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Comment by fleitz | Hacker News Reader

Please explain how bitcoin can discern vicarious liability. You're still going to need lawyers.

Please explain how a bitcoin blockchain record can testify in court that a copy of a document is authentic. Hint, you're infront of a jury, you have a blockchain hash, and opposing council has a notary public with 40 years of experience, both copies of the document differ, the original cannot be found. Hers has an official looking seal, you have some random numbers.

Please explain how I can buy a pack of cigarettes at 11 pm in under 5 minutes with bitcoin.

In short most of your claims are highly exaggerated and don't work beyond the most trivial scenarios.

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> Please explain how a bitcoin blockchain record can testify in court that a copy of a document is authentic. Hint, you're infront of a jury, you have a blockchain hash, and opposing council has a notary public with 40 years of experience, both copies of the document differ, the original cannot be found. Hers has an official looking seal, you have some random numbers.

Here's an imaginary possibility. A hundred and fifty years from now, courtrooms come with computer systems built from scratch and operated by court clerks. Their sole purpose is verifying blockchain records. The jury knows to trust the machine. In fact, the jury instructions tell them to.

None of the jury members have ever seen official documents on physical paper. They only know about paper documents from watching historical fiction movies. In such movies, the possibility that the documents are forged is always a major plot factor.

I think in practice, the first time someone needed to do this, a bunch of high grade academic cryptographers would acts as expert witnesses pro-bono. From there, it would be like a hacking case - an expert explains the issue to the jury, who take a decision. Assuming it is technically sound, bitchain certification would win.

Subsequent cases would be able to use the precedent, and win with less interesting experts.

These comments are actually making me think of this case:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howland_will_forgery_trial

Bitcoin might let you say things like "both parties signed this document on this date" but you will still need a jury to decide "Action [foo] does or does not constitute a violation of this document which they both signed on this date".

I've faced these authentication issues in Asia and the Middle East. There is an increasing willingness of authorities to trust non-traditional means of authentication through neutral third parties. For example, I recent pointed to a commercial corporate records provider as a source of authentication of a foreign corporation being in good standing and the local Middle Eastern authority was willing to go online, look for themselves and conclude that the information was correct. I beleive that such forward-thinking authorities will begin to participate in BTC hashing and be willing to gather the information for themselves.

If you think about it, this is a lot more convincing than getting a ribbon-covered document from a foreign jurisdiction that you may not be able to read, even if it authenticated by a series of trusted authorities (a chain of embassies in this case).

Do you remember when computers used to take whole rooms and apparently "Computers in the future may weigh no more than 1.5 tons." and "There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home."

Now iam replying to this from a phone

Just saying technologies improve over time, bitcoin is a very interesting mix of technologies, probably the most exciting thing to come along since email, web, bittorent and social networks

The most exciting thing since the web? Really? It's an interesting technology, but let's not forget Foursquare launched the same year and has had more of an impact on business, and Instagram launched a year after and has had more of an impact on the general population.

Bitcoin was engineered to take time, it wouldn't be as popular as it is now if things played out differently.

In fact the whole value of the currency is based on the fact it takes work, and therefore time, to create.

Foursquare? Yeah, right... and Instagram is basically imgur with filters... Compared to peer-to-peer money, your examples aren't very good.

For now, you cannot buy a pack of cigarettes with it, but as more vendords accept it, you will have apps on your phone that will let you easily do that.

Look, bitcoin is a platform and it is in it's infant stages. But, it has huge potential. Potential does not mean odds of success are 100%

I don't think you understand even if the vendor accepts bitcoins, and even if I bring my laptop I still can't buy anything in under 5 minutes.

https://blockchain.info/charts/avg-confirmation-time

Yes you can. You do not necessarily need a confirmation if you are willing to take a small risk (and a vendor accepts risks much bigger than that if he's in business).

Considering the extent to which cigarette vendors around here keep their merchandise locked up, I don't think they're willing to take on a lot of "I hope these bitcoins are legit" risk.

Merchant software can listen to the network for 10 seconds. If no contradicting transactions have been broadcasted, the probability of the bitcoins not being legit is EXTREMELY small. You only need confirmations for large transactions. Zero-conf are completely safe for the large majority of transctions.

Bitcoin-type technology has tons of potential, my friend.

Or I can use actual money and forget all this nonsense ... Which do I choose?

What about credit cards? Chargebacks are quite common.

Credit cards are not a feature of a currency. You could just have credit cards that keep debt in BTC instead of USD.

The point of the person you're replying to is that, for 99.999999% of businesses, there is no benefit to using BTC. It doesn't offer the buyer any protection, it's extremely volatile, and it would require an overhaul of the entire economy's infrastructure to implement in any meaningful way.

This is incorrect, see my post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6812657

Also, nice strawman with the laptop. Ever heard of smartphones?

Actually, you have an expert (or more than one expert) who can testify to the nature of the block chain and the difficulty and expense involved in altering its history.

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