Is it really a cryptocurrency when it's completely centralized? No. This is just Facebook-bucks. Store dollars. It's has absolutely none of the benefits of a real cryptocurrency.
Is this a joke about fiat currencies and their tendency to suddenly become valueless and cryptocurrencies tendency to suddenly become valueless by making a cross language pun connecting the owner of a new cryptocurrency and the name of a currency most famously known for a hyperinflation.
Papiermark (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Papiermark) pre 1924 was the hyperinflated currency, then followed the stable Reichsmark and after World War II Deutsch Mark and East Deutsch Mark. Deutsch Mark remained until 2002 when the Euro got introduced. For Germans Mark is just a name for currency like Kronas (Sweden), Francs (France), Lira (Italy). Hyperinflation is too long ago to remember.
Germans use cash much more than the average Western European. The memory of hyperinflation and bank system collapse is one of the explanations why people prefer to store value in currency (often foreign currency) and not trust so much a bank or card issuer.
Also, in West Germany, the Deutsche Mark (1948-2002) is strongly associated with the post-war economic boom. It's still a common rhetoric among conservative populists to argue for a return to the good old times ^W Mark.
I don't think it is just a "common rhetoric", but rather a common mainstream truth that the change from the Mark to the Euro (which can be kept weaker) allows German companies to export cheaply while making people's salaries and savings worth less.
I think Hyperinflation fears are ingrained into EU policymakers DNA. They are so afraid to create demand in the macro economy via deficit spending because of the legacy of the Weimar Republic and what it led to. Looking at the WR case, they had to pay war reparations in hard currency not fiat. Because of this, you have Germany pushing for very dovish fiscal policy limits on Greece and the PIGS. And to make things worse, monetary policy, doesn't work even with negative interest rates.
there seems to be a desire, arising from confusion and encouraged by opportunism, to conflate the term cryptocurrency with conventional notions of electronic cash.
I've listened to people from the world bank, the IDB and at least one representative of a central bank explain to me with enthusiasm how their pet crypto and blockchain projects were creating new opportunities for their organizations. There's always some crypto consultant lurking in the background of these conversations.
Having done different projects both in the public and private blockchain space, I believe the majority of the confusion comes from almost no one actually understanding the point of something like Bitcoin. While it's clear for IT people to look at a Paypal like system and point to the obvious central point of failure (the company behind it, the website "paypal.com', etc), almost no one outside of IT understands decentralization and why someone would want it.
Especially after learning all the downsides you get with these kind of distributed systems (slow finality, low throughput, limited in capabilities, inefficient, open to new attack vectors).
At that point and in so many circumstances the crypto part is ultimately just a different kind of database. Databases and protocols are just boring... At least from the perspective of the person using the currency.
In general, who cares how Chase keeps track of my checking account? It might have this feature or that feature but when it is being used as it is there isn't much to be excited about. If you're Chase it might make life a little easier to choose one thing or the other but the rest of the world probably doesn't care.
Who cares? You should. Bitcoin offers a public audit trail less commonly known as triple-entry bookkeeping or momentum accounting. Chase still uses double entry.
What's more Chase charges $25 per month to keep an open checking account, keeps only a small portion of your funds on hand and may both lock you out of your account and freeze your funds on a whim whereas Bitcoin won't.
I'd rather not have the entire planet be able to audit my transactions.
I don't care what Chase does with my dollars because the promise isn't that there's a vault somewhere that a banker can point to a pile of bills and say "that's Cole's money right there." The promise is that at any time I can withdraw any amount of money, and o have no problem believing that promise.
As for locking my account on a whim, that's what I signed up for. Every time so far I have had a financial account locked it has been because someone who wasn't me was trying to use my money. As for avoiding being punished for crime well I'm not too into money laundering so I think I'll be ok. Otherwise it's balancing the risk that the bank will make a fixable mistake with the existing system which has the ability to fix errors and reverse thefts.
The public audit trail has yet to return thousands of my dollars from mtgox. I bet if there was massive fraud and or theft of the reserves at Chase that I would have had my money back immediately.
(I don't actually have a checking account at Chase)
> Chase charges $25 per month to keep an open checking account
This is just a ""feature"" of the backwards American system, plenty of countries still mostly have free current accounts. Although the very low interest rates are definitely putting pressure on banks to try to find ways to charge people.
Cash can't do those things either. It would be relatively easy to have a regulated bitcoin bank that offers such services. Coinbase is heading that way.
Presumably that wouldn't fit with any of the demands of cryptocurrency enthusiasts though, being able to freeze your funds etc. Also I'm not sure how they would tackle reversing any fraud given that bitcoin is amazingly irreversible.
