BitTorrent is selling for $140M to Justin Sun and Tron
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
Seriosly, it's frightening how this project managed to raise so much money from thin air.
They're working on building and stabilizing the blockchain first. Dapp partnerships are coming but you cant have people commit to building on a nonexistant blockchain ;)
Expensive/Slow?
Which only make sense in a very narrow "technically correct" kind of way. From a larger perspective they still don't make sense. Pissing away small countries worth of electricity to validate an incredibly small number of transactions is a horrible idea.
...And that is just one of the deep, fundamental flaws in blockchain-based currency.
When the consistency algorithm is proof of work chains, or when the proof of work is used to control the scarcity and disbursement of the valuable token, only then you have the whole "world turning into fucking Mordor" problem.
So mostly they are gambling apps (with source of randomness the blockchain itself), exchanges, or artificially scarce "collectibles" (like cryptokitties).
Might be a bit too early. Don’t know if the market is even close to ready.
The most used dapp had just over 4000 users in the last 24 hours, while CryptoKitties, arguably the most famous dapp, didn't even have 400.
Find me a dapp that isn't one of those two things with appreciable usage and I'll be impressed.
Security tokens are a Bad idea.
Dai is basically only useful for speculating on cryptocurrencies and so I dismiss it like I dismiss exchange dapps. This whole industry can't be built on speculating on the value of nonces.
> It's awesome until your private key gets stolen and suddenly a hacker in Russia owns your house.
I like the legal system. The transactions I'm involved with are already cheap and the non-cheap transactions aren't made cheaper with the blockchain.
I’m pretty sure blockchain applications will emerge eventually and have wide usage.
But I also think crypto is more so where the Internet was in the late 70s than 90s. Except for the hype (the Internet wasn’t as hyped in 70s and 80s.)
Amazon success, yes.
Yahoo, had alot of money and continuously pissed it away on poor choices (Mark Cuban, just to name one. 5MB limit on email).
Chuckecheese tokens have more widespread usage than XRP.
And Ripple the protocol != XRP which is kind of funny with the ridiculous valuation of XRP. XRP is a pregen (shit)coin which banks would be loathe to use.
I am not going to make a comment about coin valuations - that is a different discussion.
You were looking for an example where something useful that creates real value for customers was created. I simply gave you an example of something that does.
When/if financial institutions start using Ripple the protocol for real then I will agree that it creates a real value for customers.
If I order an eval kit for the latest RPi clone and I do not use it after a week of evaluation it is debatable whether the kit created a real value for me.
Really strange time to be alive. People give money away in a scam ( at least tron is in my opinion) and the owner go to buy nice stuff...
I see companies closing in to 1 trillion USD, housing feeling decoupled from reality and the entire crypto market cap even now is ~300bln USD for what mostly is pure speculation. Odd.
if more dollar units exist, and the same or less purchasable units exist, then purchasable units have a value in more dollar units
the people increasing the money supply had an idea about what other people would spend the additional money on, but economists never predict human behavior accurately. but it doesn't really matter, the primary recipients of the additional supply are their friends.
If housing prices disconnect and accelerate away from what incomes can support servicing a mortgage, housing is overvalued. If PE ratios start to become wildly unjustified, equities are overvalued. This is regardless of money supply.
2) What is a "justifiable" P/E multiple? What is the justification (other than past values) for _any_ P/E ratio? What were the drivers of either the numerator or denominator?
This is to say, that macro and micro economics try to model extremely complex systems. When trying to analyze "value" it's worth considering that your mental model might not be accounting for many/most of the relevant forces.
> This is regardless of money supply.
When vast amounts of money are added to the ecosystem - the economy in this case - the recipients all have the same choices of what to do with the money so that they don't lose it or have less of it. When the expectation is the even MORE money will be added to the ecosystem, then the market participants need to increase their own money faster than the rate that an individual money unit has less ability to purchase its share of the economy.
You have choices across the yield curve which dictate the velocity in which you increase your own supply of money. Some choices are below the expected rate of new money units, so you are expected to lose purchasing power. Other choices are expected to be above the rate of new money units, and this includes housing and stocks.
If there is an excess of money and the purchasable units are not increasing at the same speed, then they will increase in price.
Regarding "overvalued" in the terms of particular asset classes, yes, things can disconnect from this rate of change.
The way we are using that term is fundamentally different and counterproductive to go into a hole about. I am using it to make a simple point: the money will go somewhere.
Cryptocurrency used to be a fun place to be in, before people started doing these ICOs that only made sense when you look at it from a cash grab.
Something that is entertaining... Get a coin daemon that was created several years ago (could probably get away with months at this point,) that happens to be on an exchange. You can trivially execute a 51% attack, by yourself, with no real investment required.
