This article is a bit dated. AFIK the latest in web scraping legality is LinkedIn vs. HiQ, where HiQ was scraping public LinkedIn profiles. LinkedIn issued a C&D under CFAA, but HiQ received an injunction that allowed it to continue scraping. This was supposed to be tried in the Ninth Circuit court over a year ago, but not sure what happened
Pretty sure the ninth published what's now the controlling opinion in the circuit. YMMV in other circuits.
EDIT: Yep. hiQ Labs, Inc. v. LinkedIn Corp., 273 F. Supp. 3d 1099 (N.D. Cal. 2017)
"In summary, the balance of hardships tips sharply in hiQ’s favor. hiQ has demonstrated there are serious questions on the merits. In particular, the Court is doubtful that the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act may be invoked by LinkedIn to punish hiQ for accessing publicly available data; the broad interpretation of the CFAA advocated by LinkedIn, if adopted, could profoundly impact open access to the Internet, a result that Congress could not have intended when it enacted the CFAA over three decades ago. Furthermore, hiQ has raised serious questions as to whether LinkedIn, in blocking hiQ’s access to public data, possibly as a means of limiting competition, violates state law."
That’s an extremely well-thought-out court finding, especially since they thought about how the CFAA was intended to be applied. Far too often we see a more liberal interpretation of the CFAA used to the detriment of a small player.
>In particular, the Court is doubtful that the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act may be invoked by LinkedIn to punish hiQ for accessing publicly available data; the broad interpretation of the CFAA advocated by LinkedIn, if adopted, could profoundly impact open access to the Internet, a result that Congress could not have intended when it enacted the CFAA over three decades ago.
I didn't realize original intent could be used in courts. How the heck did "original intent" lead to federal abortion and federal gay marriage when all law in letter and in practice had delegated these questions to the states?
Courts have a variety of legal theories available. They can pick and choose from textualism, original meaning, original intent, evolving meanings/living constitution, stare decisis, or common law jurisprudence (i.e. law made up by judges) to get the result they want or believe should be the law.
> Last month, the inevitable happened: Brady Gaulke, a 26-year-old Nashville man, was killed in a collision with an S.U.V. while riding a scooter. His grieving parents have launched a petition to ban the devices in Nashville. “[E]-scooters are unsafe at any speed, and we are calling on Mayor David Briley and the Metro Council to ban them from the streets immediately,” the petition reads, arguing that Mr. Gaulke should be “the last victim of an epidemic that the e-scooter companies and local government both refuse to acknowledge.”
Imagine being gaslighted by the auto industry so hard that you think scooters are the problem here, not the car that actually hit and killed someone.
All of the problems that are discussed in this article are artifacts of a culture and cities designed around cars, period.
Imagine being gaslighted by the scooter industry so hard you think that cars are the problem here, not the scooter rider that made an illegal turn in front of an SUV which tried but failed to break in time to avoid hitting him.
>not the scooter rider that made an illegal turn in front of an SUV which tried but failed to break in time to avoid hitting him
I rented a Lime S scooter in Louisville, Kentucky this weekend. It became apparent after about a block that the brake was completely non-functional. I parked the scooter, ended the ride, and reported that it had a defective brake...but yet it remained available for rent in the Lime app anyway. Seems like a lawsuit waiting to happen.
The more I think about it, the more I regret not tossing the scooter into the nearest dumpster after the ride was over and the parking photo was submitted.
Cars obviously are the problem here. Had the SUV driver been riding a motorcycle, there is a high probability the scooter rider would be alive. But instead of saying to car drivers, "you are operating the least-forgiving vehicle, therefore you will bear the most burden of responsibility", we say, "ran over a bike because your were texting? Here's a $120 ticket, pay more attention next time."
SUVs generally are more dangerous to the other parties in a collision.
But in this case the scooter rider suffered fatal head injuries because he wasn't wearing a helmet. He would have still suffered fatal head injuries no matter what vehicle hit him since it wasn't the size of the vehicle that mattered here; what mattered was that he fell off his scooter and hit his head.
SUVs are more dangerous to pedestrians and cyclists (and scooter riders) than sedans. If you are using a tool that endangers everyone around you then you bear partial responsibility for increasing the latent risk of transportation even if you’re not the proximate cause of a given accident.
Where do you draw the line between individual responsibility and what businesses should shoulder as far as above and beyond safety measures?
I don't necessarily have an answer, but saying scooter companies are responsible for someone's death in the same comment as you mention an illegal uturn seems contradictory to me.
That second part was a separate paragraph because it was a separate response to a different part of the comment I was responding to. It wasn't directly related to my comments on the responsibility of the scooter rider.
