Quote from: BillyBobZorton on November 24, 2017, 08:14:37 PM

Blockchains, if not attached to a decentralized token, don't interest me, and I don't see how they can interest anyone in this forum to be honest. Without a cryptocurrency, blockchains become MySQL databases.

Well, a distributed database, but a simple database all the same.

The main issue is that without any form of token there's little incentive for the participating parties to stay honest. And if you don't worry about whether the participating parties stay honest, why use a blockchain in the first place?

Quote from: BillyBobZorton on November 24, 2017, 08:14:37 PM

Im interested in seeing improvements on the current damocle's sword of Bitcoin: PoW.

Thus far, all other alternatives have fallen short. PoS and so on don't cut it. Ideas like the tangle with IOTA and Byteball with DAG are good ideas but not really a replacement for PoW.

Agreed. A viable alternative to PoW would be a game changer, but it doesn't seem like we're quite there yet. IOTA's tangle is basically a DAG, both IOTA and Byetball suffer from the fact that they as of now still require central entities to protect their networks from attacks.

Quote from: chiggz on November 26, 2017, 09:20:28 AM

Right now, blockchain technology is not very useful and practical for most applications. If we focus focus on Bitcoins best and worst features we can predict how it will evolve for the further years. Currently the Bitcoin blockchain takes several minutes to confirm a single transaction. Compare this to your transactions on your mobile phone using, say, ApplePay transactions are nearly instantaneous. So any application requiring high volume and quick confirmation times is not a great application to be put on the Bitcoin blockchain for the near future. Whether this will change within 5 years is a guess.

Depending on the state of the mempool, instantaneous 0-conf transactions are viable for small transactions even today.