Tron is just an overhyped marketing machine and a massive cash grab. Now they're using the money to buy some real world assets to consolidate their image in the distributed/decentralized world. Their strategy works, what can I say. As far as the product itself, just take a look at their website (https://tron.network/index?lng=en) under the DApps section, they just list some mockups with dead urls or no additional info...a joke really for a project worth several billions in market cap.
Taking a look at their repository (https://github.com/tronprotocol/java-tron) there is no sign of a virtual machine that's supposed to run smart contracts, however they do attempt to create some kind of documentation for it (http://wiki.tron.network/en/latest/TRON_Virtual_Machine.html)
Seriosly, it's frightening how this project managed to raise so much money from thin air.
Key difference: dot-com bubble followed successes like Yahoo, Amazon, Hotmail. What are the crypto equivalent of the Yahoos that have a material product and user-base?
I'm thrilled to participate in building something that won't be government controlled. It's the same excitement I had when the web wasn't Facebook and Google.
Believing is good, proving is better. Every time I hear this kind of comment I've never once found a person that could give me concrete proof or simple explanations of how any of this is being "successful". I'm not trying to be a skeptic, it's just the easiest position given the situation.
AFAIK Ripple-the-software has very little to do with crypto. It’s a centralized system to move fiat and only the super tiny fee it charges banks are paid using XRP — and that too is optional.
Chuckecheese tokens have more widespread usage than XRP.
Distributed doesn’t necessarily mean “decentralized”. I can have a distributed database stored across 5 servers. It wouldn’t mean my database is “decentralized.”
Ripple (the protocol) has been tested and presumably is still tested by money transfer firms and banks for evaluation purposes but not used in production.
And Ripple the protocol != XRP which is kind of funny with the ridiculous valuation of XRP. XRP is a pregen (shit)coin which banks would be loathe to use.
I never said Ripple == XRP. In fact, I meant Ripple the company.
I am not going to make a comment about coin valuations - that is a different discussion.
You were looking for an example where something useful that creates real value for customers was created. I simply gave you an example of something that does.
Well you did write Ripple and XRP so you can see how one could be confused. :)
When/if financial institutions start using Ripple the protocol for real then I will agree that it creates a real value for customers.
If I order an eval kit for the latest RPi clone and I do not use it after a week of evaluation it is debatable whether the kit created a real value for me.
Tron VM has a beta release out, but it's not a priority currently.
They're working on building and stabilizing the blockchain first. Dapp partnerships are coming but you cant have people commit to building on a nonexistant blockchain ;)
All the most used dapps are games and distributed exchanges for coins. Distributed exchanges do not justify the existence of these coins (which are meant to power distributed apps not just be tokens for speculation). The games don't need to be dapps they are just novelties.
Find me a dapp that isn't one of those two things with appreciable usage and I'll be impressed.
I'm well informed already about these things. Note that neither of them have significant adoption.
Security tokens are a Bad idea.
Dai is basically only useful for speculating on cryptocurrencies and so I dismiss it like I dismiss exchange dapps. This whole industry can't be built on speculating on the value of nonces.
Why could not you have both ? No one said that you need Securities transactions to be irreversible. STO can bring more liquidity to property assets and simplify dramatically otherwise complex financial operation (title emission, splitting of subsidiaries and so on).
I do hate the point that talks about adoption when we are talking of a technology that has less than 5 years of age (Ethereum for that matter). I hear it a lot and I cannot stop myself to think that this is the same kind of reasoning could have been use again Amazon in 1996 (Bookstore are a small business and Internet has no adoption)
Stable coins are a terrible idea that one day people will realize as such. The economics of a stable coin make no sense. All it takes for it to be totally useless is just enough people to refuse to accept it or the market crashing to the point where trade volume is so low you can never cash out. Just because there is 1 for 1 fiat backing, doesn’t mean you can actually claim your money.
I’ve been at BEF the last couple of days and http://www.dapp.com is exhibiting. They are launching a service to help promote these kinds of decentralized apps.
Might be a bit too early. Don’t know if the market is even close to ready.
