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Kik, once valued at $1B, is to be closed

forbes.com

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Re: Kik, once valued at $1B, is to be closed

#191

Post by teekert »

chx wrote: post #78

Cryptocurrencies are scam. End. This is very simple. Yes, they are a new kind of scam, a good name suggested is Nakamoto Scheme. https://prestonbyrne.com/2017/12/08/bitcoin_ponzi/ Also notable: https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/2018/04/05/debunking-bu... which doesn't outright call it a scam but certainly points out > Git gives you pretty much everything offered by the business case for blockchains. The one thing…

For the first time man creates something digital that cannot be copied.

chx: Scam!

Re: Kik, once valued at $1B, is to be closed

#192

Post by Bantros »

michalu wrote: post #144
me551ah wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do Cryptocurrencies provide value and do something that country backed currencies can't? They do have their own advantages and disadvantages, but it purely boils down to how many people trade in it. Take gold for example, people believe that it has value and trade in it. The price of gold is decided on the basis of market forces of demand and supply. Similarly, a cryptocurrency's worth is decided by the demand for it…

It's funny to watch how these completely illogical arguments gain momentum in crypto community, I start to be suspicious that someone is pushing them on purpose to hype the herd. Gold has superior chemical and physical features, quantum computers are built from gold. One third of the demand comes from jewellery which helps inflate the price, but even without that you hold some of industrial value, just the price woul…

> When you have a humanitarian catastrophe or a conflict first thing enemy does is cut out the energy. Bitcoins are useless.

As are your debit and credit cards, Apple Pay, Google Pay etc.

Re: Kik, once valued at $1B, is to be closed

#193

Post by DagAgren »

michwill wrote: post #127
chx wrote: post #78

Cryptocurrencies are scam. End. This is very simple. Yes, they are a new kind of scam, a good name suggested is Nakamoto Scheme. https://prestonbyrne.com/2017/12/08/bitcoin_ponzi/ Also notable: https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/2018/04/05/debunking-bu... which doesn't outright call it a scam but certainly points out > Git gives you pretty much everything offered by the business case for blockchains. The one thing…

Sorry, but this looks like a completely uneducated opinion. There were many attempts to create virtual money which cannot be shit down, and all of them dated before Bitcoin failed due to government intervention. Bitcoin solved that, and the simplest solution was the wasteful proof of work. Of course, when someone is using the same principle for something centrally controlled, which can be done by a database, that is…

Sure, if you want to do that, Bitcoin is one of the very few working solutions that have been found.

But do you actually want to do that? Who are you providing a service for by doing that?

We know the answer: Scammers and criminals, by and large. Everyone else is better served by a centralised service.

Re: Kik, once valued at $1B, is to be closed

#194

Post by DagAgren »

Svoka wrote: post #125
jjeaff wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Properly implemented "Laundering" services for crypto currency can make follow-the-money effectively useless. The funds are transferred to a wallet, they are mixed with many other coins, and then they are paid out in different sized transactions to the recipient. Assuming you have a busy enough pool, it should be technically untraceable.

Honestly, it seems like you’re trying to make it sound like a device one would use exclusively for scamming.

Not exclusively - it is also used for extortion, laundering money, and paying for illegal goods and services.

Re: Kik, once valued at $1B, is to be closed

#195

Post by spurdoman77 »

heavenlyblue wrote: post #185
michwill wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, but this looks like a completely uneducated opinion. There were many attempts to create virtual money which cannot be shit down, and all of them dated before Bitcoin failed due to government intervention. Bitcoin solved that, and the simplest solution was the wasteful proof of work. Of course, when someone is using the same principle for something centrally controlled, which can be done by a database, that is…

You know, my first foray into the world of Big Corpo people was when I met this guy studying at . He was looking for ways to use blockchain to help regions with unstable currencies. Well, he was doing his Ph.D, actually on that topic. So he would approach people and suggest they all meet up and have this think-tank somewhere in North London. Now imagine you've got about 20-30 people sitting in the same room: and they…

Bitcoin didnt require initial investments of mining hardware, initially it was mined with normal computers. Mining hardware is more like a running cost that goes up with usage/value.

