Re: [Cryptography] actual journalism, was LRB article, Satoshi's Trump Card
On Sun, Jul 2, 2017 at 5:37 PM, John Levine <johnl@iecc.com> wrote:
Then maybe some combination of them could earn some crypto coin.
Having looked at the articles the author wrote before and after the pair he wrote last year on the Craig Wright affair
Didn't notice a pair, unless this video makes the first of them. https://www.lrb.co.uk/2016/06/28/andrew-ohagan/on-craig-wright-and-satoshi-n... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zxMU4C6bGKw
I think I can say with fair assurance that [authors have] better things to do than to screw around with cyber funny money.
Sounds like there's a market for concierge services that will collect this cyber funny money and convert it to deliverable fiat under contract.
real money
There's that word again. Last time it came up no one seemed able or brave enough to risk defining and defending in context with cryptocurrencies, beyond say, "paying taxes with it".
Speaking of actual journalism, online magazine Slate has a weekly Slate Money podcast which is quite good because host Felix Salmon when he's not making dorky jokes has an excellent grasp of finance and economics. Last week's edition had an interesting segment on Initial Coin Offerings. It starts at about 31:14 in the podcast.
http://www.slate.com/articles/podcasts/slate_money/2017/06/uber_amazon_buyin...
They conclude (I think correctly) that most ICOs are scams even if their proponents don't think they are
Yes they're "scams" in that hardly any of the more than hundreds of effectively cloned coins out there are bringing any substantial new developments or combinations of capabilities that will cause them to float to a top ten position long term. Notwithstanding, it's an open market full of niches and this process is vital to developing the space. Developing scaling, privacy / anonymity, integration with things and economies are very large potential areas. These are early days.
they note that for most alt-coins the only practical way to buy them is to use bitcoin as an intermediary.
Some areas will lead / lag at times, the market matrix is no exception. There was no way to buy BTC (₿), and you probably can't readily buy KPW (₩) yet either. If certain forces get their way, you won't be able to buy either ever again, maybe not even beloved USD ($)...
On 03/07/2017 7:28 AM, grarpamp wrote:
Yes they're "scams" in that hardly any of the more than hundreds of effectively cloned coins out there are bringing any substantial new developments or combinations of capabilities that will cause them to float to a top ten position long term.
The coin to invest in, the coin that I will invest in both in money and as a software contributor, will solve the scaling problem, will be capable of scaling all the way to wiping out the US$ as a world currency. It will have integral support for sidechains with payments out of one sidechain to another sidechain being endorsed by sidechain signature from a single authority which is itself periodically but infrequently endorsed by a short sidechain multisignature, which can be generated by arbitrarily complex rules idiosyncratic to that sidechain provided that conformity to the rules has verification of bounded computational time that the central chain can evaluate. It will have an efficient system for securing history in which Merkle trees do not grow to enormous depth, so that it is possible to efficiently verify any one small part of history without needing to verify all transactions that have ever taken place. (Because scalability implies we abandon everyone verifying everything down to the last byte.) It will be decentralized in the sense that if the police grab every single major contributor, software writer, and server, they cannot change the rules and make the currency act differently, they can only seize the money of the people that they have grabbed.
participants (2)
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grarpamp -
James A. Donald