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Fidelity CEO Abigail Johnson says the company is mining cryptocurrencies

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191–200 of 222 posts

Re: Fidelity CEO Abigail Johnson says the company is mining cryptocurrencies

#191

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the base unit a lot of trading is quoted in satoshis instead of "x thousandth fractions of a bitcoin"

Ehm...where is this the case? Pretty much all exchanges that I actively monitor all list their order books, trade history etc. in bitcoin, with a varying number of decimals, and they also accept orders in bitcoin denomination as well. Sometimes they offer a switch in their own trading UI to use mBTC (milli-bitcoin, a thousanth of a bitcoin) as the unit, but that is always optional and I know nobody who uses it. That…

> Ehm...where is this the case?

Most of the exchanges shut down their chat rooms but thats where it is mostly said, and other real time trading arenas where people talk. People say 200k/sat while reading .000200000 btc

but a satoshi also works in other quotes where other cryptocurrencies are the base unit as well. In an XMR/ETH market, the XMR would be quoted in X eth-sat or ethereum satoshis.

The GUIs use a variety of different metric base units and there is no agreement on the GUIs, that has nothing to do with the terms people use in speech, as they don't say "x thousandth of a bitcoin"

Re: Fidelity CEO Abigail Johnson says the company is mining cryptocurrencies

#192

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Thank you for being a voice of reason in a domain that has increasingly become overrun by frauds and zealots. As someone who has been involved in blockchain research since 2011, it’s sad to see a promising technology (in limited use cases) turn into a buzzword thrown around by the many speculators and scam artists peddling vaporware and pumping crypto prices.

>it’s sad to see a promising technology (in limited use cases) turn into a buzzword The same thing happened to REST. Every "web interface" is supposedly REST now, yet the client and server are even more coupled than they would have been if the interface were implemented in SOAP!

It's an industry cycle. 15 years ago it was "XML all the things!"

Re: Fidelity CEO Abigail Johnson says the company is mining cryptocurrencies

#193
post #73
post #47

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Very interesting name for a decimal. What an intricate community

Wait until you see the nomenclature used for Ethereum units: Wei, Kwei, Szabo, etc https://etherconverter.online Buterin couldn't possibly have made it more complicated.

It looks like standard SI prefixes to me, what's so complicated about that?

Re: Fidelity CEO Abigail Johnson says the company is mining cryptocurrencies

#194

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The tech media (and tech startups) has this bad habit of hyping up technologies before they're ready for prime time. They did it with 3D printing, they did it with VR, and now they're doing it with blockchain.

They did appending 'Cloud' to everything too.

To be fair, most things are moving to cloud. There is just no hype around it anymore because it is considered standard practice now.

Re: Fidelity CEO Abigail Johnson says the company is mining cryptocurrencies

#195
post #62
post #56

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It's the name of the creator of Bitcoin, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satoshi_Nakamoto . You can imagine them as little pennies with Satoshi's head imprinted on them, if you like. And it's not really a decimal; it's more properly "1 bitcoin" in the technical sense. 1BTC was later defined to be equal to 10^8 Satoshis because that seemed like a useful amount of money to track exchange rates for (though now it's about…

"Name" is maybe not quite right, "Satoshi Nakomoto" is the creator's pseudonym. The actual author of the bitcoin whitepaper is unknown and the subject of much speculation. I'm sure OP knows this, I'm just being pedantic.

A pseudonym is a kind of name, so “name” is entirely correct, if not entirely complete (though, AFAIK, it is as complete as is known to be correct, since it is only widely presumed, rather than known, that the name is a pseudonym.)

Re: Fidelity CEO Abigail Johnson says the company is mining cryptocurrencies

#196
post #154

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One of the things I found surprising and curious about bitcoin is that the minimum viable amount is actually the transaction fee, which is maybe around 27,000 satoshis (median tx size x 120 satoshis/byte). The surprising part for me was that, as a corollary to that, wallets with less than that amount have bitcoin in them which is potentially permanently removed from the total supply of BTC.

Well, you can send zero fee transactions, they'll just take a while to get through, depending on the current size of the mempool. And you can also always send transactions from multiple addresses, meaning you can add up these small amounts to something more meaningful

Will zero fee transactions ever get confirmations? They'll be the absolute last thing any miner includes so unless there's nothing else I wouldn't expect them to get any confirmations.

Re: Fidelity CEO Abigail Johnson says the company is mining cryptocurrencies

#197

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This one is funny. While cryptocurrency gets most of the brickbats around here on HN, I think Deep Learning is also in the same boat. Executives want to apply Deep Learning to everything and anything they can get their hands on. The results most of the time are underwhelming and could be had with a much simpler set of tools. Just wondering how long before Deep Learning goes into trough of disillusionment.

brick·bat ˈbrikˌbat noun plural noun: brickbats a piece of brick, typically when used as a weapon. a remark or comment which is highly critical and typically insulting. "the plaudits were beginning to outnumber the brickbats" My WotD

Mine too: I'd never heard it before and had to look it up. Now I'm just lying in wait for an opportunity to use it.

Re: Fidelity CEO Abigail Johnson says the company is mining cryptocurrencies

#198
post #133

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The term "industry" suggests they produce something, which in the case of bitcoin mining is questionable.

they produce security of distributed decentralized database and continued operation of payment platform on top of it.

There's nothing really produced as there's no product, the software is running a service.

Without the service, there is nothing.

Re: Fidelity CEO Abigail Johnson says the company is mining cryptocurrencies

#199

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The tech isn't going to die, it's just not going to change the world in any sexy way. Maersk is using it for something as boring as secure claims for containers to fight corruption in shipping. In government we're looking into running things like the land ownership registry and other public records on the tech. Not because it's hip, but because it'll save employee resources when we have to perform less audits, and be…

Property title, availability of airspace, really any complex system that requires mutual cooperation (or at least awareness) could benefit from uniform distributed ledger technology.

can you link any property title stuff? do you mean commercial residential or both?

Re: Fidelity CEO Abigail Johnson says the company is mining cryptocurrencies

#200
post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait until you see the nomenclature used for Ethereum units: Wei, Kwei, Szabo, etc https://etherconverter.online Buterin couldn't possibly have made it more complicated.

It looks like standard SI prefixes to me, what's so complicated about that?

They don't use SI prefixes. They use wei, ada, babbage, shannon, szabo, finney, ether, and einstein. facepalm
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