aakilfernandes

While a fair point, cost is not value. It is the lower bound of value.

It could be that targeted ads are creating $10 value per person but it only cost $1 per person, $9 of which goes to the advertiser/consumer.

1) Irreversibility. You have a payment system with that small companies can actually build gateways to true cryptos. Not to mention the “high risk” businesses locked out or priced out of fiat gateways

2) Cryptographic proofs of payment. With that you can do a lot of fun stuff, especially with smart contracts. Going back to #1 you can make the gateway trustless

Libra isn't a cypherpunk wet dream, but it moves us in that direction and thats a good thing. This article is written from the perspective that crypto mass-adoption is right around the corner (i.e. just a few UX tweaks) and that Libra will displace the crypto-utopia that could-have-been. I couldn't disagree more.

The lack of adoption is a combo of a 1) network "dead-zone", 2) reversal risk, and 3) regulatory friction.

FB & Co are uniquely situated to fix these 3 in a way small companies just can't.

1) Any network is useless unless people you need to use the network are using it. Cryptos are still in the "dead-zone" where there's not enough people using it where it has value as a payment platform. By integrating into existing apps (Venmo, FB Messenger, Paypal) that could change

2) Every fiat transaction has some level of reversal risk. There is legislation in the US that requires, and companies that implement, reversal of payments if the payor claims fraud or account takeover. Any company that sits in between fiat systems and the crypto systems have a huge amount of this risk cause they can't reverse crypto payments. These companies are uniquely capable of handling this risk because they already spending resources to figuring out that you're a real human being and you are who you say you are.

3) Regulatory friction (AML/KYC) is something these companies are uniquely able to tackle because they have your identity. Furthermore, they have the legal resources to find out how far they can push the line and lobbying to keep them from harm when they get too close.

This could occupy a useful space, but it is by no means a Metamask replacement (which they explain why).

Affiliate marketing is the closest thing to truly passive incom outside investing. That said, it's harder than it looks unless you can find a sticky niche with little competition.

Different jurisdictions have different compliance requirements. Not sure, but my guess is the goal of this project is to allow regulatory arbitrage with a single unified interface.

0x is a decentralized, non-custodial exchange protocol. The UI could have malware though, which is why it makes sense for various relayers to have a single UI.

I'm a little confused what the use case is for this. Can someone elaborate?

Ive consulted for a few years in the US, never had this happen to me or heard it happening to fellow consultants.

Ah. Yes I think Foreman was a bad example of what I was trying to get at.

I think my main point was that if Howey had 100 fungible orange groves, and one was sold as a security and 99 were sold straight up, that wouldn't make all 100 orange groves as a security, would it?

In United Housing v Foreman, a sale of stock was considered not to be a securities transaction, even though a stock is explicitly a security.

IANAL, but:

The interesting thing about securities is that although we think of a security as a "thing" (like Kin) its actually a transaction - as in a "securities transaction". Meaning with two transactions involving Kin, one transaction could be a securities transaction, and the other could not.

This is more obvious when you think of the original Howey test. Selling an orange grove is not a securities transaction, but selling an orange grove where you also promise to cultivate the asset for the profit of the investor is.

Selling $5 of Kin in to a Kik user doesn't sound like a securities transaction, but selling $5 Million to a VC fund does (though probably one exempt from registration).

I don't think your assessment of 538's models is correct. They used to have something called the "nowcast" which is what your referring to, but they got rid of that.

A neural network trained on HN comments would probably give a scathing critique of a tangentially related project.

There's a simple way to prevent re-entrency.

----------

bool isEntered = false;

function doSomething() { if (isEntered) { throw; } isEntered = true; ...; isEntered = false; }

----------

I don't really understand why they went with this gas-limit solution. I feel like there must be something I'm missing cause its too obvious.

IMHO the VM here isn't really the problem. Its the compiler. The way I look at it this is really a compiler bug, that only gets "activated" with this upgrade.

Yikes. And this is why we don't use "clever" solutions.

For some context, gas (or operations expense) usage was never designed for re-entrency protection. After the DAO attack, in order to prevent re-entrency attacks the Solidity interpreter limited the gas of external calls.

It's clever way to solve the problem. However now when we're trying to change around the gas for certain operations, it's jeopardizing previous contracts that relied on this "clever" solution.

To be honest, this is really bad, cause I'm not sure how Ethereum can ever safely adjust gas.

Edit:

I'm not sure how Ethereum can ever safely adjust gas... until they go back and "monkey patch" all the smart contracts that used the external gas call limit. Since we only can see the compiled code, there's no real way to know if a deployer explicitly wanted that external gas call limit, or was just using it for re-entrency protection.

My hunch is that the only people buying into these obvious scams is other scammers. They look at it and think "hey, I bet a bunch of people will fall for this. I'll buy some first.".

But maybe I'm too naive =/.

Do passwords get shared with Plaid?

Name of service please?

I guess it depends on how you read the statue.

we protect (money with a brokerage firm) that is used for the purchase of securities

or

we protect money with a (brokerage firm that is used for the purchase of securities)

Unfortunately, due to the nature of law, there's no way to get an answer on this until it goes to the courts which will only happen if/when there's a problem.

What other reason would you have an Ameritrade account?

> But how many axioms does one need? And how simple can they be?

In this article, what does "simple" mean? At first I assume it is "simple to understand" but clearly thats not the case.

I got lost quite a bit on this, but luckily I stayed through the end.

> It’s a similar problem in natural science. You see some elaborate set of things happening in some biological system. Can one “reverse engineer” these to find an “explanation” for them? Sometimes one might be able to say, for example, that evolution by natural selection would be likely to lead to something. Or that it’s just common in the computational universe and so is likely to occur. But there’s no guarantee that the natural world is set up in any way that necessarily allows human explanation.

Because moving has transaction costs.

Imagine two lots right next to each other going for a million, but it takes another $100k to set up the store and move in everything.

Walmart moves into one of the lots, then someone offers them 1 million and $1. They could switch lots and make $1, but the switch would cost $100k.

Lying to the shareholders is criminal (maybe civil offense, IANAL) if you're a public company.

It sounds like what is commonly referred to as "sharding" in Ethereum. Is this the case, or is it something different?

By that I mean, are they implementing sharding a different way, or are they going an alternative route?

Blockchain makes perfect sense as a PKI and for URIs. You don't actually hold state there, just public keys and the location of the actual data.

That logo is fantastic

Assuming you mean public blockchains, the main advantage is censorship resistance (you cannot have an administrator delete entries or restrict access).