Yes, and there's a whole world of consultants out there just waiting to fix mismanaged outsourcing by inexperienced project managers

Expect a pullback rather sooner than later. The big question is whether Bitcoin will manage to stay above 10k for good, if yes we're going to to be in for a good time. Not sure if I'd expect a new ATH before 2021 though. We still have a lot of resistance levels ahead and who knows what other surprises 2020 still holds in store.

If Ethereum is also prepping its moon rockets, all the better. Confidence in one pushes confidence in the other.

Ironically it can help to raise prices. Gets rid of the cheapskate clients and the ones that stick around usually gain more appreciation for the time you give them. If all you have are cheapskate clients you're shit out of luck though.




Have you been trying to acquire projects in Europe? Unfortunately the market has been mostly locked down by head hunters but expertise is still very much sought after.

Looks a bit like a closed source version of RetroShare [1] but with a fancier website and the added thrill of potentially catching some malware along the way. The direct integration of a cryptocurrency is neat of course, but all the privacy and security promises in the world are worthless if there's no source code available.

[1] https://retroshare.cc/

Auch noch wichtig: Falls man als Empfänger in Deutschland sitzt gilt es noch die AWV Meldepflicht (ab EUR 12.500,-) zu beachten, ansonsten kann Bußgeld drohen. Größere Grenzüberschreitende Geldtransaktionen können generell das Interesse deiner Bank erwecken, auch unabhängig von Crypto.

What technologies are you working with? IT is very broad and anecdotally IT seems to be one of the sectors that's least affected by the pandemic. If you're in events or tourism, then you're fucked, but IT seems to be fine for the most part.

Except in practice this "urge to accurately select the borrower's projects" doesn't work out quite as well. I mean people are sending coins to scammers to double their money FFS (╯ಠДಠ)╯

We need a paradigm shift that goes beyond underdelivering ICOs, cloudmining ponzis and thinly veiled HYIP scams. A new understanding of money and economics. Bitcoin delivered on the first one, but we're still far from the second.

Pretty much this. Even if Bitcoin becomes dominant, the way we currently run our economy still requires a form of inflationary fiat currency.

In a completely crypto dominated utopia this may even be private money in the form of centrally issued tokens, although it's more likely to remain governmental currencies. The thing is, our current understanding of growth-based economy requires a heavy amount of forward-looking loaning to function, ie. businesses borrowing money "from the future" to allow for growth in the present. This system unfortunately only works if the loans are based on an inflationary currency, otherwise businesses end up short on money in a literal way, ie. with a deflationary currency you can't take money "from the future" without it missing somewhere else -- it turns into a zero sum game where any economic growth on one side can not happen without a bankruptcy on the other.

Accordingly I do believe that even in a Bitcoin world most loans would still have to run on fiat. Everything else just doesn't add up, at least as long we insist on our economies to grow or unless economics undergoes a major paradigm shift.

To expand on this -- there's no confirmation count that defines a transaction as "completely mined" or "fully confirmed".

There's no predefined limit that says "welp, now it's settled" except for the one defined by the recipient of the coins.

So for low risk transactions 1 confirmation is fine but with high risk transactions you might want to wait for a few more confirmations before regarding the transaction as settled, with 6 confirmations often being regarded as the sweet spot between security and practicality (ie. waiting time) in that case. Rationale being that the higher the confirmation count the more expensive an attack (which, accounting for oppportunity cost, get exponentially more expensive with each confirmation, starting in the tens of thousands for the first confirmation).

Of course! But if those 2 fees then cover, say, 20 or 200 instead of just 2 transactions it will be much easier to reach a balance between the interests of miners (ie. high fees per block) and users (ie. low fees per transaction).

I'm a bit on the fence, but I guess even on the main chain turing-completeness could be okaish given rigorous tooling, a very strict language and a very restrictive interpreter. Yet here we are with the most popular smart contract platform making methods implicitly public by default (or maybe they changed it by now, I haven't been following Ethereum all that much)



Part of the problem of smart contracts is probably that people have been trying to apply them to use cases for which they make absolutely no sense.

