181–190 of 278 posts
The trouble with this article is that the author doesn't seem to know what Bitcoin is for. Notice the vague treatment of actual cryptocurrency applications. There are lots of predictions about startup activity, "flippenings" and venture capital, but little about the goods and services customers will actually be buying, or what specifically startups will be building. It's this kind of thinking that leads people into t…
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I find it hilarious you think Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong doesn't "know what Bitcoin is for." Maybe you don't know what it is for. People that are sane like Mr. Armstrong and Satoshi Nakamoto intended it to be used as a currency. If Satoshi is still alive I'm sure he was quite disappointed when Bitcoin decided to not scale past its blistering 7 transactions per second. "Bitcoin can already scale much larger than tha…
It doesn't matter what Satoshi said five years ago, it matters what he would say now, given what we've learned about Bitcoin since. His old opinions are less and less informed each year. Increasing block size utilization has series tradeoffs for decentralization, privacy and reliability. Each year we learn and understand those tradeoffs better. Pro block-size increase people never seem to directly address them though…
The current system where every user is a network node is not the intended configuration for large scale. That would be like every Usenet user runs their own NNTP server. The design supports letting users just be users. The more burden it is to run a node, the fewer nodes there will be. Those few nodes will be big server farms. The rest will be client nodes that only do transactions and don't generate. https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=532.msg6306#msg6306
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No neither of those are it, I'm familiar with those. I believe this would still be the same old Bitcoin, but there will clients that use these proofs to run a lightweight full node without relying on external sources or resorting to a lite wallet model.
Sounds interesting -- if you remember the details pls post.
This space is difficult, after the last years there's some stigma and trust-levels towards and within the crypto-community are super low (similar to the porn space) and I decided for myself, this sector is over. Main reason is: distributed DBs are hard, publicly distributed DBs are even harder, there are so little use cases that justify the effort involved (except currency & fund raising).
Maybe I am wrong.
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> Dilution / inflation is a feature not a bug. This is not true. We have simply adopted a system where it is a feature. We did not have steady enforced inflation until the 1950s. There are entire schools of economics that believe the concept of controlled inflation should be relegated to the past, and replaced with market ruled inflation / deflation. I'm not saying I understand how such a fictional world will work (a…
Inflation is an emergent property of money. It isn't set or enforced it just naturally happens because of money. Monetary policy can be set to try to corral it to certain ranges based on economic beliefs about what rate of inflation implies in terms of growth and risk. 2008 happened because of bad debt. That the bad debt was cheap debt certainly poured fuel on the fire, yet the fundamental issue was deregulation and…
I just wanted to write 'hey, could anyone give a brief overview/current status of the crypto space' but then I realized once again that I might get answers influenced by personal investments (I've got still quite some significant portfolio). This space is difficult, after the last years there's some stigma and trust-levels towards and within the crypto-community are super low (similar to the porn space) and I decided…
“Privacy” seems to be used as a buzz word here. I can assume but no concrete idea what the author means by blockchain with built in privacy features
https://whycryptocurrencies.com/challenges.html#privacy-and-...
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Well said. pegged decentralized synthetic digital bearer assets. That's a mouthful. Each word has a purpose and together they describe a hugely innovative and valuable technology. It is my belief that there are very, very few people who have an understanding of how important this innovation is. And too few people understand the importance of the more simple digital bearer asset, of which bitcoin is the prime example.…
This is exactly what I'm talking about, though. Bearer bonds have been illegal to issue in the US for the last forty years precisely because their principle advantage over registered bonds is that they make it easier to break the law. I'm not saying I can't see the utility of Bitcoin or blockchains in general for criminals. That much is plain. Speculators as well. The question is whether there is any utility for anyo…
We are seeing a flourishing system of financial experiments being built as truly anything goes in this new digital worldwide ecosystem. Not all of the experiments will work but at least they will be tried and the market will decide whether or not they are useful and valuable to this digital society.
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Why would someone agree to take out a loan with a 6% interest rate when the fed funds rate (not incl spread for various retail products etc) is 400+ bps lower. Even with the spread you are going to be paying less than that for a regular margin loan for trading, which is what I assume these loans are used for.
Most people? Personal loan rates are closer to 7-8% on average I think. The fed funds rate is the very basic rate of economic activity. I mean, you obviously included the caveat about the spreads for retail products. What did you think those spreads looked like?
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Paying 6%, or even 4%, on a savings account is a MASSIVE red flag to anyone with a bit of financial sense.
> Paying 6%, or even 4%, on a savings account is a MASSIVE red flag to anyone with a bit of financial sense. Not necessarily. Our equivalent to a savings account (caderneta de poupança) had a return above 6% per year until a couple of years ago (it's down to slightly above 4% per year now). It's very easy to beat that (for instance, the 5-year prefixed federal government bond has a return of 6,39% per year at this mo…