Some additional downers:
- The Roosevelt Institute growth numbers are based on this initiative being 100% funded by increasing the federal deficit. The same report deduced that if the initiative is paid for by increasing taxes on the remaining population, the net effect on GDP, prices, and wages will be closer to zero, just money changing hands. Yang's proposal will fit somewhere in the middle, with roughly one third to half of the cost coming from VAT. The study's model also relies on the following assumptions, both of which I personally do not believe will hold, especially if the main revenue source will be a VAT:
"1. Unconditional cash transfers do not reduce household labor supply.
2. Increasing government revenue by increasing taxes levied on households does not change household behavior."
[1, page 5,12]
- Over half of means-tested welfare (including Medicaid) goes to people under the age of 18, so these costs won't be touched. "In an average month during 2012, 39.2% of children received some type of means-tested benefit, compared with 16.6% of people aged 18 to 64 and 12.6% of people 65 years and older." The median monthly benefit for these groups was $447, $393, and $303 respectively. The only means tested program that isn't dominated by minors is SSI, the vast majority of which goes to the elderly and people 18 to 64 with disabilities who would not re-enter the workforce. [2, p16, 24]
That's only useful as a hedge for ETH. A mortgage where you have to put down 373% of the value of the house in liquid currency as collateral is not competitive in the slightest.
This method appears to just measure the Tx and Rx paths on an off-the-shelf modem, so you'd have to physically check the router, or I'm sure this could be handled in firmware. They're measuring phase and amplitude differences from unmodified traffic on 2.4GHz so you can't detect it as an outsider.
Proof of work mining is just a bunch of computers trying to brute force the password for the next block so they can get the mining bounty and fees from the transactions they include, so the vast majority of the results are thrown away. For bitcoin in particular, the difficulty is a sliding scale based on how quickly the most recent blocks have been mined, so increasing the number of miners leads to more energy being required to mine a block while the transaction capacity stays relatively constant.
I can say at least that the Xbox 360's standard ban for pirated games that failed verification checks was a console level ban, as in, you can take your hard drive and plug it into a new console and you're gaming again. There were also several times account bans were applied as well, like when Forza 3 dropped several weeks early and people tried playing online.
But the knowledge that he's stealing others' work comes from sources other than the blockchain record, if you don't count the fact that it's internally invalid for a living person to claim a work created in 1506. So the immutable ledger provides no value.
Regardless, taking a picture of a painting doesn't verify that you painted, or even currently own that painting. Adding a timestamp doesn't change that.
Proof of work is intentionally useless to the miner to increase the cost of attacking the network. There are initiatives like curecoin and foldingcoin which integrate folding@home into their proof of work, but the output of that is still "useless" to the miner and relies on the folding@home team not manipulating the process, which becomes a bigger risk once hard rewards for folding are introduced.
I think it's really only comparable for online transactions, where all credit card transactions are Card Not Present and you aren't able to 100% guarantee that the delivery went to the correct person or that the card wasn't stolen, making fighting the chargeback sometimes not worth it. A brick and mortar doing swipe transactions should have everything they need to effectively fight chargebacks, so I wouldn't consider that money to be 'gone' the way it would be in a double-spend.
Representing a physical product as a unique cryptographic hash that the consumer can independently verify is generally a lot harder than attaching a photo. From a comment below:
> Leanne Kemp, an Australian who in 2015 founded a company called Everledger, has now encrypted the distinguishing features of 1.8 million diamonds and their provenance on a blockchain.
> More than 40 features are logged to create a fingerprint for each diamond, logging it from mine to ring.
For this to provide proof of authenticity, I need to be able to visit a jeweler not employed by Everledger, and have them be able to use a rubric to classify my diamond along these 40 features in a way that uniquely describes it in a way no other diamond could be described. I then need to be able to visit a second and a third jeweler and obtain the exact same classification along these 40 features.
When visiting Everledger's site, I can't get any information on the classification process beyond that sentence. The supposed core of the product doesn't even have a white paper.
