I think Tech wise it's very interesting. Very high transaction rates, much more decentralised that centralised systems. "converging on decentralisation" as a route to adoption and uses way way less power than POW. A "blockchain", you can use at scale for real-ish stuff (like gaming?...)

HOWEVER if it takes off, there is the scary danger it become, as @fractalUniverse called it FED 2.0.

The biggest problem I see is centralisation of the token distribution. A few whales dominate the voting for BPs. Vote buying is already happening so there's already corrupution, in a system that provides trust through the unquestionable integrity of the block producers...

Telos is interesting in that they capped the snapshot at 40,000 tokens on their chain. Personally I think that was too high and they really should have implemented a logarithimic function rather than a cap to give the big whale investors something for all the money they gave block.one.

The big problem is identity. The WORBLI chain is tackling that using KYC approaches. Most people seem to imagine there is a magic identity solution around the corner that will make EOS great again... get you URI handouts here folks... except I'm really skeptical there is any such solution anytime soon.

not disputing this but it seems theres still a very long way to go even in iceland.

Just looking into this experiment. Has there been much real world usage? Are there other examples of regional coins like this and how does Aurora compare?

What would happen if all work stopped on bitcoin core? I can see why some altcoin projects need lots of development but bitcoin users don't see any difference from how it was years ago.

An ETF will change things quite a lot

just curious. Do wallet client use some something other than port 80 when sending transactions?

Are services where people pay to have their coin stored for them and are reliably insured in the even the keep gets hacked/messes up?

If a price rise is gonna to be driven by consumers then maybe some good news just before thanksgiving will trigger a rally.

So did the OP HODL?

It's true noone is completely safe. But then noone is completely safe in the real world either. All houses can be broken into by thieves with enough skill.

information security is a mine field. The more experienced you are the more paranoid you can get.

Are you developing hardware or just blockchain software?

Yes, I can't argue against this either. Anyone producing goods for instance with fiat based upstream costs would probably find selling in BTC (and holding it) a risky strategy. couple of pounts:

i) There's the upside potential to consider too. If you sold your carrots for some bitcoins a few years ago and you'd very happy about it today.  (but you'd have to have been able to afford to hold them).
Basically volatility isn't a problem in you can afford the risk.
Say, if I'm a comfortably well off consultant who own a home, my running cost are quite low I can afford to charge my services in BTC knowing they might go up for down Vs Fiats. In general suppliers who can afford to take the risk on a portion of their income will find this much easier.

iii) Conversion to more stable values stores is always an option. If I sell my BTC and convert to fiat as soon as I sell my goods there a lot less risk. It's important to remember, fiats can go up and down too. The UKs brexit referendum dropped GBP by 20% over a few days and this affected importers significantly. It's not BTC level volatility but just pointing out there is no ultimately stable currency.
(Maybe BTC will become the ultimately stable currency one day? once everything has been mined and there a no more forks its possible BTC becomes ridiculously stable. I'm not really sure this is likely and it's not necessarily easy to define what stable actually means, for now it means compared USD but that may not always be the case.)
The downside of simply selling in BTC and converting to fiat is that BTC prices will be equally volatile.

Yes. It would be quite interesting to know how much all current holders actually paid in total but it's something we can never know.

I agree. Reworld uses cases are necessary to sustain BTC long term and at the moment it must be over valued.

Sending money is an easy early uses case, but it's not clear what it might take to get crypto more widely adopted.
I was chatting to a local organic farmer recently about whether they would be interested in starting to sell their produce in BTC. I think the idea is interesting, but as most consumers aren't using BTC they unlikely to adopt. It will take time for ordinary people to get used to managing their funds and feeling safe doing so. No doubt there are more software innovations needed to really make this happen.

The other thing is money creation. Now we have central banks and commercial banks creating money (as debt) and feeding it down to companies, who use it to pay staff. This creates massive stability (inertia?) in the current system. It seems much more likely that an alternative crypto-based economy grow in parallel to this old paradigm, without some major innovations this can only happen very slowly in the margins and it will take a long time to gain critical mass.

Perhaps one day noone will ask how much a bitcoin is worth today. Rather they will ask how much a USD is worth today. But the truth is this could take long time.

If BTC crashes it could go down like the nasdaq in 2001 and take quite a long time to come back up. I think it will. If I can a stash of bitcoins, I'd definitely hold some right now, but I'd also be looking to divest some into safe stores of wealth.

thanks both of you!

I made some changes to the PROT key just in case, maybe thats why it gave an error. i'll try it again... that is if i can still remember the password.... doh!

This is a good vis. Makes it clear how small BTC still is and how crazy economics is.
Unlike the number of dollars in circulation, or the number of bitcoins in existence, the actual marketcap of bit coin is not 'real' in the same sense. The price of BTC in dollars can fluctuate arbitrarily based on supply and demand, this could make the market cap of BTC expand or contract by billions, yet no new money was created or necessarily even changed hands.

can you elaborate what you mean by  keyconv ENCRYPTED_KEY?

EOS will be open source software and not a network. Xenon intends to fork the software and run the network. They will just use these tokens rather than the ones EOS are selling.

seems a little crazy to me, but that seems to be what it says. Won't they need to spend a small fortune in gas to send everyone tokens?