8 ms·

Some ideas for native Bitcoin apps

103 points by livestyle 12y ago

bitsweet 12y ago
I think this is a great post. I do wish it covered some of the other Bitcoin 2.0 concepts since it can do more then just efficiently moving small amounts of value around. Many think that concepts like smart contracts and fractual ownership (e.g. Reddit's recent announcement) require new altcoins, metacoins, or ethereum but don't realize Bitcoin can natively supports them too. There are already open source colored coin [1] APIs that allow anyone to model ownership of anything on the Bitcoin Blockchain, without any intermediary currency. [1]http://coins.assembly.com/ http://coins.assembly.com/ (disclosure, helped create this ^)
- artia 12y ago
  Awesome points. See my other post above, there's a link to you in that post
apo 12y ago
Also see OpenBazaar, a peer-to-peer marketplace: https://openbazaar.org https://openbazaar.org This is a rapidly developing example of an application that couldn't exist without Bitcoin.
- kristofferR 12y ago
  Yeah, and the upcoming UI looks fantastic too: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2UISZbGXP74 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2UISZbGXP74
- cinquemb 12y ago
  That seems pretty promising. I'm wondering if this project might try going into currency as the landscape evolves, As i think it would be great to see centralized exchanges made irrelevant and the network more resilient, though i suspect it might be a bit harder to solve than physical goods.
artia 12y ago
Also worth reading: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8410986 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8410986 Two compelling blog posts by two Bitcoin thought leaders at the same time. Multiple discovery at its best
- uptown 12y ago
  Also interesting that these posts are coming at a time when Bitcoin's value has dipped to its lowest level in recent months.
  - barnaby 12y ago
    Bitcoin has lost some value recently, yes, but what it's bought with that loss is increased merchant adoption. Currently merchants instantly sell bitcoin which causes the downwards pressure on the price you've been seeing. However, as the utility continues to grow this trend will very likely reverse.
logicalman 12y ago
For point 2, there is a white paper on using cryptocurrency to incentivize the development of Tor networks - http://www.nrl.navy.mil/itd/chacs/ghosh-torpath-torcoin-proof-bandwidth-altcoins-compensating-relays http://www.nrl.navy.mil/itd/chacs/ghosh-torpath-torcoin-proo...
- kristofferR 12y ago
  OnionTip.com is a simpler way of incentivizing people to run Tor nodes by using Bitcoin. It may be too simple though, since the amount donated in laughably low compared to the work done by the nodes. Torcoin and similar solutions may be a better solution due to that issue.
derefr 12y ago
> 2. Allocating bandwidth, storage, compute. Before Bitcoin was a thing, I was thinking about the Erlang VM's "reduction-counting" processing paradigm, and noticed that it was a lot like having a dom0-scheduler "treasury" with domU-process "citizens", where each citizen gets paid a basic income every scheduling interval, and then can spend it to "purchase" time-spent-aware on a virtual core. In Erlang's model, processes lose whatever they don't spend in a given interval—this is necessary to prevent a process from "saving up" and then blocking the VM for seconds at a time. However, if rather than putting a cap on wealth, you just cap spending per interval, then processes could do lots of other clever things with their income: trade it, invest it, spawn subagents that consume it, etc. This would be a very interesting platform for running goal-directed AI agents on: somewhere between Core Wars and Heroku. Now, if the only "ledger" of reductions was in the local dom0, you'd have nothing more than a toy server: a sort of fishtank for agents to interact within. But throw a blockchain at the problem, and now agents could pay to spawn sub-agents (or copy themselves) anywhere that'll take their dom0's currency. Interestingly, since cryptocoins are all pretty fungible, this would imply that the "intelligence" of an AI—or of a hypothetical Hansonian brain-emulation, for that matter—could be measured in units of dollars-spent-per-second.
- abecedarius 12y ago
  See http://e-drexler.com/d/09/00/AgoricsPapers/agoricpapers.html http://e-drexler.com/d/09/00/AgoricsPapers/agoricpapers.html for more in that line. Also http://www.cap-lore.com/Economics/DSR/ http://www.cap-lore.com/Economics/DSR/ and http://www.whatisthought.com/eric.html http://www.whatisthought.com/eric.html under "artificial economies of agents that reinforcement learn".
- lpgauth 12y ago
  Cool idea, the only problem I can see is how you define a reduction. In the Erlang VM a reduction is kind of a magical unit... and not a reductions are created equal.
