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> Johnson said that the company had made several venture investments in bitcoin-related businesses and that the company was looking at applications of blockchain technologies alongside several leading universities.
Every crypto article makes the same vague claims about the potential of non-specific blockchain technology. I'm surprised there was no mention of replacing Visa in this one as well.
I got removed from a project because I was raining on everyone's blockchain fantasy. Later they begrudgingly admitted that blockchain wasn't going to solve the hard interoperability problem we were facing (bog standard need to pull & analyze data from multiple incompatible data stores held by multiple independent parties).
I can forgive all the business guys for that thinking given articles like these, but the tech guys who were fanning the fires of that fantasy and telling me I didn't understand blockchain....
I got the distinct impression that there is a growing cottage industry of tech consultants and outsource companies that realize that if they can get their clients to "do it on the blockchain" they will be able to bill 10x as much for a project that has a current very good solution (and relatively fast to implement solution). And for which blockchain won't be a benefit. But the client may very well be able to get more VC money, so it's starting to turn blockchain 'skeptics' into martyrs.
And the most frustrating thing is that the innovation in Satoshi's paper (bringing together in a unique way prior known solutions) is really exciting and there are very good uses for blockchain. The international shipping companies using blockchain to track shipping container provenance strikes me as really, really perfect.
The bad uses of blockchain is going to kill the tech before it's had time to mature naturally and find its place.
Thank you for being a voice of reason in a domain that has increasingly become overrun by frauds and zealots.
As someone who has been involved in blockchain research since 2011, it’s sad to see a promising technology (in limited use cases) turn into a buzzword thrown around by the many speculators and scam artists peddling vaporware and pumping crypto prices.
Blockchains are the future, aka merkel trees are the future, aka git is the future. Put the world in source control. Distributed, trustless, decentralised source control.
Facilitating inter-bank transfers is one promising application that's already operational: https://ripple.com/
I like that the post mentions she's mined 200,000 Satoshis. Is this some kind of Bitcoin Shibboleth? I had to google it. It's about $8.
1 Satoshi = 0.00000001 BTC (10^-8 BTC)
It represents the smallest fraction of 1 bitcoin you can use as an amount in a transaction, so they are the smallest (indivisible) units.
One of the things I found surprising and curious about bitcoin is that the minimum viable amount is actually the transaction fee, which is maybe around 27,000 satoshis (median tx size x 120 satoshis/byte).
The surprising part for me was that, as a corollary to that, wallets with less than that amount have bitcoin in them which is potentially permanently removed from the total supply of BTC.
Very interesting name for a decimal. What an intricate community
Yes I laughed reading that part because it followed her saying they made a lot of money. How embarrassing.
the base unit
a lot of trading is quoted in satoshis instead of "x thousandth fractions of a bitcoin"
Ehm...where is this the case? Pretty much all exchanges that I actively monitor all list their order books, trade history etc. in bitcoin, with a varying number of decimals, and they also accept orders in bitcoin denomination as well. Sometimes they offer a switch in their own trading UI to use mBTC (milli-bitcoin, a thousanth of a bitcoin) as the unit, but that is always optional and I know nobody who uses it.
That being said, I also had a great laugh reading the article when it came to "200,000 satoshis". Although I totally believe her - it's hard to earn significant amounts of BTC via mining today without investing huge amounts of money and dealing with constricted ASIC supplies, so you need to have time and cash to blow at it. But she shouldn't have mentioned that number in the context of "yeah, our mining ops suddenly started to generate huge returns".
I cannot imagine a headline that would make me more interested in investing with Vanguard.
0.005% lower expense ratios is what shifted my stuff from Fidelity to vanguard. Idk how much exposure they're putting into crypto currency based on this.
Come for the lower expense ratios, stay for the focus on running low cost indexes mutual funds, as opposed to experimenting with cryptocurrencies.
The difference in fees is probably closer to 0.5% (50 basis points), not 0.5 basis points.
I can't wait until large firms, or very rich people start throwing a lot of money at mining and start co-opting cryptocurrencies
As it stands, the rich have already co-opted cryptocurrencies.
Minting algorithms have mostly generated the majority of the entire supply in the first few months, allowing anyone with existing capital to purchase majority stakes or mining power.
You think they aren't? Mining is a multi billion dollar industry.
The term "industry" suggests they produce something, which in the case of bitcoin mining is questionable.
I think co-opting suggests attacks on the consensus mechanisms or figuring out how to exploit Satoshi's abandoned wallets.
This is sarcasm, right?
How did this article just get written? Consensus happened in May...
Sure, if you have more of a kitty than many countries to play with, an army of lawyers and an IT department... have fun.
I have all the computers in our office mining crypto when we leave for the day. It is pretty easy to setup.
I hope you realise the product of your mining belongs to your company given its their electricity you’re using (compared to the computers just suspending).
Whoo boy. If you aren't the owner, expect them to fire you and replace your paycheck with the tiny bit that you managed to mine.
I'd love to know what the electricity cost is to do that versus their immediate market value. Are you mining lottery tickets or do they have immediate worth?
Just like people used to run SETI@home on their work networks after hours
What do you mine?
It sure feels like "blockchain" and "cryptocurrency" are the new misunderstood but mandatory usage buzzwords of the day.
So someone at Fidelity watched Mr Robot I think they missed some parts but lets see how this plays out...(starts thinking about moving investments away from Fidelity).
Dream of satoshi is dead now
How so?
There will probably be more bad news from China this year. It seems very risky to do what they are doing.
Maybe they're following Cuban's advice which is to invest heavily into anything China bans.
It would be highly irresponsible not to do so
Why?
Artificial and delusional scarcity of software derived database entries, of which a multitude of newer alternative service networks are being created every day?
ROI of creating an investment portfolio 1 year ago, and selling today:
- All Bitcoin: ~500%
- Mix of top market: ~2800%
- All Strat: ~13500%
Meanwhile, stock investors call 12% a good year.
Now compare total market capitalization of equity markets to Bitcoin. I doubt you could liquidate millions of dollars of bitcoin in a day and not make the market plummet. You can do that in the last 30 minutes of the stock trading day with no very little price fluctuation.
There are equities that are up triple digits, including Nvidia...who is realistically the biggest winner in crypto mining.
Eh, I don't really know where to start to explain how wrong this is.
The crypto market is still niche. There are stocks that make 100-1000% performance. But the stock market is "saturated" for representing assets, equities and companies. So its growth is limited.
Meanwhile, people said stuff like this before 2000 about all sorts of individual stocks.
I can do you one better because I made 200x ROI investing in the roulette wheel in just a single day.
Some people told me that I'm confusing good investment decisions with high volatility ones, but what do they know? They're just stupid investors! /s
Yup. Few people realize Bitcoin has been literally the best performing investment in human history. One dollar invested in March 2010 is worth $1+ million today. 1,000,000× returns.
But the downside of performing so well is that it is too easy to get distracted by the price and disregard the radical improvements that Bitcoin brings over legacy financial systems...
"If these trends continue..."
What about the Sharpe ratio? Divide the return by the (daily?) standard deviation of returns.
All Strat?