Re: Gavin Andresen - State of the Union - Bitcoin 2013 Conference

On 05/29/2013 08:35 AM, Melvin Carvalho wrote:
> Includes payment protocol using X.509 certificates :)
> 
> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JfF5mJDgZWc&feature=youtu.be

At one point he says: "If you want to invent a better PKI solution,
please do." That might be a place where Web Keys could help. :)

I'm also confused as to why there isn't more work to do some
better modeling of ecommerce transactions in Bitcoin. For example,
marking up assets, listings, and digital contracts. Most of the work
tends to focus on the core infrastructure (which is fine, but kinda
misses the point of what's needed to make Bitcoin more palatable as a
medium for economic exchange). I think the two biggest problems right
now are 1) the delay it takes to verify a transaction, and 2) the lack
of a good digital contract/receipt mechanism. If Bitcoin gets those two
things addressed, it'll become a very powerful mechanism for economic
value exchange.

The other thing that confuses me is why the system was built
independently of the Web. It seems to me that a decent bit of work is
going into re-inventing the wheel in core Bitcoin infrastructure (things
like identity, identifiers, message passing, etc.).

I'm also curious to see if Bitcoin is going to try and make the system
currency agnostic. As we all know, that would sort of defeat the purpose
of the Bitcoin currency... but providing the software to governments
that issue their own fiat currency would be an interesting experiment.
It would mean that governments could operate without a banking system
for value exchange.

The other thing that really struck me about the video is how genuine
Gavin Andresen comes across as when he talks about many of the aspects
covered in the video. I think Bitcoin has a great spokesman in Gavin,
and that's going to take the community much further than it would get
without him.

There was a story I read recently about the real power of the Bitcoin
community not being the actual currency itself, but rather being a
gathering place for like-minded currency hackers. If Gavin exemplifies
core members of the Bitcoin community, it's certainly something that I
think will have a very positive long-term impact on our global economic
system.

-- manu

-- 
Manu Sporny (skype: msporny, twitter: manusporny, G+: +Manu Sporny)
Founder/CEO - Digital Bazaar, Inc.
blog: Meritora - Web payments commercial launch
http://blog.meritora.com/launch/

Received on Wednesday, 29 May 2013 15:19:17 UTC