  - derefr 12y ago
    I think the definition of a reduction (in terms of what it buys) is allowed to be pretty much arbitrary while still having an effective distributed economy emerge on top of it. Think of it as a communist state that both issues currency, and sets arbitrary prices for all state-produced goods in terms of that currency. In one state, a loaf of bread (or a multiplication) might be worth $1, and a hamburger (or a network message send) $5; in another state, the costs might be reversed. This would shake out as 1. exchange rate nash-equilibria between dom0s, determined by their "monetary policies"; and 2. spawning of subagents on dom0s with better cost-structures for the particular tasks they're assigned to accomplish. (If you're doing a lot of network IO, you'd want to delegate that part of your job to a place where network IO—after currency-conversion—is cheap.)
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
coinbased 12y ago
Interesting to see VCs like Chris Dixon desperately pumping Bitcoin in a last ditch effort to wipe the egg off their faces.
- tomasien 12y ago
  If you're referring to the recent price drop - you should learn about what causes price fluctuation in Bitcoin. It's actually largely due to the fact that Bitcoin is actually rapidly becoming USED rather than HELD which causes downward pressure on it. This causes miners to become un-profitable btw which will eventually cause upward pressure on the price (but that problem is worrying as it's getting really expensive to produce BTC - just a side note). But while the price dropping is somewhat concerning, it is extraordinarily clear to anyone paying attention that BTC and crypto generally is growing in utility rapidly. For context: I'm a fairly neutral observer who does not own Bitcoin. I do have USD on the Ripple ledger.
  - barnaby 12y ago
    :-) Well said. I read this after I posted elsewhere on this thread about how the price drop is caused by adoption so in fact we are buying _utility_ with the value that we lost. Once we've bought enough utility the price trend will likely reverse. I do own bitcoin, and I buy lots of stuff with it all the time. I can't recommend it enough.
  - reddytowns 12y ago
    Why would unprofitable mining cause a upward pressure on price? There is a fixed amount of bitcoin distributed per day cumulatively to all miners regardless of their number. I doubt the recent price drop is due to people buying and selling in bitcoin since it's way too steep a decline. I'm guessing that most miners themselves also happen to be investors as well. After all, if you believe in bitcoin enough to purchase equipment to mine it, you must also believe that the price will at least stay constant or rise. So it seems natural to keep some of your profits in bitcoin. So people mining and investing together are heavily dependent on price, more than those doing one or the other. With the constant slow decline, it left a lot of miners languishing, and they not only need to convert all their current profits to their local currency to pay the bills, but their bitcoin investments as well. This creates a feedback loop and an ever increasing rate of price decline until enough miners run out of bitcoin to sell and/or close up shop.
jzwinck 12y ago
How about a browser plugin that lets you pay a few cents here and there to hide ads? You could whitelist the sites you care about (no need to pay off every random blog), and give them a sort of "budget" (unknown to the site). Then each time you view a page on cnn.com or whatever, your browser could toss a few Satoshis over to them in exchange for receiving a page with ads completely removed. Sort of like the NY Times paywall we all know and love/hate, but easier to deploy for less gigantic sites with less staff, and more voluntary (users who don't pay would just see ads as they do now).
eterm 12y ago
Micro-gambling Peer-2-peer gambling Webcams The real wonder is why haven't any of the major players in these areas adopted it in any way. Curiously it is the payment provider industry who has paid it some attention, rather than any of these. Perhaps the traceable nature of bitcoin makes it unappealing for these use cases. In the early days of bitcoin where it was relatively easy to get anonymous bitcoins (by paying cash through unscrupulous dealers not paying attention to KYC rules), these would have made great use cases for bitcoin. Now however, I feel like bitcoin doesn't provide relative anonymity over more traditional methods of payment. I think there could still be a case for a new mail-like protocol that combines email and cryptocurrency for an email system which is both encrypted by default but also everyone sets a payment level for mail to reach them. So I say "My Address is <bitcoin address? mail address?>, pay at least 0.001 bitcoins to get mail through". This system: *Puts a direct cost on spam (therefore massively reducing it) *ensures everyone owns private keys (so mail can be encrypted simply by knowing their address) Two fantastic features. Sadly it won't happen, mail is too entrenched.