Diamonds are comparatively easy to classify, as they are supposedly unique in many ways, and don't physically degrade over time. When it comes to tins of milk, I can't think of a secure proof of authenticity process that doesn't involve the consumer verifying the composition of the product with a gas chromatography machine.
I can't find very much information on Everledger's features process, just on the blockchain aspect, which doesn't inspire confidence. It's not enough for them to create 40 features you can fingerprint a diamond by, they have to be 40 features that are independently and consistently verifiable.
If I have to send my diamond to Everledger to verify it, I'm effectively just trusting them. Representing a physical object as a cryptographic hash for security doesn't work if the consumer can't independently verify the hash.
The audit log already exists, or else how would China have found and prosecuted those executives?
The problem at hand is ensuring that the information that makes it on the chain is correct, or at least that other members of the chain have a way of noticing and repudiating that contribution. Cryptocurrency blockchains accomplish this via proof of work and forking, which is why everyone is so interested in the technology. But the only reason they work is that the proof of work mechanism is literally what keeps the network running, and if the network isn't running, all of the sunk costs miners have made are effectively worthless, so even though the miners don't have a reason to trust each other, all of their economic incentives are aligned. The only reason to fork is if you think some people have defeated the proof of work mechanism, or if they are pushing a different version of the blockchain software, which wouldn't be allowed in any real-world application anyway.
Proof of work uses inherently useless calculations to determine that one isn't flooding the network with transactions, because every transaction with a correct key is just assumed to be correct. What real-world application does that map to? Certainly none of the ones in the article, which is why these companies don't use proof of work, they use permissioned blockchains. But a permissioned blockchain is effectively like a standard write-only database with an audit log that each individual in the production line has a password to, which is trivial to accomplish with existing tech. The only way other actors can verify if their peers' inputs to the system are correct is if they verify the physical results, and now we're right back where we started, where you can't trust the system more than you trust any one individual, but now with a db that's at least an order of magnitude slower than any competitive option.
Officially, PLEX can only be redeemed for subscriptions, but it can also be traded as an in game item for ISK (standard in game currency). The only real difference between it and a cryptocoin is that selling PLEX on a secondary market is against the ToS. You will get flagged if you're trading away PLEX ingame for nothing in return, because they assume you're selling it.
Yes and yes. This is the big pitfall i see so many ignoring - the real challenge if you're trying to interface with the outside world is establishing what the internal token means in the outside world without depending so heavily on a centralized weak link that the decentralization of the blockchain's maintenance is pointless. If the actors in a system don't trust each other enough to make changes to the database unilaterally, why would they trust that the other actors aren't lying about their on-chain/off-chain holdings?
I think the biggest hurdle regulators will have to overcome if they want anything other than a blanket ban on ICOs will be verifying "good faith" execution of their business plans.
If you create a cryptotoken that has a real business purpose and sell it with the expectation that it will be redeemable for that purpose (basically selling gift cards for a service that doesn't exist yet), and a secondary market forms that appears to believe that the tokens are stock and trades them accordingly, are you guilty of securities fraud? What if you never actually develop that service, would that impact your case? If so, how do you distinguish between something that was a ponzi from the start and a mismanaged project that failed to deliver?
In general, any game that has a manufactured annoyance that can be bypassed immediately by paying money/watching an ad.
Usually achieved by a stamina system (You can play up to 5 levels in 30 minutes, or play another immediately by paying), balancing play so playing without "Premium" items feels sluggish and uncompetitive (but not so sluggish that the game is unfun), and having a lot of gambling style elements to overcome the first two (No gems? You can spin the prize wheel once a day! Also, you logged in 3 days in a row! Have some gems!)
This is the SEC, their entire reason for existing is to regulate transactions between USD and the rest of the world. If you want to transact on the blockchain directly, you are absolutely free to do so, but if you want a situation where law enforcement backs you up when something goes wrong, the US govt has been pretty clear that they are not interested in recognizing transactions as legally enforcable if they can't know where the money's coming from or where it's going for about 15 years now.