201–210 of 244 posts
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> The end user doesn't care what database you're using. They care about utility. I agree, but this isn't just about the end user. Many businesses incur costs to third parties that could be reduced or eliminated by trustless systems whose validity of data can be verified mathematically without an auditing team. The blockchain of today can't do that yet, just like the internet of 1985 didn't allow you to buy books, but…
"Trustless" systems require you to trust miners. I think miners are pretty much the last people you would want to trust.
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A derivative is a security with price that depends on the value of the underlying asset. Bitcoins are derivatives for the blocks in the blockchain. You find a new block and you have a coins. Bitcoin value depends on the value of the underlying, the blockchain network.
Bitcoins are asset, plain and simple. Fiat currencies are derivatives, gold is not. There are derivative instruments on top of gold that let you make money on its market trends, but saying gold is derivative is totally meaningless. The bitcoin protocol gives bitcoin asset value. Now the speculative price market is a derivative, but that's not bitcoin, that's an instrument for people to make money on top of bitcoin.
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It's just really hard for people to see beyond the present. Innovators in one cycle are often blind to the opportunities in the next. I see it in a couple of my successful friends that built their own companies on the web and mobile when it comes to crypto. I'm reminded of the quote about the radio: “The wireless music box has no imaginable commercial value. Who would pay for a message sent to no one in particular?”…
Here's another quote: "The CueCat isn't worth installing and using, even though it's available free of charge" —Walt Mossberg[1], WSJ Tech Reviewer, 2001 I think he nailed it. 1. https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB971305166620370724
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No, you didn't get that right at all. Doubt and skepticism are inherent parts of creating new ideas, and at no point did I express that the people who are skeptical are wrong. Rather, I am surprised to see comments on a technical website like Hacker News that are treating the long, drawn out development of cryptocurrencies and blockchains as something that is completely different than the long, drawn out development…
So your point is that some technologies take a lot longer to mature than average, for example {some examples}, and the delay itself should not be held against such late-blooming technologies. I'm onboard with that. Although your argument may benefit from better phrasing, because it actually does come across like that, which is a disservice to your advocacy effort. Back on topic, I don't see a lot of people in this th…
Just my two cents after spending months dealing with banks and PSPs.
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I liked your answer. But you didn't answer his/her other criticism: "...It's almost 10 years old and today it's actually less useful than it was a few years ago due to runaway fee growth. The feedback system works in the wrong direction. Did the Internet get less useful the more people used it?" The fact that network effects to some extent works in the wrong direction for this technology is concerning. What happens w…
Cryptocurrency isn't blockchains anymore than AOL is the Internet. Bitcoin may be getting less useful, showing that a proof of work system that incentivizes miners the way it does may be broken, but this doesn't fundamentally cease to justify the use of blockchains as a data structure. It just means we need to figure out a way to keep blockchain security while improving/replacing proof of work.
This is not a property these systems possess. The computational power of the system remains is bounded by the computational power of weakest full-node.
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You hit the nail on the head, the challenge with Blockchain and Bitcoin is that it did two things, which together were supposed to tackle the original problem, peer to peer monetary exchange without a trusted intermediary. So for that the blockchain provides the trust mechanism which is useful. However, the blockchain is just the channel, it needed a medium of exchange, you couldn't very well use USD because then you…
> Now absent speculation, the price of BitCoin would be reasonable, and determined by the effort of the miners, since they are exchanging their fiat currency for computers and energy, and that creates a stable layer for the price. You've got it backwards. The effort by the miners is determined by the price of Bitcoin, not viceversa. Also, I think requiring what you suggest is a fallacy, since I, as a user of some tec…
I'm simply saying that the value of Bitcoin has outpaced what is it's potential intrinsic value through the above mentioned exchange of value.
If you removed the limit on the number of bitcoins and rearranged mining so that difficulty would increase more in parallel with the increase in performance of computers, then you would end up with a stable currency that would have the potential to achieve the original vision of the white paper.
Is anyone else tired of hearing the word 'bubble' applied to everything? Whether we're talking about tech stocks, chicken futures, tulips, or Bitcoin, it's become a really tired and meaningless term. You can't know if an asset is in a 'bubble' until long after the bubble has burst. Bitcoin is far from having burst, so this article and all those that came before it offer nothing new or insightful. Please, let's move p…
There are plenty of things being called a bubble that aren't, but cryptocurrency is almost certainly one right now. The formal definition of a bubble is something that's priced far above its inherent value. Unless you want to argue that there's currently $500B+ of actual value in cryptocurrencies right now and not just speculation, it's absolutely a bubble. That said, bubbles don't always have to end in a burst. If r…
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I liked your answer. But you didn't answer his/her other criticism: "...It's almost 10 years old and today it's actually less useful than it was a few years ago due to runaway fee growth. The feedback system works in the wrong direction. Did the Internet get less useful the more people used it?" The fact that network effects to some extent works in the wrong direction for this technology is concerning. What happens w…
Cryptocurrency isn't blockchains anymore than AOL is the Internet. Bitcoin may be getting less useful, showing that a proof of work system that incentivizes miners the way it does may be broken, but this doesn't fundamentally cease to justify the use of blockchains as a data structure. It just means we need to figure out a way to keep blockchain security while improving/replacing proof of work.
Cryptocurrency is a vital component of the distributed blockchain architecture. It provides the decentralized economic layer, without which blockchains would be centralized by virtue of their dependence on a centralized payment processor.
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Many financial transactions take place between parties who don't necessarily trust that the other side isn't fudging their numbers in order to get a better deal for themselves or to conceal information. Auditing firms exist to pour through the financial books of both sides to say, with our due diligence, we've confirmed that the financial statements both parties are claiming are supported by evidence. This is a time…
I know you're no partial to this line of reasoning, but please humor me... Could we achieve the same end by creating a big Git repository under control of the SEC? Anyone can make a clone, SEC will approve pull requests as needed. Or would you argue that this effectively becomes a blockchain as soon as we use start using hashes? I think it's useful to have a paper-trail of hashed blocks/files, gives you a simple ment…
In the end, you're just moving the third party elsewhere, and you'd still need staff to verify that people are committing their finances regularly and aren't trying to sneak in retroactive changes in large commits. If someone ever decides to try to get away with rewriting their git history and arguing that the SEC accepted an erroneous pull request that contains the wrong history, that would need to be audited/litigated out to resolve whose tree was correct (just because the SEC owns the master repo doesn't necessarily mean that their custodians of it haven't rewritten history themselves). Also, the fact that the "authority" repo is centralized means you may have issues if for some reason it's inaccessible (these issues arise in reality when GitHub goes down).