The Decentralized Future
blog.ycombinator.com
blog.ycombinator.com
My guess is that we're having our geeky dreams without thinking what's the reality happening around us. It's very comfortable to be utopist when thinking of bitcoin, instead of seeing that it's still the same winner-takes-it-all scheme.
People will ALWAYS put convenience first. Even those that say they won’t, it’s typically an isolated action (like, email is harder when not using google apps, but it’s worth not being spied on. Walk in their house, Echos and smart devices everywhere).
The hope for Blockchain is we can now, finally, begin building true decentralized things without sacrificing this innate human want for convenience. It’s technology advancing towards multiple mutual goals (a technical one and a human one).
Be prepared to rebel and re-re-decentralize in 20 years.
I’m speaking on Blockchain, not bitcoin.
I currently (as I understand the state of pos) see pos useful for other the other blochain ESC stuff and pow for a safe currency (BTC)
Where before you had to trust one server, now you can have many. Multiple writers, multiple readers. That's all.
They are a drop-in replacement for having to trust admins.
On the other hand, backups and replicas could prevent other things, such as: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E1d5VvCa8Fo
Those multiple writers, multiple readers are not free. They waste billions in server/electricity costs over traditional architecture designs. The most prominent blockchain bitcoin costs 2.5 billion dollars a year [0] to process a miniscule fraction of what Visa can handle.
Now, with Bitcoin and Cryptocurrencies: Programmers are creating money itself.
This article makes a bull-case very articulately, with sprinklings of realism. I am looking forward to this series. Being a blockchain cynic is the norm these days, and I appreciate when someone takes the trouble to lay down a well-reasoned and well-researched argument - great job rrecuero.
Clearly, there is irrational optimism/scams abound, but we can often forget that the mass-irrationality can be decoupled with the 'actual' promise of the idea. And the fundamental promise of the idea (Bitcoin, Cryptocurrencies, Blockchain etc) is for us to rethink 'how things work the way they work and why' and attempt to improve it. The Bitcoin paper should atleast get us to think about what is money. It matters less whether these "blockchain things" ultimately succeed or fail -- the fact that something NEW is being attempted, has to be applauded (Ofcourse, it would be great to figure out a way to do this without harming people using their credit cards to buy shit coins).
I love reading about blockchain ideas/projects. Like many, I too am jaded by the scams - but I think it is worth maintaining some optimism through this.
This article doesn't even touch upon some very important use-cases like: moving money across borders and money being seizure resistant etc. I think there is was, and has always been a market for a product that allows us to store value in a way that is cross-border, govt resistant and anonymous (whether it is a $500B market or $5B market is less interesting than appreciating that a product was invented to fulfil this use case). There are plenty of interesting use-cases to explore here.
In the section on Tokens, the article says: "contributors can transfer their assets instantly and easily to other people (pending regulation)" while referring to securities. IF this becomes a reality, it would be huge.
I see a lot of upside if even a fraction of the promise of this tech is realized.
As you mentioned, asset tokenization (securitization) is one of the biggest markets. If companies like Harbor achieve their vision, it would be huge.
I can confirm from my own experience that reading pop-sci books about blockchains--although they sound really cool and do provide motivation to look further into the tech--doesn't give you any confidence about the technology itself.
There's no shortcut, if you want to be more "enlightened", you should stop reading medium blog posts or pop-sci books and start looking into the protocol itself, run a node yourself, and try stuff out. When you do so, you'll get the "enlightment" you were looking for.
Which is what? That the blockchain is a solution in search of a problem? There is very, very little reason to use a cumbersome data structure when better ones exist (eg: just a regular database, or something like git). Worse, the only way the blockchain gets all it's supposed valuable attributes is when you provide a financial incentive to mine. Aka -- bolt a "currency" on top of it and then go market it to tons of rubes so you can convert all of the generated tokens into cold, hard fiat to pay your bills. Without the "currency", who will pay miners to trustlessly verify all the transactions? The parties running the service? If so... since you seem to trust all them to pay the bills.... why not just use a database instead and save some substantial fiat?
