Quote from: jgarzik on April 06, 2011, 08:34:15 PM

Quote from: nanotube on April 06, 2011, 08:28:53 PM

yes, but having each company start their own chain[...]

Who said anything about each company starting their own chain? That's not distributed, nor decentralized.

The future of satoshi's proof-of-work technology is a chain marketplace. Multiple chains will exist for different purposes (bitcoin, BitDNS, BitX). Multiple chains will exist in the same competitive space (bitcoins, jgarzik-coins).

Wall Street firms may cooperate on a single "Wall Street NASDAQ chain", where all NASDAQ stocks are traded, for example. That would be cooperative and super-strong, yet secure against double-spending (aka naked shorting, etc.)

The thing that you're missing is that with bitcoins the bitcoin is the deliverable. It doesn't represent anything at all and that's what allows it to be settled electronically.

If you want things in the block chain to represent shares (ie: you want the management to count your vote come agm time or pay you a dividend) or you want some farmer to deliver you some corn then they (the management or the farmer) becomes the point of failure. You're relying on them.. the fact that there's a block chain that says they should do something is completely irrelevant. They might as well just keep their shares/corn orders in a very ordinary spreadsheet.

BitDNS is a different matter.. with DNS there is something that can be delivered electronically where the thing itself is stored in the blockchain. This would work.. but you don't really need the whole proof of work thing. If all you want is a first-come-first-served name grabbing model that is basically just a simple distributed database where the p2p swarm stores the zonefile and accepts updates from keyholders and allows new registrations where the name doesn't already exist. I don't see a role for proof-of-works here. Double spending doesn't really exist.. I guess the analogy would be if you tried to transfer (sign away to a new controlling private key) the same domain name to two different new owners.. how much of a problem would that be? Is it really worth doing proofs of work to stop it? Maybe.. but I'm not really convinced. With coins you can doublespend them to anyone.. with a domain name you'd have to find two people who wanted to buy the exact same domain from you at the same time. The motivation for fraud is significantly lower.