191–200 of 257 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
And yet there was a protocol change to fix the application failure.
There wasn't a protocol change either. The hardfork that came after the burning failure of the DAO moved account values from the DAO to a new contract. The protocol remained the same.
Litecoin is now back because of Segwit. It's Bitcoin's hope to push a final acceptance of Segwit on Bitcoin. But, it doesn't have a real value in my opinion. About cryptocurrencies in general I can say that I use them to get payments and to pay employees and I find them very useful and the user experience is much better than normal banking (fast international transfers and complete tracking) and no need for KYC.
I don't really get the draw towards crypto-currencies - aside from mining them to bring more into the pool of available currency - is there a point to purchasing or using them to make purchases? Is there a reason I should start using these currencies? Aside from trading currencies to make a few bucks?
It is a value store which is insulated from manipulation by Central Banks and not speculatively dependent upon the performance of a particular company or nation. It is subject to precise, predictable, and slow inflation. If you look at Greece where savings accounts got a haircut and ATM withdrawals were frozen, or Venezuela where staple commodities and health care are now in cases only available for Bitcoin due to th…
Until the owners (and there are owners) of Ethereum don't like the outcome of a particular contract and roll everything back for their profit/gain.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There wasn't a protocol change either. The hardfork that came after the burning failure of the DAO moved account values from the DAO to a new contract. The protocol remained the same.
A hardfork is a protocol change.
The underlying code is overridden for a single block before reasserting it with full authority but it does not affect the protocol.
The clients and nodes in the network communicate and operate just as before, in fact, a client without the hardfork code can still receive and process the hardfork block but reject it due to not being compatible with it's consensus machine.
However, this is one layer above the protocol that makes up the Ethereum network. The protocol is merely interested in the validity of a block, not how to achieve this conclusion.
If you wrote a client that simply accepted all blocks as valid, it would accept this hardfork without problem, sans not having a correct balance record anymore.
What it would not accept is one of the newer hardforks because those actually changed the protocol and EVM to some extend, making it not understandable to old clients. Those could be interpreted as actual protocol changes.
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They're all speculative; only one of them is useful.
For extremely limited definitions of the term useful.
No one's arguing bitcoin has the same level of adoption as USD for facilitating trade. They're arguing that it has more than zero and that ETH has zero.
Two comments up you argued that having fewer options inherently means you're getting a worse deal than someone with more options. Bitcoin is an extra payment option in n>0 situations. "n is small" is true, and a reasonable point when evaluating the usefulness of bitcoin. "n is small and therefore n is zero" is a little less reasonable argument, but seems to be what you're arguing.
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Agreed on bitcoin not being the perfect solution for crypto. I think Ethereum has a ton of potential in this regard. Smart contracts have many applications and provided the developer community around Ethereum continues growing, I see no reason why it won't overtake Bitcoin within the next 10 years.
All this smart contract talk makes me somewhat sceptical. There have been a lot of talk about code replacing lawyers for years now, I still see very little of that actually happening. Can you name any cool smart contract use cases?
Replacing X, when X is a task performed by a human is not an easy task for any technology.
Take for instance Automobiles replaced Horse Cab drivers, but it created Automobile drivers. So have cars really replaced the drivers? In a way they have, and in a way they haven't.
Today Smart contracts are being used to performed mostly financial transactions. Our main problem remains the same what it was in front of the Internet in early days. They wanted their refrigerator to be able to automatically order milk once it runs out of it, but it turned out that IoT wasn't even a thing then.
On the other hand, replacing telegrams and faxes with email was a lot easier task. Doing things which have no pre-internet equivalence (for instance camming) were a lot more easily integrated.
Same here, the main and the easiest use of Smart Contracts would be in the fields where there is no current usage exists. Currently Smart contracts are being used for some lightweight usages for instance performing trades of cryptocurrencies. Today ENS is launched where they are using Smart Contracts to implement domain registry systems. Tomorrow maybe decentralized uber would be made possible. None of these tasks are really 'replace a lawyer' tasks.
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World tensions are high. Apparently whenever there's bad news, the cryptocurrencies spike? It's kind of like a safety net similar to gold. The current thing driving it might be a combination of factors, among which is the North Korea situation with chinese investors moving funds into cryptcurrencies?
Are people honestly that concerned about North Korea?
1. Chinese investors see crypto as a way of moving currency outside of China. The Chinese government has recently cracked down on movement of money outside of the country.
2. The rise of populism could drive people into crypto. The rise of actors like Donald Trump, Marine Le Pen, Geert Wilders (although defeated) implies major currency instability, especially around USD, EUR.
On (2), from what I understand Gold has become less of a good hedge against world economic stability as well.
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What is this?
A somewhat controversial protocol upgrade developed for bitcoin. On the bitcoin network it has not reached the necessary support yet. Most bitcoiners view its activation on litecoin as a large scale beta test.
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The ole e-commerce metric. Does anyone else hate when they have tunnel vision for years and are made aware of a really amazing opportunity they should have noticed earlier? Many crypto tokens are dividend producing assets, just like most separate corporate bonds have yields. Sure there may be somebody wishing the dutch east india company's bonds were successful in underpinning global finance for 500 years, but the re…
Fascinating analogy. Are you saying that the rise in Bitcoin's value recently is driven not by speculation so much as more people realizing Bitcoin's true value as an investible asset? And where are the yields coming from if not speculation ... ICOs?
This makes their networks more secure quicker as well as turning nodes into investments in themselves. The amount of that currency you can earn in a year is the yield. This promotes price appreciation on the markets, and for those fearing mass dumps and market corrections it is prudent to realize that node operators all have different time horizons, just like any dividend investor in stocks.
This is all complementary to whatever else you would like to use those networks for.
With yields being around 8% annually, there is plenty of room for other market participants to discover these networks and accept lower yields.
Key words to look for are Supernodes, harvesting, masternodes, staking
When any network with those things become valuable and liquid enough then ICOs can happen with those currencies being the funding mechanism for the next leg up.
Each of these phenomenons have to be evaluated individually, for their interesting and their most dubious aspects. Yes many ICOs are organizations with no more backing than the blue skies of Kansas, but they don't have to be dubios. It helps to see the ecosystem as a whole, and this ecosystem is a new evolution of capital formation.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The ole e-commerce metric. Does anyone else hate when they have tunnel vision for years and are made aware of a really amazing opportunity they should have noticed earlier? Many crypto tokens are dividend producing assets, just like most separate corporate bonds have yields. Sure there may be somebody wishing the dutch east india company's bonds were successful in underpinning global finance for 500 years, but the re…
Fascinating analogy. Are you saying that the rise in Bitcoin's value recently is driven not by speculation so much as more people realizing Bitcoin's true value as an investible asset? And where are the yields coming from if not speculation ... ICOs?