191–200 of 278 posts
I perhaps cynically believe that is what has kept, keeps and will keep cryptocurrency going.
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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…
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Check out open bazaar. It is a decentralized p2p market place similar to ebay. Even has a decentralized escrow system with moderators that get paid to resolve disputes. Best part of it is that there are no fees at all to buy/sell stuff other than the cryptocurrency transfer fees. You also pay a fee if there is an issue with the product you bought/sold etc. Not much people using it though. Seems like best selling item…
> Seems like best selling items are gift cards. So either this is a way for crypto to be "used" for purchases at popular stores, or it's being used for money laundering. (those gift cards are easily sold on eBay and other marketplaces for fiat; this is how you'd take payment in mostly untraceable crypto and cash out without having to subject yourself to exchange KYC/AML)
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Seriously. The risk adjusted return on whatever that crazy contraption is is almost certainly negative, and probably incalculably so. The idea that any sane financial instrument could increase its return by two points by the holders of it voting to do so is... I haven't the words.
> whatever that crazy contraption is The people who built "that crazy contraption" are pioneers in an industry that is going to help lift hundreds of millions out of poverty via cheap, non-predatory financial services and create trillions in wealth by further unifying the global market. I am somebody who spends hundreds of hours per year reading about Ethereum and blockchain. I could stop doing this whenever I want,…
First of all, without real-world, not imaginary adoption the sentences like "lift hundreds of millions out of poverty via cheap, non-predatory financial services" are nothing but literally empty memes.
Second, the projects like https://iohk.io/ are way superior than current Ethereum in any dimension except that, and this is what makes it still alive, Ethereum is here for many year.
Other than that, Ethereum is an amateur hobby project, badly designed by an uneducated amateurs, badly implemented by inexperienced amateurs, and has been obsoleted by literally tens of world-class teams.
That iohk folks, for example, has been smart enough to employ (as research fellows) world's top experts in relevant fields who have produced world-class solutions way above any amateur crap currently in use.
Even most of HN alumni barely understand what does it mean to have an executable specifications in Haskell (guaranteed lack of contradictions and guaranteed correctness of implementation) and verified by a proof-checker on-chain language (guaranteed soundness of the other-peoples's code)
Nevertheless, it seems that there is literally no demand for adoption of these already up and running world-class top-tier solutions (by iohk) given that there is literally nothing better, nothing even close. Why? Because, it seems, that no one is interested in anything but speculations and memes.
You literally have no idea, my friend.
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It's complicated, and I'm not sold on the Lightning Network as the future, but > Which can be be reneged on if one party is malicious, meaning they'll only occur between trusted parties? This is not correct. My understanding is essentially each party is tying up Bitcoin as being between them on the blockchain, then trading cryptographically verifiable assertions of each other off-chain about what the latest status of…
Ever meet someone with a startup idea that is really an insanely complicated way of achieving something people already can do? It's like, you want to tell them "people will never do steps m,n,o,p,q,r,s and t because that's not how people think, and they have other simpler ways to get what they want. That's the Lightning Network.
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> A 6% interest rate on USD would be a red flag, but Dai isn't USD. Is this written in their documentation? Cos this is where the smart money gets out. The DAI competes against the USD. So all their transactions have to be in USD. No vendor for your products is accepting these magical tokens. No one in the economy except vanishingly small fractions accept digital tokens for trade. Also, this is how the economy functi…
> No vendor for your products is accepting these magical tokens. No one in the economy except vanishingly small fractions accept digital tokens for trade. MakerDAO has a list of vendors who accept Dai today [1]. The list also contains a number of payment processors that enable businesses to accept Dai. It's true that it's not widely used now, but every product has to start somewhere. I don't think I'm going to be get…
With that in mind, accepting cryptocurrencies is just a technicality and doesn't reflect any acceptance of it as a real currency.
Are there any vendors who actually price their products in a cryptocurrency?
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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…
I don't think Satoshi's opinion would be any different now. Decentralization as a primary goal and maximizing it at all costs is a narrative that grew after he left. It was originally a means to an end and things just needed to be decentralized enough to be resilient. Relevant Satoshi quote: The current system where every user is a network node is not the intended configuration for large scale. That would be like eve…
The client nodes have to validate in addition to only doing transactions. Satoshi doesn't say that in his comment. But the faster the block size growth, the faster it gets to "every Usenet user runs their own NNTP server", and the fewer and fewer run full validating nodes.
His comment is self-contradictory.
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I should've phrased that better. What I meant was to assume consumer affordable storage space will increase in size exponentially i.e. if we pay $0.01 / GB today, we should be paying fractions of that fraction in a year (because obviously "exponential" is loose term here). > (ignoring things like High Frequency Trading) HFT is not a blockchain transaction. They are off blockchain transactions entirely because they tr…
> The point of bitcoin is that everyone should have a copy of every transaction (excluding lightning network transactions). Is that the point of bitcoin? Satoshi said: > Long before the network gets anywhere near as large as that, it would be safe for users to use Simplified Payment Verification (section 8) to check for double spending, which only requires having the chain of block headers, or about 12KB per day. Onl…
And it needs 3TB?? Cmon, that's not lot of gain for a lot of loss of control by the average.
How do you fix their No. 1 problem: scalability? The blockchain updating, and certainly mining, are inherently slow.
Those are two different problems: scalability and finality. Obviously every transaction can not be processed and stored by everyone. That much is clear even to casual observers. There has been two or three main ways people have tried to achieve this during the past decade. The obvious thing to try would be to shard the blockchain like you would a database. This turns out to be hard to do in a trustless way since shar…
Most mobile wallets are light wallets, that query servers for the information on demand. It works great, but you have the risk of the server lying to you.
So the next level up is SPV wallets, which verify that transactions are included in blocks and that the proof-of-work is valid. So the cheat them you need to reproduce POW, which is very expensive, and also very secure.
This notion that everyone needs to run a full node is simply false. SPV security, and even light wallets security, is enough for almost everyone. Exchanges, payment processors and the paranoid few can still run full nodes.