rkbabang

Food for thought. Reading this reminded me that in the mid to late 90's I thought Realtors were doomed because of the internet. The existence of sites like ISoldMyHouse.com fed into my confirmation bias (until I tried to use it to sell my first house). The internet has changed many things, but not exactly the things I thought it would and not in exactly the ways I predicted. I suspect the same will be true for blockchain tech. It won't play out in exactly the ways I (and most other people) think it will. I am pretty confident that having a currency than can't be manipulated by a government agency or central bank is a good thing, everything else people say blockchain will be used for however I'm not as sure about. Even if it ends up being used only to revolutionize money, stock trading (and maybe keeping track of titles to property in the 3rd world and banking in the 3rd world) that will still be huge. And of course facilitating black market trade which I think of as a positive, with a few exceptions, of course, such as murder for hire. Thanks for the article.

Because that time is many, many years in the future. I think you have two too many manys. It is years in the future, but not as many as most people think. If auto parts stores exist only in rural areas the companies which survive the transition will be a small fraction of the size they are now.

Will they deliver to you on the side of the highway? 30 minute drone delivery to wherever you are, now that would kill the autoparts brick and mortar stores.

For things that you can wait 2 days for, I've found Amazon to be cheaper than my local Autozone. I've so far bought windshield wipers, brake rotors, and brake pads off of Amazon. Although having the part immediately is important if you need an alternator or something. I've changed an alternator on the side of rt128 once, I called a friend to pick it up and bring it too me while I was sitting there. Waiting two days for it wouldn't have been an good option, I would have to had the car towed.

So if you think this will represent 2% there is still a lot of growth left. If you think it will be 15%, or 51%, or 80% there is a hell of lot of growth left. :) Exactly. If you think there is any value at all, either as currency or store of value, then even at present prices, crypto in general is one of the most asymmetric bets of all time. I can understand people saying bitcoin will go to zero. What I find odd is when people say the fair value is 50b to 100b. Your basically saying it should be exactly 1% of world money supply which seems oddly specific A good graphic which illustrates this point. https://howmuch.net/articles/worlds-money-in-perspective Larry Page is worth as much as Bitcoin. Just one human being out of over 7 billion is worth as much as all of bitcoin put together. Bill Gates is worth as much as all of Bitcoin + Larry Page + a few $B more.

It was even worse than I thought. It didn't just hit $13, a trade went through at $0.10 cardboard posted this story in its own thread: http://www.cnbc.com/id/104544759 There is so much crazy going on. $30M market sells, margin buying and stop losses. I know derivatives exist as well, I'm not sure if that had anything to do with it. Anyway coinbase says all of the transactions are final and can not be reversed. I'm thinking there are probably a lot of people setting buy orders with ridiculously low limits right about now just in case.

The problem is that humans and AI are judged using different standards. If human kills someone by accident it's OK'ish since you know it's human what can you do... If AI kills someone by accident, it's clearly broken, nefarious, and should be never used again. At least regulatory agencies subscribe to this fallacy less than regular people. Otherwise we would not have seen cruise control, autopilot or industrial robots at all. ::) Of course you are correct. Humans are not rational, which is just one more reason why they shouldn't be running things. When either a human or an AI makes a mistake you could say that it is in a way broken, but when a human makes a mistake (s)he might learn from that mistake, get better, and never do it again. When an AI makes a mistake, it might learn from the mistake and upload the new info to millions of other similar AIs who all learn from it and never make it again. AIs are superior in every way. Humans should never touch heavy machinery. I'm reading a fascinating book ("The Righteous Mind" by Jonathan Haidt) about how humans react emotionally to just about everything and use reason only later in an attempt to justify their emotional reaction. Reason is just a post hoc tool we use to explain what we already want to think. You could be that old blind guy with the super long soul patch on Kung Fu (.) I can only point the way, Grasshopper. You must walk the path yourself.

Someone was able to buy ETH for $13 today. http://www.coindesk.com/13-ethereum-ether-prices-plunge-2500-gdax-exchange-flash-crash/

How do you plan for needing only exactly as much as you need until you die and no more? If you retire at 60 and die at 72 that is a very different calculation then if you retire at 60 and live to 120. Since you have no way of knowing how long you will live, you need it to be sustainable. In the extreme case it could be even longer than 120. If Aubrey de Grey is correct you may live to be 1000 or more. Eventually you may look, feel, and perform like you're 25 again, but there is likely to be quite a few decades while they are perfecting all this life extension stuff where you are just being kept alive and healthy, but still elderly. So do you plan for 10 years of retirement or 60? Or 150?