Ensuring the integrity of your distributed application by running the same code on every node in the network is a fundamentally bad idea. It only makes sense in zero trust, monetary applications like Bitcoin and Ethereum itself - or speculative tokens built on top of them.
> It only makes sense in zero trust, monetary applications like Bitcoin and Ethereum itself - or speculative tokens built on top of them.
Which only make sense in a very narrow "technically correct" kind of way. From a larger perspective they still don't make sense. Pissing away small countries worth of electricity to validate an incredibly small number of transactions is a horrible idea.
...And that is just one of the deep, fundamental flaws in blockchain-based currency.
The duplicated code can be as simple as a few cryptographic operations for each broadcasted transaction. This can easily scale to tens of thousands of nodes and transactions per hour without requiring significant computing resources over the baseline of running a high bandwidth internet node.
When the consistency algorithm is proof of work chains, or when the proof of work is used to control the scarcity and disbursement of the valuable token, only then you have the whole "world turning into fucking Mordor" problem.
No connection to the actual world outside of the blockchain.
So mostly they are gambling apps (with source of randomness the blockchain itself), exchanges, or artificially scarce "collectibles" (like cryptokitties).
I wonder if most blatant bs ICO projects are not just clever (pre-regulation) transfers of wealth from retail investors to management. Tron is the quintessential hype > value project, and now they are bolting on actual assets through buying stuff with their war chest. Even better for management, they don't have a fiduciary duty to token holders..
What scares me even more is how overvalued everything else must be around us. It really can't be that people give money away in such way and other valuations are still sane, there has to be some correlation.
I see companies closing in to 1 trillion USD, housing feeling decoupled from reality and the entire crypto market cap even now is ~300bln USD for what mostly is pure speculation. Odd.
Look at the whole casino market. From Las Vegas to video game gambling websites, there is a huge amount of money in there. Now imagine one global casino playable from anywhere in the world and you have the cryptocurrency market. There's no way it's going to stop. On top of that look at religions and how they were created and how they survive mostly from their huge amount of followers. Now imagine that cryptocurrency followers are pretty religious about their "crypto". You now realize it might not be a crazy idea to invest there.
This is, most religious preachers believe what they, preach; unlike most ICO owners, who are purely in it for the money.
Cryptocurrency used to be a fun place to be in, before people started doing these ICOs that only made sense when you look at it from a cash grab.
Something that is entertaining... Get a coin daemon that was created several years ago (could probably get away with months at this point,) that happens to be on an exchange. You can trivially execute a 51% attack, by yourself, with no real investment required.
Crypto can still be fun to be in. If you pay attention to all the ICOs and the crashes and media hype, you're gonna get sad about it. But there are other places in this sphere you can find and still enjoy like the earlier days.
For example, for all the ICO bunk out there, there's also some awesome tech being developed. The lightning network for Bitcoin is really cool! I just paid 18 satoshis to a game the other day. That's less than a penny. There are people in that community building games and working on the tech and its constantly improving and that feels really good. It's pretty flakey, but you can watch it getting better over time.
There's Grin, an implementation of MimbleWimble which is under development. It has an origin story like Bitcoin - one day, somebody with a harry potter pseudonym signed on to the Bitcoin IRC and dropped a white paper and then left, never to be heard from again. Now it's under active development. There is no ICO planned, only an open genesis block, like the good old days. You can contribute, if you want! Or you could read the white paper to understand what makes it different and special.
Ethereum is working on scaling and sidechains. Those are not pump and dumps by private scammy companies, that's really cool new tech!
Whether you love or hate crypto depends greatly on which aspects of it you choose to pay attention to. It's easy for anyone to get disillusioned paying attention to ICOs all day. If you're actually into cool things and not just the "can i make a quick buck" aspect of it, go find those things. They're out there.
Most religions started with a bunch of charlatans as well, the second layer is filled with believers. I've seen the same happening with cryptocurrencies
things aren't overvalued if the money supply has been increasing, which it has
if more dollar units exist, and the same or less purchasable units exist, then purchasable units have a value in more dollar units
the people increasing the money supply had an idea about what other people would spend the additional money on, but economists never predict human behavior accurately. but it doesn't really matter, the primary recipients of the additional supply are their friends.
