While the mainstream argues about whether bitcoin is or isn't this or that, while bitcoin attracts all the attention because of its spectacularly high price, people are working on blockchain things all over the place, relatively quietly in the background.
Whether or not bitcoin does this or that is immaterial to growth of non-currency blockchain applications.
Bitcoin/Monero/Zcash are already incredibly useful by making things like Wikileaks possible, which was previously shut out of the world financial system from US Govt pressure. This contribution to international politics alone has changed the world.
Does anyone see WikiLeaks as a good thing anymore? The concept is interesting but WikiLeaks is beyond worthless and Julian is just an attention seeking whore, being played by global superpowers
i'd expect that kind of stupidity from reddit, but here? Has mainstream media truly got such a hold over everyone? that they can destroy the reputation of a service (and a political refugee) while doing absolutely everything they accuse the service of doing, except blatantly and malevolently?
Starting to wonder whether the west deserves a service like Wikileaks; maybe we should be condemned back into the days where whistle blowers were quietly dealt with and the population could live in dumb ignorance.
You aren't being very objective about Assange. He played bait and switch throughout the election cycle acting like he had some kind of big reveal that he never revealed and he picked sides with Trump. He's got an agenda. It's not wrong to have an agenda, but he's manipulative.
I don't have an particular allegiance to "that rag". If you don't want to present the full picture, that's your issue, but you obviously have a dog in race.
>that they can destroy the reputation of a service (and a political refugee) while doing absolutely everything they accuse the service of doing, except blatantly and malevolently?
Can you show me where the NYTimes told Chelsea Clinton her mom should claim the election was rigged and refuse to concede?
Wikileaks destroyed it's own reputation with irresponsible releases with unredacted names, clearly timed releases to act as damage control for specific candidates, and generally just being unprofessional as hell.
They are the only place a whistle-blower can go, without being hung out to dry; Your main complaint about them is that they sometimes, supposedly act like the rest of our media...
I don't know how you can make that claim with a straight face. Wikileaks has played a ridiculous coy Was-he-or-wasn't-he game with regard to Seth Rich to the detriment of his family and national discourse.
Meanwhile, whistle blowers have gone to major media organizations again and again without being hung out to dry. The Washington Post didn't hang out Deep Throat to die - his identity got revealed by a family lawyer 3 decades later. Süddeutsche Zeitung didn't out the Panama Papers leaker. Most of 2017 has been spent with major stories covering the airwaves based on whistle blowers from within the White House. Edward Snowden's name got revealed at his own request.
Let's not be disingenuous and act like there aren't responsible organizations and journalists dedicating their lives to aiding whistleblowers and publishing the news in a responsible manner.
I don’t think there’s any debate that the information WL releases is factual. The only complaint I hear is that they are not shining their flashlight where some particular entity wants it shined. The obvious answer is more flashlights, not to smash the bulb of the single light we have.
There were very few complaints about WL until they exposed Clinton.
The complaints might have started then, but Assange was all that was left of Wikileaks at that point simply a joke attempting to regain some form of legitimacy.
In my opinion, the man never had any values and just lucked out exposing some legitimate info, in an irresponsible manner. Finally he just went off the rails believing his own press.
Beyond worthless? That’s a spat in the face to all whistleblowers, journalists and lawyers who WikiLeaks worked together with to reveal dirty state and corporation secrets.
Did everyone forget Afghan and Iraq war documents already? Cable leaks? Journalists who were risking their lives?
WikiLeaks to this day hasn’t released a single inauthentic leak.
>Did everyone forget Afghan and Iraq war documents already? Cable leaks? Journalists who were risking their lives?
Have you? Wikileaks is irresponsible as hell. Their leaks were unredacted and put the lives of informants at risk as well as exposing the names of people who have been victims of sex crimes and persecuted by corrupt governments.
People like Glenn Greenwald and the journalists working on the Panama Papers illustrate really well how irresponsible and biased Wikileaks is.
They decided to become a political organization and obliterated their credibility.
If they release something is it real... probably. Is it free from spin? probably not. Are they releasing things in a fair and even fashion (i.e. everything gets released unless there is a damn good reason not to, like people could end up dead)? I doubt it now.
It seems some people view apolitical as leaking things damaging to people they don't like, and political when leaking damaging things against people they do.
You're getting downvoted, but this piece from the Atlantic really made me deeply suspicious of Wikileaks' motivations. A chilling quotation from the article:
>“Hi Don. Sorry to hear about your problems,” WikiLeaks wrote. “We have an idea that may help a little. We are VERY interested in confidentially obtaining and publishing a copy of the email(s) cited in the New York Times today,” citing a reference in the paper to emails Trump Jr had exchanged with Rob Goldstone, a publicist who had helped set up the meeting. “We think this is strongly in your interest,” WikiLeaks went on. It then reprised many of the same arguments it made in trying to convince Trump Jr. to turn over his father’s tax returns, including the argument that Trump’s enemies in the press were using the emails to spin an unfavorable narrative of the meeting. “Us publishing not only deprives them of this ability but is beautifully confounding.”
A site that engages in leaking evidence of our government's wrongdoing is necessary. But it seems that they're starting to take a far more politically biased role and that the Wikileaks of the past is no more.
Yes, Wikileaks has a spin (it’s run by people after all), but they’ve only posted factual documents. To give public full picture, we need more Wikileaks-copycats with a different spin.
There are quite a few projects vying for owning the next generation of block chain. Generally known as ffm tech (fast,free,and minerless). They depend on some variation of PoS, hierarcal blockchains, and Byzantine consensus algos. Basically there's lots of serious work going into making blockchain ledgers scalable to permit money-like usage.
Some examples are Raiblocks and Ethereum's Plasma protocol.
The solution in Casper: if you approve more than one block at the same height, someone can submit both your approvals to the winning chain, which destroys your stake on that chain. The submitter gets a reward. There's a long delay to withdraw your stake so plenty of time for someone to submit.
It's fine for your favored chain to win. And maybe you can get a group of validators to cooperate and make that happen. But they better have bet on only that chain, or they will lose their stake.
If the validators are conspiring on a secret chain, and they're betting only on the secret blocks, the public blocks won't be finalized.
You generally get around the "nothing at stake" problem by requiring validators (consensus-forming nodes) to submit a deposit that is subject to deletion upon proof of bad behavior. For example, if I get two conflicting messages signed by you in Ethereum's Casper network, I can present that data as proof to the Casper smart contract where you lose your deposit.
