'The Way the Senate Melted Down Over Crypto Is Very Revealing' (nytimes.com) 112
Ezra Klein, writing at The New York Times: Think about it this way: The internet we have allows for the easy transfer of information. We costlessly swap copies of news articles, music files, video games, pornography, GIFs, tweets and much more. The internet is, famously, good at making information nearly free. But for precisely that reason, it is terrible at making information expensive, which it sometimes needs to be. What the internet is missing, in particular, are ways to verify identity, ownership and authenticity -- the exact things that make it possible for creators to get paid for their work (for more on this, I highly recommend Steven Johnson's article "Beyond the Bitcoin Bubble").
That's one reason the riches of the web haven't been more widely shared: You get rich selling access to the internet or by building companies that add convenience and features to the internet. So Facebook got rich by building a proprietary infrastructure for identity, and Spotify created a service in which artists could eke out payment from works that were otherwise just being pirated. The actual creators who make the internet worth visiting are forced to accept the exploitative, ever-changing terms of digital middlemen.
This is the problem that the technology behind crypto solves, at least in theory: If the original internet let you easily copy information, the next internet will let you easily trade ownership of digital goods. Crypto lets you make digital goods scarce, which increases their value; it lets you prove ownership, which allows you to buy and sell them; and it makes digital identities verifiable, as that's merely information you own. Together, they unlock the potential for a true economy for digital goods, where creators actually get rewarded for what they make. I will admit to some skepticism that this is how it'll play out, because many of the financiers funding crypto also founded and sit on the boards of the companies that set the terms of today's internet, but we'll see.
That's one reason the riches of the web haven't been more widely shared: You get rich selling access to the internet or by building companies that add convenience and features to the internet. So Facebook got rich by building a proprietary infrastructure for identity, and Spotify created a service in which artists could eke out payment from works that were otherwise just being pirated. The actual creators who make the internet worth visiting are forced to accept the exploitative, ever-changing terms of digital middlemen.
This is the problem that the technology behind crypto solves, at least in theory: If the original internet let you easily copy information, the next internet will let you easily trade ownership of digital goods. Crypto lets you make digital goods scarce, which increases their value; it lets you prove ownership, which allows you to buy and sell them; and it makes digital identities verifiable, as that's merely information you own. Together, they unlock the potential for a true economy for digital goods, where creators actually get rewarded for what they make. I will admit to some skepticism that this is how it'll play out, because many of the financiers funding crypto also founded and sit on the boards of the companies that set the terms of today's internet, but we'll see.
Not bitcoin (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: Not bitcoin (Score:2)
Re: Not bitcoin (Score:4, Insightful)
Bitcoin with lightening network. Million transactions daily. Visa and mastercard each process hundreds of millions of transactions daily in one 100th the energy use.
To enable world wide micro transactions like discussed means 10s of billions of transactions daily.
Crypto is several orders of magnitude to slow.
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You can build any number of transactions per second on bitcoin, as long as you use it as a value store instead of actually marking the transaction on the bitcoin ledger. This is a lot like gold used to be: it was stored in a bank vault, and when you paid someone, the bank marked down that you had paid someone. It didn't actually move the physical gold (rarely).
Of course, with that system you also lose the guarantees of bitcoin. The transaction processor or exchange can become insolvent, and you lose your mo
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Exactly my remark every time someone brings up lightning networks as a magic solution for Bitcoin's flaws.
It's tackling Bitcoin's decentralization-induced issues by building centralized network on top of it. In the real world, we've been calling these "banks" for a long time.
Re: Not [the issue] (Score:2)
Really sad excuse for an FP branch. But at least it wasn't AC, so I know who to pay less attention to going forward.
I have two substantive responses, but this is not the place for such, though I feel like taking a passing kick at cryptocurrency partly because it is related to the actual story in that it also attempts to create scarcity. However any claim of scarcity based on an infinite supply of numbers (and an infinite supply of algorithms to play with the numbers) is both "living in sin" and indicates a
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But at least it wasn't AC, so I know who to pay less attention to going forward.
ohno
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Are you trying to make the point that you can't make an arbitrary number of transactions on top of bitcoin?
