Steve Wozniak launches Efforce, a blockchain-based energy-saving platform
efforce.io
efforce.io
At the same time, I fear that he has picked a weird way to address climate change.
It is VERY unclear from the beginning what Efforce actually is. Almost at the bottom, you see it's an ICO.
Perhaps we can describe it as the equivalent of a carbon offsetting marketplace, just for energy?
Well, if that's the case... It doesn't need a blockchain, and it doesn't need a token. It can be done, today, in dollars and euros.
If there's a token, and a token sale, Efforce and its founders will benefit from it, even if their efforts will not positively impact the world. That's unfair.
Why not, instead, reward them in a "normal" way - create an energy efficiency marketplace, earn a commission on the energy "traded" there, voilà. No blockchain, no token sale, no bullshit.
Am I wrong? If so, what did I not understand?
Edit: I see that EFFORCE is listed/tradeable, and apparently worth ~$950M already, which makes me even more suspicious... [0]
[0]: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/steve-wozniaks-blockchain-ven...
It's yet another example of the misconception that blockchain somehow guarantees data validity. In reality it does the opposite: it reduces tampering, sure, but there are other ways to reduce tampering that don't also forbid validation. A broken meter will put bad data on the blockchain just the same as it will any other database, but because you're using blockchain you now can't go back and fix it when you find the error.
If you are right then I'd hope you'd start an efficiency as a service company that covers upgrade costs up front and collects payments over time. There is a huge lack of providers in the space that are a few thousand dollar or less upgrades with payouts over about two years. You can see the challenge, you have to spend less than a few hundred dollars in overhead/transactions over a multi year relationship!
The vast majority of companies in this space are targeting large facilities with multi million dollar upgrades, because it is hard to make the numbers work otherwise.
Statements like this make me question the truthiness of the entire venture. If they chose Malta for specific tax reasons or laws, just say so! Most rational people are going to read this and have their bullshit detector go off (for better or for worse).
This assumption should be strong enough that attaching a famous name to them should not change your position much.
The restriction free rewards for issuing an ICO are nearly unfathomable. Millions to billion dollars of dumb money flowing it based only on tens of thousands of dollars in marketing. Some people find it easy to rationalize.
In a situation like this involved parties might feel it's justified because the money they're defrauding out of the public could be applied to a virtuous cause.
Are they ever not fraud or a scheme to enrich the architects of the scheme?
Moreover, there is a huge lemon market problem: If if an issuer is in the the (say) 1% of honest efforts they are in constant competition with fraud, under pressure to make misleading fraud-like promises and offer fraud-like returns-- prudent parties realize this and exit knowing that they have better options. So investors are left with the honest participants that were too clueless to realize this or not attractive enough to have other alternatives.
Note that startups also enrich their founders, although usually not in massive upfront cash payments.
The Ethereum ICO is a good, rare example of non-fraudulent ICO.
Block chain doesn't validate things happening in the real world (energy saved, KWh consumed) only auditors/inspectors can do that. The data from the smart meter can always be faked before it goes to the blockchain network.
Have I missed something? I'd be inclined to give Woz the benefit of the doubt on most things but I don't get what blockchain gives here apart from marketing BS - for which its a year or two behind the times?
How exactly?
I agree with you that use of blockchain on its own is not fully secure, but that can be mitigated for the most part through the same sorts of proof-of-work and proof-of-stake mechanisms and entities that Etherium, etc. use. with adjustments.
This might be exactly the time for Woz and co. to get into this given that there are others handling those problems, right?
None of that does anything to prove that the energy consumption data you are submitting is true.
Nope. No amount of "proof of X" will help if you put false data on the blockchain in the first place. They will do a great job securing the false data though. Good luck with that.
For aspects such as meters or constantly changing physical data, I am not sure if it will ever be possible to ensure the authenticity of physical -> digital touchpoint.
Is this something an embedded processor can help resolve ? In essence eliminating the possibility of fake data emerging from the meters ?
Usually a company will not generate its own energy. Depending on the country, the infrastructure is sometimes publicly owned and managed.
Maybe the physical -> digital touchpoint here could be outside the boundaries of the company. The energy grid should report those numbers as references, to subscribers agreed upon by the company for example. There it could be certified by the government.
Or something like that?
