The open source nature of Bitcoin, makes sure that development can always be forked. We saw this as recently as with the creation of Bitcoin Cash, which forked form Bitcoin to implement bigger blocksizes, and which is not developed by Blockstream. In the end, if you don't read the code, you'll have to trust someone else did, and would raise a fuss about any shady findings.
The problem with useful proof of work, is that the emission rate becomes very hard to control. In most PoW consensus algorithms, a difficulty parameter is constantly updated to keep the average block-time around 10 minutes. To do useful PoW consensus, you'd need to find a useful problem, where the difficulty of solving the different problems is easily solved, while the solution to the next block, is still dependent on the solution from the last block.
I wonder if Bitcoin is the perfect currency for the globalized world. I need currency to pay taxes to the state I currently live in, but if I'm a global citizen, not planning to be a permanent residence of any specific country, then doing my banking in a currency that can be easily moved, and can't be seized, is very valuable. Is the Fiat alternative keeping CHF in a Swiss bank account?
I suppose there exists a Nash equilibrium, where every actor can't act in a way that will decrease the effectiveness of the plan. Problem is that it's way too computationally expensive to calculate one for a 10 player Hold'em poker game, let alone an economy with millions of decisions and actors.
The main source of savings in a single-payer system isn't simplified billing, but increased negotiating power on everything from drug prices to salaries. With that being said, I agree that if every US citizen should enjoy the quality of service, that people with premium health care coverage has, it would probably be more expensive than most European single-payer systems.
Every robotic task tangially related to Auditing. I work with robotic task automation at one of the big 4, and it's really amazing how much trivial work that's being done by humans.
Depends on the cryptocurrency in question, but yes, a cryptocurrency working under a Proof-of-Work scheme like bitcoin, will use more energy than credit card systems. I'm not sure it'll ever be possible to outperform centralized, digital systems on an energy usage level. What I was critical of, was the comparison to physical money. Energy usage isn't really that important a metric for payment systems though, price is probably more relevant, where some innovations in cryptocurrency might come to be competitive with credit cards.
This is not entirely true, as cash requires energy after it's been minted. Money transport, cashiers and gold old fashioned vaults all require energy. With that being said, PoW is definitely wasteful, and for crypto-currency to be taken serious on the world stage, another form of consensus algorithm is required. Personally I'm partial to Proof of Stake[0].
8mb blocks would mean that the bitcoin blockchain, would grow by 35 gigabyte a month. Compare this to the total blockchain size of about 120gb right now. This increases the cost of mining, by requiring miners to keep up on harddisk space. This cost can be amortized, as you can scale your processing independently of your harddisk space, making it even more profitable to mine for big investors, than smaller fish.
I think it might be because their are precendent for ICOs delivering amazing returns. Everyon wants to get in on "the next Ethereum", without realizing how rare opportunities like that are.
I think what the miners are afraid of, is that the power of the bitcoin network, leaves their hands and fall into the hands of second layer operators. At the same time, a higher blockchain size would make it less profitable for small miners, to mine bitcoin. Bitfury recently released an analysis, that predicts that 95% of current miners, would find mining to be unprofitable at blocksize of 8MB. This would further centralize profits and power over the protocol, with the big datacenter miners.
How would inter-operability differ from sharding? Is the difference that sharding only works with a specific blockchain technology, and inter-operability could connect multiple, technologically different, blockchains?
What do you mean by bitcoin is not supposed to improve over time? There's active development going on, even with bitcoin. It's currently hampered by politics, but if you look at the crypto currency space as a whole, developers are constantly trying out new things and improvements.
There was a case in Denmark, where a large real-estate agency, was forced to pay damages, caused by keeping a large real-estate listings website, from scraping their listings.
I wonder how different the ROI is between college degrees. I could see a large number of degrees having practically no ROI, compared to just entering the labor market, while others will be more substantial.
I think both security and productivity is thought about. Having a domain specific language, built with block chain deployment in mind, is definitely useful.
Wasn't ARPANET started as a project where individual communication nodes could fail, and the message could still arrive? Military technology generally needs to be reliable, which makes it a good fit for civilian use as well. Of course, there are plenty of aspects of military technology that isn't as necessary in civilian life.
I think there'll be an economic incentive for at least miniaturizing battery cells, while keeping capacity. Even if there is a limit to EV range, where consumers simply won't be interested in cars that go much further, reducing the weight of the battery itself, will be a direct economic boon for the consumer. There might also be some unforeseen boons to cheaper and lighter batteries, kind of how the personal drone market sprung out of the advances made in lithium-ion batteries for Smartphones/Laptops.
While only solving the storage part of the equation, checkout projects like Sia Coin[0] and Storj[0]. Both of them aim to provide hyper-competition for storage space, through the use of blockchain technology. I think a future, where multiple blockchain projects provide access to computational resources, isn't too farfetched.
I don't think hackers outside the establishment have that kind of power, but cybersecurity is the frontline between super-powers in the 21st century. I wouldn't be surprised if we have a kind of Stanislav Petrov[0] figure, who'll refuse to press the button in a first strike cyber attack.
There's an interesting project called Solar Coin[0] attempting to do this. I'm not too sure how it relates to crypto-currency, though.
[0] https://solarcoin.org/en/front-page/
I think the important difference is killing people when running as intended, versus killing people when disasters occur. In a way, a Nulcear power plant is similar to dam; when the dam breaks, it's a serious disaster, but as long as it runs as intended, humans aren't really at risk.
Nuclear weapons disarmament is a political problem, and Musk primarily works within the realm of engineering. Besides, game theoretic arguments can be made against nuclear weapons not being much of a threat at all.
It's not all of Europe which has strict laws about firing people. For an example, the Danish concept of "Flexicurity"[0], where the state protects the worker against the financial trouble of getting fired, but not getting fired itself. Of course, this tend to lead to a rather high tax rate.
Cost of living is always important to consider. Looking at this site[0] for a ballpark figure, it would seem that someone living in San Francisco needs to be earning at least the double of someone in Berlin, to afford the same standard of living. San Francisco is still a very attractive place to work as a Software Engineer, but it's not as black and white, as the huge difference in pay might make it look.