You could argue that Ethereum is a useful application because it allows for about fifty other major coins to work, becoming like a provider for virtual currencies.
True, but the article is not about the blockchain; moreover, I'd be shocked if CNBC were discussing inner works of software and technical concepts that the general public has no interest in.
One reason that people are working on blockchain things all over the place because money is pouring into it at an absurd rate thanks to investors' fear of missing out on the next big thing. This is not a criticism, there is nothing wrong with entrepreneurs going where the capital is.
Also verifying image authenticity in a world quickly hurtling past a the uncanny valley with turn key neural nets to fake just about any media at no cost and with no special skills.
I think what might be happening here is that the traditional software development practices and habits would get on that, turning it into a project costing millions, taking years, and not doing what it promised.
There are very few good use cases for blockchains, a lot of companies are doing things with blockchain tech that are not suited and they would be better off simply using a traditional database and APIs.
Mainstream media tends to bundle in the term "blockchain" two separate things: 1) an append-only, verifyable, transaction log/db 2) a distributed consensus based update mechanism
#1 is IMO fairly mundane and uninteresting. Unfortunately, a whole lot of the "blockchain" work happening is focusing on it.
#2 is much more interesting and what will power truly interesting innovations. Sadly, it is largely under-advertized.
10 years on there are no non-currency blockchain applications that make any sense. And even if they did exist, since the blockchain integrity guarantees only work if there is a valuable reward for "mining", a failure of blockchain-as-currency would doom non-currency blockchain applications as well.
I'm not an economist, but the argument in the article seems a little constructed. There are plenty of places where cryptocurrencies can be exchanged against cash. On the other side, when did the author last try to buy a pizza with actual gold?
None of them are nothing else than classic fiat debit Visa or MC cards. They just make an API call to exchange some gold or crypto for cash at point of sale. Merchant still gets paid with fiat from the "gold" card.
Merchant still gets paid in his local currency even when you pay with a foreign visa card.
The merchant sees his favourite currency, the customer sees his favourite currency, and all the exchanging goes on behind-the-scenes. I don't see why a bitcoin or gold debit card is materially different to any other foreign debit card, from the perspective of either the merchant or the customer.
Yeah but sometimes it seems like people are not aware of this. Lots of crypto advocates are talking about future where crypto will become de facto currency and transactions will be done in BTC or some other tokens. So merchants would price their goods and services in crypto tokens.
We are definitely not there if we ever will be (personally I am skeptical most of these tokens will turn out to be more than fads few years from now). Merchant still gets paid with USD, GBP, JPY, EUR or whatever currency is local to the merchant.
It also must be more inefficient to use Bitcoin or gold card. Because there is an additional layer of conversion from BTC/gold to fiat which I believe is not as advantageous as paying with fiat which uses daily Visa/MC interchange rate (Visa/MC set exchange rate for currency pairs once per day so it doesn't fluctuate when you buy 2 coffees per day for example) and is as good as you can get.
I imagine whatever service you use to change BTC/gold to fiat in the background must incur some fees albeit small ones (Coinbase or something else that's used by these cards, the API call you make to Coinbase to change BTC to USD will charge you small fee). So you will be paying more on fees / get worse exchange rate.
I still don't understand what's the advantage of using these Bitcoin or gold debit cards as it seems you are just paying extra fees for extra layer of conversion. I'd stick with old school boring bank debit cards since transactions are done in fiat anyways.
CNBC is a joke. It's the Techcrunch of financial news. Occasionally they publish something of value, but mostly it's just repurposed press releases and garbage commentary.
There is no point. A paragraph later, "I understand that the entire development of this ecosystem is new, hence the need to compare it to existing forms of money. And, yes, 10 or 20 years from now, dollars may be obsolete and bitcoin could be the world's reserve currency."
This article is terrible. One empty contradictory statement after another with zero actual analysis. It really is shameful this kind of thing gets published by someone who calls himself a senior analyst & commentator.
Bitcoin will never be a currency in the traditional sense, as it fails the stable store of value test, which then impairs it's ability to serve the other functions money (unit of account, medium of exchange). However, Bitcoin and other cryptos are more like investments that also happen to be massively efficient global wealth transfer systems (relative to existing methods). CNBC's crypto coverage continues to be shallow, click-baity, disappointing garbage.
...when compared to a handful of fiat currencies, maybe. It's not fair to gatekeep with top performers, in my opinion.
There are many national currencies that lack stability. That doesn't make them "not currencies". It just makes them volatile currencies.
In fact, that's precisely why Bitcoin has become so popular in those countries—particularly Latin America; Bitcoin may not be stable, but it's a more reliable store of value (for now) than the bolivar or Argentinian peso.
that's precisely why Bitcoin has become so popular in those countries
I wonder though, if this relative stability is more to do with the stake invested in it from more stable currencies like Dollar, Euro and Yen.
In my head I can't get away from the idea, that beneath all the value vested in bitcoin is the actual olde worlde currencies that ultimately people need to change it back to in order to buy things.
When currencies experience hyperinflation, people stop using them. Even the people required to use them by law (wherever there is hyperinflation, there are always capital controls). They can still nominally be called currencies, but they are not much of anything.
I don't think anyone ever complained about their savings appreciating in value. I had used bitcoin for years to buy things online and send money to friends/family, until the fees went nuts. Now we use other coins like ZCash and Ethereum.
Compared to what? Don't forget that there are likely 10x or more resources spent on securing fiat accounts and transactions then there ever has been for Bitcoin.
yeah, and Netscape isn't the dominant web browser, and I don't order pet food from pets.com, my grandma no longer uses AOL, and I don't listen to music with Napster anymore. What's the point?
>V1 of a technology as disruptive as this doesn't necessarily survive in the end. Version 2 or Version 3 is where it gets really interesting.
The technology that's here to stay is blockchain, the currencies associated with them are irrelevant in the grand scheme for now. I think Bitcoin has the brand recognition to hang in there for a while, but if nothing new is brought to the table with every newly introduced altcoin they're destined for failure.
Even Kodak is trying to get into cryptocurrency/blockchain game. I think DRM via smart contracts is a feasible and cool concept, but no one is going to take Kodakcoin (it's a real thing) seriously unless it has liquidity and value beyond photographers. Until they can leverage atomic swaps it's going nowhere in my opinion.
