Scam after scam, that's all blockchain is. Just another way to fleece the average consumer. There has not been a single valuable use, a single product, that actually improves anyone's day / process / life / anything. I am very open to changing my stance if someone presents evidence to the contrary.
Monero. It’s provided a private money for the internet. That helps people. It’s valuable. A permissionless, censorshipless decentralised private money.
Are there any other significant untraceable cryptos other than Monero and Zcash(using privacy fetures)?
This is a really good read. More of this and less of Elon's chatter needed!
I was trying to summarize, for an employee who got caught in “Elon Musk shouldn’t have manipulated the BTC” (!) (obviously the employee lost 25% of his savings), I was trying to summarize the list of dangers of having savings in BTC. - Laws of any big country could change and trigger the sale for a lot of sellers of a country, - Especially given BTC is used by Iran to bypass petrol restrictions, used by ransomware an…
The first part of point #2 is interesting because it's a blessing or a curse depending on which side of the hegemony you're on. Hypothetically speaking, if the Soviet Union were the current dominant superpower, or if China were the dominant superpower 15 years from now, and the US were under sanctions, wouldn't point 2 be a blessing? Being able to circumvent the wishes of the superpower du jour, for better or worse, does give an inherent value to the network regardless of whether the energy used is green or not.
So many reputations and projects in blockchain rest on this flawed idea that users need to run nodes. Users do nothing to extend the chain! If a group of miners wants to change the protocol, it takes another group of miners to counter it. And there always will be another group, because miners compete. From the bitcoin whitepaper: "He ought to find it more profitable to play by the rules". And let's get serious: users…
> Then they can choose which fork to buy or sell. Funny how this is now the only activity for this: buy and sell forks in a vacuum. Because in actual real world scenarios users definitely don't chose that. Just go into a shop and watch people not chosing anything, but, you know, just paying.
Even granting that, it's still not user nodes that matter. We've seen from history (BCH/BSV/BCHA) that applications and exchanges decide which fork gets the ticker.
Blockchain, Decentralization and Smart Contracts have had nearly a decade to prove their value and disrupt the marketplace. So far nothing but whitepapers, pipe dreams and exit scams - nothing my mother can use. What's the point? Nobody is using crypto as an alternative to fiat. Prove me wrong.
I think, it will probably take another decade. I think, BC could go to 5 million before it stablizes.
If Vitalik is correct that the only viable defense against the attack described in this article is users validating nodes en masse, then blockchain is doomed, because you're never going to convince more than a small percentage of users to validate blocks.
Personally, I think that custodial entities such as Coinbase (or in the future, banks) can probably be relied on to not do anything too controversial.
Monero. It’s provided a private money for the internet. That helps people. It’s valuable. A permissionless, censorshipless decentralised private money.
Are there any other significant untraceable cryptos other than Monero and Zcash(using privacy fetures)?
I work in applied Cryptography so I’m well placed to judge.
Other than Monero and ZEC (the latter of which has some issues for me which I posted about before) Grin is the only other project that isn’t a clone.
Hi. Bitcoin.org contributor[0] here. You can start and run a fully validating Bitcoin node with 7GB of storage space and 128MB-256MB RAM. Download the official GUI Bitcoin software here[1]. Enable pruning to store just 7GB. This validates all blocks. The ability to prune older blockchain data is an inherent feature of blockchain, as explained by Satoshi himself: > Once the latest transaction in a coin is buried under…
> Once the latest transaction in a coin is buried under enough blocks, the spent transactions before it can be discarded to save disk space. Everyone should have this quote ready when there's an inevitable "but there's no tampering of the log, and all transactions are kept forever and can be verified!"
This feels like a misunderstanding of how the syncing process works. You don't only download the last n blocks and assume the current state is accurate. You download the entire chain, validate it, and optionally discard the redundant information. As far as your client is concerned it still verified the entire chain end-to-end. The only difference with pruning is that you can't revalidate the chain end-to-end without redownloading the whole chain, but I'm not sure why you'd want to do that unless your machine was compromised.
Blockchain, Decentralization and Smart Contracts have had nearly a decade to prove their value and disrupt the marketplace. So far nothing but whitepapers, pipe dreams and exit scams - nothing my mother can use. What's the point? Nobody is using crypto as an alternative to fiat. Prove me wrong.
I have responded to a thousand versions of your comment on HN. No matter what I write the haters never change their minds. HN is not an enthusiastic place for blockchain devs.
Perhaps we don’t change our minds because we haven’t seen a convincing counter-argument to the thesis that blockchains are fundamentally about getting rich quick through buying in early (or pre-mining) and then finding greater fools.
The most successful actual applications thus far, as far as I can tell, have been silk road and paying ransoms.
I know people that send money home and they don’t use cryptocoins. These remittances communities are savvy and price sensitive, if there was a superior product it would be spreading like wildfire.
There are also big risks to fiat money, such having the entire economic output of your civilization be grossly distorted by central banks.
No one is saying that fiat money is perfect. This is a logical fallacy to jump to "Fiat has issues, therefore I will only own bitcoin". That is like saying "McDonalds is unhealthy, therefore I will only eat sand"
Scam after scam, that's all blockchain is. Just another way to fleece the average consumer. There has not been a single valuable use, a single product, that actually improves anyone's day / process / life / anything. I am very open to changing my stance if someone presents evidence to the contrary.
- Fuels research for applied cryptography (example Zero knowledge cryptography) and privacy technologies.
- Pressures existing systems (Fiat, Paypal ...) to improve and keep up.
- Gives options to people living in censored governments
- Shows us that one of our most foundational systems (Money) can be re-engineered using modern tech and experience of studying what happened in the past.