sidko

It doesn't matter that a business isn't making a business decision based on altruism. What matters is that the incentives of the users are aligned with those of the business

The loss of privacy in this case may not be worth using a public ledger.

In general though, I think it would be an interesting experiment if individuals can hold central bank money directly instead of going through commercial banks.

How do you define "1$ USD peg"? As of right now, the price of DAI is $0.98, 2% off its "peg". Asking as a serious question, since I see this statement a lot.

Banks have existed long before fractional reserve though. You really don't need fraction reserve for banks to exist.

The value of Bitcoin comes from social consensus. You cannot fork that. You can only fork a code repository. End of the day, it is just a bunch of 1s and 0s without a social consensus of value.

Only a fraction of Brave users use BAT though, so not sure it should be counted as a blockchain app. You don't need BAT to use Brave, the browser.

> Well, Journal uses zero-knowledge encryption that ensures Journal employees can’t read or decrypt the information of the user. This isn't an actual zero-knowledge proof, just regular encryption as the image below describes. Not sure why it is described as 'zero-knowledge' in the article.

>That’s insane. That’s more than Apple, Amazon, and Alphabet’s 2017 net income combined.

That's not insane, that's false. Just Apple's 2017 net income was $48.35B [1], more than the $45B in the parent comment.

[1] https://investor.apple.com/investor-relations/sec-filings/se...

Protonmail.

How would you send him/her dollars?

Can you explain how you see that happening?

Your reply almost implies that Google is a charity and is providing "the amount of free services" as a public good. It is not.

>Has been discussed for years with nothing to show

Yes, it's literally an overnight success. I think they started coding this last night, and it's in beta today /s

On a more serious note, a lot of work has firstly gone into making sure all the different implementations work well with each other, aka the standardization problem. That's a big win in and of itself.

The routing problem isn't trivial either. Lightning currently uses an 'onion-like' routing scheme where, similar to TOR, the nodes have a very limited information on the origin and destination addresses. This is great news for privacy.

The lightning network has been running on the testnet successfully for many months now, and some early adopter merchants even accepted testnet coins for small purchases. Over a 1000 lightning nodes are currently running.

If you're a Coinbase user, please don't use Coinbase to buy. The fees are really high. Instead, use GDAX. Your Coinbase account is sufficient to register with GDAX and all your privileges like limits, KYC, etc. is carried over.

It supports both Market Orders and Limit Orders. Transfers from GDAX to Coinbase are instantaneous and off-blockchain, so there are no fees.

As a bonus fun fact, if you transfer BTC from GDAX to your personal wallet, there is no Bitcoin network fee charged to you. However, if you use Coinbase, you'll end up paying a lot more in fees than you must because Coinbase uses very inefficient fee-estimation systems and still haven't deployed SegWit or batching which would reduce network fee for their customers.

>They are interested in it due to the pretty charts and slick interface of coinbase and robinhood You got to be kidding if you think Coinbase has a slick interface/user experience. You would need to explain why in-spite of such a terrible interface, people are flocking to Coinbase to buy Bitcoin/Ethereum. In fact, so much so that Coinbase was the top app on the App Store for a day [1].

[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2017/12/08/coinbase-was-top-of-us-apple...

>Many of the young adults and teens do not understand the concept of compound interest at all

I'll need a source for that. It doesn't seem like humans in general are wired to really grasp the power of compound interest (or exponential functions for that matter), so if you're claiming that young adults today are less likely than average to grasp that concept, I'd need a source for that. I do not believe it to be true, but I am happy to be proven wrong.

ERC20 is just a token standard on Ethereum. You can issue ERC20 tokens for anything. Some of these will be securities, some won't. It's the use of the tokens that matters, not the protocol/tech behind it.

Here's a list [1] of 400 exchanges you can buy Bitcoin from, 34 of trade BTC/USD. This doesn't include some sites that charge a premium and allow you to buy with debit cards. There are also Bitcoin ATMs, over 1000 of them in the United States [2].

[1] https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/bitcoin/#markets [2] https://coinatmradar.com/

Apple's contribution to the Vision Fund is only 1% of the total Vision Fund's raise [1].

[1] https://techcrunch.com/2017/01/04/apple-joins-softbanks-visi...

