Also known as the oracle problem. Some platforms find solutions to this in a decentralized way, see Augur. The solutions to real world data being inputted into a blockchain is an economic one.
Right. Perhaps comparing the coo to checkpoints isn't an apt analogy. However, the intent is the same. Without a coo, transactions would be probabilistic and confirmed once they went above a cumulative weight threshold, but the transaction volume is still too low to prevent a Sybil attack, hence the coo. It's still an open question whether or not the tangle can function coo-less, but it makes for an interesting experiment.
IOTA is moving towards an open source coordinator (released today on github), and eventually coordicide (which is what it sounds like). It's been the goal of the project from day one. Bitcoin had checkpoints when it started; the coordinator is analogous to checkpoints. Wouldn't touch XRP with a ten foot pole, though.
That's just due to liquidity. The peg is maintained through arbitrage, so of course if you have low liquidity you're going to have fluctuations around the peg.
Duped? I use gitcoin now to build software projects. Is that use case a figment of my imagination?
And nice concern troll. I think there are two types of people in crypto. Some like me, who are building things and see the huge potential in decentralized infrastructure, and then speculators that will dump money into anything as long as they see a positive return. Do you really feel that bad for the speculators? No ones forcing them to invest in shitty ICO's with tons of red flags.
Isn't traceability a positive aspect for cryptocurrency in this case? You've got nothing to worry about if you're an honest investor, and frankly, this is one of the benefits of a pseudoanonymous crypto.
There's a decentralized peg to USD called DAI which is backed by ETH as collateral. It's maintained the 1$ USD peg throughout the entire crypto bear market. MakerDAO is quite impressive, and I hope to see it absorb the liquidity away from tether.
I've used it and it's fairly straight forward if you're tech savy. I bet on the midterm election, and the price of ETH. Since it's just a set of smart contracts, I expect market makers to start building 3rd party UI's to shill their markets, which should be interesting.
I remember showing a friend this really crappy online video stream in the late 90s, and I think he said something like "How can this ever be useful? I can rent a DVD and watch high quality video without any interruptions." He wasn't wrong.
That's just simply not true. Stock markets / futures markets are not decentralized in any sense of the word. You still require a 3rd party if you're going to trade derivatives over the counter.