- yuvipanda 12y ago
  I'm always wary of email/spam solutions that require 'payment' of some form. See https://craphound.com/spamsolutions.txt https://craphound.com/spamsolutions.txt for a lot of reasons (in particular, Unpopularity of weird new taxes, Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money, Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical, Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually, Sending email should be free)
  - eli 12y ago
    It also makes it suddenly expensive to run a decent sized email list. For security announcements, say.
    - eric_bullington 12y ago
      No, the idea is that users would be able to set an incoming fee per email address, including a default fee for unknowns. Users would simply whitelist email subscriptions at 0 fee. In fact, this could likely be done completely automatically beyond the initial setup (and then only if you want to diverse from the defaults).
tomasien 12y ago
There's some crazy, crazy infrastructure growth going on with BTC, Ripple, and Stellar. It's thrilling to see what is just becoming possible.
Animats 12y ago
Bitcoin can't handle micropayments. The block chain is limited to about 7 transactions per second, and every node has a full copy of the block chain, so traffic goes up roughly as the square of usage. There's a minimum fee for each transaction (if you want it confirmed in any reasonable length of time) and it's currently about $0.30. That's more than many merchants pay to process a credit card transaction. Nor can Bitcoin handle fast payments. It takes about an hour to get solid confirmation of a transaction, by which time the price of Bitcoins may have changed substantially. If you're selling anything that actually costs you money, you have to wait for some confirmations. One gambling site tried accepting unconfirmed transactions. People would bet, then, if they lost, double-spend to kill the payment. A distributed digital currency without these problems is technically possible. That may be the currency that actually becomes useful for micropayments. Meanwhile, Bitcoin for vending machines, music tracks, and parking meters isn't going to happen.
- tokenizerrr 12y ago
  I thought the fee was 0.0001btc and thus $0.03?
- mahyarm 12y ago
  Chaum ecash is one way to solve it. You'd use chaum ecash tokens backed by bitcoin by an issuer. You would then use the tokens, since they are instant, have no transaction cost and can be anonymous. The ecash tokens themselves require a central issuer that is trustable to avoid double spending, which is it's central issue with it. To side step the trust issue, the issuers would be a large multi sig bitcoin pool. The two technologies compliment each other. Bitcoin creates a purely virtual good that has scarcity and solves the trust issue. Chaum ecash solves the cost, speed and anonymity issue for bitcoin. Bitcoin will become something like the international wire transfer mechanism. One implementation of chaum ecash is open-transactions, i suggest you check it out: http://opentransactions.org http://opentransactions.org
- mappum 12y ago
  Actually, Bitcoin can handle micropayments extremely well by using micropayment channels. https://bitcoinj.github.io/working-with-micropayments https://bitcoinj.github.io/working-with-micropayments In short, the payer sends a signed transaction to the payee every time they want to increment the payment, but the payer does not broadcast the transaction to the network until they want to finalize it. To prevent double-spending, the payer and payee first set up a 2-of-2 multisig, so all transactions must be signed by both parties. This lets applications send many instant micropayments, and only one transaction fee is paid.
SmokyBorbon 12y ago
After reading these lame, generic examples, does anybody on HN have any good ideas for bitcoin-based projects?
panther2k 12y ago
I'm working on a crowdlending network that enables the first idea: https://s3.amazonaws.com/loancoin/whitepaper.pdf https://s3.amazonaws.com/loancoin/whitepaper.pdf To the extent people are interested, we'd really appreciate any feedback.
untilHellbanned 12y ago
To continue the discussion... https://hackpad.com/Native-Bitcoin-Applications-dNXoRdhwIb5 https://hackpad.com/Native-Bitcoin-Applications-dNXoRdhwIb5
gracehopper 12y ago
This list is pretty good but I suspect infrastructure work is far from done. Also Marketplaces aren't quite native by this definition-- cdixon is more so pointing out that their reaches can be expanded to the unbanked. I think the real magic of Bitcoin lies in the Blockchain itself and its application to the real world via smart contracts. The fact that bitcoin is a currency might turn out to have been a big distraction or just a side effect of the real applications. If this is true it further points to the need for ubiquitous infrastructure.
