briatx

This means that YOU failed to write a good test because the questions were not specific enough.

Cryptocurrency is wasting modern technology to recreate the economic system of the 1800s.

You're not sending money. You're sending tokens. People who say that they are sending money "on the blockchain" are being disingenuous.

You have to account for transaction fees into cryptocurrency, the blockchain transaction fee itself, and the conversion into the target local currency.

You left 2/3rds of that process out, conveniently.

Pretty sure ACH and SWIFT can do more than 7 transactions per second.

Talk about a step backward.

You're right! It's actually negative sum.

Maybe you do buy BTC on Exchange B.

Then you transfer to Exchange A and sell, and what do you get when you sell? Tether.

The point of Tether initially is regulatory arbitrage for Tether based exchanges. It gives them a fiat substitute without having regulatory baggage that trading in actual money would require.

Tether then turned into a lifeline for a Bitfinex bailout and now acts as a (almost assuredly illicit) liquidity provider to Tether based markets.

The only reason Tether is worth a dollar at this point is because the Tether denominated Exchanges say it is worth a dollar. They are really what backstop Tether now and are fully complicit.

Bitcoin doesn't solve any trust problem outside of how many bitcoins are in each wallet.

Even in the very basic ecommerce use case: buyer purchases item online with bitcoin. The buyer must necessarily trust the vendor to deliver.

There's no recourse outside of the good graces of the vendor. There's no chargebacks or third party mediation.

Thus Bitcoin actually reverses the risk assumed by online purchases from the vendor to the buyer.

This is the reason why Bitcoin is a failure outside of niche grey and black market concerns. It is far worse for the consumer than existing solutions that isolate them from transaction risk, and will usually kick back a small percentage in cash back.

Broadly speaking blockchain only solves a singular problem: Trust

This is only true in the cryptographic sense when talking about data on the blockchain.

Blockchains do NOT solve any trust problem outside of data on the blockchain, and in real world use cases when we're not dealing with how many coins each person has in a wallet, this is the most important thing.

Specifically your cryptographic tamperproof data on the blockchain is useless if you have bad actors entering garbage data.

It's useless if the data on the blockchain is out of sync with state in the real world.

Even in the internet commerce use case where bitcoin was supposed to take over, once the bitcoins are transferred you still have the unsolved trust issue of verifying delivery.

Saying blockchains solve the trust issue in the real world is disingenuous magical thinking, and I wish people would stop doing it.

That is not at all how the money multiplier works.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Money_multiplier

blockchains aren't garbage. They're useful.

If they were useful, all these corporate pilot programs would be raging successes by now. Instead they quietly fizzle.

I personally haven't seen an application that isn't better implemented with pre-existing technologies.

Or maybe after much research and some testing they conclude (correctly) that "blockchain is useless."

Each time it forks it creates the same supply of bitcoins virtually indistinguishable by anything other than name and mining nodes.

Sure, the limit of Bitcoin Core is still set at 21M, but that limit is quite arbitrary and in time maybe more malleable than people currently believe.

1) Tether is not the Fed.

2) Tether claimed in the beginning that they had $1 USD in the bank for every 1 Tether issued.

3) Given (2), printing Tether out of thin air that isn't backed by USD deposits is fraud.

No, instead Bitcoin forks: https://www.forks.net/list/Bitcoin/

The internet was scalable by design.

Bitcoin is not.

I applaud going back to the original source, but the paper has been updated.

See this better Bloomberg article: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-11-04/lone-bitc...

Relevant quotes:

One entity on the cryptocurrency exchange Bitfinex appears capable of sending the price of Bitcoin higher when it falls below certain thresholds, according to University of Texas Professor John Griffin and Ohio State University’s Amin Shams. Griffin and Shams, who have updated a paper they first published in 2018, say the transactions rely on Tether, a widely used digital token that is meant to hold its value at $1.

“Our results suggest instead of thousands of investors moving the price of Bitcoin, it’s just one large one,” Griffin said in an interview. “Years from now, people will be surprised to learn investors handed over billions to people they didn’t know and who faced little oversight.”

