It doesn't matter that a business isn't making a business decision based on altruism. What matters is that the incentives of the users are aligned with those of the business
The loss of privacy in this case may not be worth using a public ledger.
In general though, I think it would be an interesting experiment if individuals can hold central bank money directly instead of going through commercial banks.
How do you define "1$ USD peg"? As of right now, the price of DAI is $0.98, 2% off its "peg". Asking as a serious question, since I see this statement a lot.
The value of Bitcoin comes from social consensus. You cannot fork that. You can only fork a code repository. End of the day, it is just a bunch of 1s and 0s without a social consensus of value.
> Well, Journal uses zero-knowledge encryption that ensures Journal employees can’t read or decrypt the information of the user.
This isn't an actual zero-knowledge proof, just regular encryption as the image below describes. Not sure why it is described as 'zero-knowledge' in the article.
>Has been discussed for years with nothing to show
Yes, it's literally an overnight success. I think they started coding this last night, and it's in beta today /s
On a more serious note, a lot of work has firstly gone into making sure all the different implementations work well with each other, aka the standardization problem. That's a big win in and of itself.
The routing problem isn't trivial either. Lightning currently uses an 'onion-like' routing scheme where, similar to TOR, the nodes have a very limited information on the origin and destination addresses. This is great news for privacy.
The lightning network has been running on the testnet successfully for many months now, and some early adopter merchants even accepted testnet coins for small purchases. Over a 1000 lightning nodes are currently running.
If you're a Coinbase user, please don't use Coinbase to buy. The fees are really high. Instead, use GDAX. Your Coinbase account is sufficient to register with GDAX and all your privileges like limits, KYC, etc. is carried over.
It supports both Market Orders and Limit Orders. Transfers from GDAX to Coinbase are instantaneous and off-blockchain, so there are no fees.
As a bonus fun fact, if you transfer BTC from GDAX to your personal wallet, there is no Bitcoin network fee charged to you. However, if you use Coinbase, you'll end up paying a lot more in fees than you must because Coinbase uses very inefficient fee-estimation systems and still haven't deployed SegWit or batching which would reduce network fee for their customers.
>They are interested in it due to the pretty charts and slick interface of coinbase and robinhood
You got to be kidding if you think Coinbase has a slick interface/user experience. You would need to explain why in-spite of such a terrible interface, people are flocking to Coinbase to buy Bitcoin/Ethereum. In fact, so much so that Coinbase was the top app on the App Store for a day [1].
>Many of the young adults and teens do not understand the concept of compound interest at all
I'll need a source for that. It doesn't seem like humans in general are wired to really grasp the power of compound interest (or exponential functions for that matter), so if you're claiming that young adults today are less likely than average to grasp that concept, I'd need a source for that. I do not believe it to be true, but I am happy to be proven wrong.
ERC20 is just a token standard on Ethereum. You can issue ERC20 tokens for anything. Some of these will be securities, some won't. It's the use of the tokens that matters, not the protocol/tech behind it.
Here's a list [1] of 400 exchanges you can buy Bitcoin from, 34 of trade BTC/USD. This doesn't include some sites that charge a premium and allow you to buy with debit cards. There are also Bitcoin ATMs, over 1000 of them in the United States [2].
Also, an additional note to your comment - remember that the Ethereum network has been backlogged for several hours to almost a day after an ICO (Bancor, Status). Now imagine one production application running on Ethereum. Now imagine several. How would they really even work?
And some projects thought Bitcoin wouldn't scale for micropayments so they should move to Ethereum because they have solved it. Oh boy.