Bitcoin Forum

Business Model of new company 21 Inc predicted by Satoshi?

Plausible speculation:
New company 21 Inc to offer realtime payment confirmations for bitcoin:
"More likely, in my opinion, is that they want to become/create ‘trusted nodes’ within the Bitcoin mining network permitting merchants & machines near-instant confidence that their transactions will be 100% confirmed. "
Source: http://alistairmilne.com/2015/03/14/what-is-21-inc-developing/

Satoshi:
"I believe it'll be possible for a payment processing company to provide as a service the rapid distribution of transactions with good-enough checking in something like 10 seconds or less."
Source: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=423.msg3819#msg3819

Maybe it wasn't a prediction but the company founders looking at his posts and getting the idea from there to launch the company

i think satoshi predicted that too, yes. he had a very good foresight.

Secret company.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/BL-DGB-40808
Satoshi was very secretive, hmm maybe there could be some conection there, it's a long shot.

Do you mean instant confirmation? I think you have never heard about greenAddress, it is a web wallet with an instant confirmation (the only rule is that also the other part uses it). Now it can be used for any payment processor.

Exactly ;)

I used to use green address until after an update it stopped working altogether, another update later and it's back working but slow as to open, it's empty now so i won't be using it again.

Has someone got a quick explanation of how instant transactions work.

An instant transaction wouldn't really be "instant" it was just be "instantly trusted" by those in the network. It could work like this:

A multibillion dollar company establish good rapport in the community and acts as a middle man. Each of us has a "bank account" with them in which we keep some fraction of our bitcoin. This huge/trusted company has 1 well known public address. We walk into a store and use our app that is run by this company, we scan the stores QR code and the bitcoin is sent to the store from that well known public address on our behalf, then the well known company deducts that amount of bitcoin from our "bank account" with them.

The store then sees that the payment came from a well known/regulated/large company and that they "are good for it" meaning that they will not try to create any double spends, thus the transaction is still on the bitcoin blockchain and the transaction is "instantly trusted" by the store, allowing the store to then give the customer the goods with confidence that there will be no double spend and thus no need to wait for confirmations.

It is the same thing , also greenAddress use an internal instant confirm. but with GA you have a multiSog address, every transaction the change will sent to another address, if they close you will note lose your bitcoin (due the nLockTime). An instant and real confirmation (as you said) will never exist in all the bitcoin blockchain because it disagree with the "basic" rule of decentralization.

"Trust" equals to "failure" in Bitcoin world. If Satoshi seriously considered adding trust to Bitcoin then something wrong with this guy.

I think your idea about a trusted node sounds more plausible that the bitcoin mining job that I heard being thrown around. I think there are several ways, they could profit from there. Offer a fast confirmation more like a service for large transactions or maybe become helps towards the retail service adoption. There are many possibilities.

Well, it should have been addressed somewhere.... We cannot walk into a Coffee shop.. buy a cup of coffee and wait 5 minutes for the first confirmation to happen, before you can leave the shop.

Having one central organization doing this, was not the solution I was waiting for.... I would have hoped some change in the protocol would have made this possible.

Edit : The secrecy is not a good thing.... but Satoshi followed that route of thought, {trusted nodes} so their must be a valid reason for that. {Patent} ?

It is impossible (at the moment) to make a change in the protocol , if you add a fast confirmation you "ruin" the decentralization of bitcoin itself.  I think the unique way is to add a largne number of nodes (but maybe I am wrong). For the large adoption as you said this is a "good" compromise between the use of bitcoin and a sort of partial decentralization.

Alistair Milne talks about combining the both ;)
"If this is the case, 21 Inc may be happy to mine at break even, profiting from adoption instead."
http://alistairmilne.com/2015/03/14/what-is-21-inc-developing/

Just to double check / confirm:
Yes, Satoshi seems to think fast confirmation can be done WITHOUT changing the core Bitcoin protocol.
See: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=423.msg3819#msg3819

Generally speaking trusted nodes are good stuff, but implementing such nodes would somewhat compromise the decentralization, and that would be the re-implementation of a trust based payment system. Probably this isn't a big price for wider merchant adoption, especially because of the wast majority of the nodes would remain truly decentralized.

Relying on Satoshi's opinion would be a mistake. He already has a track record of making big ones (unsustainability of mining without subsidies, selfish mining, centralization of mining). It's better to use your own brain if you know how, of course.

Not as long as it's optional whether you want to use 'pure' Bitcoin or 3rd party processing service.

Yes, I thought this issue before, about the confirmation, waiting for a confirmation in a real purchasing is very troublesome and time wasting, you can't ask people to wait for a confirmation after they sent the money, this is would stop Bitcoin from becoming a real currency. Satoshi predicted this issue and he always predicted the issues, now company like 21 inc will work this out.

At the moment bitcoin is a good and alternative way for send large quantity of "money" without the use of a centralized intermediate (like a bank) and especially with the lowest fees in the world. It will be a real "currency" when the actual economy system will completely broke, because bitcoin is not compatible with the FIAT economy.

a way to do it without trusted parties is just query other nodes in real time for any attempted double spends.  (see BIP 35) 

If you and the company selling you the goods both have coinbase account, your transaction is also real time. Is it the same as 21?

This is the most interesting Satoshi thread in two years. It does appear that he supports the trusted node concept as presented by the 21 group. Centralization wouldn't be necessary if the company simply intends to act as an insurance company against theft guaranteeing to pay their connected merchants for zero confirm transactions. They would need to comply with worldwide updates or risk being caught on the wrong side of a fork. They could also decide to fork Bitcoin into a private network, if necessary, at any point in time. Neither of these options would centralize the network. As for providing near-instant (0 confirmation) transactions that are guaranteed to be valid. I'm not sure that's possible as a trusted node component of the current larger network. It would be useful for avoiding cancer nodes or a Sybil attack but not classic double spend attacks.

This is correct. The core nugget of bitcoin remains, anything you build on top of that core does not compromise the blockchain.

LOLOLOL. Trust me, you have no clue about Satoshi or his motives. So please don't make stuff up about him. You're using his creation, that would automatically make you a fool if you're calling him a fool. That's just circular logic.

Circular logic? There is only circular fallacy in your post.

I think Satoshi just got a lot of the basic ideas and implications right, even at the beginning and the following 2 years or so - I mean he invented it. The companies that come along now are merely obvious incarnations of various ideas.

There already are solutions that don't rely on centrally trusted nodes for instant confirmations besides sidechains:

http://lightning.network/lightning-network-paper-DRAFT-0.5.pdf
http://lightning.network/lightning-network.pdf
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=970822.0

There is no reason both cannot exist as well.