71–80 of 83 posts
Just imagine what FB would know: when and where you were born; who you are related to; who you know; where you shop; what you buy; how much you paid and how much money you have got left. Basically, your whole credit history is up for grabs.
That's got to be the most lucrative data set ever.
Damn - too late again. Back to the day job ...
I'll be honest, I am a Bitcoin fan. But I realize there is a relatively large chance that it might just fail entirely (or only be used by criminals and just be regulated to death). Venture Capital investment in Bitcoin has been fairly massive - and from many top tier VCs e.g. a16z, USV & Accel (but notably not Sequoia nor Greylock). Some key investments: 75m for Coinbase, 20m for Xapo, 9m for Circle (still haven't la…
> Some key investments: 75m for Coinbase, 20m for Xapo, 9m for Circle (still haven't launched) and many smaller investments. That barely breaks a billion. It doesn't seem massive to me in relation to the rest of Silicon Valley. For comparison: Instagram.
Viewed in this manner, Bitcoin starts to make sense to me. When all you're doing for a transaction is USD->BTC->USD, it doesn't matter what the price or volatility of BTC is. You're buying $30 worth of BTC which the seller is going to almost immediately convert it back to USD. It's cheaper than credit cards for two reasons: one, the risk of loss in the event a vendor is compromised is limited to the amount of the transaction, and two, the blockchain makes it really easy to automate transaction auditing.
Ehrsam was also pretty adamant that Bitcoin isn't a way around existing laws. The first generation of Bitcoin firms were run by amateurs; the second gen (which he considered Coinbase a part of) are run by people who have spent their lives working in banking and securities. This means they will operate a lot more like banks, which includes complying with all the legal regulations as well as the operational processes like outside auditing and information security. This also means that governments will still be able to restrict the flow of Bitcoin: if China decides that BTC->CNY transactions are forbidden, no trustworthy Bitcoin exchange is going to process them. Any that do are likely to be flagged as money laundering operations by the US Govt which will make it very hard for them to do business with a legitimate bank.
Again, when you look at it like this, Bitcoin is a disruptive new technology -- but it's not revolutionary. As always, the guys making the big money in a gold rush aren't the gold miners, it's the guys selling the shovels...
I'll be honest, I am a Bitcoin fan. But I realize there is a relatively large chance that it might just fail entirely (or only be used by criminals and just be regulated to death). Venture Capital investment in Bitcoin has been fairly massive - and from many top tier VCs e.g. a16z, USV & Accel (but notably not Sequoia nor Greylock). Some key investments: 75m for Coinbase, 20m for Xapo, 9m for Circle (still haven't la…
The only failure scenario for Bitcoin that I can see is a technological one: if someone finds a way to break transaction integrity, that would be very bad. But the basic premise is sound, so even if Bitcoin falls in this manner, some other cryptographic value transfer system will continue to exist.
I was initially not a Bitcoin fan. But I saw Fred Ehrsam (one of the founders of Coinbase) speak at SXSW, and it's clear that he gets it: he said one of the biggest things harming perception of Bitcoin is that the media keeps calling it a "currency", which it clearly is not. He seems to view it as a better transaction process that's more efficient than credit cards (the justification being that a credit card transact…
This. Anarchists (crypto- and not) developed Bitcoin environment as a way to go around the laws, but now as it matures into a real tool, it's being taken over by people who are serious about making money. It's both a victory and a failure of Bitcoin - we have a potentially interesting new financial tool, but all the promises that "Central Banking / Feds can shove it" remain unfulfilled.
For instance, when I buy 1BTC at $600 they have ~4 days to get it to me. I assume that if they believe Bitcoin is trending down, they will wait to buy at $550 or lower and then give me the "cheaper" Bitcoin and take home the spread. I haven't heard any confirmation of this but I'd assume they are doing this. Does anyone know for sure?
Does Coinbase make money by speculating in the bitcoin purchase/sell interval? For instance, when I buy 1BTC at $600 they have ~4 days to get it to me. I assume that if they believe Bitcoin is trending down, they will wait to buy at $550 or lower and then give me the "cheaper" Bitcoin and take home the spread. I haven't heard any confirmation of this but I'd assume they are doing this. Does anyone know for sure?
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I've worked on a few large scale financial databases and none of the ones I've worked on use transactions (using Oracle). Most of them are insert only with bi-temporal data: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitemporal_Modeling
Do you have any more info on that technique? The wikipedia article is a little scarce.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Most people aren't going to want to hold their own keys as most people can't stop their computers from being constantly infected by malware. Just as people don't want to keep large amounts of cash in their safe, they will want someone else to take the responsibility of securing their coin. Pretty much only the tech savvy will care to even understand what a key is or care to hold their own. Bitcoin isn't a political m…
Bitcoin with central key escrow is completely and utterly pointless, unless the goal is to generate a lot of waste heat from servers. > Most people aren't going to want to hold their own keys as most people can't stop their computers from being constantly infected by malware. We have cheap, secure hardware crypto tokens that rely on two-factor auth. You don't need to keep millions of dollars on a Windows PC. > Just a…
You've confused Bitcoin for a political movement; for most, that's not what it is and never will be, it's simply a payment network for e-cash.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do you have any more info on that technique? The wikipedia article is a little scarce.
A simple entry into the field is to imagine that instead of storing a row in which you have a single balance, you would instead have an append-only table in which you store all transactions including their timestamp and auditing info. The balance would then be calculated as the sum of transactions, and you could modify the query to view a balance in the past by only including transactions before a certain point in ti…