Bitcoin's security is a function of the electricity that is expended for its operation. Unfortunately, Bitcoin's unwavering commitment to a lack of technical innovation (via political coercion) will be the catalyst of its eventual downfall barring any adjustments to the economic goalposts ie when fees aren't enough to sustain security once block rewards dry up. Bitcoin is either a self fulfilling prophecy or it isn't. The biggest threat to Bitcoin are the much more efficient 2nd and 3rd generation distributed consensus mechanisms; See ETH, DOT, AVAX, etc.
Proof-of-stake blockchains are accomplishing more than was ever imagined possible with Bitcoin at a fraction of the cost.
It's unfortunate how uninformed people willing to jump into a conversation/invest in cryptocurrencies can be.
My company Decentralabs is committed to delivering socially useful products and services that protect user privacy and enable users to own their data. In August 2019 we started work on Noteworthy, the umbrella platform that enables all of our current and future offerings. Noteworthy is a networking framework, orchestration toolkit and serverless application platform for building collaborative self-hosted online services. Think AWS, Kubernetes, Django/Rails but for the individual, not the enterprise. Our mission is to empower the development of a safe, free web. We hope our tools will help ensure the long term political and economic neutrality of the web. Our strategy for growth is slow and steady self-bootstrapping and keeping the lights on by building solutions for other orgs who value user data privacy.
We are hiring, connect with us via Matrix #noteworthy:tincan.community
We've been working on a plug-and-play Matrix homeserver solution that will be entering private beta very soon. Powered by WireGuard, we tunnel federation traffic (from other homeservers) to your homeserver without requiring you to expose any ports to the world. Our solution gets you from 0-to-Matrix homeserver in about 60 seconds. This offering is part of a broader ecosystem of open-source applications that we plan to package, make push-button and provide professional support services to a non-technical audience. Our primary deployment target being custom fabricated SBCs similar to the Raspberry Pi 4. We are actively seeking developers interested in building and deploying privacy preserving, self-hosted applications (like Matrix) for this platform. Join our mailing list if you'd like an invite to our beta or to check out our developer documentation: https://www.noteworthy.im
The DAO represents, at this time, an altruistic profit driven organization. That organization is comprised of people who have combined their financial resources to facilitate the autonomous expansion and decentralization of goods and services for the purpose of providing equitable financial benefit to all members (DAO token holders). Anyone can become a member by contributing Ether to the DAO during its creation phase or purchasing DAO tokens from someone who has them (an exchange). The DAO prides itself on transparency, collaborative engagement, and the focused wisdom of the crowd. The DAOs capabilities are strictly defined in computer software that executes on the Ethereum blockchain, and is deterministic based on its interactions with its members and other smart contracts. Fundamentally, the DAO facilitates collaborative financial interactions between its token holders and the entities it funds in a largely trustless manner. I say largely because it is still under active development as its community is constantly working to optimize its autonomy and decentralization.
Members vote on proposals that decide on how the organization will spend its money. Generally, active member participation is(not?) required for a proposal to be successful. A member can, at anytime before a proposal in which they do not support is approved, withdraw all remaining Ether sans the Ether previously approved for the funding of a proposal (a process called splitting). In return for funding proposals, DAO members are issued "Reward Tokens" which can be used to redeem a proportional amount(their contribution) of the DAOs profits.
Where did it come from?
The DAO's development was initially lead by a German company called Slock.it (former members of the Ethereum foundation) but it is now being adapted and evolved by the community that has risen around it.