paulsutter 12y ago
Item 2, allocating resources for a true mesh network is a cool idea. It's clean, a b2b transaction for a specific standardized service: forwarding or storing data. It does not sound like a legal minefield. Am I too optimistic? Hats off to cdixon. The other four I don't understand, can someone help me out? There is no technical reason that existing money transfers get delayed or expensive because of international borders. The issues are regulatory [1]. How does bitcoin solve that? Same with payments and micropayments. There's nothing technically difficult about moving small or large amounts of money between people. Compliance with regulation is where all the trouble comes in [1], and Bitcoin is not miraculously exempt from those regulations either. Am I missing something? I'm really curious. Like most technology folks, I /want/ to be more excited about bitcoin. [1] https://www.wepay.com/api/payments-101/payment-regulation-challenge https://www.wepay.com/api/payments-101/payment-regulation-ch...
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
cwiz 12y ago
I think there is huge opportunity in decentralising existing business models that are well suitable for p2p. Think of Uber / AirBNB / etc with no fees and no government power over them. Another huge opportunity in distributing revenue of these services to peers running the network. This may cause rapid growth & unparalleled fault tolerance. Third thing that might be disrupting is ability of such services to issue their own coins/stocks, which price is linked to service's revenue. Revenue is then distributed among stock owners, and service can issue such stocks at will without government's approval.
netcan 12y ago
Out of these 4 categories, marketplaces is the one that I think has the most potential for a breakaway change. Micro-payments, micro-incentives and any kind of a scaling down of transactions is something I'm not exactly sure about. Maybe there's some cool stuff here, but I would be surprised. Marketplaces though are a different story. Marketplaces have been developing into giants since the internet began and the financial infrastructure for running them is terrible. Ecommerce, native or not, will also be impacted. Anti-fraud & payment verification colour the world of ecommerce enough. Solving friendly fraud (mostly chargebacks) could enable a lot of otherwise transactions and serve underserved markets (EG shipping goods to high risk countries like most of Africa). ATM though BTC is still in a shaky place. Even bitcoin owners don't use it much. Most people don't have bitcoin wallets so unless a service is important enough to make people use it, BTC cannot be the only option. Marketplaces are the kind of thing where users can be forced to use the payment method available. EG, if Uber paid driver in BTC, drivers would accept BTC.
- datadiver 12y ago
  what you said and decentralized marketplace could emerge with bitcoin, where marketplace works like a blockchain explorer. Craigslist + bitcoin = Alibaba
comex 12y ago
> Incentivized social software. Up until now, social sites have had to rely on non-monetary currencies such as likes, followers, karma, upvotes, etc. With Bitcoin we can add actual monetary incentives to the mix. This is happening organically on Reddit where users are tipping each other using Bitcoin and Dogecoin. Incidentally, this is a pretty bad idea, because of how the way people think about things changes when money gets involved. Someone said it well in a recent thread, so I'll defer to them - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8392883 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8392883 (AFAIK, most Reddit tips are only for a few cents, so the only real value is the acknowledgement that someone appreciated your post enough to tip you. This sidesteps the issue, but means that it isn't a good reflection of what would happen if you tried to make a real incentivized social network.)
- gregpilling 12y ago
  Club Med used to solve the problem with beads. Vacationers would use beads to buy beer or whatever while there. At the end of the stay they add up the beads that you used and give you a bill. It is pretty effective at making you not think it is money. My bill was over $600 for 2 weeks :(
  - JoeAltmaier 12y ago
    You know that going in. As a way to quit obsessing about the money and just enjoy yourself, it worked quite well.
wslh 12y ago
Speaking about cryptocurrencies in general, where are these on the list? - Open source and Kickstarter like projects funding - App/Startup Coins - Virtual Goods - Silk Roads
jgalt212 12y ago
Does any know or care to hazard a guess on how much BTC Andressen Horowitz owns?