You can, basically you just have a shadow ledger, and are the actual owner of the bitcoin. You keep track of transactions people make, and tell them they own the coin, but actually it's just on the shadow ledger, and only enforceable by contract law.
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No. Ezra Klein's point appears to be that cryptography could be used to limit the distribution of good information and thereby increase its value. He speculates that could lead to a better situation, but I think it's really hard to compete with free BS, so I'm extremely skeptical.
Cryptocurrency was apparently dragged in by the FP. For no reason (apart from the spelling overlap) or perhaps thinking it is a "better" way to measure value? I think that's BS because there is no scarcity in cryptocurrency. I'm no
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No. Ezra Klein's point appears to be that cryptography could be used to limit the distribution of good information and thereby increase its value. He speculates that could lead to a better situation, but I think it's really hard to compete with free BS, so I'm extremely skeptical.
Yeah, I agree with you, his point is nonsense. But I think NFTs are nonsense, too.
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I didn't say that, but on reviewing my comment, I think I can see where you might have misunderstood me in that direction. Perhaps I should have said "skeptical or too pessimistic"?
Optimism is nice, but right now I'm not seeing much room for such. I don't suppose you have a better solution approach to offer?
Serrendipitously, I just read an author with a similarly optimistic view of cryptography. Permanent Record by Edward Snowden gives his side of this and some related topics. My feelings were mixed and n
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Describe how this is done with only BitCoin, otherwise it's "build any number of transactions per second on something else".
I keep hearing this argument cropping up (Score:2)
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Right now it seems impractical and worse than the dollar as a currency. But, if inflation goes too crazy, people might decide that they'd rather put their wealth in bitcoin than in dollars, even with the risks of the gold standard.
Historically speaking, what fiat currency has ever resisted the attraction of over-inflation?
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Right now it seems impractical and worse than the dollar as a currency. But, if inflation goes too crazy, people might decide that they'd rather put their wealth in bitcoin than in dollars, even with the risks of the gold standard.
Historically speaking, what fiat currency has ever resisted the attraction of over-inflation?
Not seeing how bitcoin is better for that than buying a euro currency ETF, or a dozen different world currencies, or foreign stocks, or commodities ETFs, or nearly anything else already up for trade. You can sell them and spend the money on your broker's debit card.
None of those are very exciting, and they shouldn't go to the moon... but I mean if the euro crashes, I can still get a really good deal on European goods, or a BMW with my dollar holdings, same the other way if the dollar crashes. Bitcoin is
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The problem is...people won't accept this.
The cat is too long out of the bag and people expect to access pages for "free" (ad supported if not truly freely offered).
This is for what I'd consider "most" of the internet with some exceptions.
But in general, people aren't going to be willing to set up a CC or other type of banking/money account just to surf the internet in general.
What could most sites possi
The idea behind micro transactions (Score:2)
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I don't see that happening in my lifetime, not in the US.
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Crypto is fast. Bitcoin is slow and has bottlenecks and is a lot more than just crypto. Ie, with crypto I can get into my bank extremely quickly, but that crypto does not contain a wallet or a ledger or anything else except authenticating me and the bank to each other and prevent eavesdropping. The bank has its own ledger, I trust it. I am not trying to get a random stranger to believe that my crypto wallet contains the amount of money I claim it has.
Bitcoin being the oldest out there has design flaws.
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ah yes bitcoin + middle man transaction processor - brilliant!
Lightning network's very existence is proof bitcoin does not deliver on the most fundamental aspects the evangelists promised. Its entirely unsuitable for peer to peer exchanges, unless those peers are large brokerages bundling transactions and members of a network - we have that its call FEDwire, ACH, SWIFT
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Yeah, apparently 4 transactions per second turned out not to be quite enough to cover the world's needs.