> things aren't overvalued if the money supply has been increasing, which it has
If housing prices disconnect and accelerate away from what incomes can support servicing a mortgage, housing is overvalued. If PE ratios start to become wildly unjustified, equities are overvalued. This is regardless of money supply.
> If housing prices disconnect and accelerate away from what incomes can support servicing a mortgage, housing is overvalued. If PE ratios start to become wildly unjustified, equities are overvalued.
> This is regardless of money supply.
When vast amounts of money are added to the ecosystem - the economy in this case - the recipients all have the same choices of what to do with the money so that they don't lose it or have less of it. When the expectation is the even MORE money will be added to the ecosystem, then the market participants need to increase their own money faster than the rate that an individual money unit has less ability to purchase its share of the economy.
You have choices across the yield curve which dictate the velocity in which you increase your own supply of money. Some choices are below the expected rate of new money units, so you are expected to lose purchasing power. Other choices are expected to be above the rate of new money units, and this includes housing and stocks.
If there is an excess of money and the purchasable units are not increasing at the same speed, then they will increase in price.
Regarding "overvalued" in the terms of particular asset classes, yes, things can disconnect from this rate of change.
The way we are using that term is fundamentally different and counterproductive to go into a hole about. I am using it to make a simple point: the money will go somewhere.
1) That assumes that what drives housing prices is residential ownership.
2) What is a "justifiable" P/E multiple? What is the justification (other than past values) for _any_ P/E ratio?
What were the drivers of either the numerator or denominator?
This is to say, that macro and micro economics try to model extremely complex systems. When trying to analyze "value" it's worth considering that your mental model might not be accounting for many/most of the relevant forces.
Ultimately a P/E ratio should be justified by discounted future expected returns, compared to the risk free rate. So ultimately, the P/E ratio is a market prediction of future earnings growth.
In the former case you're assuming houses are for living in. That's a human perspective (and one I share) but the capitalist perspective is that houses are stored value and can be even more valuable if they're empty and well guarded. They become another sort of bitcoin, but backed by the reality of tangible property.
Depends on the jurisdiction, right? In several parts of Europe, they put RE ownership restrictions in place because they value housing as housing above value storage. In the US, not so much. Note the decline in foreign purchases of RE in Vancouver when they started taxing those transactions because people living in Vancouver were prioritized over Chinese dollars flooding the market.
True story, about a month ago I was going through BWI airport security check wearing a token conference Tshirt. The TSA guy at the check patting me asked me "Do you hold cryptocurrencies"?
That took me by surprise and my paranoid immigrant-brain thought I might get in trouble about carrying cryptos undisclosed in my ledger wallet or something. He repeated again and asked what I hold.
That's when I realized he was just an enthusiast and an amateur investor himself. His follow up question was "What do you think of Tron". I tried explaining to him how the project seems like just marketing and that he should be careful. He didn't seem convinced.
But that's when I realized. Random non-tech people are heavily invested and rooting for random scam projects. That's not good.
Exactly. Same with EOS, Iota, NEM and the other 1497 shitcoins. A themeforest logo, someone else's whitepaper through google translate to some language then back to english exported to PDF, pull some random linkedin profiles, a fiverr.com cartoon video, throw $10k at mcafee for a tweet (stick it on a credit card), and your practically at the ICO presale launch stage - on your way to $50m+ scam ICO club... Don't worry about infrastructure or a testnet there are w3schools tutorials on launching a coin on eth, or stellar..
Reposting an old comment I made about TRON (the cryptocurrency) here:
For those that haven't heard of TRON, it is what I would call one of the most successful scams in the history of cryptocurrency. It is a currency that was made on top of Ethereum (thus, it took no actual effort to create, as this can be done instantly and for free), paired with a significant amount of hype and lies to investors.
Some investors in TRON have lost up to 66% of their net worth thus far (https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/tron/), making it one of the largest crashes that has been seen in the top 10 coins on CoinMarketCap in quite awhile. Some of the things investors believe are completely absurd, citing that the Chinese government or Amazon will use TRON. It's unfortunate the levels of misinformation that so rampantly spread and cause many to lose their hard-earned money.
