I've mentioned two previously suggested approaches further upthread:



Both approaches have the premise in common that providing UBI would stimulate the economy by providing a larger part of the population with essential capital.

Optimistically it is a reflection of the law of diminishing returns, that is: 1,000,000 people with USD 1,000,- each will spend more than a single person with USD 1,000,000,000,- because in the end there's only so much money can buy but everyone needs to eat.

Pessimistically it is a necessity to prevent Capitalism from cannibalizing itself by ensuring that the general populace is able to continue purchasing goods and services and keeping the economy going (a point that gets criticized as a downside by the article mentioned in OP because seizing sharing the means of production has worked so well in the past /s).

So that's one way how financing UBI is being looked at. I guess essentially you could call it "reverse trickle down economics" which, unlike its namesake, may actually work for a change.


Another line of thinking I've seen is that by replacing existing social security and welfare programs with UBI you could get rid of a lot of bureaucratic and administrative overhead (ie. no need to waste resources on evaluating how much each person gets if everyone simply gets the same) and thus save money that could be used to help finance UBI.


That's what I can think of off the top of my head, I'm not sure what other approaches are out there. I think the financing challenge is one of the most difficult aspects to experimentally verify in real world UBI trials (ie. most trials that I'm aware of have been essentially capital injections). However I do think that tweaking socio-economic incentives in a way that allows financing UBI by pure market mechanics alone is both possible and viable.

How would the network know what difficulty is required to ensure so that an average computer needs about an hour until an address is generated?

Sure. What's more to love for a government than a centralized currency? But once it comes to that it would likely be less attractive to the rest of the world. What's the point of using a government controlled cryptocurrency? Might as well stick to fiat.

Yet another collection of royalty free photos (that are also free free, not just royalty free for a small licensing fee):
https://unsplash.com/

And here's a nice list of public domain / CC0 photo directories which I've also found to be incredibly useful:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Public_domain_image_resources

There's no surefire bet to increase an investment by 50% within 2 months. Even if there were, people would be unlikely to share it.

That being said, if anyone tells you otherwise they are lying to your face and you should take your money and leave.

Exactly. Which is why many have cautioned people to stay away from centrally issued stablecoins such as Tether.

There are also attempts at decentralized stablecoins, but it's not an easy problem to solve:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=3421190.0




That depends which way the money leaves. People selling USDT does not equate people leaving crypto for good. Currently the majority seems to flow towards BTC, rather than USD:

https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/tether/#markets

I don't think so.


First of all, the graph above would need to be cleaned up regarding the Bitcoin Cash stress tests mentioned in the article:


Anyone who would use the graph above to "prove" Bitcoin Cash transactions catching up to SegWit transactions would be biased in their interpretation of the data themselves.


Secondly, in this discussion so far we have only established that weighting SegWit transaction count based on the ratio of legacy vs SegWit inputs may be a more objective metric. As of now we haven't even checked the difference between weighted SegWit transaction count and simple SegWit transaction count. Put differently I'd love to see the data on which franky1 bases their claim of SegWit transactions being on average only "0.25 SegWit".

Looking at the last few blocks I see that the majority of transactions (I guess > 95%) consist of either legacy transactions only or SegWit transactions only. The mix of SegWit and legacy inputs seems to be rather rare, at least rarer than to have an impact of the magnitude as described by franky1.

Obviously one would need to take a larger sample than the manual look that I just did, but the point is: Without any data to back it up, franky1's claim of SegWit adoption being only 1/4th of what most statistics tell is a baseless assumption. If I missed the part of discussion where actual data is used to prove this claim (ie. a weighted SegWit transaction count or the amount of "mixed" SegWit transactions) please link me up.

The sad truth is that even knowing the real identities of an ICO team accounts for nothing more often than not. Crypto has seen its fair share of questionable investment opportunities for a long time and even in cases where the identities of key figures where known they were rarely held accountable.



Based on the sheer amount of airdrops lately I'm convinced that a fair share of projects do just that. Probably not as profitable as carding but definitely easier.

Transactions can include inputs from both legacy as well as SegWit addresses. As soon as a transaction includes a single input from a SegWit address, the whole transaction needs to be sent in the SegWit format.

Looking at the code in the repository posted by ETFbitcoin above, that's all that segwit.dance is checking for:


https://github.com/prusnak/segwit.party/blob/gh-pages/charts/extract.py

Unless I'm missing some additional data processing there's no weighing going in terms of how many inputs came from legacy addresses and how many inputs came from SegWit addresses.

So yes, frank1 is right in that a transaction is counted as a (full) SegWit transaction regardless of how many legacy inputs are involved. I'm not sure if I'd call it misleading though as from a protocol view a SegWit transaction is simply a SegWit transaction as soon as a single SegWit input is included. As such the data is pretty straight forward and a fairly reasonable metric to use.

If it's a useful metric for defining SegWit adoption is up for debate of course. But what does SegWit adoption even mean? eg. SegWit transactions weighted by input ratio, percentage of blockweight taken up by SegWit transactions, count of used SegWit addresses, bitcoins stored in SegWit addresses...? I guess you'd have to use a mixture of multiple metrics to get a clearer picture. The conclusions would still be a question of interpretation though.

Choose one.

I'm not saying that secure wireless connections are impossible, but I definitely wouldn't trust a hardware wallet with a bluetooth connection until it's far more established and a lot of people have hacked away on it.

Talking about hacking away, there are no public repositories and the software seems to closed source. No way I'm gonna touch that.