For example, for all the ICO bunk out there, there's also some awesome tech being developed. The lightning network for Bitcoin is really cool! I just paid 18 satoshis to a game the other day. That's less than a penny. There are people in that community building games and working on the tech and its constantly improving and that feels really good. It's pretty flakey, but you can watch it getting better over time.
There's Grin, an implementation of MimbleWimble which is under development. It has an origin story like Bitcoin - one day, somebody with a harry potter pseudonym signed on to the Bitcoin IRC and dropped a white paper and then left, never to be heard from again. Now it's under active development. There is no ICO planned, only an open genesis block, like the good old days. You can contribute, if you want! Or you could read the white paper to understand what makes it different and special.
Ethereum is working on scaling and sidechains. Those are not pump and dumps by private scammy companies, that's really cool new tech!
Whether you love or hate crypto depends greatly on which aspects of it you choose to pay attention to. It's easy for anyone to get disillusioned paying attention to ICOs all day. If you're actually into cool things and not just the "can i make a quick buck" aspect of it, go find those things. They're out there.
Mix this with an unstable administration running the largest economy in the world.
That took me by surprise and my paranoid immigrant-brain thought I might get in trouble about carrying cryptos undisclosed in my ledger wallet or something. He repeated again and asked what I hold.
That's when I realized he was just an enthusiast and an amateur investor himself. His follow up question was "What do you think of Tron". I tried explaining to him how the project seems like just marketing and that he should be careful. He didn't seem convinced.
But that's when I realized. Random non-tech people are heavily invested and rooting for random scam projects. That's not good.
Dennis Rodman was literally at the Singapaore Summit with Trump and Kim Jong Un wearing a t-shirt for his "Pot Coin" [0].
I'm not sure I even want to live in this world anymore.
[0] https://www.theverge.com/2018/6/12/17453080/dennis-rodman-po...
So it is that easy...
For those that haven't heard of TRON, it is what I would call one of the most successful scams in the history of cryptocurrency. It is a currency that was made on top of Ethereum (thus, it took no actual effort to create, as this can be done instantly and for free), paired with a significant amount of hype and lies to investors.
The TRON Whitepaper (what investors are 'supposed' to read and invest off of) is written terribly and copies significantly from other successful projects: https://www.reddit.com/r/ethtrader/comments/7oeh92/trons_trx....
It's possible that the CEO of TRON made at least $300M USD from selling his own coins that he created out of thin air: https://www.reddit.com/r/ethtrader/comments/7oh01s/trx_tron_....
The CEO tweets in ways specifically designed to entice investors to speculate on his coin, such as specifically telling people it will go up in value: https://twitter.com/justinsuntron/status/947463313775927297, or specifically saying the downwards price movement is due to changes to CoinMarketCap information (completely false): https://twitter.com/justinsuntron/status/951191786902274048
Some investors in TRON have lost up to 66% of their net worth thus far (https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/tron/), making it one of the largest crashes that has been seen in the top 10 coins on CoinMarketCap in quite awhile. Some of the things investors believe are completely absurd, citing that the Chinese government or Amazon will use TRON. It's unfortunate the levels of misinformation that so rampantly spread and cause many to lose their hard-earned money.
Also, how have Disney not sued them for the trademark violation yet?
I find calibrating my mistrust of cryptocurrency startups difficult; I cannot tell whether this is a baseless speculation, or an actual betrayal-based business plan, or an attempt to make people share less files by reducing trust in BitTorrent client software.
(Honest question.)
libtorrent is solely maintained by Arvid Norberg who happens to actually work at another blockchain company, Blockstream. If you want to do one thing to support the BitTorrent ecosystem, it's to contribute to libtorrent to reduce the bus factor.
IMO these services could perhaps be a backend for some user-friendly storage broker. But people just don't like the idea of encrypted data where they're the only ones who have the key. "Who do I call if I forget/lose/destroy my passphrase?"
From the outside looking in, that might as well have been "But I honestly don't see anything radically distinct among Uber/Lyft/Curb". Just different groups trying to build something based on the same idea. Even if the core concepts are similar, it's very much the case, as always, that execution is everything, and each group is invested in making their own solution win in the market.
I don't, for Uber and Lyft; I've never heard of Curb. As a user, the two don't distinguish themselves in any way that effects my choice.
Execution is nothing if it doesn't meaningfully increase adoption.
If you never rode in a cab before those companies existed you have no idea how terrible it was.
That's very location specific, living in London Uber is no cheaper than minicabs on most journeys, you already could find out the price of a journey beforehand, larger minicab companies already had apps for booking (albeit not as polished), and Uber drivers generally seem to lack the kind of local knowledge of roads that allow local cab drivers to choose faster routes than whatever route their app indicates.
