Slightly off tangent, but I think for this we'd need to start from scratch either way.

Regardless of what growth potential I still expect from Bitcoin and some of the other cryptos I'm not convinced that a deflationary currency can work without an inflationary currency to relieve market pressure -- ie. without credit I'd expect economic growth to stagnate, and credit within a deflationary ecosystem is financial suicide. Note that I mean credit as in company bonds, not as in maxing out ones credit card.

Slightly off-topic, but it's worth pointing out that the truth is rather dire in this regard:

https://bgr.com/2018/10/04/china-hardware-backdoors-sophisticated-chips-used-in-us-bound-tech/

In short, supply chain attacks on hardware do happen. However it doesn't appear to be as critical if you only produce the chips in China and assemble the rest of the hardware within a trusted environment (ie. backdooring a chip is much harder than backdooring a motherboard).

That would still require trust in none of the developers leaking the selected algorithm.



...just like all GPUs where apparently no one is bothered about where the chips come from. Like I said, I think it's more a question of where the miners are deployed, not where they are produced.



Focusing on software, rather than hardware. We live in a globalized society of specialization, so naturally knowledge accumulates where its applied most.



Because it's apparently neither profitable nor interesting enough.

One common denominator of most UBI approaches is that everyone receives it, regardless of income. That's what the universal in universal basic income stands for.

Which means that:

1) The question of "if some people get {public-social-security-benefit}, what does everyone else get?" doesn't present itself.

2) Unlike most other social security approaches the incentives for putting yourself to work are unchanged. Income is not removed from the equation. If you want to improve your standards of living, working will provide you with income on top of basic income. As such it also stands to enable innovation by alleviating the risks of entrepreneurship.




Remember Bill Gate's call for income taxes on robots and AIs? It sounded kinda silly at first but will likely become a necessity in the future if we want to prevent the gap between the rich and the poor to widen further.

Incidentally it could also be the most viable way to finance UBI; a question that has -- in my opinion -- been largely inadequately answered for the last decade or so during which UBI started to receive public attention.



Which is what makes war automation even more terrifying. Because guess who'd have access to the required technology and resources.

I've been using EtherDelta and Waves DEX in the past, but not for long. The volume was abysmal and trading felt rather sluggish (especially EtherDelta, I think Waves DEX was okayish). So while I'd love to use decentralized exchanges over centralized ones, I'm sticking with centralized exchanges for now.

I'm interested to see if anyone else has something to add though. It might very well be that either platform has vastly improved since I last tried it. Or maybe I just gave the wrong platforms a spin.

Because we've been in an incredible bull market for more than a decade, interest rates are close to nil, confidence is high and money is plenty.

Once the next bust cycle begins -- ie. the "beginning of the end for the stockmarket" -- even large scale investors will lick their wounds, leading to a decrease in private investment. Which in turn will many companies see requiring public investment again.



What modern startups can save in terms of infrastructure and distribution, they need to make up in terms of expertise. Software development ain't cheap. Scaling a business isn't either, even in the digital realm.

It's fairly obvious that UBI is necessary to prevent Capitalism from devouring its own base. Without it, you will see an end of Capitalism as described by Karl Marx more than a hundred years ago -- that is, as generated wealth surplus flows from employee to employer (eg. from worker to factory owner) the former will eventually be unable to purchase the products sold by the latter, leading to the latter losing their (and their employee's) livelihood and to the collapse of the capitalistic system.

Accordingly UBI is not something that companies merely support out of their goodness of their heart, but also because they have a better understanding of economics than last century's industrialists.

However, that doesn't make UBI necessarily a bad thing. On the other hand, the call for distributing ownership and control is easier said than done -- Communism tried the very same thing and failed for the most part both economically and in terms of empowerment.

In essence, I think the argument against UBI that the author is trying to make is rather flawed. The notion that UBI would lead to people becoming passive consumers has been debunked (as far as the so far limited experiments allow us to conclude) -- the author even mentions it early on, before making a baseless contradictory statement for the sake of supporting their argument. The article also seems to imply that UBI and other socio-economic measures are mutually exclusive (eg. when talking about Denmark) -- which simply isn't the case. Assuming we find a way to finance UBI in the first place, we can keep a proper public infrastructure and provide UBI. Proper wages and UBI are not mutually exclusive either -- looking closer the latter could enable the former by the basic mechanics of supply and demand. That is, if people are not coerced into taking a shitty, underpaid job, the wages for shitty, underpaid jobs will have to adjust accordingly lest the job is left undone.

That being said, so far there are so many different approaches on how UBI could be implemented (eg. replacing existing social security vs complementing it, how to finance it, how to battle possible side-effects...) that debating its merit without looking at specifics is rather pointless. Regardless of that, UBI not being a catch-all solution to economic inequality is a silly reason to dismiss it, given the fact that there probably is no such thing as a catch-all solution to economic inequality.

Agreed. I think it would make sense if such a selection process would be formally defined -- and agreed upon -- in advance. Otherwise we'll end up with a debate on the selection process itself and during the worst time at that.



Pretty [1] much [2] every [3] chip [4] gets produced in China. GPUs included. So naturally they not only have the know-how but also the infrastructure. It'd be weird if it were any different with Bitcoin miners. The means of productions have been gifted rather than seized.

[1] https://www.fool.com/investing/2017/05/17/nvidia-corp-relationship-taiwan-semiconductor.aspx
[2] https://www.extremetech.com/computing/276169-amd-moves-all-7nm-cpu-gpu-production-to-tsmc
[3] https://www.extremetech.com/computing/276690-report-intel-will-outsource-chipset-production-to-tsmc
[4] https://www.gsmarena.com/qualcomm_going_back_to_tsmc_for_its_7nm_chips_production_starts_later_this_year-news-31804.php


I think electricity cost plays a larger role in terms of geographical (and by extension legislative) decentralization than where the miners are produced. If Europe and the US had electricity prices closer to China I'd expect the dominance of a certain ASIC manufacturer to be much less of an issue than it is today.

