Re:Ask HN: What was impossible earlier that is easy in the B...
by TheDong on Friday June 30, 2017 @01:05PM
(#14672053)
> self-owned online identity
gnu-social existed long before blockchains, as did many other federated systems.
> shared programmable ownership
What does that mean?
> global value transfers completed in less than a hour
Customers of the same bank can do the same globally usually. It happens they're transferring "internal bank numbers" instead of real money, but all cryptocurrencies are also just proxies for money and both sender/receiver must be using the same crypto-currency. Not very different.
Also, paypal, snapcash, etc seem to work just fine without a blockchain.
> immutable public timestamps
The library of congress begs to differ. So does gnusocial (federated/distributed timestamp). Mailing lists were used for this purpose at some point too.
Things like freenet exist just fine without blockchains.
gnu-social existed long before blockchains, as did many other federated systems.
> shared programmable ownership
What does that mean?
> global value transfers completed in less than a hour
Customers of the same bank can do the same globally usually. It happens they're transferring "internal bank numbers" instead of real money, but all cryptocurrencies are also just proxies for money and both sender/receiver must be using the same crypto-currency. Not very different.
Also, paypal, snapcash, etc seem to work just fine without a blockchain.
> immutable public timestamps
The library of congress begs to differ. So does gnusocial (federated/distributed timestamp). Mailing lists were used for this purpose at some point too.
Things like freenet exist just fine without blockchains.