Bitcoin is NOT infinitely divisible. Each Bitcoin is divisible into 10^8. There were reasons to choose this number and isn't arbitrary [1].

[1] https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/31933/why-is-bit...

Also, an additional note to your comment - remember that the Ethereum network has been backlogged for several hours to almost a day after an ICO (Bancor, Status). Now imagine one production application running on Ethereum. Now imagine several. How would they really even work?

And some projects thought Bitcoin wouldn't scale for micropayments so they should move to Ethereum because they have solved it. Oh boy.

Remember the market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent. It is seldom a good idea to short an asset just because you think it is a bubble, unless you're able to call the peak.

Did you look into Lunyr much at all? They are just using IPFS on the backend (or plan to use, per their ICO communication to raise money), and using an Ethereum-based ERC20 token to 'incentivize' people to contribute and edit.

You'll find a lot of such dismissive articles about Bitcoin throughout its existence. Here's a collection of 'Bitcoin obituaries' if you want to reinforce that view: https://99bitcoins.com/bitcoinobituaries/

There are horror stories on the consumer side too. Multiple withdrawals when only one was instructed, delays in getting money after a buy/sell, locking people out of their accounts still with Bitcoin in them without providing a reason, canceled buy orders during a volatile market, and what not.

r/bitcoin is littered with such user complaints. It is sad that the best way to get support on Coinbase issues is to go on reddit to complain.

Many people have moved to Circle for a smoother consumer experience.

p.s. no relation to either Coinbase or Circle except as a consumer.

Just to clarify, this is NOT Ethereum, it is a fork of Ethereum, also referred to in that tweet reply as 'private Ethereum'. There is nothing called 'private Ethereum' - all Ethereum transactions are public. But lots of these enterprise blockchains fork from Bitcoin or Ethereum and create their private versions. This doesn't use ETH/ETC.

It allows a way to 'split' the DAO, and also take your 'share' of what's left and just leave.

For instance, you are already scared and don't want to deal with this anymore, you can just take all the ETH that you put into this and forget the whole thing happened.

However, there are some issues with timing, and other attack vectors/flaws in this mechanism outlined in the research being referred to in the article.

Here's the original research paper. It's a very good read: https://docs.google.com/document/d/10kTyCmGPhvZy94F7VWyS-dQ4...

Be careful with malware ads on Google Search. This happens fairly regularly, and in some cases can mean a direct loss of money, e.g. if you search for 'blockchain', instead of the online Bitcoin wallet showing up, Google ads often points to a malware that is a phishing site and occasionally people fall for it and lose all their Bitcoins [1]. This has been going on for a long time [2][3].

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/27j1gd/i_had_53_bt...

[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/2pm4tx/blockchaini...

[3] https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/4e99po/blokchalini...

Because search tends to have a significantly higher margin than Google's other offerings (say Cloud), even if non-advertising revenue reaches 10% of total revenue, the non-advertising profit is below 10%

Taxing capital gains less than ordinary income is a crude method to ensure that you're not being taxed on your losses (in terms of real purchasing power). Unless that's fixed first, there is no way you should be paying for losses.

Based on today's taxation laws, if you bought a stock for $100 10 years ago, and sold it for $110 today, you'll be taxed for the $10 "gain" even though in real terms you lost a fair amount of money. Calculating the real loss (not the nominal gain) is complicated because you need to consider inflation each year into the calculation and the IRS doesn't allow for that.

Not disagreeing that capital and labor need to be taxed at the same rate, but the situation is trickier than just saying "lets tax all gains and wages at the same rate".

Why is the time obscene? It usually takes 45 days for confirmation if you pay via a credit card. Compare that to about 60 minutes for 6 confirmations on the Bitcoin blockchain, and it's orders of magnitude higher.

You aren't actually comparing the few seconds it takes to swipe your credit card to 60 minute Bitcoin confirmation I hope. It's about 'reversibility' of a transaction - for a Bitcoin transaction to propagate takes about the same time as a credit card swipe to propagate.

Edit: Wow why the downvotes? Seems like people here don't understand the first thing about how payments work in the real world. The funds are not 'confirmed' instantaneously. If someone walks into your store and pays you $1000 with a card, you can't say withdraw it in cash in 2 seconds.

It takes about the same time for a 0-confirmation Bitcoin transaction as an 'unconfirmed' card transaction.