103 points by livestyle 12y ago

I think this is a great post. I do wish it covered some of the other Bitcoin 2.0 concepts since it can do more then just efficiently moving small amounts of value around. Many think that concepts like smart contracts and fractual ownership (e.g. Reddit's recent announcement) require new altcoins, metacoins, or ethereum but don't realize Bitcoin can natively supports them too. There are already open source colored coin [1] APIs that allow anyone to model ownership of anything on the Bitcoin Blockchain, without any intermediary currency. [1]http://coins.assembly.com/ http://coins.assembly.com/ (disclosure, helped create this ^)

artia 12y ago
Awesome points. See my other post above, there's a link to you in that post

apo 12y ago

Also see OpenBazaar, a peer-to-peer marketplace: https://openbazaar.org https://openbazaar.org This is a rapidly developing example of an application that couldn't exist without Bitcoin.

kristofferR 12y ago
Yeah, and the upcoming UI looks fantastic too: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2UISZbGXP74 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2UISZbGXP74
cinquemb 12y ago
That seems pretty promising. I'm wondering if this project might try going into currency as the landscape evolves, As i think it would be great to see centralized exchanges made irrelevant and the network more resilient, though i suspect it might be a bit harder to solve than physical goods.

artia 12y ago

Also worth reading: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8410986 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8410986 Two compelling blog posts by two Bitcoin thought leaders at the same time. Multiple discovery at its best

uptown 12y ago
Also interesting that these posts are coming at a time when Bitcoin's value has dipped to its lowest level in recent months.
- barnaby 12y ago
  Bitcoin has lost some value recently, yes, but what it's bought with that loss is increased merchant adoption. Currently merchants instantly sell bitcoin which causes the downwards pressure on the price you've been seeing. However, as the utility continues to grow this trend will very likely reverse.

logicalman 12y ago

For point 2, there is a white paper on using cryptocurrency to incentivize the development of Tor networks - http://www.nrl.navy.mil/itd/chacs/ghosh-torpath-torcoin-proof-bandwidth-altcoins-compensating-relays http://www.nrl.navy.mil/itd/chacs/ghosh-torpath-torcoin-proo...

kristofferR 12y ago
OnionTip.com is a simpler way of incentivizing people to run Tor nodes by using Bitcoin. It may be too simple though, since the amount donated in laughably low compared to the work done by the nodes. Torcoin and similar solutions may be a better solution due to that issue.

derefr 12y ago

> 2. Allocating bandwidth, storage, compute. Before Bitcoin was a thing, I was thinking about the Erlang VM's "reduction-counting" processing paradigm, and noticed that it was a lot like having a dom0-scheduler "treasury" with domU-process "citizens", where each citizen gets paid a basic income every scheduling interval, and then can spend it to "purchase" time-spent-aware on a virtual core. In Erlang's model, processes lose whatever they don't spend in a given interval—this is necessary to prevent a process from "saving up" and then blocking the VM for seconds at a time. However, if rather than putting a cap on wealth, you just cap spending per interval, then processes could do lots of other clever things with their income: trade it, invest it, spawn subagents that consume it, etc. This would be a very interesting platform for running goal-directed AI agents on: somewhere between Core Wars and Heroku. Now, if the only "ledger" of reductions was in the local dom0, you'd have nothing more than a toy server: a sort of fishtank for agents to interact within. But throw a blockchain at the problem, and now agents could pay to spawn sub-agents (or copy themselves) anywhere that'll take their dom0's currency. Interestingly, since cryptocoins are all pretty fungible, this would imply that the "intelligence" of an AI—or of a hypothetical Hansonian brain-emulation, for that matter—could be measured in units of dollars-spent-per-second.