The whole bitcoin/blockchain "movement" is just pure hype. It's people at the top of the pyramid hyping a worthless technology in order to cash out their tokens before the whole thing collapses in on itself...
Do you not see any value in decentralization? In theory with blockchains, you could replace giant companies with open-source programs that pay for their own server costs with transaction fees, without taking any profit margin off the top. That would be very interesting for stuff like cloud storage and social networks. You can argue it's overly idealistic and may not work out, but you can't pretend there's no value in decentralization
Do you think these applications are viable if the token has significant monetary/speculative value attached to it?
That said, you're free to believe what you want to believe.
Just one thing though, everything you said above I heard hundreds of times before, and there are good explanations for them. I just don't have time to argue here because these are things you can find out on your own if you put your mind into it. (To be honest I don't think I can convince you no matter how I try unless you open up your mind, so I won't try)
Anyway, if you don't care, that's fine too. It's not like not believing in cryptocurrency will doom your future. You'll do fine. And even if the whole thing fails, I'll do fine too. But it's always good to have an open mind about things you don't yet completely understand and try to learn. ("Thinking that you understand completely" doesn't count as actually completely understanding)
Eh, the history of ARPANET involved practical use cases (i.e. communication between specific institutions and ballistic missile defense coordination) from the start [1]. If one includes circuit switches, i.e. the telegraph/telephone system, as a blueprint Internet then the practical application reaches back earlier.
No, no it wasn't. Close to light speed communication provided about 10 orders of magnitude faster/cheaper communication than before. I cannot even fathom how someone would not immediately realize how that massive increase in communication would not be useful.
Contrast this with blockchains which are practically 10 orders of magnitude more COSTLY since every node has to process every transaction when you could just do that on one server (hence why bitcoin transactions cost 2.5 Billion dollars a year to process a fraction of what Visa can process).
Just like you cannot fathom how Bitcoin can be useful in February of 2018, 99.9% of the world population couldn't fathom how Internet would take off back then when it launched. That was why it was not mainstream for a long time until it took off.
The dotcom bubble was fueled by speculation in how useful the internet would be. Granted, it busted but many companies survived it and some are now the biggest companies in the world.
> That was why it was not mainstream for a long time until it took off.
Internet growth has been incredibly fast: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Internet_usage
I can see some utility in blockchains. However, my main point is that the economics of them make them terrible for 99.99% of problems.
Internet: 10 orders of magnitude faster/cheaper communication than before.
blockchains: 10 orders of magnitude more COSTLY.
Then we're talking about different things. My comment was specifically in response to "Internet was a solution searching for a problem".
Your point actually supports my comment because like you said it's terrible for 99.99% of problems, which means it may be great for 0.01%, which means it's a solution that's solving only a small problem for now, and looking for more problems.
I understand the technology perfectly well. I read the Cryptoassets book to try and undsetand exactly that: the value of them as 'assets'. I came away exceedingly underwhelmed.
But I have never seen a single person who truly "understand the technology perfectly well" say it's underwhelming.
Most of those who actually dug deep enough to "truly understand" do see the limitations, but because by that point they understand the potential, they see the limitations as problems to solve and opportunities to take.
It is those who only scraped the surface that say it's "uninteresting", "underwhelming", etc.
Ancient people thought they "understood the world perfectly well" and thought it was flat. Suit yourself.
I'd say I've noticed an inverse correlation - people who don't understand the technology see it as this amazing thing, the kind of people who know their hash functions are a bit skeptical.
This is tautological, so i hope you’re aware of how logically useless it is. Either you haven’t seen much, or you define away any disagreers as people who don’t understand.
The biggest problems with Bitcoin (specifically) are: 1) it is not necessarily a store of value and 2) it fluctuates too much.
If someone can solve these two problems then we will have an extremely powerful cryptocurrency.
Venmo. Zelle. During banking hours: e-mail my banker, wire transferred within minutes.
If you accept the limitation that the receiver can be anywhere in the world, but must be from the US or have an US bank account...