Reminds me of the Sci-fi book I read when I was in college. "Tom Paine Maru" by L. Neil Smith. People had implants in their heads and whenever they heard a voice they heard it in their own language regardless of what language it was actually spoken in. And similarly whenever they saw text of any type they saw it in their own language.

I agree, while many people have heard the name "bitcoin" most people don't know what it is. And the vast majority of people have never heard of any of the other blockchain projects/currencies. After this goes full-on mainstream, when the real bubble happens, I think it will be time to sell and wait for a good crash to buy back in. But we are years away from that right now. I don't have an opinion on SegWit in particular, but in general bitcoin needs to do something to address the blocksize/scaling issues. SegWit seems to be working fine on the litecoin blockchain right now.

One reason I see this as probably the biggest opportunity of a lifetime is that right now it is pretty much just tech people with no investing experience at all fooling around with this stuff. Articles like this one abound every time there is even the slightest drop. It's quite amusing to see a drop back down to where it was last week called a massacre and people panicking. Crypto Massacre: Why Value of Bitcoin, Ethereum, Ripple, NEM & Others Sharply Fell On the FB groups you have people in an frenzy wanting to know "why is it falling?" "What's going on?" It's crazy.

My second category is something fundamentally different from money. It is about decentralized applications running on a decentralized internet. You could be right that everything ends up running on Bitcoin's blockchain in the end, but I'm not sure you want applications running on the same blockchain as your money. I think the requirements are too different to mix them. The money blockchains need to emphasize security above all else, where the application blockchains would really be all about speed, scalability (to an almost infinite degree), ease of programing, power efficiency, and sure security too, but only secure enough. Here's an interesting piece I just read which talks about a lot of Category 2 developments and projects. https://hackernoon.com/the-good-the-bad-and-the-ugly-of-consensus-2017-8776056f97a3

The supply of bitcoin is fixed (and declining as people lose access to them..), but the supply of cryptocurrencies in general is infinite. That'll be an interesting dynamic to see in action over the coming years and decades.. +1. That is why I think there will be a small handful of winners. I think there will be different categories of blockchains, at least 2-3 categories globally, or maybe this will vary slightly by region as well. But within each category the network effects are what makes them valuable, so I don’t think there will be too many of them. Why are there only 4 credit card networks (VISA, MC, AmEx, Discover)? Why aren’t there thousands? There could be an infinite number of them right? It is because a credit card is useless unless it can be used almost everywhere. This limits the number of them that can exist profitably. I think the same market forces will be at work in this industry. Here are the 3 categories of blockchains I predict: 1) Bitcoin (or something else like it), with its high fees, slow transfer speeds, and fixed/shrinking supply looks to me like it will be "digital gold". Good for long term storage of large sums of money or to safely facilitate large transactions safely. Maybe it will be used mostly by the wealthy or with its very public ledger by corporations to store or transfer large amounts transparently. I don't see it as the everyday unit the average person gets paid in and uses to buy a coffee and a donut at Dunkin Donuts. But the average person might have some as a deflationary savings vehicle. 2) Ethereum (or maybe Tezos) or something else like it. Being Turing complete will be used for smart contracts and to build businesses on top of and other specific types of instruments I’ll call “tokens” here. This will be a much faster blockchain able to handle an enormous number of transactions per second and probably either the base token or a derivative token will be the unit people use for everyday transactions. Tokens on this block chain will also represent stock in corporations and will be traded in all the ways stocks are traded today. And there will exist derivative financial instruments coded in smart contracts such as calls, puts, etc. Dividends can be paid in either the base token or in the token shares (like dividend reinvestment). And of course the company can buy back its tokens on the market and destroy them or do secondary offerings and create more tokens. 3) Monero, DASH, or something else. I see the need for a private currency. This one will mostly be just a currency, like bitcoin, with limited smart contract programmability, but with complete privacy as to how much you own or what transactions you made and with whom. Maybe this exists and Bitcoin doesn’t, or maybe Bitcoin hardforks to something else which works this way. Or maybe this exists as a separate thing as it does now. Those are the three categories I see. There may only be 1 or 2 winners in each of those categories and, as I said above, category 1 might go away and only categories 2 and 3 end up existing long term. Of course this is all so new that I might be completely wrong.