You've pointed out that the omnipresence and logistics of cars are fundamental to entire cultures and cities, and yet when something new is introduced that clashes with that, you're claiming that the people calling for the revocation of the new thing are gaslighted by "proponents" of the established thing - the thing that is cemented into the design of the world already. Given the options to roll back the scooters or redesign a part of civilization, though the latter may be an ideal, surely the parents of the dead calling for the former are not being unreasonable, and even more surely are not "gaslighted"?
Scooters and cars are not compatible on the same roads. Whoever wants to risk their life could drive these scooters. However, when a company makes scooters widely available and with no barriers (e.g. no scooter licence) the perceived risk lowers as in "everybody does it, must be ok" or "if it's legal it's safe" type of judgement.
Banning scooters is not a smart idea but the entry level should be stepped up a few notches. Maybe operating one should require some safety lessons. Or maybe a licence that can be lost as incentive to not do stupid things.
The alternative is to not do anything and learn from accidents and deaths of others. This is the long and painful road.
The scooters are the problems because they do not obey the traffic laws.
Atlanta just created scooter ordinances and the local news is showing announcements from APD with the new regulations. No riding on sidewalks or leaving scooters on sidewalks. You must act like a car and move with the flow of traffic like a car. Fines will be given out.
I used to walk over abandoned scooters on my commute every day when I worked downtown.
And it wasn't the car, either. IT WAS THE DRIVER CONTROLLING THE CAR. We've been brainwashed so hard, people can't even use language to describe what actually happened, lest responsibility fall on the individual.
> people can't even use language to describe what actually happened
This is a good point, although I'm not sure sure I agree with the cause or motive. But if one starts paying very close attention to the general nature and specific wording used in forum conversations, I think it starts to become clear that very often participants believe they are discussing "just the facts", when in reality they are often discussing things in the form of a story, or a particular perspective which usually only takes into consideration a subset of all the relevant facts.
In this case, new technology has been broadly deployed into society without corresponding training, and a young man has ended up dead. It seems unlikely the entirety of the fault rests in one place, but rather could plausibly be attributed to any number of things that had they been done differently, the gut-wrenching emotional pain this family has to live with for the rest of their life could have been avoided.
I believe if each of us made a serious effort to be more mindful of our thoughts and words, we could perhaps move closer to a society where these realities can be discussed in a more objective manner, and we could enjoy both the advancements of technology, while increasing the likelihood that everyone gets home to their loved ones at the end of the day.
It was the guy on the scooter that made an illegal turn in front of the SUV, disregarding traffic laws put into place precisely to prevent the type of accident that occurred.
This is so badly needed in the Ethereum space. Metamask is a massive drag and a known onboarding blocker -- Hedgehog seems like a huge leap forward. Congrats team!
Sounds like you're referring to security tokens, which place a securitized asset's cap table on a public blockchain. 0x works with all tokenized assets, so we're not opinionated about which assets people want to trade -- other companies like Harbor (https://harbor.com/) offer tokenization services. You're right that placing bearer instruments on a public blockchain presents some issues and the jury is still out a bit.
An alternative might be found in protocols like UMA (https://umaproject.org/), Augur (https://www.augur.net/) or MakerDAO (https://makerdao.com/) which allow you create synthetic tokens that trustlessly track the price of a real-world asset by creating financial incentives to rebalance the price of the minted tokens. MakerDAO has already been used to create over $80MM in a synthetic USD token called Dai (https://makerdao.com/dai/) and UMA has created a synthetic S&P500 token, allowing anyone anywhere around the world to get exposure to US Stocks (https://medium.com/uma-project/announcing-us-stock-index-tok...).
If you want to list the same assets as everyone else with the same interface in the same markets, then yes, it's hard to compete. However, we see a world of tokenized assets coming online that will need unique markets for exchange. Something like Radar Relay (https://radarrelay.com/ for ERC-20 commodities) is totally different from Veil (https://veil.co/ for prediction market shares) is totally different from BoxSwap (https://boxswap.io/ for trading collectibles). Even within ERC-20 commodities exchange, there are many different models of exchange within different markets that are sufficiently differentiated.
We think of 0x more like Stripe: an under-the-hood technology that allows entrepreneurs to move more quickly and easily add exchange to their product. The concept of "tokens" and "exchange" will become very abstract in the near future.
Not that I have any interest in launching an exchange, but I do see what you mean by the possibility of an exchange becoming quite abstract. If housing deeds are traded then a housing marketplace is an exchange. If cars ownership is traded then a car marketplace is an exchange. If in-game items are traded, it's an exchange.
