their transactions to people who didn't commit any crimes. It makes it no longer as easy as a couple monopoly companies making a quick agreement to screw over an entity that didn't do anything illegal.
    - notyourday 8y ago
      Only in the realm of digital stuff. The moment it hits real physical world it becomes clear that the entire castle is built on sand, using sand. Since we have not figure out yet how to feed ourselves and house ourselves using the crypto assigning it such attributes is rather odd.
      - stale2002 8y ago
        > Since we have not figure out yet how to feed ourselves and house ourselves using the crypto assigning it such attributes is rather odd. Of course there is a way to do this. You go to a store and pay for food with crypto if the store accepts it. Is has an advantage over credit cards, as a couple companies could block your transactions, whereas this is much more difficult with crypto. Lots of in person stores have had problems with the visa MasterCard duopoly. Being able to escape from the risk of censorship from visa and MasterCard, for brick and mortar stores, is useful in and of itself. Money is digital. And you can use digital money to pay for physical things. And you can get around censorship, enacted by private companies, using digital payments that are harder to censor, and this works for real life physical goods.
arisAlexis 8y ago
public tracking of government money. public ledgers have been used since ancient Athens. This one can be tamper proof. Second public tracking of charity and how the money reaches correct targets and how it is spent.

QuackingJimbo 8y ago

Seconding this request. Whenever I ask a crypto bull this question directly they just call me an idiot without providing any actual examples.

zhoujianfu 8y ago
Illegal stuff?
- Waterluvian 8y ago
  This is where I've landed too. 1. Making money by trading fun bucks. 2. Anything where you need a currency but all the way better options aren't viable (crime).
  - tyre 8y ago
    For (2) one of the real values is being able to carry (practically) unlimited cash with you. Right now, USD in cash is capped at $100 notes to make it inconvenient to move large quantities. With crypto, you fly anywhere in the world with a private key in your luggage. That key could have $100 or $1,000,000,000. Thinking of international drug smuggling, one serious problem is moving all of the cash out of the country. Crypto solves that easily.
rtpg 8y ago
There is a legit use-case in micropayments with certain crypto implementations that don't share the blockchain's massive centralisation (what else do you call "every transaction has to be accepted on one shared append-only log"?), that would allow for offline P2P transactions if you have some trust. These cryptocurrency implementations along with some infrastructure would let you build a cheap low-cost micropayments system where you would just need to have some local trust. You could build out a federated payment network and build out infrastructure based on needs. All while avoiding the massive waste that comes from "everyone store every transaction ever" The problem of credit card companies and the like charging really high rates still affects a lot, and "Paypal, but federated" could help tackle this with some cryptocurrency concepts in the background. Though to be honest, I don't think this is going to happen. The communities are so focused on completely trust-free models that they don't see how they could build something extremely useful with way less cost and more utility by being more flexible on that point
- QuackingJimbo 8y ago
  Interesting Why not just use the real Paypal?
  - icelancer 8y ago
    > Why not just use the real Paypal? Some of us are banned for no actual reason from Paypal. Some others, banks.
  - brian_cloutier 8y ago
    Paypal micropayments cost 5% + 5 cents. cryptocurrency micropayments could potentially be much smaller. What if you could pay per packet the wifi access point forwards for you? Or pay per watt some charger gives you? Maybe nanopayments is a better name for them.
    - QuackingJimbo 8y ago
      Re Paypal cost, is that micropayments to businesses? I just sent my friend $0.01 and it was free, with a linked bank account. Understood that the bank account payments take a while to settle but we're talking about micropayments so settlement time doesn't really matter Fair point about nanopayments. But what's the win? Why split up the cost per single watt or packet? No one cares about losing one cent per day due to rounding errors
      - brian_cloutier 8y ago
        > But what's the win? Why split up the cost per single watt or packet? No one cares about losing one cent per day due to rounding errors Honestly with this question you've summed up most of my feelings about blockchains. Humanity feels like it's become more powerful in some very specific way. We have a new tool and we're trying to figure out what it's good for. I've pattern matched this to early reactions to the internet. Many of the critics pointed out that the internet didn't really make anything new possible, we could already quickly communicate with people across the world! But, it radically lowered the cost of that communication and put it into a format computers could use and that was enough to put companies like Blockbuster out of business. It's really hard to work backwards from a new tool to places it could successfully be applied. And if 10 years from now we haven't found a use for nanopayments I'll admit it was a silly idea, but it sure does seem interesting.