> creating a potential mining platform for cryptocurrencies.
I find calibrating my mistrust of cryptocurrency startups difficult; I cannot tell whether this is a baseless speculation, or an actual betrayal-based business plan, or an attempt to make people share less files by reducing trust in BitTorrent client software.
Can someone explain what this means for BitTorrent as in the protocol and ecosystem? I did not know that BitTorrent the company even existed or maintained uTorrent until this confusing announcement. I assumed the protocol was an open community thing, but it seems like this company has been trying (unsuccessfully) to become a media empire?
I would guess this means absolutely nothing for the protocol and ecosystem. Both have been around a long time (in tech years) and I've never noticed any way that BitTorrent the company affected BitTorrent the protocol.
Technically they are, but in reality, none of the BEPs matter unless libtorrent implements them. Every modern client links against libtorrent for their torrent logic; when picking a client, you're just selecting what version of libtorrent and UI framework you want.
libtorrent is solely maintained by Arvid Norberg who happens to actually work at another blockchain company, Blockstream. If you want to do one thing to support the BitTorrent ecosystem, it's to contribute to libtorrent to reduce the bus factor.
I love cryptocoins, I think tokens are kinda interesting and I've read a bit about some of the token/blockchain/storage offerings. But I honestly don't see anything radically distinct among Tron/Storj/MaidSafe/LBRY/etc.
IMO these services could perhaps be a backend for some user-friendly storage broker. But people just don't like the idea of encrypted data where they're the only ones who have the key. "Who do I call if I forget/lose/destroy my passphrase?"
Well, it happens that we haven't figured out yet how to kill two birds with one stone with regards to decentralization and user-friendliness. However, the implications of a decentralized internet, like SAFEnet (built in Rust) could be potentially life-changing: https://safenetforum.org/t/where-do-you-see-maidsafe-in-thre....
It might not happen but as we've seen with the CA breach, data is the new oil (money) and the new nuclear fusion (danger), and we should aim to have control of it ourselves treating it as the form of factual power it is.
> But I honestly don't see anything radically distinct among Tron/Storj/MaidSafe/LBRY/etc.
From the outside looking in, that might as well have been "But I honestly don't see anything radically distinct among Uber/Lyft/Curb". Just different groups trying to build something based on the same idea. Even if the core concepts are similar, it's very much the case, as always, that execution is everything, and each group is invested in making their own solution win in the market.
Still from the user perspective I see no difference between Uber/Lyft or taxi - I choose the one which is fastest/cheapest on a given circumstances, so not sure what's your point here.
> If you never rode in a cab before those companies existed you have no idea how terrible it was.
That's very location specific, living in London Uber is no cheaper than minicabs on most journeys, you already could find out the price of a journey beforehand, larger minicab companies already had apps for booking (albeit not as polished), and Uber drivers generally seem to lack the kind of local knowledge of roads that allow local cab drivers to choose faster routes than whatever route their app indicates.
The only area Uber has a compelling advantage is journeys of ten miles or more across the city, where not having to return to the area where the journey begun means that they are cheaper than a minicab.
- You can improve the design in the above video with a threshold algorithm, where you only need to get X >= Y of reset tokens correct (Y should be high enough for entropy, and X is enough for your memory to be accurate).
- Or the model I most/best prefer, is doing multi-part social-proof backup login. Aka you have 3+ friends (or services, if you don't trust your friends?) who when combined together can unlock a backup of your key.
These systems work, and I'm confident you'll see even centralized systems convert to them (we're already seeing Facebook do it) for higher security.
Martti 'Sirius' Malmi, Satoshi's 1st contributor to Bitcoin, also has joined our team to work on solving problems around this - like, if you need to trust 3 of your friends, how do you actually have a guarantee that those are* your friends' pubkey, not some imposter account, especially because consumers won't be good at copying/checking pubkeys. He's already got a bunch of code for it working: https://github.com/identifi/identifi-lib
What, exactly, did they buy here? A trademark? These guys don't make libtorrent, they don't control the DHT, I'm not sure how they're even counting users.
