I don’t have hundreds of unpopular opinions on blockchain/cryptocurrency, or anything for that matter. I did manage to rant for over sixty tweets. At the suggestion of multiple people I have compiled the tweets into this post. I tried to organize them thematically as best I could.
via https://medium.com/@nelsonmrosario/unpopular-blockchain-opinions-d6221804ef44
While blockchain is the future, I do not believe the future is what we are living today. We are living among the experiments. What we see around us might be in ruins tomorrow. What we get as our future might not have been invented yet. With hopes still high and a sharp eye on the industry, I am waiting for the ultimate blockchain. Will it be Ethereum? Or NEO? Or Qtum? Or Tezos? Or something else? I don’t know. For now, I am excited to witness one of the largest shifts a human life can live through. Even if the future does not appear to be near, the future is not far either.
via https://hackernoon.com/the-new-age-of-dapps-is-here-and-its-not-based-on-ethereum–2246fc4d9eee
“Any cryptocurrency—even Bitcoin—can be a shitcoin, if you build sufficiently asinine startups on top of it 💩”
Given this trend of rising corporate and central banking interest in blockchain technology, it’s inevitable that the first widespread mainstream adoption of blockchain and cryptocurrency will be driven primarily by the existing status quo and power brokers. […] Business models which operate on artificial scarcity simply cannot exist alongside a reality of public blockchains. Even if a group did attempt to deploy a for-profit protocol on a public blockchain, the code by default is opensource and thus it’s trivial to copy the code, lower the fee and then redeploy. Public blockchains are owned by nobody, controlled by nobody and can never be shutdown. Smart contracts can be owned by nobody, controlled by nobody, and execute as coded every time. The result is a blockchain commons; a universal common resource which renders old-world business models obsolete, and ushers in a new foundational paradigm on which to create value for all of humanity.
via https://medium.com/peerism/blockchain-commons-the-end-of-all-corporate-business-models–3178998148ba
About a week ago, I put together the Marmot Checker, which is another piece of the puzzle in terms of automating knowledge generation throughput. Briefly, an image is uploaded, processed, and sent to the Google Cloud Vision API to get descriptions of the image; these descriptions are checked against a user-defined list of words, and if there is a match, the image is added to the toadserver. Although the implementation is quite is simple, a few hundred lines more of code and you’d have, say, a smart contract that sends the submitter of matched content some amount of tokens as a function of the match score and/or the users’ reputation. On the whole, this is part a growing set of tools for the scientific community. Already we’re seeing more and more startups building tools to streamline the collaboration workflow process between research laboratories.
via https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/how-blockchains-can-further-public-science–1457972964
Bitcoin has long been thought to be the world’s most unstable currency – moving from being worth $2 to $1,137 in the last five years. But that wildly volatile currency is now becoming a safe refuge when compared to the fluctuations in the pound.
For a brief period this week, Bitcoin’s 10-day historical volatility – a measure of how much its price has been changing – dropped below that of the British pound.
Nakamoto (The Proof). Scan de passeport, fichier numérique .jpg, 2506 x 3430 px, 2014
“Nakamoto est le créateur du Bitcoin, système de paiement révolutionnaire permettant d’effectuer des transactions en ligne de manière anonyme et infalsifiable. Cette monnaie virtuelle est largement employée sur les darknets, réseaux garantissant l’anonymat à la réputation sulfureuse, notamment du fait des activités cybercriminelles qu’ils facilitent (commerce de stupéfiants, faux-papiers, etc.). Dès son premier message public et jusqu’à sa disparition le 12 décembre 2010, Nakamoto a tout mis en œuvre afin de préserver son identité. Non localisable de par ses adresses IP toujours différentes, ses messages sont publiés à des heures aléatoires et écrits dans un Anglais ne permettant pas de déterminer sa nationalité. Ayant créé les premiers bitcoins, on lui prête une fortune estimée à plusieurs centaines de millions d’Euros. L’importance de sa création et le mystère parfaitement maîtrisé autour de sa personne ont aujourd’hui fait de lui un véritable mythe contemporain, alimentant un nombre toujours croissant de rumeurs et de fantasmes.”