abecedarius 12y ago
See http://e-drexler.com/d/09/00/AgoricsPapers/agoricpapers.html http://e-drexler.com/d/09/00/AgoricsPapers/agoricpapers.html for more in that line. Also http://www.cap-lore.com/Economics/DSR/ http://www.cap-lore.com/Economics/DSR/ and http://www.whatisthought.com/eric.html http://www.whatisthought.com/eric.html under "artificial economies of agents that reinforcement learn".
lpgauth 12y ago
Cool idea, the only problem I can see is how you define a reduction. In the Erlang VM a reduction is kind of a magical unit... and not a reductions are created equal.
- derefr 12y ago
  I think the definition of a reduction (in terms of what it buys) is allowed to be pretty much arbitrary while still having an effective distributed economy emerge on top of it. Think of it as a communist state that both issues currency, and sets arbitrary prices for all state-produced goods in terms of that currency. In one state, a loaf of bread (or a multiplication) might be worth $1, and a hamburger (or a network message send) $5; in another state, the costs might be reversed. This would shake out as 1. exchange rate nash-equilibria between dom0s, determined by their "monetary policies"; and 2. spawning of subagents on dom0s with better cost-structures for the particular tasks they're assigned to accomplish. (If you're doing a lot of network IO, you'd want to delegate that part of your job to a place where network IO—after currency-conversion—is cheap.)

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

coinbased 12y ago

Interesting to see VCs like Chris Dixon desperately pumping Bitcoin in a last ditch effort to wipe the egg off their faces.

tomasien 12y ago
If you're referring to the recent price drop - you should learn about what causes price fluctuation in Bitcoin. It's actually largely due to the fact that Bitcoin is actually rapidly becoming USED rather than HELD which causes downward pressure on it. This causes miners to become un-profitable btw which will eventually cause upward pressure on the price (but that problem is worrying as it's getting really expensive to produce BTC - just a side note). But while the price dropping is somewhat concerning, it is extraordinarily clear to anyone paying attention that BTC and crypto generally is growing in utility rapidly. For context: I'm a fairly neutral observer who does not own Bitcoin. I do have USD on the Ripple ledger.
- barnaby 12y ago
  :-) Well said. I read this after I posted elsewhere on this thread about how the price drop is caused by adoption so in fact we are buying _utility_ with the value that we lost. Once we've bought enough utility the price trend will likely reverse. I do own bitcoin, and I buy lots of stuff with it all the time. I can't recommend it enough.
- reddytowns 12y ago
  Why would unprofitable mining cause a upward pressure on price? There is a fixed amount of bitcoin distributed per day cumulatively to all miners regardless of their number. I doubt the recent price drop is due to people buying and selling in bitcoin since it's way too steep a decline. I'm guessing that most miners themselves also happen to be investors as well. After all, if you believe in bitcoin enough to purchase equipment to mine it, you must also believe that the price will at least stay constant or rise. So it seems natural to keep some of your profits in bitcoin. So people mining and investing together are heavily dependent on price, more than those doing one or the other. With the constant slow decline, it left a lot of miners languishing, and they not only need to convert all their current profits to their local currency to pay the bills, but their bitcoin investments as well. This creates a feedback loop and an ever increasing rate of price decline until enough miners run out of bitcoin to sell and/or close up shop.

jzwinck 12y ago

How about a browser plugin that lets you pay a few cents here and there to hide ads? You could whitelist the sites you care about (no need to pay off every random blog), and give them a sort of "budget" (unknown to the site). Then each time you view a page on cnn.com or whatever, your browser could toss a few Satoshis over to them in exchange for receiving a page with ads completely removed. Sort of like the NY Times paywall we all know and love/hate, but easier to deploy for less gigantic sites with less staff, and more voluntary (users who don't pay would just see ads as they do now).

eterm 12y ago

Micro-gambling Peer-2-peer gambling Webcams The real wonder is why haven't any of the major players in these areas adopted it in any way. Curiously it is the payment provider industry who has paid it some attention, rather than any of these. Perhaps the traceable nature of bitcoin makes it unappealing for these use cases. In the early days of bitcoin where it was relatively easy to get anonymous bitcoins (by paying cash through unscrupulous dealers not paying attention to KYC rules), these would have made great use cases for bitcoin. Now however, I feel like bitcoin doesn't provide relative anonymity over more traditional methods of payment. I think there could still be a case for a new mail-like protocol that combines email and cryptocurrency for an email system which is both encrypted by default but also everyone sets a payment level for mail to reach them. So I say "My Address is <bitcoin address? mail address?>, pay at least 0.001 bitcoins to get mail through". This system: *Puts a direct cost on spam (therefore massively reducing it) *ensures everyone owns private keys (so mail can be encrypted simply by knowing their address) Two fantastic features. Sadly it won't happen, mail is too entrenched.