Edit: Well of course now there would be an incentive to burn petrol to run turbines and generate locally, then turn them off to capitalize on a high in the energy efficiency security market...
exactly. Everytime with this smart meter comes up, this is the crucial thing that just doesn't make sense. No replacement for "auditors/inspectors"!
That's the fallacy of DRM. There's no real way to keep data from a user.
This isn't just a problem with software engineers, but most engineering disciplines. It's impractical to transport logs hundreds of miles for processing, until we create a system that can do it efficiently. It's impractical to keep detailed records of billions of transactions, until we set up a database and reporting infrastructure that can handle that load.
This is your model for securing electric meters?
No amount of private keys and digital block chain security is going to provide physical security
Under those conditions it's always possible to divert power to 'adjust' the perceived power usage.
My point was that block chain doesn't validate anything - a private key will prove that the data (good or bad) is from the specific user, block chain won't validate that its good.
This is only true for corrupted miners. That is not an issue in this case because the company controls 100% of miners (and therefore, you are trusting them not to write bad data).
It is completely irrelevant to the question of corrupted clients, which no blockchain can guarantee against. All you have to do is attach some bypassing wires to the input and output of your "blockchain-enabled smart meter" to write completely fraudulent entries to the history that can never be fixed.
> (and it's a very expensive and wasteful way to do so)
No it isn't. You're confusing blockchain (the algorithm) with Proof-of-Work (a method for providing decentralized consensus).
> Blockchain does nothing to verify the correctness of the data it holds, only its consistency with the history.
Correct. Nor does any other data structure. Blockchain is literally just a data structure, nothing more.
the original comment was about selling mislabeled energy.
Not sure what attack you have in mind.
At the end of the day a subscription model is probably easier.
(works in progress, some more like app stores)
The step change in software/OS from boxed to subscription will continue to next phase. With AI the current subscription model is probably not granular enough. Every device/robot will switch tasks and capabilities and upgrades/downgrades with such a frequency that traditional subscription breaks (refunds/tax/fees etc) so blockchain subscription per device without human interaction will probably work better. AI is bots learning from bots which is already distributed, so centralizing that may be inefficient (high bandwidth).
Some people, when confronted with a problem, think "I know, I'll use Oracle." Now they have two problems.
https://blog.codinghorror.com/regular-expressions-now-you-ha...
Don't think in binary. Think, whether this system provides better validation/certification than where auditors/inspectors come by at the end of the year to check records. Perhaps, it's harder to systematically cheat the system if you have to announce your data to the world daily, then if you wait till the 11th month, and cook your books so everything works out.
I doubt this removes the role of auditors/inspectors, but it might supplement them.
The first chapter of the whitepaper? [1] There's two sides entering a contractual agreement around energy consumption.
[1] Section 1.2 - https://efforce.io/WP_ENG_V1.pdf
You can use crypto to build communities around a shared incentive, this in itself is an extremely powerful feature which doesn't get anywhere near enough attention considering that every idea these days relies on shared incentives in order to succeed.
[0] https://www.theregister.com/2019/02/12/intel_sgx_hacked/?utm...
[1] https://blog.quarkslab.com/attacking-the-arms-trustzone.html
This company is run by a bunch of random people. The very first thing I see is where to buy the token. There's a bunch of growth charts that have nothing to do with the platform itself (more people are expected to use energy in the future, just in case you didn't know). These type of blockchain pitches are way too familiar at this point.
Honestly without real standards/regulation blockchain is just going to be synonymous with fraud and failure. Bitcoin is its own thing, not just "blockchain". Companies are leveraging its success as if they're offering the same features (like immutability) or growth prospects just by offering "blockchain solutions".
Hopefully Steve can avoid the McAfee/Segal ending.
Woz's reputation is likely a factor in the traction this post (and perhaps business) is gaining, and I hope that it's a credible operation for his sake. He's taking an engineer and founder role, and there is a separate CTO (who has experience founding a Square-reader-like[3] company in Italy).
[1] - https://efforce.io/WP_ENG_V1.pdf#page=40
[2] - http://securities.stanford.edu/filings-case.html?id=101308
[3] - https://jusp.com/ (NB before you click: TLS certificate is expired at the time of writing, since 2020-02-13)
My sense is that potential investors would be wise to be aware of information like this, as part of various decision-making factors and research before they invest their own money (or other people's) in potentially risky projects.