seibelj 8y ago

I have also thought about this a good amount, and the answer is any place you want a market. Markets are a very interesting thing, and when they exist all sorts of things happen, but especially real time price discovery. What digital assets enable are markets around digital goods. Software can be funded and operated using new tokens specifically for that project. I believe it can be one solution for financing and creating real gains from open source.

googlemike 8y ago
Agreed that markets are very interesting, and agreed that real time price discovery is a thing that happens in markets... But I still fail to see how blockchain is relevant here? A centralized system for managing supply and demand equilibrium through dynamic price changes seems like the best system here. I do not feel as though have answered my question - would you mind expanding on your answer?
- seibelj 8y ago
  Blockchain allows you to run certain types of programs in a purely decentralized manner. You can create a smart contract and allow anyone to use it, and pay for its operation, forever into the future without maintaining any infrastructure. The user pays. The use cases are novel and not necessarily directly applicable to current problems, just as the Internet was novel and required entrepreneurs to invent new business models. But let’s imagine you created a new protocol for email. You decide that all emails in the new protocol require the use of a token. You are now incentivizing early users to bootstrap, improve, develop, and promote the protocol. What was previously unfundable is now profitable. I’m only scratching the surface, but with some imagination you can see how “not crazy” this is.
  - epanchin 8y ago
    Much easier to charge users using their own credit cards. Don’t see what crypto is solving here? In your email example, what is the advantage to you over charging a subscription? How do you create ongoing revenue?

troquerre 8y ago

Handshake.org decentralizes the root zone and obsoletes certificate authorities. Basically, it lets you register new TLDs that are censorship-resistant, seizure-resistant, and tamper-proof.

jasonvorhe 8y ago
At the expense of no one getting do your site because they don't use a custom DNS server?
- monsterbash506 8y ago
  Opera and Brave are integrating ENS (ethereum name service) into the browser so you can resolve .eth domains. There is no fundamental reason why this couldn't happen for handshake (cool project btw).
- troquerre 7y ago
  The alternative is having your domain shut down for “sensitive” content in pretty much any country outside of the US and Canada.

3mtj20 8y ago

why not payments...which is what bitcoin was founded to do (though perhaps has moved too much into store of value territory)

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RhodesianHunter 8y ago
AFAICT none of the blockchain tech has the ability to scale to the volume of something like Visa due to it's decentralized nature.
- 3mtj20 8y ago
  There are some solutions like lightning network. Also, no one is saying that blockchain in its current state solves all problem better than what we have now. What matters, and why some people would bet on certain blockchains/tokens/projects/etc is the belief that there are certain projects that have real potential to disrupt a big incumbent like Visa.
- josephg 8y ago
  I'm not convinced that there are essential technical reasons stopping decentralized systems from scaling into the 10Ktps range that we would need to compete with VISA. We would have to make a few changes though - we couldn't send all transactions to all nodes - instead we'd need a tree of confirming networks or something. And we might need a 2PC protocol for transactions. (Eg first I send money and generate a hash. Once thats been confirmed you can commit a receive money message. Or something like that). But I acknowledge that the burden of proof is on me here. And I'm not convinced its worth doing - I agree that there aren't many good use cases for this.
rococode 8y ago
As with other blockchain techs, the question I have for this is: is using bitcoin for payments superior enough to replace current payment systems (credit cards, PayPal, bank transfers)? My gut feeling on this is no, having used it with some frequency over the past 7 or 8 years, and I've yet to hear a really convincing argument about why Bitcoin is so much better.

garmaine 8y ago

Anywhere where there is no trusted intermediary, or their fees are too expensive. (And yes that’s a much smaller space than the block chain hype machine makes it out to be, but it is something tangible.)

