Centralized node services cannot screw you over other than refusing to provide service. Even when using a centralized node, your wallet still manages its own keys.
1,688 karma · joined December 11, 2015
That's because like fine art, the mechanism that produces block space can only generate a very limited amount per unit time, and latent demand is always orders of magnitude higher than the supply. You can't just flood the market with fresh Ethereum block space any more than you can flood the market with fresh Banksies.
Note: Was memory hard. ETH's PoW algo was abandoned by the main chain as of last year.
A lot of AI's power usage is going towards generating images, or writing fiction, or doing any number of other things that don't help people improve any kind of physical processes. That's not to get into the GPU usage of video games, which by every economic measure consist of entirely useless calculations. In both AI and crypto you can find people using the resources to perform "useful" and "not useful" calculations; it's all subjective and at the end of the day people have the right to run up their electricity bill on whatever they fancy.
> If somebody invents a chip that uses 10% of the power, the industry would gladly adopt it and decrease consumption by 90%.
If someone created an invention that used 0.012% of the power to run a blockchain, many chains would gladly adopt it and decrease their energy consumption by 99.988%.
In fact that's exactly what Ethereum did, with its move from Proof of Work to Proof of Stake. Now, almost every new chain is PoS.
> This is the general pattern in computing, except for crypto.
Ethereum did it.
That said, in many countries it is only illegal for residents of that country to facilitate foreign money services for others, it's not strictly illegal for them to take advantage of money services that do exist. In those cases, a borderless app doesn't actually break the law.
Basically, I can't agree with you that it's "not a good thing" that Argentinians are able to hold 10 dollar balances on their phone so that they can afford groceries next month. I think that's a good thing. People can afford groceries who weren't able to before.
By the way, I'm going to adjust that bar one more time. Good applications are ones where the added value "cannot be attained with less effort by other means", not where the added value "cannot be attained by other means".
I would be hard pressed to find someone who could more cheaply and easily smuggle physical dollars into Argentina than they could smuggle in stablecoins.
On a side note, "can't be done without blockchain" is not the bar to clear here. The bar is "could be improved by blockchain".
The article is dubiously unsourced and I can spot several inaccuracies just from reading it, so it's likely the rest of the data in the article is inaccurate too.
Through backwards-compatible soft forks.
Nobody removed the ability to make non-segwit transactions. SegWit did not change the existing transaction format or change the chain, it repurposed the "anyone-can-spend" transaction space.
Unlike with a lot of other cryptocurrencies, the Bitcoin dev team bends over backwards to try to make sure their protocol updates extend the existing protocol rather than changing it.
And most critically neither issuance nor balances have been changed, with the exception of the isolated value overflow error that was corrected during Bitcoin's infancy in 2010.
> Every fork happens in order to effect some change – and whether that change is beneficial or not is the matter of policy, not technology.
It's a matter of individual opinion. And with Bitcoin, every individual user can assert their own opinion by running the protocol version that aligns most with their own opinion. You can't opt out of your bank's software update.
> Voting against a fork (with your mining power or wallet) is also a policy decision. You can't escape human nature in a system built and used by humans, not even in a very conservative/change-averse one, because conservatism is, once again, a human value, not a technological one.
I can't argue with that. Being a bitcoin user is inherently a policy decision.
Everyone makes a policy decision by clicking the "download" button. It's part of Bitcoin's strength and it's part of Bitcoin's weakness.
The best tool we have against them is prevention. In practice, this usually means a friendly bank employee refusing to honor a customer's wire transfer. Because once the money is sent, there's no getting it back.
In fact, all else equal, I'd rather have crypto stolen by someone else in my home country than to have fiat currency stolen by an international thief. At least with the domestic criminal there's some chance of tracing the theft, tracking them down, and bringing them to justice in my home justice system. With the international thief, there's really zero chance of that.
If someone alters the amount of bitcoins out there, my wallet software won't recognize those bitcoins as legitimate.
I think you asked and answered your own question. It's still "a thing" because people still speculate on it. In particular, people gamble on it being more of "a thing" in the future.
Which money are you talking about? Most monies are driven substantially by monetary policy and other direct government intervention. The very reason fiat is no longer finite is due to government intervention in the 1930s (going off the gold standard).
Bitcoin (e.g.) is actually much more like gold in that the amount of it in circulation isn't determined by any law, policy or intervention.
Or just over time. Everyone gets there by their 80s or 90s, if they're lucky.