I think it would have been much better launched in EU. I can totally see this is as a platform for energy efficiency accountability and energy efficiency investment tracking for tax break purposes.
My problem with it is that (1) the whitepaper is too thin on tech details and (2) it seems to have a fixed energy project model connected to those EFFORCE tokens preventing it from being used on a national level where a country has its own legally mandated reward scheme different from EFFORCE vision.
Knowing my country, that would lead to gaming the system.
> For the entire duration of the contract, the Beneficiary pays a part of the energy savings generated to the E.s.Co. This gives a return on the initial investment.
> The greater the energy savings obtained by the Beneficiary, the greater the returns for the Esco and the Contributors, since the savings generated are the actual financial performance of the initial investment.
So, contractors figure out how to make a company more energy efficient, and in return they get a cut of the savings they saved the company.
> the company can use EFFORCE to look for the necessary crowdfunding to proceed with the energy redevelopment projects, in exchange for sharing the savings generated.
In the building construction industry, there's a huge gap between an optimal energy performing construction and what finally gets built, due to the immense reluctance of clients to deal with the upfront cost or uncertainty associated with newer, high-performing constructions and technologies. It's somewhat mitigated in the commercial sector since commercial clients have incentive to "brand" their buildings as sustainable, but it's depressing as hell in the residential sector. Although it would definitely be harder (albeit, have way more impact) to use the EFFORCE model during new construction versus retrofits.
This is why human society invented regulations.
"So, contractors figure out how to make a company more energy efficient, and in return they get a cut of the savings they saved the company."
Which is why it is a real world job. And companies contract such people to either want to save money on their own, or because they have to, because of some law.
"> the company can use EFFORCE to look for the necessary crowdfunding to proceed with the energy redevelopment projects, in exchange for sharing the savings generated. "
But this and the whole need of the blockchain, sounds so vague and overly complicated and the outcome either, that I doubt, you find enough gullible people, wanting to do the hassle of studying it with enough detail, to not oversee some nasty catch, costing you even more in the end, than you could ever save. Because Efforce ... wants to somehow make money, too.
Which is the #1 sign of every crypto scam (or a less maliciously: of a poorly constructed crypto project).
A whitepaper at the very least should outline the incentive mechanisms of _all_ the actors (and their actions) in the system (and not just the miners like they do).
On top of that it has the very traditional real world->blockchain problem of needing to have verified data about the real world on the blockchain for the token to work. "The data that each smart meter will transmit will be validated and certified by the blockchain" sadly are just empty words, as the blockchain can neither validate nor certify anything about the real world on its own (and any "smart meter" can be tempered with). That's also only a single data point that's required for the token to work (if everything else holds up). They would also need prior energy consumption, which the implementing companies would be incentivized to downplay.
The concept is as full of holes as your run-of-the mill 2018 bubble crypto project.
But yeah all the data eventually has to come outside of the blockchain itself. This is always the weakness and shifts the trust issue to whoever is providing the data. Blockchain itself is no Magic bullet to resolve the fundamental issue of "trust"
I read a little bit and it seems critical. EFFORCE is dedicated to energy saving, but it mentions "mining" without any algorithm details. Assuming it is Proof-of-Work like Bitcoin (since it does "mining"), then why would they use the absolutely energy inefficient algorithm to save energy?
How an energy saving platform not mention any efforts to save energy in their tech itself?
Best cryptocurrency typo since hodl.
Sorry, we can't discuss it.
The massive "NOT FOR UNITED STATES PERSONS" disclaimer isn't exactly encouraging either.
> You may not, nor are you authorised to, deliver or disclose the contents of this document to any other person.
Very clear that we can't discuss it.
> EFFORCE Limited, a Bahamas based company limited by shares, formed for the purpose of issuing EFFORCE tokens on behalf of its controlling entity EFFORCE Ltd, a Malta company
Nothing says "I am not a crook" like using two different corporate entities in notorious tax avoidance jurisdictions.
While Malta is in the Eurozone, I'm not sure you could launch something like this in a country with respectable financial regulators. Mind you, those are in short supply after Bafin/Wirecard...
My knowledge comes from having worked in the online gambling industry and knowing a lot of people who live in or have lived in Malta.
As a Swiss, I don't know whether I should be offended or relieved that our usual suspect, Zug, does not seem to be involved in this.
