261–270 of 337 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
How so? Can't you just do the same thing staking Ether instead of yet another ERC20 token?
Yes agreed, in several cases this summer I thought I was doing well with ICOs until I did the math and realized I would have done at least as well by just holding the ETH.
Meanwhile I use it regularly to do business transactions from the command line and shell scripts, which appeals to me greatly as a hacker who does business.
Open source finance! It's the future, guys.
Sorry about the speculative bubble. It's not really my fault though. Traders and investors are a bit crazy.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> These contracts say - essentially - that they will operate in good faith on the chain. (If they did not, they could be sued in the usual way). So what does the blockchain add? Why can't this be a database set up by the consortium?
(I'm explaining the dream here. If I knew what I was talking about, I would have done it.) If the blockchain community gets the contract/language issues sorted out, a small dev team could knock out a first-stage system like the fisheries system in three months and in two layers of technology (contracts, oracles). It would be trivial to operate and resilient to server failure (less-so the oracles). Ten years later, it…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree. "Bitcoin as anarcho-capitalist proof of concept" does seem to be the correct framework for understanding why it exists, why it works the way it does, and what one might find valuable about it. On that front it's been at least a partial success. I can't buy a cup of coffee with Bitcoin, and I doubt I ever will, but the fact that it works at all is a lot more than I suspected we would see at this point. It's d…
Tracking ownership of some intangible set of rights is actually basically the one thing that BTC/ETH-esque tech is really useful for, so the Kodak thing is far from the craziest coin announced. A sane thing to do would be to piggyback on one the existing blockhains and their pre-existing hashing power. In this scenario, Kodak would create some kind colored-coin or side chain representing ownership of certain photogra…
That's what they're doing. They're creating an Ethereum-based ERC20 token and smart contract platform: https://www.bitsonline.com/introducing-kodakcoin-kodak/
People are so upset about blockchain being useless. Meanwhile I use it regularly to do business transactions from the command line and shell scripts, which appeals to me greatly as a hacker who does business. Open source finance! It's the future, guys. Sorry about the speculative bubble. It's not really my fault though. Traders and investors are a bit crazy.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes agreed, in several cases this summer I thought I was doing well with ICOs until I did the math and realized I would have done at least as well by just holding the ETH.
And this here is why we’re in a bubble.
But I do agree we're in a bubble.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> A blockchain ensures that some sequence of agreements was made in a way that everyone can trust. [...] The rest is fairy dust and noise. Amen. "Blockchain" is today's fad just like the "nanotech" mania of yesteryear. That doesn't mean there aren't advances and opportunities, but it feels like 90% of the people promoting it can't even give a high-level explanation of why it's a good fit for their use-case. > For exa…
A friend of mine told a great story about how some Koop aid drinkers were pitching blockchain internally for internal chargeback for services. So you’d use your corpcoin to rent cubes and get pens from the facilities folks, and trade coin to get servers, etc. the idea had traction until the accountants revolted.
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…
Before the central banking era, the US banking system was made more fragile than it would have been under a free market by 1. Civil War era banking regulations that required banks to hold US bonds as reserves and 2. laws against interstate branching.
The former resulted in an unstable centralized money supply that fluctuated with the volume of outstanding US bonds and the latter prevented more diversified banks from emerging that could better weather localised shocks. Canada had neither of these mandates and consequently had a far more stable banking system.
There were proposals before the Fed was created to make the US financial sector more like Canada's, but the banking cartelists won the argument, and the Federal Reserve mandates were passed to cartelize the banking sector under a centralized hierarchy.
Also keep in mind that macroeconomic theory is just theory. It cannot be scientifically proven correct due to the complexity of the factors involved. Also keep in mind that there is an enormous financial incentive to popularize the idea that centralized control over the money supply is economically beneficial, and Economics is not immune to undue influence. Consider that the Fed alone employs thousands of economists, and consider the institutional biases the Fed and its shareholders likely have.
Even with all these forces at play, there's no macroeconomic consensus around your belief that free market banking is less effective than central banking.
A couple of good talks by George Selgin on pre-Fed era and the 100 year performance record of the Fed:
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…
I honestly feel like the terms decentralized and distributed are often used as synonyms when people talk about blockchain, even though they mean very different things. I get that a blockchain is distributed, but how is it decentralized? Aren’t you just replacing a big database in a data center with a big database replicated to many computers?