The problem with these 2 examples is rather straightforward though: What's the benefit of smart contracts in those scenarios?

- When buying an airline ticket from an airline company, you are already relying on a centralized service while not using a middle-man. Except for payments, obviously, but that's where plain old cryptocurrencies would suffice as well. Adding a smart contract into the mix only increases complexity while the benefit is...?

- Same when buying an insurance. The farmer is already dealing with an insurance company directly, so a smart contract would only add complexity. Granted, one could imagine a crowdfunded, free-market type of decentralized insurance, but the viability of such an approach would be a discussion of its own.

The challenge, when applying smart contracts, is that they should not only work -- which is already hard in its own right. Smart contracts need to be applied to use cases where they work better than what already exists.

Overhyped -- maybe. But I think this buzz is mostly based on a misunderstanding which problems a smart contract (and blockchains, for that matter) can and can't solve.

I doubt that smart contracts will ever go beyond decentralized monies and facilitating p2p commerce / trading; however these use cases alone could already prove groundbreaking.

If one could trade classical stocks / securities and handle their dividends with the ease of ICO tokens that would be quite revolutionary, at least in my book. After all there's a massive overhead of brokers and bankers one could get rid of by replacing them with nearly frictionless p2p trading.

On the more futuristic side of things I do think it's imaginable that further down the road one (or even both) of the peers could be replaced by a machine. In the simplest case, this could be a casino script. In a more optimistic case, one could imagine a future iteration of current voice assistants taking care of more complex (financial) tasks. The latter being a more speculative use case, obviously.

More realistically, however, I think the most important role that smart contracts will play, will be the part of the unsexy utility technology, doing the heavy lifting in the back. Prime example being Lightning Network and other protocol layers (eg. token / asset layers, at which point we're back at the question of the viability of smart contracts handling digital assets).

Send them an email to safedice@protonmail.ch, as stated in OP:


From what I've seen support is slow at times, but usually able to help.

Especially since most of these phrases are uniquely broken, making it easy to discern phrase copy / pasters from your run-off-the-mill shitposter.

Remember kids, before investing in a new project, always ask yourself this: "It your token is ERC-20?"

There's also DAG-based coins though (of debatable merit of course, but that's a different discussion).

And I'm still not sure how one would secure a blockchain without incentivising miners / stakers by means of a native token (or by building on top of an existing cryptocurrency).



Blockchains are transparent by design. Anonymity is achieved by specialized transaction formats,.



Blockchains don't prevent double-spending. PoW does. (and arguably other forms of Proof-of-Resource such as PoS)

Precisely. It all depends on the use case.

Blockchains shine when it comes to storing transactional data in a public ledger that anyone can read / write to, ie. an adversarial environment. If you are operating within a trusted environment, ie. one where the permission levels of each user is centrally administered (eg. an internal company database) other solutions will fit the bill much better.

Being a sort of distributed database is not what makes blockchains special, it's that it allows full public read and write access while remaining reasonably secure.

To any newcomers reading this list of recommendations: Be especially wary of the following points, those are a great way to fall for scams and lose money:






No... just, no.

Yes you can, but whether you should depends.

As long as you are only receiving coins, there's little wrong with reusing your paper wallet (except for potential privacy concerns as pointed out by Velkro).

Once you import the private key of your paper wallet to spend coins, there's 2 things to be aware of:

1) Depending on what wallet and which configuration you use, the remainder of your balance might get sent to a change address (as mentioned by biggNY)

2) Once you import your private key to an online device (such as an internet connected laptop or smartphone), you lose all benefits of cold storage (ie. your cold storage paper wallet is now only as secure as a regular hot wallet).

For security reasons I personally wouldn't reuse a paper wallet after I have swiped the private key, but that depends on your personal preference and the amount at risk I guess.

Speak for yourself!


Best case we'll see an echo of the recent bullrun soon and have a scenario like the two bubbles of 2013.

Worst case we're at the verge of a new crypto winter such as the one from 2014 - 2016 and crypto will live to see another day eventually.

Worst worst case crypto is dead for good and we should all get away from our screens and out for some fresh air.


I personally don't see crypto dying any time soon, so I'll just have a nice cold pint and wait for all of this to blow over.

The maximum stack size for a Bitcoin script to be still considered valid is 1000:



Depending on your script you are more likely to run into the maximum script size in bytes though:



For reference:

https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/blob/78dae8caccd82cfbfd76557f1fb7d7557c7b5edb/src/script/script.h

https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/blob/78dae8caccd82cfbfd76557f1fb7d7557c7b5edb/src/script/interpreter.cpp

Nah... I think you're giving people too much credit. I'm pretty sure that as soon as Bitcoin stabilizes and starts recovering, we'll see a lot of money flowing into alts again.

