If I pay for something using LN am I going to find it a superior experience to paying with cash or card, or am I going to find it a cumbersome experience for which I am charged an exorbitant fee?
345 karma · joined April 12, 2008
Can it operate on it's own, or does it need to be a layer on top of a cryptocoin network?
What incentive do LN node operators have to operate?
Isn't that what "off-chain transactions" and the "Lightning Network" are?
What are the equivalents with cryptocurrencies/blockchains? I ask this all the time, no one seems to have an answer.
The extent of the discussion around cryptocurrencies seems to be rambling on about things that either, no one understands, few people care about, or as a solution to a "problem" that few people if any, actually have. But people are "really excited" about these obscure curiosities, because if they can get other people about excited too they can sell their holdings for more than they paid for them.
The comparison between the web and cryptocoins seems really strained because not only can you not show the average Joe anything that would really impress him done with a cryptocurrency, beyond an irrational exuberance, but also because the two are so vastly different in scope.
The impetus of bitcoin was about an experiment of enacting a certain type of monetary system related to a certain political philosophy. In comparison the web is basically infinite. You can read about, write about, or discuss that political philosophy, or any of a hundred others, or you can do any of millions of other things having nothing to do with a political philosophy.
One of the great legacies of the web is the dematerialization and demonetization it wrought due to zeroing out reproduction and distribution costs.
Now we have people pretending that code that can be literally copy and pasted to start a new network of ____coin is somehow super wow! valuable!
Does it get sent back to the mothership? How is it processed? Is it discarded? Who has access?
When data is the new oil, these questions answer themselves if there is not legislation to prevent it.
Such data would be hugely attractive for commercial interests.
Hedge-funds and the like, use aerial imagery to get data like the amount of cars in parking lots at shopping areas.
With a fleet of cars with 360 degree cameras driving around, not only could the number of people on the sidewalks be counted, but it would be technically possible to identify most of them.
Not to sound like a jerk, but I would be shocked if there were anyone working on this that was not pursuing things in this way. It just seems kind of obvious that you can't have some big hunk of metal rolling around, following some abstracted track from a map, without "looking" where it is going.
Another interesting thing to consider, should there be widespread use of autonomous vehicles is the absolutely massive deployment of digital sensors that would entail, and who would use this data and to what ends? It would basically be realtime Streetview.
We have these, they're called debit cards, credit cards, paypal, etc.
For anything "state-sanctioned," centralized and "trustful" systems are always going to be more efficient, and chosen over less efficient and inferior options.
This is why it's hard to see where something like bitcoin would ever find widespread use, it's only good for non-"state-sanctioned" things.
If large numbers of people were to start doing non-"state-sanctioned" things, they wouldn't start using bitcoin, they would change the laws of the state.
You may feel a $20 fee is negligible, how about a 1% price move? 10%?
It's funny how often one sees these sort of high-dollar scenarios described for this "decentralized"! "currency of the people"!
Like, sending million dollar wires is a fairly niche market, and to my knowledge people regularly engaging in such things seem to be getting along just fine, there not crying out desperately for a better solution. And how exactly is bitcoin better for doing this if your million dollar transactions don't consist of the spoils from an exchange hack, exit scam or the like?
It's just a very reliable network for sending very big transactions.
Do you think the traditional channels for sending million dollar wires are unreliable? This seems like an area where the market is likely to converge on the very most reliable options and any service provider in this area with even a hint of unreliability would rapidly fade away.
You're enthused about dealing with cryptocurrencies for reasons of being insured by a centralized, third-party, who you've placed your trust in.
Who is transacting monetarily in bitcoin? Why do they find it superior to other options? Is this a growing cohort?
But here's the problem with this idea as being some buoy for bitcoin/cryptocurrencies, once an economy of this sort develops with some semblance of structure, that market is going to seek out inefficiencies. First on the chopping block? A massively inefficient distributed currency system.
For this reason I think any sustainable use case of a bitcoin like system is necessarily rather niche, and rather 'seedy' or worse, ransomware, etc. But if all the bitcoin dreamers fade away, it becomes much easier to counteract the use of btc-like systems for ransomware extortions and the like.
This is completely antithetical to bitcoin. Upon reading that sentence, I thought surely this is a joke.
Not only is a bank account for bitcoins completely antithetical to the very notion of bitcoin, but it eliminates any need for bitcoin's central innovation, a distributed, unified verification system in the form of a 'blockchain,' generated by a clever utilization of P and NP.
Money is fungible, it doesn't really matter if I have dollars, or pesos, or yen in my bank account. The only reason you want a bank account for bitcoin is because you want a bank account with magic internet money that magically, irrationally increases in value until it doesn't. And you don't want the headache of worrying about all the potential missteps when messing about with your magic internet money.