> The technology that's here to stay is blockchain, the currencies associated with them are irrelevant in the grand scheme for now.
But blockchain's validity is validated by miners, and miners stick around because they're compensated for constructing a valid block.
How does miner compensation work in the cryptocurrency-free environment, and if there are no miners, what are the guarantees that some central entity did not rewind and fork the blockchain?
>How does miner compensation work in the cryptocurrency-free environment, and if there are no miners, what are the guarantees that some central entity did not rewind and fork the blockchain?
You can establish whatever hypothetical situation you desire, but in the real world not all blockchain/cryptocurrencies are designed to operate the same way. Bitcoin, Ethereum and Ripple are all different approaches. They each have their own incentives and use cases, but they all sit atop blockchain.
>Is there a significant difference between Bitcoin and Ethereum approaches?
The two have very different approaches. Bitcoin was designed to be a currency, with blockchain being the mechanism to facilitate transactions. Ethereum was built from the start as a platform to run applications for zero downtime, along with its own cryptocurrency and smart contracts. If you follow the HBO series Silicon Valley, Pied Piper's platform running thanks to the smart refrigerators is reminiscent of Ethereum.
>From what I can tell Ripple expects entities to run validation nodes as a service to the public
Ripple is an oddball, but I threw it in as an example. It was created by a company which mined all of the coins from day one and held onto a significant portion of them, yet claim it was built to connect different payment systems together. For example, here's a statement their lead cryptographer made.
“Payment systems today are where email was in the early ‘80s. Every provider built their own system for their customers and if people used different systems they couldn’t easily interact with each other. Ripple is designed to connect different payment systems together.”
Yes, they removed distributed Proof-of-Work from the equation and used a distributed consensus algorithm instead. They're encouraging companies and institutions who are interested to run their own validator nodes. Running one doesn't make you any money, but it does help make the network more secure. Its an interesting alternative to PoW that doesn't require anywhere near as much electricity as PoW mining does.
If Napster disappeared overnight, literally nothing of value is lost. If Bitcoin disappeared overnight, millions of dollars of value is gone.
That's the game Bitcoin is playing in. It doesn't matter if it becomes a global currency, but if it's not being taken seriously and is just for playing around, there are a lot of people who are going to lose a lot of money. What you're describing is gambling at best, theft and fraud at worst.
I posted another comment above but it reflects on this one as well.
The difference is that napster was centralised even if it was peer to peer. Bitcoin cannot simply disappear in the same way that Bittorent hasn't disappeared, the paradigm is different as there is no central server which tracks the nodes.
Napster and Limewire were peer to peer but not decentralised. There is no one bittorrent network.
My guess is that bitcoin as we know it now will not exist in the future, but there will be a fork which wins and that fork will take on the name bitcoin. When Napster died it's network was lost, not so with bitcoin, the blockchain will fork and a fork will win.
Money has/is currency when it is generally accepted. Bitcoin is unlikely to ever be generally accepted for various reasons. The transaction costs are too high, it's inconvenient for typical currency users, and you can't pay essential expenses such taxes in it.
The author seems to go out of his way to demonstrate that he doesn't understand how cryptocurrencies work, and half the article is somewhere between factually incorrect and misleading. It's amusing that he felt the need to demonstrate that the dollar is the more established currency.
At the end he's pretty much correct though. Crypto has a long way to go before it's demonstrated to not just be a speculative bubble. I hope it gets there ... or at least I think I do.
I feel like all these stock market type journalists and investors can't really wrap their head around it. The decentralized nature of it really trips them up.
Being a major global currency is never the goal. Even if it's something people want to achieve, there are still many factors, how loose the central banks control fiat money flow is one of them.
Bitcoin has shown us exactly why centralized monetary authorities are so important, and that alone was worth it. With a decentralized currency you end up with something that is neither stable nor easily liquid, because it’s not in the interest of those who hold the most to provide either.
Decentralized _operation_ might be ok but decentralized management and oversight seems to have not worked out. "Market Forces" don't seem to produce good architecture.
As far as I can tell the biggest problem with Bitcoin right now is the high transaction cost, which happens because it's not worth it for miners to validate transactions unless you essentially bribe them. If mining were more lucrative on its own, this wouldn't be a problem, but the reward rate for mining is hardwired. So in this case I'd say the problem isn't caused by the market but rather by the hard-coded nature of the monetary policy and the fact that there isn't a good process to change such core matters.
No, the high transaction costs are because the blocks are too small. As the currency has grown in popularity the volume has increased but the blocks have not, therefore the competition to get your transaction into the block has grown and market forces means prices have increased because of it.
Still the argument that "high transaction costs are because the blocks are too small" doesn't conflict with the argument that there is no easy way to change the code running bitcoin's blockchain, and in fact the latter would allow the former.
No, forking bitcoin doesn't change the code running bitcoin's blockchain. Carefully re-read what I wrote: "no easy way to change the code running bitcoin's blockchain".
So in the dystopian future of Chinese bank account/citizen social points and even present-day American Fed/Bank collusion, you are continuously supportive of centralization? And now you claim the experiment has been "worth playing out" while Bitcoin has experienced the most adoption it's ever had within the last few months? What?????? Please tell me you are joking.
Also, what incentive do governments have to keep people paying their taxes and using their own fiat that corporations seem to be able to control and play with hundreds of billions on their own accord and on separate rules. What about privacy, with the government having easy access to every financial institution I encounter and every transaction I make, why should I agree to that?
Pretty much all the early adopters who sought to use bitcoin as a currency have backed out because transactions aren’t confirmed for days, in which the price swings wildly, or transaction costs are insane, or some combination of both.
And what about privacy? At least with banks you have some. Or with cash you have the ultimate privacy. With Bitcoin every transaction is public and permanent. You’ve got to convert to dollars at some point, because bitcoin is no longer really transactable itself, and once you do your entire spending history is now available to the big bad government.
You can get a transaction confirmed within 10 minutes if you’re willing to pay $30 in fees. This could change in the future, even if it doesn’t, it’s still remarkable that it’s a possibility. You can also wait 2 days and then pay a $5 fee.
