I hate exchanges, and don't trust them one bit. I was previously beginning a process of slowly getting ~1000 USD at a time turned into CAD and deposited into my bank account, and the exchange that I was using (Quadriga) finished an exit scam right before I sent them another 1k.
Conversation
I do think that it's the best way to receive donations in practice. People can send donations with incredibly low fees and you don't deal with chargebacks or disputes since payments can't be reversed. Can use btcpayserver.org if you want to hide how much you're receiving.
1
my problems with Bi/tcoin are primarily political in nature (it's extremely destructive and also totally controlled in practice by like five guys who want to launder money from China, both bad long term outlook); I have used it extensively and know what it's capable of
1
4
Bitcoin isn't very private at all even when not reusing addresses but I would like it far more if it was. I see support for laundering money as a necessary evil similar to criminals benefiting from end-to-end encrypted messaging. I do agree proof of work is a serious problem.
2
Balance is opposite for communication vs exercising economic power. e2e comms proportionally benefit those without power more. Money laundering protocols proportionally benefit the extreme wealthy much more.
2
yeah no, KYC/AML regs benefit the extreme wealthy because they have ways to dress up anything they want so it looks good. a woman in Belarus who needs to pay rent doesn't
2
1
Re PoW, have you seen Algorand? Very interesting idea IMHO
Quote Tweet
So, I've read about @Algorand new blockchain technology, with Tal Rabin on board.
Executive summary of the core new idea.
But first, admirable work. Short technical paper, longer rigorous paper, sensible safe programming language for the implementation.
Show this thread
1
One issue with many of these approaches is that they often can't support cold storage and encourage centralization since people want to earn money from PoS but don't want / can't run a dedicated machine all day to do it for them. Don't know details of that approach specifically.
2
Well, it's not that BTC doesn't have centralization problems
To my understanding if cost of participation is low, deflation can be kept low, and what you describe is less of a problem
It was designed by cryptographers (e.g., Tal Rabin) to be similar to BTC
Quote Tweet
Replying to @davidgerard @giladby and 2 others
To my understanding, you don't (necessarily) have to incentivize participant by inflating the coin for every block.
Unlike PoW, the cost of participating is very cheap, holders are incentivized to maintain the coin, just to keep their shares. Even if you do low cost=low inflation
1
A mining pool is different than needing to hand over the keys for your money to the pool though. By centralizing, I mean placing more trust into these pools, by turning them into banks, not just pooling of hashing resources where they are in a position to choose the transactions.
1
Bitcoin mining pools could start adding transaction censorship for example, but miners would be free to switch to another pool if they don't support it for one reason or the other, even an entirely selfish one like preserving the currency's value vs. exit scams involving staking.
One problem is that there aren't enough pools to begin with, and there can and they might form a cartel. Especially with zero regulation.