284 karma · joined August 12, 2014
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.
It is unclear how blockchain smart contracts contribute any value to the users in this case.
Do you have any examples of projects that would be truly different or impossible to implement without smart contracts?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
For example, when typing in "Martin Shkreli is a" on Google, the only auto-complete is "Martin Shkreli is actually good". Try the same on Bing and DDG, you will see all of the negative auto-completes you'd expect.
and,
"ARS spokesman Christopher Bentley said the ban would not include scientific publications released through peer-reviewed professional journals."[0]
[0]:https://www.apnews.com/5ada25fc57b44a0989e681d6dc2a3daf/Trum...
Individual IPFS nodes are certainly blindly trusting the developer's signature as a stamp of approval. Adding more nodes doesn't make that problem better. It makes it worse by providing a greater false sense of security.
In the case of a compromised server operator, as long as hosting company X is smaller than Amazon, it's always better to use Amazon's cloud service to mitigate the possibility of server operator tampering.
In the case of a vendor, accepting _bitcoin_ has own security advantages, and bitcoin comes with its own blockchain built-in. As a vendor you probably wouldn't really need to worry about the blockchain as much as you would need to worry about avoiding exchange rate fees.
[1]: http://toggl.com/