Bots and cheating are in a similar category but considered different things. Cheats unfairly enhance a player's ability to raise their rank while bots sell the lowest-level accounts to people who don't want to spend time grinding in-game points (in League's case, IP to buy Champions or Experience Points to hit level 30, the bare minimum to participate in ranked play).
Theoretically ETH can easily replace bitcoin as a payment method for anything that can be bought with BTC currently. I would imagine some people investing in ETH are expecting that to happen.
My BofA account has a whole spending habits section with graphics and charts and a ton of features, for free, which comes with my debit account. Why would I want to do all this myself?
The only real answer is privacy, but I would just use BTC instead of USD if I wanted privacy anyway, and BTC is already programmable.
In most publications editors select headlines for all stories in an issue. The writer does not have a say in what is printed as the title of their own article.
This is a perfect example of what I was talking about. It is a nice idea. However there are no problems charities face that existing FIAT currencies or bitcoin or standard real-world contracts don't already solve. Unless there is a case to be made that censorship or centralization is a problem for contracts in the charity space, this app is a solution looking for a problem, in my opinion.
It is unclear how blockchain smart contracts contribute any value to the users in this case.
Using a blockchain to enforce scarcity and authenticity of digital objects is a cool idea on paper but only actually becomes effective under one of two scenarios:
1. Everyone simply agrees and acts accordingly thereby giving the ledger value. See: US dollars.
or,
2. There are real-world repercussions to violating the rules. This implies some form of hybrid blockchain/real-world-contract with trade via blockchain and enforcement via the real-world law.
There are advantages to trading on a blockchain. To make the claim that a digital item (can be simply copied with a screenshot) is "rare" because it's one-of-a-kind on the blockchain only works if everyone agrees that ownership via blockchain is as important or more important than the pixels that make up the image.
The definition of "works" in my previous statement is up for discussion, considering this idea is silly on its own merits, it might be working just fine as far as the creator intended.
The more confusing thing is what will happen when the userbase finds out Ethereum "smart contracts" aren't good for anything except online gambling which certainly will not be allowed on the TokenBrowser app. Also, I shook my head when I saw your screenshot, that is certainly not a good first impression.
It's not only a free-market solution, it's also the solution that doesn't involve giving your ISP plaintext data and trusting them to do nothing wrong with it because the government said so.
If someone is concerned with their ISP knowing the sites they visit, they can use TOR or a VPN to re-route that traffic elsewhere.
There is no way to avoid this.
The way the internet works right now, someone at some point has to know which server you want to connect to. It's your ISP or your VPN provider or the TOR nodes you're connected to, or some other lesser-known program that obfuscates your identity.
This does not restrict your freedom because you can still encrypt your traffic and obfuscate your browsing history easily using free and open source software.
Of course you shouldn't use a free VPN for anything sensitive, but to obscure your browsing data (like what you search for or what media you consume) it's completely fine.
TOR is free and is specifically for the purpose of anonymizing your connection to the website you're visiting. This article isn't about authenticity of your identity, it's about confidentiality of your browsing history.
Using a simple free VPN to encrypt your traffic is enough. This does not cost time or money. Neither does TOR.
You shouldn't trust your ISP to not be collecting your information in either case. Even if they say they aren't spying on you that does not mean they should be trusted with any of your plaintext data.
Ethereum tried this, and a bug in the code lead to millions of dollars of value lost. They ended up hard-forking the code by changing it to match the intended outcome of the code, thus reversing the actual outcome of the execution of that code.
Eventually you'll have millions of lines of code, and within those millions of lines of code there will be a bug. It's no different than writing a legal contract in English. In both cases you can only do your best to make sure there is no misunderstanding or undefined behavior, but there is always a possibility that at some point someone will find a flaw and exploit it.
To put things into perspective, let the Bitcoin network hashrate (double SHA256 per second) = B and the number of SHA1 hashes calculated in shattered = G.
B = 3,116,899,000,000,000,000
G = 9,223,372,036,854,775,808
Every three seconds the Bitcoin mining network brute-forces the same amount of hashes as Google did to perform this attack. Of course, the brute-force approach will always take longer than a strategic approach; this comment is only meant to put into perspective the sheer number of hashes calculated.