Which on the one hand is okay, since every new technology needs to go through a explorative phase to reach its full potential.

But on the other hand it's a bit like the radioactive quackery of the early 20th century and just as silly.

They don't. If a mesh node wants to access the internet, it still needs to access via a centralized service provider. How else is the mesh network going to connect to the internet? There's no other way to access it, not even on a physical level.

I guess what DaveF and to some extend OP are asking for is an additional status like "Proposed" that indicates something has been merged and released but is still in a state of flux? Or is this what "Proposed" means anyway?

The point I'm trying to make is that, even assuming no rise in price, Bitcoin can still take a couple more halvings before the hashrate loss would become relevant in terms of security.

Taking the example of BCH, all prices remaining equal and ignoring mining fees, it would take Bitcoin 5 more halvings (41 -> 20 -> 10 -> 5 -> etc) to come down on BCH's security level.

However already the 3rd halving's impact will be greatly diminished due to mining fees becoming the primary source of income, which means that we'll have reached a floor beyond which Bitcoin's security level won't break (assuming mining fees don't diminish due to less usage). Additionally BCH and other forks follow the same halving pattern, so BTC's halvings does not put it at an disadvantage. SHA-256 alts that are not direct blockchain forks of BTC have lost all relevancy and it's highly unlikely that any new promising alt coin project will pick up SHA-256 as their PoW hashing algorithm of choice; so unlike GPU-mined coins BTC will probably never have any competition for hashpower to speak of. (Unless BCH or BSV top BTC's price of course, but... you know) And without mining hardware "on the sidelines" (i.e. mining other coins than the target), there's no hashing power to attack Bitcoin.


However I believe the above to be mostly theoretical, since just like you...


...I'm also confident that Bitcoin's price will continue to off-set halving losses for a while longer.

Which is also why it's critical that 2nd layer infrastructure becomes established by then to keep transmitting BTC affordable.

Bitcoin has an enormous security overhead though, so even at half the hashrate a majority attack would still be orders of magnitudes more expensive than a similar attack on any of the alts (and even with those relatively "easy" targets majority attacks are surprisingly rare). Accordingly I wouldn't worry that much about hashrate dropping as block subsidy decreases. By 2032 block subsidy will be only secondary to mining fees anyway, so subsequent halvings will have less and less of an impact.

At a first glance 2.5 years seem laughable given the financial damages, but with them merely being a "secretary" it looks more warranted. It will be much more interesting to see what sentence the heads of the operation are going to receive, assuming they ever get caught.

Offering escrow services for contract killings seems like a good way to scam a few more coins out on top of your "retainer":

"I understand if you don't trust me, even though I only take 50% in advance, but here this guy is a trusted escrow that can hold the coins for just a small fee!"




Talking of which, since we're already on the topic of cryptocurrencies and crime in the media -- has anyone here watched Westworld? In season 3 they introduce an app called RICO, which is essentially Uber for crime. According to the creators it's in part inspired by "the idea of the blockchain" so it's probably the first (fictional) dApp that made it into mainstream science fiction. Pretty neat in my opinion.

I'd even argue that in terms of smart contracts turing-completeness has been proven to be more of a liability than a blessing. At least if you honestly strive for immutability without centralized oversight and are not just paying lip service.

Don't you mean 4 thousand weights unit? ie. k as in kilo as in thousand (as opposed to mega as in million)

*There are sites on the darknet that exist to hire contract killers for bitcoin scam would-be clients

FTFY

Most (if not all) of those sites are fake, you'll find plenty of articles on the subject matter. IIRC there's only one murder that's actually linked to a hitman that was hired via a hidden service and that one was an amateur that got caught pretty quickly.


Think about it, it's a pretty perfect scam.

You offer murder for hire, but since you're nice you only want 50% up-front. So you take 50% up-front and then... that's it. No one dies, your victim likely is kind of a dick anyway and they sure as hell won't go to the police ¯\_(ツ)_/¯