This has also led to a proliferation of local talent which looks passable in a suit, can open mailboxes, is versed in law and/or accounting, and does not steal excessive amounts of money.
The business model is basically "stuff that is not provably illegal yet". During the Cold War, Switzerland got away with a lot, but in recent years, many formerly lucrative areas of business started drying up thanks to stricter money laundering laws etc. So for an ecosystem that has evolved to accommodate financial engineering right at the edge of legality, cryptocurrency seemed almost a custom made niche.
This claim is false. The internet is littered with corpses of Malta-based gambling sites that exit scammed their playerbase. This doesn't occur in jurisdictions where the gambling regulations are "decent".
Edit: unless you mean "decent" from the perspective of unscrupulous gambling sites who are looking to scam people out of money.
* Does Woz have trustworthy advisors for whether to get involved in things like this?
* What does the EFF think about the big, thick block letters "EFF" at the start of this company's logo? The company also spells their name in all-caps as "EFFORCE" in text of their site. ("EFFORCE" sounds more like a commando unit of the EFF, which is arguably a better idea than a blockchain ICO&mining scheme with the pretext of saving energy.)
To be honest, I really hate the new "big, thick block letters" EFF logo. The flat design trend destroyed the good original EFF logo and turned it into three featureless and boring letters. The fact that "EFFORCE" can create a logo that looks like the EFF using nothing but three capital letters is the proof of how featureless the logo is.
This is not the first time people have proposed this, someone even pitched this to our research group not long ago.
The basic idea of broadening the investment base for EPC is like any kind of crowdsourced investment to cut out the middleman of institutional investors (instead of giving my money to a bank to invest in EPC, I do it myself). With the same downside that individuals are usually much worse judges of projects than institutions, so what you gain in reduced costs you lose in high risk.
Then comes the blockchain bit, which suffers exactly the same problem of every project I've seen like this which is there is no technological way to tie the tokens to the energy use. Saving energy cannot 'generate' tokens, therefore you have to come up with a contract that ties the energy savings value to the value of the tokens. In which case there is basically no difference to just using cash since all the 'security' of the arrangement comes from contractual obligations, which are easier to create and more reliable to enforce using regular currency.
My issue with all of those ideas is that they are essentially trying (even if failing, for now) to devise ways for humans to trust fellow humans with less.
Contrast the experience of using the railway in South Korea (typically you never have to show your ticket) and China (where staff went through my luggage and confiscated shaving gel of all things): setting aside any legitimate justifications for either treatment, one makes you feel like a fugitive who should not be trusted most of the time while the other treats you like a responsible and honest adult—and we all know how labeling works.
Will it be impossible to address, in a post-scarcity society, the underlying issues that cause humans to lie to or hurt each other? Do we actually have to resort to dressing more and more of inter-human interaction into a straightjacket of never-forgetting blockchain?
He took questions after giving a short speech.
One person asked what he thinks about blockchain-based businesses.
Joe basically said "These days, in Silicon Valley, if anyone brings up a business idea that involves blockchain, that's how you know that team doesn't know what they're doing."
Basically, to paraphrase, people trying to throw blockchain into business concepts is like throwing like spaghetti against walls. Investors, according to Joe Lonsdale, do not typically find such ideas respectable-- in fact, the opposite: they seem to find them comical and gimmicky.
I'm sure there exist a few rusty metal sewage snakes in need of lubrication, but that's not what most people are selling snake oil for.
Not only does attaching to it act as a fairly reliable indicator of fraud or cluelessness, but it also means that you'll be constantly wasting your time deflecting suggestions to copy practices which are illegal, unethical, or just technically unsound from the majority of other 'blockchain' based ventures.
He brought up an example whereby some user could hide something very illegal within the encrypted data.
To be honest, I don't know enough about block chain or the blockchain economy, but the idea of hiding data/URLs related to very illicit content definitely makes me think it could be abused. Especially since decryption would be necessary to uncover the abusive usage (i.e. the concealing of illicit content/URLs to illicit content)
Who remembers how Imogen Heap's blockchain based "Creative Passport" would solve all the music industry's efficiency and fairness problems? Her mi.mu gloves are pretty cool though, but they don't need blockchain.
https://tidal.com/magazine/article/imogen-heap-and-the-block...
