111–120 of 310 posts
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Absurdity of the action has no correlation to profitability of said action.
If that were true there would be no economy.
Can someone in the know shed some light on why does every project need its own currency?! Why isn't a standard coin like BTC or eth good enough?
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> Blockchain is perhaps the most economically important invention of the last 500 years Holy cow are you serious? The most economically important in the last 500 years? So the steamship, the airplane, the automobile, the railroad, the telephone, the printing press, nuclear power, vaccinations, electricity, radio, radar, the semiconductor, television, the cell phone, penicillin, the Gregorian calendar, pasteurization,…
> In early 2017, the Harvard Business Review suggested that blockchain is a foundational technology and thus "has the potential to create new foundations for our economic and social systems." It further observed that while foundational innovations can have enormous impact, "It will take decades for blockchain to seep into our economic and social infrastructure." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blockchain
500 years ago was 1517. This is just a bit into the Age of Discovery. We hadn't even managed to sail all the way around the world yet (that wouldn't come until 1522). The Enlightenment was still a couple centuries away. Feudalism was still a thing, plagues still routinely struck. Absolute monarchs reigned over lands. Most people still lived on subsistence agriculture and would starve is there was a bad harvest. People routinely died of things that we don't even think about because of modern medicine.
Now, compare that to the world we live in now, where satellites and cables beam information around the world in milliseconds and childhood deaths from diseases are much rarer now. I could be in China in less than a day if I wanted to. And I'm not likely to starve this winter and I never had smallpox as a child.
Blockchains MAY someday be important. But it is the height of tech arrogance, not to mention a gross lack of awareness of history, to put a yet largely unproven technology that most of the human population has not even heard of on the same level as vaccinations. A LOT has happened in 500 years, and it is WAY too early to be making those kinds of pronouncements.
(As a side note, two of the most underrated inventions of, let's say the last 100 years or so: the pallet and the ISO container. Both of these are so crucial to the modern economy that they blend into the background.)
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Blockchain is perhaps the most economically important invention of the last 500 years. Right now the whole space is worth less than $100B, and it's going to be worth tens or hundreds of trillions of dollars. Obviously valuations have far outpaced the present usefulness of these technologies, but because the pie is so enormous it would be irrational not to overpay. Right now prices are too out-of-whack with reality so…
It might be #3 behind the transistor and the internal combustion engine.
How can one profit off of this?
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It is a currency. You can trade it for goods or services. The idea of moving it into a national currency is what we do now because we are in the early stages. I see a future where you just pay in coin.
It's a currency that can't buy much of anything, so it's close to useless as far as paying for the needs of a typical person. You can speculate about the future of crpyotcurrencies all you like, but the future you imagine is not inevitable and certainly not the reality of today or the foreseeable future. Beyond that, if we're speculating, a world where all transactions live on a blockchain is an ideal one for a gover…
Yet. Everything needs to start somewhere.
I have a fetish for watching complicated court cases play through. What you realize is a judge in a courtroom has a lot of power. They can take your money, freedom or even kids. However, if I had few hundred thousand in Ethereum encrypted placed into a few random anonymous git hub repros, well, the government can't take it. It is truly yours. No one can take it. That must be horrifying proposition for (some) governme…
I have a fetish for watching complicated court cases play through. What you realize is a judge in a courtroom has a lot of power. They can take your money, freedom or even kids. However, if I had few hundred thousand in Ethereum encrypted placed into a few random anonymous git hub repros, well, the government can't take it. It is truly yours. No one can take it. That must be horrifying proposition for (some) governme…
And if you go hide a few million bucks in cash in the middle of a desert, they can't take it either. The hard part has always been getting it out and not getting caught. Nothing is truly yours.
Plus as more avenues for directly using bitcoins opens up, the 'getting it out' problem becomes a non-issue. Plus, mixers!