Time after time socialism has brought nothing but catastrophe, genocide and hunger. Venezuela is just the latest example in a very long line of examples.
I live in Miami and have so many Venezuelan neighbors escaping that country because of socialism.
>My food situation... well, i used to eat 3 times a day, pizza, nutella Grilled meat idk anything that i wanted to eat, now sometimes i eat twice or once a day, and sometimes i have the bad luck of having nothing to eat for the whole day ;( it gives headache...
>i used to work in a office editing videos in sony vegas, making around 2-4 videos per day.
>Everytime i steps the streets, i see starving people with not too bad clothes, makes me think about how people that used to be like me is now looking for food at gargabe... sometimes i am afraid of end up there too....
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I can imagine myself in his shoes so easily! I used to live in Bolivia and lived the same way he used to live. Churrasco, pizza, shopping whenever - now Venezuela is in a really bad place.
You can't really compare Venezuela socialism and Northern European socialism. The only thing they have in common is the word socialism. IMHO it is totally useless as it is used to describe things that are completely different.
and yet they so often end up there. I think its desperation, trying to convince a whole population to do things differently all at once which never goes well. They end up trying to make change by fiat, instead of working with what they have. So authoritarianism.
Venezuela was democracy. Indeed, Chavez was elected democratically. It eroded. The institutions were weakened. It is now an authoritarian regime, willing to stay in power no matter the costs.
Well, even if nobody else seeds you're still no worse off than you would be with just an HTTP server. At present the main incentive is generosity, which works pretty well for a lot of things; for example a lot of people started pinning the Turkish Wikipedia mirror when it was announced purely as a stand against censorship. In addition, you can also pay a pinning service. In the longer run the IPFS developers are also working on Filecoin, which is a cryptocurrency that adds a payments layer on top of IPFS so you can pay to have someone else serve your content.
Ethical/moral interest in the content, for one (wolfgang42 gave an example of that). That's a pretty small market though.
The other content could be academic and an alternative to information akin to the old Usenet (pre binaries) and things like Gopher and BBS.
The major demand for a system like this, I'd wager, is pirated content. That is, if its better than the current models. The two big models currently being used for piracy are:
1) Usenet/NZB
* Centralized. Only a handful large networks with long retention. Rest are resellers.
* Usenet servers adhere to DMCA; indexers generally don't
* Pretty much requires payment for payserver & indexer
* Little bit rougher on resources due to PAR2 and quick downloading/unpacking of large files has I/O impact. Nothing huge on recent desktop systems.
* Requires a bit more software for everything to work though nowadays there are all in one packages doing the dirty work for you.
2) BitTorrent
* Decentralized.
* Not anonymous. Requires at least VPN, who likely log, even though they claim they don't.
* Free as in beer
* Requires upload
* Based on open source and open standards
* Self-hosted. Some indexers adhere to DMCA; generally
they don't
* Private indexers ("trackers") have a reputation system requiring more than 1:1 download/upload.
* Doesn't work at all with DSLite (native IPv6 + IPv4 behind NAT).
* BitTorrent, like Usenet, also has abstraction software (full stack) to make life easier.
BitTorrent is far better known among the general public but I regard BitTorrent as a poor man's Usenet. If it ain't on Highwinds, it ain't anywhere (of course not completely true given DMCA but still, they got 3,3k days retention).
With Usenet you pay for a sub to a payserver & indexer, with BitTorrent you pay by uploading and VPN.
Now, my question is, where does IPFS belong in this list? Can it compete with these 2 technologies?
There is nothing to say that all coins need a fixed supply. It wouldn't be hard to establish voting to release a given amount of funds/authorize the selling of bonds. All blockchains have a transient central authority, the miner.
I don't think a stablecoin has been made, or at least if it has it hasn't found wide adoption. That is part of the problem, if people couldn't make profit off of speculating on bitcoin it's quite likely that it wouldn't be as widely accepted/talked about.
It wouldn't be too hard to make a inflationary coin, just mint coins proportional to the estimated GH of the network. That would give the coin a price ceiling.
Bitcoin is likely going to remain the most conservative of all the cryptocurrencies. Even the most liberial of them is having trouble scaling to the current demand. The current demand is really quite low.
