Former top official says Fed should ‘Maybe’ create ‘FedCoin’ to rival Bitcoin

Post by i386 » Sat, May 05, 2018, 6:53 AM UTC

aserafini wrote: post #39

alex_young wrote: post #16

How about fedDigitalCash? It's crazy that I pay a few percent of every transaction to visa for no reason every time I buy anything in 2018

Yes, paying a few % on every transaction to move kilobytes of information over a network is absurd. The true cost is less than pennies but the EMV cartel led by VISA has successfully kept the price many orders of magnitude higher, employing anti-competitive tricks like: hiding the cost to consumers by contracually preventing retailers from increasing prices for VISA payments.

Post by therein » Sat, May 05, 2018, 6:57 AM UTC

FreakLegion wrote: post #30

marknadal wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is already a word for what you are talking about, and you used it: Consensus. So I counter your argument. It is useless to call "Blockchain" something that must necessarily have consensus. Or else we should just call it a consensus mechanism, not a blockchain. So instead, I propose the following: A blockchain, is a cryptographically signed linked list. Note, things like "a distributed ledger" aren't included in…

> A blockchain, is a cryptographically signed linked list. I've always assumed this definition by analogy with Cipher Block Chaining ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Block_cipher_mode_of_operation... ), but of course where a word starts out and where it ends up can be two very different things.

Post by masterbit » Sat, May 05, 2018, 7:00 AM UTC

Jasper_ wrote: post #36

dnomad wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would say this is a rather limited, technical understanding of a blockchain. The three most interesting aspects of a blockchain are (1) the state of blockchain is visible to all participants (2) the rules (the code) for changing the state is visible to all participants and (3) there is some mechanism to detect and punish rule breakers and aggressors who try to deform the state. Look at it this way and indeed a bloc…

What? There is no mechanism to "detect and punish rule-breakers" in either Ethereum or Bitcoin. Bitcoin's only mechanism is to push global human-readable alerts, or to pressure rule-breakers to stop through a blog post, as in the case of SPV mining: https://bitcoin.org/en/alert/2015-07-04-spv-mining . If you define "rule-breaker" as "generates invalid blocks", then the only punishment rule-breakers receive is that...…

Post by thisisit » Sat, May 05, 2018, 7:03 AM UTC

geofft wrote: post #19

What is a "blockchain"? To me, a blockchain is a way of solving double-spend problems in a Merkle tree maintained by open distributed consensus, by using some scheme to resist Sybil attacks. The scheme is not necessarily proof-of-work, but the fact that there's a double-spend problem and you're solving it is key to the idea. If you don't have a double-spend problem because all your transactions commute (e.g., Certifi…

Post by [deleted] » Sat, May 05, 2018, 7:08 AM UTC

geofft wrote: post #19

What is a "blockchain"? To me, a blockchain is a way of solving double-spend problems in a Merkle tree maintained by open distributed consensus, by using some scheme to resist Sybil attacks. The scheme is not necessarily proof-of-work, but the fact that there's a double-spend problem and you're solving it is key to the idea. If you don't have a double-spend problem because all your transactions commute (e.g., Certifi…