The only area Uber has a compelling advantage is journeys of ten miles or more across the city, where not having to return to the area where the journey begun means that they are cheaper than a minicab.
Highly OT, but the same concern exists for ordinary people with cryptocoins.
It might not happen but as we've seen with the CA breach, data is the new oil (money) and the new nuclear fusion (danger), and we should aim to have control of it ourselves treating it as the form of factual power it is.
- 0server reset is possible through PBKDF2 & AES backup (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xFR8cx7jB1c)
- You can improve the design in the above video with a threshold algorithm, where you only need to get X >= Y of reset tokens correct (Y should be high enough for entropy, and X is enough for your memory to be accurate).
- Or the model I most/best prefer, is doing multi-part social-proof backup login. Aka you have 3+ friends (or services, if you don't trust your friends?) who when combined together can unlock a backup of your key.
These systems work, and I'm confident you'll see even centralized systems convert to them (we're already seeing Facebook do it) for higher security.
Martti 'Sirius' Malmi, Satoshi's 1st contributor to Bitcoin, also has joined our team to work on solving problems around this - like, if you need to trust 3 of your friends, how do you actually have a guarantee that those are* your friends' pubkey, not some imposter account, especially because consumers won't be good at copying/checking pubkeys. He's already got a bunch of code for it working: https://github.com/identifi/identifi-lib
* how the PBKDF2 & AES backup works: http://gun.js.org/explainers/data/security.html (couple videos in, each only 1min long)
(“Illegal” here is a euphemism for anything considered morally wrong to consume or distribute by most of society)
I don't consider closed source clients for security reasons, or bloated ones (Vuze etc.) because I'd rather use a spare GB of RAM to make a filesystem more snappy than to load a Java environment that eats alone half the resources of a small server.
Deluge is more of a power-tool, albeit one most people can use happily.
The big thing that I like is that you can use the desktop GUI (GTK) client with a remote daemon doing the actual downloading. Plenty of them have web-clients (Deluge does as well), but it's nice using the proper GUI. Other than that, it has all of the usual tools you'd want from a client.
At this point, I think the name recognition is the fundamental asset they have as a company.
> given the company is not only well-versed in the technologies necessary for decentralised, peer-to-peer networking through its software and protocols but also has a foothold in the entertainment industry via BitTorrent Now, helping independent artists and musicians promulgate their work using the same technology used to pirate the latest episodes of your favourite TV shows
Whenever webster's gets around to defining "shitcoin" "TRX" should be the first synonym but that hasn't stopped Justin Sun from raking in billions and now buying BitTorrert. Projects putting out products and/or developing hardcore tech like new virtual machines sitting on the sidelines and Justin Sun's are joining the 3 comma club. Capitalism rarely rewards the best and we're just getting to witness this firsthand.
And if you believe that, you still haven't learned anything. Only a tiny fraction of crypto "investors" will ever get return on their investment. Only the people at the top of the pyramid will win. You yourself helped line the pockets of the scammers who reeled you in.
The entire space is a giant scam. And yeah a couple people walked out with lambos, but so did Bernie Madoff and the Enron execs.... until the rug was pulled from under them....
"The BitTorrent specification is free to use and many clients are open source"
Most tech people I talk to have realized Blockchain is useless outside of applications that require decentralized verification.
You wouldnt use blockchain for social media, you wouldnt use blockchain for most download services, you generally wouldnt use blockchain when a centralized server is cheaper and faster.
It costs more money to pay multiple people to verify. It costs less money for less people to verify.
Not sure the detail I need to go on HN, but the understanding of blockchain on reddit is non-existent. They believe it can and should be used everywhere.
This understanding has created uninformed youtube videos and ICOs that promise the moon.
Then there seems to be people who work in tech that understand what is useful here, and whats hype.
Most techies moved on, sure you own bitcoin because thats a real application of blockchain, but outside of Bitcoin there isnt anything currently useful.
Ask a Tron owner about blockchain, that should be enough to show you how misunderstood crypto is, and how the people who own alt coins are going after money rather than tech.
For one thing, the blockchain doesn't provide tamper proof asset registries because the blockchain can be forked (see the DAO fiasco for proof).
Second "temper proof asset registeries" aren't actually a problem that really needs to be solved. The hard part of any registry is making sure the data that goes in is valid.... and that is a meatspace warm-fuzzy-human problem, not a technical problem.
I don't believe in the saying that you need a problem to be solved. For sure the country I live in now cannot lookup easily what other real estate properties I own in every part of the world. All governments would need to select a distributed database and encode everything on it. Well this is now called Ethereum or insert your favorite platform here and they will develop on it because the technology makes it easy.
Sooo innovative...
what keeps a Russian from stealing your house today?