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Sure, just let's all open a 1000$ channel ... I'm sure there will be a company to just match billions of dollars of liquidity for minimal fees. Lightning is a sham floating on a bunch of millionaire hobbyist and a couple companies burning through VC money providing liquidity as charity. Charity won't scale and no one is fucking paying 10% interest on locked up liquidity in channels.
Lightning is just a very cute mathematical trick, with no other true application other than pretending Bitcoin is scaleable wit
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Micropayment for webpages hasn't happened for the same reason it hasn't happened for TV and TV got riddled with ad: people are too cheap. And then it happened (VOD, Netflix...) because even cheap people got too aggravated by the insane amounts of advertising. But it won't happen with the web because there are adblockers that keep the insanity in check.
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But it won't happen with the web because there are adblockers that keep the insanity in check.
Until adblockers become so ubiquitous that the ad driven model is no longer sustainable.
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Nah... That'll never happen: there'll always be enough people too dumb or too clueless to install an ad blocker, meaning there'll always be enough ads reaching their target audience precisely.
Re:Not bitcoin (Score:5, Interesting)
Micropayment for webpages hasn't happened for the same reason it hasn't happened for TV and TV got riddled with ad: people are too cheap. And then it happened (VOD, Netflix...) because even cheap people got too aggravated by the insane amounts of advertising. But it won't happen with the web because there are adblockers that keep the insanity in check.
It's not about people being cheap, it's about how people make decisions and spend money.
It has to do with the transaction cost, and spending money every click, even when it's automatic, is a big transaction cost. For instance, did you really want to think about how much it would cost when clicking the /. article to read the comments?
The subscription model (Spotify, Netflix, NTY) has taken over because you're only asking people to make that payment decision once, and after that they don't need to think about it anymore.
An ad-free web is viable if someone figures out how to make a prescription based opt-out network. But anything micropayment based is a dead end IMHO.
Therefore, someone might figure out how to use crypto to monotenize more of the web, but it won't be through micropayments.
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Or go maybe a bit hybrid. Think of MMOs; pure free to play which makes you zero money, versus pure subscription which prevents lots of potential customers from playing. But there are quite a few that are in the middle - you can subscribe, or you can be totally free, or you can be in the middle and pay for a few extras now and then. Maybe it surprises the traditional MMO peeps but those people who buy the occasional extras are spending enough to keep a game alive; and not on pay-to-win stuff but on cosmet
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It has to do with the transaction cost, and spending money every click, even when it's automatic, is a big transaction cost.
It's only big if you have to think about it. Credit cards work on this principle. Here, there, big, small, automatic, manual, the true transaction cost isn't revealed until the bill comes due, or your card is declined. In the mean time people continue on in a semi-automatic behavior. At least with a micropayment based upon cryptocurrency it's effectively printing your own money, and buying things with it. Using ink and paper that appears to cost nothing.
Ezra Klein is wrong. (Score:5, Insightful)
From the summary:
That's one reason the riches of the web haven't been more widely shared
Oh they haven't? Because it seems to me like these riches have been widely shared, in greater abundance than history has ever seen. We are flooded with content. Inundated with it. Art, music, videos, games, articles, code, you name it. We are drowning in it.
The actual creators who make the internet worth visiting are forced to accept the exploitative, ever-changing terms
That's also how it was before the internet. "Rights holders," not "content creators" made all the money, and the content creators got table scraps. The only thing the Internet changed was introducing new platforms that could connect content creators more directly with consumers, bypassing publicists, but that hasn't worked well due to content overload.
Crypto lets you make digital goods scarce
I think Klein means "blockchain lets you make digital goods scarce" but that is really a technicality. AND it's a luddite idea. Lets NOT play a stupid game of "lets pretend like digital data is a physical thing" so that we can live like we are still back in the stone age. Removing the power of technology is no way to make good use of it. Instead we need to make the appropriate cultural and economic shifts that all this power requires. Maybe certain categories of content are just too abundant now to justify a payment model. Too bad, so sad, feel free to seek different employment and be surprised when the content supply on the internet fails to dry up. Or maybe we can look into alternate sponsorship schemes such as paying per live performances (with internet content distribution largely being publicity-garnering), donation funding (as per open source models), physical copy distribution, or whatever. There are many options.
