171–180 of 337 posts
Ethereum isn't useful for smart contracts; they are too expensive to call methods on chain and EVM is too inflexible and bug prone. The only use for ethereum is shittokens, and you could practically coingen these for free, and trade forever. No load on the shared commons, isolate activity to the specific coin. The only advantage is the ECR20 standard that aids exchange integration. SV is all a blaze about Ethereum, b…
What other smart contract platforms are worth following?
a) Do "dapps" really to use their own tokens instead of USD or even ETH to function? b) How are closed ecosystems that utilize "utility tokens" benefitting customers? How are closed ecosystems better than open systems, open protocols?
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You’re seeing everything just fine. Imagine you’ve spent your whole life investing millions of dollars in entrepreneurs. Building models and testing hypotheses with no real agency: you can’t control what the CEO does or the product the engineering team builds or the way they market the product. Your job is to provide returns for your LPs. That’s it. Now imagine, instead of spending thousands of hours interacting with…
I don't disagree with anything you said. But, separately, if you asked me if I wanted to use something to store/transmit value that was only reliable 99.9999999% of the time, I would immediately say no. At Visa scale, that means 15 transactions a day are incorrect - not delayed, just straight up incorrect. Maybe that already happens and we just don't hear about it because they can fix it without any one noticing or i…
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Reading up on ChainLink: > Several data providers respond to this service agreement with a bid in the form of a data reply — when enough data providers have responded, the majority response is taken (or average depending on the request), outliers are removed, and data is fed into the contract. What's to stop me from setting up 10,000 different data providers that initially provide good data to get a good reputation s…
There's a penalty payment that each node puts up into escrow for each assignment of data, and if the data is not accurate in relation to all the other providers of that same data, the node will lose the payment. There will also likely be a small amount fo LINK required to start a node with enough reputation to gain assignments which would also increase the cost of a Sybil attack.
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Sure, but Lituania also didn't need to use the Blockchain for this use case.
> Lituania You didn't even read properly - we were talking Estonia. At the scale of a local health care system the blockchain is perhaps really nothing more than a fancy database, if at that scale it will stay energy efficient for a long while.
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it's a very noble approach, but the facts are not in your favour. The 'people' that keep bitcoin valuation high are: early adopters (including ones who lost access to their wallets), HODLers and speculators and perhaps a few casual drug buyers. As a mainstream currency, BTC is pretty useless at world scale.
You forgot a big one that’s not going away quickly: money launderers.
It's all the same thing every year on HN. People trying to find all sorts of excuses for Bitcoin existence - blockchains, smart contracts, ICOs - as long as they don't have to accept that Bitcoin's main purpose is and always was to have an alternative to the financial system, crippling regulations, government control and taxes. In other words, everything people hate about libertarians, they try to ignore in Bitcoin.…
>Bitcoin's main purpose is and always was to have an alternative to the financial system, crippling regulations, government control and taxes. Does bitcoin really do any of those things? Right now, btc core is not an alternative to cash- a problem that maybe will be fixed in time, but currently only seems to be getting worse. If bitcoin really did take off as a global currency, the IRS would audit unreported bitcoin…
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You’re seeing everything just fine. Imagine you’ve spent your whole life investing millions of dollars in entrepreneurs. Building models and testing hypotheses with no real agency: you can’t control what the CEO does or the product the engineering team builds or the way they market the product. Your job is to provide returns for your LPs. That’s it. Now imagine, instead of spending thousands of hours interacting with…
I don't disagree with anything you said. But, separately, if you asked me if I wanted to use something to store/transmit value that was only reliable 99.9999999% of the time, I would immediately say no. At Visa scale, that means 15 transactions a day are incorrect - not delayed, just straight up incorrect. Maybe that already happens and we just don't hear about it because they can fix it without any one noticing or i…
Manual input at restaurants alone should hit that threshold. As you correctly pointed out, reversing the transaction is very low friction, which is something I've not yet seen presented in any blockchain based solution.
Monegro believes that this paradigm shift affects the way that developers should think about their applications: “The combination of shared open data with an incentive system that prevents “winner-take-all” markets changes the game at the application layer and creates an entire new category of companies with fundamentally different business models at the protocol layer.” Ok, thin protocols + fat apps --> fat protocol…
Early blockchains like bitcoins might have this thin/fat protocol aspect, but this is much less true of newer blockchains like ethereum. Granted, with programming languages like Solidity we are still quite limited but there are some interesting developments ongoing, like possibly integrating the webassembly tech with some blockchains, to allow more flexibility on the application layer (see ewasm for ethereum). But ge…
> What is of interest to them is the fact that their data can become decentralized with the blockchain
I'm not really interested in putting my emails in a blockchain, or did you mean some kind of... different data?
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Personally I see a lot of different areas where the blockchain will be extremely useful. The reason I think that is very simple. The blockchain allows us to create scarcity in an otherwise abundant medium. This means that potentially (and yes it will take time) we will see be able to mimic the physical space and create items that are to some extent unique (even though the can be copied. The art market is based on exa…
But all your examples are possible (and have been successfully implemented) without a blockchain. So what does the chain add? Besides which, when is turning abundance into scarcity a good thing?