Crypto Currency Thread

[Behemoth]

coyft said:

How does a normal database transfer value?

By keeping a record of ownership. The Land Registry uses a regular database to record property ownership. When value is transferred, the record in the LR database gets updated & can be queried by any interested party.

Thinking your wine/whisky use case through, you can record provenance on a blockchain for something newly produced. Anything already existing has a problem because somebody has to show evidence (and others have to agree) to verify what has gone on in the past. But you still have the problem of forgeries on the physical asset to deal with and then you still need a real world adjudication process & system to ascertain valid claims. What happens with lost bottles whose identities are then forged?

If your wine & whisky are coming from a manufacturer or organised group of manufacturers, then these entities are best placed to run the system (and pay the overheads for maintaining it as it can be a viable part of production cost because it adds value to their newly sold products). As such, it's centralised and much cheaper to do on a normal database than on a blockchain. Building a smart contract would be far more difficult, with hundreds of edge cases to think through and code up for. Creating something like this without bugs is almost impossible imo.

[HannsG]

Joey Deacon said:

Guess how long that takes depends on whether you are currently up or down.

Big falls again today, if you are down then you might be in for a long wait.

I Was up on TRX £2.5k a month back and should have sold.

Cardano and NEO have been absolute dogs for me, Once the market recovers I will be selling these off and sticking it into the Mainframe Cryptos.

Get my investment back on these two and bail. I think I'll stick to bricks and mortar, learned my lesson.

The amount of money I have in crypto could have paid for a deposit on a buy to let

[Behemoth]

Incoming fud to help drive price down a few more thou:



This is from a paper by a pair of finance academics. Very informative charts in the appendices & the upshot of the thesis is that Tether manipulated price in the 2017 runups. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_i... . I'm looking forward to seeing how this gets peer reviewed..

[anonymous-user]

HannsG said:

I'm out when I am break even on crypto.

I always regretted selling up in October last year, I made enough, but could have made a lot more selling in December( I still have a few hundred) The problem is how much you want to make. The x15 etc are few but you can still make something and I think there are a few years still to run. The Olympics in Japan will accept cryptos, that is some exposure and other coins in development. The next big coin might not even be released yet. I'm rebuying in in September unless I build another mining computer.

[Behemoth]

coyft said:

No one is in charge of the contract and there would be no adjudication, it either pays out if an event is true or it doesn’t. I thought that’s what smart contracts were intended to do,

Take flight insurance you could have a product that pays out in crypto if the flight is delayed by more tha x hours. The payout could be immediate as the event is easily verifiable.

Are you suggesting a crypto driven insurance pool where users pay in without the airline or insurance industry's involvement? Who is setting up the rules for it? Who is custodian of the crypto fund? What happens if a bunch of flights are delayed for a pool-destroying amount of time over one continent, earning $$ for those residing or travelling there but destroying the rest of the world's cover? I can imagine a whole load of events that create awkward edge cases. The smart contract would be a huge task to programme. Who would maintain it? Complexity makes these things fail & most people who aren't in the software business hugely underestimate complexity.

[Bluedot]

coyft said:

Behemoth said:

coyft said:

No one is in charge of the contract and there would be no adjudication, it either pays out if an event is true or it doesn’t. I thought that’s what smart contracts were intended to do,

Take flight insurance you could have a product that pays out in crypto if the flight is delayed by more tha x hours. The payout could be immediate as the event is easily verifiable.

Are you suggesting a crypto driven insurance pool where users pay in without the airline or insurance industry's involvement? Who is setting up the rules for it? Who is custodian of the crypto fund? What happens if a bunch of flights are delayed for a pool-destroying amount of time over one continent, earning $$ for those residing or travelling there but destroying the rest of the world's cover? I can imagine a whole load of events that create awkward edge cases. The smart contract would be a huge task to programme. Who would maintain it? Complexity makes these things fail & most people who aren't in the software business hugely underestimate complexity.

You’re over thinking it. A simple insurance contract offered by an insurance company that compensates travellers if let’s say an EU flight is delayed by more than 2 hours for any reason. It would be executed automatically by the smart contract. It wouldn’t be difficult to program it’s a set of simple rules that would be verified by various databases. If the flight is delayed the insured gets payed out automatically, if the flight takes off within two hours of departure the contract is cancelled. No need for any arbitration, paperwork or claims management.