QuackingJimbo 8y ago
> Anywhere where there is no trusted intermediary, or their fees are too expensive Such as......?
- garmaine 8y ago
  Extremely common in international transactions, to name one space I work in.
  - icelancer 8y ago
    Not sure why you are being downvoted, this is a very obvious use case for large sums of money transferred internationally, especially in certain jurisdictions.

elliekelly 8y ago

When it comes to laundering money and ponzi scheming cryptocurrency is second to none in terms of cost, risk & speed. Edit: Strugglinng to type on my phone.

QuackingJimbo 8y ago
You got me there. I am in the 99th percentile of crypto bears but I myself have used Bitcoin very effectively to buy illegal drugs, buy illegal steroids, and bet on sports illegally. Bitcoin is truly second to none in these domains.
- 3mtj20 8y ago
  If you're doing those things because you think your transactions are anonymous...you're putting yourself at risk. Bitcoin is not private, like at all.
seibelj 8y ago
You are 100% wrong! Traditional banks have order of magnitude more fraud than crypto, and the nature of blockchain makes it extremely easy for analysts to trace money laundering with little effort. Google “chainalysis”

Mirioron 8y ago

Transferring money from one country to another. It might seem easy right now, but if Visa or MasterCard ban you or your recipient, or their region, or country then it becomes much harder.

QuackingJimbo 8y ago
Just don't get banned by Visa or Mastercard
- icelancer 8y ago
  Oh, simple enough.
elliekelly 8y ago
Every instance of international money transfer being more difficult via Visa/MasterCard than Cryptocurrency is by design. When you hear about a government issuing new “sanctions on North Korea”, for example, those sanctions are implemented by making it prohibitively difficult to effect transactions with North Korea.

baddox 8y ago

I think the centralized solutions are certainly better for the people who have no major issues with the centralized solutions. That’s nearly a tautology, of course. But it’s pretty reasonable to consider there may be many people and use cases that do not work with the centralized solutions, even if those work great for you and for everyone you know.

peteretep 8y ago
> consider there may be many people and use cases that do not work with the centralized solutions The comment you’re replying to is actively soliciting examples of those
- baddox 8y ago
  Yes, and my point is that being unable to come up with examples based on personal experience is not very convincing evidence that no examples exist.
  - peteretep 8y ago
    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell%27s_teapot https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell%27s_teapot

RexetBlell 8y ago

Game items like weapons and shields in an RPG game. Imagine if there is a global database of such items and different game developers build different games around it. So you could use your items in different games. What centralized entity would you trust to run and maintain this database? What if this centralied goes bankrupt and shuts down the servers? If you are a small game developer, you are screwed. Even if it's Google, you still can't be certain that Google will not shut down the project and turn off the database like it has with certain projects in the past. A public open blockchain is a neutral database that it would be reasonable for many small game developers to use for this purpose without fearing that it will get shut down, or the rules would be changed.

kalleboo 8y ago
> to use for this purpose without fearing that it will get shut down, or the rules would be changed. Looking at the hard forks in existing cryptocurrencies I wouldn't trust the rules to not change
- RexetBlell 8y ago
  Making it hard to change the rules is one of the value propositions of decentralized blockchains. Hard forks are pretty rare and when do happen, they are contentious the original chain survives (for example Ethereum Classic). Compare this to a centralized entity like Blizzard changing rules in World of Warcraft. Wouldn't you agree that it's much much easier for Blizzard to change the rules in their game, than to change the rules of a blockchain by hard forking?
  - zacharycohn 8y ago
    But Blizzard doesn't change the rules willy nilly just to screw with you. They change it for balance or in-game economy reasons.
learc83 8y ago
As a game designer (on the side) I definitely wouldn't want to give up control of balancing my game to some third party item creator. Items balance is too game specific for this to work unless you're just taking the name and some general type and implementing your own take on it, in which case I don't see much point.

hboon 8y ago

Creating frictionless markets which players can more easily enter without a gatekeeper (e.g. a monopoly). The trick is to tokenize and write smart contracts representing the entities and relationships. It's a long way to go before achieving this, but we'll get there. Hopefully.