Could one think of stores as one-sided exchanges, where resale is just not natively possible? Does Google operate an ad exchange? Is iTunes an exchange? If digital goods ownership were on a blockchain then resale would be possible... What about physical goods?
95% of blockchain projects are a garbage heap, crypto currency is WAY overvalued, but the 5% of projects that are actually useful, and have a real need for a blockchain may just fundamentally change parts of how we live life
when micro transactions as a concept came to games, it changed the way people wrote games. when crowd funding became mainstream, it allowed more innovation from people with just a need and an idea
don’t dismiss the 5% useful for the 95% useless (and no, i’m not going to enumerate the useful cases because it’s been done to death)
*EDIT: and to be clear, i think the currency part of crypto currency is in the 95% not helpful (maybe unless you’re talking about stellar, which deals more with fiat/other currency exchange and for the most part eschews spending crypto currency itself)
> don’t dismiss the 5% useful for the 95% useless (and no, i’m not going to enumerate the useful cases because it’s been done to death)
It sounds like you can't point to any, like everyone else who insists there's a 'there' there. Nobody has been able to point to a single, legal, use case where crypto is better than a fiat based technology. Zip. None. But they're all sure it's there.
Don't you think with all the interest in the space, if someone had come up with one, it'd be enormous? EOS raised over four BILLION dollars a few years ago and still doesn't have a working blockchain. [1] You can fire up a blockchain in minutes. If there was a company that actually created something of value, it'd be worth more than the mewn y'all are trying to reach.
We've been waiting for a decade now, I'm sure OP will deliver /s.
How about real time cross border remittance and settlement? Current fiat approaches require large illiquid reserves, are slow, and not very scalable.
It’s also useful for transmitting money long distances when banks won’t do business and you want to avoid a paper trail (drugs). Fiat is perfectly fine for in person transactions, but not when distance is involved. You may or may not morally agree with it, but this is a proven use case.
> How about real time cross border remittance and settlement? Current fiat approaches require large illiquid reserves, are slow, and not very scalable.
It's bad for that, we've been through this. To send money you have to pay ~1% to an exchange in your home country, wait a few days for it to clear exposing yourself to huge forex risk, pay a $1 transaction fee give or take, then pay ~1% to an exchange in your destination country netting you 3-5 days latency, 2% fee plus $1 plus 10 minutes and incalculable forex risk. And the risk your exchange will literally just steal your money a la Quadriga. Or getting it confiscated en route like the $825M taken from Bitfinex by various government entities for laundering money.
There are a lot of solutions to this problem ranging from a credit card to buy things, TransferWise (0.85% fee give or take) to Interactive Brokers ($20 per million fee, or 0.002%) to Norbert's Gambit (free) to a wire transfer if you have to settle instantly. Or even just opening an HSBC account in both countries and moving the money instantly online via web banking.
Then there's Square Cash and Venmo for free domestic transfers, the free/instant domestic RTP network in the US, the free/instant SEPA network in Europe and the often free/instant Interac e-Transfer network in Canada.
> ...and not very scalable.
According to the Bank for International Settlements triennial report of 2016, the foreign exchange market cap averaged $5.1 trillion per day.
That's $1,861.5 trillion dollars per year. Forgive me for thinking that means the scaling issue is pretty much solved. It's probably the single most liquid market in the history of the world.
> It’s also useful for transmitting money long distances when banks won’t do business and you want to avoid a paper trail (drugs).
I did say a legal use case. One that neither violates laws nor sanctions. Worse, Bitcoin leaves you with a paper trail. You'd have to use Zcash or Monero.
> Fiat is perfectly fine for in person transactions, but not when distance is involved. You may or may not morally agree with it, but this is a proven use case.
It is, though, because you can use your Visa card to send money instantly to anywhere in the world that isn't sanctioned.
You've done a good job explaining how to do foreign exchange and how you can personally buy things in other countries. What happens if you're an international business that uses Bank of Melborne and has to pay vendors in Croatia using Primorska Banka? How does actual money get sent? Not credit that can be settled at a later date. Real money, sometimes large amounts that needs to be settled. A forex market is absolutely going to be necessary to do this, and as you pointed out those are very liquid markets which helps. A forex is only one piece of the puzzle though. You somehow need to get money out of Bank of Melborne and into the forex market. Then you somehow need to get the money out of the forex market and into Primorska Banka.
I get it, you want to play devils advocate, but every example you gave solves a problem that isn't "real time cross border remittance and settlement". They either aren't cross border (Venmo/Square Cash), or don't actually result in settlement (TransferWise, Norbert's Gambit), or aren't realtime (Interactive Brokers takes 3 days to settle your account FWIW).
