The elephant in the Bitcoin room is that it simply cannot scale up to high TPS rates. If any kind of meaningful adoption actually happened, the network would keel over pretty quickly trying to globally broadcast all that data, and the blockchain would quickly balloon to unmanageable sizes.<p>I see a lot of these articles hailing Bitcoin as the answer to some monetary injustice or other, or as the fundamental underpinning of some revolutionary new product, but people totally ignore Bitcoin's technological limitations. Instead, the blockchain is talked about as if it's some magical box that is pretty much whatever the author needs it to be.<p>The amount of cognitive dissonance in the Bitcoin community regarding this topic is baffling. The whole point of side chains was that even core devs realized that Bitcoin can not scale. Yet side chains were hailed by the community as some sort of fantastic innovation that is 'good for bitcoin'.<p>Maybe these people are just talking their book, I don't know, but next time you read an article about Bitcoin or blockchain tech just realize that VISA can handle 47.000 tps. Bitcoin currently is doing slightly more than 1.<p>Inb4 'merkle trees', 'invertible bloom filters', 'something something moore's law', 'corporate shill', 'freedom hater', 'the market will sort it out', 'side chains', etc.<p></offtopic rant>
Well, the music industry wanted copyright with "no formalities", and that's in the TRIPS agreement. No more need to put a copyright notice on something, or send a copy to the Library of Congress.<p>Now the industry is whining that keeping track of who owns what is too hard. They dug their own hole. Let them deal with it. This is so typical of the music industry, which has been shooting itself in the foot since the invention of the tape recorder.<p>The article seems to be proposing some kind of a micropayment system, where every time someone buys a track of music, all the sub-payments to the various contributing parties get cranked out. That's not only too complicated, but the transaction volume would be huge. Bitcoin is not web-scale. The Bitcoin block chain is currently limited to about 7 TPS.<p>This idea comes back now and then. Ted Nelson's Xanadu had a micropayment system something like this. A bunch of fanatical libertarians tried to make it work. The free World Wide Web won out.<p>The amount of effort that the computer industry puts into keeping the music industry happy is excessive. Apple or Google could buy out the entire music industry for cash.
Bitcoin does not solve this issue, a blockchain does. That's what the guys at Ethereum for example are trying to achieve: vanilla blockchain, build anything on top.
If your sole goal is to store information in the blockchain, why not use Namecoin? It's almost as secure as Bitcoin, and specializes in storing small bits of data in it's blockchain.
I believe that BitShares Music project is the most tangible effort in making this kind of platform happen.<p><a href="http://bitsharesmusicfoundation.org/" rel="nofollow">http://bitsharesmusicfoundation.org/</a>
<a href="http://peertracks.com" rel="nofollow">http://peertracks.com</a>
He's describing a network where payments are being distributed hierarchically and recursively to all the creators behind a work. What does that have to do with bitcoin? you could replace the payment method with another and it would all be the same.
The problem here is, music gets produced at increased rates. You might have a huge database of all the music from yesterday, which would be less useful than you think if you'll not figure a way to make every musician put metadata for their newest creations there.
This idea is revolutionary. It would piss all the right people off if it works and also ensure that all the right people get transparently compensated for what they do.
songcoin is another interesting option where consumers get to transact and "invest" in artists or songs... "Songcoin Wants to Be Music’s Alternative Currency" <a href="http://www.billboard.com/biz/articles/news/digital-and-mobile/5915780/songcoin-wants-to-be-musics-alternative-currency" rel="nofollow">http://www.billboard.com/biz/articles/news/digital-and-mobil...</a><p><a href="http://songcoin.org" rel="nofollow">http://songcoin.org</a>