generalseven

I guess President Vladimir and Chairman Xi would be delighted with the comparison.

Buried at the bottom of their FAQ:

"This change won't affect a number of groups such as Pro Networks and Non-Profits."

Assuming this means that most of the small community-driven groups will be unaffected by the change.

Still, this is clearly a communication fail, as well as a cardinal sin for usability:

By charging users to RSVP yes, they are literally putting a tax directly on a key engagement activity for the whole site.

I also agree with the comment that Meetup has done a poor job of improving itself. The "design facelift" they did 2 years ago negatively affected the growth of our group, and they haven't added much value since then.

A better approach would be to take 15% of ticket sales done through the site in a way that could improve engagement and revenue.

Meetup may have a well-deserved PR hailstorm for this.

MimbleWimble = very cool tech.

Indeed I stepped right into the next "civil war" by using "BCash" instead of its symbol, BCH.

Chill out, please. I don't want to see it fail at all.

Read my original remark more closely. This is good for the whole industry. We are holding both.

Agreed, I put "market cap" into quotes for just this reason.

And congratulations on the trading. Please buy more Bitcoin with the profit. It's all good for the industry. just wait and see.

I'm a board member and founder of https://www.bitcoinwednesday.com/

What happened on 1 August and with the prices immediately after suggests how the conflict over the blocksize has been widely misreported.

Bitcoin was not ripping itself into two in a civil war, but innovating new forms of governance and token distribution for new projects.

We now have a technically proven, and from the looks of it, established new method of token distribution that is arguably far superior to crowd sales and ICOs.

If you don't like the BCH or Bitcoin implementation, there are already hundreds of other cryptocurrytencies, but you can also fork your own from the biggest, original (and arguably most widely distributed).

BCH now has a "market cap" of about $3.7 billion dollars, probably a world record for a startup (open source project) that was literally released to the world a few days ago.

If you own bitcoins before the fork, you should now own equal amounts on both sides of the coin, and (hopefully) soon will be able to buy or sell either token, depending on your preference.

Bitcoin itself has a $52 billion dollar market cap right now post fork not only because it survived the challenge and may soon implement Segwit, but because it will be one of the best chains from which to fork new projects.

There is no need to take sides from this perspective. Just sell the token you don't like and use the gain to buy more that you do like. OTOH, it's perfectly fine to like and hold both just like it was once okay to use more than one web site.

[post edited: BCash to the more neutral BCH ]

Lazare,

You've selectively skipped over critical parts of my argu ment. But never mind... ;)

From your perspective, even in-game virtual limited-edition collectors items that might appreciate in value could be considered "securities". As would limited edition digital art work or, let's say, protected hashes of such works.

Or a limited gift voucher to purchase the first edition of a product funded by Kickstarter....

Basically you can try to draw conclusions of what a typical token crowd sale is or isn't at this stage, but -- at least in my view -- you would probably be jumping to a superficial conclusion.

This isn't about new legislation. The Howey Test dates from 1946.

Which may or may not be suitable for technology developed and used in 2017, let alone 2018, 2019 or further down the road. So you're completely missing the point.

But if your only argument is that government authorities "could" interpret the law in the most aggressive way, few would argue.

FYI --

Jean-Philippe Vergne will present his research in a presentation with the same title at the 4-year anniversary of the Bitcoin Wednesday Conference in Amsterdam on 5 July.

See:

https://www.bitcoinwednesday.com/speakers/jean-philippe-verg...

"...unlike traditional fiat currencies, cryptocurrency is technology — and thus, price depends on innovation potential... improving the underlying software of a cryptocurrency leads to predictable increases in its price."

Lazare, you said it:

"The typical ICO very obviously meets all 4 elements, inasmuch as it involves a company raising money via an ICO..."

Do we really know what a "typical ICO" is at this stage? And as fast as the sector is changing, how do we know what will be typical by the time new legislation is

(a) passed and (b) enforced?

Many (typical?) ICOs are not companies, registered as foundations to support free, open source software with crystal-clear terms of the token distribution:

Which explicitly state that it is not an investment and that it is likely that participants will lose all of their money.

This is just one exceptional example, and many more will follow.

Forward-thinking jurisdictions such as Switzerland which understand and actively support ICOs are quickly developing a strong competitive advantage against the more regressive ones.

One of the world's authorities on the design and implementation of currency systems and author of Money and Sustainability, Professor Lietaer has become one of the leading critics of fiat money systems...

See https://www.bitcoinwednesday.com/event/bitcoin-wednesday-47/ for the full conference program.

Please share in your social networks.

This talk is full of gems including:

- Lightning Network in a Nutshell - What Happens When We Start Streaming Money? - Bitcoin's Gini Coefficient - Mind-blowing Ideas for the Blockchain

“Banking as an institution is going to get replaced by banking as an application, and then banking as an open protocol.”