EFT transfer to an exchange, purchase crypto (1% fee), withdraw to a different exchange ($1 fee), sell crypto (1% fee), SEPA transfer to recipient.
Classic path:
TransferWise handles everything (0.85% or less). Or:
EFT transfer to Interactive Brokers, FOREX exchange ($20 per million), withdraw via SEPA to Croatian account. They allow you to link both AU and Croatian accounts. Or:
Open an HSBC account in both places and use the online instant account-to-account global transfer tool (rates vary, ~2%) and send a SEPA payment. Or:
Wire money (pricey). Or:
With a brokerage account and an established business you can instantly make your payment through margin (3.9% per annum). IB will allow you to borrow Hrvatska kruna and withdraw instantly via SEPA payment. Then you can transfer in Australian dollars over EFT at your leisure.
Seriously, this is a solved problem and the crypto path is not faster, it's not safer, it's not cheaper, it's not easier.
> TransferWise handles everything (0.85% or less).
TransferWise doesn't do settlement. You still have to pay a merchant with a card who then needs to settle. No actual money is being settled through TransferWise.
> EFT transfer to Interactive Brokers, FOREX exchange ($20 per million), withdraw via SEPA to Croatian account. They allow you to link both AU and Croatian accounts.
EFT transfer to IB isn't instant. SEPA requires you to be using Euro. SEPA does handle settlement, but you still need to do settlement with both the EFT transfer as well as within your IB account. IB does have programs to allow early withdrawal before your account is settled if you quality, but again that isn't settlement.
> Open an HSBC account in both places and use the online instant account-to-account global transfer tool (rates vary, ~2%) and send a SEPA payment.
Again, SEPA requires you to be using Euro. Additionally, you would need to do settlement on the initial transfer to HSBC.
> Wire money (pricey).
The company you're using to wire money needs to handle cross border remittance and settlement, so how do they do it?
Just to reiterate... you've done a fine job explaining how a consumer can send money across the globe. You're not wrong to say that as a consumer there are perfectly acceptable solutions that can accomplish what they need. What you've completely failed to do is explain how to accomplish "cross border remittance and settlement" using Fiat in a way that is fast, doesn't require vostro account (i.e. illiquid reserves), and is scalable with the number of possible banks you'd need to transfer money to/from.
Ah I guess I misunderstood your question. My understanding is that settlement can be accomplished the way that TransferWise bootstrapped. They matched up two pairs of domestic transfers, where if I wanted to send money to Canada, they waited until someone wanted to send money to the US, then we'd each domestically transfer money to eachothers recipients. Minimal reserves, and everything happened domestically.
Visa is NOT instant. VISA transactions take up to 48 hours to clear. And in some cases the credit card processor can and will hold funds for even longer than that.
Some do, but some like Square will pay you out next business day free of charge or instantly for a small surcharge. To your point they’re floating that during settlement. It’s instant in the sense that the transaction is approved instantly and the settlement is a formality.
Settlement is not a formality. Money still has to change hands behind the scenes in various bank accounts. The only thing that's instant is the check for available funds. The actual transfer of money still occurs via ACH.
Within the US, ACH is being superseded by RTP realtime payments. SEPA is realtime in Europe. It's a formality from the perspective of the customer because the payment 'happens' immediately, and the merchant gets paid out within 24 hours, sooner if they really need it. Is this really a problem?
But still, definitely a promising improvement over ACH.
It is a practical problem that the merchant has to wait 24-48 hrs for funds. It's a cash flow problem. It slows down the speed at which that cash can be used to purchase other goods or services. For example, a made-to-order business has to wait for funds to clear from a customer (or front the capital) before they can turn around and order goods to produce the product a customer is purchasing. Which slows down delivery. And that effect is amplified across the whole supply chain.
> It's a cash flow problem. It slows down the speed at which that cash can be used to purchase other goods or services.
No. That's what lending is for. Square will allow you to cash out instantly for a 1% fee, they offer merchants a debit card they can use to access the funds in real-time as they're received for no additional fee, or you borrow some amount of float at today's incredibly low interest rates.
As a business in need of liquidity you can even sell your accounts receivable for less than 1% to invoice factoring companies. There's so many options out there.
Or the merchant can open a credit card and get fee-free interest-free loans for a whole month.
This is not an issue today, or rather, you’re making mountains out of molehills. There are ways of addressing this without crypto or throwing out the existing financial system. But more importantly what how many merchants wait for funds to clear before they go out and buy the supplies to do a job?
