Beyond bitcoin: The future of blockchain and disruptive financial technologies 

+allen smith Thank you for your kind words Allen. As for your land title example, we must start from the beginning. First of all, all titles are transferred on one date to the new Bitcoin blockchain system. Every title is replicated there, just as it is in the paper system. When this is done, the Bitcoin that represents the ledger entry is sent to the owners of the title. The possessor of that Bitcoin possesses the title to the property. When they send that Bitcoin to another person. They then can prove that they own that property. Now the first objection to this is, "what if the computer that holds that Bitcoin dies, or the person with the pass-phrase dies, or some other catastrophe happens destroying the Bitcoin that represents the title?" This is where Multi-Signature Bitcoin Transactions come in. Each title can only be transferred when a number of signatures beyond a threshold is reached. For example, in a "Multisig" Bitcoin transaction to move a million dollar house to its new owner, you could require that any two of your law firm, you and your wife are needed to unlock the Bitcoin and transfer the property. If you don't trust your wife, or are divorced, this can be handled in contracts separate from the Blockchain, or by adding more signatories to the Multisig Transaction. If you have five children, you could require that at least four of five of them are needed to move your property. You can quickly permute many ways you could distribute responsibility amongst people you trust. There will be the need for new services and dispute resolution mechanisms, and ways to deal with orphaned property that will be interesting to say the least. One thing we can say for sure, is that the State is not needed to provide any of this, just as they are not needed to resolve disputes on eBay and Amazon, who have built their own reputation and dispute resolution systems (which are actually private courts) that serve everyone perfectly. Government wont want to get smaller, but eBay and Amazon did not ask for them to get involved in their disputes; they simply built what they needed and launched it without asking permission. Dispute resolution will go this way for sure, because its fast and cheap and unbiased, unlike the State's courts. This is why (like it or not) Sharia courts are springing up everywhere. They are voluntary, extralegal and very efficient and fair to the people who agree to be bound by them. There is no reason why this cannot apply in our world, and completely replace the monopoly justice system of the State. Government doesn't like the fact that Apple and Google have locked them out of their devices with military grade encryption, but they have done it anyway, without asking permission first, because it is both the right thing to do and they simply did not need to ask. There is nothing that the State can do to withdraw this technology, and that is a good thing, because as we can see with these Brookings Bitcoin meetings the people from the State have absolutely no idea what is going on, and this makes them very dangerous. If you like the way that I think, you may enjoy some of my analysis on Bitcoin: medium.com/bitcoin-think/grundsaudaag-jour-de-la-marmotte-ground-hog-day-8570677dd90b#.pxo2k0x3n That is a good place to start!