I was going to ask the same thing. If they bought the "BitTorrent brand or anything associated with their acquisition of uTorrent then they just spent $140M to be unilaterally hated by that entire community since they have a shady past of doing ad deals and adware/malware.
Is a real life Pied Piper "decentralized" internet even desirable? I kind of like not having a big chunk of the internet on my hard drive and serving it up to other clients.
I’m particularly curious about the moral/legal aspects of serving websites run by others on one’s own machine. Who takes responsibility when illegal content is discovered? And how does one make sure that the illegal content is not redistributed?
(“Illegal” here is a euphemism for anything considered morally wrong to consume or distribute by most of society)
Could never be erased or censored, never go down, never be taken over by telecoms, yeah it has some desirable properties. If you have high speed internet you are most likely already taking part in an internet sharing scheme already.
Never be taken down by telecoms seems like quite a stretch, since they can filter the technology every single one of these distributed platforms rely on: TCP/IP. VPNs won't help if every node must broadcast to other nodes for the network to function, and thus giving away their identity of being a participant in whichever network.
BitTorrent The Company isn't focused around their p2p client. They've been trying to become some form of media publisher for a long time now, but haven't had any particular big hits there.
At this point, I think the name recognition is the fundamental asset they have as a company.
Exactly...they have nothing to speak of, but a lot they like to talk about. Cohen got real lucky here and if he is as smart as he is supposed to be, he will stash away a couple million of that for a rainy day. History is littered with inventors who ended up broke.
Oh? Care to elucidate on that? What do they actually do and how do they make money besides selling a few ads on that client? Serious question I'm sure everyone here would like to know the answer to.
> given the company is not only well-versed in the technologies necessary for decentralised, peer-to-peer networking through its software and protocols but also has a foothold in the entertainment industry via BitTorrent Now, helping independent artists and musicians promulgate their work using the same technology used to pirate the latest episodes of your favourite TV shows
Though I use Transmission on my NAS4Free box, which I control remotely through the excellent transgui program (https://github.com/transmission-remote-gui/transgui) I also install qBittorrent to all Windows/Linux users asking for a client for it being very stable and consistent among platforms, the latter very important for newbies, but I see now they're porting Transmission to Windows as well. Good!
I don't consider closed source clients for security reasons, or bloated ones (Vuze etc.) because I'd rather use a spare GB of RAM to make a filesystem more snappy than to load a Java environment that eats alone half the resources of a small server.
Last I heard, Deluge was the preferred minimalist client. I've never noticed much difference between the ones I've tried other than that some have ads. Performance seems to be pretty much the same across the board.
I wouldn't called Deluge minimalist - that's Transmission.
Deluge is more of a power-tool, albeit one most people can use happily.
The big thing that I like is that you can use the desktop GUI (GTK) client with a remote daemon doing the actual downloading. Plenty of them have web-clients (Deluge does as well), but it's nice using the proper GUI. Other than that, it has all of the usual tools you'd want from a client.
That's a very disingenuous phrasing. They were hacked. Maybe (probably) due to bad security practices, but they didn't intentionally distribute malware.
uTorrent is pure ad-filled garbage since they bought it...nearly impossible to use from all the popups and shit. at one time it was the only thing anyone used but i seriously doubt anyone bothers with it anymore.
Maybe bittorrent will finally achieve mainstream adoption. More importantly, maybe tron will find a way to eliminate those pesky bittorrent data leacher
This is surprising news! TRON was (is?) a cryptocurrency everyone on Reddit loved to hate, now they're going around buying BitTorrent -- actually useful software? What is to come of this? Are they going to try and attempt to blockchain-ize BitTorrent's protocol, like vTorrent[0]?
I've been a blockchain watcher since 2010. I started (and abondoned) the first Ethereum meetup in ATL. After having several chances to become a blockchain millionaire and staying on the sidelines, I finally dove in 4th quarter of last year. I watched $3k turn into $115,000 in about 3 months, then watched it evaporate back to $3k. Saying I have a few crypto regrets is the understatement of a lifetime. That being said, this space has taught me one of the most valuable business lessons - skeptics stay broke while dreamers and sale people buy lambos.
