zherbert

You think the current global financial system is energy efficient? How about the raw materials used by global militarizes financed by unending money printing? If you fast forward a couple decades, and Bitcoin becomes the global reserve currency, mining will be far more efficient than the amount of enormous military spending and middle-eastern oil production financed by fiat currencies and the petrodollar standard.

You people are advocating for shutting down one of the most important human advancements of all time – money that is directly linked to energy.

That's preposterous, Bitcoin incentivizes production of whatever energy is cheapest. That does not necessarily mean fossil fuels, though it is often that those are cheaper.

Hydro is a perfect example. A sizeable percentage of all Bitcoin mining is done with cheap hydro.

Bitcoin will do the same for nuclear, making it cheap and plentiful.

Bitcoin mining incentivizes the plentiful production of cheap electricity. This will make it so that there are no such thing as power shortages in the future and push us towards a Type I civilization on the Kardashev scale.

Bitcoin mining reduces the risk for energy generation projects, because they no longer need to worry about who will purchase the extra capacity.

Bitcoin mining can act as a load-balancer for the grid – spin down some machines if there is high demand, spin up machines if there is low demand.

There are so many benefits. It is unfortunate that there is a serious lack of understanding on this website.

Wow, honored our post is so upvoted and discussed! In case anyone wants to read the prior posts in our series, links below!

Part 1: Software and Services https://hardware.substack.com/p/falling-out-of-love-with-app...

Part 1.5: macOS Privacy Scandal and App Store Policy https://hardware.substack.com/p/falling-out-of-love-with-app...

Part 2: Hardware and Accessories https://hardware.substack.com/p/falling-out-of-love-with-app...

Skynet is built on top of the Sia decentralized cloud storage platform (https://sia.tech). Sia uses a blockchain to facilitate cryptocurrency transactions and store file contracts (which are like cryptographic SLAs between users), and is very similar to Bitcoin in architecture.

Anyone can operate a Skynet Webportal (the server), and Webportals can choose how they'd like to monetize – for example, they can run ads.

You can also run your own Skynet Portal by downloading Sia v1.4.3, released today. It costs about $10/mo to run a Portal because you have to form file contracts with a few hundred storage providers on the network. But then you do not have to go through a Webportal middleman.

Disclaimer: I work on the Sia/Skynet team.

Still ridiculous, $150 more for an upgrade that most people will have to purchase.

According to Apple's specs, there is still a 256 GB option.

Wholeheartedly agree, especially when demoing the ability to film simultaneously on multiple cameras, and the 4K front-facing camera. The 64 GB is really a slap in the face.

I would also add – give Sia a try, especially if you have tried it before our v1.4.0/v1.4.1 releases! https://sia.tech/get-started

Hi all, author here, just wanted to say I am thrilled to see the HN community discuss decentralized cloud storage in more detail. There are many drawbacks today and narrow use-cases, but our goal is to continue to improve Sia – and over the coming years we will prove that decentralized storage can compete directly with Amazon, Google, and Microsoft. We feel confident that the marketplace dynamics, in particular, will foster competition between hosts on the network and maintain prices that are an order of magnitude cheaper for storage and two orders of magnitude cheaper for bandwidth.

Appreciate your response. My comparison to the cost of a hard drive today is not meant to be a direct comparison, but instead to demonstrate that traditional cloud storage is actually quite expensive. Sia is able to bring down storage costs by an order of magnitude and bandwidth costs by two orders of magnitude. While most HN readers understand the nuances of cloud storage costs, most non-technical readers are unfamiliar with the high costs of S3 storage and egress.

We do not yet have the ability to share the same set of contracts across multiple machines, but it is on the roadmap. This would include using the same set of contracts on desktop and mobile devices, which will open up some intriguing use-cases.

I couldn't agree more

This guy is only worth $3B, he may be spending half of his entire net worth to make this happen. I hope he inspires the richest billionaires of the world to fund such lofty ventures.

That's definitely true. Going through this process has been extremely complicated and uncertain.

That's true, but there's a ton of uncertainty with regards to who the "issuer" is for token sales.

And I believe it's 2000, not 2500.

That's true, but that is not the point of the post whatsoever.

ETH and BTC are highly liquid these days. You may be saying that ETH's "intent" is to serve as "gas" but irregardless the markets are highly liquid and the order books are deep.

Even so, that's what SAFTs tried to do, but it looks like the SEC may be concerned about their structure.

Under current rules, after 1-yr lockup period investors are able to sell to other accredited investors.

Hopefully by then we'll have some new, regulated exchanges that can automate the process.

I think the better way to think about it is that you are investing in the network itself (at least in Sia's case). Siafunds could be valued with an NPV of the future revenue generated by users buying storage on the Sia network.

It's much harder to figure out how to value utility tokens. Here's an interesting starting point: https://medium.com/@cburniske/cryptoasset-valuations-ac83479...

There's also other well-known OTC desks like Cumberland Mining

While I cannot give legal advice, generally the only acceptable path is for a Reg-D filing with the SEC. This means that your token is considered a security, but the filing is technically an "exemption" filing.

So far I believe the only other projects that have pursued Reg-D filings did so under the SAFT framework, which is currently under scrutiny by the SEC. We may be the first project to raise money for a token that itself is a transferrable security, and pursue filing under Reg-D.

honestly it's a bit of a mess right now

SEC enforcement does not fix the problems that we discussed in the post. Many projects have raised money through Reg D exemption filings (such as Blockstack and Filecoin), but they are still ultimately selling utility tokens.

We are arguing that the incentives behind ICOs of utility coins are bad. I could easily devote more blog posts to the legal/regulatory side, but that is not our intention for this post.

I'm the author, if anyone wants to discuss!

It's a great question. Most exchanges like Gemini have OTC desks that are highly liquid. We have a direct point of contact at Gemini, and can convert as much as we want.

Gemini also has daily auctions where you can move a ton of crypto.

Hosts actually set their own prices, so as Siacoin increases, the price for storing data (denominated in Siacoin) decreases. Hosts compete with one another, so prices are driven down to their absolute lowest.

The recent issues have been on exchange wallets, which should be fixed very shortly on Bittrex and Shapeshift, as announced recently on Reddit and Twitter.

The key is to never buy from an FBA seller. Only buy from Amazon.com as the seller.

Today my girlfriend spoke about wanting a cinnamon roll, and later in the day her iPhone Facebook app showed an advertisement for cinnamon rolls.

We were trying to determine if maybe she had seen that same ad earlier in the day on Facebook, and it planted the craving in her head.

Regardless, it was a very freaky experience. I doubt Facebook is listening, but it's likely their ads are inadvertently influencing us. As we scroll quickly through our news feeds, we automatically ignore most ads. But they are still making an impression.