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> Blockchain today doesn't fulfill any human needs.

I am more than happy to disagree with that. Bitcoin is a monetary system that is fully independent of any existing financial system, and it's super robust. It's a great hedge against the existing financial system.

It offers permanent, irreversible settlement in under an hour, with payments to anywhere in the world. It offers irreversible logging and time-stamping, in a way that is programmatic and accessible. People are using this today, every day and gaining value out of it.

It's money that you can own without anyone realizing that you have it. Including oppressive governments. It's money that can't be seized. It's money that can't be censored. You balance can't be frozen because PayPal wants to run an investigation, or found some tiny ToS violation.

Bitcoin has a huge amount of value that a lot of people are actively making use of. If you can't see that, it's either because you don't understand, or because you are outside the group of people who benefit from this truly unique money.

Exactly. One of my eternal questions about shiny new technologies is, "Great, but who's getting value from it on a daily basis?"

I keep asking this about Bitcoin, et al. For 6 years I've been getting, "Oh, it's just about to take off! You'll see soon!"

The Internet was definitely delivering value daily by 1990. It wasn't just a technological curiosity. Email, Usenet, mailing lists, file transfer, remote computing: all providing the sort of benefits that let researchers and academics justify paying to connect up.

I think cryptocurrencies and blockchains are technologically neat, and I appreciate them on that level. But neat technology doesn't always end up being useful.

Perhaps this isn't on the same scale as the internet in the nineties but there are needs being met with this tech. I pay contractors in bitcoin. It saves on transaction fees and is really easy to do. It is especially useful for international payments.

It's funny that the examples you mentioned don't fulfill any human needs either. Why is the market cap 70 Billion? Because humans love to speculate. Couldn't that be called a human need?

I think one of the really good applications of blockchain technology, is to build a system superior to DNS: https://ens.domains/ The names are assigned in automated way, based on the highest bid. The name auction is run by a piece of code (which you can see here: https://github.com/ethereum/ens/blob/master/contracts/HashRe...). All domain name businesses (like Godaddy) could be automated away by a piece of code. That seems powerful to me.

I remember the internet in '95 and it sucked. The modem was loud as hell, everything took forever to load, there was very little content, and my parents would yell at me when they wanted to make a phone call.

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100% agreed

All currencies are an agreed upon abstraction of estimated future value. Some are less gentlemanly than others (inflation gives more value to the people that receive the money first in the money multiplier cycle.) Inflating digital scarcity by creating endless new liquidity pools which are not fungible with the largest liquidity pool reduces consensus, liquidity, and cooperation. The trade is in the hopes that the other projects create something useful and good beyond their liquidity/currency value. So far, they've caused more harm than good. You can fork technolgy and lower margins to 0, you can't fork network effect/adoption which is why VC's care so very much for network effect in their investments. It's one of the few ways to beat a billion dollars out of a capitalist society built to reduce margins and pricing power over time.

Thus, it's amazing that digital scarcity is working at all, it was tried and failed before with Chaumian cash, this one is working, but it could driven to failure be endless fragmentation, or at least slowed greatly. Speaking a common language is great. Fungibility is great.

If you are building awesome tech, do it, you don't need a "new" token to side step fundraising regulations. This idea that you can avoid securities law by offering securities but calling them "coins" is pretty silly.

I think GP means an aggregating fund, not a news aggregator.

Next one is MobileGO ICO which closes in like 3 days.. has raised the most so far in ICO than any other coin..

On the plus side, token sales are actually mainstream - so companies will actually be able to choose this hacked together version of the old public securities model and controlling their own destiny via DAOs and, well, simply setting up shop outside of the US. Choice is a good thing for companies, and it's a clever compromise - but if the only way VCs can invest is with hacks like this, I'm not feeling bullish on America's chance of participating in this new economy.

Yes! A VC telling us that bypassing VCs and enabling people to invest in what they want directly is bad. News at 11.

But no, you see, they are worried about SEC compliance. Aren't you glad VCs are looking out for your interests?

I was under the impression that you can't currently recover your files from a seed on sia. Is that correct?

I was also wondering if siacoin is LN compatible. Can you speak to that? It looks like there is something similar up, but will I be able to pay for storage with any other LN compatible coin?

I'd have loved to see the value of coins like these that are supposed to provide a specific economic utility have their value essentially determined by it. For instance you could simply mint new bitseconds * mining efficiency each time that someone issues a proof of storage over a given time period. This way the value of bitseconds shouldn't never go above the real price for storage over time.

Obviously you'd need to set the mining efficiency below 1 to encourage people to actually store user files, or else it'd always be more profitable to just store for the mining rewards.

Sia to the moon?

> useless and worthless ripple coins

https://ripple.com/files/xrp_cost_model_paper.pdf

> How quickly we forget average peoples buying million dollar homes without understanding the basics of interest rates.

If they are so stupid to buy a million dollar home without even having income (NINJA loans), it doesn't mean I must be out of all possible deals I can make.

And yes, by sharply increasing the barrier of entry, the government effectively standing in the way of me of making a fortune!

I'm not saying that I definitely make a fortune if there is no such requirement. I'm saying my chances would be significantly better (by the way, it doesn't imply that chances would be big, it's would be just better).

Unlike leftists, I never asking any help from the government. I never dare to think that rich owe me money! I never dare to blame the government if I lose my money in risky investment!

May be I'm sound aggressive but unlike leftists I'm super peaceful since I don't think anybody owe me anything!

I just want the government leave me alone.