Even after the last person moves to Bitcoin it's value, i.e. What you can buy with it, will increase due to supply and demand. And given a fixed or even shrinking supply and a growing demand from a growing society with increasing wealth and increasing productivity, you should see a certain amount of increasing value. This of course is a simplistic example as I don't think Bitcoin will be the only currency in society. So it will always be able to also gain or lose against the other currencies in existence.

I don't know about potcoin, but Bitcoin Is Helping the Pot Business Get Over Its Banking Problem

The problem is that humans and AI are judged using different standards. If human kills someone by accident it's OK'ish since you know it's human what can you do... If AI kills someone by accident, it's clearly broken, nefarious, and should be never used again. At least regulatory agencies subscribe to this fallacy less than regular people. Otherwise we would not have seen cruise control, autopilot or industrial robots at all. ::) Of course you are correct. Humans are not rational, which is just one more reason why they shouldn't be running things. When either a human or an AI makes a mistake you could say that it is in a way broken, but when a human makes a mistake (s)he might learn from that mistake, get better, and never do it again. When an AI makes a mistake, it might learn from the mistake and upload the new info to millions of other similar AIs who all learn from it and never make it again. AIs are superior in every way. Humans should never touch heavy machinery. I'm reading a fascinating book ("The Righteous Mind" by Jonathan Haidt) about how humans react emotionally to just about everything and use reason only later in an attempt to justify their emotional reaction. Reason is just a post hoc tool we use to explain what we already want to think.

Because human driven forklifts never kill anyone? "OSHA statistics indicate that there are roughly 85 forklift fatalities and 34,900 serious injuries each year" Or human driven vehicles never kill anyone? "There were 1.25 million road traffic deaths globally in 2013" AI won't be perfect. It doesn't have to be perfect, just better.

Tech is the answer to everything, or at least it can be. It can eventually solve every problem we currently have or worry about (including death). It can do all the work we currently do ourselves for us and more, and it might allow us to settle the solar system, then the galaxy, then other galaxies. The only questions are: When?; How much of this will we who are currently alive live to see?; and, Will we destroy ourselves first?

My vote goes to the dishwasher, but maybe that is because ours is currently broken and we are experiencing what life without it is like. Lucky repairman is coming today. But yeah the washing machine is big, as is refrigeration, and central heat/AC. It is crazy to think that none of these things existed a relatively short time ago.

I agree with you. I read the book when it first came out, so it has been a few years and I don't remember all the details, but I don't remember being shocked or outraged at anything I read. He isn't the messiah, he's a human being. Nobody's perfect. Also, it was an authorized biography. If you allow someone access to your life, you have to realize they are probably going to write things you might have prefered to remain private. If that wasn't the case it wouldn't be a very good biography IMHO.

I disagree with you on ETH. It is technically infinite, but it increases by a small fixed amount of ETH every year, so the inflation starts out tiny and approaches (but never quite reaches 0%). In fact it may even be deflationary in some years due to coin losses, which nobody disputes is a thing. I've heard some estimates that as much as 15% of bitcoin may be irretrievably lost already. People are not always smart about backing up things, thumb drives are lost, hard drives crash, hardware wallets are lost/damaged, paper wallets are lost/damaged, people die without leaving instructions to their heirs on how to retrieve their cryptocurrencies maybe the heirs don't even know it exists at all. Back in the first few years when bitcoin was almost worthless many people lost a lot of coins and didn't worry too much about it, etc, etc. There will always be some loss, so the tiny, almost zero inflation rate doesn't worry me. These new coins will be used to pay miners every year which is something I see as a problem with bitcoin. Once mining isn't very profitable because of coin creation I think fees are going to rise dramatically. The bitcoin fees are already too high. I did some reading on ZCash and I now think you are correct. I was reading too much of the ZCash official line on how the trusted setup went and cheerleading by supporters on how secure the encryption is. I only had a tiny amount, but I just shapeshifted it back into BTC as I am no longer comfortable with it. Thank You for bringing this to my attention. There is a lot of back and forth and lies, and tribalism, on the message boards about this, and it is hard to know what to believe, but this piece written by one of the 6 people involved in the trusted setup is what really changed my mind. I just don't see ZCash as one of the eventual winners. My Role In The 2016 Zcash Trusted Setup Ceremony

What are your thoughts on Ripple and XRP? Ripple truly is the largest scam around. It's a company releasing a currency which the can inflate infinitely and assign to themselves. On top of that it's not even a cryptocurrency, there is no mining either through POW or POS. I agree with wachtwoord on ripple. You have to trust the corporation, it isn't a cryptocurrency at all. I don't think that going from trusting governments and central banks to trusting corporations to control money is much of an improvement.