We get it- Hacker News is rabidly, irrationally anti-cryptocurrency. Which is ridiculous, considering most people here 1) Create or participate in online spaces and 2) Wish to monetize their services in ways that don’t necessarily involve advertising. You don’t think peer-to-peer micro transactions are going to transform your work in a fundamental way? Then I’m sorry, but you lack imagination.
No, I don’t think micro transactions have a future - peer to peer or otherwise - but not for any technical reasons. Humans suffer from decision fatigue [1] wherein making decisions just wears you out and you don’t want to do it regardless of size. A decision requires a costly, difficult evaluation of worth regardless. That’s why even though buying shows one at a time on iTunes would likely save you money, you pay for Netflix - because you don’t want to decide to pay. Micropayments aren’t a limitation of the existing financial system, it’s just accounting. This is a limitation of human physiology. We could have it right now if people wanted it but they just... don’t.
AWS became successful party because of the "micropayments for servers" style hourly model.
Micropayments are most certainly a limitation of the current financial system: Pulling together all the disparate banks of the world to cooperate to create a global API to facilitate payment for <$1 amounts? Don't assume that all problems are technical: This would be near impossible, where cryptocurrencies are doing this right now.
Flattr isn't micropayments. You as a reader pay a decidedly non-micro amount into a pool monthly that's then divided between flattr sites based on apportioned viewership on a monthly basis. This is the Netflix model, and exactly what I suggested. This is accounting, not micropayments. Neither the viewer nor the content creators ever transact sub-penny amounts, they only exist in the context of calculation and apportionment. And they do this specifically because people don't want to make individual purchasing decisions.
> AWS became successful party because of the "micropayments for servers" style hourly model.
Again, that's accounting, or more accurately, metered billing. A low price for services is not micropayments either.
> Micropayments are most certainly a limitation of the current financial system: Pulling together all the disparate banks of the world to cooperate to create a global API to facilitate payment for <$1 amounts? Don't assume that all problems are technical: This would be near impossible, where cryptocurrencies are doing this right now.
If this were something people wanted, you'd load up a, for instance, PayPal account and drain it pennies at a time. Once an aggregate payout to a specific merchant exceeded the transactable threshold it would execute automatically. This can be done today. People just don't want it.
And it only works like that because of the current financial system. Flattr exists because of the lack of a solution in the current financial system: Cryptocurrency (eg ETH with Web3) would allow sites to build a Flattr-like system without the middleman, and cut down on the overhead of actually building a company around it.
People don't want that. You're describing a solution in search of a problem. We have the technology to execute on this right now but nobody does, because people don't want it. If they wanted it, we'd have it, and we'd be iterating in the problem domain not the solution domain. There's no pent up demand for a world in which you're constantly forced to make tons of individual purchasing decisions.
More importantly though, people have learned not to value content. This is a huge problem for the media industry. Nobody wants to pay anything at all for what they create, they want to pay with their time and attention - through ads.
> when micro transactions as a concept came to games, it changed the way people wrote games
Has there ever actually been a case where microtransactions made for a better game? Everything I've read about what it's like working for studios that rely on them is creepy stories about trying to chase 'whales'.
If think in some games where cosmetics are the only commodity it works well. In-game customization frankly was not a priority for game-devs, as it did not turn a profit. That is until games like League of Legends et al made customization micro-transactions their entire business model. It's meant newly fantastic support for the art departments! It's also lead to a number of games that are constantly updated over many years instead of just made for release, so one can play their favourite games without them become stale. Yes, this has existed in the form of a subscription service before, but cosmetic micro-transactions have effectively socialised some games, where the whales pay for game development and less wealthy individuals still get to enjoy the game without paying anything! Path of Exile probably wouldn't exist without micro transactions, at least to the popularity it has become, and I've never had to pay a penny to play that game.
So there are a few cases. That's not to say that most mobile game micro-transaction models aren't absolute hot, filthy, dirty, disgusting, stinking garbage.
I wouldn't say "better"; That's pretty damn hard to substantiate! What's the other option? Well 1 is that the game wouldn't exist. I guarantee that Popcap [1] wouldn't be too happy, and there are plenty of people that get enjoyment from their games (arguably sometimes to an unhealthy degree). If micropayments weren't a thing, then many of their games would likely not exist.
I don’t see what is the point of this comment other than “hurr durr blockchain bad”. Providing a marketplace tokenised assets/digital assets is useful.
In what way is it useful? You say that like it's obvious, but it's not. It's on the challenger to explain why it's better than the status quo, not the other way around.
