[Cryptography] Crypto basic income

[Ray Dillinger]

On 09/24/2017 07:21 PM, erik wrote:
> Why would one trade in a cryptocurrency that is just emulating 
> typical banking, instead of just using typical banking? It defeats the purpose 
> of a pseudonymous, decentralized and immutable public ledger system.

This seems to presume that everyone agrees on the purpose of a
decentralized immutable public ledger system, or even that everyone
views pseudonymity as part of the purpose rather than merely a side
effect of distributed implementation.

Pseudonymity in particular is one of the properties that effort is often
spent specifically to eliminate (introducing Trusted key servers and
certificates) in block chains designed for specialized purposes that I'm
seeing now.

For example there's a startup in Virginia whose CEO I was talking to
earlier today who's using a block chain to manage special-purpose coins
in a sort of distributed, online mall - think Amazon with all goods
shipped from the vendor, and nobody except the vendor gets that vendor's
sales data.
While it's distributed, it's not Trustless - there are privileged
servers that do things like serve keys and match IDs.

As currently mooted, the design has no pseudonymous users allowed
period, but 'mix' transactions in every block to preserve privacy by
preventing anyone from knowing which users spent how much to which
vendors. Data blocks within each 'mix' transaction are encrypted to
individual vendors revealing information about individual orders.

The point is different people have different ideas about what the
"purpose" of block chains and cryptocurrency are.  No single vision has
a monopoly on deciding what it means or what its purpose is.

Before the year is out, we're even going to have some national
governments start issuing block chain currencies.

			Bear


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