Whenever webster's gets around to defining "shitcoin" "TRX" should be the first synonym but that hasn't stopped Justin Sun from raking in billions and now buying BitTorrert. Projects putting out products and/or developing hardcore tech like new virtual machines sitting on the sidelines and Justin Sun's are joining the 3 comma club. Capitalism rarely rewards the best and we're just getting to witness this firsthand.
> skeptics stay broke while dreamers and sale people buy lambos.
And if you believe that, you still haven't learned anything. Only a tiny fraction of crypto "investors" will ever get return on their investment. Only the people at the top of the pyramid will win. You yourself helped line the pockets of the scammers who reeled you in.
The entire space is a giant scam. And yeah a couple people walked out with lambos, but so did Bernie Madoff and the Enron execs.... until the rug was pulled from under them....
You clearly are not very knowledgeable about the space. Lots of people got very rich, not just a tiny fraction and doing so didn't require investing in an ico. When I started the meetup, ETH was trading at around $6. You do the math on how much a $2500 position ended up being worth in Dec of 2017. There a ton of legit tech in the space. There's also lots of gold-rush scanners. My 3K to 115K wasn't the result of an ico. I got in well after the ico at $0.05 and it went to $0.11. Had I been smart enough to liquidate at even a $0.09 level I literally could've bought a 2013 limbo (I looked just to torture myself).
I don't know why you have any regrets - you apparently have capital to burn, you say you have learned the lesson, and there's a shitload of cryptoblockchaincoin opportunities out there and new ones everyday. Apply your lesson, become rich like 'lots of people' and then post a pic of that Lambo on #MyCryptoLambo with the rest of us!
This is going to be one of those huge historical moments when idiots/the greedy get screwed and we write about it later.
Most tech people I talk to have realized Blockchain is useless outside of applications that require decentralized verification.
You wouldnt use blockchain for social media, you wouldnt use blockchain for most download services, you generally wouldnt use blockchain when a centralized server is cheaper and faster.
It costs more money to pay multiple people to verify. It costs less money for less people to verify.
Not sure the detail I need to go on HN, but the understanding of blockchain on reddit is non-existent. They believe it can and should be used everywhere.
This understanding has created uninformed youtube videos and ICOs that promise the moon.
Then there seems to be people who work in tech that understand what is useful here, and whats hype.
Most techies moved on, sure you own bitcoin because thats a real application of blockchain, but outside of Bitcoin there isnt anything currently useful.
Ask a Tron owner about blockchain, that should be enough to show you how misunderstood crypto is, and how the people who own alt coins are going after money rather than tech.
"...the understanding of blockchain on reddit is non-existent."
The understanding of a lot of things are almost non-existent on reddit, or rather the people who know what they are talking about are buried by an algorithm that vastly prefers populist comments typed as quickly after OP as humanly (or robotically) possible. Of course this makes reading the article (or other posts) and having your comment visible mutually exclusive.
I didn't realize how little correct information was available on reddit until I became very specialized in a subject, went to that subject's sub, and saw that practically nobody there even knew the basics--yet they happily chat about the subject anyway, pretending they were experts. The rare exceptions were nearly invisible, lost in in-jokes and references.
Be-very-fucking-ware when asking advice about something you are unsure about on reddit, they will channel so much smoke up your ass you'll burp clouds. And once one person makes a confident declaration which is totally false or misunderstood--pretending they're some pro or expert--almost immediately every other guy in the thread is copy-pasting his response to every other instance of that question as quickly as they can to get points or whatever. It's silly.
For the record I try not to be so delusional as to believe I'm the only one who knows anything and everyone else is stupid--I'm totally average, lots of people are brighter than me. This is a systematic thing brought on accidentally by their forum design.
I was foolish enough to speak up on a networking related subreddit. Silly me, 20 years of experience, I should have known better than to share.
I got pummeled by a handful of small time networking guys who think their one rack data center is hot shit and there is just no other way to do things than to buy Cisco and parrot what their sales guy says. I kid you not, one of them seriously was calling his Cisco sales guy and asking about some Cisco news, got some spin from his sales guy and, and then posting what his sales guy told him.... (dude even said he was doing that) I was done.