Tech changes the world. Trying to make the world hold still is doomed to failure. Instead, adapt!
Re: Ezra Klein is wrong. (Score:3)
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We do have a way to impose scarcity on digital goods: DRM. As you say, blockchain has nothing to do with scarcity, except for arbitrary tokens that have no inherent value. Say I create something of value, a book or movie or song, and release it on a blockchain. That lets you prove it came from me, but you can also extract the song or movie and distribute it on its own. The inherent value of the song or movie isn't diminished. All that's lost is the record showing who created it.
If you want to prevent t
Re: Ezra Klein is wrong. (Score:2)
Ezra Klein is wrong... but you seem to agree (Score:2)
From the summary:
That's one reason the riches of the web haven't been more widely shared
Oh they haven't? Because it seems to me like these riches have been widely shared, in greater abundance than history has ever seen.
You misunderstood the statement. It refers to the fact that people are getting rich from the web, but these riches are going to just a handful of super-rich companies-- Google, Amazon, Facebook-- and the riches have not been widely shared with the people who actually make the content that people are downloading from the net.
We are flooded with content. Inundated with it. Art, music, videos, games, articles, code, you name it. We are drowning in it.
Exactly. And people are getting rich from that content we're drowning in: Bezos, Zuckerberg, Brin... But those riches aren't being shared.
The actual creators who make the internet worth
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Good reply, but by inlining your reply you inherited the peculiar logical structure that may have made his original presentation so confusing and illogical. I think I get what you're saying, but it was hard.
So now my response got bifurcated. On the original side, I was going to focus on Why We're Polarized to ask if anyone has read it. I'm hoping to get it next week, but I'm surprised to discover that I've never read a book by Ezra Klein, though his name is familiar. Must have seen him on the Web?
The new
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Oh I see. Yes I was thinking of "riches" as "the digital products," and not as the actual money made off them. If that is what Ezra was getting at then I do agree, that wealth has not been widely shared.
And yes, "same as it ever was." Throughout all of human history, in fact, and despite famous attempts at spreading the wealth around. Our technology has not saved us from our nature. At least, not yet.
I reflect that people today who live a middle or lower class life in America have luxuries that the wea
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"You misunderstood the statement. It refers to the fact that people are getting rich from the web, but these riches are going to just a handful of super-rich companies-- Google, Amazon, Facebook-- and the riches have not been widely shared with the people who actually make the content that people are downloading from the net."
But doesn't this just demonstrate the issue at hand. By your own explanation above, most of these content creators are creating content that no one wants to pay for. The sites this con
People are paying [Re:Ezra Klein is wrong...] (Score:2)
"You misunderstood the statement. It refers to the fact that people are getting rich from the web, but these riches are going to just a handful of super-rich companies-- Google, Amazon, Facebook-- and the riches have not been widely shared with the people who actually make the content that people are downloading from the net."
But doesn't this just demonstrate the issue at hand. By your own explanation above, most of these content creators are creating content that no one wants to pay for.
To the contrary. The content creators are creating content that people do pay for, both directly (why do you pay for internet service, if not for access to the content?) and indirectly (if you're viewing ads, you're ultimately paying). And people are getting rich from those payments. But, the pay is going to people other than the content creators.
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Tech changes the world. Trying to make the world hold still is doomed to failure. Instead, adapt!
I remember when coal was the new tech [wikipedia.org]. Good thing we didn't hold the world still otherwise bad things might have happened. ;-)
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The only thing the Internet changed was introducing new platforms that could connect content creators more directly with consumers, bypassing publicists, but that hasn't worked well due to content overload.
