jebeng

A very large amount of Bitcoiners absolutely insisted we were headed towards hyperinflation due to QE back then. In fact that was the very reason a lot of them were interested in Bitcoin in the first place.

Interesting how things have worked out. They were right about Bitcoin's value, but badly wrong on all of the economic related predictions.

Brevik does/has done consulting and currently does some sort of ambassador type role in China for Tencent's version of Path of Exile too.

Federal level enforcement vs municipal perhaps. Not sure it really has anything to do with banks in particular when all kinds of federal law enforcement agencies act in the same militarized manner.

> But if you break the law to disrupt the financial system

That's quite the generous description of this $600 million scam operation that was apparently completely full of shit from day one.

I mean Uber does some shady things, but it's not a scam.

Oh wow. Now that you mention this I totally remember this project from like 2015 when some people, including Come-From-Beyond, were raising money for some sort of ternary computing hardware project.

Totally forgot about it, and never put two and two together(three and three? :P) to link it to IOTA. Now that they are quite wealthy, I wonder if it will become a reality. I'm highly skeptical, but I really don't know enough to form a real opinion. Definitely one of those things that make you go 'huh?' though.

When they print the Tether to purchase BTC, who's keeping the BTC that's bought?

Assuming this is an actual fraud going on and not real USD being held to back each Tether 1:1.

I think you have it backwards. It's the 'liberal ideology' as you put it that is conflating and rebranding the classic economic liberalism. I think it's fair to say Thatcher and Reagan were proponents of free markets and private ownership, which is at least a basic part of the reason they are considered some of the best examples of neoliberalism last century.

I think you misunderstood their comment. They weren't asking about network fees at all.

I think you have it backwards here for the most part.

What problems do you see infinite blockchains solving?

No comment on whether or not a crash is inevitable, who knows where the price is going. That's not really too important to me. But the fact that Bitcoin is for now the most secure and technologically sound blockchain is what makes it interesting. And actually having those unique characteristics is what makes it special. I definitely don't see much special with 'blockchain the data structure' on its own.

There should be some sort of value threshold or something similar. If your holdings of the hard fork's resulting coin is worth less than some trivial amount, then it shouldn't be necessary. But if for some crazy reason the market decides that another joke like Bitcoin Cash is actually worth some significant amount, then it seems hard to argue that this should somehow be immune to tax.

I don't think this is the type of thing they can really elaborate on for obvious reasons.

But the genuine holder is probably going to be blocked when they start throwing flags like that, and that's probably just standard everywhere with any type of automated fraud protection.

I think there are a few viable, but expensive attack vectors that have been well known within the community for years. But one thing that's always bugged me is how many people out there seem to think that a cryptocurrency could survive being an actual target by a sufficiently powerful state. The economic damage alone just by the whisper of an actual 'war on Bitcoin' would be devastating, without anyone actually lifting a finger. Let alone putting resources into actual attacks on technical, economic, and social levels. Doesn't really matter if a few enthusiast cypherpunks around the world can keep a few nodes going and technically say 'bitcoin is not dead, see!' when the economic model and security is fundamentally based on continued demand for BTC.

I've been really interested in Bitcoin and have followed it closely since Satoshi was still active, and consider myself a pretty big fan of it in general. But the general arrogance and delusion about the reality of where real power is in the world is a bit cringeworthy. And it's always been that way in the community.

It might get interesting in the future if two or more states have competing interest in Bitcoin(or whatever). I can imagine some hypothetical situation where the US political tide turns very anti-BTC, but say China has enough money tied up in it that it's incentivized to attempt to defend it. Like say if enough people in positions of political power have significant portions of their wealth tied up in it. That's possible, I guess. Sounds messy though for something that relies on economic confidence.

Either way, so far all the luck has been on the side of Bitcoin, as really there's been little to no political pushback against the technology itself. That's pretty awesome, and it's made for a very interesting 7 years or so since BTC really woke up and people around here and elsewhere started seriously discussing it. But the political risk is very real and understated imo. The technical risk is interesting in theory for sure, but just knowing a sufficiently powerful state has the ability to attack is probably more than enough to cause massive economic damage without actually pulling any technological triggers.

Perhaps, but I don't think too many people are seriously arguing that Bitcoin or any other flavour of it is a serious contender to replace regular currency. Either way, there should still be some utility there if it's possible to have a secure, censorship resistant asset that provides some privacy. Maybe we're not quite there yet, but I don't think the idea is going to go away anytime soon.

There are tons and tons of cryptocurrencies that have infinite emission schedules. Doing that doesn't appear to give any competitive advantage over other currencies. I don't know if they've decided yet, but the I wouldn't be surprised at all if the subject of this article(Ethereum) ends up with an infinite emission schedule too. It's very common among cryptocurrencies who use Proof of Stake as their decentralized consensus method of choice.

Plus, Bitcoin isn't deflationary by any standard definition of the word. It's not inherently price deflationary of course, since that's dictated by demand. And the money supply inflates, albeit at a known predictable rate which slowly decreases over time.

How is this realizing microtransactions in a decentralized manner?

Having to pay a few cents in transaction fees to get a transaction included on the Bitcoin blockchain does not seem like a great platform for true microtransactions(say <$1).

21 offers their own microtransaction service, but that's just a centralized shared wallet/ledger that offers nothing new. There are multiple centralized services where you can send someone else bitcoin.

The only thing that has potential is payment channels, but I'm not sure how they are going to be implemented in a way that bypasses the Bitcoin blockchain's miner fee.

Just want to chime in and say that this doesn't imply that PGP is safe. I mean, it probably is. They would not let us know, either way.

Oh wow. I didn't know this.

Interesting. This could become a real competitive advantage for them.

Recursively deleting everything.

It's people have made these jokes online for as long as I can remember.

It's sad that it's even remotely possible now that this might become a reality. And you wouldn't even know it.

I've found Al-Jazeera to be the best news network out there. It seems to be only one that's not ridiculously biased and ratings driven.

There is such a wide range of porn now through. A lot of it is quite antisocial.

Having a child look at Playboy or those low budget late night tv softcore movies is one thing, or even something more graphic. It's not really about the sex or nudity that's the problem. But imagine children on 4chan. A lot of that stuff can't be healthy.

"Nudity and sex are normal" That may be true, but internet pornography in general is definitely not normal.

I don't support any censorship. But if you were a parent, you might want to think twice about giving your 12 year old free reign on internet porn.

You would probably find the best bang for your buck in Michigan. Lots of quality, just little work.

There is child pornography in the block chain already unfortunately.

Many millions of dollars worth. Huge number if you include gambling related commerce. Even without gambling it is almost certainly an 8 figure amount.

edit: monthly

Yes, quite the success story.

Only possible because of the ineptitude of other market participants utterly failing in deploying ASICs.

I remember seeing this before. The quality of the courses were often quite poor. And many instructors would start a course and not finish it, leaving the people following the course hanging.

Totally different product really...

Well, yeah. But you should have seen the numbers they were promising us in 1999...

Gotta hand it to him. That's commitment!