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> "decentralized network of trust" That's the really interesting bit about Bitcoin - it's an attempt to create a system that will enable trust in Internet-scal
by mseebach 14y ago
> "decentralized network of trust"
That's the really interesting bit about Bitcoin - it's an attempt to create a system that will enable trust in Internet-scale groups.
Currency is obviously a prime candidate for "trust", but I also think Namecoin is tremendously interesting. Next up, PKI certs? Eliminating hard-to-scale single points of trust (whether the DNS roots, VeriSign or governments) is hardly "doing nothing".
- baddox 14y agoSee also https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Smart_Property https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Smart_Property.
- mseebach 14y agoI like it, very clever. But doesn't the block chain get unfeasibly large at some point, especially if it gets "overloaded" will all kinds of things?
- baddox 14y agoI haven't taken the time to fully understand it, but I gather that there are proposed ways to trim the block chain's history. For clients that don't need a long history, I imagine they could just download a snapshot for, say, Jan. 1, 2013, that simply listed all the bitcoins and their owners at the time, rather than all the transactions that happened before that point.