Imogen Heap: Mycelia's Creative Passport and reimagining the music industry
Multi award winning artist Imogen Heap shares how she's creating a fairer music industry with Mycelia's Creative Passport and demonstrates how to make music with her wearable tech mi.mu gloves.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3_lR5ua54XY&ab_channel=Nesta...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imogen_Heap
>Heap developed the Mi.Mu Gloves, a line of musical gloves, as well as a blockchain-based music-sharing program, Mycelia. She also composed the music for the West End/Broadway play Harry Potter and the Cursed Child. Over the course of her career, she has received two Grammy Awards, one Ivor Novello Award, and one Drama Desk Award. In July 2019, Heap was awarded an honorary doctorate from Berklee College of Music.
Imogen Heap's Mycelia: An Artists' Approach for a Fair Trade Music Business, Inspired by Blockchain
https://www.forbes.com/sites/georgehoward/2015/07/17/imogen-...
>“It sounds a bit far fetched maybe right now, but I really believe it’s attainable,” Heap adds. “We just need musicians to put their foot forward and sign up for something that isn’t really there yet. There’s no ecosystem there, there’s no marketplace there. Will you put the flag in the ground showing that you’re here?”
Hmmm...
Makes me wonder how many top 1 world wide companies you have to have founded to be considered a successful entrepreneur.
EDIT: HN, where people argue whether Wozniak really qualifies as a successful entrepreneur or not :)
> In May 1983, Apple entered the Fortune 500 at #411 after only seven years of existence. It became the fastest growing company in history.
Both Jobs and Woz left in '85.
OK, I'll bite.
First of all nobody is denying that he/Apple was extremely successful. The argument is if entrepreneurship was his strong point, and I think most people would agree that it isn't. Nobody is denying that he was probably one of the greatest programmers of his generation and that is engineering genius was fundamental to kickstarting one of the most successful tech companies in the world.
You can absolutely found an extremely successful company without being a great entrepreneur if other things align, like having a co-founder who is a great entrepreneur and having a truly groundbreaking product.
Entrepreneurship is not being good at sales. It's not being a good leader. It's also not being a good coder and it's not being good at whatever metric you might feel is important. It's about founding an (eventually) profitable company.
(which is to say, there isn't actually a real disagreement here, except over how language is parsed)
He's a worse-than-average entrepreneur, and I'd wager that without the other Steve, the Apple I would have been one of the many promising microcomputers which fizzled out.
The less charming aspect is that I don't think he really had much skin in the game in any of his post-Apple efforts, and some people who went along with them probably could not afford their failure as easily as he could (although I've never heard first hand testimony to that effect).
And this particular company seems downright snake oil, with Wozniak serving as a figurehead. John McAfee with less sex, drugs, and harm to whales.
Just off the top of my head:
Disney Bloomberg Automattic Air Jordan Craigslist Baskin-Robbins Andreesen-Horowitz Kleiner Perkins Wilson Sonsini Goodrich and Rosati Fenwick & West
In this list, I see really only 1 - Disney. Air Jordan isn't a company, it's a brand from another company - Nike.
The others may have been named after their founders, but the companies are not about their founders and weren't started/successful because of the relationship with the founder.
edit: checked out the whitepaper, its not even about the blockchain saving any energy itself. instead you save energy somewhere and record it on blockchain... for ... ?
Solana is clearly BFT, unlike what Emin claims.
To be fair, I don't expect Solana to be as centralised as other chains only for the reason that you need a gaming rig to run a consensus node. Solana is not centralised for the reasons you mention.
Its not hard to understand: "if X has green and non-green options, and you choose non-green, that doesn't mean you can claim X is non-green."
Because the new system is completely unusable there was absolutely no legitimate purpose to start this lockup at this time as a public system rather than just some fake-money test network.
Once (if?) it becomes usable it will have the additional ultimate property of further enriching the beneficiaries of Ethereum's 72 million coin pre-mine, since those super large positions are effectively illiquid (can't sell more than a small share without crashing the price), its low risk for those parties to place large amounts in lockup.
The concept of "proof of stake" has fundamental soundness problems which have not been addressed except by obscuring it with deceptive obfuscation and protecting it against peer review through sheer complexity. https://download.wpsoftware.net/bitcoin/pos.pdf
At my last job, we tried to make an initial implementation of this, but the specification was extremely complex, and even worse, ambiguous in many places. We were frequently unable as a group to agree on what the specification meant. Maybe it has improved in the two years since I left.