+allen smith The US Government cannot stop Bitcoin, and even if they ban it, the rest of the world will use it, and only US Entrepreneurs will suffer. The classic example of this is CDMA and GSM; the two competing telephone network standards. The USA tried to have its own proprietary standard, CDMA, whilst the rest of the world settled on GSM. In the end, the US had to give in and join the rest of the world on GSM. America can either be the centre of Bitcoin or a satellite state. I made this very clear to the UK government in our Consultation submission: medium.com/bitcoin-think/our-submission-to-the-british-governments-digital-currencies-call-for-information-160fbf103bbc#.qfvd1fo31 the jurisdiction that puts a moratorium on laws affecting Bitcoin will reap all Bitcoin startups, companies and entrepreneurs. The moratorium should last at least until the last Bitcoin is mined. By then, what Bitcoin is and its killer applications will be part of history, and then, if needed, appropriate laws can be drafted. Sharia courts are fair for the people who agree to be bound by them. They are an abomination for people who do not accept their basis. In a free society, people are at liberty to use courts that follow their philosophy, and there is no problem with this. The law is a service, just like any other, and it should not be a monopoly of the State. Whilst I am not for the standards of justice that Sharia courts dispense, I am for the example they set, where people can have the justice they want without interfering with anyone else. I guarantee you Sharia courts are coming to the US, if the population of people desiring that style of law continues to increase. I understand that there are some people today who simply will not accept Bitcoin, and thats fine. As long as they do not interfere with people who do use it, there is no problem. People can sacrifice the truth all they like, but the status quo never lasts. This is why I am answering you in a letter on a video service that is bigger than any TV station that ever existed. What we are doing is normal now, and not even questioned. This will happen with Bitcoin also; it will become a part of the fabric of life, and no one will give it a second thought, just as they do not think about watching movies on Netflix on an iPad, which to anyone from the 1960s would look like pure science fiction out of 2001 a Space Odyssey. History proves that I am right about this; Bitcoin is inevitable, and by Bitcoin, I mean Bitcoin, not something that is Bitcoin-like that comes from banks. You are right that these people are not rational, and that is why they will fail. They are the ones who object, but who, when the society changes, simply fade away into the past along with their objections. This has happened with every life changing invention. The God of the Bible is real, by the way. Keynesian economics is falsified, and only the Paul Krugmans of the word believe in it. Another side effect of Bitocin is that Keynesianism will be discredited forever. The monetary policy levers of the Federal Reserve will be made redundant by Bitcoin. When the economy runs better without them, Keynesiansim will die. You are right about Gavin. Did you know that he gave a talk about Bitcoin in its early days to the CIA, and immediately after that, Satoshi dissapeared? All of these people, who can be filed under the category, "Statists" do not understand Bitcoin and what it is going to do. Frankly, that is a good thing. You are correct that it would be better for people who want to build applications that are databases to use MySQL. There is no such thing as "Blockchain without Bitcoin" all these companies do is hide the Bitcoin from the users. None of the people who are selling that snakeoil encrypt their email or understand cryptography. This is why you hear nonsense like that, and in fact, the R3CEV representative in the previous Brookings video on Bitcoin said explicitly that they have no software and are going to ask the banks what it is they want them to build. NASDAQ is using some software to transfer ownership of stocks; the question is how does it actually work in practice, and when these stocks are transferred to you, can you transfer them at will without reference to NASDAQ? I imagine the answer is "no". Did you know that there are other stock markets that are being developed right now where you can transfer shares at will to other people as Bitcoin transactions? The shares in the company are Bitcoin tokens, that are quotal shares in the incorporation. You can buy them from people, authenticate them and they can be traded on any exchange that deals in them simply by you sending them in a Bitcoin transaction. This is the revolution, not NASDAQ's walled garden. Its going to happen, and is already happening. If you want to understand the core idea behind Bitcoin I suggest you get GPG. If you are running a mac, get GPG Tools. Then you can learn about public key cryptography, send and receive encrypted email, and understand how trustless systems work from the bottom up. This is about the Block size debate t.co/u85qNOZrQl I just published it. The deputy editor of the New York times just tweeted that, to paraphrase, "People like me make him a Bitcoin unbeliever". Addressing the math part of your question, read this: medium.com/bitcoin-think/the-bitcoin-gauntlet-e9e721297aca#.z6qv8uz4m Right now, there are people who want to centralize Bitcoin to stop it from spreading like wildfire. They also want to be able to identify everyone using it, and also block transactions and address they do not like, the way Coinbase blocks addresses because they have been used in purchases of things they disapprove of. Its important that the block size is always beneath the capacity of domestic quality computers so that anyone can always run a full copy. 20 years ago, today's blockchain would be very expensive to run. A gigabyte hard drive cost $1,000 at one point, now that much storage is cheap and in silicon without moving parts. This is about who controls Bitcoin, and we will not allow the State to take over the network via its dupes, agents, sycophants, legion of lunatics and infantile democracy apologists.