I would argue that it hasn't worked well due to domain squatters. You can't get people to come to your site if they can't find it, if you can't get a decent domain then it cannot be communicated by word of mouth, and squatters are sitting on enough domains and making them unaffordable enough that now even sizable companies are having to use stupid names because all the good ones are taken.
Not making domain squatting illegal is one of the great failures of the internet age.
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Nano fits all these bills and it works and is available right now.
https://content.nano.org/white... [nano.org]
Seriously, download the natrium wallet, find a faucet to get some fractional nano for free. Send it between your friends or other accounts, whatever, be amazed at the speed and the fact that if you send 1 nano, your recipient gets 1 nano. It's as close to venmo for payments as I've seen.
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I don't see bitcoin really figures into this at all - beyond you *could* use to facilitate some payment to unlock some DRM crap but a credit card or check by mail subscription for that matter both solve that.
The who NFT thing is kind of a joke too. The people making money on it are huge real world personalities. The 'value' if there proves to be any durability at all to the token is its attachment to their name not the thing that was digitally signed and deeded (or the URL pointing to it anyway).
Like anyone
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Re: Not bitcoin (Score:2)
Almost 90% people are completely missing the advantage of making (certain types) of information expensive !
For eg: Zero transaction costs for information has resulted in even the best news website unintentionally having mainly just click bait, polari,ing and fake news percolating up to most viewers. Simply because the algos have over the years become expert at achieving the target coded in them - achieve maximum eyeballs / interaction / stickiness all of which happens 10x more when you trigger deeper emoti
Re: Not bitcoin (Score:2)
Edit:
By "expensive" I just meant "not free". As in currently publishing anything on the net in virtually free so anyone and everyone with an agenda has become a News Site / Channel or lots of them have become "Fact Checkers" to themselves prove their disinformation is correct.
Such things don't happen so much outside the net because there's certain cost to setting up a newspaper or news agency etc and those organizations can be regulated or have their brands impacted by their actions.
It's like if printing pe
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No "payments structure" will ever compete with bittorrent.
If you want some information for free, you will find it somewhere on the
internet.
For those who aren't hipsters in the know like NYT (Score:5, Informative)
"Crypto" here refers to cryptocurrencies, not cryptography.
Sheesh... Here's another term that's going to go the hacker way for no good reason.
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Actually, it refers to cryptography as well even in this use. These idiots have just recursively abbreviated because they cannot handle longer words....
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I think it's more of a case of a writer trying to appear in command of youth lingo. They're afraid spelling out words will make their article look like a boring piece for boomers - and the lightness of the content does indeed suggest it's trying to be a smart article for the ADD generation.
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Crypto just means hidden. And it is used a lot outside of the technical or mathematical realm. Crypto species for instance. Or Cryptosporidium which is commonly abbreviated to just "Crypto".
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Crypto just means hidden. And it is used a lot outside of the technical or mathematical realm. Crypto species for instance. Or Cryptosporidium which is commonly abbreviated to just "Crypto".
In this case it is "cryptographic currency" -> "crypto-currency" -> "crypto". Makes zero sense, as "crypto" is already short for "cryptographic" in this context.
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To be fair, without cryptography these cryptocurrencies would be useless. So you could say they are built on cryptography, because they are.
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To be fair, without cryptography the entire modern internet would be useless.
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Er, but also unline banking wiould be useless without crypto, so you could say anything online is crypto :-) Cryptocurrencies are fare more than just cryptography, and the crypto is really just a small part of what they are all about anyway. "Blockchain" is just another way of composing cryptographic methods in a particular way.
Smartcards for example, totally built on top of cryptography, and smartcards can be used to protect a wallet full of money, quite similar to crypto currencies in many ways.
So you m
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People who know what they are talking about call it #DeFi, brah.
But, whatevs Boomer.
I swear the tech industry has turned into the fashion industry and 80s valley girls are in charge.
Re: which increases their value (Score:2)
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It's the dummies using it. I've literally heard "I love digital art because you get so many originals!"