The fear of already having missed the Bitcoin train is too big. The lure of investing in "the next Bitcoin" is too strong.

Besides, didn't you get the memo that Bitcoin is old tech? /s

I think you are referring to "taint". Tainted coins is / was the concept of marking coins that were part of a criminal activity.

The idea behind colored coins is to allow for tokens / transferrable ownership rights via (in this case) Bitcoin transactions. Colored coins were pretty much the predecessor of Ethereum tokens, although I might be oversimplifying things a bit.

Note: This applies to classical markets as well, albeit brokers and banks are usually obliged to prevent you from buying assets beyond your experience and risk profile (at least in Europe). Not that this prevents the willing from bad financial decisions (or banks from pushing questionable mutual funds on the uninformed). In short: Know what you're buying.

...I'm not sure how you'd "invest" in fiat currency, unless you're a friend of forex trading.

If you mean advantages of cryptocurrency investments vs investing in classical stock markets / bonds: I guess higher growth potential, little correlation between crypto and classical markets allowing for hedging opportunities and -- depending on your personal background -- lower barrier of entry. Oh, and of course a higher degree of sovereignty, assuming you handle your crypto yourself. The downside of crypto being a high-risk environment, both in terms of volatility and scams should be clear from the get-go as well though.



In time. Assuming it does.



Liquidity depends on the stocks and the coins you trade. Fastness depends on whether you have direct access to one of the stock markets, which usually doesn't come cheap. If for trading stocks you have to go through a broker like pretty much everyone else, then trading crypto is usually much faster. That is, crypto trading offers more of a level playfield than stock trading.




I think I get what you're saying, but I'm not sure I'd go as far as calling "blockchain technology" tangible ascribing inherent value to precious metals and cryptocurrencies. Obviously the inherent value of previous metals and cryptocurrencies is higher than that of fiat currencies but still its valuations stem from their rarity rather than their inherent properties.

As far as I'm aware of asset ownership protocol layers on top of Bitcoin (eg. XCP, OMNI) don't rely on a source address for its "color" but rather some additional meta-data that is part of the (on-chain) Bitcoin transaction. Whether this form of meta-data is compatible with Lightning Network is a different question of course, but at least as far as XCP is concerned there seems to be efforts being made:

https://counterparty.io/docs/paymentchannels-lightning-faq/

(assuming it's still current, I'm not actively tracking Counterparty anymore)


There have been other projects working on LN-based colored coins as well:
https://www.coindesk.com/bitcoins-lightning-network-now-digital-asset-compatible/

However the project mentioned in this article seems to have moved to Ethereum since then.


So it seems like LN-enabled colored coins have been in the realm of possibility since early LN drafts, I'm not sure whether the current protocol spec still allows for it though.

Both Sovrin and Blockstack rely on tokens ie. a native cryptocurrency.

https://sovrin.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/Sovrin-Protocol-and-Token-White-Paper.pdf

https://blockstack.com/tokenpaper.pdf


uPort is built on top of Ethereum, ie. relying on a cryptocurrency-based blockchain for its security.

https://developer.uport.me/overview


While their main use case is not monetary transactions, all three rely on either being a cryptocurrency as well (Sovrin, Blockstack) or on running on top of a blockchain that is secured by cryptocurrency (uPort). So we still only have examples of cryptocurrency-dependent blockchains :X

Are the other small amounts that you sent to the previous addresses showing up in your wallet?

For future reference -- You can export the xPub key from hardware wallets such as the Trezor and Ledger as well. Generating and monitoring addresses from there takes a bit more legwork but keeps you in control of the funds instead of putting you at the mercy of a third party.

If you are merely connecting to other devices within your own home network (as per OP) setting up port forwarding should not be required. You only need to set up port forwarding if you want to connect to other nodes on the internet, assuming the in and outgoing connections get blocked by your router.

To set up port forwarding on your router googling for the name of your router / router brand plus the phrase "port forwarding" should yield helpful results. For a more general guide, see here: https://www.wikihow.com/Set-Up-Port-Forwarding-on-a-Router

Ethereum has a native currency and private companies maintaining private blockchains are the very definition of third party service providers, so that doesn't answer my question. As per the question above I'd love to hear whether there's an example where neither is the case.

Serious question -- can you give an example for a blockchain that enables any of these use cases while relying on neither (a) a native currency nor (b) a third party service provider securing said blockchain?