1. Payments and value management on the internet currently suck horribly compared to what you could imagine. (Insert your own imaginations here, since you don't like mine.)
2. Some attempts are being done to make payments and value management on the internet more convenient, but they are controlled by central authorities -- Facebook, Apple, Google, Twitter, Amazon, whatever -- so they will exclude, censor, limit, and control. (Just like Twitter controls your API access, Facebook forces you to use your real name, Amazon surveils your preferences, etc etc etc.)
3. Blockchains are the only way I know of to do this kind of thing without that kind of central authority, in a thoroughly open source way.
4. I can quite easily imagine a future when blockchains make it very convenient and nice for individuals and organizations to do payments and value management on the internet, in various creative and interesting ways.
Bonus point:
5. Resource use is indeed something to consider. (That also goes for, like, why are we using so many torrent boxes to seed Game of Thrones? Kinda useless! Stop wasting teh energies!) It is indeed also something that is being very actively considered by leading blockchain developers; for example, it's the major project that Vitalik Buterin is spending his waking hours on, in the form of scaling through proof-of-stake. There are highly functional versions of proof-of-stake already working for years, notably BitShares and Steemit, but they use a form of delegated voting that the Ethereum community mostly doesn't want.
" Blockchains are the only way I know of to do this kind of thing without that kind of central authority, in a thoroughly open source way."
Alternatively, the banks or payment companies are a series of non-profit foundations with protections or basic rights of customers built into their charter using regular, efficient databases with zero or low cost transfer between them. You pay a small, monthly fee to participate with your specific bank which may be waived if you do a lot of business with them. You get regular statements authenticated by the bank's HSM w/ hashes of those posted in one or more trusted, timestamping services for event bank's records are lost. Any major changes to practices might receive a majority vote by customers or people representing them from a diverse background.
So, basically traditional banks with legal incentives to not do bad stuff run by people whose background is pretty trustworthy. Many examples exist of coops, credit unions, and nonprofits that take care of customers due to good incentives. The admin overhead is kept lean per charters. The tech is vastly more efficient than proof-of-work-type schemes since it's just database transactions. Better cost/efficiency than before since new banks aren't stuck on expensive mainframes. ;) What you think?
1. Payments and value management on the internet currently suck horribly compared to what you could imagine. (Insert your own imaginations here, since you don't like mine.)
2. Some attempts are being done to make payments and value management on the internet more convenient, but they are controlled by central authorities -- Facebook, Apple, Google, Twitter, Amazon, whatever -- so they will exclude, censor, limit, and control. (Just like Twitter controls your API access, Facebook forces you to use your real name, Amazon surveils your preferences, etc etc etc.)
3. Blockchains are the only way I know of to do this kind of thing without that kind of central authority, in a thoroughly open source way.
4. I can quite easily imagine a future when blockchains make it very convenient and nice for individuals and organizations to do payments and value management on the internet, in various creative and interesting ways.
Bonus point:
5. Resource use is indeed something to consider. (That also goes for, like, why are we using so many torrent boxes to seed Game of Thrones? Kinda useless! Stop wasting teh energies!) It is indeed also something that is being very actively considered by leading blockchain developers; for example, it's the major project that Vitalik Buterin is spending his waking hours on, in the form of scaling through proof-of-stake. There are highly functional versions of proof-of-stake already working for years, notably BitShares and Steemit, but they use a form of delegated voting that the Ethereum community mostly doesn't want.