If cryptocurrency is, for you, a way to get away from the abusive dominance of banks, why would you use such a service?
When you get banned from Facebook for talking about whatever you can't buy or sell on the Internet anymore because you don't carry "the Mark". They are a private company so they can deal with whomever they want. You can still use cash. These tech companies want it so that if they ban you they can really screw up your life. Just look at people who have their whole Google existence wiped out because of some random policy violation.
It's called "cloud feudalism". Amazing how accurate that term is, during feudal times, the king was free to change their terms, and if you disagreed you could shut up or get out of the kingdom, which was a difficult process and meant cutting off ties with people and business partners (or letting them know about your change of address). And if the king said "You, you did something I disliked, out!", you could protest all you want but that would fall mostly on deaf ears.
Of course "deaf ears" is nowadays support emails being handled by copy-pasting bots.
If it's a currency and is implemented using cryptographic concepts, I feel comfortable calling it a cryptocurrency. "Decentralization" is a spectrum and a highly subjective one, so I don't think it should be a requirement.
Indeed nowadays a lot of people relate the word 'crypto' with Blockchain related concepts, but being crypto only entails using some cryptographic concepts.
Cryptocommunication might be nothing but HTTPS/TLS. Cryptocurrency could very well be something similar, without involving Blockchain technology.
In that case I can say that I'm doing my groceries with a cryptocurrency, because the transaction is encrypted between the terminal and the bank. That doesn't make any sense.
Can it be exchanged in binance for bitcoin? If yes, and this gets a lot of users, then it s a huge deal, centralized or not. (And yeah it is cryptocurrency as long as it is based in Cryptography )
Could you please expand? If the big Chinese miners go rogue (actually go rogue, take over a currency and actively tries to stop the larger public from taking it back), what recourse does the larger public have? Wouldn't they need more mining power, or an impractical fenced-off network that's still decentralized in some manner?
The only benefit I see is that it'll likely be an ERC20 token which means more gas payed to Ethereum (which is great). Also, it'll essentially be a fiat on-ramp for billions of people looking to get into real cryptocurrencies. Assuming they allow the token to be traded on crypto exchanges anyway.
I don’t think FB will use Ethereum or any other existing cryptocurrency.
They would want full control and there is no reason not to run own blockchain.
Also environmental impact of Ethereum mining is bad PR for Facebook.
I can't read the article in it's entirety but decentralisation is not what makes a crypto currency a crypto currency. Visa, Master card, Joe shmoe, anyone can start a centralized ledger that uses crypto.
I would strongly disagree here. Decentralization, though a term fraught with poorly acknowledged and contradictory premises, is essentially the defining value proposition of cryptocurrency.
Take away decentralization (which I would be more comfortable calling "aspirational decentralization" to reflect actual practice) and cryptocurrency is indistinguishable from conventional electronic currency.
It's as good as any ICO; exercising control isn't good for businesses, but Buterin has shown he can make it happen if the stakes are big enough, just like Zuck will also be able to do.
No it doesn't. ETC is worth something like 2% of the value of ETH, it's a joke in comparison. Besides, the existence of "Ethereum Classic" is not something special, it's the inevitable side effect of suddenly having the balance of your ETH wallet "cloned" in a fork, you only have to lose if you don't treat both wallets like they're real.
The "community" chose to roll back a $40 million transaction that was very inconvenient for Vitalik. If he had instead said "code is law, and we stand by it" then ETC would never have existed in the first place. My point is, it was Vitalik's prerogative to reverse a million dollar transaction that he didn't like, a privilege reserved for the elite.
Beyond that, the community didn't really have a choice either way. By definition of owning ETH you are incentivized to (primarily) support whichever chain the creator says he will continue to support. What kind of choice is that? There is no "market" in the sense you speak of, ETH users are a captive audience.
It's important to keep in mind that the creators of ETH gave themselves an order of magnitude more coins to start with than will ever be mined. While it is true that some of it has been sold many times over by now, it still creates a power dynamic within the community which can hardly be ignored.
It's especially problematic for a project that was supposed to be PoS, where the coin holders are also the miners, with the privileges that brings.
The existence of ETC says to me that ETH has the same problem, that is a bunch of power users can change the rules if they want to (if it is financially beneficial for them to do so). No different to a fiat currency controlled by the government.
Yeah that's just wrong. If you want to change the rules, you need to update the client software which means forking. Are you saying that a group of core devs can fork the chain and not have it be contentious?
