[tostitos1979]

Very good points. In complex financial transactions (at least within regulatory domains), my understanding is that rollbacks can and do happen. I initially thought across borders/regulatory domains, blockchain will shine. I haven't seen a killer application just yet. It is a bit frustrating because the tech is indeed interesting .. we just don't have multi-billion dollar real (as opposed to imagined) use-cases beyond the distributed ledger.

[bradleyjg]

"I initially thought across borders/regulatory domains, blockchain will shine."

Massive institutions with billions of dollars at stake would rather have a predictable and stable regulatory regime to conduct transactions in the shadow of then to rely on a technical solution that supposedly obviates the need for one. Things come up -- bugs, acts of god, internal fraud, hacking, flash crashes, and so forth and so on. They want to be able to go to arbitrator and ask for a sensible and reasonable result and not be reliant on a totally inflexible mechanical rule set. Not the least of which because they can afford the very best lawyers to try to convince those arbitrators that what they want is sensible and reasonable.

[notzorbo3]

A few years ago, a substantial amount of money was accidentally wired to my bank account. After about a month, I got a letter from the bank if I agreed on that money being wired back to the sender. I agreed, because I knew the implications.

With a technology like bitcoin, where receivers are pseudononymous, that would have never been possible.

Noone except for those who wish to remain pseudononymous will ever use bitcoin for any real-world scenarios. The costs are higher, the risks are higher, it doesn't scale, there are no checks and balances.

I don't want bitcoin for the same reason I don't want an AI to run national defenses.

[tyingq]

I wonder if there's such a thing as Bitcoin address typosquatting. Especially targeting single bit typos (of busy wallets) to catch single bit errors. I guess, though, vanity wallet addresses are hard to create. Or maybe there's also a checksum that keeps this from working anyway.

[bradleyjg]

There's a checksum, so your desired typosquatting address may not even be a valid address to begin with (the chance that it is valid is only 1 in 2^32). Even if it is a valid address it would be very very difficult to generate it. The difficulty of doing so would be at least as difficult as preimage attacks on both SHA-256 and RIPEMD-160.

[tyingq]

Interesting thanks. Is it remotely plausible on any other cryptocoin?

[JackFr]

https://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/blog/the-blockchain-paradox-why-dis...

"Let me explain why. In economic organization, we must distinguish between enforcing rules and making rules. Laws are rules enforced by state bureaucracy and made by a legislature. The SWIFT Protocol is a set of rules enforced by SWIFTNet (a centralized computational system) and made, ultimately, by SWIFT’s Board of Directors. The Bitcoin Protocol is a set of rules enforced by the Bitcoin Network (a distributed network of computers) made by — whom exactly? Who makes the rules matters at least as much as who enforces them. Blockchain technology may provide for completely impartial rule-enforcement, but that is of little comfort if the rules themselves are changed. This rule-making is what we refer to as governance."

[DINKDINK]

>The Bitcoin Protocol is a set of rules enforced by the Bitcoin Network (a distributed network of computers) made by — whom exactly?

Bitcoin and Blockchains are an opt-in rule system. You literally subscribe to the rule set (called consensus) that you wish to participate in. No one coerces you into participating in a rule system you do not want to participate it.

Your capitalist||socialist country is invaded by socialist||capitalists and they change the rules of your country's bank? Your blockchain doesn't care, it is enforced at the user level, at the edge.

[roywiggins]

And if there's a fork? As I see it, either you follow the fork supported by the majority of miners, or you run the risk of finding your coins worthless, because everyone else is on the other fork.

[DINKDINK]

>And if there's a fork? If someone proposes to violate the rules of your blockchain, you ignore them. Only when users support rule changes does the market value them.

>either you follow the fork supported by the majority [...], or you run the risk of finding your coins worthless

Any thing is only worth what others will pay for it. This is the case regardless if you are using a blockchain or not. If the world suddenly decided USD were worthless and you held lots of USD, yes you would find that your USD are now worthless.

[roywiggins]

The problem seems to me that users and miners have different priorities, and it's the miners who decide what the consensus is, not people who actually hold bitcoin. Of course, miners hold BTC too, and presumably want BTC to hold its value, so they wouldn't, say, intentionally inflate BTC (unlike a government-backed currency). But there's still a disconnect there. Consensus is consensus of miners, not consensus of users.

[SCHiM]

This is true in the abstract. However in the real world Bitcoin is in such a bind right now. While the USD had been stable in that sense since it came into existence.

[vasilipupkin]

In my opinion, the ICO is the blockchain killer app. You don't really need a distributed ledger except in case of digital currencies, which can be used to facilitate transactions in specific apps

[random023987]

> In my opinion, the ICO is the blockchain killer app.

There are so many examples, from Canadian Tire Money https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Tire_money to Microsoft Points https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Points showing you can create private currencies granting the bearer certain privileges without a blockchain.

[vasilipupkin]

Airline miles, etc. Of course, you can. It's not that you can't do it, it's that blockchain makes creation of such currencies easier.