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Cryptocurrency company Ripple says SEC lawsuit is imminent

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Re: Cryptocurrency company Ripple says SEC lawsuit is imminent

#181

Post by arcticbull »

bt3 wrote: post #153
arcticbull wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Currency roughly speaking doesn't move across borders, correspondent banks in each country have a ledger, you send money by decrementing the ledger on the send side and incrementing it on the receiver side. Someone else does the opposite. The exchange rate is set such that the ledger balance tends around 0. No new currency needed.

I have no experience here, so I understand this in theory, but in practice, banks would somewhat indefinitely have some digital sum of a range of currencies in which they may not wish to have exposure to. How do you solve for that as a bank?

I suspect they directly trade the major currency pairs, and trade via USD for minor pairs.

Re: Cryptocurrency company Ripple says SEC lawsuit is imminent

#182

Post by loceng »

dmix wrote: post #158
loceng wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except you can, through effort and organization (none of this "trustless" mantra non-sense/propaganda), get in place a competent democratically elected government with integrity via accountability and oversight - perhaps even running for elected positions yourself if you're passionate and strong enough. Or you can ignore the nuances and complexes, say fuck it, and support a system that disables power that good organi…

Normal people don't run for political office. Not from any of my life experience.

Until there's a strong enough impetus and they start to learn the game to understand it: I'd considered Andrew Yang a normal person, who published a book called The War On Normal People before running for President this last election.

More people like him will come to light, especially once policy proposals he's made like Freedom Dividend/UBI, Ranked Choice Voting, Democracy Dollars, Journalism Dollars get implemented to break apart the two-party system.

Re: Cryptocurrency company Ripple says SEC lawsuit is imminent

#183

Post by loceng »

a1369209993 wrote: post #161
loceng wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except you can, through effort and organization (none of this "trustless" mantra non-sense/propaganda), get in place a competent democratically elected government with integrity via accountability and oversight - perhaps even running for elected positions yourself if you're passionate and strong enough. Or you can ignore the nuances and complexes, say fuck it, and support a system that disables power that good organi…

> you can, through effort and organization (none of this "trustless" mantra non-sense/propaganda), get in place a competent democratically elected government with integrity via accountability and oversight No, you can't; that's rather the problem.

You can. It's not a fixed state - where it is or isn't competent. It's complex, dynamic, with many moving parts - and it's evolving. You put a system in place and then you see how bad actors will take advantage of it, then you once you have enough of the population educated, understanding, pissed off - the impetus occurs - they will vote for change that adds policies (or undo bad policy most likely stemming from regulatory capture of industrial complexes) that will correct to prevent or limit potential harmful behaviour that will cascade from bad policy.

In my last comment I highlight the main policies necessary for a big shift to be able to occur:

"Until there's a strong enough impetus and they start to learn the game to understand it: I'd considered Andrew Yang a normal person, who published a book called The War On Normal People before running for President this last election.

More people like him will come to light, especially once policy proposals he's made like Freedom Dividend/UBI, Ranked Choice Voting, Democracy Dollars, Journalism Dollars get implemented to break apart the two-party system." - from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25509841

Re: Cryptocurrency company Ripple says SEC lawsuit is imminent

#184

Post by HexagonalKitten »

jl2718 wrote: post #180
HexagonalKitten wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Most ripple believers thought that central currency was basically antithetical, although one based on unskilled labor hours might be acceptable as fallback. This stuff always sounded like it came from people who've never hired. Unskilled labor is not all equal. > Satoshi’s concept was to use hashcash to both secure the ledger and issue currency. This was brilliant but antithetical to the no-currency concept, and re…

The unskilled labor concept was not often discussed in forums or in most of my interactions at Stanford, but when I went to Cal, I realized that the labor value theory foundations were a lot more important to the early supporters than I had thought. I learned about the origins of the movement from a UW student visiting Cal. Somebody may have given a talk there and it caught on. Smart contracts seemed to me to be anot…

> One of the biggest learnings was how much speculation would dominate over anything non-financial

Yup. And still does. There was a huge sea change circa 2013(?) when everything became about currency and speculation. Every idea had to pivot to being its own coin, or including some useless utility token (a bit later) because that was 99%+ of the value to investors.

> Is there any reason that Bitcoin doesn’t have Turing completeness, faster blocks, oracles, etc? Not really; but ...

It feels like the first implementation couldn't have gotten it right if it aimed for too much more than Satoshi did. But technically, yes, BTC is a plausible base for this as much as anything else.

> debate inside the smart contracts community about the halting problem and how it could be used to attack the network. This is probably practically solved with transaction costs alone, but I think it was a practical software engineering compromise do scripting without looping and backward jump instructions because they made the software much more complex and vulnerable to attack.

