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  Cashless transactions require a third party
Cryptocurrency.. (miners are decentralized and don't require you to trust them)



The network is still the third party.

With cash, or bottle caps, or any physical token, all you need are two people that agree it has value. Possession is the ledger.


The network can still run between those two people alone (if consolidation is solved).


Nature has an elegant solution to the double-spending problem for physical commodities.

If only there was a way to timestamp digital transactions without a write-only ledger...


Yes... I wonder how Nature implemented that...


By dropping transmutative alchemy from the sprint, allowing the implementation of a capability system on top of a now unforgeable subset of existing resources...


Sounds like the whitepaper for this week's hottest ICO!


Thank you so much. I'm on the verge of framing this and putting it on the wall. Cubicle wall, but still.


  all you need are two people that agree it has value
Wrong. All currencies need a network (physical or otherwise) or else it's just bartering between two objects.

The entire idea of currency requires a network of people who project a common value in the implemented token/object/hash.


Transactions still have to be approved by the network. ATM it's pretty slow. And many coins have one pool with majority of the hash rate --> not so decentralized


«ATM it's pretty slow»

For most cases you don't have to wait for a confirmation. Accepting a typical non-RBF 0-conf transaction is safer than accepting a credit card payment, because it is trivial to reverse a CC charge, but difficult to suppress a 0-conf transaction sitting in the mempool of thousands of Bitcoin nodes.

«many coins have one pool with majority»

It is not the case for most popular coins: BTC, ETH, BCH, LTC...


That's because rejecting RBF transactions without making it part of consensus is not incentive compatible


you still need permission to do it, even if you don't need to trust the permission granter.




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