"Blockchain" is probably fine. I suspect that it will eventually get some nice implementations where you want to be able to attest to integrity over time/space where multiple trusted parties evolve and change. A "distributed digital notary" if you will.
Cryptocurrencies as currently implemented (bitcoin and ilk) are eventually going to die for lack of a use case.
Problem 1: Most people like centralized authority of money. Most people like being able to get back their money when things get "stolen", for example. And people like reputation systems so that they don't get scammed (ie. illegal drug market).
Problem 2: Fees suck, but they're invisible to most people. Merchants hate fees, but you need users before that gets moving. We're also seeing that cryptocurrencies have non-trivial fees, as well. Funny that.
To be fair, traditional fees keep falling and some of that is probably due to cryptocurrencies. But some of that is simply trying to ward off the rise of a single digital purchase standard which would disrupt all of the incumbents. The payments space is a no-holds barred fight to the death and the incumbents would rather die than let anybody else get a foothold.
Problem 3: Cryptocurrencies aren't sufficiently anonymous. There is a use case for genuine anonymity. However, the current cryptocurrencies fail to be truly anonymous at blockchain as well as reality. Keeping your operational security sufficient to stay truly anonymous is damn difficult and having to go through an exchange doesn't help. Cryptocurrencies really need a decentralized exchange, but I'm not sure how that would even work. And, even if it did, since nobody could charge fees, nobody would have any incentive.
So, cryptocurrencies are mostly useful for people who fear central authority, are possibly concerned about fees, and only need to remain "semi"-anonymous. That pretty much describes petty criminals and mid-tier corrupt party bosses and ... not much else.
Monero is the go-to privacy coin. Unfortunately, I am not as experienced with privacy/security, but it appears to be good enough for many. Perhaps someone else can speak to its efficacy?
Finally, there are decentralized crypto exchanges. None that take fiat in (AFAIK) but there are definitely decentralized exchanges. Don't know of any off the top of my head, but I'm sure they're just a quick google search away.
Those are the things that stuck out to me about your post.
I think it's good to take a look at both sides of the story but the only way to find the truth is going deeper and learning the protocol yourself and form your own "sovereign" opinion, which is what I did after getting frustrated with tons of conflicting opinions online, which by the way turned out to be mostly propaganda to preserve their own crypto-wealth as I started learning more about the landscape.
Based on my somewhat brief experience as a crypto investor it hasn’t given me great hope of it solving corruption...
Immune systems will develop I believe.
But do we really have a new era here? I'm not sure if with 32 years of age I'm already too old to recognize the New and grog it. I don't feel it. I feel there's a lot of buzz around blockchain, sure. But it looks like it would be all. Bitcoin is just as centralized as banks are, for instance.
And here is where the other stuff starts. When single things start systems these systems tend to be quite centralized. That is the natural order of systems. E.g., people could manage their own bitcoins on their laptop, but they choose to have an Exchange take that effort of their hands.
Seeing centralization take a foothold and not seeing anything real besides buzz, I'd argue the bet is still against.
On the other hand I'm seeing Amazong completely automating logistics in more and more areas of life. Shouldn't that be something to look into?
Blockchain takes it further and conceptually adds history to the TCP/IP protocol. This has extreme value as it allow data to behave like physical properties.
That's a rather odd statement. Can you justify that?
You see the same history repeating, just a lot quicker. Therefore I assume whatever you do with blockchains will become a centralized system as well.
PS: If you think about it, as technology cash is even more decentralized as bitcoin. Yet banks happened.
- https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/7dl4r3/miner_centraliz...
- https://medium.com/@cloudycalvin/potential-threats-to-bitcoi...
A handful of actors with a controlling stake isn't exactly the same thing as "centralized" but it's close.
Bitcoin and the rest are coming for New York/Silicon Valley money managers, which only exist for gatekeeping and rent seeking. The finance industry will be eliminated by new exchanges and equity crowdfunding.
But not even that: If you're in China and the original blockchain is censored and all your node will ever see is the StateChain, you have misplaced your trust.
