| "All of the other Bitcoin use cases I know of are incremental in nature" I don't think most people are aware of some of the crazy things Bitcoin could enable. Bitcoin is programmable money in a much deeper way than PayPal/Stripe/whatever APIs are "programmable money". It's a global distributed ledger with a scripting language [1] for performing a wide variety of transactions [2][3] with zero or minimal counterparty risk. However, it's certainly possible we're shooting ourselves in the foot by growing too quickly and unleashing the wrath of banks and governments before any killer applications are built, but if these ideas are compelling enough they'll survive in some form. 1. https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Script 2. https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Contracts 3. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mD4L7xDNCmA More reading for the curious: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Smart_Property https://docs.google.com/document/d/1AnkP_cVZTCMLIzw4DvsW6M8Q... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decentralized_Autonomous_Corpo... https://github.com/DavidJohnstonCEO/DecentralizedApplication... https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=152334.0;all |
Isn't the viability of the distributed ledger predicated on the value of Bitcoin? Workers verify transactions because they get paid in something that they value. If the value of Bitcoin drops (say: government regulation), then the incentive to mine/verify goes away?
Assuming that happens and the miners go away, wouldn't the ledger be open to malicious attack?