Because there is no status quo? (And solutions that aren’t better than status quo should be automatically thrown in the trash?). Now if your question is why are markets useful, then that is obvious is it not?
Secondly, I find this viewpoint highly regressive, the asking of why is X useful question. We can go to the moon but why is it useful? These type of questions are ultimately backwards and short sighted. Why do we spend X to research Y and why is Y useful is not clear until $many_years. It may not be obvious to you if it is useful or not but it is not up to you to decide (the invisible hand of the market decides).
From your other comments, it is clear that you have already decided that “all cryptocurrency are scams” so I don’t think you are arguing this point in good faith.
> Because there is no status quo? (And solutions that aren’t better than status quo should be automatically thrown in the trash?).
I think in general, people are excited by technology that's innovative and promising. It doesn't have to solve problems better or more efficiently today but it should have some clear path to doing so, yeah.
> Now if your question is why are markets useful, then that is obvious is it not?
I guess what I'm asking is why are markets for crypto tokens useful? If I built great tech around markets but it only let you exchange week old chicken nuggets would that be valuable?
> From your other comments, it is clear that you have already decided that “all cryptocurrency are scams” so I don’t think you are arguing this point in good faith.
Substitute 'cryptocurrency' for 'entries in a MySQL store' and re-read everything that's been posted here.
Going to the moon yielded amazing technological advances, in engineering, in materials science, in physics, chemistry, national identity, etc and promises to do so again as we iterate. Capital and research expenditure isn't negative sum. Then who knows what we might find out there?
Crypto is not new technology in any way. It's a 10-year-old recombination of 20-year-old tooling. Merkle trees and hashcash. That's it. All the money being spent on it is paying miners in China to repeatedly hash numbers and pay their electric bills. There's no research, no innovation. Just people selling each other spreadsheet cells they're sure are going to be worth something one day because 'blockchain'. It's religious, not scientific. Combine that with the world of finance, zero regulation and irreversibility, there's no way to make it anything other than a scammer's paradise. Scamming people is a feature, not a bug. All based on what, the idea that 'inflation is theft' and 'the gubmint shouldn't tell me who to send money to'? Any ECON-101 class will set you straight.
It's actively anti-efficient, regressive in terms of user experience and negative-sum: the more the price goes up the more you have to pay miners, the more cash needs to come into the system to keep the price stable. PoW isn't decentralized (>51% of BTC hashpower is concentrated in a few mining pools in the PRC), it's not trustless (PRC), it's not fast (7tx/sec), it's not cheap, it's not a good store of value and it fails to solve human problems (deflationary in the face of an expanding population and economy).
It's abjectly failed at every one of it's stated goals, all that's left is 'number go up.' What's to like?
If crypto was a fad it would have died long ago. Yet here we are still talking about it with more money and development behind it than ever before. I really encourage you to read this newspaper column from 1995 predicting the end of the internet because just as you have put it, there are already way better options out there. https://thenextweb.com/shareables/2010/02/27/newsweek-1995-b...
> If crypto was a fad it would have died long ago.
That's appeal to authority. Let's focus on what it does and doesn't do, and how well. The internet wasn't built to literally become less efficient the more data was transferred over it, right?
Why are we judging it on it's capabilities of today? Scaling is a problem actively being worked on. Again, your comment draws a parallel to the aforementioned article. There are certainly problems, but some of us see the potential for a true digital cash and people will continue to work on it one way or another until it's achieved.
It was built on the crudest app tech stack vis a vis HTML, CSS and (not even sure JS was a thing yet in 1995) JS. Not many could predict the cloud becoming a multi trillion dollar industry in 1995.
> It's a 10-year-old recombination of 20-year-old tooling. Merkle trees and hashcash. That's it.
This is an unfair characterization. Every technology can be described as a recombination of what existed before. Bitcoin solved the distributed consensus problem in a completely new way. This was a long open problem.
> There's no research, no innovation.
There's a ton of blockchain motivated research going on in signature schemes, distributed consensus, formal verification, zero knowledge proofs, verifiable delay functions, game theory, governance, economics, etc.
I don’t see why crypto skeptics feel the need to regurgitate the same tried and debunked talking points into every single thread about crypto. This unhinged rant might as well be a copypasta at this point. None of this thread is even about bitcoin.
You bring up an interesting point in that I can’t think of another technology out there quite as polarizing as crypto. It’s almost fanatical devotion from both sides. I disagree that the points are debunked, I think the current thinking from the pro side is that those are “today’s problems” and the future will be different. I think the anti camp like myself are frustrated by the religious devotion to something that in our opinion represents regression from the status quo as a north-star, driven in part by uninformed debaters assuring us crypto will solve problems they themselves don’t understand. I think it’s like how my dad used to hate medical shows because they were to him a parody of his profession but to the less informed of us, just kinda fun and cool.
