I really like this idea, but I'm struggling with the decentralized aspect of it. If you can control the content, what exactly are the user's getting? Content can be scraped and saved indefinitely, the IP address information can potentially be leaked, the exact security of the system is unclear.
It seems like I'm just moving to a less efficient platform with more open moderation and socialized bandwidth and storage costs.
These posts kill me. Anyone who says they are burning strategies onto fpgas when they trade with GDAX has no idea what they or doing or talking about. The platforms are way too immature for this to matter. Source, was in real HFT for 10+ years.
It benefits the people in power. It benefits corporations who need cheap exploitable labor, or directly profit from the operation of the prison industry. It forces people into low paying menial jobs that keep large companies profitable. It serves a political purpose by scapegoating and marginalizing minorities. It fills the pockets of politicians who help to expand the system and cater to the military-industrial complex that perversely feeds on inequality. I don't think there is a system of oppression or economic control in existence that doesn't benefit somebody, directly or indirectly.
This is cool. Get it ready before AR goes mainstream. Even Chrome right now in vr mode is pretty cool despite being completely beta and not having really any vr specific features.
"The Matrix is a system, Neo. That system is our enemy. But when you're inside, you look around, what do you see? Businessmen, teachers, lawyers, carpenters. The very minds of the people we are trying to save."
Are you a beneficiary of this system? We aren't very good at thinking on a large scale as a species, and most of us on Hacker news are in some way beneficiaries of the system, relative successes. However, there is something deeply troubling about the social and economic structures that are currently pervasive. I don't think you or anyone else is a 'bad person' for not fighting against the way things are, but I personally believe there is a better way, and we have the tools now to find it.
The entire system is a scam. Inflation and debt are designed to subjugate people to the state from cradle to grave, and to create an orderly and contained society that preserves the power and status of a privileged few. It doesn't just seem like people are spinning their wheels, they are doing exactly that. People who are paying off their mortgage and worrying about their student debt are literally enslaved by this system. Bitcoin is important because it has shown us that we can create value and engage in commerce without the state. I think this will be an important historical artifact, because it points to the possibility that we are rapidly developing a radical new way to organize people.
I totally believe that it is possible he wanted to do that. Why not sell all of his LTC at $10? Why continue to focus his time and energy on it? There is only one reason, which is that it hadn't made him enough money yet. Now that it has, the idea that he will focus substantially all of his time on it to make it even better rings pretty hollow. Maybe he will do that instead of spending his tens of millions (or more) on other pursuits. Altruism is a pretty rare quality, financial motivation has an uncanny way of actually getting things done.
I couldn't agree more with this sentiment. Charlie has been the driving developer and force behind litecoin since its inception, and while he may continue to fill that role, nothing signals actual stake in the success of a project like ownership. If Satoshi dumped his coins and then said he wanted the project to succeed the price of Bitcoin would be negligible, a very clear market signal that he didn't believe in it's future prospects. It's like saying, I got mine, thanks guys.
Also, with respect to this being like a CEO taking a $1 salary. Most CEOs have massive stock and performance incentives linked with their company's success. Charlie has none.
I'm going to chime in here also. I sent an email quite a while ago and heard absolutely nothing. Considering I have basically an unbelievable amount of experience related to this I was surprised that I didn't even get a followup or inquiry.
Hiring is hard, this could be just the result of poor hiring practices, or it could be something else entirely. Either way, it gives a very poor impression, and considering how small the pool of talent in HFT and Smart Contracts is that isn't something a new company can afford to do.
I remember fingering to read these .plan files back in the day. :) Is twitter the modern replacement? I don't think we have anything quite as succinct.
I think this is just the tip of the iceberg for Bitcoin. Time will tell if I am right or wrong. If we think of it as simply a currency, or a store of value we can place limits on its value based on what we know about gold, fiat currency, etc. We can extrapolate and come up with a valuation that we think is appropriate. However, its not just any of those things. It's a paradigm shift in digital ownership of value, and could potentially be a record of and a secure digital token for a huge variety of physical goods, virtual services, etc. Whether this happens is largely dependent on scale, but we will leave that argument for another thread since the troll army will show up. Bitcoin is something entirely new in the history of value transfer and ownership, stop trying to compare it directly with the systems that will be eclipsed by it.
You should read up on it before you draw conclusions. It does have useful properties, it structurally is similar to Bitcoin while having the smart contract capabilities of Ethereum. Eth is inflationary, and being valuable is really not what you want in the token that drives your smart contract ecosystem. It's value is almost entirely driven by speculation. Further, it's designed to virtualize the mining process for all tokens that derive from it, that keeps work on chain and creates long term value rather than the ICO which is designed to remove as much money from people as quickly as possible.
Whether those properties matter to you is up for debate, but we have replicated the semantics of Bitcoin very closely, on a network that does more transactions. It makes the store-of-value argument for Bitcoin very weak indeed.
It's not :). It is also a running commentary on the idea that Bitcoin can survive simply as a store-of-value when that functionality can be replicated.
Yeah I've given it more thought. It really all comes down to mining power. Right now a lot of miners are signalling for segwit2X. If they end up committing their resources to it and the companies in the ecosystem do also, then the minority fork will be Bitcoin core. At least until such time as they merge back in. There is way too much drama around this entire thing, but that is what happens when you have billions of dollars on the line and a huge ideological and corporate divide.
Bitcoin is about the proof-of-work, everything else is really secondary in the structure. It's too easy to spawn nodes for them to have much economic power in the system. If the companies and wallets support 2X then we will see it rapidly become the dominant chain. It ain't over till it's over and nobody is going down without a fight, I expect in the extreme case Bitcoin core will switch proof-of-work and claim to be the "real" Bitcoin if the miners abandon them.
This is a great idea. Mostly for the marketing angle, but it also will start to show people what is possible. It's like a taste of a entirely new network, which will have capabilities that we can't even imagine right now. The blockchain space is really hot for a reason, lots of hype, but also lots of promise because it offers a glimpse of systems that will disrupt many entrenched companies.
Sure, but this doesn't account for how Bitcoin or digital currency actually scales. There isn't any reason that the same proof-of-work couldn't secure an order of magnitude more transaction volume. That kind of throws this analysis into question.
I think this is incredibly overblown. How much does the existing financial system cost to operate? How much do ATMs, Private financial networks, money security, transportation, staff, legal, etc, etc. Comparing per transaction cost does not even begin to account for the energy costs of the current financial system. Even with the escalating cost of mining we are getting a deal compared to the way things are now. Hopefully research will yield significantly better incentive structures than pure proof-of-work, but in the mean time it has proven to be remarkably effective.
This is so cool. I see you used Erlang for various components like the UI, was your primary reason for using Pony instead of Erlang for the data processing performance? That seems like a safe assumption given Erlang's frustrating performance characteristics. There isn't a lot of information out there about Pony vs Erlang in production, hopefully you guys will write up more in the future about the differences you have encountered.
It seems like I'm just moving to a less efficient platform with more open moderation and socialized bandwidth and storage costs.