jabgrabdthrow

I don't buy this at all. Robots can just simulate your brain, and use thermal noise to imitate quantum randomness.

You have to believe that quantum randomness is a channel through which some higher intelligence sends signals, which is pure mysticism IMO.

Too bad the author used "EIT" instead of "torture".

I don't think maximum decentralization is what the author is pleading for. To the contrary in a different article he does in depth about how his alternative consensus protocol specifically limits the number of distinct block validators because of the marginal utility of each additional validator vs the linear increase in cost, and the consequences this has on speed and scalability:

http://bytemaster.bitshares.org/article/2015/01/07/The-Most-...

Stop calling privacy-conscious software "dark". You are hurting your cause.

The idea is that CFD providers like coinapult should be able to pay you more interest than a bank. Of course they don't and so you are right that just holding your $10 is better.

Absolutely - just explaining why OP is not "pretty much what r/bitcoin is"

r/bitcoin is full of bitcoin fanatics who will bury any cryptocurrency-related news that isn't bitcoin. Mention XRP, BTS, ETH, or really any next-gen blockchain tech that doesn't ride on bitcoin and you are called a heretic.

Of course not, if you think it's likely don't put your money in. Even Bitcoin's rapid price drops in the past have not been fast enough to have triggered a peg break. And you're trading the risk off against the risk of a bank haircut or account freezes or what have you.

Again, to be clear: I am not encouraging anyone to put their money into this.

Check out the discussion in the comments here. The article you linked has effectively only one argument: that BitUSD will not maintain the peg in the event of a flash crash in BTSX value. The author and the lead developer of BTSX have a back-and-forth which clarifies the whole situation.

http://prestonbyrne.com/2014/08/24/what-goes-up/

"more hashes != more security" is true even if POS does not work (or rather, security scales sublinearly with hashes - economies of scale + diminishing returns on value of security). Nothing-at-stake is solved by DPOS, the ethereum team lags behind POS development by a few months it seems (they just mentioned using TAPOS a few weeks ago when the inventor has moved past it a few months ago).

> Bitcoin already provides a global currency and distributed ledger-- there is no need to re-invent those wheels.

Yeah, at a cost of several million dollars per year of burned power. You'll find the less BTC someone owns the less likely they are to bring up non-arguments like "more hashes = more security!" Let's stop pretending there isn't room to innovate.

Ok, 90% of these "useful mining" projects get the economics backwards. Paying coins to miners does not generate demand for the coin! The miners (in this case, tor nodes) will sell and push the price to the ground. Who will buy the coins? Other altcoin enthusiasts who also don't get the economics?

(And yes, this argument theoretically applies to Bitcoin, but you have to use bitcoins to pay the transaction fee to use the bitcoin network, which has value because of its network effect for use in value transfer).

If either party was a proper "Capitalist Party" we would be much better off. I think it would be harmful if people said "capitalism doesn't work, what alternatives are there?" and switched to some system where the oligarchy is just as well off but everyone else has less freedom with their money.

You mean like http://www.dc.uba.ar/inv/tesis/licenciatura/2010/lerner ?

Our site is too WIP for any publicity but I can't help but plug this here... Domain namespaces should have automatic global price discovery: http://dotp2p.io

Power grab by Bitcoin old money. Let's put all alternate chains on SHA256 miners with two-way BTC pegs but also let's not enable generic cross-chain trading. Sigh =[

please don't use HN exclusively for advertising =[

You can be a parasite and still provide a service, no?

There are a whole host of problems introduced by price-fixing which go way beyond running out of supply. We definitely need DNS on a blockchain, but Namecoin won't do it.

I'm working on an alternative to namecoin with the following features:

* Profitable (what? profitable cryptocurrency? what?) * Powerful disincentives for squatting * Lots of funding for the project, which means we can actually push towards critical-mass adoption

More will be available at domains.bitshares.org within ~2 weeks.

My crypto knowledge is not really up to snuff but doesn't this not use any real end-to-end crypto when it easily could? SSL, AES, and blowfish could all be MITM'd, right?

This is what Invictus has been doing to raise money for their DACs via AngelShares

Check out invictus.io, I wouldn't call their work "cryptocurrency" as much as more general "next-gen blockchain tech." Ignore the shitty website, it's a disaster - read the whitepapers.

Going even further, a cryptocurrency could be like shares in a company which can earn profit by performing services that couldn't be done except by a distributed autonomous entity.

The founder of Ethereum used to be a founder at Invictus, a company with several DACs in the pipeline (check out http://invictus.io/bitsharesx.php). He was asked to resign for mysterious reasons.

Is precious metal a pyramid scheme? o.O

That's the thing, I actually think that's just how people without absolute pitch think it would be like, but everyone with absolute pitch that I've talked to describe different pitches as different "buckets" - categorically, qualitatively distinct.

edit: I suspect this conversation won't lead anywhere because there isn't good language to talk about phenomenology. But I think we both understand the other's hypothesis.

I'm interested in it from a purely philosophical / phenomenological point of view. It is as if most people are colorblind, and some people can see colors. You certainly don't say that yellow is "higher" than red but "lower" than blue.

If you listen to how people with absolute pitch describe their experience, you will realize that they are experiencing perceptions that you cannot. That is interesting.

This is very interesting to me. A while back I was fascinated with the concept of absolute pitch (some people have a qualitatively different, categorical perception of pitch) and did quite a bit of research on the topic. One resource that I invite anyone that is interested to read is the research done by this guy:

http://aruffo.com/eartraining/

Ignore the fact that he has a "learn AP here!" link - usually that is a signal that it's a scam of some kind, but in this case he has quite a bit of interesting material to back his theories if you go to "AP Research".

The problem with the solutions you suggested is that there is no easy automatic trustless mechanism for demonstrating proof-of-work. Edit: Of course, if you don't mind some centralization/trust, then your suggestions could theoretically work.

One altcoin called primecoin has a proof-of-work algorithm which finds long runs of prime numbers, which is supposedly useful for some purposes.

The most common alternative to proof-of-work mining is called proof-of-stake, which is used in a few altcoins (most notably Peercoin). It still doesn't provide anything useful, but at least it provides a mechanism for securing the blockchain without wasting a bunch of energy. You can read about it here: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Proof_of_Stake