| > Are you? Why? So far, no bitcoin/blockchain advocates have been able to explain to me a single non-illegal use case that isn't better served by a traditional, centralized database. I agree if you change "isn't" to "couldn't be". Consider if I'm a small company and want to process cards. So I try to sign up for a payment provider. Except, oops, I'm outside the US where terms tends to be stricter. And, oops, I'm in a legal field (in my jurisdiction) but one that the payment provider considers risky or morally suspect, such as, say gambling, or adult products, or prostitution, or even just travel. A lot of companies find themselves spending ages sorting out payments because of this. I've worked with startups (in travel, in one case) that spent weeks getting approvals from one provider before suddenly getting "no" - in the end it took four attempts and several months in case; we developed the whole platform faster than we could get approval from a payment provider. That's unusual, but it happens, and in general having dealt with payment processors in various companies over a period of nearly 20 years: it's been nothing but pain and misery most of the time. That's not a problem of the "traditional centralized database" directly, but indirectly because the centralized database allows for centralized gatekeepers of transactions: Your payment provider may or may not care about the nature of your business, but if the card association does, or the issuing banks does, or the bank handling the merchant account does, it doesn't matter. This, to me, is the biggest potential value of crypto-currencies: The rising importance of card payments over cash have been one of the largest un-democratic power-grabs of our time by handing power to those controlling the approvals process. Some previous developments, like PayPal, had the potential to change this, but quickly ended up as steeped in problems as the card providers. I understand why: They're taking significant risk, and they're managing that risk. I'm not suggesting some sinister cabal trying to control morality through payments; merely that these companies first interest is to protect their share holders investment, not the public interest. But crypto-currencies has the potential to give us "digital cash", of sorts, in that while it's not exactly the same (it's much easier to track for starters), it is much closer to cash than cards in terms of inability to control its use. We can track it after the fact like we can with cards, but we can't easily stop people from making payments or taking payments. That has value. Whether that's enough to sustain Bitcoins current momentum is another matter. |