Tag: blockchain

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What is Tether?

Tether is a unique (and controversial) cryptocurrency.  It is unique in that it’s tied to existing fiat currencies.  Currently, Tether supports US Dollars (USD), Euros (EUR), and in the future Japanese Yen (JPY). What this intends to accomplish is limit the volatility of the Tether cryptocurrency to that of the underlying fiat asset.  All good so far.

The controversy is delineated in this TechCrunch article, not the least of which is the lack of transparency with their claims of fiat-backed cryptocurrency, which is in contradistinction to what its website states.  The same article points out that:

The most interesting thing about Tether is that you don’t need to redeem them for dollars. As long as a cryptocurrency exchange believes that one Tether is worth one dollar, you can just use your Tether to buy bitcoin, or ether, or whatevercoin, and then transfer / convert that to dollars.

So, although it’s yet to be verified that Tether is a fraud, it’s very much being used.  Certainly the utility of some type of fiat-based stablecoin is of interest to the crypto community in that it’s been one of the top ten cryptos for a while, in spite of its reputation.

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Blockchain Patience And WW III?

Gary Vee speaks about blockchain at the ChainXchange conference in Las Vegas on August 14, 2018.

He emphasizes patience, stressing that we are still early in the game.

He suggests becoming a practitioner in the execution of blockchain within your craft to make a long-term impact.

Re cryptocurrencies, he warns that it’s likely that 90-98% of currencies won’t make it. He notes that blockchain is a foregone conclusion, but the currencies built on it are not.

99% of people’s understanding of blockchain begins and ends with Bitcoin, which further signals that we are at the beginning.

If you truly understand blockchain and its inherently decentralized nature, how would China, Russia and the United States accept and allow it to happen? Other than atomic bombs and armies, it takes away all their leverage. Parallel this with a global movement of nationalism and blockchain becomes more vulnerable than you might think.

The internet has already upended the status quo and they don’t want blockchain to execute a 2.0 version on them.

The nirvana of blockchain at scale equates to the dynamics of WW III.

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A Case for EOS

https://youtu.be/A3Yp2Z50_lk
Dallas Rushing Discusses EOS:
* Instant transactions
* No-cost transactions
* Real-Name account names
* VCs have invested hundreds of millions of dollars to the EOS ecosystem
* Chinese govt ranked EOS as best blockchain in world
* Block producers who support the ecosystem
* Currently processing the most transactions per second of any blockchain in the world
* Blocktivity.info shows EOS as the most active blockchain in the world

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The Liabilities of Uncertain U.S. Crypto Regulation

Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse, whose company created cryptocurrency XRP, and Michael Arrington, the founder of TechCrunch, who now runs a dedicated crypto fund, shared their thoughts at TechCrunch Disrupt San Francisco yesterday.

Among a number of blockckain and crypto points, they discuss regulation, or lack of it in the United States. Arrington emphasized that the lack of regulatory clarity is “single-handedly fucking the next stage of technology development.”

Arrington also noted that he does not like EOS.

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Charles Hoskinson’s Presentation and Q&A re Cardano in Tel Aviv


In August 2018, in Tel Aviv, Charles Hoskinson discussed Cardano and answered questions about banks and cryptocurrencies.

Hoskinson is the CEO and Founder of Input | Output Hong Kong (IOHK), which is “a technology company committed to using peer-to-peer innovations to provide financial services to the three billion people who don’t have them.” They created the Cardano distributed computing platform that runs the blockchain for the Ada cryptocurrency, which aims to run smart contracts, decentralized applications, side chains, multi-party computation, and metadata.

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What is Cardano?

Cardano describes itself as (see link further below):

This is the first blockchain project to be developed from a scientific philosophy, and the only one to be designed and built by a global team of leading academics and engineers. It is essential that the technology is secure, flexible and scalable for use by many millions of users. Consequently, considerable thought and care from some of the leading experts in their fields has been devoted to the project and informed design decisions. The scientific rigour applied to mission-critical systems such as aerospace and banking has been brought to the field of cryptocurrencies, with a high assurance implementation. We believe this is the first time that this has been done.

A major innovation of Cardano is that it will balance the needs of users with those of regulators, and in doing so combine privacy with regulation. The vision for Cardano is that its new style of regulated computing will bring greater financial inclusion by providing open access for all to fair financial services.

https://www.cardano.org/en/what-is-cardano/

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“Mass Influence and Adoption of Blockchain Technology”

https://youtu.be/fXHsLsvvrMA

On Wed, August 15, 2018, at the Blockchain Futurist Conference 2018 in Toronto, Canada, Larry King moderated a panel discussion titled “Mass Influence and Adoption of Blockchain Technology,” with Charles Hoskinson, Justin Wu, Al Burgio, and Matthew Roszak.

The following time markers index the respective discussion points. Continue reading ““Mass Influence and Adoption of Blockchain Technology””

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What is EOS? (And EOS.IO?)

EOS is a cryptocurrency that powers the EOS.IO blockchain. Calling itself “The most powerful infrastructure for decentralized applications,” EOS.IO is a decentralized system that enables the development, hosting, and execution of commercial-scale decentralized applications (dapp) on its platform.

A dapp built on the EOS.IO platform does not require micropayments by end users to send messages and perform tasks. This is left up to the individual dapp developers to determine how transactions fees (which are extremely low) will be paid. This means companies are free to come up with their own monetization strategies and offer their users service for free or otherwise.

The EOSIO platform was developed by the private company Block.one and released as open-source software on June 1, 2018.

Here is how CEO, Brendan Blumer and CTO Daniel Larimer at Block.one describe it:

 

https://youtu.be/eRAxrqaqGEQ

An interesting point made by Blumer is “The idea of EOS is that if you’re able to build a basic website you should be able to build/launch a decentralized business.”

Furthermore, it’s also become the #1 (most active) blockchain on Blocktivity.info

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Social Privacy and Immutable Distribution

The problem of “whales,” or outsized influencers on blockchain media, such as Steemit, is well known. Few people with lots of social clout can disproportionately support or demote other perspectives. Such is antithetic to the ideals of decentralization but has come about as a way to incentive early adopters to help promote a platform based on blockchain’s immutable distribution. This will change. It may change on Steemit in the future. But it’s already changing on other blockchain social platforms, such as Trybe. Even so, the issue of how much or how little privacy should be required in such a community is unclear. This thread touches upon a discussion of related points.

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