Good choice, ETH is my largest crypto holding by far, not because it is the one I bought the most of, that would be Bitcoin, but because I bought ETH at around $8 where my BTC was acquired between $200-$800. I purchased some ZEC a few days ago to further diversify.

It appears that the revolution isn't AI at all. The big thing here is increasingly powerful alternatives to CPUs. CPU's have hit a dead-end and so the whole industry will evolve sideways. The GPU is only the beginning. We are going to see more and more very cheap alternatives to the CPU that outperform CPU's by orders of magnitude on specific tasks. The alternatives to CPU's have been going on for decades. I believe these chips are called ASIC's. Xilinx is one of the companies that make these. Altera is another one. One very good example of this is that in mining for Bitcoin, there were (are?) specialized computers that use ASICs and only do one thing...mine for bitcoins. They are incredibly efficient at this and are WAY faster than GPU's...Bitmain's "antminers" are a good example of this. You are mixing up terms a little bit (I'm an ASIC design engineer) Xilinx and Altera make PLDs (Programmable Logic Devices) which can be custom programed (even on the fly to a limited degree) to perform an application specific task/algorithm more quickly and power efficiently than a CPU could do by executing software. These are much faster than using a CPU to perform the same function, but not as fast as nor as efficient as a pure custom designed ASIC would be. ASIC is just an Application Specific Integrated Circuit. Any chip which isn't fully programmable and turing complete could be called an ASIC. The line is a little blurry sometimes as I've worked on plenty of chips which would be called ASICs yet had embedded CPUs inside them, yet they are programmed internally so that the chip itself only performs an application specific function and can't be reprogrammed from the outside by the customer (who may not even know there is a CPU in there). Basically when you are optimizing for programmability software run on a CPU makes sense, when you are optimizing for power efficiency and speed a custom designed circuit makes more sense. And of course the custom logic can interact with and control the CPU and vise versa A GPU has specialized circuitry to perform a math on matrices quickly, yet still be somewhat programmable which makes them useful in 3D graphics and simulating neural networks. I'm not sure AI will ever use ASICs rather than GPUs, completely, but a GPU with self programing PLD functionality would be interesting. The reason bitcoin miners moved from CPUs to GPUs to PLDs and now to fully custom ASICs is that bitcoin mining is just doing the exact same type of calculation over and over again with no need for programmability, so it is a perfect fit for a fully custom circuit. Turing complete CPUs can do anything the other chips can do, just more slowly and consuming more power. A fully custom ASIC does whatever it was designed to do more quickly and power efficiently. A PLD is like a large array of transistors which can be re-wired internally, it isn't as easy to reprogram them as it is to write new software for a CPU, but once configured it will do a specific function more quickly and efficiently than a CPU (but not as quickly or power efficiently as a full custom ASIC). Now if you think about it a CPU is just a type of ASIC, it is transistors on a chip wired in a specific way. So a CPU itself can be implemented as fully custom designs or programed onto PLDs. My senior project in college was designing a CPU with a custom instruction set and programing the design onto a bunch of Altera PLDs (it took 6 of Altera's largest PLDs at the time to fit my CPU design). It was nowhere near as fast as implementing the design in a custom ASIC like fashion, but it allowed a college student like me to implement my design in less than a year, build it, and start running programs on my processor in the lab. This is in fact how PLDs are often used (as prototyping devices), they are also used when the expected number of parts needed will be small. If you only need a few hundred parts and they don't need to run very fast you are probably better off using a PLD, but if you are going to sell a few million chips, or they need to be as fast as possible you are probably better off designing an ASIC. A CPU or a GPU are really just special kinds of ASICs which can run software. My apologies if this was too rambling and confusing.