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mightybyte 8y ago

One problem that I think blockchains could be well suited for is the storage of police evidence. Not physical evidence of course, but anything that could be turned into data. There was a scene in the show Billions where U.S. prosecutors tampered with evidence in the from of notes taken while interviewing persons of interest. Since blockchains are at their core a tamper-proof append-only data store, if those notes had been stored in a blockchain that evidence tampering would have been impossible. Any time the stakes are high enough a centralized technology can become vulnerable to people being bribed, etc. Note that my use of the term "blockchain" here isn't limited to public blockchains. You most likely wouldn't want to store police evidence publicly on a blockchain like Ethereum. You'd want that to be private, but there do exist private blockchain consensus algorithms like BFT that do have the same tamper-proof properties without requiring a public proof of work network.

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peteretep 8y ago
Why does this need a blockchain rather than being simply cryptographic signing?
- monson 8y ago
  Securely signing a cryptographic message with a provable timestamp still requires a trusted third party, as far as I know. A trusted third party can be corrupted.[1] Writing data on a decentralized blockchain inherently provides a secure timestamp that cannot be modified without being noticed. Not to mention the extreme costs involved with trying to rewrite a blockchain's history. [2] I disagree with the parent comment on one thing-- I would much rather trust a public blockchain with a respectable hashrate over a private blockchain. You could simply store a salted hash of the data on the public blockchain, and still keep the actual evidence private. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trusted_third_party https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trusted_third_party [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trusted_timestamping https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trusted_timestamping

dcosson 8y ago

IMO the original use case of just Bitcoin is still by far the most compelling. A non-inflationary store of value not unlike gold, but it can be transferred for a very low cost anywhere in the world in minutes. I think the same arguments that come up about privacy can also apply to currency - I'm not doing anything illegal, why I do I care if I'm being monitored? or I'm not buying anything illegal, why do I care if banks and payment processors can block transactions? It's nice to have an alternative and be able to do things outside of that system just in case. I don't, however, really understand the fanatics that want every cup of coffee they buy to use crypto. I definitely don't see any practical benefit to that.

peteretep 8y ago
Why don’t you think companies can inflate the crypto money supply in the same way that they inflate the fiat money supply?
- icelancer 8y ago
  I don't understand this question. Why do you think Bitcoin is inflatable as such?
  - peteretep 8y ago
    Because I don't see any reason why Bitcoin can't be a fractional-reserve asset.
    - zby 8y ago
      You can have fractional-reserve only because the public cannot see any difference between money from M0 and M1. In crypto the public uses M0 directly. For now at least. There are some M1 constructs - at MtGox there were 'codes' redeemable for bitcoins, but they are not transferable between exchanges.
      - peteretep 8y ago

guessy 8y ago

Unseizable money.

rblatz 8y ago
It may not be easily seizable, and with the right security practices it may be nearly impossible to seize directly. But governments could announce certain coins are not spendable and enforce that on companies or people subject to their jurisdiction. Prosecuting anyone who accepted one of those coins with a crime.
- RexetBlell 8y ago
  Which is why privacy technology is being implemented in blockchains like ZCash, Monero and Ethereum.
- Sargos 8y ago
  Those types of tyrannical governments already have people operating in black markets. Crypto doesn't really change that it just makes the bad government's job harder which the vast majority of the world would agree is a good thing. The people of Sudan, Syria, Turkey, and the Phillipines among others are grateful that cryptocurrencies give them an option of having freedom.