Woz is huge in hacker circles, a legend in his day. But as you say, the last decades have been pretty unremarkable.
Private Placement 45%
EFFORCE Ltd 20%
Incentive for Mining 20%
Ecosystem and Consultants 15%
In fact, considering that we are stilling waiting for the first tangible contribution to society out of the blockchain field that matches its surrounding hype, I would argue that doing things differently is probably a good idea.
I love the idea of having markets for more things (ex. in Ontario we have cap and trade for carbon emissions), but the blockchain idea makes no sense.
I think it has. Worldwide ecommerce runs on cryptography. there are laws and regulations on how crypto should be made secure and managed in ecommerce.
if you mean blockchain cryptocurrency by the word crypto then you may be correct. but in general terms crypto has a lot of actual legal value for it.
Also it's a legit question rather than a statement. I haven't ever seen what blockchain is truly good for, but perhaps I've missed something.
They can, though. All it takes is a majority of the miners deciding to do so. For example: https://blog.ethereum.org/2016/07/20/hard-fork-completed/
The DAO hard fork happened because most people with economic power who run nodes in Ethereum accept Vitaly's decision. With Bitcoin there's a concensus at this point that only bug fix hard forks are accepted.
There was a consensus that Cyprus bank accounts were solvent, until they weren't.
> The DAO hard fork happened because most people with economic power who run nodes in Ethereum accept Vitaly's decision.
Yes. The point is that can happen to Bitcoin, too.
Is it unlikely? Perhaps. It's also unlikely you'll have your bank account take a haircut via government action like Cyprus took.
What's more, you've shown that you know enough about cryptocurrencies that you know this.
You are arguing in bad faith.
I disagree.
I'm ultimately arguing that this:
> I understood it that if I keep the private key secure, nobody can take it away from me.
Is demonstrably false, both from a practical and a technological standpoint.
I've more faith in developed-world governments than I do in Bitcoin's miners.
Which you won't do, because you can't.
Instead you dumped your life savings into something that’s demonstrably wrecked you a few times, at one point leaving you with 20% (?!) of what you started with? If you don’t care about what’s in there, as you mustn’t to be ok with that, why do you care about putting it into a bank account? Because of the Cypriot banking crisis of 2012? On a tiny island in the Mediterranean split between 3 countries (the Greeks, the Turks and a pair of British overseas territories serving as military bases from when the whole island was under their administration) known for its shaky financial system? 4% of the land mass of Cyprus is a UN buffer zone between the various belligerents!
I mean you know how that reads right? It sounds a bit like the anti-vaxxers of finance.
If you see the amount of debt being created and not payed back, it’s just a system designed for risk takers. I was buying phyisical gold as well, but over time switched to Bitcoin + having an own apartment in case I lose it all.
For me just the legal definition of being a creditor to the bank when I wanted to own my money didn’t feel right.
> Also are you sure? 90 years ago US was on the gold standard. Are you sure you can still get the gold that was promised 90 years ago?
If I wanted gold I’d buy it. My comment was about bank failures — dollars - not their redemption capabilities. It is true fact. What you’re describing is a default, external to the banking system that did happen and would not affect you if you used money like you’re supposed to, as a temporary store of value to buy assets with.
> If you see the amount of debt being created and not payed back, it’s just a system designed for risk takers.
None of this matters at all if you buy assets with it like I said. Which is what you were doing. The system works.
Executive Order 6102 is an executive order signed on April 5, 1933, by US President Franklin D. Roosevelt "forbidding the hoarding of gold coin, gold bullion, and gold certificates within the continental United States." The executive order was made under the authority of the Trading with the Enemy Act of 1917, as amended by the Emergency Banking Act in March 1933.
"The main rationale behind the order was actually to remove the constraint on the Federal Reserve preventing it from increasing the money supply during the depression. The Federal Reserve Act (1913) required 40% gold backing of Federal Reserve Notes that were issued. By the late 1920s, the Federal Reserve had almost hit the limit of allowable credit, in the form of Federal Reserve demand notes, which could be backed by the gold in its possession"
One is a bank defaulting on its obligations to provide you a certain number of units of currency regardless of their market value. This has not happened since the FDIC was created in the wake of the Great Depression.