Schellingcoins are designed to address external, quantitative phenomena. Opinions regarding cultural works are personal and qualitative, and spontaneous reactions to cultural works are even more so. This is different from the commonly expressed quantitative values that the SchellingCoin proposal requires. To adapt SchellingCoins to cultural criticism we must adopt the methods of collective intelligence and the digital humanities and use some tricks to turn personal opinion into cultural appraisal.
http://www.furtherfield.org/features/articles/abc-accelerationist-blockchain-critique
The cryptocurrency craze spun into a new realm of ridiculous with Kanyecoin, Dogecoin, Ron Paul Coin and the bounty of other clone-coins that sprung up to ride the Bitcoin wave. But the latest altcoin to enter the market, Auroracoin, wants to take the futurist trend back to its cryptoanarchist roots. The altcoin was designed specifically for Iceland, and the creator plans to give every citizen of the Nordic country a digital handful of Auroracoins to kickstart their use. Auroracoin is the brainchild of cryptocurrency enthusiast Baldur Friggjar Odinsson, and he’ll be the one distributing pre-mined coins to the entire population of Iceland at midnight on March 25 in a countrywide “airdrop.” Each Icelandic citizen—all 330,000 of them—will receive 31.8 AUC through a digital transaction. Citizens all have a national ID number available through a public database, which will be used to verify their identity.
http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/in-one-month-everyone-in-iceland-will-own-cryptocurrency
I’ve been a very busy boy. All day, we’ve been chasing the scoundrel with our stolen bitcoins through the blockchain. Around lunchtime (UK), I was chasing him across the roof of a moving train, (metaphorically). I was less than 20 minutes, or 2 blockchain confirmations, behind “Tomas”. He was desperately creating new wallet addresses and moving his 49 retirement wallets through them, but having to wait for 3 or 4 confirmations each time before moving them again. Each time I caught up, I “666"ed him - sent 0.00666 bitcoins to mess up his lovely round numbers like 4,000. Then,all of a sudden, decimal places started appearing, and fractions of bitcoins were jumping from wallet to wallet like grasshoppers on a hotplate without stopping for confirmations.
Bitcoin is a digital currency, meaning it’s money controlled and stored entirely by computers spread across the internet, and this money is finding its way to more and more people and businesses around the world. But it’s much more than that, and many people — including the sharpest of internet pioneers as well as seasoned economists — are still struggling to come to terms with its many identities. With that in mind, we give you this: an idiot’s guide to bitcoin. And there’s no shame in reading. Nowadays, as bitcoin is just beginning to show what it’s capable of, we’re all neophytes.
http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2013/11/bitcoin-survival-guide/all/
Distributed Autonomous Corporations (DACs) are a generalization of the concept of a crypto-currency where the currency is backed by the services its miners perform rather than a real-world commodity like gold, oil, or, ahem, thin air. If we can barter for goods and services, why can’t we back currencies with goods or services? DACs may be simultaneously viewed as crypto-currencies and unmanned businesses. As businesses, they perform services intended to be valuable to their customers. Such services might include money transmission (Bitcoin), asset trading (BitShares), domain name services (DomainShares), or a thousand other business models sure to emerge as people realize that DACs are not mere “altcoins”.
Bitcoin is volatile. Very. That much is clear. But what is not so clear, and perhaps a key reason for this volatility, is just what the fundamental, or intrinsic value of BitCoins is when one strips away the pure euphoric momentum to the upside or downside. To answer that question, we go to Raoul Pal, head of the Global Macro Investor, and his November 1st recommendation to “Buy Bitcoins”(when BTC was $210 so nearly a 100% return in 1 week) which among other things attempts to “value BTC using a macro framework” or, in other words, the first supply-demand driven fair value assessment of BTC.
Primecoin is the first scientific computing cryptocurrency, a project derived from Bitcoin but with novel non-hashcash proof-of-work that mines prime numbers.
Bitcoin’s resilience comes from a property I refer to as Too Big To Regulate. Put simply, it’s easier to tell ten people to behave, than ten thousand. So if we want a system that’s impossible to regulate, get the power in the hands of ten thousand rather than ten. But there are some factors in Bitcoin that are not Too Big To Regulate. There’s only a few parties that turn bitcoin (which teleports) into dollars (which buy stuff). There can, and will be more, but the quantity of these critical nodes is not set by Bitcoin itself.
http://www.wired.com/opinion/2013/05/lets-cut-through-the-bitcoin-hype/
The key idea in Zerocoin is that each coin commits to (read: encrypts) a random serial number. These coins are easy to create – all you need to do is pick the serial number and run a fast commitment algorithm to wrap this up in a coin. The commitment works like encryption, in that the resulting coin completely hides the serial number . At the same time this coin ‘binds’ you to the number you’ve chosen. The serial number is secret, and it stays with you.
http://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2013/04/zerocoin-making-bitcoin-anonymous.html