Okay Bitcoin fails. Monero succeeds. Now what dude? Also, I don’t have to convert to cash. Paying a $30 fee for a 10 minute confirmation for a car or house transaction would be perfectly acceptable even in its present form. Still, don’t know why I’m wasting my time trying to communicate with you as you are very obviously some delusional liberal cuck low sentience bubbled nerd like 80% of this site.
Just lol at you claiming banks offer privacy. My personal banker asks me to type my password in on his computer. That’s standard practice at nearly ever american bank. Nothing to stop them from keylogging. And they can freely scroll through all your transactions as you sit there with them.
I can’t believe it’s possible to be this delusional and this afraid or resilient to change. I truly wish I never have to hire or do business with anyone like you.
Yeah? Visa and MasterCard can confirm a transaction in seconds for 3¢ on the dollar. The price can swing 10% in 10 minutes—and you’re talking about two days? It’s not usable.
Lmao. Who is going to let you buy a car not knowing how much the currency you are paying with is going to be worth by the time they cash it out? Or do you just pay an extra 25% to cover the spread just incase?
The blockchain has some great uses. Decentralized currency is not one of them.
And as far as doing business with me, I really doubt you could afford me, so there’s no worries there.
Once again, pure retardation. The blockchain is completely useless if not backed by miners and value creation, otherwise it’s just a regular distributed server.
I’m glad you’re exposing yourself in this way to me, gives me that much more confidence in you being wrong entirely and me being right. Which I already knew, but I appreciate the extra confirmation.
EDIT: HAHAHAHAHAHA just saw your other comment saying Ripple literally has more intrinsic value than Bitcoin. My GOD. MY GOD. PLEASE KILL YOURSELF IMMEDIATELY. You are absolutely done, brain is roasted my friend. Your view of the world is about as accurate as that of my 3 week pup.
Lol at that subtle jab. With your IQ/RQ I would really be surprised if you have a net worth of over $3.50.
@rjromero, it doesn't hurt to be courteous and respectful to people. The crypto community has a very bad reputation for obvious reasons and it really is not pleasant.
I want the government to raise taxes, because I want it to do a lot of useful things for society that it can't otherwise do. That's what government is for.
And I want it to be very hard to dodge taxes, so everybody pays their share. If that means less privacy, so be it.
Mass speculation is not adoption. Few of the people jumping on the hype train with dreams of becoming rich will ever take their coins off the exchanges.
As for privacy, the whole world has access to your Bitcoin transactions.
“They” are? Everyone seems to expect everything in Bitcoin development to happen by magic and complain when things don’t happen quite fast enough. These complainers are rarely writing code to make it happen themselves though. If you don’t like it, get involved and help it move faster. Lightning is testing right now, so people who want to help could start there by helping to test the network.
I’m using “they” to refer to the larger community. Go back a few years ago and look at hypotheticals about changing bitcoin to deal with scaling issues. The thought was that when changes were needed the community would vote for those changes. Simple. Until it wasn’t.
But now voting power is too consolidated for any real community change to occur. The block size needs to change. Lightning doesn’t solve the fundamental problem. It just creates a new group of people with power to confirm transactions. Decentralized… until it isn’t.
There was this idea early on that power would be distributed across a wide range of people and the future of BTC would be transparent and democratic. I don’t know that mining pools were really forseen, at least not in the way the exist today.
I guess my point of this whole thread was that we quickly found out when something is “decentralized” it just results in a relatively small group of people becoming the defacto authority through force (in this case, sheer computational power). It was thought that wouldn’t be possible. But here we are.
Lightning solves the fundamental problem that a blockchain can’t scale to support the number of transactions needed. A block size limit increase can only get you so far. The block size will still need to increase with lightning at some point but it’ll be many orders of magnitude less.
Under lightning who is this new group that confirms transactions you’re concerned about? At the moment hashing power is fairly well distributed on the Bitcoin blockchain, not at all well on BCH. For lightning transactions there could be thousands of “people” you can decide to open a channel with. You can set up your own nodes if you wish.
> when something is “decentralized” it just results in a relatively small group of people becoming the defacto authority through force
Failure to grasp this principle accounts for a large percentage of libertarians, and to somewhat of a lesser, though still significant, degree, ideological conservatives.
Not true, some projects like Groestlecoin already have it implemented on their mainnets. Bitcoin development is akin to airframe development. Slow is smooth, smooth is fast.
Opinions are irrelevant. People will store the value they generate by working in any medium that offers them the most security and long-term increase of value over time. If a cryptocurrency is more secure, convenient, and less deflationary than someone's local fiat counterpart, why would they not store most of their value in it? If we go through 20 years of seeing Bitcoin outperform the inflation of a dollar, no hijackings of the blockchain, no breaking of SHA or ECDSA, why would I not store a majority of my value in it?
He's completely wrong. In his experience people talk about their value not in bitcoins but in dollars, that's because he's talking with speculators who are not interested in what decentralised and distributed ledgers mean. People who think that we're in a revolution of not just currency but also government talk about the value of their crypto in terms of bitcoins and not dollars.
Bitcoin is still young and the technology is immature. What we see today is not what we're going to end up with. But, at one point the idea of separating church and state would have seemed insane, now in a big chunk of the world having any religion associated with government would be unthinkable. Likewise in the future we could look back at the dark ages where centralised authorities managed currency and manipulated it for the benefit of the few.
The thing about revolutions is that people often don't see them coming.
It may never overtake USD, EUR, or other majors. But it doesn't have to, even just making it to the top 10 currencies would put it into the trillions. As more country's currencies fail or get reset, bitcoin becomes that much more trustworthy.
With all due respect to Warren Buffett, I wouldn't listen to his opinion on Bitcoin. He doesn't even pretend to understand it. Who cares if Bitcoin does or doesn't have a shot at becoming a major global currency. There is a virtually infinite variety of valuable assets of which currency is just one kind. Bitcoin is an asset, and has value. Same for many other cryptocurrencies. As long as there's a use case for cryptos (currency or something else) they will have some value. End of story.
But how does it keep it's value stable? How does a store of value weather a small panic when the hope and excitement has died down? When the hodl has stopped because everybody is tired, living their lives, and using Bitcoin. Bitcoin isn't `the magical internet money' anymore, it won't stay buzzword of 20xx either.
Bitcoin needs an inherent value otherwise it will crash. I always believed Bitcoin provided a service to keep it's value stable. You argue against this.
