
We already know blockchain’s killer apps - rbanffy
https://hackernoon.com/we-already-know-blockchains-killer-apps-f2d443eba35
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CryptoPunk
Great article.

>>Preston Byrne argues: well, effectively what you’re saying is that
“tokenization onto a blockchain allows you to break securities laws.” That’s
hardly an innovation so much as a circumvention.

That's an innovation in circumventing centralized authorities.

>>As a payments layer, Bitcoin is slow, expensive, and unscalable. But if
Bitcoin is to serve as digital gold, that doesn’t matter. Bitcoin being hard
to move around encourages people to treat it like gold. Almost all of the
political and economic characteristics of Bitcoin make it the natural
cryptocurrency to fill this niche.

This is not true. A store of value needs to be mobile to be effective. Value
is only stored to eventually be moved. Bitcoin's liquidity has to concentrate
on off-chain ledgers controlled by trusted third parties when on-chain
transaction fees are exorbitant. That makes it highly susceptible to
regulations.

If in 10 years, almost all trade in Bitcoin is being done on exchanges, and
almost all trade in another cryptocurrency is being done in peer-to-peer
retail transactions, and China shuts down its exchanges, the other
cryptocurrency will still have significant liquidity in China, while Bitcoin's
will be severely reduced.

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ctulek
Wow. The writer of this article like many other articles I read about Bitcoin
in these days does not seem to care about all illegal activities happening on
top of Bitcoin, and just talking about it as one of the killer apps.

Am I the only one who watches all this Bitcoin drama with a sad face if not a
broken heart where people are killed, hurt, or get frauded? I had and have
zero belief that this stuff will work but on top of that I am really
disappointed how it evolved from a geek project to a big wave of distruption
if not a distraction.

Anyway, do crypto currency communities have any plans about preventing illegal
activities that hurt real people?

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C14L
Are you describing what paper money does or what Bitcoin does?

Sooner or later, blockchain-based money will be regulated. Just like paper
money is today. But its too early now.

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ctulek
Bitcoin, if not worse, has similar problems that cash money has. While
governments trying to get rid off cash, now we have Bitcoin on top of that.

There will be regulations on Bitcoin for sure but how can it be regulated
without breaking the original premise, that is, being able stay anonymous with
one's transactions?

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C14L
Bitcoin's original premise was to offer money transfers that are low cost and
fast. Sadly, that isn't the case anymore for the original Bitcoin.

The ledger is public, so it was never really anonymous. Just hard to follow.

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gt_
In the least, it should be useful in some non-paradigm-shifting, more obvious
applications like concert ticket sales (see TIX) and date-stamping of
journalism and public records (see PO.ET).

I’m interested if anyone disagrees. If a blockchain is a basic immutable
ledger, I guess I wonder why there isn’t more attention on already-useful
ledgers which currently depend on less efficient infrastructure to enforce
consistency. It seems possible this is what Vitalik is getting at.

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OldFatCactus
>> I wonder why there isn’t more attention on already-useful ledgers which
currently depend on less efficient infrastructure to enforce consistency

Honest question, what about current infrastructure makes it less efficient
than blockchain for your examples?

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gt_
Yeah good question. I didn’t elaborate very well on that.

The inefficiencies come about in transactions by separate parties. I am no
expert on how Ticketmaster works, but I will use an event ticket as an
example. If customer(a) buys a ticket from a venue and wants to sell it to
customer(b), there are 4 separate parties dependent on that transaction. The
current solution is having Ticket unique Ticket stubs which are difficult
_enough_ to counterfeit that they protect the transactions _enough_ but
counterfeit tickets do get made and sold often. Those make cause for problems.
And, selling the physical tickets requires a physical transaction. All of
these things mark inefficiencies.

These mirror the inefficiencies overcome by cryptocurrencies in that the
solutions replace _stringent centralized enforcement_ with _decentralized
access_.