Another is a sovereign default where the country decides not to honour its obligations to those holding units of its currency or its debts. This has happened ~6 times in the history of the United States, and I do include the cancellation of the gold withdrawal rights as a sovereign default. This has nothing to do with the FDIC or your bank.
I can't stress this enough, neither of these things matter to you if you do what you're supposed to with money, which is not keep your life savings in a mattress or a savings account, but use it as a temporary store of value, medium of exchange and unit of account and buy things with it. Gold, real estate, magic beans, I don't care. This is practically ECON-101.
On the subject of freedom, backing all currency with gold eliminates my right to choose what I back my personal economy with. A gold backed currency has strictly less freedom than a fiat currency. I can today choose to back my personal economy with gold, silver, platinum, magic beans (crypto) or Apple stock by leveraging a brokerage account and a credit card. If you believe in freedom, it's actually what you want.
But if we’re going to play this game, if everyone walking into the bathroom came out with a renewed sense of self esteem, a nose bleed and a sudden urge to dance, yes, I think you would be looked at sideways for closing the door. What’s lacking from your rhetorical question is context.
I'm not even talking about Monero or the particularities of its current dominant usage as I think this is irrelevant for the above point.
I’m not sure it strengthens arguments for blockchain etc but on a tight economic value add it’s true.
In this case, CryptoKitties purchases represent money that was diverted from intrinsically valuable goods and services: cars, fruit, haircuts, shoes, software, and so on.
Every dollar spent on CryptoKitties was a dollar that didn't go to a farmer, a plumber, or a musician. That's not creating economic value; it's destroying it.
It's a pyramid scheme, plain and simple.
The jury's still out on the "legal" part of that particular business (spoiler: probably not).
Disclaimer: ex co-founder, left the company at the end of 2018, still in good terms with them.
[0]: http://fabrica.land/
I am a bit disappointed that it is not.
Actually after doing more reading, I'm not really sure what this is. Landing pages with almost no tangible information are the worst kind.
With grid-energy blockchains there is a tangible good. But decreased power consumption by one metric doesn't assure power is not used off platform. (not to mention the green-ness of any such generation)
Not sure I fully understand this one, perhaps I missed it in the white paper. The more traditional method of this is the investors fund the project and then the benefitting company pays the investors a portion of what they would have been paying the utility companies if it hadn't been for the upgrad project. It's not clear to me if that actually takes place in the Efforce method, does the benefitting company have to buy tokens to pay the investors?
Also, if all savings are calculated based on meter readings sent "directly" to the chain, how do you account for changes in energy requirements due to upsizing or downsizing or any other change not covered by the contract? A mechanism for this would seem to require a method of putting a thumb on the scale, and if that's he case then why use the token instead of the more traditional method.
I'm not saying that Proof of Work algorithms have no value at all, but I believe they have very little value to humanity compared to most other uses for that energy, and increase the costs of energy in many cases for most other applications.
Currently Proof of Work spends energy to create a betting market for rich people. Maybe in the future there might be useful application of it, but we've yet to get any further than theorising and small scale demonstrations.
Anyway, I would agree that if the PoW had a secondary purpose, like enhancing the efficiency of the blockchain, or providing scientific compututation, it would provide more value to humanity.
https://docs.ethhub.io/ethereum-roadmap/ethereum-2.0/proof-o...
I mean, it totally sounds advanced and futureproof.
Navigation didn't work for some stuff on mogile but I dowloaded the PDF whitepaper and I must say this is more shallow than most "tokens".
If I understand correctly, people invest money into a pool that is distributed for companies/industries to spend, in order to increase their energy efficiency. Once they are done ("once" should be "if"), part of their savings goes to the investors. I think it is reasonable to assume that such process doesn't need any crypto proof and ultimately depends on lawyers, salesmen and bankers. Making a company or an industry more efficient requires talent and strategy, not just pouring money and it is a very risky and long process. If these guys feel competent to make a profitable energy efficiency fund, they should start one. And with clear legal protection for the investors, not a token.
Edit: Good example, estate transfers and mortgages are a potentially quite good use-case for blockchain. Why is nobody using it? Because it's Fucking Magic.. nobody with a sensible risk profile is going to replace a "contracts and lawyers" process that works well-enough with Fucking Magic.