I don’t disagree. Do you have any examples of where Reddit got blockchain all wrong? While I have said many critical things that get me downvoted to oblivion on Reddit, I wouldn’t say everything I read on a sub where I understand the subject matter well is wrong.
I gave up reading comments there quite some time ago. As I said, reddit doesn't collectively get things (like blockchain) wrong--individuals get things right or wrong, and reddit most often promotes the wrong answers because wrong answers are more spectacular, more exciting, and quicker to type than the truth.
Reddit's chronological weighting is a very big factor in this. If your comment comes a few minutes after a post, such as the time it takes to read the content of the post--or if it takes time to thoughtfully type out a response--it is scored vastly lower by the black box and is less likely to be seen and voted on.
There are certainly exceptions, but unless you already know a lot about the subject at hand it's very hard to pick them out among the deluge of jokes, smark, and people rapidly parroting the misconceptions of others.
But techies are not necessarily where the money is.
A large number of financial execs have spotted the hype, and see it as their "contribution" to their bank. It gives them the chance to do something different, maybe run their own team, and make a name for themselves.
From the stories I've heard they are not all clueless about the real potential either; They just see that this is likely to eat up even more investment, and they want to be on the gravy train.
I've heard that several of the consultancies are into this area as well, though they really have no clue what they are doing. Some of them have zero experience but they can still sell projects on the strength of their brand.
I agree. There are a few interesting areas, such as how a blockchain scheme might be useful to the Tor network, but it is all hype. I really laugh at those who think blockchain tech can/will replace property registries, real estate agents, and lawyers. I guess these were the same people who thought SecondLife would replace teleconferencing.
I'm working on a pretty cool project. It's called Regen Network. We're a distributed verification network for ecological data with a strong bias towards encouraging more regenerative agriculture. And we're using a blockchain as part of our verification model.
I have to agree that for the most part we haven't seen any real products come out of the crypto space. And there's a lot of chaff. It actually blows me away sometimes how many icos there are
why not? for sure it's awesome to have tamper proof asset registries on the blockchain that are compatible worldwide. it will revolutionize everything really.
> for sure it's awesome to have tamper proof asset registries on the blockchain that are compatible worldwide
For one thing, the blockchain doesn't provide tamper proof asset registries because the blockchain can be forked (see the DAO fiasco for proof).
Second "temper proof asset registeries" aren't actually a problem that really needs to be solved. The hard part of any registry is making sure the data that goes in is valid.... and that is a meatspace warm-fuzzy-human problem, not a technical problem.
there is no contentious forking if it's true decentralization. But this is more of a thing if governments would participate and run nodes along with anyone that would like to attest too.
I don't believe in the saying that you need a problem to be solved. For sure the country I live in now cannot lookup easily what other real estate properties I own in every part of the world. All governments would need to select a distributed database and encode everything on it. Well this is now called Ethereum or insert your favorite platform here and they will develop on it because the technology makes it easy.
In the end you don't need decentralisation for verifying integrity - there is and was a large body of research for verifying integrity of such records like timestamping services.
Possibly the most succinct refutation of the reasonableness of IP rights ever devised. Rather than proving that copyrights should be respected, it forces people to realize that when computers allow you to completely encompass all human effort into the design or creation of a work, and remove entirely all human effort from the duplication or distribution, dollar value as a measure of scarcity or rarity becomes meaningless.
"You wouldn't download a car" is a reference to an IT Crowd skit which parodies the anti torrenting campaign you linked. IT Crowd is a wonderful British sitcom, I recommend any techy would enjoy it.
Or this is one of those historic moments where human civilization enters a new phase of international value creation and value transfer with monetary policy forever decoupled from government. That is the crypto narrative. ICOs and security tokens used for international crowdfunding are part of that bottom up borderless future.
Social media content is not a scarce, fungible resource, it doesn't require global consensus and doesn't require an arms race of useless hashing to prevent double-spends (since there's nothing to spend).
