In the linked article I find this part very interesting:


Furthermore, in order to enter the PoS game, one is supposed to own 1,500 ETH to receive stacking reward. This is really huge, and I don't see how they are going to avoid centralization. Ah, wait, the network is already pretty much centralized.

Nowadays, everybody seems to be concerned about transaction speed (in other words, scaling).

Forgive me, but I don't see a problem related to transaction speed anywhere. Does Nano, at the moment, have to process 7000 transactions per second? Nope.

Does EOS have a congested network? Nope. It doesn't even have a network currently, only a test network.

So why do we have to solve a future problem that isn't likely to appear any time soon?

To paraphrase Andreas Antonopoulos, in order to be able to scale you have to have a scaling problem first.

It is as if during the Dial-up internet people were trying to make the network support live streaming. It would have been impossible.

Only when the time comes, we should be focused on solving the scaling problem. Not ahead of time.

No you cannot say that Ripple is a real cryptocurrency. It is looks more like a centralized system, which is the the very opposite of what a good cryptocurrency should look like. For me, Ripple is a sort of banking system for transferring value. That being said, I do think Ripple has its place in the current constellation of things, probably as a new type of payment technology.

It's not a question of either or, it is both for serious investors. I don't consider myself an investor of any kind, but people who invest do have a portion of their portfolio reserved for what's called alternative investments. Among them, bitcoin has to have a prominent place.

This is what I personally feel about ZEC.
As a beginner in the crypto space, I was initially drawn to it as a promising coin with a good developers team. I even mined some ZEC for some time using my modest GPU equipment.
Had I known better, I would've been immediately suspicious of its 20% developers fee. Nowadays I don't even consider ZEC for anything serious.
You have other privacy coins to choose from, many of which come without any premine whatsoever.
And you can easily switch to mining them once they have modified their proof of work to be ASICS resistant.

Exactly what I was going to say, just look at the OP's image:



No point going further, first they have to prove they have a finished product that works.

It's an interesting read.

As I understand it, the crucial question is whether or not ICO's should be considered securities?

And according to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the answer is yes.

If that's so, all laws and regulations that apply to securities should apply to ICO's.

If you try to defraud your investors, if your sole intention is to issue some worthless coins for your own monetary gain, you should be aware of the consequences.

Within the linked article there is a link to another articles which I find very interesting (i.e., simple test how to determine if an ICO is a security or not):

The Simplest Way to Understand Why The DAO Was a Security

I see, thanks for the link and for clearing this up. After all, it is a little bit more complicated than I thought.

This is a question that has been lingering in my mind for some time. I think I know the answer but maybe I'm wrong. Hopefully someone can clear this for me.

In a totally decentralized peer to peer network, two miners relatively far from each other (if you can say this) mine a block approximately at the same time.

They announce their solutions, and we have a situation where two blockchains propagate through the network. Each one of them is being accepted by their closest local nodes and continues to spread out.

Roughly speaking, after some time we should have a situation where half of the network has accepted one blockchain, and the other half of the network another.

If this logic is valid, than the first half of the network should already be mining a new block on top of their version of the blockchain, and the second half on top of theirs.

Again, if this logic holds, is it so that the one who mines the next (second) block decides the overall winner?

If the second block is found within the first half of the network, their blockchain is the ultimate winner (as the longest one), and the other half of the network has to revert to the solution of the first half and abandon their version of the blockchain.

Is this indeed so?

Yes, indeed they do. Each miner does that on their own when trying to solve the next block hash. Or, one can say that their software automatically chooses the transactions for them. Naturally, in order to make more money, they will choose the transactions that have higher fees over the lower fee ones.

Blockchain technology could indeed be the solution to questions about patient data safety and privacy.

For example, patients could be given the choice to decide what data to share (store) in a public ledger, and what to keep private.

I think the vast majority of patients won't have anything against sharing their crucial data or parts of their medical history if that's going to save their lives.

For example, every medical institution should have access to patients' blood type, just in case urgent blood transfusion is needed.

On the other hand, there are alwasy delicate data (e.g., AIDS) the patients could decide to keep private, not share at all, or possibly encrypt on the blockchain and share only with medical institutions of their choosing. 

Honoring the Spirit of Privacy is not really a valid reason the developers should remain private. And they definitely lose a great deal of legitimacy, lowering their grade to the likes of the countless scam coins where the developers team is totally unknown. When the team is unwilling to stand behind their project, it tells a lot about the nature of the project, isn't it? First thing I check about a new cryptocurrency is the team. If the team is anonymous, I don't even bother to check anything else.

To my mind, what set's apart a good cryptocurrency from fiat money can be summarized with these two main keywords:

1. censorship resistance
2. ability to function in a trustless environment

Fiat money is not censorship resistance and we have to trust our governments with it. The moment a cryptocurrency loses these two features, it's not much different from fiat.

Miners are crucial for any decentralized cryptocurrency that is based on proof of work (PoW). And this is nothing that applies exclusively to Ethereum. Miners help record transactions in the public ledger. They keep the entire network safe, stable, and secure. So practically the most important aspects of any system of this type are in the hands of the miners.

Hmm, mega.nz?

If you are going to trust a wallet installation from untrustworthy places, at least make sure to protect your operating system from possible viruses, malware, and other types of malicious software. You can do that by running a virtual machine, for example, and within the VM install the wallet.

Bitcoin's Scripting system was designed that way (not to allow on-chain smart contracts) on purpose in order to be more secure. [1]


So this is a feature, not something that needs correcting.

That being said, you can implement Ethereum-like smart contracts using off-chain solutions such as RSK.

Really? I wouldn't be so sure about the long term. In any case, if you are a serious BCH trader, you should be aware of certain details about the entire BCH ecosystem. In particular, there are four major wallets you should be monitoring constantly.

I've learned this from an excellent medium article (which has probably been shared here on this forum, not sure):

https://medium.com/@btcWolves/bch-heading-towards-the-abyss-f1b2b9ec41f1

It is really worth your time, especially if you want to look at the whole problem from an emotionless trader perspective.

I don't quite get your point here. But if I get it correctly,

you can't talk about MyEtherWallet under the "PC wallets" category.

MyEtherWallet is an online wallet. You can access it from any number of operating systems, including PC, Linux, Mac OS, etc.

And it is accessible from any device, not just the one where the wallet is installed originally.

One of the problems I have with platforms of this type is privacy. If it uses blockchain technology to store your personal data, how much of it do you want to make public?

Once you make your data public and it is stored in the public ledger, it is there forever, there's no way to change your mind any more.

So, if you ask me I would think twice before using it.

This is not entirely true. Solidity is not the only option. Etherium is not the only blockchain you can run smart contracts on.

You can do that on top of Bitcoin's blockchain too. Keyword: RSK.

https://www.rsk.co/

and, for example, this thread:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=3189777.0

If I were to start learning smart contracts, I would use RSK instead.