Which ones are you thinking of? They should support immutability and auditability as first-class citizens while being resistant to third-party manipulation/coercion.
Who maintains the source of truth for this record of agreement? If it is one entity, that's the unaccountable middleman. Blockchain is not right for every environment, but there are industries where the middlemen are taking more than the equivalent of every party maintaining a blockchain team.
> Mining several blocks in private to confirm the fake transaction may be needed to prevent the other miners from reorganizing the blockchain in order to steal the fees and output of transaction T. If the attacker is not in collusion with 51% of the miners, then this may cost the attacker millions in rented hashing power ...
Does this mean that this exploit only has value to an attacker who is already capable of sustaining a 51% attack?
Fiat money loses purchasing power by design. This rate has accelerated when governments need to raise money. They have been seized overnight.
In 2020, Bitcoin will inflate slower than most fiat currencies. The culture enforces that this rate will not increase arbitrarily. Storing it in a digital safe you control will prevent seizures.
Are fiat people living in a cult or can they present arguments in good faith?
On Facebook, you can create updates that your friends will see and consume updates from them. While these updates go through some filtering and sorting, they are still much more decentralized than curated updates from newspapers and TV.
If we define "pyramid-Ponzi scheme" is that the value goes up if more people talk about and buy it, then every asset is a pyramid-Ponzi scheme. Startup shares, lottery tickets, stocks, US dollars, oranges, everything.
Fiat onramps will remain important because they drive the majority of mainstream adoption. Setting up a fiat on-ramp in an alternate jurisdiction invites a poker Black-Friday style government intervention (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Scheinberg#Ac...).
Most ICOs are speculative but not Ponzi/pyramid schemes. They do not borrow against previous investors' funds and they do not have referral DAGs. Do you consider Facebook's IPO a Ponzi/pyramid scheme?
This is only useful if the bits are useful independently of the creators. For example, the gaming streamer, hiphop, and Discord tokens would be valueless without the promises of merchandise, giveaways, and upvotes.
We need to balance consumer protection with chilling effects on innovation. If regulators had applied strict interpretations of securities law to cryptoassets and exchanges, only accredited investors would have been allowed to invest and only big banks could have afforded to comply with exchange regulations.
Rebalancing cryptoassets on the same exchange (without withdrawing to a wallet [1]) doesn't require on-chain transactions. The fee would be the order fill fee, which for GDAX is 0-0.25%, much less than 2% of the account balance.
([1] For the not-your-keys-not-your-coins crowd: if you don't trust Coinbase with the coins, you can't trust it with the fund either.)
> profits are slim at best, and you generally take what you can get from a revenue perspective ... publishers today have about as much bargaining power as do Uber drivers [1]
Because of the race to the bottom incentives for publishers, we will see both intrusive, secret crypto-mining AND advertisements, not either-or.
O(n) total world energy expenditure on Bitcoin scales to O(1) transactions, so it currently only gets worse as more energy is poured into the system for the same transaction output.