If you want to prevent others posting as you, just sign posts/actions with a private key. If you want transferrable ownership of short usernames, that can be done by having the previous owner sign a timestamped file stating the (public key of) the new owner, maybe with some hashcash thrown in to prevent a double-transfer. Since there's no need for global consensus, you can limit spam using whitelists (i.e. ignore almost everybody); it can be reduced further by adding hashcash to posts/actions.
(Yes, hashcash didn't work for email; that's because email must interoperate with existing non-hashcash senders, and hence can suffer a downgrade attack; plus email allows clients to disconnect after sending, so the servers have no way to request them to include more hashcash, which drives down the price they're willing to accept to 0).
I don't understand; messages should be tailored to their audience, and Hacker News commenters are technical folk. I wouldn't give that explanation to non-technical folk.
My non-tech answer would be that blockchains prevent some specific types of fraud in virtual currencies (e.g. trying to create new money out of thin air). Social media doesn't involve virtual money, e.g. it's fine to create new posts, friendships, etc. out of thin air. Hence they don't need a blockchain. The problems that social networks do have (e.g. posing as someone else, sending spam) can be dealt with in other, less expensive ways.
Just a few seconds ago I was wondering if anyone of importance (technical importance) did in fact talk positevely about blockchain(s). If anyone is or knows someone like that, I'm interested.
There are many. It's reasonable to assume that there will be use cases outside of the cryptocurrency space. Just because there's a ridiculous amount of hype doesn't mean there's nothing there.
I never understood how Steem purports to be "censorship resistant". steemit.com is just a centralised, privately operated website hosted on AWS, so it's not any more censorship resistant than anything else hosted on AWS.
Every single post, comment, and vote is in the distributed Steem blockchain, copied in seconds to every full node, only a small fraction of which are run by Steemit—same as any other blockchain/p2p system.
The fact that you need to store all previous blocks (and content) to fully validate later blocks is an advantage in this case.
I was super into using hashcash for antiabuse in social stuff pre-bitcoin, but the difference in hashing rate in-browser versus in C even then rendered it somewhat ineffective at anti spam as an abuser could hash 10-100x faster, and the delays on the UX side for legitimate users made it a nonstarter. With GPUs and hashing asics now that gap is even worse.
(FWIW these days the Steem blockchain that holds the steemit content is delegated proof of stake, for block production.)
How does Steem store user generated content like images and videos? Are they in the blockchain itself? If so, how do they solve the problem of people downloading the blockchain being liable for illegal content added by other users?
The Steem blockchain only holds unicode text: words, html, json. Images and video are embeds or img tags, which point to URLs on ipfs or elsewhere. That’s a separate challenge.
It seems like any on-chain user generated content is likely to be a problem; arbitrary binary data can be encoded as text. I suspect this problem already exits on the bitcoin chain though, so it's not like it's unique to Steem.
Not sure what they do, but it's entirely possible to build a solution where all image/video content is stored on-blockchain as well.
>If so, how do they solve the problem of people downloading the blockchain being liable for illegal content added by other users?
Divide each file into N shards, make sure every miner has no more than N/2 shards of any file at any point in time. You only 'get' a complete file if you specifically ask for it.
BitTorrent does what again? Yeah, I know they claim to have 100-some million users, but that's pretty easy to say. I think the buyers got a bad deal here. I have followed technology for a long time and BitTorrent has managed to get in the headlines once every 2-3 years with some big announcement or the other, all of which have amounted to nothing.. correct me if i'm wrong but i'm pretty sure i'm not. There last big announcement was (surprise, surprise!) another crypto-currency thing to add to the 1600 that are already out. Like that's going to go far...
>There last big announcement was (surprise, surprise!) another crypto-currency thing to add to the 1600 that are already out. Like that's going to go far...
Maybe I'm wrong but I thought the last announcement as you claim wasn't anything to do with BitTorrent but instead was about Bram Cohen dipping his fingers into Crypto with Chia. Less as an action of BitTorrent but more of an action as him as an individual. He's no longer with BitTorrent according to the wikipedia page on him
Seriosly, it's frightening how this project managed to raise so much money from thin air.