However, as long as you have any source for the most recent block that the MITM does not control, they cannot trick you into following a shorter chain. In other words, as long as any side-channel (malicious or otherwise) posts blocks, you can always follow the longest chain. The Blockstream Satellite [2] was created for this reason -- so that nodes always have a reliable side-channel separate from the bitcoin protocol to verify blocks coming from the bitcoin network. Alternatively, some nodes check Tor mirrors, which should be difficult for adversaries to control.
[1] https://eprint.iacr.org/2015/263.pdf [2] https://blockstream.com/satellite/
This is not true, you can already build (and people are) dApps that run in the browser (no extension) using the latest native Web Crypto API that we've made easy to use:
https://hackernoon.com/so-you-want-to-build-a-p2p-twitter-wi...
Dominic Tarr and the Beaker Browser guys with SSB also have even webasembly-ified libsodium which is highly rated ( #4 ranked on GitHub https://github.com/topics/cryptography ).
It is just that a lot of investors are caught up in hyped-up vaporware scams, rather than real technology that already exists and works and is available for developers to use today.
Only in the USA. And that is hopefully changing in the next month or two with the upgrade in the ACH system.
Really? I use it often and it always takes a few days end-to-end
I mean, look at the video right here: https://intercoin.org/
It even uses the same terms, such as "Power to the People". https://qbix.com/blog/index.php/2017/12/power-to-the-people/
I am glad that these challenges in crypto are finally being recognized and publicly written about at YC. Perhaps we should apply!
The DJIA and Bitcoin charts seem well correlated, at least over the past month: DJIA: https://www.marketwatch.com/investing/index/djia Bitcoin:https://bitcoincharts.com/charts/bitstampUSD#rg30ztgCzm1g10z...
In my opinion people treat it as they would any speculative asset.
If the coiners (what do you call this tribe?) accomplish "Permissionless Innovation" though, they will have did something great.
Bringing financial inclusion to the billions of unbaked it's the biggest unfulfilled promise of cryptocurrencies.
For it to work it must be engineered on the protocol level for this use case, I think Cardano is trying to solve this problem.
The store of value and savings part it's more or less easy to solve, the big problem is the lending without a stable coin it will be very difficult to implement, big Fiat currencies like the Dollar and the Euro have the powerful backing of a central bank and ultimately the collateralization of all the taxpayers as a protection against high volatility and black swan events, this will be very difficult to implement in crypto, MakerDAO is tring to do it but I don't see it working on a big scale.
Is there any evidence for this? Perhaps a statement from Satoshi that they were motivated to publish by the crisis?
"The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks"
Source: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Genesis_block (or you can verify on the blockchain as well)
On the scalability issue if you sacrifice the decentralization is theoretically possible for Bitcoin to process on-chain, Visa level of transactions and with current energy consumption levels or even less.
You would probably get 3 to 6 physical data center locations probably on the same continent connected with high-speed links with 1 Terabyte 10min blocks.
LOL Proof of steak https://youtu.be/U3OEk2dNYcU?t=44
Proof of stake is a pipe dream. Such a system can’t reliably achieve consensus due to the nothing-at-stake problem. Additionally, randomly selecting a winner in a distributed yet unpredictable way continues to be an unsolved problem.
Sharding has the cost of weakening security.
Bitcoin is addressing scaling better than any other blockchain. It’s making transactions more efficient through technologies like Segwit and Schnorr. It’s adding robust smart contracts and instant payments using second layer sidechains like rootstock and lightning.
Ethereum is already imploding under its own weight — it’s impossible to even sync a full node on basic hardware. In a few years it’ll be dead.
How so?
> Sharding has the cost of weakening security.
Why?
Raiden is a comprehensive implementation that includes Lightning Networks for ERC20 tokens, something that Bitcoin doesn't even have.
>>Proof of stake is a pipe dream.
Your information is incorrect. Ethereum's proof of stake is close to complete conceptually and the first version, a hybrid PoW/PoS protocol called Casper the Friendly Finality Gadget, is currently under development and will be implemented in Ethereum soon.
