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I'm going for a "wait and see" attitude on this one because I suspect there must be some hidden opportunity to extract wealth from the blockchain that I'm just

I'm going for a "wait and see" attitude on this one because I suspect there must be some hidden opportunity to extract wealth from the blockchain that I'm just not smart enough to see, but just by reading the article, it seems like this is another case of "groundbreaking because... blockchain." FTA: The company will be creating “coloured coins”, appending special information to the blockchain indicating that a particular fraction of a particular bitcoin can be redeemed according to the terms written into it. That coloured coin can then be passed around just like a normal bitcoin, while preserving a record of who owns the asset it is linked to. Ok. I don't have an inherent dislike for bitcoin. I understand how bitcoin works. I understand the incentives. I've read the whitepaper. I don't see how decentralization is useful for this task. Why would I want to store asset records on the blockchain? What does this make possible that isn't already possible without the massive computational overhead of a global decentralized ledger? I understand the implications that financial assets can be tagged to colored coins and that those coins can be traded without the need for a third party. I understand that it's all public and that the blockchain's data integrity is fortified through global consensus. Why does this matter? What does this make possible? I also wonder how the institutions will react when rich investors start getting their colored coins stolen by hackers. Will the NASDAQ honor the value of APPL colored coins that were pilfered from someone's laptop? What about in situations where coins are lost or accidentally sent to the wrong address? Will some random bitcoiner wake up one day to discover that they're a majority shareholder of Microsoft? As I said, I'll wait and see, because if I was as smart as these finance people then I'd probably have an apartment in the heart of Manhattan to prove it.

sktrdie 11y ago
It allows one to put a piece of information on the internet, and as long as the network lives, nobody can possibly remove that piece of information. It's stuck there forever. Not sure if that will be useful or not in the future, but that sort of thing was not possible before bitcoin came along. I look at bitcoin more as a breakthrough computer science theoretical finding. It's not just an idea that needs to "make something possible". It exists in nature whether we find a use case for it or not.

sktrdie 11y ago

It allows one to put a piece of information on the internet, and as long as the network lives, nobody can possibly remove that piece of information. It's stuck there forever. Not sure if that will be useful or not in the future, but that sort of thing was not possible before bitcoin came along. I look at bitcoin more as a breakthrough computer science theoretical finding. It's not just an idea that needs to "make something possible". It exists in nature whether we find a use case for it or not.