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Interestingly the economist misses the traditional definition of Fiat: a currency whose value is determined by the Fiat of a state. Whether or not Bitcoin exhibits similar trends as currency that isn't backed by the state is immaterial to the ethical appeal (to some) of a medium of exchange where participation is voluntary and consensual.
ICOs are the hyper speculative .com penny stocks of this particular economic cycle/bubble. A few may rise from the ashes of an eventual burst, and the general idea may be have some validity to it, but most cryptocurrencies are a sham and are going nowhere.
1. How are coins valued when the underlying company is building a product it will never be able to, or never intends to monetize (eg if Wikipedia had an ICO).
2. If another company acquires this browser company, what happens to the coins?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Dogecoin was created explicitly to have a low value suitable for micropayments & tipping. It hasn't really worked out much better for Dogecoin...interest in it seems to have waned a long time ago. My bet is that it hasn't caught on as a medium of exchange simply because that's not really a major pain point. Cryptocurrency's competition as payment isn't $USD; it's Visa, Mastercard, Discover, Stripe, Square, and other…
I think dogecoin failed to go anywhere at least partly because it was a literal memecoin. Certainly made it hard for me to take it seriously as a semi-layman at the time.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
that's funny, I don't remember consulting my government this morning when I paid for a cup of coffee with cash
You must live in: Alaska, Delaware, Montana, New Hampshire or Oregon. (Or be oblivious) States where the sale of a cup of coffee doesn't involve a tax.
But if you don't like even that much, then replace "cup of coffee" with "lemonade from a neighborhood lemonade stand".
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wonder if part of this is due to dust. My understanding is that at these prices you don't really want to split a coin for a $.25. As a result it's poor for micro payments and daily macro payments alike.
Dogecoin was created explicitly to have a low value suitable for micropayments & tipping. It hasn't really worked out much better for Dogecoin...interest in it seems to have waned a long time ago. My bet is that it hasn't caught on as a medium of exchange simply because that's not really a major pain point. Cryptocurrency's competition as payment isn't $USD; it's Visa, Mastercard, Discover, Stripe, Square, and other…
It died off because _some people_ tried to turn it into a real thing for micro transactions, etc.
How does Bitcoin work offline? Let's say the world goes to hell (assume internet has been taken offline) and we need to trade using a form of trusted currency. Just curious...
It doesn't work at all without the peer network. However, you might be able to construct an "IOU" of sorts by creating a signed transaction offline, to be fed to the network later. (I'm not 100% sure whether anti-replay features make this impractical.)
Unfortunately though, it's the network that verifies the absence of double spends, so there's no guarantee of uniqueness.
With the no internet, and limited interbank settlement, I would still bet on the value of crypto over the fiat inflation that would be used to facilitate credit-worthiness.
This isnt directly related to the article, but I have two questions about ICO coins I was hoping someone here could answer. I read that recently a group raised millions of dollars in less than a minute to fund the creation of a new web browser. 1. How are coins valued when the underlying company is building a product it will never be able to, or never intends to monetize (eg if Wikipedia had an ICO). 2. If another co…
If the company is acquired, a number of things could happen. It's important to note that for the most part, the company doesn't control the coins. They simply publish a contract that provides for the tokens to function, but normally the administrative capacities of such a contract are limited once the sale is over. When administrative capacities do exist, they are typically controlled by one or more people controlling a particular private key. The owner of that private key will have control of the contract, so in order for a company transfer to transfer control, that private key would have to also transfer. (they'd probably want to redeploy the contract under a different key anyways since there would be no guarantee the old owner didn't still have a copy of the old key.)
How does Bitcoin work offline? Let's say the world goes to hell (assume internet has been taken offline) and we need to trade using a form of trusted currency. Just curious...
It doesn't work at all without the peer network. However, you might be able to construct an "IOU" of sorts by creating a signed transaction offline, to be fed to the network later. (I'm not 100% sure whether anti-replay features make this impractical.)
And if you grant the holder of that IOU the sole right to print and distribute notes representing subdivisions of that debt, you’ll find yourself back at cash!
Interestingly the economist misses the traditional definition of Fiat: a currency whose value is determined by the Fiat of a state. Whether or not Bitcoin exhibits similar trends as currency that isn't backed by the state is immaterial to the ethical appeal (to some) of a medium of exchange where participation is voluntary and consensual.
"Code is governance" -- the article does support the idea of cryptocurrency as fiat money because the laws, in this case, are the code. The developers and miners, no matter their good intentions, do hold power over the currency that everyday investors do not have. No matter how egalitarian the distributed ledger set up looks on paper, we'd be remiss to think the power structures behind cryptocurrencies are so radical…