I know bitcoin isn’t the only crypto, I also know proof of work isn’t the only algorithm out there. Bitcoin is the best known and most successful, and proof of work is the only algorithm so far proven to work as specified. I was giving more credibility to the space than I usually do with those simplifications, if I wanted to make fun I’d call on our boys Tether (a fraud [1] run by a fraud who tried to start a Ponzi scheme [2] and whose connection to Bitfinex eventually got revealed in the Paradise papers [3] - in which most crypto prices are denominated), IOTA (it’s ternary for no reason, isn’t decentralized, and tried to write their own hashing algorithm and when that failed they called it a DRM scheme [4]) and Dentacoin (your dental records on the blockchain for no discernible reason [5]). Even a team trying to start a BTC ETF concedes 95% of all volume is fraudulent [6]. That’s a bad place to start no matter how you slice it.
Apologies for offending you, though, that wasn’t the intent.
Look at numeraire, nothing on the internet could achieve what numeraire has done, it puts skin in the game for financial predictions. The guys there were able to run a hedge fund out of it.
If we go to computing primitive. The internet was formed to distribute information, not sensitive information.
There is no protocol on the internet to store, share and process sensitive information like identity data, financial data or digital assets.
An analogy to this absurdity is that in the real world, people distribute newspapers on bicycles and trucks whereas money/ gold is moved around in armoured trucks with gunmen.
The internet doesn’t have a protocol that acts like the armoured truck with gunmen, bitcoin was potentially the first one to do so.
Is a speculative asset like bitcoin a gamechanger, I don’t think so, but I do think there’s value in adding native layers on the internet that enable the exchange of sensitive information.
I don’t think it is possible to offend me with your posts (for the record I didn’t read it, I am sorry if you spent any time writing it). Maybe you should start a blog or something instead of ranting about something entirely offtopic and trying to derail the thread.
> We think of 0x more like Stripe: an under-the-hood technology that allows entrepreneurs to move more quickly and easily add exchange to their product.
One’s velocity should always be slightly less than their SEC defense attorney. If you're legit, take the time to make sure your paperwork is legit.
Launch Kit is not an ICO or promoter, it's a platform for crypto exchanges. Could you elaborate why you're referring to a comment detailing the SEC going after ICO scams?
After reading the Why page, I still don't have a concrete notion of what this is. So I'll jab a few questions that might help me make some sense:
First question is about decentralization. What is off-chain relay in this case? Is that a centralized part of the system? Are there centralized parts of the system?
Can this be used to implement more robust margin trading? To my knowledge, only centralized exchanges/brokers currently exist for margin trading.
What settlement speeds can be expected?
That's it for the questions. I don't want to retract from them, but I'll mention that the site doesn't work well with Dark Reader: all theme generation modes, except static, render most of the text invisible.
First question is about decentralization. What is off-chain relay in this case? Is that a centralized part of the system? Are there centralized parts of the system?
Off-chain relay is how parties find each other facilitate a trade. As a maker, I can create an order off-chain, but I still need to find a relevant taker who is interested in filling the order by sending it to the 0x smart contracts on-chain. Relayers pool together these off-chain orders and serve them up through a website, so that it's easy to find people to trade with. Note that this process is optional -- you can still trade peer-to-peer if I send you the order over email, SMS, etc. While relaying is centralized, relayers are non-custodial, so your funds are never at risk. We also have plans to make some parts of relaying less centralized in the future through 0x Mesh: https://blog.0xproject.com/0x-roadmap-2019-part-3-networked-...
Can this be used to implement more robust margin trading?
As for margin trading, yes, you can trade dY/dX tokens on 0x relayers, or combine 0x orders with any on-chain lending protocol such as Dharma or MakerDAO to get leverage.
What settlement speeds can be expected?
All trades currently settle on-chain, so the Ethereum block time is our bottleneck. Look for some updates on this near future :)
To expand on this - a middle ground between the centralized exchanges dominating today and the (relatively) slow and expensive ones on the Ethereum mainnet would be a sidechain using a different physical topology and consensus model.
Some examples that have been gaining buzz recently (these are just examples, there are alternatives to each) if you want to read up and grok the statr of implementation and thoughts today: Plasma chains, PoA Networks xDAI, SKALE, PegaSys.
Been following the 0x project for a while, just want to say this is an amazing project that demonstrates the power and potential of smart contracts and decentralized finance. Keep up the good work!