Starting at what?
What is the value proposition that is actually in play here, for which there is some hard evidence of it's existence, other than a speculative frenzy?
It's a bit galling how many people this go 'round are just outright saying "yeah, it's a ponzi, come on guys hop on! there's a high ceiling! hope you get your chair when the music stops!"
But my first reading of this comment was as a wry response to the content of the parent comment.
And that is why natural language is not a formal system!
The same way psychologists and the military measure intelligence.
>Wouldn't that introduce biases?
Like what?
>What makes you think this is what college is for nowadays?
Colleges and Universities have historically been and should always be about the preservation and pursuit of knowledge. If that is what is being optimized for, then you should also optimize for intelligence because the two are inextricably linked.
That wouldn't dilute status because only 1 percent of the population is in the top percentile of intelligence.
First one must determine what goals, tasks, and activities are the most worthwhile and broadly beneficial to pursue. Then pursuing and being productive in moving towards those things brings happiness, contentment, meaning, and fulfillment.
Easy to type, harder to do, but worth pursuing.
Can that really be said of anything, with the nature of markets, and supply and demand?
If I invest in solar panels, or oil wells, then the expected value per unit sold of the product I produce will be dependent on a massive number of predictable and unpredictable inter-playing forces in a global complex system.
While I can make forecasts of an average expected unit price by studying historical prices, factors affecting them, probabilities of various events, etc. there is also the case that my very selling of the product has an effect on the price I can expect.
As a supplier at a certain scale I can expect revenues to follow a downward curve, with each unit supplied a certain amount of demand is satisfied and thus lowering the overall market price and my expected revenue.
It's not exactly a one-way curve, at higher supplies and lower prices, new avenues of demand can be opened and prices can follow a curve upward.
I like the idea and thinking you've proposed here, but it seems like the complexity of markets is more complicated than Kolmogorov complexity.
It seems the like what produces value in terms of the most optimal ratio between input and output is always in flux. And when a maxima of optimal value is found all the mechanisms of market forces work against it being deterministic and precisely reproducible.
I think to deduce a measure like you proposed in an economic context you would have to have a product that is absolutely finite in potential supply and all potential uses for the product strictly defined, enumerable, and un-extendable. And therefore lowering JumpCrisscross complexity would simply be a matter of optimizing production costs.
But I'm not sure any such scenario exists, it would require a deterministic understanding of the universe and it's constituent parts that we don't have and it would have to preclude the ingenuity and creativity that seem to be key human qualities that drive the flux and change we see in the world.
A ton of gold exists in a single time and space, meaning security measures are highly localized and conveyance to another location requires a non-trivial energy expenditure.
The more or less "pure information" basis of crypto-currencies mean the security mechanisms surrounding them must be "global," they can be potentially accessed unauthorized by someone anywhere on the planet through means of social engineering, exploiting faulty code, or similar. And once accessed the "pure information" can vanish from the reach of the ostensible owner with just a few electrons cycling through a few circuits.
In fact what percentage of the total supply of bitcoin were acquired in just such a manner?
And from this point of view the propensity for a crypto-currency to suddenly vanish if every 'i' is not dotted and every 't' not carefully crossed, is rightly seen as a liability for the 'store of value' game.
Also interesting to consider is the kind of security precaution spread that exists between between various value levels in precious metals, vs. crypto-currencies.
For example, consider the difference in security mechanisms employed by someone storing a couple gold coins in a box in their house, vs. Fort Knox.
Whereas your security precautions for storing $10, or $1,000,000 in crypto-currency are not a whole lot different.
You can have free speech or you can have "hate speech."
Hate is an emotion, a label people apply to the way they feel. The way you feel is your choice. Emotions and feelings are variable and subjective.
Freedom is absolute and objective, something is free or it isn't.
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it's exciting to imagine
What exactly excites you about such a scenario, from an open discourse and marketplace of ideas perspective?
But how to ship it to China and India? Set up some high voltage lines? Convert the locally generated electricity to some form of transportable, easily re-convertible embodied energy?
If you search the title or visit the author's homepage you can sometimes find a copy hosted, and these days there is of course sci-hub.
The US has just exited a period of a record setting "hurricane drought," so maybe the hurricane remnant weather seems unusual because no such storms have made landfall in the US for the past decade plus.
That this year had a cluster of large storms isn't really indicative of anything in and of itself. Most things appear to happen in clusters. Things aren't perfectly evenly distributed.
https://weather.com/storms/hurricane/news/major-hurricane-us...!
dot com stocks themselves may have been a lot of hype but at least they had the precedence of several hundred years of capital market infrastructure around them to lend some credence.