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Home :: Money

05 May 2018

Blockchain's two-flavored appeal Money

A recent story in Medium describes yet again quite well why blockchains don't solve any real problems: Blockchain is not only crappy technology but a bad vision for the future.

So what is their irresistable appeal?

Bitcoins remind me of a story from the late chair of the Princeton University astronomy department. In 1950 Immanuel Velikovsky published Worlds in Collision, a controversial best selling book that claimed that 3500 years ago Venus and Mars swooped near the earth, causing catastrophes that were passed down in religions and mythologies.

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  posted at: 23:00 :: permanent link to this entry :: 0 comments
Stable link is https://jl.ly/Money/bccrud.html

15 Mar 2018

Paypals vs. Bitcoins Money
I have learned about a dandy new cryptocurrency called Paypals. How does it stack up against Bitcoin and other currencies?

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  posted at: 14:00 :: permanent link to this entry :: 1 comments
Stable link is https://jl.ly/Money/bitpal.html

22 Jan 2018

What is Amazon Go really about? Money
Today's papers are full of puffy pieces about the wonderous new Amazon Go (pronounced, I hope, Ama-Zongo) in which you tap your phone as you enter and cameras watch what you do, figure out what you've put in your bag, and charge you for it when you leave. There's certainly no check-out lanes and few visible staff but the whole thing smells to me like a gimmick.

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  posted at: 15:46 :: permanent link to this entry :: 1 comments
Stable link is https://jl.ly/Money/amazongo.html

22 Dec 2017

Great forking Bitcoins Money

Let's say I'm with the Chinese government and decide that I am tired of people evading currency controls and money laundering using Bitcoin. So we adjust the Great Firewall of China to block port 8333. We also add some proxies that allow some uncleared transactions from outside to flow into Chinese networks but not the other way, and keep track of which ones we let through.

Since a large fraction of the miners are inside China and all of the hard currency exchanges are outside, this will cause a pretty serious fork. No doubt people will start trying to evade the block, but the GFoC works pretty well, and any evasion will take a while to start being effective. It'd also be easy to tell who was trying to evade (look for outside transactions in the chains they publish) and send someone around to chat with them.

Even if the two sides are eventually reunited, then what? You have two separate chains, with overlapping sets of transactions, which would make any sort of ad-hoc hack to splice one chain onto the other impossibly hard, even if the anarchists in the Bitcoin world could agree to it. The bitcoin voting algorithm would eventuall make one chain win and the other one disappear. If some of the disappeared transactions were yours, how would this affect your opinion on Bitcoins?


  posted at: 15:08 :: permanent link to this entry :: 0 comments
Stable link is https://jl.ly/Money/bitsplit.html

26 Sep 2017

Some contrary advice about the Equifax breach Money
Here's some unexpected advice about what to do about the recent giant Equifax breach: nothing.

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  posted at: 01:47 :: permanent link to this entry :: 0 comments
Stable link is https://jl.ly/Money/equinot.html

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