8 thoughts on “The Blockchain Economy”

  1. There’s still a problem in the interface between the cryptocurrency and the actual currency, i.e. the exchanges, and paper money still has a use. As can be seen in places like Puerto Rico.
    Eventually there should be a crackdown on these cryptocurrencies. It is already happening in China. To a large degree the technology will likely be adopted for electronic money transfers in some other form.
    Oh and Bitcoin doesn’t scale. It’s also deflationary by design. There’s been a fork in the network to fix some issues already and it won’t stop there.

    1. There’s also the matter of enforcement of contracts involving the cryptocurrencies. Governments just have to require total disclosure as a condition for their enforcement.

  2. Paul D. writes:

    There’s also the matter of enforcement of contracts involving the cryptocurrencies. Governments just have to require total disclosure as a condition for their enforcement.

    Maybe I’m just a starry-eyed idealist, but “governments” (at least here in the U.S of A.) answer (most of the time) to the people of whom the “total disclosure” would be demanded.

    I don’t think the “demand” (ahem) is ultimately going to go very far. Sort of like a lead balloon.

    Hale Adams
    Pikesville, People’s still-mostly-Democratic Republic of Maryland

  3. The point of crtptocurrency is that it is self regulating with no govt. involvement. The problem is that the blockchain grows and is copied to every node with every transaction. Popularity could destroy it.

    It doesn’t require record locks because it only adds new records; never edits old records; however, I wonder if two nodes could produce identical new records? (however rare.)

    1. If I’m recalling correctly form when I read up on bitcoin, it has a hard coded limit on the number of transactions/tick of the clock the blockchain can record.

      As for 2 nodes producing identical new records, the system operates on a lock step clock, one new block each tick.

  4. Questions I have:

    – how will an economy, and government, deal with a plurality of currencies, most unregulated by government, some allowing transactions with anonymous accounts?

    – An example is given of a “cryptobank” operating on a crypto-currency blockchain, directly connecting borrowers and lenders. Will it also evaluate the credit worthyness of borrowers?

    An observation about blockchains: they don’t handle embedding large documents well. But they could link to outside documents, with a secure hash, attesting to the existence of the document at a given point in time, and revealing if the document is altered.

  5. There’s a scifi story to be written, I think, about a fully blockchain based system of government. Voting, legal documents, trials, lawmaking…

    1. I’ve heard abstract proposals for blockchain based voting. But given that every transaction on the blockchain is a public record, I’m not seeing how to properly do the secret ballot without a physical token (ballot) being distributed to voters.

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