101–110 of 121 posts
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In the case of Argentina, in most cases people have turned to the much safer USD.
Only when and where they've been allowed to.
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but most national currencies have long since abandoned of the idea of being backed by physical resources, and have shifted towards promises, belief, and trust. are you saying that de-centralization introduces unique aspects that make physical backing a necessity?
Exactly. State currencies have their issues, but they do at least accept that a currency built only on faith and trust must be centralized. I am proposing that making a currency decentralized creates certain limitations. Without a central authority its extremely unlikely that a monetary system built on faith will last long. For bitcoin the claim is that the network is what you must have faith in, not a central author…
On the plus side, the protocol effectively has a built-in bug bounty program! :-D
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Most likely multiple anonymous wallets of different cryptos. The real question is whether anyone else has access to them... if yes I expect there to be nothing left.
I think his wife is holding everything in Dubai.
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Yes, global banks also fall under US control if they want to transact with anything in the US financial system. Less so if they don’t have American customers, but they still do have to follow American laws. For example several very old Swiss banks have been shut down by US regulators because they were doing business in the US with US citizens and their secrecy was being used to break US law by Americans.
Do you have a source for that? It sounds interesting and I want to learn more, as I was not aware of anything like this happening.
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I’m just curious - if you were to try making a decentralized currency as a fun project, what mechanism would you use instead? I’m someone who doesn’t really use it, but was fascinated with it before “blockchain” became a buzzword. edit: proof-of-work. I have been out of the loop for years :) My next question is are there downsides to proof-of-stake, and why has bitcoin not moved towards it?
I would change the emission so as to deter speculation and instead make it fair across generations: fix the block reward. I would make it as simple as possible so as to better stand the test of time.
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Yes, global banks also fall under US control if they want to transact with anything in the US financial system. Less so if they don’t have American customers, but they still do have to follow American laws. For example several very old Swiss banks have been shut down by US regulators because they were doing business in the US with US citizens and their secrecy was being used to break US law by Americans.
The decrease in the number of Swiss banks prior to the UBS-Credit Suisse merger was largely a product of Swiss bank consolidation in the 1990s, not the US shutting them down. UBS and Swiss Bank Corporation were the first and third largest Swiss banks when they merged in 1998. Credit Suisse was the second largest Swiss Bank when they acquired Switzerland's then fourth largest bank, Volksbank in 1993 and they had also…
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I’m just curious - if you were to try making a decentralized currency as a fun project, what mechanism would you use instead? I’m someone who doesn’t really use it, but was fascinated with it before “blockchain” became a buzzword. edit: proof-of-work. I have been out of the loop for years :) My next question is are there downsides to proof-of-stake, and why has bitcoin not moved towards it?
Proof of stake is no different than most traditional governance structures such as corporations in that it relies on a committee with an honest majority to keep the system secure. Validators are supposed to act like some kind of completely neutral, decentralized system, but they are not. For example, the fundamental principle of PoS is slashing for equivocation: when validators present two alternate versions of histo…
As someone coming from the PoW worlds of Bitcoin and Monero there has always been something about PoS that gave me an ick, but I could never quite place my finger on it. Especially when Ethereum clearly seems to have PoS working well in practice. I’ve always had a suspicion that Ethereum could have never gotten off the ground, at least to the success level it currently has, if it had been PoS initially.
The mechanics of slashing not working are interesting. Do we know of any abuse attempts by validators and have we seen any validators get slashed yet?
Your point about PoS not being truly permissionless is a big one for me. Aside from it being fundamentally opposed to the core promises of cryptocurrencies, what’s to stop TPTB from slowly accumulating enough of a stake and then bam, we’re back to the legacy permissioned finance ecosystem but with MUCH more fine-grained tracking and telemetry. That seems like an extremely pernicious attack.
The point about trust is another big one. Cryptocurrencies are meant to be trustless. That means a user doesn’t need to trust anyone else as they can fully validate their view of the world for themselves. Of course they may trust other participants for efficiency, but they don’t need to. And caveat emptor, as with all distributed systems you must assume (trust) that you are not currency inside a partitioned network, since AFAIK there is no way a system can internally verify that it is not.
How much these things matter in practice only time will tell. Ethereum appears to be working well at the moment and just keeps chugging along.
I’d like to see more work put into finding ways to utilize the work from PoW. For example I have an idea to use Monero’s CPU-favoring PoW for PoW based DDoS protection as seen in Tor [0]. When a user accesses a website they are given a PoW challenge to complete. This challenge is actually for a share of mining rewards as in P2Pool. The mining reward share would go to the website operator. This would harmoniously improve several things about the web. First, it would help protect websites against layer-7 DDoS attacks. Second, this L7 DDoS protection reduces the webs dependence on companies such as Cloudflare, the internets biggest man-in-the-middle. Third, it provides a way to pay website owners costing the users a small amount of their computers time and energy in much the same way as ads do currently. Fourth, it reduces the webs dependence on advertising as the way to fund your website. Fifth and finally, it helps secure the web-native currency in which website operators would be paid and which others can use for whatever they want.
I think such a solution would be truly beautiful.
0: https://blog.torproject.org/introducing-proof-of-work-defens...