I agree broadly with what you're saying here, but with respect to GP, you could indeed say the same thing about gold ... it's only worth the value ascribed to it in terms of "real world" things. Except that gold does have a few pretty nifty usecases based on its intrinsic properties as well, such as for jewellery and electronics.
I wonder if the same could be said about BTC, in that mining is effectively digging up new prime numbers right? and prime numbers do have intrinsic value for many communications and computing applications no?
Nope, bitcoin mining is based on finding large integers that hash to small integers (under the current threshold). It's got nothing to do with primes. Although there is a cryptocurrency based on this very concept, currently with a market cap of $12M: http://primecoin.io/
I don't think there is any different value to that of Bitcoin. However I think they provide a service (money transmitting) better than existing competitors.
I also think that altcoins don't compete with Bitcoin because Bitcoin is unable to saturate the market.
No, mining does not generate value except supporting Bitcoin. Prime numbers (not mining) also only have cryptographic value if they aren't known to anybody else.
Losing the nifty usecases for gold would plummet the price. Luckily were addicted to technology and jewelery. This won't change quickly. However Bitcoin is losing their usecase and already struggling to stay relevant.
You could not. Exactly because it has some nifty use cases. The jewelry market is what keeps gold stable - it can absorb a small panic and stop it from becoming a large burst and anchors the gold price into a real world quantity.
If you create a store of wealth without any kind of real world anchoring, any small panic would be enough to permanently move its price to any random value. That makes it quite useless for a store wealth.
But what's the advantage over directly buying Dollars or Euros?
A very good use-case for cryptocurrencies is taking money out of countries with strict capital control, like China. But obviously, such governments are also quite authoritarian and will not have problems blocking a cryptocurrency if they see fit.
That's not true. You cannot buy food with Bitcoin, you have to exchange it. And to do that, you have to sign up to some exchange or equivalent. Many of such exchanges have turned out to be a bit more dodgy than the typical first world bank. Plus, huge volatility and high fees.
> I wouldn't listen to his opinion on Bitcoin. He doesn't even pretend to understand it.
People said the same thing back in 1999 when he said he does not understand the tech boom and cannot figure out the winners from losers so he is going to ignore it.
People called him a dinosaur because he did not understand tech and you know what happened next. Most tech companies went bankrupt.
Dinosaur is a fair summation of Buffet's approach to investment. He's built his wealth on shying away from risk, identifying stable low-growth sectors and sinking his capital there. Very old fashioned and unsexy but pure sense.
While I don't agree to the general sentiment of the article, gold and oil barrels were never really considered currency. The question becomes: is bitcoin currency or a commodity?
Its the first way to have a trustless, digital cash system as opposed to a digital payment system. In a payment system, people essentially exchange IOU's. Like writing a "good for $x note" or cheque. Payments always incur counter party risk, and thus can only happen among users who trust each other - or they must rely on a trusted third party (bank, paypal, credit card company etc).
Bitcoin allows peer 2 peer cash settlements, where users do not need to trust each other, because there is no counter party risk since they exchange something of value. Think gold, or although that is somewhat confusing, paying with bank notes (bank notes really are IOUs, but issued by a bank or central bank, so when we use them, we consider them valuable because we trust the bank, not the person paying with them). With cash payments, you dont rely on a third party, you dont take on counter party risk, you exchange things that actually have value, that you have to be sure can not be forged. Sounds trivial, but its a really difficult thing to pull off. Even in the real world, its not easy, bank notes can be counterfeit, gold may be fake, etc. In the digital world, its even harder because you also have to make sure each coin can only be spent once (its trivial to copy data). Bitcoin was the first solution to this problem.
source: https://np.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/6ufksx/am_i_...
What people confuse often that the Blockchain != Bitcoin. The concepts behind the Blockchain are certainly valuable, but to equate all that value to the value of Bitcoin itself is a logical fallacy.
Folks should learn to appreciate the Blockchain separately from any cryptocurrency. We can have a world where Blockchain is widely used, but we don't use any of 1500+ coins and tokens out on coinmarketcap.com.
> With cash payments, you dont rely on a third party, you dont take on counter party risk, you exchange things that actually have value, that you have to be sure can not be forged.
Funny. To me, practically only value bitcoin and gold have is based on the trust that you find a third party tomorrow who is willing to change it to something actually valuable (actually as in actually useful in your life). So you very much rely on third parties.
Price is dictated by third parties (the market) in any economy. What OP is referring to is the ability to own or trade the asset without reliance on any third party such as a bank or exchange.
In the early days, detractors would said Bitcoin paper doesn't make sense. Then they admitted the paper makes sense, but said there is no value of the coins. Then they admitted the coins had value, but they said only criminals would use it. Then after many established legitimate businesses adopted it, then they said it is only usable by people with computer smarts but not for average folk. Then average folk started using it and they said it is not scalable. Then all these low transaction forks and innovations like the lightning network we're coming out, and then they say, "little shot at ever being a major global currency".
The bar has been constantly rasied, and the crypto currency community continues to pass it. The fact that this mainstream news article is making the high criticism that it won't be a global currency and not one of these earlier lower criticisms is evidence of success.
Mainstream news articles are making this hype train go much more faster. Feels like a bunch of PR firms are hyping bitcoin and I don't know why. I even saw another Bloomberg post that has the opposite conclusion today. Someone is ordering a bunch of submarines. (See http://paulgraham.com/submarine.html )
> Then they admitted the coins had value, but they said only criminals would use it. Then after many established legitimate businesses adopted it, then they said it is only usable by people with computer smarts but not for average folk.
And now many criminals and legitimate businesses are beginning to drop support for Bitcoin [1][2][3]. The crypto currency community is failing to reach pitifully low bars that were set years ago.
CNBC demonstrated "how easy it is" to buy Ripple via Poloniex exchange on television. They also often have a "Ripple watch" counter on the screen displaying current worth in dollars.
They skipped the step where, after trying for days due to server overload, you have to verify your coinbase account with a webcam photo of your id which will then get rejected for unknown reasons.
Indeed. Quite a few exchanges are either having serious performance issues or they completely stopped new user registrations. And good luck with the verification process. If you succeed after a month, consider yourself lucky.
On the positive side the mess is a result of an enormous demand. If you had a serious exchange that's taking new users and a quick verification, you'd make a killing.
First you have to buy Ethereum then wait for it to placed into your Coinbase account. Once you own Ethereum there's a bunch of steps to buy Ripple using Ethereum.