>>Such a system can’t reliably achieve consensus due to the nothing-at-stake problem.
Your criticism is long out of date. Vitalik Buterin addressed how the Nothing at Stake problem can be solved in 2014:
https://blog.ethereum.org/2014/11/25/proof-stake-learned-lov...
>>Bitcoin is addressing scaling better than any other blockchain. It’s making transactions more efficient through technologies like Segwit and Schnorr. It’s adding robust smart contracts and instant payments using second layer sidechains like rootstock and lightning.
Bitcoin's lack of Turing Completeness at the base layer is a critical weakness that limits the range of second layer solutions that are possible. Ethereum has far more sophisticated and numerous scaling solutions in development as a result.
>>Sharding has the cost of weakening security.
That is not certain to be true. There are a lot security impacting variables at play that sharding affects, and some of them positively. Even if security were reduced, it wouldn't mean the trade off for more scalability wouldn't be worth it. Sharding enables massive scaling while preserving the ability for consumer grade nodes to contribute to validation. That seems like a good trade off.
>>Ethereum is already imploding under its own weight — it’s impossible to even sync a full node on basic hardware.
That is highly misleading. SSDs have been syncing fine. HDDs have been having syncing problems, but that was solved in the most recent Geth release.
>>In a few years it’ll be dead.
Disingenuous FUD.
Ethereum is the primary Dapp platform, with 30X more developers working on it than the next most active platform. It has a multipronged scaling strategy that is in an advanced state of development and dwarfs that of any other blockchain. It is now the most widely used blockchain in the world, processing 3X more transactions per day than #2 Bitcoin. And in all of these categories, its momentum is growing.
Is the lone implementation which is still on testnet and no ecosystem surrounding it.
> ERC20 tokens, something that Bitcoin doesn't even have.
Bitcoin has no interest in implementing an equivalent as a layer-1 feature. This should be a surprise to no one. Off-chain scaling is the official direction of the Bitcoin community. There's no interest in adding bloat to the layer 1 protocol. Ethereum is the "everything including the kitchen sink" approach. Anyways, saying Bitcoin does'nt have ERC20 is factually incorrect: Rootstock implements ERC20 tokens as a second layer network.
> Your information is incorrect. Ethereum's proof of stake is close to complete conceptually and the first version
It's not any where near complete, which is why the difficulty bomb was rolled back (which in and of itself is hilarious -- Ethereum only pretends to be decentralized).
> Vitalik Buterin addressed how the Nothing at Stake problem can be solved in 2014
He described how to solve it 4 years ago, yet they still can't release even a hybrid PoS solution. Slasher does not solve the nothing at stake problem, it merely obfuscates it. Long range attacks are still possible.
I noticed you completely glossed over how PoS systems will agree on randomness. Good luck. I'm sure it's just another 4 years away.
> Bitcoin's lack of Turing Completeness at the base layer is a critical weakness that limits the range of second layer solutions that are possible.
Lack of Turing Completeness is a feature and intentional. If you want a general purpose distributed computer use rootstock. Which, by the way, is 100% compatible with the Eth VM.
> Sharding enables massive scaling while preserving the ability for consumer grade nodes to contribute to validation.
That's cute. Ethereum doesn't even have any "consumer grade" nodes today. Anyways, sounds like you're taking the long way around to agreeing with me: Sharding sacrifices security.
> That is highly misleading. SSDs have been syncing fine. HDDs have been having syncing problems,
Again, taking the long way around to agreeing with me. A full archive node currently requires a 400GB SSD! You're only option is to run a light node, which further contributes to your networks centralization.
> Disingenuous FUD.
Eh, you'll see. The monolithic approach of Ethereum is very naive.
> with 30X more developers working on it than the next most active platform
Easily proved false, anyone reading can take a look at the respective github repos. Bitcoin currently has over 550 contributors, Ethereum only has 200. Bitcoin has over 16k commits. Ethereum has only 9k. This doesn't even take into account the larger ecosystem of software Bitcoin has.