+allen smith Thank you for this interesting and useful thread. Thank you for this interesting and useful thread. There absolutely is no such thing as blockchain without bitcoin. Some vendors claim that they have done this, but what they are actually doing is not exposing the bitcoin outside of their systems. Any company that manages to produce blockchain without Bitcoin will trumpet this from every tech outlet on the planet. None of them do so, because they know that someone is going to pull back the curtain and expose them. You cannot have a blockchain without Bitcoin or mining. You can change the words used, (from "mining" to "validation") but that does not change what is actually happening under the hood. There are no two ways about this, and no amount of hype can alter reality. When I talk about Blockchain.info users sending balances to each other, I am not talking about their platform as it is today. I am talking about a possible solution to the throughput problem, where a large service with many users can sent balances to each other in what is essentially a walled garden. My idea, rather than destroy their business model, would allow them to scale to Facebook size without encountering any of the limitations of the live Blockchain, reconciling with it in large batch transactions. Its important, when we think of new ideas to separate how systems work now and thier limitations, and how systems could work in the future. How Blockchain.info works now and its limitations has nothing to do with future development and experimental features. The contributions of any developer are only logic. Logic does not require respect; all that is needed from it is for it to be correct and fit for purpose. The Reiser file system was written by a man convicted of murder. No one thinks his software is now faulty because he was convicted of a crime. Similarly, the only thing that matters in any software contribution in Bitcoin is the effect that contribution has on how Bitcoin works. You don't have to be an expert in Bitcoin to have an opinion on it. You do have to be an expert on Bitcoin if you want to change how it works. I actually keep saying that everyone is entitled to their opinion; I am a Libertarian. medium.com/@beautyon_/this-is-just-my-opinion-44d2baa037db Software is a problem in engineering. You would not expect to take the opinions of a street sweeper into account when a suspension bridge is being designed, why would you take that person's opinion into account in a software engineering matter? You ask if I know enough to criticize the developers? The answer is yes. Mike Hearn's aborted plan to take over Bitcoin would have centralized it so that only companies like Google could run a full copy of the Blockchain. It would mean that in order to build a service on it, you would need to go to them, or some other company to access financial services based on Bitcoin. That means signing a contract, being bound to use cases they approve of, etc etc. You don't need to understand C to be able to categorically say that this is not good. Software is a new discipline, where logic can be put into motion inside a machine. This is unprecedented in human history. It means that ideas can be tested and exposed to pure logic, which is completely objective. Man is not objective, computers and the logic they run on are. This is why, when people argue about Bitcoin or any software, they are wasting their time. The software itself is the answer to any question about it, not someone's opinion. This is a very new scenario in human technology, and the number of people who understand it is constrained to the software developers. You say that a billionaire walled garden bitcoin wont last. Looking at how other walled gardens operate (Twitter, Apple App Store, PayPal) the evidence says that walled gardens can thrive and grow to a huge size. PayPal is a perfect example of what a Centralized Bitcoin would look like, and frankly, that is a nightmare. Thank you for taking the time for reading those posts; I like it when people point out the problems in my thinking; it helps me hone my arguments and delivery!

+allen smith Yes, you are wrong, but its not your fault; you have been lied to. The problem with this thinking is that it assumes that the blockchain exists separately from Bitcoin. The truth of the matter is that the blockchain is the solution to the Double Spending problem or how to create a digital currency without a central authority. The Blockchain is not merely "an unchangeable ledger system"; this is what snakeoil salesmen are trying to sell to companies, and which I completely destroy here: medium.com/bitcoin-think/grundsaudaag-jour-de-la-marmotte-ground-hog-day-8570677dd90b You simply cannot assert "an unchangeable ledger system, that is controlled by a party. So no mining" without explicitly saying how it works. Every company that says it is selling Blockchain without Bitcoin is simply hiding the technical details, which include mining by default. Mining happens and bitcoin is generated, but this is hidden from the public and done internally; it is still there underneath. They are misapplying this software, and trying to sell a not fit for purpose solution to hapless executives like the ones in these Brookings vidoes and the regulators, who are completely out of their comfort zones and depth. When you say, "It seems to me to work" this does not mean that what these people are claiming is true, and its like a magician pulling a rabbit out of a hat. It appears that a rabbit has been pulled out of a hat, but this is not the reality at all. You are of course right that there are many cases where you take into account the non-expert opinions, but once again, there are some cases where you should not. Brain surgery, and software development are but two. All of these areas are in a class of activities where expert knowledge is a requirement. There are no two ways about this. Taking your doctor's advice is completely different to the requirements of being a brain suregeoun. Your body belongs to you, and you are free to destroy it or take your doctor's advice. If however, you want to do arithmetic, there are no opinions involved; 1+1=2 and opinion does not come into it at all. That is how software works. It is math, not opinion. Finally for this point, just because you hear about people doing it all the time, it does not follow that what they are doing is what they claim to be doing, just as participants in a Ponzi scheme claim to have made a profit, and may have even done so, but that does not mean that what they are doing is a real business. Bitcoin not Blockchain advocate are in fact indistinguishable from Ponzi schemer. Given the history of the public perception of Bitcoin, this is schadenfreude first class.

+Irdial Discs Precisely. It's not about revolution, or even about a widespread movement towards ideological support for anarchism. It's all about the slow silent process by which one way of doing things becomes obsolete, while another thrives. If/when anarchism replaces democracy in the world, it will be like the way mobile phones replaced land lines.

+capitalist4life so cute, isn`t it?

2022: There are now more than 20.000 cryptocurrencies, and what's truly astonishing is the growth rate.