My raw water company, Mother Earth's Golden Shower LLC, will henceforth be renamed Blockchain Systems LLC, trading under the ticker symbol BS. We will leverage innovative blockchain solutions to disrupt the raw water sector as a first step to bringing about the Singularity, where all my bros will be free to cuddle puddle with sexy robot avatars containing copies of the uploaded brain of Stacy from marketing. Please deposit your venture capital directly into my Cypriot bank account (no crypto currencies accepted.)

steele it's been 13 20 30 minutes and I still have the edit button available. I'm going to stop watching for it now.

It's been over an hour and 20 minutes.

Gone after two hours.

I beg to differ
Burger King has launched its own cryptocurrency in Russia called ‘WhopperCoin’

"It turns out that for the person paying for a product, the key feature of a new payment system — think of PayPal in its early days — is the confidence that if the goods aren’t as described you’ll get your money back. "

This is false. I have had a Paypal account since a couple of months after it started in 1998. It was initially popular because was it was free (as in beer) to send and receive money for (primarily ebay) purchases, in a world where sending postal money orders, writing checks, and going to the bank to transfer money were still common activities. At the time Paypal offered no dispute resolution services, and was not linked to ebay (which was itself new). Paypal fees were added quickly afterwards, ebay integration next, and the various levels of buyer protection much, much later.

/old

ebay acquired paypal just after its IPO in 2002, what's your cutoff for early days?

Point taken. It was all a long time ago now. The big change though was when ebay stepped in and forced sellers to be liable for customer satisfaction by issuing Paypal refunds even without the seller consent. That was, when ... 2007 or so?

Don't even remember, not a fan of paypal, but that would still be about ten years ago. 5 years after mainstream adoption. You have to figure back in those early early days us old people were the same sort of people who were first messing around with bitcoin, the technical literates that set the groundwork. I think the author's point is we're just not seeing bitcoin or the blockchain being adopted for mainstream currency use outside of that group because it doesn't offer the protections and perks that banks and paypal do. If you want to supplant a system you either have to completely destroy the old one or offer something better. The blockchain is offering neither for those of us in the first world.

Technically though, as a new payment system, Paypal's key feature and the reason it became widely adopted was low cost, speed, and ease of use - only after it became quite massive did more "bank like" or "credit card like" features of institutional services like buyer protection get rolled out.

I know nothing about the blockchain above what I've read in the news. It seems to me crypto-currencies are still in their volatile infancy and could yet go either way: settle into mainstream, regulated, and guaranteed usage, or fade back into the, um, ether. The author's overall point seems valid though: Unlike Paypal, Bitcoin does not address an obvious consumer need. Outside of an ideological attraction, speculative frenzy, and the obvious criminal advantages, I can't see any pressing reason to use it over existing services. Still, I think we are closer to the beginning of it all than the end and wouldn't bet large sums on it either way.

Look into stellar. Its being implemented in a few real world cases.

Would stellar fall under the realm of currency speculation and illegal transactions?

According to the US irs, crypto is a property not a currency.

Sorry, crypto-what now?

Yes and no. There is speculation on Stellar as an asset, however, it is also being used as a system for cross-border financial transactions.

There are a lot of financial business processes that stand to be improved by block-chain. For another example, tZERO is worth checking out.

It is still very early days for blockchain. If used for currency and transactions (highly speculative) it actually stands to eliminate the shadiness that we have come to expect from central bankers and financial institutions by introducing transparency and an operating framework that doesn't allow tampering with the numbers.

It is early. I'm not even against crypto-currencies, but sometimes the hype train needs to be put in check if you ever want to see real progress. The author makes some excellent points that most blockchain aficionados don't really have decent answers for besides dropping yet another crypto-currency. Ankylosaur seems to have hit on the most mainstream use of a blockchain which is to completely ignore what a blockchain is and use the term as a marketing gimmick.

Blockchain voting system. Idea I want to fiddle with in my spare time if I ever get any. Probably would never be used precisely because it would be more secure than what we've got, but wheee side project. Ok so the article kind of addresses it - an election with lots of attention should be fairly easy to ensure a lack of foul play...except that we still get an awful lot of recounts. Plus there are a lot of voting system outside the political arena - ex: stockholder votes. There are some companies that still do that shit by phone and paper, amazingly. Seed a new chain, voters with verified identity get a key, cast a vote, results tallied and verified against other ledgers, vote is recorded and chain is dropped.