> Ethereum is the primary Dapp platform,
A little early to make any of these claims...the only popular Dapp in recent memory is cryptokitties and it brought the Ethereum network to its knees. Anyways, like I've said, Bitcoin has a fully compatible Ethereum VM running as a layer 2 network.
> It has a multipronged scaling strategy that is in an advanced state of development
I wouldn't call it multipronged -- Vitalik has it all hinging on PoS and that has been officially delayed until late 2018 at best.
> dwarfs that of any other blockchain.
Well, until you look at actual commit and contributor count. Then it's clear Bitcoin has far more development happening.
> It is now the most widely used blockchain in the world, processing 3X more transactions per day than #2 Bitcoin
I mean, bitcoin is operating at capacity. I'm sure Ethereum has more spam transactions though, I agree. Saying Ethereum is the most widely used blockchain in the world his hilarious. People know Bitcoin. A small fraction of those people know Ethereum.
> And in all of these categories, its momentum is growing.
As its network continues to crumble. Best of luck. We'll reconvene when Casper finally launches...hopefully while we're still young.
Uh, what about running a full archive node? The bitcoin txo set is also much larger the the utxo set
You're right that it's incomplete, in the sense that it's not completely finished, but not much more incomplete than the LN implementations on Bitcoin. They're on mainnet, but the developers say it's just there for testing purposes, and large amounts should be transacted on it. Its ecosystem is limited to buying sweaters from Blockstream and buying a VPN subscription.
To claim that the Raiden implementation is significantly behind the Bitcoin ones is misleading.
>>Bitcoin has no interest in implementing an equivalent as a layer-1 feature.
Which is a disastrous technical decision based on absurd self-defeating dogma. Ethereum already has 92% of the token market capitalization, up from 73% in July 2017. All the while, the token market grew from $4 billion to $60 billion.
Network effects matter, and the destructive dogma you're promoting resulted in Bitcoin letting Ethereum becoming the dominant crypto-asset platform, with a growing share of a rapidly growing market.
In any case, the fact that Raiden has ERC20-compatibility is another example of why your characterization of it as being "a poor and incomplete implementation of Lightning" is absurd. It's a comprehensive, full-featured implementation that is very nearly complete.
>>It's not any where near complete, which is why the difficulty bomb was rolled back (which in and of itself is hilarious -- Ethereum only pretends to be decentralized).
I didn't say it is "anywhere near complete". I said that Ethereum's proof of stake is close to complete conceptually and the first version, a hybrid PoW/PoS protocol called Casper the Friendly Finality Gadget, is currently under development and will be implemented in Ethereum soon.
>>Easily proved false, anyone reading can take a look at the respective github repos. Bitcoin currently has over 550 contributors, Ethereum only has 200. Bitcoin has over 16k commits. Ethereum has only 9k. This doesn't even take into account the larger ecosystem of software Bitcoin has.
Ethereum developers are working on all of the Dapps being built on top of Ethereum, each of which has its own set of repositories.
Only comparing the repositories for the Bitcoin and Ethereum official projects, which are centred only around the main clients, is an absolutely ridiculous measure of total development activity with respect to the platform.
And even this comparison is extremely disingenuous. You're comparing ONE repository hosted by the Ethereum project to one repository hosted by the Bitcoin project, when the Ethereum project has its work divided across a far larger number of repositories (151 vs 4):
It seems like every single argument you've made is misleading.
>>He described how to solve it 4 years ago, yet they still can't release even a hybrid PoS solution.
Good development takes time. The fact that the implementation has taken time to develop is not an indictment of the solution provided by VB to the Nothing at Stake problem.
>>Slasher does not solve the nothing at stake problem, it merely obfuscates it.
Ethereum is not developing Slasher, which was a very early proposal that does not contain the solution to the Nothing at Stake problem that VB proposed in the linked article.
At least learn the basic facts before confidently criticizing Ethereum.
>>Lack of Turing Completeness is a feature and intentional.
The lack of Turing Completeness limits the range and sophistication of second layer solutions that can be built on top of a blockchain. Ethereum's range of second layer solutions is far larger than Bitcoin as a result of having it. Turing-Completeness is an incredible benefit, and it's very shortsighted (or malicious) to discounts its value.