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Facebook sells ads (Score:5, Informative)
So Facebook got rich by building a proprietary infrastructure for identity
Facebook got rich by getting you to give them all your information in exchange for the ability to see a bit of other people's information, and then they used that huge amount of info to sell very targeted ads to companies with lots of money who want to sell you stuff. They didn't build Facebook for you at all, just for the advertisers. Facebook isn't your digital identity, I don't even have a Facebook account. If you want a digital identity, use PGP (the real "crypto" application).
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If other people refer to you on Facebook, then you have a shadow identity there. Waiting to be associated with you as soon as you touch the poison.
What is cryptocurrency (Score:4, Insightful)
"Let’s recognize if we gathered all 100 senators in this chamber and asked them to stand up and articulate two sentences defining what in the hell a cryptocurrency is, that you would not get greater than five who could answer that question,"
I'm not sure I could answer that. Blockchain is easy: "a distributed ledger of transactions." But I'm not sure I can clearly define what a cryptocurrency is in a way that covers all the meanings usefully.
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I'm not sure I could answer that. Blockchain is easy: "a distributed ledger of transactions." But I'm not sure I can clearly define what a cryptocurrency is in a way that covers all the meanings usefully.
Well, one way one might define cryptocurrency as it currently exists is to list its current practical uses. From what I've seen over the last several years, those are mainly:
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Except it’s actually none of those things. At its heart, cryptocurrency is just a number on the blockchain, your “wallet” is your public key (think of it like a drop box, as a real world analogy), and the wallet’s associated private key essentially works like a password which allows you to instruct the network to move numbers from your wallet into someone else’s.
Any monetary value associated with the numbers in the blockchain is a purely arbitrary construct, which is why the v
The summary literally says nothing (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: The summary literally says nothing (Score:2)
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Also, the NY Times gives each web browser a few trial articles. Use that information as you wish.
It's all about nothing (Score:2)
Why the US is losing to China. (Score:1)
The US best minds are so focused on trying to make/pretend virtual shit worth something, rather than actually trying to produce something of tangible material existence that would make lives better. Fucking virtual shit is worthless because you can keep producing any amount you want for mere pennies.
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The US best minds are so focused on trying to make/pretend virtual shit worth something, rather than actually trying to produce something of tangible material existence that would make lives better.
Pirated-Entertainment Sites Are Making Billions From Ads [slashdot.org]
Someone seems to be making money from "virtual shit".
There's nothing crazy about it (Score:5, Insightful)
Which would of course nearly or completely kill crypto, as it's mostly used for drugs and money laundering.
The industry got wind of the legislation and made it rain on a bunch of senators. The "melt down" was those senators reacting to a bribe.
The only thing revealing here is how easy and cheap it is to buy a US Senator.
Re:There's nothing crazy about it (Score:5, Insightful)
I find it legit hilarious how the crypto crowd goes apeshit crazy over legislation intended solely to properly tax exchanges. Why exactly is this controversial?
You wanted your BTC to be treated as real money. Be careful what you wish for.
This is so much worse than tax law for them (Score:4, Insightful)
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That''s a fair distinction.
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legislation intended solely to properly tax exchanges
If the wording were such that the proposed reporting requirements only affected exchanges there wouldn't have been such a large opposition. That may have been the intent (if you're willing to accept their public statements at face value) but the definition of "broker" has been left loose enough to allow for a great deal of collateral damage. A classification of miners as "brokers", for example, amounts to an outright ban on domestic mining since there is no way the miners would ever have access to the infor
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Well, i disagree. The definition of "broker" is pretty clear: is someone who runs financial transactions on behalf of a third party. I fail to see how this applies to miners, who sell transaction blocks.
The key word here is "financial", as in buying and selling for legal tender. No one cares about, or is asking to regulate, digital transactions within the Bitcoin network.