Most of the time Ethereum is less than a penny for a simple value transfer, and it does more than twice as many transactions per day as Bitcoin. It's also pretty easy to implement simple payment channels:
I was just pulling up avg tx fees. I realize that tx cost on ETH varies highly, do you have a preferred site to tell what contracts are economically viable for what amounts?
For instance I would be happy to buy a cryptokitty or two at the ~1 USD price range, but if the tx fees are ~1 USD then it's obviously a no go.
It tells the lowest gas price you can use to be reasonably sure your transaction will go through, and how long it's likely to take. Using that gas price it also gives a dollar cost of a simple transfer, which at the moment is higher than I expected at 20 cents for a 20-minute wait, or 33 cents for a 3-minute wait.
For cryptokitties you'll have a higher gas cost; I don't really know how high but I think I've seen people complain about spending six bucks for cryptokitty transaction at a 60 gwei gas price.
The one justification for skyhigh valuations is believing there will be a deus ex machina technology solution that comes out to solve the scalability problems of crypto. Honestly, it could happen (https://lightning.network/ or something else, ideally for on-chain transactions), but in _my_ opinion, betting on that outcome at this time is just not worth it. I believe a more likely scenario is we have a major correction, and then grow from there.
In the worst case (1 tx per channel) LN would actually double the # of tx.
I am really looking forward to LN being really tested, but the thing that worries me is that the security model relies on txing before a certain block. If we see a large amount of the traffic move from on chain to LN then we could get ourselves into a situation where there is a run on the chain to close channels. If there is a large market maker that attempts to steal from a channel that is being used to route many others we could see a mass closing of channels which could push the fees high enough to make it cost prohibitive.
LN isn't a panacea it actually changes the security model.
It's not deus ex machina, because it's not unexpected. Lightning has a working alpha on Bitcoin, and Ethereum has something similar with Raiden, plus the Plasma paper and early code, a recently-published spec for the first version of sharding with a 100x throughput improvement, various special-purpose off-chain solutions like FunFair's fate channels, TrueBit for verifiable computation off chain, a simple multicore hack, and simulation code for full proof of stake.
I'm not saying there won't be a market correction, since they happen on a regular basis. Just a few months ago Ethereum dropped from $420 to $130.
Yes I am a long term believer in the technology, my gut just says the next correction that comes will be a bloodbath. Accordingly, I'd prefer to wait until that occurs before getting more involved.
If I'm wrong and "lose money" (ie don't get the gains) I'm okay with that too, since I've thought about this a fair amount and I'm confident my position is the most reasonable at this time.
Bitshares, STEEM, and the new project EOS all support them (EOS will have free transactions, and STEEM already does). Definitely check them out if you're interested in the space. Alot of people dismiss them because DPoS isn't proof of work, but if you dig into the philosophy behind it I feel like it makes alot of sense.
They've been lagging behind / undervalued for the last couple years IMO but the big money behind EOS is giving STEEM/BTS the attention they deserve.
I sent my friends 50 bucks worth of BTC for christmas time. At that point the fees for regular tx were ~5 bucks so I just bundled them and payed less than a dollar per send, making sure to send the change into a segwit address. I missed someone so I went ahead and sent a one off from a segwit address. That was only 1 buck tx fee. Totally doable for a $50 tx.
But if the valuations are anywhere close to proper we need to have significantly higher throughput.
If I can't send someone 10 bucks on bitcoin it loses a lot of value for me. I've previously used it to pay for lunch/poker w/e when I don't have my wallet and someone that I am with is interested in it. Even litecoin is hitting 1 USD avg tx fee.
And then there's RiaBlocks which looks the most promising currently. I hope it gets a rigorous security review though. IOTA, Byteball, Steem, BitShares etc. don't really cut it IMO. Cardano also has reasonable plans for scalability.
The futures market will do the rest. Only settlement is once a day. But as the bitcoin price moves (which indicates that the settlement price that evening will be different), actors will buy and sell which should bring the futures market in line with the bitcoin price. So in the end you'll end up with a pretty close mirror. You only need 1-2 algo traders for that.
Yeah bitcoin is distributed, it functions as if it has a ~10m global semaphore. The actual details are much more complicated, but with the current design you are not getting around that, current efforts are to build systems that only settle to the chain when trust is broken.