Technology already exists and has done for years for this sort of thing, you could probably write the equivalent in VBScript in less than an hour.
If insurance companies wanted technology to pay out automatically with no quibbles then they could have done it years ago, they don't though.

[Behemoth]

coyft said:

A simple insurance contract offered by an insurance company that compensates travellers

That's fine & dandy. It doesn't need a slow expensive & awkward decentralised blockchain, though. Stuff like this is automated on normal databases every day. Smart contract is a buzz phrase. Any insurance company can just build a standard database for this pretty cheaply and get on with it. If I click on a product on Amazon & that triggers a robot in a warehouse to find the item, package & move it to dispatch, all code driven by algos, is that a smart contract? Probably.

[anonymous-user]

coyft said:

Behemoth said:

coyft said:

A simple insurance contract offered by an insurance company that compensates travellers

That's fine & dandy. It doesn't need a slow expensive & awkward decentralised blockchain, though.

And if that's the case why does a currency need a slow expensive & awkward decentralised blockchain? Might as well just get your visa card out or use cash....

Totally agree, as I have said several times on this thread it is a solution looking for a problem that doesn't exist.

I can use my Mastercard to pay for goods anywhere in the world, why do I need to bother with Crypto?. I did buy some Bitcoin at the end of last year and I could not believe how slow and expensive it was to transfer between wallets.

Any value it has is purely speculative in the hope that it might have some use in future.

I can only assume it of any use for people who want to hide money for whatever reason and are not worried about the volativity of it's price. Off the top of my head I can only think of criminals who would want to do this.

BTC is currently a third of the price it was in mid December, that doesn't sound like a good store of wealth to me.

Then look at something like XRP which is not decentralised, Ripple labs own the majority of the coins. Hats off to them, they have invented some magic beans with no value and made themselves rich with nothing to back it up.

It will all come crashing down soon.

[Behemoth]

coyft said:

And if that's the case why does a currency need a slow expensive & awkward decentralised blockchain? Might as well just get your visa card out or use cash....

It doesn't. That's why instant small value transactions belong on a higher layer. Nobody is going to wait 10 minutes for an on chain transaction. Nobody needs to see their coffee receipt published to the world & immutable for all time.

[x5x3]

Joey Deacon said:

It will all come crashing down soon.

lol - not been on here for quite a while but good to see the same old people saying the same old things

[NRS]

Behemoth said:

coyft said:

How does a normal database transfer value?

By keeping a record of ownership. The Land Registry uses a regular database to record property ownership. When value is transferred, the record in the LR database gets updated & can be queried by any interested party.

Thinking your wine/whisky use case through, you can record provenance on a blockchain for something newly produced. Anything already existing has a problem because somebody has to show evidence (and others have to agree) to verify what has gone on in the past. But you still have the problem of forgeries on the physical asset to deal with and then you still need a real world adjudication process & system to ascertain valid claims. What happens with lost bottles whose identities are then forged?

If your wine & whisky are coming from a manufacturer or organised group of manufacturers, then these entities are best placed to run the system (and pay the overheads for maintaining it as it can be a viable part of production cost because it adds value to their newly sold products). As such, it's centralised and much cheaper to do on a normal database than on a blockchain. Building a smart contract would be far more difficult, with hundreds of edge cases to think through and code up for. Creating something like this without bugs is almost impossible imo.

Of course it would only be for new bottles. But that's not an argument not to do it, just it won't help for old bottles. With the QR code you just use some seal that is difficult to remove and put on another bottle without being a mess, and it over the cork. That stops them buying a bottle, and putting it on a fake. Or, more likely, buying a bottle, drinking it, and then resealing the bottle with a fake replacement. It means you can keep a track of the real bottles, and if you made it in a way the seal is damaged if opened/ swapped to another bottle then it creates a far more robust system than we have now. The manufacturer owning a normal database of owners will not help if a lookalike seal is slapped on a fake bottle/ the drunk bottle.