kwikiel 8y ago

Blockchains are essentially paperclip optimiser machines. For bitcoin - paperclips are PoW hashrate. The network rewards people that contribute to it's growth. It doesn't care about people and people values - it's like a new kind of living organism that uses people as substrate to exist

rblatz 8y ago

I’ve thought that a potential use of blockchain would be proof of ownership of certain digital items such as an mp3 or an e-book. Such a system could allow you to move purchases between devices and apps, and prevent vendor lock-in.

rbreve 8y ago

Censorship free apps and content

eouw0o83hf 8y ago

Real estate, particularly with regards to ownership and property title. Ownership of a property is a difficult concept to prove, and there is an enormous industry of title insurance which exists to dig through the records and insure a purchase against unknown claims against the property. A public ledger would make property title/ownership simple and knowable. Overall I think blockchain technology is incredibly over-hyped, but does have some suitable applications, particularly where public records are involved.

travisjungroth 8y ago
I've heard this argument, and I don't see how it works. It relies on trusting the information put onto a blockchain.
- eouw0o83hf 8y ago
  It most definitely does require a base trust - however that's not an argument against the solution, just a challenge to implementation. We implicitly trust a tremendous amount of digitized information because we trust its sources - for instance, digital banking works because we trust banks to only log verified transactions to our account. Sourcing that information is absolutely very difficult, but it doesn't mean it can't or shouldn't be done.
  - travisjungroth 8y ago
    Requiring trust is absolutely an argument against the solution. Once you're willing to trust someone, you may as well use a database and a contract.
defen 8y ago
> A public ledger would make property title/ownership simple and knowable. Only if all the property records are already in the ledger, right? If I buy a house via blockchain, someone can still come along and say their great-aunt should have inherited it 80 years ago, before blockchain records existed. So you still need title companies.

geomark 8y ago

US expat trying to receive money overseas. US banks won't serve you unless you have a US address. Many lie and say it is illegal. The usual work-around is to establish some kind of US address through a relative or friend. Still ends up being costly and slow to do transfers. Some startups have tried to address it but it is still not very good. Coinbase like to claim they have solved this issue but it is total BS because they won't let you purchase BTC on their platform without a state ID. Useless for an expat who moved overseas long ago. But if I need to be paid by someone in another country who can buy BTC then that is usually the best solution for me. It is a small market so not a driver in the crytocurrency space.

phillc73 8y ago
> US expat trying to receive money overseas. US banks won't serve you unless you have a US address. I admit to knowing almost nothing about the US banking system, but is it really true that one can't make an electronic transfer using an IBAN (International Bank Account Number)? I live in Austria and just paid a number of invoices, through online banking, to bank account holders in France, Czechia, Slovenia and the UK. All I needed was their IBAN.
- geomark 8y ago
  Of course you can make an electronic transfer, as long as you can manage to keep a bank account open at a US bank. But don't let them find out you are living overseas or they will close it.
seanmcdirmid 8y ago
As long as you have social security number, some banks will do it at least. I chose HSBC USA because I was living in China and they were super used to that.
StreamBright 8y ago
This is why we have Transferwise, Revolut, N26 and a bunch of others.
- 8y ago

nradov 8y ago

Synaptic Health Alliance has a good use case for using blockchain technology to share a directory of healthcare providers across multiple organizations while avoiding the free rider problem. https://www.synaptichealthalliance.com https://www.synaptichealthalliance.com

luckydata 8y ago
Why do you need a blockchain to do that?
- nradov 8y ago
  What other architecture would you recommend? There's no single entity which can be trusted to maintain a centralized database.
  - luckydata 8y ago
    I challenge that requirement. Why no single entity can be trusted? It's like saying the banking system doesn't work because no single entity can be trusted with maintaining a database of transactions. That's self evidently false.
    - nradov 8y ago
      Which single entity can be trusted? None beyond the US federal government exists today, and they don't want to do the job. I suppose in theory all of the industry players could get together and establish a joint venture or nonprofit company specifically for the purpose of creating and maintaining an accurate database of provider contact information. But that seems a lot more complex.
      - luckydata 8y ago
        Doesn't seem that complex to me. Insurance companies kinda do that already. It's not a technology issue, otherwise Google or Microsoft would have figured it out already, it's a governance and legal issue. Blockchain doesn't seem to be bringing to the table anything valuable in this case.

