| I read you saying it's quite complicated, but everything you said feels reasonably simple to me. Maybe I've been staring at these challenges for too long? Maybe in a few years everyone will feel it's reasonably simple? Or maybe not. When you get a charge hold on your credit card, there is nothing you can do to satisfy it either aside from waiting for the charge to resolve. I'd like to think we're used to this reality. Regarding needing to keep track of all unspent/spendable outputs, the Bitcoin client has been doing this since the beginning. If you go into your Bitcoin data directory, there are two sets of databases—the blockchain and all of the unspent outputs in the blockchain. These get updated with every mined block. Querying it is easy. Regarding coloredcoins, the annotations live on the blockchain but the protocol (ie. how they're interpreted) lives in the client. Part of the reason why multiple accounts are popular in crypto wallets is precisely for this scenario. You can keep your car-owning colored coins in one account, your spending change in another, your life's savings in more, etc. It's kind-of like having a Checking, Savings, Retirement, Investment, Mutual Fund, etc accounts in your bank. You're absolutely right these all come with new challenges for us to work through, but I'm not having trouble imagining a rosy future where people aren't accidentally giving away rights to their cars and failing to meet rent because their savings are tied up in a complicated Script that is refusing to get resolved. We're not there today, but it's still early and many folks are working on all kinds of innovative wallets. :) |