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Comment by ebcode | Hacker News Reader

I would suggest you take a step back and think about PayPal. Do you think PayPal changed the world?

What PayPal did was reduce the "friction" of online transactions. Suddenly you no longer needed a merchant account at a bank to accept credit cards online. That was huge, right?

Similarly, a blockchain (Bitcoin's, as the premiere example) allows you to sidestep the credit card companies and banks entirely. This reduces the "friction" even more. Now, all you need is a string of alphanumeric characters, no account, no verifiable identity.

PayPal was a first step in the direction of reducing online transaction friction, blockchains are a second step.

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PayPal is simply made is worse. We had transacted over 1million+ in net value with little to no chargeback. One day my developer deployed his API credentials in production on our server which got our accounts linked by their algorithm. The developer had some past chargeback, suspicious history. They banned our well-established account which has been operating over 2-3 years successful. I caution anyone who is looking to use PayPal for any serious startup.

>Now, all you need is a string of alphanumeric characters, no account, no verifiable identity

To the average person how are these features?

I don't want a string of alphanumeric characters, I want 16 numbers printed on a card I carry in my pocket. I want a company who maintains the account and secures it and handles all the hassle if something goes wrong.

who will mange the per use-case blockchains (the distributed ledger for a given use-case)? I like decentralization... more power-to-all...but the reality is eventually there will be power-brokers (for example, miners in bitcoins or exchanges like coinbase) who has deep pockets to manage and scale these blockchains.... there will always be ripples and ethereums built blockchains which mostly maintained by single player... but then how is it any different than now... what am I missing?

I think what you're missing is that the blockchains depend on network effects to function. They scale naturally with adoption, being decentralized. Facebook does not scale naturally with adoption, because it depends on its own private funds to purchase more servers and bandwidth to handle the scaling, whereas decentralized technologies do scale easily because each player pays for their own equipment.

So, no, they (blockchains) won't be "maintained by a single player". The code may be centrally maintained, but not the network, and it is the network that holds the value. The crowd is fickle, and bitcoin could turn to nothing tomorrow based on the whim of the crowd. Still, the internet has this same quality, and it's still going strong. It (the internet) is simply too useful to be discarded. It remains to be seen if bitcoin is that useful as well.

When I buy/sell bitcoin on Coinbase, am I considered part of network? Yes the transaction will be part of the blockchain but I am not participating directly rather using proxy (in this case, coinbase for it). This is what I meant by powerbroker.

Second, to my scaling point, In order to be a part of a network one has to maintain a complete blockchain on local server/computer. This is something just not scalable in practice for 99% of people or the use-case... so regardless of the intent there will be an emergence of powerbrokers....

So using the internet analogy, yes internet is decentralized but who owns the backbone (att and few major players) will be the case for blockchain.

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