zacharycohn 8y ago

Department of Homeland Security published this handy flowchart which NIST republished: https://imgur.com/a/RlUj9Ed https://imgur.com/a/RlUj9Ed I have found it to be very useful during these conversations.

brian_cloutier 8y ago

My favorite examples both involve markets: (for the sake of convenience I'll talk about these two products as if they already exist and work. They don't.) 1. Althea (https://althea.org/ https://althea.org/) is incentivized mesh networking. Currently, mesh networking is an under-provisioned public good. It's a public good because how would you even pay for it? If you want to provide bandwidth to some mesh network you need to spin up your router and then form some sort of business arrangement with all the other routers in range. If you want to consume bandwidth from some mesh network you must first form a business relationship with every router you'll be using. With a protocol such as Althea all you have to do is start your router and set a price in $/byte . Your router broadcasts that price, and assuming the price is competitive packets will start to be forwarded and you'll start to receive payments. With Althea all of these business relationships I described before are still formed! However, they exist in the form of standardized smart contracts which are cheap and quick to create. Like in all liquid markets, there's no negotiation over terms. While incentivized mesh networking is theoretically possible without a blockchain, the transaction costs are so high that I'm not aware of any deployments. The blockchainless answer for reducing transaction costs seems to be: create some central entity which everyone signs up for. It collects information on who routed packets through who and collects and distributes payments accordingly. The blockchain answer gives you: - no intermediary who takes 20% just for matchmaking - an easy way of paying other parties - no need to sign up or register for anything. You're just communicating with your peers! 2. Filecoin is distributed file storage much like Amazon's S3. Currently, there are only a couple suppliers (Google, Amazon, Microsoft, etc) who store your files. They have some healthy competition and economies of scale which bring your price down but supply is still rather limited: mostly because there's no standardized "file storage contract". Also, they seem to enjoy premium pricing, even with all those economies of scale they manage to be most expensive options. Backblaze and some company called Wasabi are much cheaper for what appears to be the same service. Can you really trust them though? My data is important. I'll put it into S3 just to be sure. The Filecoin network goes through some crazy steps to prove that providers are actually storing the files they claim to be storing and actually replicating them the number of times they claim to be replicating them. This lets you trust any supplier on the network and turns object storage into a commodity. Filecoin also has the same blockchain benefit of requiring little registration. Do you have a desktop computer with a 2 TB hard drive, even though you're only using a few hundred GB of it? Start the Filecoin daemon and wait, after some time passes you'll have money. This 0-registration is a level of UX which blockchains cannot currently provide but in principle they could. However, it's something that would be very difficult for any central service to provide. And again, the file storage becomes a commodity without any intermediate market-maker taking x%. The blockchain acts as that market-maker.

aaronbrethorst 8y ago

fleecing rubes and money laundering.

zby 8y ago

Gold but for the internet. I.e. value store that is digital and government independent. It is kind of fringe niche - but I think it will stay.

quickthrower2 8y ago

A means of financial exchange for countries with hyperinflation.

