Quote from: toknormal on January 09, 2017, 05:30:37 PM

2. use of your blockchain as a payments system

Ok, here there is slightly more to work with. A blockchain CAN work as a payments system because it can transfer value from one holder to another. However, what are we competing with ? Legacy payments systems which are already inuse, therefore the blockchain would have to deliver some kind of substantial advantage to be adopted. Lets look at the properties that a payments system needs to be attractive to large scale commercial adopters:

agnostic (it should be able handle any currency denomination)
fast (typically processing a single trade in 2-3 seconds)
easily reversible (if the cashier rang my brussel sprouts through on the other guy's bill by mistake they should be able to credit them and charge me within a few seconds)
both locally and globally scaleable (i.e. if my business needs more capacity it should be able to add servers to get it. If the network as a whole needs more capacity it should have recourse to growing infrastructure to gain capacity at least linearly with invested capital)

What do you notice about blockchains ? They are lousy at every single one of these. As a payments system they are "welded" to a single denomination, they are slow, unrealiable, inflexible and not easily scalable by the end user.

Most cryptos do not and cannot currently meet those criteria. With the lightning network BTC can move one step closer though and be competitive. But as tante pointed out Dash can meet all those criteria with the the fast, infinitely scalable masternode network (clearing system) and with the evolution release be reversible and currency agnostic. Unlike lighting though it will not rely on semi centralized 3rd party layers with high fees but rather do it at the protocol level in a more efficient decentralized way lowering fee's.

Quote from: toknormal on January 09, 2017, 06:11:16 PM

Quote from: aigeezer on January 09, 2017, 05:55:32 PM

When I trade crypto, my objective is always to gain more crypto and I'm acutely aware of denominating prices in crypto

Ok - in this respect you're right that there is 'value' for certain market participants in denominating in crypto. What I really meant was that price denomination (point 1) doesn't necessarily create any new demand on your coins the way that use as a capital asset does.

So lets say for example the UK decided to denominate everything in Bitcoin. All retailers had to list prices in Bitcoin and government statistics were reported in units of bitcoin. They could do this overnight without needing to buy a single bitcoin, it's just a labelling excersise and as long as Sterling was still accepted as a form of payment there would be no direct demand.

Obviously there would be indirect support for bitcoin's value against Sterling because people would want to hold it, but note: they'd still be holding it in category 3 of the above "adoption" categories since the blockchain would still not be used as a payments system. The existing payments systems would simply be re-configured in "bitcoin" denominations. Credit accounts would still hold credit, however denominated - not blockchain tokens.

I would also disagree with this in that if overnight everything in say the USA could be bought in BTC then crypto would skyrocket as it's a superior form of money/currency/store of value that people would want to "own". And that's with the USA having the world reserve currency, so the smaller the country the more value crypto would gain compared to the local currency, think venezuela. If everything in venezuela was priced in BTC there would be no reason to hold their local, centrally planned, hyperly inflated wheelbarrow money.