61–70 of 112 posts
What Fed and others in banking want is new forms of distributed accounting and settlement processes. You can apply the cryptographic technology for verifying and connecting database rows across institutions in a way that is both transparent, private and secure. If there is a public ledger online, it can be audited by anyone.
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.
If you'd add a reputable escrow service, dispute resolution system and fraud insurance on top of any cryptocurrency, these features will drive the cost up just as high or more.
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…
> What is a "blockchain"? I am always curious, blockchain was not defined in Nakamoto's work. So, where did the word actually originate from? And what did it meant for the word's inventor.
However the whitepaper does use the phrase "chain of blocks". https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf, page 7.
So probably the word "blockchain" came about because someone read or heard someone else say "chain of blocks" in the paper and they said "oh, so a blockchain", and thus the word was born.
In a nutshell, the St. Louis Fed thinks there's no good case for central banks to get involved in creating cryptocurrencies (though there is a case for fiat electronic money). ISTR that the Swiss National Bank expressed pretty-much the same opinion, too, not more than a few weeks ago.
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…
> What is a "blockchain"? I am always curious, blockchain was not defined in Nakamoto's work. So, where did the word actually originate from? And what did it meant for the word's inventor.
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…
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…
This really misses the picture of what's going on. Fedcoin could be coordinated by the federal but live on or be connected to a public smart contract platform where that, now digitised asset, could be used programmatically and interdependently with many other systems in a much more efficient and easy to assemble way than can now be done. This may not sound like a good idea to most on hn but it's at least new.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
We tried the "anyone can issue money" model in the 1800s, all it led to was bank runs and scams. The current system exists for a reason. If the blockchain crowd wants to relearn those lessons, they are welcome to, as long as they keep their shenanigans out of the real economy and away from people who don't want anything to do with the experiment.
> We tried the "anyone can issue money" model in the 1800s, all it led to was bank runs and scams. And now it's back with technology behind it. A lot of people call ICOs scams. What's the equivalent bank run? Perhaps a panic flee from fiat reserves?
Bitconnect is sure to be one of the first of many examples. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitconnect
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…
No. It's not like all the Chinese miners are controlled by the government. It's not some monolithic agency.
And then, there are many other coins.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It could be reasonable to somehow have control over things like the difficulty of mining or to be able to spawn new currency at a reduced cost via some sort of master certificate while still allowing transfer without communicating with a central coordinator system. A distributed system is a lot less likely to go down or become completely compromised.
The properties of "unlikely to go down" don't require a trustless blockchain; the attributes of being resistant to a node being compromised don't require trust beyond consensus. git is unlikely to go down and verifiable. Copies of a git repo verified by gpg signatures and repos that only accept commits that pass verification requires only as much distribution as running three instances. The fed can do all of this wit…