Hello,

Could someone pls explain some specific details - what I mean is that in general I understand the idea behind, but I'm missing what is the actual advantage over the "classic" systems?

I will point out my doubts:

1. The general feature always mentioned is ensuring that nobody "manipulates" the history of the shipping - however it's just an entry in the blockchain - it only ensures that the specific "id" is not faked - how that suppose to ensure the real goods, while the "id" is just a sticker or print or some box or whatever kind of container?

2. How the blockchain solution is better from just "any" (well designed) computer system - I wan't to emphasize the words "well designed", so the system is distributed over different parties (data is replicated between different parties having no common business or even to some "escrow" company) and everything is well secured with proper roles for users, change history logging, good authentication protocols, data encryption, cryptographic signatures, etc...

What is your opinion guys?

Best regards,
Piotr

Ok, maybe I was not clear enough, but I didn't really mean its price / value.
I was thinking about Litecoin popularity, new services, etc.

So basically - let's say such scenario:
Due to "issues" and still unclear solutions to it (with Bitcoin), companies decide to use Litecoin as its primary crypto-coin.

Hi Litecoin enthusiasts,

We are all watching all the trouble Bitcoin has in recent times regarding block size, scalability and so on.
I would say that it is perfect opportunity for its "brother" which is very similar, but different.

Why this is not happening? Why Litecoin is not gaining popularity now?
I'm interested in your thoughts.

But that's exactly the thing !

The trick with envelope and post does work, because post stamps are legally recognized and respected.
Imagine going to a court and showing what? a webpage of that [Suspicious link removed]pany? an application displaying something?
Even if that is absolutely true - how do you imagine the judges respecting the fact whether you show them on the screen that date your work was "stamped"?
So what?
For them it's just a webpage, or app, whatever, one of millions...

Do you get what I mean?

Come on guys, anybody else?

BTW, the same applies to, for example, education / training certifications etc.
In order it to make sense, the "normal" institutions or companies would have to respect them, their administrations would have to respect them (from legality point of view), governments as well, and so on, and so on.
Basically, the "block-chained" certificates would need official, legal meaning.

Without all that, it's just a high tech toy...

I think I know what you mean.
I would say that using bitcoin makes sense if somebody can't or (for whatever reason) don't want to deal with traditional finance.

So with bitcoin you can avoid cash, banks, debit / credit cards, etc., so everything related to "normal" money.
You can just pay for something "without" money. That's the difference.

Hi,

There is lots of being said and created regarding securing various rights or ownerships with the block-chain technologies.
Technically it is brilliant, but I'm still confused about using this kind of things in "reality".

I mean, I can digitize my ownership or whatever and store it in the block-chain, but to be legally recognized, all the (for example) notary offices would have to accept such thing and so far I don't think it is the case...
If I really want to proof ownership, I still need the paper with stamps and all that legal stuff.
And the same with courts. We can keep creating those great block-chain services, but from legal point of view they mean nothing...

That's the "missing link" for me here.

What do you guys think?

Hi!

Assuming all the similarities between bitcoin and litecoin, would it be feasible / doable to adapt NBitcoin to also handle litecoin?
I mean not necessary in one codebase, but maybe as a child / side project.
How much work would that be?

I have a question to someone knowing well that project (the .NET bitcoin implementation created by Nicolas Dorier)

Assuming all the similarities between bitcoin and litcoin, I'm just wondering - would it be feasible / doable to adapt NBitcoin to also handle litecoin?

I mean not necessary in one codebase, but maybe as a child / side project?
Besides the "scrypt" algo (because that's the most obvious part), how much work eventually could that be?

Hi !

I know the litecoin was created as a clone of bitcoin with few changes (like hashing algorithm or block mining interval, etc.)

I would like to ask, how this state changes over time - I mean, is it that after litecoin inception and initial differences, they both keep walking their completely independent paths,
or is there any effort made to "re-apply" the bitcoin developments back on the litecoin (of course if they make sense), so they keep differ only in that initial set of features ?

I think I need to elaborate a bit more about my proposal. What Green Address does is providing "safe" transactions, so they check and guarantee that any transaction sent from their wallet will not be fake (doubled).

That means If you check that your payment comes from address hosted by them, you can ignore network confirmations and accept that transaction instantly. And here is the place when "traditional" trust comes back to the game.
But that's exactly what I'm trying to say - if we will be a bit more pragmatic and accept, that we can trust "somebody", this will solve the problem of waiting for confirmations (and of course all transactions will still be mined, so we can always fall-back to that in case of doubts).

Then we can have more such wallet services where we trust (anyway you can't do business completely without trust - it's an utopia...) and still whoever wants, can use private wallet soft, where transactions will be processed by network and full confirmations.
So no problem with dictating a "trustful" approach or lack of choice.

Not sure which times exactly you mean, but AFAIK the "standard" confirmation times are kept on more / less constant level by auto-correcting the mining difficulty factor. So if the load will increase, but the mining power will not, the difficulty will be lowered to keep ~ 10 minutes per block.
The problem with filling up the blocks with transactions - I think that's one of the current debates now - to increase block size, so I guess that (have to) will be solved soon...

I was thinking recently about that issue with bitcoin doing only few transactions (or so) per second and long confirmation times. Last times the community is “desperate” about the need to increase scalability / speed in order to compete with traditional payment systems in future.

I just realized that this is simply wrong direction of thinking (in my opinion). Essentially we get all that goodness related to distributed / decentralized model, but that comes with the price of speed. It’s simply impossible to achieve high efficiency in such heavily democratized structure. On the other hand, really high speeds are possible clearly due to centralization of systems.

I would say that instead of trying to “catch the rabbit”, maybe the solution is to accept that unpopular concept of centralization and do something similar what Green Address does (let’s call it “pragmatic trust”), and simply leave the current decentralized approach as the “super-feature” to carve in stone all the transactions without rush, or serve as the arbiter in case of problems ?

To me there are two primary problems that hold bitcoin from being like a currency and keeping it "only" as a commodity:

1. Transaction time (confirmations) - for buying (investing) or just transferring that's fast enough (who worries if it takes for example half an hour if you do this very infrequently), but I can't imagine buying stuff in a shop and waiting 20 or 30 min by the check-out to wait for those confirmations...

2. Price volatility - with such a wild and unpredictable jumps it makes bitcoin interesting for speculations, but no one is going to keep bitcoin as "normal" money, because essentialy every single day you wake up and have no idea how much you will be able to buy for your "money" today...

The thing is, you all are right saying that the success can be a reason to hide, but there is one detail here - NOW, if we know it's a success...

That time just a single guy or cryptography fun, could not have any idea that it will have such big impact on the world - it was just yet another cryptographic idea / toy / experiment...
It was not even the first e-money, and these others were "normally" published with authors etc.
It's like creating a new encryption algorithm, publishing it, and hiding its origin from the public "just for case"...

Of course it really could be a random case that for some reason it stayed unknown or initially unpopular, which later turned to be "useful" to hide from unexpected success.
The second thing - time of creation - could also obviously be just a timing coincident.

But how about both those facts "coincidenting" together ??
Just too much randomness here 

By all means, no...
I also meant the opposite, but what I think is that the collapse has triggered the initiative
What I also think is that those "people" were not just geeks...

Let me share my personal thoughts about creators of bitcoin. I would like to just point out the following two observations:

1. With so big effort spent (in time, work and people) still nobody was able to clearly find out who that was - that means there must be really strong reasons to keep that unrevealed.

2. Bitcoin started / appeared pretty much right after those big banks collapse being the beginning of serious world crisis.

Now I will leave you with your own conclusions from the above two things :-)