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I don't know much about Raiden, is there anything preventing a side chain of bitcoin from implementing it?

I think we can all assume that threats of violence and bodily harm are not and should not be covered by the 1st amendment. Only using the US eccentric amendment as an example.

Or better yet a decentralized protocol to easily contribute to people you support that cannot be censored. A stable asset is still needed for this to work and a mature ecosystem around it. Not ready for mainstream, but if you are being denied service, there is always crypto currency.

Good use is subjective, plenty of people are using the blockchain as a speculative asset and willing to pay transaction fees for it.

For now yes. More privacy features are on the road map though. You can always easily convert Bitcoin for a more anonymous eccentric currency and then convert it back to Bitcoin if you want to hide your trail if you need to.

But you can still sell the shovels for the ICO gold rush.

Valid points. The project is not production ready yet. One of the main devs has a good explaination of his tweet stating:

>"Ethereum isn't safe or scalable. It is immature experimental tech. Don't rely on it for mission critical apps unless absolutely necessary!"

https://medium.com/@Vlad_Zamfir/about-my-tweet-from-yesterda...

Bancors price floor they were propping up collapsed as well. Good example of a flawed project. Analysis of some of its flaws by Emin Gun below:

http://hackingdistributed.com/2017/06/19/bancor-is-flawed/

Bitcoin is not a security so I don't think the comparison is valid. Your other examples don't involve securities or the SEC. I'm not familiar enough with Unikrn to comment on that.

They needed a language to compile to the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM).

Stack exchange with more info. https://ethereum.stackexchange.com/questions/3112/what-is-th...

Thanks for linking docs

Standard peer reviewed libraries for the new world of smart contracts is sorely needed. Hopefully the increased complexity does not increase the gas costs of the contracts too much. I think most devs would trade higher gas costs for a more secure platform to develop on. Anyone who lost funds in the parity wallet hack would probably agree.

https://www.coindesk.com/30-million-ether-reported-stolen-pa...

Multiple chains that have diverged in the past can never join together. Unless you want to double the amount of total coins in the network. Its technically possible if two different chains wanted to merge they could decide on which block they will merge at, but there is the huge issue of agreeing on an exchange rate between the both old coins to the new coins.

What about dominant assurance contracts for funding public goods?

As a crypto fan, I try to pay close attention to the critics. Its tough to find someone who understands the tech and doesn't think it has some chance of success.

Having said that, Tim Swanson has some good critiques of bitcoin/blockchain. http://www.ofnumbers.com/ He does work for R3, the banking consortium which isn't creating blockchain technology, but distributed ledger technology.

Don't forget that it is not just the technical details that give it value, also the cryptoeconomic incentives that make it possible for a group of self interested miners to provide a network users can trust.

"hacked" is definitely subjective. For anyone interested checkout the"attackers" legal threat right before the fork. https://pastebin.com/CcGUBgDG

Here is the HN discussion about it. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11927891

Can you point out where they are asking for money?

Thanks, edited.

This may help you out to get started, then read the previous article I linked.

https://medium.com/@nopara73/explain-uasf-like-im-five-ae879...

It is not a simple topic with two sides. It has very technical details as well as economic incentives for both sides which leads to a lot of game theory.

It depends on your view point. For Bitcoin to succeed it must be able to withstand what some view as an "attack" on it. If bitcoin is vulnerable to this attack it doesn't deserve to last, it needs to be fixed, tested and tried again. All of these cryptocurrencies are still experiments and advocates equate changing the code consensus code like patching a 787 in mid flight because of how much value is dependent on the network working.

The miners fork winning will be a bad thing if you value the decentralized aspect of the currency and want bitcoin to succeed. Not everyone does.

In what scenario would it be in anyone's interest to raise the maximum total of coins to be created?

The majority of cryptocurrencies value is derived from what the market thinks it is worth. The market can deem any coin's value to be worth 0 at any time. The value is extremely volatile and can lose and gain value quickly. There are some projects like Tether and Bitshares who have tried to create a stable digital asset. I don't know how successful they have been.

https://tether.to/

Speculation is that this is primarily due to Bitmain's announcement yesterday to hard fork if the UASF soft fork gets any momentum. Jimmy Song has a good analysis on this.

https://medium.com/@jimmysong/examining-bitmains-press-relea...

This forking of Bitcoin is a required trial that the chain must go through to prove how resilient it is to this type of attack. It is unknown which chain will win in the event of a fork, maybe Ethereum will win, probably not PotCoin.

Financial privacy. You can still report it on your taxes. Maybe some of the coins you now own were stolen and you just happened to get them from the exchange and you are concerned about the fungability of bitcoin in your legal jurisdiction.

A decentralized network has trade offs associated with it.

As a lay person they shouldn't care unless it solves a problem they have. It is only too much for a layperson until bitcoin is a good answer for the problem they have. From women in Saudi Arabia who cannot own bank accounts, to the people of Argentina and Venezuela who are desperate to move their wealth into another asset, bitcoin still offers them an answer despite its great volatility.

One bitcoin is worth more than the current world reserve currency because the market demands it. Even if it is mostly speculators with cheap money that flows from all of the central banks printing it and offering negative interest rates.

Perceived 'crypto economic incentives' will taint any controversial decision in most public chains. Those incentives must be tested to prove that they work. If they fail, we rebuild chains with better incentives; this is how bitcoin became anti-fragile.

Last I heard, tethers peg to the dollar was unsustainable.

The blockchain can be used to enrypt the data you generate on a blockchain and entrust the user with a cryptographic token that can be used to generate different tokens that allow others to decrypt specific sets of data, like location tracking.

The tough part about this is that for the user to truly own their data, they must be entrusted with the root keys of their data, and if they lose it, and their backup pass phrase, the data is lost forever.