Out of all the cryptos I've seen over the years, I'm most bullish on Ripple. They actually have a clear use case and are being implemented by big companies. Its still a bit of a pain to buy some, but I'm crossing my fingers that Coinbase will add them this year.
but that's different. There's only a limited amount of btc you can mine, whereas currency can be printed as profligately as you like ... it's more like "gold" in that sense ...
Interesting point. I wouldn't say profligate since creating a new coin, and getting people to adopt it is far less trivial than printing a bundle of notes. But, I think you're right in pointing out that it is a side-channel through which more money can be "created", but in this case it's not a fiat (government) policy decision.
Yes, the point being that it is (generally) easier to control a few government decision makers than exactly everyone who can make a website and start a cryptocurrency first node.
There are many international institutions that check such things (IMF, or just the international money markets, etc). Basically everything that the cryptocurrency-libertarians folks keep on ignoring: turns out such problems were basically solved already.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 284 ms ] threadWhether or not bitcoin does this or that is immaterial to growth of non-currency blockchain applications.
https://www.quora.com/What-are-the-best-news-sources-about-b...
Starting to wonder whether the west deserves a service like Wikileaks; maybe we should be condemned back into the days where whistle blowers were quietly dealt with and the population could live in dumb ignorance.
and the very next sentence
> Has mainstream media truly got such a hold over everyone
This is from the political director of CBS News: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/commentary-the-unbearable-smugn...
Unfortunately, it's only seemed to have gotten even worse over the past year, even after such a mea culpa.
CBS should fire that guy.
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/11/the-sec...
Yes, it's a "rag", the facts are still there.
Oh come on. I'd expect that kind of talk from reddit, but here?
Can you show me where the NYTimes told Chelsea Clinton her mom should claim the election was rigged and refuse to concede?
Wikileaks destroyed it's own reputation with irresponsible releases with unredacted names, clearly timed releases to act as damage control for specific candidates, and generally just being unprofessional as hell.
Meanwhile, whistle blowers have gone to major media organizations again and again without being hung out to dry. The Washington Post didn't hang out Deep Throat to die - his identity got revealed by a family lawyer 3 decades later. Süddeutsche Zeitung didn't out the Panama Papers leaker. Most of 2017 has been spent with major stories covering the airwaves based on whistle blowers from within the White House. Edward Snowden's name got revealed at his own request.
Let's not be disingenuous and act like there aren't responsible organizations and journalists dedicating their lives to aiding whistleblowers and publishing the news in a responsible manner.
\s ?
Wikileaks has done a real disservice to its image as an objective, truth seeking organization when it acts like it has.
There were very few complaints about WL until they exposed Clinton.
In my opinion, the man never had any values and just lucked out exposing some legitimate info, in an irresponsible manner. Finally he just went off the rails believing his own press.
Did everyone forget Afghan and Iraq war documents already? Cable leaks? Journalists who were risking their lives?
WikiLeaks to this day hasn’t released a single inauthentic leak.
Have you? Wikileaks is irresponsible as hell. Their leaks were unredacted and put the lives of informants at risk as well as exposing the names of people who have been victims of sex crimes and persecuted by corrupt governments.
People like Glenn Greenwald and the journalists working on the Panama Papers illustrate really well how irresponsible and biased Wikileaks is.
If they release something is it real... probably. Is it free from spin? probably not. Are they releasing things in a fair and even fashion (i.e. everything gets released unless there is a damn good reason not to, like people could end up dead)? I doubt it now.
>“Hi Don. Sorry to hear about your problems,” WikiLeaks wrote. “We have an idea that may help a little. We are VERY interested in confidentially obtaining and publishing a copy of the email(s) cited in the New York Times today,” citing a reference in the paper to emails Trump Jr had exchanged with Rob Goldstone, a publicist who had helped set up the meeting. “We think this is strongly in your interest,” WikiLeaks went on. It then reprised many of the same arguments it made in trying to convince Trump Jr. to turn over his father’s tax returns, including the argument that Trump’s enemies in the press were using the emails to spin an unfavorable narrative of the meeting. “Us publishing not only deprives them of this ability but is beautifully confounding.”
A site that engages in leaking evidence of our government's wrongdoing is necessary. But it seems that they're starting to take a far more politically biased role and that the Wikileaks of the past is no more.
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/11/the-sec...
Some examples are Raiblocks and Ethereum's Plasma protocol.
In a situation where this type of conspiracy takes place it makes economic sense to join them.
If the validators are conspiring on a secret chain, and they're betting only on the secret blocks, the public blocks won't be finalized.
Let them think cryptocurrencies are a passing fad. Let them believe they're secure in their offices and studios.
The longer they believe this the better for us.
This is relevant because if you want to fix it, it would be completely useless to act on the entrepreneurs.
"Kodak shares have more than tripled since company announced 'KodakCoin'"
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/01/10/kodak-shares-have-more-than-...
This is not the future I signed up for..
At CES they also came out with the Kodak Kashminer. The terms are so hilariously bad it can't be real.
https://twitter.com/chrisbhoffman/status/950861459302445056
But, for the right use cases it's revolutionary.
#1 is IMO fairly mundane and uninteresting. Unfortunately, a whole lot of the "blockchain" work happening is focusing on it.
#2 is much more interesting and what will power truly interesting innovations. Sadly, it is largely under-advertized.
The merchant sees his favourite currency, the customer sees his favourite currency, and all the exchanging goes on behind-the-scenes. I don't see why a bitcoin or gold debit card is materially different to any other foreign debit card, from the perspective of either the merchant or the customer.
We are definitely not there if we ever will be (personally I am skeptical most of these tokens will turn out to be more than fads few years from now). Merchant still gets paid with USD, GBP, JPY, EUR or whatever currency is local to the merchant.
It also must be more inefficient to use Bitcoin or gold card. Because there is an additional layer of conversion from BTC/gold to fiat which I believe is not as advantageous as paying with fiat which uses daily Visa/MC interchange rate (Visa/MC set exchange rate for currency pairs once per day so it doesn't fluctuate when you buy 2 coffees per day for example) and is as good as you can get.
I imagine whatever service you use to change BTC/gold to fiat in the background must incur some fees albeit small ones (Coinbase or something else that's used by these cards, the API call you make to Coinbase to change BTC to USD will charge you small fee). So you will be paying more on fees / get worse exchange rate.
