Right. I imagine a future where AI capital entities just hold bitcoin and never do anything with it other than hold it forever to secure the things they're doing on the advanced financial platforms of the future.
In the USA at least, it still exists, and it's called cash.
If cash were invented today, it would be illegal. For most small payments if not large transfers, in the USA consumers actually have the right to transact anonymously. Tracking micropayments publicly forever on a blockchain seems like a step backwards. Being able to track large transfers on a blockchain is one of the benefits of living in the world where the Byzantine General's Problem has been solved.
For what it's worth, we also trust the NSA to have written and verified our most important cryptographic hash functions, leading to the first rule of crypto -- never roll your own novel hash function.
I see this as the start of a community effort to verify Intel SGX. I imagine that the process of rolling out a consumer facing high stakes product on SGX involves external verification of SGX beyond what it's gone through before.
I lost a bank account last year and was unbanked for a little while. I really hate my customer service interactions with banks and would be quite happy if I could unbank myself.
Life pro tip:
If your Charles Schwab broker emails and says that they're wondering why your retirement savings are nothing but medical marijuana penny stocks and if you'd like to come in to talk about healthy portfolio management strategies, you should go into the local office and not ignore that email.
Consumer micropayments is one of the most basic possible applications of this technology and that it hasn't been implemented yet is sad. I'm not a fan of the customer experience of Venmo and Paypal and Apple Pay that require me to have a bank account or a credit card. They work in the first world for transfers over a certain minimum but there is really clearly room to innovate still.
Do you see a future where blockchain technology exists but consumers don't use cryptocurrency? I do also. Who is to say that WhatsApps's implementation of Mobilecoin has to use their own proprietary cryptocurrency instead of letting users denominate transfers in local fiat currency?
Your github led me to https://turtlecoin.lol/ which makes your point and undermines it at the same time. Turtlecoin launched with an incremental and a catchy name and no ICO and on the surface sounds like it achieves a lot of what Mobilecoin attempts to.
Ultimately though, Turtlecoin is a parameter tweak and relaunch of existing coins that doesn't solve the core problem of consumer payments. Mobilecoin is at least attempting that, and for $30M, they should at least get a fancy mobile UI, hopefully one that filters up to an improvement of the Signal UI also.
It's right to be skeptical. Blockchain applications aren't being delivered. Still, the promise of blockchain convergence requires us to believe in a future that we can't quite see at hand where applications start being delivered all at once and the ecosystem hits critical mass. I'm now in the business of skeptically predicting the future and I've basically started pre-rejecting all ICO pitches if it's not being delivered imminently.
MobileCoin still stands out as a clever, simple design where the economic value comes from one trusted crypto anarchist saying that we as a society can in fact use Intel SGX for critical applications -- like a simple implementation of consumer micropayments. I, like many others, didn't believe this until Moxie said it was ok, but I believe in this because Moxie is in fact the most trusted person in Silicon Valley.
I'm curious about your blockchain side projects beyond Turtlecoin hacking, feel free to email me if you have any interesting code running...
The main difference is that MobileCoin trusts Intel's SGX to create a platform that should be able to scale quickly on mobile. It also has a solution to allow for private key recovery in case you lose your phone.
Zcash is more provably secure as it doesn't require trusting Intel's SGX but it's untenable on mobile right now as it's too computationally intensive. Monero and Dash are effectively anonymous for small transfers but for very large movements of money, the deep state can crack their tumbler algorithms. They provide good enough rather than verifiable anonymity.
As CEO of the Signal Foundation, Moxie is in a unique position to encourage Signal protocol chat services to adopt something like MobileCoin. I would imagine that progression would go Signal -> WhatsApp, and that Signal would only reject MobileCoin if Moxie himself rejected MobileCoin. I think there isn't really a first use case other than an existing Signal protocol service adopting it.
I don't see nearly as much use case for humans and cryptocurrency as for AI and cryptocurrency.
I think in the future, the average technologically savvy person will be just as confused about what bitcoin is and does as they are today and it will mostly be used to securitize options and derivatives of unprecedented complexity.
I think it may be healthy to reset dopamine by doing this occasionally for a week or so at a time, but I like the cheap dopamine and connectedness of my social media connections.
Really? I tried doing this search and can't find much. I'm pretty up on the state of the scientific literature on kratom, because I'm in the industry, curious, and have been actively working at improving the dreadful wikipedia article.
Even the peer reviewed evidence for kratom working for opiate withdrawal is quite weak, despite boatloads of anecdotal evidence. There are studies in mice and some observational studies, but nothing that meets the standards of an FDA clinical trial. Kratom has just not really been seriously studied.
If I'm missing some papers or a body of research, please let me know.
