Quote from: sAt0sHiFanClub on August 21, 2015, 03:31:26 PM

Quote from: tvbcof on August 21, 2015, 02:53:54 PM

6) Develop technology which safely allows 80,000 people to ride one bus with little or no difference in compfort and maintanance costs.

- Now each passenger pays the expected modest fee and the bus company has enough income to operate a very secure business.

Developing such technology is more challenging that the simplistic ideas of 'buy more buses', or 'charge more per ticket.' That seems to be the task that Blockstream is undertaking with their 'elements' suite of innovations.

sidechains could aggregate the activity of thousands of sidechain transactions to a single on-chain transaction. Even a tiny transaction fee at the user level passed up to the Bitcoin backing layer would support very robust infrastructure.

I would add that merchants of a certain size will provide pretty decent savings to customers who will participate in their company 'rewards program' or use company gift cards. If the merchant had their own branded currency system it must be worth at least as much to them as a silly little rewards card. This could bring a tsunami of value into what I've always called a 'subordinate chains' cypto-currency ecosystem. Sidechains would be an example but the word was not coined when I started promoting that scaling mechanism.

Seems to me that what Blockstream is shooting for is to be recognized as a trusted authority both technically and ethically in a world where sidechains are a major economic player. If a 'branded currency' is a useful thing to large corporations, they (unlike a gaggle of plebs) have the muscle to induce governments to lighten up and allow them to at least exist.

I would never expect the financial services industry proper to be very supportive of real sidechains operating under a 'free' backing store since they are doing very well under the current fully controlled systems. I could see this sector promoting something like XT which gives them the hope of monopolizing the take from a centralized and controlled solution just as they do with most fiat systems today.

Except that what you are doing is effectively "dressing" up the bus company to be contracted out to a 3rd party operator. That operator runs the buses, invests in new buses that are entirely his. collects the fares and manages the majority of the business. Then you tell your shareholders that they never owned the buses in the first place - only the bus stops. But you originally thought there was a limited number of stops, you now find that their are 100,000,000 bus stops where previously you had one. Your bus stop is virtually valueless. The buses go by full.

Except with a two-way peg, each of the sub-operators are completely dependant on the backing-store as their value basis. If it fails, they fail. Think of it as having a monopoly on the wrenches needed to keep any bus healthy no matter who owns or runs the buses. They have no choice but to keep the backing store solution healthy.

As I say, there is clearly a lot of value to be had by a merchant in getting consumers on-board as evidenced by the the rewards programs. A small fraction of this passed on to a tight and secure backing store (hopefully native Bitcoin in it's current 'free' form) may well be many many times the value to be had by simplistic transaction fees or even by the current rather high inflation rate.

Quote from: sAt0sHiFanClub on August 21, 2015, 03:31:26 PM

80,000 to a bus??? Thats exactly why you shouldn't be in charge. Grin

Making Bitcoin be everything to everyone is like 80,000/bus supercharged, amped on meth, and shot full of on steroids. That's why Hearndresen should not be in charge.