I still don't understand what's the advantage of using these Bitcoin or gold debit cards as it seems you are just paying extra fees for extra layer of conversion. I'd stick with old school boring bank debit cards since transactions are done in fiat anyways.
Oh wait...
No, it's not. I don't get his point about this.
This article is terrible. One empty contradictory statement after another with zero actual analysis. It really is shameful this kind of thing gets published by someone who calls himself a senior analyst & commentator.
...when compared to a handful of fiat currencies, maybe. It's not fair to gatekeep with top performers, in my opinion.
There are many national currencies that lack stability. That doesn't make them "not currencies". It just makes them volatile currencies.
In fact, that's precisely why Bitcoin has become so popular in those countries—particularly Latin America; Bitcoin may not be stable, but it's a more reliable store of value (for now) than the bolivar or Argentinian peso.
I wonder though, if this relative stability is more to do with the stake invested in it from more stable currencies like Dollar, Euro and Yen.
In my head I can't get away from the idea, that beneath all the value vested in bitcoin is the actual olde worlde currencies that ultimately people need to change it back to in order to buy things.
When currencies experience hyperinflation, people stop using them. Even the people required to use them by law (wherever there is hyperinflation, there are always capital controls). They can still nominally be called currencies, but they are not much of anything.
Napster never survived it was replaced with Limewire and then Bittorrent.
V1 of a technology as disruptive as this doesn't necessarily survive in the end. Version 2 or Version 3 is where it gets really interesting.
The technology that's here to stay is blockchain, the currencies associated with them are irrelevant in the grand scheme for now. I think Bitcoin has the brand recognition to hang in there for a while, but if nothing new is brought to the table with every newly introduced altcoin they're destined for failure.
Even Kodak is trying to get into cryptocurrency/blockchain game. I think DRM via smart contracts is a feasible and cool concept, but no one is going to take Kodakcoin (it's a real thing) seriously unless it has liquidity and value beyond photographers. Until they can leverage atomic swaps it's going nowhere in my opinion.
But blockchain's validity is validated by miners, and miners stick around because they're compensated for constructing a valid block.
How does miner compensation work in the cryptocurrency-free environment, and if there are no miners, what are the guarantees that some central entity did not rewind and fork the blockchain?
You can establish whatever hypothetical situation you desire, but in the real world not all blockchain/cryptocurrencies are designed to operate the same way. Bitcoin, Ethereum and Ripple are all different approaches. They each have their own incentives and use cases, but they all sit atop blockchain.
From what I can tell Ripple expects entities to run validation nodes as a service to the public https://www.reddit.com/r/Ripple/comments/6w5vsd/validator_no... but glad to be corrected if other (stronger) incentives exist.
The two have very different approaches. Bitcoin was designed to be a currency, with blockchain being the mechanism to facilitate transactions. Ethereum was built from the start as a platform to run applications for zero downtime, along with its own cryptocurrency and smart contracts. If you follow the HBO series Silicon Valley, Pied Piper's platform running thanks to the smart refrigerators is reminiscent of Ethereum.
>From what I can tell Ripple expects entities to run validation nodes as a service to the public
Ripple is an oddball, but I threw it in as an example. It was created by a company which mined all of the coins from day one and held onto a significant portion of them, yet claim it was built to connect different payment systems together. For example, here's a statement their lead cryptographer made.
“Payment systems today are where email was in the early ‘80s. Every provider built their own system for their customers and if people used different systems they couldn’t easily interact with each other. Ripple is designed to connect different payment systems together.”
All of them failed or bowed to the US's FinCEN. Bitcoin was the first without a chokepoint the governments could step on.
That's the game Bitcoin is playing in. It doesn't matter if it becomes a global currency, but if it's not being taken seriously and is just for playing around, there are a lot of people who are going to lose a lot of money. What you're describing is gambling at best, theft and fraud at worst.
The difference is that napster was centralised even if it was peer to peer. Bitcoin cannot simply disappear in the same way that Bittorent hasn't disappeared, the paradigm is different as there is no central server which tracks the nodes.
My guess is that bitcoin as we know it now will not exist in the future, but there will be a fork which wins and that fork will take on the name bitcoin. When Napster died it's network was lost, not so with bitcoin, the blockchain will fork and a fork will win.
At the end he's pretty much correct though. Crypto has a long way to go before it's demonstrated to not just be a speculative bubble. I hope it gets there ... or at least I think I do.
It was an experiment worth playing out.
Mining is incredibly lucrative.
Or, maybe the question is what is the bitcoin blockchain? The truth is there is no such thing.
Also, what incentive do governments have to keep people paying their taxes and using their own fiat that corporations seem to be able to control and play with hundreds of billions on their own accord and on separate rules. What about privacy, with the government having easy access to every financial institution I encounter and every transaction I make, why should I agree to that?
And what about privacy? At least with banks you have some. Or with cash you have the ultimate privacy. With Bitcoin every transaction is public and permanent. You’ve got to convert to dollars at some point, because bitcoin is no longer really transactable itself, and once you do your entire spending history is now available to the big bad government.
Okay Bitcoin fails. Monero succeeds. Now what dude? Also, I don’t have to convert to cash. Paying a $30 fee for a 10 minute confirmation for a car or house transaction would be perfectly acceptable even in its present form. Still, don’t know why I’m wasting my time trying to communicate with you as you are very obviously some delusional liberal cuck low sentience bubbled nerd like 80% of this site.
Just lol at you claiming banks offer privacy. My personal banker asks me to type my password in on his computer. That’s standard practice at nearly ever american bank. Nothing to stop them from keylogging. And they can freely scroll through all your transactions as you sit there with them.
I can’t believe it’s possible to be this delusional and this afraid or resilient to change. I truly wish I never have to hire or do business with anyone like you.
Lmao. Who is going to let you buy a car not knowing how much the currency you are paying with is going to be worth by the time they cash it out? Or do you just pay an extra 25% to cover the spread just incase?
The blockchain has some great uses. Decentralized currency is not one of them.
And as far as doing business with me, I really doubt you could afford me, so there’s no worries there.
I’m glad you’re exposing yourself in this way to me, gives me that much more confidence in you being wrong entirely and me being right. Which I already knew, but I appreciate the extra confirmation.
