221–230 of 247 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Annnnd... if you have a structural problem which cannot be corrected via interpersonal, regulatory, or political action, then what do you do?
Quit and start over, or move. That's why people migrate between countries or quit jobs.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are ideas around trusted oracles and consensus recommendation ratings for oracles that aren't terrible and may work (no comment on scalability, of course).
Trusted is the opposite of trustless.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Actual court decision.[1] This is just a rejection of a preliminary injunction. The ICO sale hadn't started yet. The court indicated that the line set by the Howey test had not yet been crossed. The ICO issuer agreed to cancel the ICO and not try again without notifying the SEC first. So the judge ruled that there wasn't an imminent threat justifying an injunction. This is not "ICOs are legal, go go go!", despite hyp…
Yes, the Tweet storm I linked to said as much. The point is when tested by a court, one of the SEC's arguments was rejected. Yes the argument wasn't about the traditional token sale - it was the SEC trying to classify airdrops as a securities issuance - but it does show that the SEC's arguments are not law. Only courts decide what is law. The big ICO case [2] involved blatant fraud, and looked nothing like the tokens…
>>The ruling came in a criminal case against a man charged with promoting digital currencies backed by investments in real estate and diamonds that prosecutors said didn’t exist.
That's a traditional security, with the tokens representing physical assets. It is not like most token sales, which are pre-functional utility tokens, which do not purport to confer a legal claim to any asset.
Moreover, the individual selling these tokens was blatantly lying about the existence of the real estate and diamonds.
So your initial comment is wildly off the mark with respect to what has been "settled" with respect to token sales.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Quit and start over, or move. That's why people migrate between countries or quit jobs.
Ah, if only it were that simple.
If you're in a situation where cryptocurrency is the best solution for currency, then you're probably in a lawless wasteland with abjectly destructive governance systems.
Seems like in that circumstance moving is the right answer.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
A blockchain isn't optimal for anything. If it was there should be some evidence of it improving something in the real world, no? Something other than a cult of buzzwords and speculation.
It is optimal for situations where you don’t want to trust a central institution. An asset worth $70bil from zero in a decade (Bitcoin) should be considered a successful experiment even if it disappeared tomorrow. Pure computer science, math, and game theory created it, and it’s quite impressive.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is optimal for situations where you don’t want to trust a central institution. An asset worth $70bil from zero in a decade (Bitcoin) should be considered a successful experiment even if it disappeared tomorrow. Pure computer science, math, and game theory created it, and it’s quite impressive.
I’m not sure that the creation of an asset bubble is a good metric for success. How do you feel about pets.com and tulips?
If you look at Bitcoin and the Proof of Work mining algorithm that was created to solve its BFT problem, what you have is a globally dispersed group of participants driving the cost of SHA2 hashing to as close to zero as possible. Electricity combined with computers can be converted to Bitcoin, which has value because a group of people believe it has value. You are optimizing everyone to solve that problem, and people are responding naturally to economic incentives.
I believe other problems can be reduced to a Proof of Work distributed problem to drive the cost to zero. LivePeer ( https://livepeer.org/ ) is a recently launched protocol built on Ethereum to drive down the cost of transcoding live video. This is a computationally intensive process full of proprietary technology and patents that forces video streamers to become beholden to centralized third-parties such as YouTube, Twitch, etc. LivePeer solves this problem by incentivizing global participants to commit transcoding resources to an open network, ultimately driving the cost of this to zero. This will reduce censorship and costs.
Beyond computationally intensive work and protocols, I believe that smart contracts will open up a range on novel use cases. For starters, pure digital assets will become a way to fund development of videogames. Free to play games like League of Legends and Fortnite sell in-game assets, but these are not unique - they sell as many copies as people buy. While this works for big players as a business model, I believe new, novel games will come from making game assets provably unique.
These are just a few examples, but many very smart, non-crazy non-scammy people are working in this industry and creating new technologies. It's sad that the fraud has poisoned the conversation so much, especially on tech places like HN.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’m not sure that the creation of an asset bubble is a good metric for success. How do you feel about pets.com and tulips?
We are far beyond anyone reading this thread other than us, and I am happy to continue discussing because I hope I can convince you that novel technology is being created to solve real problems. It isn't the panacea that fraudsters have been pushing, but I believe interesting solutions and companies will come of this. If you look at Bitcoin and the Proof of Work mining algorithm that was created to solve its BFT prob…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
We are far beyond anyone reading this thread other than us, and I am happy to continue discussing because I hope I can convince you that novel technology is being created to solve real problems. It isn't the panacea that fraudsters have been pushing, but I believe interesting solutions and companies will come of this. If you look at Bitcoin and the Proof of Work mining algorithm that was created to solve its BFT prob…
I know people from Ethereum Foundation personally and it only strengthens my negative view of the space. You can believe whatever you want, but I'm interested in results and actually useful products. Currently there are zero. There are many who share your religious beliefs though.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"I'll give you a hint: it doesn't" It surprises me how much anger and claims of authority people that don't like blockchain show. Just be modest and open to potential uses of a technology. Are you a coder? Have you ever used Javascript? If yes then it's creator is a big proponent of blockchains. Take a moment to think about this. Numerous other examples too.
Its creator also opposes same sex marriage. Perhaps creating a programming language doesn't mean you're right in all other contexts.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What do you think is easier: making several companies run on their servers a federated databases or using a worldwide publicly available one?
What do you think is easier: convincing farms to send a cheap message to a federated database when they ship out products, or have them buy up insane quantities of computational power to compute crypto hashes, using insane amounts of power to do it? Blockchain is crazy expensive to run. Why would anyone pay for that when there's dirt cheap alternatives that are every bit as effective at solving the problem?