Quote from: Hugroll on October 13, 2015, 06:29:43 PM

Quote from: gugo on October 13, 2015, 06:28:22 PM

I will stay.

lol OP isnt asking if you should stay or go hes asking if bitcoin should stay to which the answer is DEFINITELY YES!!

No big deal, but I'm the OP and I was indeed asking if you should stay or go (paraphrasing The Clash) -- or at least that was my intent. But I do agree: definitely yes.

To convince any skeptics, tell them to substitute the word "blockchain" for "bitcoin" in a lot of discussions about the latter. (It doesn't always work but often enough it does.) They will see that the blockchain is really what people are talking about when they talk about bitcoins -- which after all are just tokens designed to reward anonymous workers on a decentralized network. If that network is valuable, it will bring fiat value to the bitcoin token -- which puts in a different light the oft-repeated claim by the skeptics that "bitcoin has no intrinsic value." It doesn't -- but the blockchain potentially has as much pure value, intrinsic or not, as any data-set could have. So what are the long-term prospects for the blockchain?

Pretty damn good -- as a public data-backup for starters. Today, individuals and companies have to publish legal notices in newspapers in order to make those notices a part of the public record by a certain date and time. Tomorrow, individuals and companies will hash whatever data they need to preserve, use that hash to create a bitcoin address, and then send some fraction of bitcoin to that address. Voila, unalterable proof that their data existed by an exact date and time before their newspaper-published notice of it. Banks using their own private "permissioned" blockchains may be required by governments to publish those chains (encrypted and hashed of course) on the bitcoin blockchain as a matter of public accountability well before they are audited.

The good thing about this use is that the confirmation time won't have to be fast. It could be done in snail-mail time for that matter because the transaction still gets published on the blockchain instantly. The fact that the transaction is not yet confirmed is irrelevant for proof-of-existence purposes. Perhaps someday MS Word will offer scientists, writers, and anyone else with a need to establish priority a feature that automatically copies their text, hashes it, and sends it to a bitcoin address, and then makes a record of what text produced each hash and address. Whatever the need, the sheer low cost will ensure the blockchain's widespread use. (It may be that its low cost is the blockchain's truly revolutionary aspect.)

The key point is that confirmation time won't matter for millions of users. Perhaps private blockchains will handle commerce and banking for sheer speed, with their data backed up on the bitcoin blockchain as a matter of routine.

In any case, the blockchain -- and its bitcoins -- would seem to have a future.