Don't get me wrong though, i don't mind one bit any amendments intended to make intent more transparent, but it is not like the wording of
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"We must do something!" != "Here is something, so we must do it!"
I've not seen many people complaining about the idea of having crypto regulations or taxes in general. (I'm sure there are some, but I'm not one of them.)
The problem is the specific wording of the bill contains provisions that are LITERALLY IMPOSSIBLE to comply with. If you run a validator node and see a transaction over $600 you're required to send the recipient a 1099-MISC tax form. How the hell do I send a 1099-MISC form to "1zbqxd5g71234"?
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If you run a validator node and see a transaction over $600 you're required to send the recipient a 1099-MISC tax form.
I'm sorry, but why, exactly? A validation node performs no brokerage.
One thing crypto hasn't changed... (Score:2)
The thing about NFTs is that, while they purport scarcity, this is artificial, or at least, uniqueness is only enforced at the contract layer. For digital media types, the actual data can still be easily replicated and distributed.
Personally
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Quite the contrary. For games, NFTs ensure uniqueness of assets and enable intra and inter-game economies. This will be a very interesting domain to watch in the future. But for artists? Aside from tryhards paying ridiculous sums for NFT artwork to gain attention / fame, I agree with you. That said, if NFTs can be leveraged to make discovery and acquisition as easy as Spotify, then they'll be successful. Most people don't want to deal with filesharing networks for music if they have som
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In-game economies are 100% centralized. What could one possibly gain from using NFTs for those?
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NFTs are a joke. You're buying a URL, and we all know how stable the web is, don't we? URL's never go stale.
The Verge [theverge.com], amongst others, wrote about this when NFT mania first started.
If you can't convince them, dazzle them? (Score:2)
Not a bad article, but... (Score:2)
It glossed over the outrageous dick move by Shelby which scuttled the compromise the cryptocurrency industry wanted (or at least found tolerable). Shelby demanded $50B worth of pork for his state in return for allowing the compromise; when he didn't get it, he killed the compromise amendment.
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To be fair the problem wasn't just Shelby, it was the rules adopted by the Senate which required unanimous consent for any amendment. If they're going to require unanimous consent for an amendment then the same should apply to passing the bill itself. (Which would be great—they could get rid of the 90+% of the bill which someone will inevitably object to and only pass the parts with unanimous support. And perhaps break it up into more manageable pieces in the process.)
The current all-or-nothing rules
Hypocrisy or stupidity? (Score:3, Insightful)
"The internet we have allows for the easy transfer of information. We costlessly swap copies of news articles, music files, video games, pornography, GIFs, tweets and much more."
Full article behind paywall.
They should apply for a patent... (Score:2)
Great if⦠(Score:1)
Greedy cunts (Score:2)
Why yes, I did notice you want to monetize the world's only post scarcity font of egalitarianism so you can get rich. You fucks.
The worst two minutes I've spent on Slashdot. (Score:2)
The title of this is taken from the NYT article.
The body of this is taken from the NYT article.
And the content of the body does not mention the Senate at all.
This does not arouse curiosity in me to read the article.
It does not predispose me to discuss the article's content.
It frustrates and angers me.
I'm getting used to this on Slashdot.
NYT trying hard to sound like an expert (Score:3)
"Crypto... Crypto.. Crypto..." cryptography? cryptocurrencies? blockchains? Write-only version control systems that burn more electricity per hour than some small nations?
"Crypto lets you make digital goods scarce..." this is not and never has been true, I shouldn't even have to explain it.
"It lets you prove ownership..." still not true; I could post a receipt of ownership to one blockchain, and a similar but critically different receipt of ownership to a different blockchain. Who's to say which blockchain is more correct? Why, you'd have to ask an authority... exactly the same request as asking that same authority who is the owner of a property.
"and it makes digital identities verifiable..." how is this different than private-key signing? Or is it just publishing a public key to a distributed blockchain implementation, in which case you're back to the "consumes more electricity than Puerto Rico" and "but which blockchain" problems mentioned above.
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