sumshetty 8y ago

I think people look at only payments and all the media hype is around payments. A lot of things with M2M communications, be it microgrids, industrial IoT networks, self driving cars that can manage payments and invoicing themselves, blockchain networks can be very effective. Fetch.ai was an interesting project that came out. Data marketplaces are interesting, checkout numeraire and ocean network Having non fungible assets on the internet currently is an impossibility, say having a special gun in fortnite that no one else can have. This may not appeal to everyone but I know a lot of gamers who would treat these as assets. I’m not sure but I don’t think any service on the Internet today can guarantee that only one copy of a digital piece of information exists, Blockchain’s can. Current internet infrastructure depends on us trusting one organisation to manage critical infrastructure and I don’t think that’s really the optimum way for anything. Governance and management of networks was something we've never thought of, but some of the best experiment in governance are running in the crypto world. I do think networks like Google and Facebook were something people never imagined, and the capitalistic model clearly rewards the builders asymmetrically. A network like Google or Facebook was built by its users and is still being built by its users. SV has propagated this stupid ideology that 10 upstarts were able to build a network that powerful and all the credit should go to them. I'm not sure what the solution to this is, but I do think users should receive a fraction of the value the networks make. And blockchains make it possible to build networks like this. Steem is an interesting experiment but hasn't gained much steam. BAT is a great experiment that could change the direction of the internet. I'm not sure if their model would work, but I do think its an experiment that must happen. The future of the internet is at stake with the ad driven cess pool that it has become. In terms on energy inefficiency, this has been a problem people have acknowledged and have been trying to solve, I think we’re less than 2 years away from a breakthrough in PoS which would make PoW redundant. Either way, I think people obsess over payments too much. I'd obsess more over how this is the first time in the history of mankind we don't need a third party to supply trust. There is no trust premium on services, which can upend multiple services, finance being the obvious one but I think it's much larger than finance. I do think that there is a lot of noise in this space and its hard for anyone rationally observing to get a clear perspective on what's going on. I could go on all day and maybe even write a scifi fantasy but yeah, there's a lot of people working towards building the future, sadly its a small fraction compared to the number of people speculating and creating noise.

rorykoehler 8y ago

https://www.idpass.org/ https://www.idpass.org/

devit 8y ago

Transactions that are in violation of the law (evading capital controls, buying illegal goods, money laundering) and are not done in person. Also, replacing trust in centralized banks with trust in mostly-centralized crypto software developers and mostly-centralized majority of miners.

stale2002 8y ago

Censorship resistant financial transactions. It is much more difficult to censor crypto payments than it is to censor credit card, paypal, or bank transactions. Crypto payments being censored just isn't something that is happening, even though crypto has been around for 10 years. The evidence proves that it is more difficult to censor.

notyourday 8y ago
Only in a separate digital realm that never touches the rest of the world. In the rest of the world there are laws that are enforced by force and no amount of math is going to prevent a SWAT team from dragging a crypto punk into a slammer.
- stale2002 8y ago
  Censorship is something that can be done by both the government, and private companies. It is something that happens with or without a court order, to people who have broken zero laws. Yes, the government often censors perfectly legal financial transactions, to people who aren't criminals. And crypto makes such censorship against people who have broken zero laws, much more difficult. It makes it no longer as easy as just calling up a bank, or a couple credit card companies, and telling them to cancel all of their transactions to people who didn't commit any crimes. It makes it no longer as easy as a couple monopoly companies making a quick agreement to screw over an entity that didn't do anything illegal.
  - notyourday 8y ago
    Only in the realm of digital stuff. The moment it hits real physical world it becomes clear that the entire castle is built on sand, using sand. Since we have not figure out yet how to feed ourselves and house ourselves using the crypto assigning it such attributes is rather odd.
    - stale2002 8y ago
      > Since we have not figure out yet how to feed ourselves and house ourselves using the crypto assigning it such attributes is rather odd. Of course there is a way to do this. You go to a store and pay for food with crypto if the store accepts it. Is has an advantage over credit cards, as a couple companies could block your transactions, whereas this is much more difficult with crypto. Lots of in person stores have had problems with the visa MasterCard duopoly. Being able to escape from the risk of censorship from visa and MasterCard, for brick and mortar stores, is useful in and of itself. Money is digital. And you can use digital money to pay for physical things. And you can get around censorship, enacted by private companies, using digital payments that are harder to censor, and this works for real life physical goods.

arisAlexis 8y ago

public tracking of government money. public ledgers have been used since ancient Athens. This one can be tamper proof. Second public tracking of charity and how the money reaches correct targets and how it is spent.