Re: Kik, once valued at $1B, is to be closed

#196

Post by me551ah »

michalu wrote: post #144
me551ah wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do Cryptocurrencies provide value and do something that country backed currencies can't? They do have their own advantages and disadvantages, but it purely boils down to how many people trade in it. Take gold for example, people believe that it has value and trade in it. The price of gold is decided on the basis of market forces of demand and supply. Similarly, a cryptocurrency's worth is decided by the demand for it…

It's funny to watch how these completely illogical arguments gain momentum in crypto community, I start to be suspicious that someone is pushing them on purpose to hype the herd. Gold has superior chemical and physical features, quantum computers are built from gold. One third of the demand comes from jewellery which helps inflate the price, but even without that you hold some of industrial value, just the price woul…

Crypto does have inherent value and that is the ledger. The ledger makes sure that the coins that are with you, are replicated on thousands of nodes across the world without a decentralized entity.

A dollar for example just represents itself. You can't easily find out how many dollars actually exist, have been traded or how many dollars will there be.

A crypto, on the other hand, is completely transparent. The ledger contains the history of all transactions which can be verified. Also cryptos are produced in a completely deterministic way.

Re: Kik, once valued at $1B, is to be closed

#197

Post by leereeves »

close04 wrote: post #167
miracle2k wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some people like Bitcoin and some people use it to pay for stuff, and they want to see more people like them, so they can transact in Bitcoin more. Some critics seem to like making frankly ill conceived semantic arguments about the academic definition of a currency (or on your case, appeals to authority), but it really has no relation to whether Bitcoin is going to succeed or not succeed.

> Some people like [cigarettes] and some people use it to pay for stuff, and they want to see more people like them, so they can transact in [cigarettes] more. Therefore cigarettes are currency. Liking something is not an argument. > frankly ill conceived semantic arguments about the academic definition of a currency My argument is ill conceived because it's "just" based on the academic ( legal ) definition of curren…

Cigarettes are currency, according to my economics professors.

Re: Kik, once valued at $1B, is to be closed

#198

Post by close04 »

leereeves wrote: post #197
close04 wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Some people like [cigarettes] and some people use it to pay for stuff, and they want to see more people like them, so they can transact in [cigarettes] more. Therefore cigarettes are currency. Liking something is not an argument. > frankly ill conceived semantic arguments about the academic definition of a currency My argument is ill conceived because it's "just" based on the academic ( legal ) definition of curren…

Cigarettes are currency, according to my economics professors.

Yes, a good example of prison currency. Another form of currency (in prison but also outside) is sex. And it perfectly fits GP’s “argument” that “some people like it, some people pay with it, some people want more” and all that.

We can either take the “everything is a currency” route but that gets us nowhere, or accept the official, legal, and recognized definition. The “ill conceived” argument based “only” on facts so to speak.

Re: Kik, once valued at $1B, is to be closed

#199

Post by Fnoord »

Lucadg wrote: post #182
davidgerard wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Safety deposit boxes turn out not to be secure or guaranteed. https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-07-22/don-t-...

It depends on the country but I agree. Being programmable money I expect better solutions to come in the future. This is a recent and interesting one https://blog.trezor.io/shamir-backup-the-revolution-of-priva...

> Based on a cryptographic algorithm created by Adi Shamir, publicly known as Shamir’s Secret Sharing, Shamir Backup is a revolution in how you use, store, and protect the backup of your private keys.

A "revolution". They just applied SSS. Hardly rocket science.

Re: Kik, once valued at $1B, is to be closed

#200

Post by DINKDINK »

hudon wrote: post #106
coralreef wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right. I'm going to challenge you to: - prevent or reverse any of my transactions - confiscate my bitcoin, or even find out how much I have You can't, and never will. Some cryptocurrencies are scams. But if you're saying all cryptocurrencies are scams, you're simply saying math and economics are a scam.

transactions are “reversed” every time a chain is abandoned. It happened in 2010 when Satoshi himself called to abandon a chain, again 2013 when Luke and Pieter called miners to abandon a chain, and probably many times since then to fix various bugs. It’s impossible to count how many of those abandoned transactions were successfully replayed on the new chain versus how many were spent elsewhere (ie reversed)

Chain reorgs and double spends are two different sets. IIRC the 2010 reorg didn't have any double spends

>It’s impossible to count how many of those abandoned transactions were successfully replayed on the new chain

To detect if transactions were double spent, you would need some sort of database. Like a data base with _really_ good integrity. Maybe with periodic and limited deltas. Increase the some of the integrity with decentralized time stamping, sleeping-beauty hashed chaining. hmmm I wonder if there is anything like that...

Cheekiness aside, it's possible a node could ascertain whether or not transactions were replayed and definitely not impossible. The steel-man reply is: node software doesn't have great resources to do it.

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