Unbounded loops are an issue, but functional constructs (foreach) have 99% of the power and little of the risk. Ideally we'd have Satoshi take three months now and make v2, which would be BTC in spirit but with the lessons of the last ten years.

> To go further, the gas price itself doesn’t solve the problem of computational complexity because only the miner that wins the block actually gets the reward, while all others downstream are expected to verify it, but they have no incentive to do so, and frankly, today, most don’t.

This seems like where we need a mechanism that allows a script to be audit-executed, and if its outputs don't match expectations a deposit can be claimed by the auditor and the script will be marked as unreliable. If the precondition of the code is that it returns the correct public key, make sure that key works. If it doesn't you can claim the QA/Security prize - which can be set at whatever amount the script author wants depending on their belief in their code.

> Most of the early eth discussions I was involved with implied doing this in snarks or some other provable computation in the initial discussions, but that never made it into eth. So no; that problem was never solved, although we are getting closer.

Is there a specific blocker for this or just that the complexity is 1000x what is currently supported?

Re: Cryptocurrency company Ripple says SEC lawsuit is imminent

#185

Post by zapdrive »

ric2b wrote: post #148
zapdrive wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bitcoin core's lightning should be the next on the chopping block of SEC.

The lightning network is a decentralized protocol for transferring BTC, it's not even remotely comparable.

You forgot the /s

Re: Cryptocurrency company Ripple says SEC lawsuit is imminent

#186

Post by garmaine »

hardwaresofton wrote: post #175
garmaine wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no middle man facilitating ripple. (Well, ideally. RipplePay was centralized. But it didn’t need to be.) Also, hawala is legal in most jurisdictions I believe.

Thanks, I think this might be the big differentiator -- the existence of middlemen is probably the large difference here, but it feels like at some point you're definitely going to need someone to keep track of value across IOUs somehow and at the very least who is trust worthy.

Well to be accurate there are middlemen in most ripple transactions, but not a middleman of the traditional sense. They're not pure facilitators, but rather active participants in the transaction. I'm not a lawyer, but I understand that by some interpretations this makes a difference in the regulation.

Re: Cryptocurrency company Ripple says SEC lawsuit is imminent

#187

Post by jl2718 »

HexagonalKitten wrote: post #184
jl2718 wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The unskilled labor concept was not often discussed in forums or in most of my interactions at Stanford, but when I went to Cal, I realized that the labor value theory foundations were a lot more important to the early supporters than I had thought. I learned about the origins of the movement from a UW student visiting Cal. Somebody may have given a talk there and it caught on. Smart contracts seemed to me to be anot…

> One of the biggest learnings was how much speculation would dominate over anything non-financial Yup. And still does. There was a huge sea change circa 2013(?) when everything became about currency and speculation. Every idea had to pivot to being its own coin, or including some useless utility token (a bit later) because that was 99%+ of the value to investors. > Is there any reason that Bitcoin doesn’t have Turin…

At that time the ZeroCoin protocol was known, but an example was only shown for simple transactions, and anything else would have been a lot more complex, and nobody who claimed to understand the snark construction at that level was willing to do it. Gavin was just cranking it out as an op code state machine because he knew he could do that himself. Vitalik would engage with all the big crazy ideas in the room, bringing as much as possible into the idea that was ethereum, and Joe was kind of like the interface between selling the dream and delivery on what they knew they could do. I realized much later that ethereum needed all three personalities in separation to succeed with the crypto community, because they were three different types of promises, not all fully congruent, but the big unifying vision was in the eye of the beholder, a belief that it would all bend eventually toward their personal vision: a utopian egalitarianism for some, and vast plutocratic wealth for others, a gpu mining business for some and environmentally friendly staking for others, etc etc.

Re: Cryptocurrency company Ripple says SEC lawsuit is imminent

#188

Post by texaspro »

chollida1 wrote: post #95

We may see a pull back in a few crypto currencies soon. ETHE the grayscale Ethereum trust has skyrocketed lately and has about 285 Million shares outstanding. On January4th an additional 1.05 Billion shares come free trading as their 6 month lockup expires. Oh and its currently trading at a 200+% to its net asset value. Its conceivable Ethereum itself could double and ETHE could still drop 50%. Fun times!!

This was 100% spot on, btw.

Re: Cryptocurrency company Ripple says SEC lawsuit is imminent

#189

Post by texaspro »

chollida1 wrote: post #95

We may see a pull back in a few crypto currencies soon. ETHE the grayscale Ethereum trust has skyrocketed lately and has about 285 Million shares outstanding. On January4th an additional 1.05 Billion shares come free trading as their 6 month lockup expires. Oh and its currently trading at a 200+% to its net asset value. Its conceivable Ethereum itself could double and ETHE could still drop 50%. Fun times!!

Any way to know what the cost basis per share was for those initial investors? I assume we'll see more price drop, unless their basis is higher than the current price (doubtful).
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