Funny how OT is referencing bitcoin all over the place, yet there is this nugget in the FAQ:
"YOU have to trust the issuer of that cash, and the contract he used to issue it, and decide whether you trust that it is backed with real value. There is no escaping this basic fact (of electronic trading of any good) — someone has to store the actual gold, or whatever it is, that supplies the actual backing value to the currency."
I like the OT concept, but it hasn't really found a niche yet - and latching on to bitcoin doesn't seem to be it.
WARNING: I sound like a OT fanboy. You may think I'm an OT developer. Neither is true :-)
I disagree with your comment on latching onto bitcoins. I tihnk its exactly what it needs to survive. I think OT just isn't mature enought yet to use in a production sense. I also think it ambitiousness also leads people to not fully understand what it can do, and what it's trying to be (including me), so they just ignore it, or mentally flag it as 'investigate later'. But I think its exactly what bitocin needs. Here are some of the markets it can help bitocin capture:
1. It allows for true anonymous transactions (porn, drugs, laundering, w/e). While not mainstream, these markets could be essential for bitcoin economy bootstrapping (IMO). Bitcoin already has means to achieve this, but OT does it better (well, chaumian blinded tokens do it better, to be specific)
2. Online wallet services are going to be essential for bitcoin to make it mainstream, and OT allows for better account based wallets (client or online) than we have seen yet from any provider. This is a big one. The level of fail in current online wallets is a big problem IMO.
3. it allows for instant clearing transactions (again, think pay-per-view movies, porn, vending machines, anything where waiting around for comfirmations is a bad idea)
4. it allows for low-fee or no-fee microtransactions (this depends on scalability of OT servers i suppose)
5. It can solve the many-online-wallets-which-one-should-merchants-accept-and-how problem with
basket currencies. This also mitigates the trust issue for users better than anything else right now (except vanilla bitcoins)
6. shit loads of other stuff i cant think of right now
It doesnt replace bitcoin, it extends it. They need eachother.
However, apart from code maturity I think OT may suffer from feature creep. For example it plans on (among other things) taking over namecoin and DNS. It wants to implement full fledged smart-contract features. It serve a lot of different markets will all the possible financial instruments. And so on.
I think it's best bet would be to fully implement a small subset, get the code rock solid, targeting certain markets, and built from there.
But I really think the bitcoin community should have a closer look at it. We're missing out.
I agree with you.
OT has got a lot of features,apart from what you have listed, which can be utilized for anonymous transactions.
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