The fact that it's a blockchain likely makes it attractive to some people, so maybe it was chosen for marketing/hype reasons. Would it have landed at the hn front page had it been a traditional investment company? Likely not.
A while back I read Matt Taibbi's book The Divide. Chapter 8 was about collection on delinquent credit card debt, and it was horrifying. According to Taibbi, "the bulk of the credit card collection business is conducted without any supporting documentation showing up or being seen by human eyes at any part of the process....in the overwhelmed modern court system, simply attesting to having the right documentation works just as well as really having it."
According to one judge, "On a regular basis this court encounters defendants being sued on the same debt by more than one creditor alleging it is the assignee of the original credit card obligation." It's also common for lenders to claim delinquency despite the loan actually being paid.
In theory, defendants can challenge all this but even if they could afford lawyers, they often don't even know they're getting sued. When they don't show up there's a default judgement against them and their wages get garnished.
If we had a really scalable blockchain to run all this, including the loan payments and loan sales, then courts could automatically check this stuff. We have the tech now to maintain sufficient privacy for borrowers.
Of course we wouldn't need a blockchain if courts were doing their job, but a pure software solution is likely cheaper than spending a lot more tax money to examine paper documents.
What do you mean by that? Do you not get a mail that you should show up in court? Or do you have to read the newspaper public announcements?
I'm reminded of Matt Levine's comments on crypto:
> The blockchain-y reinvention of everything in the financial world -- money, contracts, companies -- is fascinating and impressive and, viewed from a certain angle, adorable. But sometimes it could stand to learn from what has gone before. After all, the elements of finance -- money, contracts, companies -- have already been invented. Perhaps their historical development might hold some lessons for their re-inventors.
A price already exists on energy and companies have an incentive to reduce their energy consumption if only to save money. Maybe you don't agree with the price, or maybe you don't agree with the cost of financing, but those two levers you can more directly control and certainly don't require blockchain
[0] https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2016-05-17/blockc...
This is true of basically every single cryptocurrency project.
The main problem the cryptocurrency tends to solve is that the lawyers, salesmen and bankers have an annoying tendency to insist you follow the law and don't steal everything.
"In the last ten years energy consumption increased exponentially world wide."
It sure doesn't look exponential: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/primary-energy-consumptio...
And if you break it down by energy use per person a really interesting trend emerges:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/per-capita-energy-use?tab...
For much of the western world energy use per person has flat-lined or started decreasing. This appears to be a fairly robust effect, you can see that Taiwan had very consistent growth until ~2007 at which point their trend closely matches USA/France/Germany.
The tremendous growth in energy consumption is mostly developing nations, mostly Asia, starting to live closer to how developed nations live.
If it is, they're getting good.
Otherwise, I don't see how they'll offset the carbon cost of the coin itself; which is a paradox I don't think they can overcome if I'm understanding this correctly.
Seemingly novel ideas like binding medical or scientific research with cryptocoins means extending trust. Which means that the cryptocoin is just along for the ride and to hype the investment. It's not decentralized and trustless.
With very rare exceptions: primecoin was designed to help uncover specific chains of primes.
No pun intended: an energy saving platform based on an energy inefficient blockchain. I should expect them to choose another blockchain or wait for Eth2.
Don't do it. There is amazing tech out there. I hate to see this
If so that seems pretty counter productive as far as the environmental goals go.
As for the rest, how does actually measuring energy saved tie into the chain? Who verifies this?
I guess it's international irony day?
Is this still a viable startup strategy?
Stan Lee was involved with a company called Stan Lee Media back around 2000 or so. Turns out his business partner was attempting to use it as a pump and dump scheme, and fucked off to Brazil when he heard the Feds were sniffing. But it gets stranger! When Stan Lee himself reacquired control of the content he created for SLM through a new company called Pow! Entertainment after SLM went bankrupt, his former business partner tried to sue him, from federal prison using intermediaries, to reacquire control of all of Stan Lee's creations, including Marvel properties like Spider-Man! The ensuing legal battle would dog Lee for the rest of his life -- kinda like how SCO v. IBM is unresolved to this day, there's still a little stub of a company trying to assert copyright over Linux.
I think Wozniak, like Lee, may have innocently gotten involved with some shady characters. Hey, it's California, it's the tech industry, these things happen.
That's a very strange phrasing.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Command_and_control_regulati...