yuvipanda 12y ago
I'm always wary of email/spam solutions that require 'payment' of some form. See https://craphound.com/spamsolutions.txt https://craphound.com/spamsolutions.txt for a lot of reasons (in particular, Unpopularity of weird new taxes, Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money, Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical, Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually, Sending email should be free)
- eli 12y ago
  It also makes it suddenly expensive to run a decent sized email list. For security announcements, say.
  - eric_bullington 12y ago
    No, the idea is that users would be able to set an incoming fee per email address, including a default fee for unknowns. Users would simply whitelist email subscriptions at 0 fee. In fact, this could likely be done completely automatically beyond the initial setup (and then only if you want to diverse from the defaults).

tomasien 12y ago

There's some crazy, crazy infrastructure growth going on with BTC, Ripple, and Stellar. It's thrilling to see what is just becoming possible.

Animats 12y ago

Bitcoin can't handle micropayments. The block chain is limited to about 7 transactions per second, and every node has a full copy of the block chain, so traffic goes up roughly as the square of usage. There's a minimum fee for each transaction (if you want it confirmed in any reasonable length of time) and it's currently about $0.30. That's more than many merchants pay to process a credit card transaction. Nor can Bitcoin handle fast payments. It takes about an hour to get solid confirmation of a transaction, by which time the price of Bitcoins may have changed substantially. If you're selling anything that actually costs you money, you have to wait for some confirmations. One gambling site tried accepting unconfirmed transactions. People would bet, then, if they lost, double-spend to kill the payment. A distributed digital currency without these problems is technically possible. That may be the currency that actually becomes useful for micropayments. Meanwhile, Bitcoin for vending machines, music tracks, and parking meters isn't going to happen.

tokenizerrr 12y ago
I thought the fee was 0.0001btc and thus $0.03?
mahyarm 12y ago
Chaum ecash is one way to solve it. You'd use chaum ecash tokens backed by bitcoin by an issuer. You would then use the tokens, since they are instant, have no transaction cost and can be anonymous. The ecash tokens themselves require a central issuer that is trustable to avoid double spending, which is it's central issue with it. To side step the trust issue, the issuers would be a large multi sig bitcoin pool. The two technologies compliment each other. Bitcoin creates a purely virtual good that has scarcity and solves the trust issue. Chaum ecash solves the cost, speed and anonymity issue for bitcoin. Bitcoin will become something like the international wire transfer mechanism. One implementation of chaum ecash is open-transactions, i suggest you check it out: http://opentransactions.org http://opentransactions.org
mappum 12y ago
Actually, Bitcoin can handle micropayments extremely well by using micropayment channels. https://bitcoinj.github.io/working-with-micropayments https://bitcoinj.github.io/working-with-micropayments In short, the payer sends a signed transaction to the payee every time they want to increment the payment, but the payer does not broadcast the transaction to the network until they want to finalize it. To prevent double-spending, the payer and payee first set up a 2-of-2 multisig, so all transactions must be signed by both parties. This lets applications send many instant micropayments, and only one transaction fee is paid.

SmokyBorbon 12y ago

After reading these lame, generic examples, does anybody on HN have any good ideas for bitcoin-based projects?

panther2k 12y ago

I'm working on a crowdlending network that enables the first idea: https://s3.amazonaws.com/loancoin/whitepaper.pdf https://s3.amazonaws.com/loancoin/whitepaper.pdf To the extent people are interested, we'd really appreciate any feedback.

untilHellbanned 12y ago

To continue the discussion... https://hackpad.com/Native-Bitcoin-Applications-dNXoRdhwIb5 https://hackpad.com/Native-Bitcoin-Applications-dNXoRdhwIb5

gracehopper 12y ago

This list is pretty good but I suspect infrastructure work is far from done. Also Marketplaces aren't quite native by this definition-- cdixon is more so pointing out that their reaches can be expanded to the unbanked. I think the real magic of Bitcoin lies in the Blockchain itself and its application to the real world via smart contracts. The fact that bitcoin is a currency might turn out to have been a big distraction or just a side effect of the real applications. If this is true it further points to the need for ubiquitous infrastructure.