Getting rid of governmental intervention and centralized control is the whole point of crypto.

Obviously you can't get rid of it entirely, but if you do high risk investments in an unregulated space and then lose money it's your own fault entirely.

People not doing their homework before throwing money at some random project is why ICOs are riddled with scams and questionable business plans to begin with. Trading within an unregulated such as crypto means you and you alone are responsible for your own luck. If you mess up, own it.

If you want to invest within a regulated space, why not stick with classical investments such as bonds, stocks and investment fonds? The yields may not be as pretty but least they are "safe"?

That makes sense. I wasn't aware of these rumors so I wonder how big the impact really was. However I've never used Binance so maybe the rumours were bigger "news" than what I perceived (or rather: failed to perceive).



I assumed that it's down at 0.96 USD because people are fleeing, but now that you mention it Tether should have been able to prop the price up regardless. Hoh boy.


Btw has anyone else noticed how USDC is trading at more than 8% above face value right now? Seems like the battle of the USD-backed stablecoins has begun.

It sounds kinda silly but starts to make sense once you take a closer look at it: Futures are mostly traded by financial professionals and almost always high risk. ETFs are mostly traded by the general public and institutional investors who assume a much lower risk than people trading derivatives. As such the regulations on ETFs have to be far more stringent than with Futures, regardless of Bitcoin's involvement.

Seems like people are fleeing from USDT and are thus moving into BTC and some of the alts in case USDT turns out to be insolvent.

Not sure why everone is fleeing USDT right now however.

What do you want to achieve?

If you want to issue your own token on the Bitcoin blockchain, look into Omni [1] or Counterparty [2]. Conceptually these tokens are similar to Ethereum's ERC-20 tokens, but with lesser smart contract capabilities.

[1] https://www.omnilayer.org/
[2] https://counterparty.io/

Fully agreed. It's a challenge I've seen again and again when it comes to approaches on how to finance UBI: Unless you find a way to globally normalize financing and distributing UBI you'll always have a problem with geographical arbitrage, eg. tax evasion or similar ways to profit from subsidies while avoiding contribution. For example, one of the earlier UBI approaches I came across suggested financing UBI by replacing income tax with an increased sales tax, thus putting the bulk of taxation on the wealthy while also removing the incentive to "optimize" your income. Obviously such a system would get easily exploited by importing goods from countries with regular sales tax, so we'd be back to square one lest we bid goodbye to the free market.

Come to think of it, solving the challenge of global taxation would likely solve a huge chunk of socio-economic inequalities all by itself. If international corporations where finally forced to pay taxes like everyone else instead of gorging themselves on Double Irish Dutch sandwiches [1] we'd probably all be better off.

[1] https://www.investopedia.com/terms/d/double-irish-with-a-dutch-sandwich.asp

Not quite.

The part where "there's not enough money for all of them" is what you get if you'd apply a credit based system to a fixed, constant money supply. Both the boon and bane of fiat currencies is that the supply is potentially endless, so there will always be money available. Increasing the money supply works well enough if it correlates with economic growth (ie. credit is being used to create wealth by producing and providing useful goods and services). It utterly fails whenever the economy doesn't reflect the available money supply (ie. credit is wasted on empty housing, failing startups, dictators with lavish lifestyles etc).

That is, generally speaking. Obviously the problem you are describing does exist, it just has a slightly different cause. It's what you get when fractional banking goes wrong, that is, when people start over-leveraging their assets, risks are wrongfully assessed and credit by consequence becomes more plentiful than healthy. As with everything, it is the dose that makes the poison. A sane credit system does work and makes sure that the money borrowed will later on be reflected in the wealth created. Unfortunately that is not always the case, eg. when reckless crediting becomes incentivized and accountability becomes close to nil. Risking other people's money is easier than risking your own. Even moreso if you get a bonus when something goes wrong and merely a slap on the wrist when disaster strikes.

Note, however, that fractional banking does not only affect fiat currencies. We've seen the same thing happen in crypto, most famously with MtGox. And here we arrive at what in my opinion is one of the most important features of Bitcoin: Being able to autonomously store and transact money, without being dependent on any third parties. Bitcoin being deflationary is, in my opinion, more or less incidental, even though it was necessary to move digital assets into the spotlight. Self-reliance and independence is what makes crypto important in my book.

No such think as decrypting a hash. You can try to brute-force it, yes, but short of a significant weakness or vulnerability there's no way to decrypt a hash.

Cryptographic hash functions are by definition one way. That is, unlike regular encryption, a cryptographic hash is irreversible. If you want to be able to encrypt and decrypt your data, you are looking for a cipher, not a hash.


Here's an npm package that might be of interest to you:
https://www.npmjs.com/package/crypto-js

Apart from various cryptographic hashes, this library also includes a handful of well known ciphers:
https://code.google.com/archive/p/crypto-js/


That being said, what do you want to achieve?

It's bigger than that.

Our economy is not merely stimulated by people buying on credit. It is built upon companies being able to take credit to invest in future developments. As such I don't think an economy where there would be only Bitcoin would flourish.

For as much flak as fiat gets, it did enable economic growth in a previously unprecedented way. As such I think we won't be able to operate without it all that easily, unless we find an economic model that does not rely on wealth generation by borrowing money from the future.

AFAIK in the case of StorJ the encrypted content is sharded, not the private keys themselves.


Come to think of it, let's check the whitepaper:


So yes, the private key stays with the content owner and should not touch the network. The content is encrypted before being published on the network, after which the network takes care of sharding the (encrypted) data.