I think i see what you are doing here while others are missing the point. If there is an open source ui, there is an open source api as well. My do-something-usefull-for-users app isn't going to launch a full exchange - but what I would implement is the api library allowing a user to exchange utility and $$ tokens from one to another while staying in my app.
ergo, the user benefit here is that the user only needs a Coinbase or like account to transfer dollars to tokens, and then the user can obtain other tokens within any particular app. The user doesn't need to sign up to yet-another-exchange-with-my-personal-data-and-who-are-these-people-anyway-and-do-they-have-the-tokens-i-use-etc,etc. Now the user can readily take tokens not in use on one platform and transfer them to a token of another platform, all without leaving the platform specific application. That's a big win for the ecosystem.
I can see why you built the slick ui to demo your product, i think it's the right move because i can use it without a single line of code. I think the next challenge you will have is getting developers to adopt an underlying api client library. If I understand what you are doing correctly, perhaps build that client library in js to be used in react and a demo app that has reduced exchange funcationality for quickly swapping two tokens. it should look as simple as the interface for sending tokens to someone now.
If I guessed all that right, the company i work for may be willing to be an early adaptor. Let me know. We certainly aren't going to build yet-another-exchange, but i think empowering a transfer of btc/eth/eos/xrp -> myLittleUtilityToken within app would be very powerful.
Hi John -- sounds like you might be interested in 0x Instant, which lets you offer one-click token-to-token swapping on your website or inside your app. https://0x.org/instant
You don't have to trust! 0x Exchanges are non-custodial -- you hold onto your funds and atomically execute trades through the 0x smart contracts, which are open source and audited.
Or they can verify them themselves since it's all open source. And for the less technically inclined there's also 3rd party audits and an active bug bounty. Point being, everything is open and transparent, and none of it happens behind the scenes, so that's where the "trustless" comes in.
While yes, that word is overused and misunderstood, and regular users still admittedly do put trust in open source code on a public network, it's a much more open system than we've been able to have before. The trust users depend on in this instance doesn't rely on faith in any single entity to tell you what's changed in their private DB behind the scenes, you can verify it for yourself.
Remember that the smart contract is committed to the blockchain and can never be changed.
Just like when you push your code to a git repo. It's guaranteed immutable, tamper proof. Data side is handled by appending to the blockchain as well. But this doesn't mean it's bug-free.
You have essentially a tamper proof Database with Stored Procedures that doesn't need DBAs. I imagine it as a giant growing BitTorrent file that is maintained (and rewarded) by many computers worldwide. Any tampering to this file, it's immediately detected via hashing (just like in BitTorrent).
The only way to break this is by branching out like you do in git. But in Blockchain, you will have to convince those computers to maintain your fork. And on this note, a Blockchain is technically not controlled by 1 entity, it is the choice of every individual blockchain maintainers (aka miners).
Yes, the thought leaders in the eth community are indeed influential just like Linus Torvalds is to the Kernel project. But that doesn't mean you can't fork Linux should you disagree with him.
What you are saying is not a technical problem. But a problem in Human Society. Or even just an inherent due to it's novelty. This issue is present to almost anything that is not yet widely adapted.
With that said, giant evil mega corporations have grouped up to work on an 'enterprisy' version of Ethereum with a standard spec for interop. We're on a good track to get more 'thought leaders'.
Whether it's a technical problem or a human one, the bottom line is that "guaranteed immutable, tamper proof" is not true. It doesn't matter that Linus Torvalds is influential on the linux kernel project because the linux kernel is not claiming that it is "immutable and tamper proof".
Sure. If you create an Ethereum-compatible token that represents the crypto derivative you have in mind, then you can indeed use this to launch an exchange for that token.
Well, their widespread acceptability seems to be declining, as indicated by all these articles and quittings lately. Presumably widespread quitting of users would only come after, not before, some high profile upsets and mistakes.
And # of Advertisers and Revenue are proportional to how people think they're doing, not how they're actually doing, and would presumably only decline after a mass exodus.
i didn't make a strong claim that they are declining right now, but sentiment really seems to have taken a dive in the past few weeks, which could be a leading indicator of a decline.
(and your linked article is 9 months old talking about even older data so is not really relevant to the current state of affairs.)
How would it be lousy? The cars can now go anywhere and dynamically route instead of being stuck on rails and the infrastructure costs are orders of magnitude less.
The most worrying part of this article for me is that processed meats that are advertised as "nitrate-free" really just use natural nitrates from celery salt, which aren't much better, if at all.
https://www.eff.org/cases/hiq-v-linkedin