paulsutter 12y ago

Item 2, allocating resources for a true mesh network is a cool idea. It's clean, a b2b transaction for a specific standardized service: forwarding or storing data. It does not sound like a legal minefield. Am I too optimistic? Hats off to cdixon. The other four I don't understand, can someone help me out? There is no technical reason that existing money transfers get delayed or expensive because of international borders. The issues are regulatory [1]. How does bitcoin solve that? Same with payments and micropayments. There's nothing technically difficult about moving small or large amounts of money between people. Compliance with regulation is where all the trouble comes in [1], and Bitcoin is not miraculously exempt from those regulations either. Am I missing something? I'm really curious. Like most technology folks, I /want/ to be more excited about bitcoin. [1] https://www.wepay.com/api/payments-101/payment-regulation-challenge https://www.wepay.com/api/payments-101/payment-regulation-ch...

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cwiz 12y ago

I think there is huge opportunity in decentralising existing business models that are well suitable for p2p. Think of Uber / AirBNB / etc with no fees and no government power over them. Another huge opportunity in distributing revenue of these services to peers running the network. This may cause rapid growth & unparalleled fault tolerance. Third thing that might be disrupting is ability of such services to issue their own coins/stocks, which price is linked to service's revenue. Revenue is then distributed among stock owners, and service can issue such stocks at will without government's approval.

netcan 12y ago

Out of these 4 categories, marketplaces is the one that I think has the most potential for a breakaway change. Micro-payments, micro-incentives and any kind of a scaling down of transactions is something I'm not exactly sure about. Maybe there's some cool stuff here, but I would be surprised. Marketplaces though are a different story. Marketplaces have been developing into giants since the internet began and the financial infrastructure for running them is terrible. Ecommerce, native or not, will also be impacted. Anti-fraud & payment verification colour the world of ecommerce enough. Solving friendly fraud (mostly chargebacks) could enable a lot of otherwise transactions and serve underserved markets (EG shipping goods to high risk countries like most of Africa). ATM though BTC is still in a shaky place. Even bitcoin owners don't use it much. Most people don't have bitcoin wallets so unless a service is important enough to make people use it, BTC cannot be the only option. Marketplaces are the kind of thing where users can be forced to use the payment method available. EG, if Uber paid driver in BTC, drivers would accept BTC.

datadiver 12y ago
what you said and decentralized marketplace could emerge with bitcoin, where marketplace works like a blockchain explorer. Craigslist + bitcoin = Alibaba

comex 12y ago

> Incentivized social software. Up until now, social sites have had to rely on non-monetary currencies such as likes, followers, karma, upvotes, etc. With Bitcoin we can add actual monetary incentives to the mix. This is happening organically on Reddit where users are tipping each other using Bitcoin and Dogecoin. Incidentally, this is a pretty bad idea, because of how the way people think about things changes when money gets involved. Someone said it well in a recent thread, so I'll defer to them - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8392883 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8392883 (AFAIK, most Reddit tips are only for a few cents, so the only real value is the acknowledgement that someone appreciated your post enough to tip you. This sidesteps the issue, but means that it isn't a good reflection of what would happen if you tried to make a real incentivized social network.)

gregpilling 12y ago
Club Med used to solve the problem with beads. Vacationers would use beads to buy beer or whatever while there. At the end of the stay they add up the beads that you used and give you a bill. It is pretty effective at making you not think it is money. My bill was over $600 for 2 weeks :(
- JoeAltmaier 12y ago
  You know that going in. As a way to quit obsessing about the money and just enjoy yourself, it worked quite well.

wslh 12y ago

Speaking about cryptocurrencies in general, where are these on the list? - Open source and Kickstarter like projects funding - App/Startup Coins - Virtual Goods - Silk Roads

jgalt212 12y ago

Does any know or care to hazard a guess on how much BTC Andressen Horowitz owns?