After a long pause, I just started attending a MOOC again. It’s on Coursera, from Princeton and it’s about BitCoin. In one of the first lectures the teacher goes through some simple hypothetical digital coin concepts. I don’t know if the lectures are publicly available piecewise, but as a whole they are at youtube. Jump to minute 50 for scroogecoin.
| Name | property | problem |
| GoofyCoin | signed receipts | double spend |
| ScroogeCoin | centralized blocks | corruption |
| BitCoin | fully decentralized | solved |
ScroogeCoin reminds me a lot of the blockchain projects a lot of big financial institutions announced over the last few months. They talk about permissioned blockchains. That sounds like exclusive access and centralized control. BitCoins inclusiveness is one of the important characteristics, and I hope enough people recognise it as such.
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