The link above gives a detailled overview with time references.

If it's going to be a permissioned system anyway, wouldn't you get better performance from a non-blockchain solution?

The permissioned blockchains are being called "a horseless carriage with a horse" by Andreas Antonopoulos.

It's always good to review your basic wallet security.

Just to steer this interesting comment slightly back on topic, see

http://www.bitcoinwednesday.com/nsa-gchq-tapped-security-sys...

The debate about permissioned vs. permissionless blockchains ties back into Hearn's thoughts on privacy.

It will be fascinating to see how his work on Corda develops compared to its permissionless competitors.

At 19’00:

"In the marketplace there is a lot of noise and very little understanding of how the fundamental capabilities of Bitcoin arise out of its proof of work algorithm. We’ll see a lot of consensus suggestions and quite honestly a lot of them are not going to work and a lot of them are bullshit that will make a lot of consultants rich selling bullshit to banks."

http://www.bitcoinwednesday.com/the-legacy-of-silk-road-part...

What kind of "Drug Lord" orders fake IDs to his home or posts his own email address to an online forum?

Here's the link to the patent application at USPTO: http://1.usa.gov/KthuRL

It sounds like Amex is trying to file a patent for our service (and many others). What does HN think we should do?

US Patent 20140006297 filed on July 2, 2013 (from link above):

An integrated, end-to-end, automated system that enables a first social networking user to seamlessly transfer value to a second social networking user, even if the second user is not registered with the money transfer service from which the first user initiates the transfer...

Our service:

PikaPay.com : https://www.PikaPay.com/

Send Bitcoins to anyone on Twitter, as easy as a Tweet!

PikaPay is a Bitcoin wallet integrated with the Twitter API and is one of the fastest and easiest ways to use Bitcoin. Just like in the Amex patent, with PikaPay the recipient doesn't need to have a PikaPay account to receive bitcoins.

We were the first to start sending bitcoins on Twitter back in 2011. But we're sure that scores of other companies have been doing "value transfer via social networks" even earlier.

Do we have to take the Amex patent application seriously in any way, and is there anything specific we should do?

We Tweeted AmEx about it recently:

https://twitter.com/PikaPay/status/420231417117683713

We're curious about what others here think about the patent and how they would approach this issue.

I'm a founder of PikaPay, bringing Bitcoins to Twitter since 2011, so here's my take:

One of the most interesting social & tech experiments since the Internet itself. We are witnessing a revolution.

The number of nodes in the Bitcoin network makes it the most secure system of its kind. If it were used as currency, you could say technically that it was one of the most (if not the most) counterfeit-secure currencies in the world.

If it were used as a medium of exchange, due to network effects alone it would be extremely valuable.

I appreciate Krugman's raising the discourse even slightly above the level of "evil hackers." I don't think he realizes that the Bitcoin movement transcends politics and economics. With Bitcoin (as technology) you can actually even create a system that Krugman himself would like to use.

The way I read this article,it seems to me as if the author doesn't think cypherpunks can also be good entrepreneurs.

Our site -- https://www.PikaPay.com, does Bitcoins via Twitter.

If you're interested please take a look. Still a lot of work to be done, but we welcome any requests, suggestions and criticisms you might have.

As announced at the San Jose Bitcoin Conference in May, we've built an enterprise API that's open to everyone. (See https://Github.com/PikaPay ) An integration with Coinbase is already in the works.

It's easier to quickly slice off the fingertip, no questions asked. Phone theft is so widespread and sophisticated you can expect new tech developed for quickly extracting fingertips coming soon.

I can predict these kinds of problems with biometric security. In the race to be the first to implement, Apple may have made a terrible mistake for a lot of people. I would now avoid these phones.

Bitcoin is really a decentralized messaging system...

The fact that it's used as a form of currency is just an interpretation of what Bitcoin is.

Gold star for your comment.

Many of the other interpretations are not regulated as currency and arguably should not be.

I can understand why people are excited about it being used as a simulation for something financial institutions would want to regulate. But the real potential is in the technology, and the innovation potential that comes out of it.

Recent regulatory moves may lead to attempts to try to kill bitcoin:

http://www.ownlifeful.net/2013/07/how-to-kill-bitcoin/

Look back at what's happened to the music business since Napster for past lessons on what has and has not worked.

To say "a site who's sole purpose is enabling the illegal downloading" is not completely true. File sharing has more legitimate uses than illegal ones. See Dropbox for details.

More than just 3 "killer apps" will emerge from Bitcoin tech. But the 3 you named are very good places to start.

Do you already have a specific alternative in mind?

Media has wrongly pegged Bitcoin as just a "vehicle for speculators." Even better, it's not just a dream, it's happening now.

Great discussion in there about Bitcoin, Namecoin, alternative CA system, anonymity, censorship, etc.