I have to agree that for the most part we haven't seen any real products come out of the crypto space. And there's a lot of chaff. It actually blows me away sometimes how many icos there are
You might if you wanted it to be censorship resistant and cryptographically verifiable: https://steemit.com
Although I could see PoW as a possible antispam measure, and it's been done before (prior art Hashcash)
I was super into using hashcash for antiabuse in social stuff pre-bitcoin, but the difference in hashing rate in-browser versus in C even then rendered it somewhat ineffective at anti spam as an abuser could hash 10-100x faster, and the delays on the UX side for legitimate users made it a nonstarter. With GPUs and hashing asics now that gap is even worse.
(FWIW these days the Steem blockchain that holds the steemit content is delegated proof of stake, for block production.)
>If so, how do they solve the problem of people downloading the blockchain being liable for illegal content added by other users?
Divide each file into N shards, make sure every miner has no more than N/2 shards of any file at any point in time. You only 'get' a complete file if you specifically ask for it.
Not saying you're wrong, but why not?
If you want to prevent others posting as you, just sign posts/actions with a private key. If you want transferrable ownership of short usernames, that can be done by having the previous owner sign a timestamped file stating the (public key of) the new owner, maybe with some hashcash thrown in to prevent a double-transfer. Since there's no need for global consensus, you can limit spam using whitelists (i.e. ignore almost everybody); it can be reduced further by adding hashcash to posts/actions.
(Yes, hashcash didn't work for email; that's because email must interoperate with existing non-hashcash senders, and hence can suffer a downgrade attack; plus email allows clients to disconnect after sending, so the servers have no way to request them to include more hashcash, which drives down the price they're willing to accept to 0).
My non-tech answer would be that blockchains prevent some specific types of fraud in virtual currencies (e.g. trying to create new money out of thin air). Social media doesn't involve virtual money, e.g. it's fine to create new posts, friendships, etc. out of thin air. Hence they don't need a blockchain. The problems that social networks do have (e.g. posing as someone else, sending spam) can be dealt with in other, less expensive ways.
Also, dammit, we're getting close: https://cults3d.com/en/3d-model/various/mkultra-3d-printable...
And that's amusingly ironic.
But techies are not necessarily where the money is.
A large number of financial execs have spotted the hype, and see it as their "contribution" to their bank. It gives them the chance to do something different, maybe run their own team, and make a name for themselves.
From the stories I've heard they are not all clueless about the real potential either; They just see that this is likely to eat up even more investment, and they want to be on the gravy train.
I've heard that several of the consultancies are into this area as well, though they really have no clue what they are doing. Some of them have zero experience but they can still sell projects on the strength of their brand.
The understanding of a lot of things are almost non-existent on reddit, or rather the people who know what they are talking about are buried by an algorithm that vastly prefers populist comments typed as quickly after OP as humanly (or robotically) possible. Of course this makes reading the article (or other posts) and having your comment visible mutually exclusive.
I didn't realize how little correct information was available on reddit until I became very specialized in a subject, went to that subject's sub, and saw that practically nobody there even knew the basics--yet they happily chat about the subject anyway, pretending they were experts. The rare exceptions were nearly invisible, lost in in-jokes and references.
Be-very-fucking-ware when asking advice about something you are unsure about on reddit, they will channel so much smoke up your ass you'll burp clouds. And once one person makes a confident declaration which is totally false or misunderstood--pretending they're some pro or expert--almost immediately every other guy in the thread is copy-pasting his response to every other instance of that question as quickly as they can to get points or whatever. It's silly.
For the record I try not to be so delusional as to believe I'm the only one who knows anything and everyone else is stupid--I'm totally average, lots of people are brighter than me. This is a systematic thing brought on accidentally by their forum design.
Reddit's chronological weighting is a very big factor in this. If your comment comes a few minutes after a post, such as the time it takes to read the content of the post--or if it takes time to thoughtfully type out a response--it is scored vastly lower by the black box and is less likely to be seen and voted on.
There are certainly exceptions, but unless you already know a lot about the subject at hand it's very hard to pick them out among the deluge of jokes, smark, and people rapidly parroting the misconceptions of others.
I got pummeled by a handful of small time networking guys who think their one rack data center is hot shit and there is just no other way to do things than to buy Cisco and parrot what their sales guy says. I kid you not, one of them seriously was calling his Cisco sales guy and asking about some Cisco news, got some spin from his sales guy and, and then posting what his sales guy told him.... (dude even said he was doing that) I was done.
Technical, it's great to locate yourself on the map and get a compass - then you have to leverage outside sources to get to the destination.
Maybe I'm wrong but I thought the last announcement as you claim wasn't anything to do with BitTorrent but instead was about Bram Cohen dipping his fingers into Crypto with Chia. Less as an action of BitTorrent but more of an action as him as an individual. He's no longer with BitTorrent according to the wikipedia page on him