What do you mean? A hash is a mathematical function that is easier to solve in one direction rather than the other way round (eg. calculating 23 * 23 is easier than calculating the root of 529) while also producing an output that looks random. As such you don't need a computer to calculate it -- computers are just faster at calculations than humans.



The assumption is that somewhere on the other side of the prairie you have a user acting as a gateway, who would then transcribe the smoke signals to a transaction and transmit said transaction to the internet (where it would then end on the mempool, with miners and all).

Alternatively you could do the same without any computers at all and just rely on smoke signals, physical ledgers and manual mining. However you'd have to implement such a protocol as an altcoin, since you'd have to vastly increase the target block interval to account for latency caused by the low bandwidth of smoke signals and lengthy transcription process. Obviously not really viable but technically possible.

This runs both ways though. With the majority hashrate presumably being located in China it may very well be that using increased block weight as a weapon would merely lead to an increased orphan rate in Europe and the Americas, further strengthening China's position.



Is there any agreement on how such a PoW change would be implemented and what code of conduct would be followed? For example how a new PoW scheme would be selected. I presume some thoughts has already been put into it, beyond merely considering the option.

Don't forget that using an airgapped device is also an option -- that is, if you have an old laptop or PC lying around you could also use it for cold storage:

1) Install a fresh operating system (optimally Linux, which is generally more secure and usually less demanding on older hardware)
2) Create an offline wallet using Electrum (or Armory)
3) Never connect your refurbished device to the internet or any local network (optimally deinstall any network driver that may be installed)
4) Use your airgapped laptop or PC only to sign transactions and nothing else, transferring said transaction via USB or a similar medium onto your online system.


Caveat regarding using a bootable USB-Flash as airgapped operating system: Don't plug the stick in while your day-to-day operating system is still running; only use it as a boot medium

Caveat regarding paper wallets: Be aware that the private key is exposed as soon as you access the paper wallet. Which means that 1) don't reuse paper wallets and 2) only access your paper wallet on a device that isn't riddled with malware.

Security aside, never forget that exchanges are also a liability on the organizational level. Even an exchange with ironclad security is -- legally speaking -- easier targetted than a private individual that no one is aware of. As such counterparty risk may play a role regardless of technical expertise.



To be fair McAfee's wallet seems to be nothing more than a glorified brainwallet anyway, ie. hardware access is likely not even required for hacking such a wallet.

Nice thinking.

Challenge being that storage coins expect to be paid for their services.

That is, miners (or whatever the terminology is for users providing storage space) expect to receive a fee, usually in the form of the respective native token. Who'd pay for that? We'd be back to relying on people voluntary hosting a full node, but with extra steps involved. The effective cost of hosting a full node in terms of bandwidth and harddisk space stays the same and would likewise increase the fewer nodes are involved (in this case, storage coin nodes responsible for hosting the blockchain).

I like your positive attitude!

If you decide to get further involved in crypto, really do think about getting a hardware wallet. It's just a one time investment and definitely worth the peace of mind. And as I mentioned above, buy it directly from the producers and make sure to initialize the hardware wallet from scratch, should you decide to get one.

The impression I get is that people either decide to run a full node on purpose or just go straight for a SPV wallet. Running a "semi-full" node (eg. Bitcoin Core with pruning enabled) seems to be the exception. Accordingly I doubt that providing the ability to run a semi-full node increases the overall node count much. However I'm just extrapolating from anecdotal observations without having anything substantial to back this claim up, so don't take my word for it.

I think the problem at hand is, that the fewer full nodes there are, the more traffic they need to bear. This in turn will make running a full node even harder, causing more full nodes to drop off, further increasing the traffic on the remaining nodes until only a handful of very costly full nodes are left. And every new pruned node that comes online needs these full nodes to bootstrap, lest they won't even become a semi-full node.

Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies have not even entered their glory days yet. Question being, whether they ever will.

The longer Bitcoin survives and evolves, the further it cements its place in the world. Everything else is just a matter of time, especially with the ecosystem being as strong as ever. Even the alt coin market should evolve beyond its bullshit phase eventually. As such I'm fairly confident that the best ist yet to come.

Have you checked whether there are any viable LocalBitcoins.com traders in your area? Centralized exchanges that do not follow KYC / AML guidelines don't last so long nowadays. Depending on where you are based your local Bitcoin traders may be a bit more flexible (although most now also follow KYC / AML guidelines once certain volumes are reached).

It's normal for a suspicious company.

Don't trust Genesis Mining. They are likely trying to cover their legal bases as to avoid prosecution for the shitstorm that will inevitably follow.

Comes to little surprise as Malta is very open in terms of business opportunities that elsewhere get regulated to oblivion. They already play an important role in EU-based gambling licensing, I wouldn't be surprised if they want to achieve a similar safe haven status with crypto.

It's not like I trust Tether, but I'm not sure whether trusting Goldman Sachs is indeed the better option.

Keep in mind that we are talking about one of the banks that were at the forefont of the 2008 financial crisis. They would have gone bust if the US wouldn't have injected billions of dollars into them. They are one of the reasons why Bitcoin entered the stage to begin with. They are not to be trusted.

Goldman Sachs backing a stable coin means nothing. If shit hits the fan they'll probably just move the liability of their stable coin to a daughter company that then files for bankruptcy leaving their stable coin unbacked.

No thank you.