Show me a regulator able to prevent bitcoin users who own their own keys from making transactions, or one able to reverse transactions once made and confirmed.
Show me a regulator who is able to do any of those things with cash transfers of USD?
Bitcoin can though. 51% of users could just outright fork and annul whatever transaction they want, no?
In addition, we’ve learned over and over again that non-reversibility is not necessarily even a desirable property to have in a payment system, which is why so many non-cash payment systems have built those in.
No they have to re-write the history. The cartel of minors does not set the rules of bitcoin. It can only undo transactions by doing more work to write an alternate history. Even with the majority this is often unfeasible in practice.
> Show me a regulator who is able to do any of those things with cash transfers of USD?
Holding and/or transporting large amounts of cash is extremely fraught, especially across borders. US legal authorities regularly seize cash without due process and without meaningful judicial recourse. Most US banknotes are contaminated with cocaine, so it's prima facie laughable that a narcotic-detection-dog alert on a pile of money is seen as sufficient evidence that the money was obtained via the drug trade (thus allowing its seizure) -- yet this is a very common tactic.
The ability to transact in cash is meaningless if governments (and entities authorised by governments, look up "sewer service" or "gutter service") can seize cash without even a pretence of due process.
Any national regular can prevent bitcoin users from making transactions which exchange BTC for their national currency, or for retailers with a presence in their country.
Show me a regulator able to prevent US dollar users who have the money in their hands from making transactions, or one able to reverse transactions once made (doesn't even have to be confirmed—in fact confirmed instantly).
The problem (and advantage of) Nextdoor is that it is hyper-local. It's great for anyone in an HOA or apartment complex or whatever. It really fills a niche there.
However I wish there was more to fill the spectrum between Nextdoor, which is really just a communication tool for people that live within shouting distance of each other (there's a standup routine in there somewhere..) and Facebook, which trends too far towards the national and global.
I wish I could close my facebook account, but it's essential for asynchronously keeping in contact with friends living around the globe now (I grew up in Silicon Valley, so my friend set in particular is rather global since everyone not in tech or other high paying professional jobs have been forced out of the housing market and moved elsewhere). What about at the level of my city, county, state & region? I really wish there were more local options.
I also wish there were better tools for building social networks around specific hobbies, industries, or interests. Where are the clubs of social networks? This requires more than just a "page" with a wall and like button. The anonymous and cancerous Reddit certainly isn't the answer either.
As far as I'm aware, YC didn't cut ties with him. Rather, YC restructured their advisor program and he was offered a role in the new structure, which many other advisors did, but he declined for whatever reason.
Of course if you were YC trying to save face for everyone involved that's also exactly what you would do.. but I think it is ill-advised to jump to conclusions before the facts are in. It might be just what it is claimed to be: a choice by Pieter Thiel not to participate further for whatever reasons he might have. Certainly YC of today is not the same as the YC he originally involved himself with.
Nearly all of Silicon Valley post-2001 is either (a) online retailers/ecommerce, or (b) parasites hanging off of the $100+Bn/yr online advertising industry. At the top of that latter food chain sit only a handful of companies -- Google and Facebook being the big ones. So much of everything you see in IT and tech in general, from the IT worker to the graphic design consultant to analytics and "big-data" machine learning startups are living off of money that came from clicks on ads or checkout carts at buy-and-ship retailers.
Facebook "only" took in around $26Bn in advertising revenue last year. But their ads are considered more reliable and higher quality than Google's products, so admit some speculation about growth potential. With a global advertising market (across all mediums) of half a trillion dollars that is quickly moving into digital, is it any surprise that these top dogs have high P/E ratios? Those P/E's are based on anticipated future revenues, shares of a pie that is rapidly expanding in size. Comparing P/E using earnings of this year doesn't give the full picture.
That said, they're certainly not undervalued either, and this analysis does nothing to explain Amazon (WTF is going on there? Surely they don't have $200bn of inventory and warehouse property. Do they?). But 35 P/E is only 3.5x more than the 10x rule of thumb, and the entire market could reasonably grow by that amount. That appears to be what investors are betting on too.
(If I had to turn this into stock picking advice, I'd note that if the market is predicting the future accurately here, then one can also say that traditional non-digital advertisers aren't going to do well in the years to come [no surprise], and also that general tech will likely see a huge influx of revenue and capital investment as the top dogs trickle down their market share gains. Baring some black swan catastrophe things will likely be good in Silicon Valley for some time to come, even outside of the FANG companies. But you should not take this as investment advice, which I would not be qualified to give, etc. etc.)
ETA: For the record there's a third prominent SV category I forgot to include in the list, which is peer-to-peer services. AKA the sharing economy. AirBnB, Uber/Lyft, Instacart. Part of why these were so exciting in the last two years or so is because it was a gold rush on new markets that hadn't been colonized by tech companies yet. Doesn't really affect this comment in any way though, other than technical accuracy of that sentence.
We don’t know for certain how much was really stolen. We just have Tether at their word. And if more was stolen than the amount frozen, it certainly is redeemable—for bitcoin on an exchange.
Yup. Also Confidential transactions, mimblewimble, sidechains, drivechains,... even bigger blocks. People forget that bigger blocks could come to BTC too, but devs are making the safe choice to try scaling with ways they know won’t compromise security or decentralization first.
People have had cheaper alternatives to Bitcoin for a while now (ETH? LTC?) and yet BTC is still valued significantly higher. There’s more to this game than a cheap digital payment.
As far as I can tell, they both share a minor investor, Barry Silbert. And anyone who thinks that means anything hasn’t been paying attention to what went down regarding the New York Agreement, where Blockstream (standing alongside many others) opposed Barry and won.
Which part do you think is a theory? Censorship on /r/Bitcoin is trivial to test, just go there and post something about censorship, criticism of blockstream, the high fees on the main chain due to block size restrictions, etc. See if your comment stays. Don't forget to log out and check that it wasn't silently grey listed.
As I said in another comment: "As far as I can tell, they both share a minor investor, Barry Silbert. And anyone who thinks that means anything hasn’t been paying attention to what went down regarding the New York Agreement, where Blockstream (standing alongside many others) opposed Barry and won."
> the company that has gone to great lengths to take over the github repository,
I have no idea what this is in reference to. The Bitcoin Core repo? The release manager for Bitcoin is employed by MIT DCI. The largest group of contributors is from ChainCode Labs. Of the half-dozen or so people who have commit access (a meaningless metric since no one has unilateral authority and they operate by consensus), only one works for Blockstream, and he has some sort of special contract where he is independent and isolated in his decision making capacity and can leave, with pay, at any time for any reason.
> censor /r/bitcoin,
There is no relationship I know of between r/bitcoin and Blockstream. r/bitcoin seems to like Blockstream, but that's not their fault. r/bitcoin has also had some issues with excessive moderation, but none of the mods there work for the company or are in any way tied to Blockstream afaict.
> and ultimately keep the block size limit at 1 MB so that they can profit from fees on their own 3rd party chain.
Blockstream's supposed scaling solution is Lightning, a peer-to-peer protocol where the users collect fees from each other, which they are developing in an open source basis with multiple compatible implementations and no vendor lock-in. It will probably reduce the fees paid to miners for comparable levels of transactions, but with those fees being collected by users directly. There doesn't appear to be any profit opportunity for Blockstream here except perhaps consulting income in helping people and industries setup and maintain such networks, which has been their "RedHat of Bitcoin" model from the beginning.
