aakilfernandes

How does spam prevention work?

There's a possibility that its affiliate advertisers to blame.

Ditto

Any idea on the tax implications of this? Do you have to pay cap gains when using crypto as collateral?

If not, seems like it'd be massively useful for whales to cash out without paying taxes.

I notice these bars every time I see them in the store. Its amazing how big a difference package design can make.

There are some users who would actually rather pay $5/mo than use a free service. Thats because paying money gives the impression (real or not) that the service is more likely to stick around and be fixed when it goes down.

Its amazing to me it took 15 years to go from hashcash to Bitcoin. I think it speaks to the strangeness of Bitcoin, and its niche idealogical underpinnings. Bitcoin solved a problem that most of the people never thought about. Yet if you're looking to solve Bitcoin's problem set, calibrated hashcash to secure a ledger seems completely obvious.

I also thought that Bitcoin's asic-vulnerability (and thus mining centralization) would be fatal. It turned out to be not fatal (yet), but thats not something which could be determined on paper. It needed real-world use before people knew if it could work or not.

I prefer the laissez-faire philosophy of classic, but the innovation is happening on the main chain.

IMHO the real bottle neck here is NAT, so I'd throw universal static ipv6 consumer adoption in with this.

Ethereum's Casper

https://github.com/ethereum/research/blob/master/casper4/pap...

It aims for more economically secure public blockchains with shorter confirmation times and less cost (electricity/hardware/inflation). I haven't delved deep enough into it to be fully convinced, but what I've gotten through so far is promising. AFAIK its the only proof of stake algorithm thats been formally documented.

Hiring a maid is especially great if you live with other people. Splitting a bill is much easier than splitting tasks.

Why are token sales not considered applications? If kickstarter or seedinvest or gofundme had been doing the kind of volume eth is doing, would you say those platforms have no "actual user base"?

Absolutely agree, and Ethereum is a great platform for building those stable currencies. Check out Stabl and Maker for two orgs trying to make this happen.

But its also trivial to issue fiat-backed tokens on Ethereum (at least from a technical PoV). See Digix who is doing this with Gold.

Been excellent seeing your posts on here and Reddit over the past few years. Best of luck!

Just got through doing this with another subscription. I was considering just putting a block on them with my CC. Would that be legal?

Sounds really interesting. Would you mind shooting me an email at aakil at safezero dot org?

Bitcoin has a trusted bunch of bootnodes hardcoded into each client. If they act poorly, its trivial to swap them out. Just like its trivial to swap an exchange rate oracle.

Stable coins still have volatility, however the volatility is pushed to a different set of players (in this case the mkr holders). These mkr holders have a big incentive to promote adoption of dai (the stable coin).

The network recalculates payoffs based on the hashrate. If electricity becomes cheaper, hashrate goes up, and the payoff per hash goes down.

Gail for President

Hey, what are you trying to build? Might wanna check out truffle

The headline reminds me of this

http://downlode.org/Etext/nine_billion_names_of_god.html

ELI5:

Lightning is a protocol built on top of bitcoin that allows the trustless transfer of Bitcoin without settling to the chain. These transfers don't need to be individually mined and don't take up capacity on the main chain.

The main drawback is that it requires locking up collateral in a "payment channel" between two peers.

IMHO lightning could be the backbone of some interesting micropayments/exchange architecture in the future.

Very cool!

Another important difference: UDP can't be used in the browser =(

Off-chain transactions. There's no reason to settle every single transaction on the blockchain.

That could take the form of regulated exchanges (coinbase/poloniex) or decentralized networks like lightning.

There is no fundamental reason why a cryptocurrency can't have a dynamic money supply.

Did the author give a 99.9% chance to Clinton? If not, I fail to see how that is relevant.

Also, Nate Silvers gave Trump a 30% chance of winning. There were plenty of pundits who saw Trump as a possibility.

xkcd: Ten Thousand

https://xkcd.com/1053/