>>That's cute. Ethereum doesn't even have any "consumer grade" nodes today.
Sure it does. SSDs are consumer grade hardware, and the recent Geth update allows HDDs to sync as well. Sharding allows massive scaling while still preserving the ability of nodes to run consumer grade hardware. You have no response to this point except your snarky "that's cute".
>>Anyways, sounds like you're taking the long way around to agreeing with me: Sharding sacrifices security.
I explicitly disagreed with you. You can't even respond honestly to my comments at a basic level.
>>Again, taking the long way around to agreeing with me.
I just disagreed with you!
Here I'll past the comment again:
"HDDs have been having syncing problems, but that was solved in the most recent Geth release."
Translation: HDDs work fine now. You do not need an SSD. So I disagreed with you. Please stop lying so much.
>>A full archive node currently requires a 400GB SSD!
A full archive node is not necessary for full validation. Full validation only requires 30 GB, and like I just explained, it's now possible with HDDs as well.
>>A little early to make any of these claims...the only popular Dapp in recent memory is cryptokitties
It is currently the most widely used Dapp platform. That's factually true. And the development happening on new Dapps dwarfs anything happening on any other platform.
>>it brought the Ethereum network to its knees.
Even at its most congested, Ethereum did not get anywhere near as congested as Bitcoin, so you are implicitly arguing that Bitcoin is regularly brought to its knees, to a much more severe degree than Ethereum, and while processing one-third as many transactions.
Here is their founder giving a presentation about it at the Decentralized AI Summit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9QMgVsbHu98
It ties together things like the "Who owns the future" book by Jaron Lanier and AI/Bots/APIs for new economies.
I also recommend this article from Fred Ehrsam https://medium.com/@FEhrsam/blockchain-governance-programmin...
I've skimmed the SEC documents Reg A, Reg S, Reg D, Reg CF they are all nonsensical when it comes to raising capital with crypto.
Non accredited investors buy securities all the time through their brokers.
Advertising to general non accredited public for unregistered securities may get you in trouble with sec.
Selling unregistered securities to non accredited investors happens all the time through private placements.
Meaning, don’t spam to the world your ico address and be diligent as to who you’re talking to about potential investments.
The SEC secretary wants a fine line distinction between a “private” and “public” raising of money. He’s right to point that all icos (besides filecoin) are trying to be considered as “private” while publicly share their address and don’t discern who sends in funds.
Here’s a recent SEC release: https://www.sec.gov/news/public-statement/statement-clayton-...
Not surprising that an investor is seeing it as the future. Investing is regulated and libertarians often see bitcoin as a good thing.
The reality is that bitcoin is volatile, and nobody wants an economy that is built on instability.
"Easily" here seems like major exaggeration. If that were true, projects like Lightning wouldn't exist.
"keeping your investment safe is not simple"
Hmm...
- nobody can destroy or seize your coins unless they have your private keys
- keeping your private keys safe is not simple
"People are making a fortune buying government-seized bitcoins" http://www.businessinsider.com/bitcoin-price-government-auct...
The first and second point are inherently at odds with each other.
The first point concludes that we need simpler gatekeepers/service providers to make it easier for normal people to use the Asset class
The second point concludes that bitcoin makes it easier to be decentralized.
But I think these sections are the light weight part of the article. I think the other points raised are more material and impactful.
https://www.barrons.com/articles/the-bitcoin-consensus-yes-i...
This is not a good argument for cryptocurrency.
Just like a regular wallet attracts pickpockets, a Bitcoin wallet is a natural honeypot for hackers.
Just like a bank attracts bank robbers, a crypto exchange is a natural honeypot for hackers.
Really, the issue here is money. Money attracts thieves. The money is the honey, and the computer is the pot.
So far there's no evidence that cryptocurrency reduces theft, and quite a lot of evidence that it encourages theft.
On the other hand, plenty of crypto exchanges have been hacked.
How do we know Satoshi is a he?