This will change. New security measures will allow Nanay to send bitcoins through a net cafe with zero chance of anyone stealing them.

I can imagine the first company to create a turnkey business package will sell like hotcakes.

I would like to see finance get away from any centralized entity and become community responsibility. The notion of aggregating wealth through intellectual property is anathema to progress. Technology progresses in spite of corporate greed, not because of it. Technology that decouples money from any central authority is a good thing. The market valuations of these IP companies are extremely exaggerated and driven by top-tier hyper-inflation. I would rephrase the question and ask "Who will survive the disruption of Finance?" These are the technologies that need to be developed, not for personal gain, but for the sake of progress.

Asset Class is kinda vague. Bitcoin is more like cash than bank notes, but they don't want to call it a currency. It's more like a basket reserve currency, but Wall Street doesn't deal with those.

NOPE you failed to answer mine. without using bitcoinsbitcoins, none of those things can be secured by the Blockchain. Your question shows that I fell for your troll bait.

Name one.

Nick Szabo has as much chance of being Satoshi as the NYT has of being a relevant news source. Did I just say that out loud?

It's time to disambiguate the term "Blockchain" and recognize the usage and meaning of the term. In a general sense it is a link connecting the historical timeline of cryptographic hashes. These hashes form blocks which are intended to contain transaction verifications of token exchanges. I will reference three two types of "Blockchains" and their moral relationship.

workchain--------stakechain

Workchains are based on Proof-of-Work for transaction verification purposes. In science, work is expressed in terms of expenditure of energy to achieve something measurable. It doesn't matter what the work is, only that it achieves something predictable based upon a given amount of energy. Given that the laws of physics are universal, participation can be accomplished without permission nearly anywhere with equivalent effect.

Stakechains are based on Proof-of Stake for transaction verification purposes. Stake is a sociological term for ownership of a percentage of a finite resource. Such ownership is usually mitigated by laws governing ownership and the power it bestows over time. Without such laws, ownership aggregates into power based on the necessity of that resource to the general population. Participation in this system requires asking the permission of stakeholders to give up some of their percentage.

Blockchains can exist anywhere on the spectrum. They may be entirely based on PoW from the distribution phase throughout its indefinite lifecycle. They may be distributed entirely by a central point and administered in any way that central authority wishes. They may scheme to find a balance in the spectrum that mitigates the permission requirement for participation with varying degrees of success.

From a moral perspective, excluding populations from an economy is apartheid. While Proof-of-Work systems can be entirely open and pseudonymous where anyone can jump in at anytime to participate in the blockchain security, Proof-of-Stake can be co-opted by agents of authority to deny access to the system for any undesirable populations. To get around this moral hazard, most Proof-of-Stake systems use Proof-of-Work systems to make their system available, at least while it pleases the stakeholders or it destroys the PoW system, whichever comes first. At that point, the PoS system no longer has a moral excuse for their aggregation of power. At that point, the only recourse is to use political power to mitigate the PoS system and restore equal access to the financial system. This is an undesirable consequence that would best be avoided by simply limiting stakechain technology to political authorities in the first place.

They're actually two sides of the same coin. <ahem>

Why would any mines want to do this? What's in it for miners?

Or maybe sha256 is too good and they wanted something with a secret back door.

They are hard problems. The principles of Bitcoin have been known for decades. It took Satoshi Nakamoto finding a breakthrough to make it work. The hard part is finding clever ways to use well known principles without taking compromising shortcuts. Compromises like POS are an example. (Note: I am not against POS, but it should be 100% transparent with full identities known and never anonymous or private.) Kludges are okay until elegant solutions are found as long as there is solid backup and redundancy. Breakthroughs are great, but incremental innovations are what wins the day. So SPV as micropayments is an innovation, but making it into a full blown payment system will require building the tools to kludge it together. I am certain an elegant solution can be found because it will challenge our best and brightest.

MMS has a size limitation of around 300KB. That is more than enough to handle transactions.

Except these are engineering problems for a key management system. Key management can be permanently isolated and offline.

This can be huge. You must focus on the colored coin wallet. In fact, this is the most fair way to distribute collectible series art as games.

I wrote about doing this exact thing awhile back. Great idea for a game!

All we would need to do then is change the internet into a system of pneumatic tubes so we can spend those special rocks.

You can only buy such assets with altcoins. You can only buy altcoins with bitcoins. Try the altcoin section.

Then those are not your addresses. That's a problem that people don't seem to understand. They think because someone allows them to borrow an address, that somehow they have an account. That's not how Bitcoin works unless they give you the private keys or at least a set of multisig keys.

No. You must keep a copy of all your keys if you think this might happen. You can always just print out a hard copy or make backup copies. Either way, it might be a good idea to import the public addresses into a watch only wallet.