Funny, I found this today after doing a deep dive on Rust and OS development. I was in awe at the quality of this content. You come out of it not only learning so much about the history and design of operating systems, but you start to pick up elements of Rust as well. Phil did an incredible job on this.
I’m not saying banking is evil by any means, but I do think the whole industry could use some competition. The industry moves super slow, and I think digital currency would make things far more competitive.
I think digital currency’s improvements to money, that I mentioned, are the point.
For those of us in the industry, we recognize that this is all one grand experiment. In my mind, it is worth all of the hype b/c digital currencies pose the following two big benefits:
- Digital currency is a new asset class and an improved form of money. Money as a concept has been around since the dawn of recorded history and it has gone through a number of iterations since. We have only been using nation-backed currencies for between 100-200 years depending on where you set the departure from the gold standard. For most of human history, we have had "hard money", meaning that no one had the power to inflate our money and lower its value(through gold). Nations have that ability today, and it has had far reaching implications. Digital currency has the potential to reduce or eliminate government control of our money. If you think this is a libertarian vision, you would be wrong. Just look at the internet and how it has quickly changed the publishing industry. Digital currencies are also programmable, meaning they have features that normal money simply does not have. Shared custody of funds and time locked funds are just two great examples.
- Digital currency paves the way for superior payment networks. The ability to send digital currency is cheaper, faster, and more global than any payment network ever invented. Our traditional financial system is steeped with trust-based relationships, manual checks, competing parties, and fraud. This results in inefficiencies from top to bottom. This all results in bank wires taking between 4-14 days, whereas a digital currency transaction takes an hour to settle on average. In the future, digital currency will also be capable of sending smaller value transactions than ever before.
If you think that aspects of this industry are ridiculous and mere gambling, you would be correct. As a person in the industry, I tend to ignore much of the industry. That being said, there are some incredibly novel ideas that are motivating the best of us to get this system working. If we succeed, we will have a much more open, fast, less expensive, and global financial system to use.
I would agree with this. They need to get re-branded and completely ignore the accusations of ageism in the industry, and instead just focus on finding high quality mentors with many years of experience, who will all be older.
Yeah I'm sorry, but web views are incredibly substandard to native apps. I've never found I hybrid app that I found comparable to its native counterpart. Simple things like scrolling can be very spotty most of the time.
So I checked this out back in 2013, and it has gotten significantly better. For one, it doesn't include a giant script at the top of each document this time around, so that's a major plus. I haven't used it very extensively, but I have high hopes for products like this. Game engine map editors have been around for decades. It would be really cool if we could create tooling that is able to spit out complex web app designs in the same way.
Couldn't agree more, the moment I looked at the FAQ and the fifth one down is "Is it fair that Mastercoin early investors are richly rewarded, considering the short issuing period of one month?", I was like seriously? If Mastercoin is such a big improvement on bitcoin, why did you choose to address that of all things right away. Also all of the currency is pre-mined over the course of a single month? Wat?