“This pattern is only present in periods following printing of Tether, driven by a single large account holder, and not observed by other exchanges,” they wrote in their new peer-reviewed paper, set to be published in a forthcoming Journal of Finance.

“Simulations show that these patterns are highly unlikely to be due to chance. This one large player or entity either exhibited clairvoyant market timing or exerted an extremely large price impact on Bitcoin that is not observed in aggregate flows from other smaller traders.”

Hard to read this as anything other than a sales pitch:

While a 24% market share — 1 out of every 4 sales in this market — seems wild, the thing that blows the minds of many Tesla Model 3 owners is that anyone is still buying an Audi A4, Volvo S60, BMW 320i, Mercedes C300, etc.

You know, of course, blockchains do not magically solve the garbage-in garbage-out problem.

Different experience here.

Split keyboards allow you to keep your keep your wrists at a more neutral position vs having your forearms rotated inward but then twisting the wrists outward in order to type on a flat keyboard.. It absolutely helps with my RSI and if I have to use a flat keyboard for an extended period of time I start to get wrist pain.

A split keyboard and ergonomic trackball such as a Microsoft Trackball Explorer or Elecom Deft Pro, combined with a weight training workout, essentially solved RSI for me.

DNS has always been decentralized. I mean, first sentence on wikipedia:

The Domain Name System (DNS) is a hierarchical and decentralized naming system for computers, services, or other resources connected to the Internet or a private network.

Waymo vehicles have virtual maps ...

You only need one reality <-> virtual desync to cause a crash.

You could easily convert HOV lanes into Automated Driving lanes. And if we have the ability to fund HOV lanes, we could also fund Automated Driving lanes.

Self driving cars are already dependent on standard infrastructure markings such as lane lines, and whenever those markings are confusing or faded it has lead to fatal crashes, such as the fatal Tesla crash on 401.

I predict self driving will not fully succeed until we build infrastructure to support it into the roads.

How many businesses in competitive areas have fax as a preferred method of communication today?

Oh just large legal and healthcare companies[1].

[1] https://www.popsci.com/why-fax-machines-still-exist

Earlier this year the Washington Post reported that many small police departments were abandoning body-worn-camera programmes because of the cost.

Although the cameras are cheap, officers can generate 15 gigabytes of video per shift; storage costs mount. Police unions often oppose body-worn cameras, fearing they imperil their members by giving superior officers licence to search them for punishable behaviour.

Other officers complain about the amount of time required to review and redact footage in response to public-information requests.

Sure, the Police themselves don't like the cameras turned on them. Suddenly it is "too expensive".

Then they will turn around and argue for ubiquitous CCTV camera installations.

Well, Fortnite Save the World launched with paid loot boxes, so...

* Bitcoin is not yet deflationary as new coins are still minted for reward blocks.

* Bitcoin is not guaranteed to go up and has so much volatility that you are essentially gambling.

* Bitcoin is inferior as a payment system, even when they use debit cards to interface with mainstream PoS.

* Bitcoin has probably topped out and we are nearing the end of it's hype cycle.

Or you could skip a step and just use a regular credit card with cash rewards and receive 1-2% of transaction amounts cash back.

I'm not sure why people want to make it harder (and more expensive) than necessary.

And if 10 years from now we haven't found a use for nanopayments I'll admit it was a silly idea

Why do you need another 10 years? Bitcoin has already been around for 10 years. The micropayment and tipping use case has been explored fully and has failed.

Maybe it's not the blockchain as storage that matters but the programming API

Even if that was true, you could easily implement a compatible API that doesn't use a blockchain under the hood, especially seeing as it is centralized by JPM.

I see this as JPM just trying to ride the hype wave, and as a contingency if blockchains go mainstream (spoiler: they won't).

1. Tx costs are basically free if you are willing to wait long enough.

2. Using a new address per Tx is one of the only ways you can preserve anonymity.

3. Lots of people have more than one wallet.

4. Manipulators could automate the creation of wallets at essentially no cost.

5. The minimum value of bitcoin is 1 satoshi which is 0.00000001 BTC or 0.0000398886 USD at current prices.

To put that in perspective you could fund approximately 250 wallets with 1 satoshi each for one penny.