EDIT: HAHAHAHAHAHA just saw your other comment saying Ripple literally has more intrinsic value than Bitcoin. My GOD. MY GOD. PLEASE KILL YOURSELF IMMEDIATELY. You are absolutely done, brain is roasted my friend. Your view of the world is about as accurate as that of my 3 week pup.
Lol at that subtle jab. With your IQ/RQ I would really be surprised if you have a net worth of over $3.50.
And I want it to be very hard to dodge taxes, so everybody pays their share. If that means less privacy, so be it.
As for privacy, the whole world has access to your Bitcoin transactions.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
But now voting power is too consolidated for any real community change to occur. The block size needs to change. Lightning doesn’t solve the fundamental problem. It just creates a new group of people with power to confirm transactions. Decentralized… until it isn’t.
There was this idea early on that power would be distributed across a wide range of people and the future of BTC would be transparent and democratic. I don’t know that mining pools were really forseen, at least not in the way the exist today.
I guess my point of this whole thread was that we quickly found out when something is “decentralized” it just results in a relatively small group of people becoming the defacto authority through force (in this case, sheer computational power). It was thought that wouldn’t be possible. But here we are.
Under lightning who is this new group that confirms transactions you’re concerned about? At the moment hashing power is fairly well distributed on the Bitcoin blockchain, not at all well on BCH. For lightning transactions there could be thousands of “people” you can decide to open a channel with. You can set up your own nodes if you wish.
Failure to grasp this principle accounts for a large percentage of libertarians, and to somewhat of a lesser, though still significant, degree, ideological conservatives.
If things continue to progress as they already have it will become untransactable. It already pretty much is as far as business is concerned.
When people need it to be close, it's "not too far away".
At other times, "you need to remember it's still a few years away".
People are too impatient.
Bitcoin has a central authority, and it's the Chinese state.
Not exactly known for getting tech right (but right about nearly ever other industry)
Bitcoin is still young and the technology is immature. What we see today is not what we're going to end up with. But, at one point the idea of separating church and state would have seemed insane, now in a big chunk of the world having any religion associated with government would be unthinkable. Likewise in the future we could look back at the dark ages where centralised authorities managed currency and manipulated it for the benefit of the few.
The thing about revolutions is that people often don't see them coming.
Bitcoin needs an inherent value otherwise it will crash. I always believed Bitcoin provided a service to keep it's value stable. You argue against this.
I wonder if the same could be said about BTC, in that mining is effectively digging up new prime numbers right? and prime numbers do have intrinsic value for many communications and computing applications no?
I also think that altcoins don't compete with Bitcoin because Bitcoin is unable to saturate the market.
Losing the nifty usecases for gold would plummet the price. Luckily were addicted to technology and jewelery. This won't change quickly. However Bitcoin is losing their usecase and already struggling to stay relevant.
I don't think this is right. IANAC but from what I recall on the topic, prime numbers are used to "seed" cryptographic keys and the like.
You could not. Exactly because it has some nifty use cases. The jewelry market is what keeps gold stable - it can absorb a small panic and stop it from becoming a large burst and anchors the gold price into a real world quantity.
If you create a store of wealth without any kind of real world anchoring, any small panic would be enough to permanently move its price to any random value. That makes it quite useless for a store wealth.
Yes. You could. I have, as have many others.
Thanks for re-iterating and further elucidating my point regarding gold's intrinsic value.
A very good use-case for cryptocurrencies is taking money out of countries with strict capital control, like China. But obviously, such governments are also quite authoritarian and will not have problems blocking a cryptocurrency if they see fit.
https://www.menufy.com/bitcoin http://spendbitcoins.com/places/c/food/
https://www.slideshare.net/bernardgolden/blockchainanchored-...
People said the same thing back in 1999 when he said he does not understand the tech boom and cannot figure out the winners from losers so he is going to ignore it.
People called him a dinosaur because he did not understand tech and you know what happened next. Most tech companies went bankrupt.
That was Buffett's point you could not pick out the winners beforehand.
Now do you understand the point?
> Anytime bitcoin is mentioned, it is expressed in U.S. dollar terms.
So this is a bad thing? If so, we should probably expect the demise of gold and oil barrels, and pretty much anything else in the world!
Bitcoin allows peer 2 peer cash settlements, where users do not need to trust each other, because there is no counter party risk since they exchange something of value. Think gold, or although that is somewhat confusing, paying with bank notes (bank notes really are IOUs, but issued by a bank or central bank, so when we use them, we consider them valuable because we trust the bank, not the person paying with them). With cash payments, you dont rely on a third party, you dont take on counter party risk, you exchange things that actually have value, that you have to be sure can not be forged. Sounds trivial, but its a really difficult thing to pull off. Even in the real world, its not easy, bank notes can be counterfeit, gold may be fake, etc. In the digital world, its even harder because you also have to make sure each coin can only be spent once (its trivial to copy data). Bitcoin was the first solution to this problem. source: https://np.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/6ufksx/am_i_...
Folks should learn to appreciate the Blockchain separately from any cryptocurrency. We can have a world where Blockchain is widely used, but we don't use any of 1500+ coins and tokens out on coinmarketcap.com.
Funny. To me, practically only value bitcoin and gold have is based on the trust that you find a third party tomorrow who is willing to change it to something actually valuable (actually as in actually useful in your life). So you very much rely on third parties.
The bar has been constantly rasied, and the crypto currency community continues to pass it. The fact that this mainstream news article is making the high criticism that it won't be a global currency and not one of these earlier lower criticisms is evidence of success.
And now many criminals and legitimate businesses are beginning to drop support for Bitcoin [1][2][3]. The crypto currency community is failing to reach pitifully low bars that were set years ago.
[1] https://steamcommunity.com/games/593110/announcements/detail...
[2] https://btcmanager.com/end-bitcoin-debit-cards-visa-tells-ca...
[3] https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/cryptocurrency/microso...
Also an article: https://www.cnbc.com/2018/01/02/how-to-buy-ripple.html
On the positive side the mess is a result of an enormous demand. If you had a serious exchange that's taking new users and a quick verification, you'd make a killing.
First you have to buy Ethereum then wait for it to placed into your Coinbase account. Once you own Ethereum there's a bunch of steps to buy Ripple using Ethereum.
There are many international institutions that check such things (IMF, or just the international money markets, etc). Basically everything that the cryptocurrency-libertarians folks keep on ignoring: turns out such problems were basically solved already.