I also love how bitcoin/block chain is still in the very early days, and may do stuff that we can't even think of it (the famous internet in the 1980's and 90's example) and yet this will not work for sure now,

[guindilias]

Hmmm. Anyone on EOS? I have a small lump on it, and the whole currency is frozen (outside exchanges, where you can trade for other altcoins). Apparently it won't be usable until 15% of people who hold them have voted "yes" for something (I know nothing about blockchains, etc, but apparently it could turn out to be useful for app developers and the like), but it's going to be a good while before they reach that 15%.
I bought at $13, it's sitting at about $9.88 now, hoping once it is usable it'll rise...

[Behemoth]

guindilias said:

Hmmm. Anyone on EOS? I have a small lump on it, and the whole currency is frozen (outside exchanges, where you can trade for other altcoins). Apparently it won't be usable until 15% of people who hold them have voted "yes" for something (I know nothing about blockchains, etc, but apparently it could turn out to be useful for app developers and the like), but it's going to be a good while before they reach that 15%.
I bought at $13, it's sitting at about $9.88 now, hoping once it is usable it'll rise...

I know more than I care to about EOS, since a good friend is a Larimer belieber. Dan Larimer once got spurned by Satoshi in a forum. He then set about being better than Bitcoin & created Bitshares (then ran away), created Steem (then ran away). EOS is his latest idealistic & overcomplex project that seems to depend too much on good intentions.

By holding a token you get to vote for a validating node (called Block Producers), of which there are 21 to run the show. Problem is most token holders are speculators and couldn't care less who runs the nodes. And most of the rest are so up their own backsides with idealistically doing the right thing that they'll take forever and a day to decide who to vote for. Many candidates have appeared from nowhere and are difficult to scrutinise.

They solicited money for their ICO and will surely be in direct sight of the SEC. tl;dnr: too complex & idealistic to stand a chance of success. But they have raised $4bln Good luck!

[bloomen]

Joey Deacon said:

It will all come crashing down soon.

It is right now.

Back to sleep until 2020 most likely at which point there'll be the bubble of the century.

[dimots]

No need for a bubble, the value is right under your nose and you yet you still can’t smell it.

One instagram clone with ‘likes’ costing one satoshi paid seamlessly and instantly to the content creator’s account and bitcoin will rule the world. Charity fundraising, celebrity endorsements, crowdfunding, shares issuing, the whole shebang moves to a micropayment enabled social media platform and bang go the banks, visa, PayPal and everything else from the old world. It’s just around the corner.

[bloomen]

dimots said:

No need for a bubble, the value is right under your nose and you yet you still can’t smell it.

No need for one, but there will be more. An inelastic supply and waves of awareness add up to future inevitability. This one needs to be put to bed and semi forgotten first though.

[NRS]

dimots said:

No need for a bubble, the value is right under your nose and you yet you still can’t smell it.

One instagram clone with ‘likes’ costing one satoshi paid seamlessly and instantly to the content creator’s account and bitcoin will rule the world. Charity fundraising, celebrity endorsements, crowdfunding, shares issuing, the whole shebang moves to a micropayment enabled social media platform and bang go the banks, visa, PayPal and everything else from the old world. It’s just around the corner.

Why does that need Bitcoin?

[James_B]

dimots said:

No need for a bubble, the value is right under your nose and you yet you still can’t smell it.

One instagram clone with ‘likes’ costing one satoshi paid seamlessly and instantly to the content creator’s account and bitcoin will rule the world. Charity fundraising, celebrity endorsements, crowdfunding, shares issuing, the whole shebang moves to a micropayment enabled social media platform and bang go the banks, visa, PayPal and everything else from the old world. It’s just around the corner.

Come on, sit down and have a think about what you just wrote, eh?

[dimots]

James_B said:

Come on, sit down and have a think about what you just wrote, eh?

I’m just trying to illuminate a simple example. Obviously the true micropayment grail is thing to thing electricity micro payments. Payments so small they cannot be managed by human systems. Bitcoin can handle that. Imagine the possibilities if you can.

[Behemoth]

dimots said:

I’m just trying to illuminate a simple example. Obviously the true micropayment grail is thing to thing electricity micro payments. Payments so small they cannot be managed by human systems. Bitcoin can handle that. Imagine the possibilities if you can.

Micropayments will happen on a higher layer through Lightning Network, but your premise is right. The early internet was full of pointless and frivolous websites that spurred mass adoption before the seriously useful stuff started appearing.