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Apparently I have reached the limit of my free articles, despite not viewing a NYT article on my work computer in months. Can you copy and paste?paddyor wrote:https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/28/tech ... egram.html
Having predicted that bigtech would eventually try to co-opt this I'm not shocked. That'll be the end of bitcoin you'd imagine.
UncleFB wrote:Apparently I have reached the limit of my free articles, despite not viewing a NYT article on my work computer in months. Can you copy and paste?paddyor wrote:https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/28/tech ... egram.html
Having predicted that bigtech would eventually try to co-opt this I'm not shocked. That'll be the end of bitcoin you'd imagine.
SAN FRANCISCO — Some of the world’s biggest internet messaging companies are hoping to succeed where cryptocurrency start-ups have failed by introducing mainstream consumers to the alternative world of digital coins.
The internet outfits, including Facebook, Telegram and Signal, are planning to roll out new cryptocurrencies over the next year that are meant to allow users to send money to contacts on their messaging systems, like a Venmo or PayPal that can move across international borders.
The most anticipated but secretive project is underway at Facebook. The company is working on a coin that users of WhatsApp, which Facebook owns, could send to friends and family instantly, said five people briefed on the effort who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of confidentiality agreements.
The Facebook project is far enough along that the social networking giant has held conversations with cryptocurrency exchanges about selling the Facebook coin to consumers, said four people briefed on the negotiations.
Telegram, which has an estimated 300 million users worldwide, is also working on a digital coin. Signal, an encrypted messaging service that is popular among technologists and privacy advocates, has its own coin in the works. And so do the biggest messaging applications in South Korea and Japan, Kakao and Line.
The messaging companies have a reach that dwarfs the backers of earlier cryptocurrencies. Facebook and Telegram can make the digital wallets used for cryptocurrencies available, in an instant, to hundreds of millions of users.
All of the new projects are going after a market that has already proved popular with consumers. Venmo has taken off in the United States by making it easier to send payments by phone. And in China, many consumers use the payment system that operates inside the hugely popular WeChat messaging system.
“It’s pretty much the most fascinating thing happening in crypto right now,” said Eric Meltzer, a co-founder of a cryptocurrency-focused venture capital firm, Primitive Ventures. “They each have their own advantage in this battle, and it will be insane to watch it go down.”
In a statement, Facebook did not directly address its work on a digital coin. The other companies declined to comment on their projects. Most of them appear to be working on digital coins that could exist on a decentralized network of computers, independent to some degree of the companies that created them.
Like Bitcoin, the new cryptocurrencies would make it easier to move money between countries, particularly in the developing world where it is hard for ordinary people to open bank accounts and buy things online. The current designs being discussed generally do away with the energy-guzzling mining process that Bitcoin relies on.
But the messaging companies are likely to face many of the same regulatory and technological hurdles that have kept Bitcoin from going mainstream. The lack of a central authority over cryptocurrencies — a government or a bank — has made them useful to criminals and scammers, and the designs of the computer networks that manage them make it hard to handle significant numbers of transactions.
“They are all going to run up against these same types of technological limits,” said Richard Ma, the chief executive of Quantstamp, a firm that provides security audits for new cryptocurrencies.
The companies are throwing significant resources into their projects, even as the prices of cryptocurrencies have plunged over the last year.
Facebook has more than 50 engineers working on its project, three people familiar with the effort said. An industry website, The Block, has been keeping track of the steady flow of new job listings for the Facebook project.
The Facebook effort, which is being run by a former president of PayPal, David Marcus, started last year after Telegram raised an eye-popping $1.7 billion to fund its cryptocurrency project.
Facebook has been coy about what it is building. The team is in an office with separate key-card access so other Facebook employees cannot get in, according to two Facebook employees.
Facebook is looking at several ways to use the blockchain, the technology introduced by Bitcoin that makes it possible to keep shared records of financial transactions on several computers, rather than relying on one big central player like PayPal or Visa.
The five people who have been briefed on the Facebook team’s work said the company’s most immediate product was likely to be a coin that would be pegged to the value of traditional currencies, as Bloomberg first reported.
A digital token with a stable value would not be attractive to speculators — the main audience for cryptocurrencies so far — but it would allow consumers to hold it and pay for things without worrying about the value of the coin rising and falling.
Several other companies have recently introduced so-called stablecoins, linked to the value of the dollar. JPMorgan Chase even said it was experimenting with the concept last month.
Facebook is looking at pegging the value of its coin to a basket of different foreign currencies, rather than just the dollar, three people briefed on the plans said. Facebook could guarantee the value of the coin by backing every coin with a set number of dollars, euros and other national currencies held in Facebook bank accounts.
The company is overhauling its messaging infrastructure, which would connect three of its properties — Messenger, WhatsApp and Instagram. That integration, which could take more than a year, would extend the reach of Facebook’s digital currency across the 2.7 billion people who use one of the three apps each month.
The big question facing Facebook is how much control it would retain over the digital coin. If Facebook is responsible for approving every transaction and keeping track of every user, it is not clear why it would need a blockchain system, rather than a traditional, centralized system like PayPal.
That doesn't compete with Bitcoin at all. Bitcoin's main value is that it is decentralized, censorship-resistant and has a fixed monetary policy. None of that is true for these. These are basically just Paypal/Venmo for specific apps.paddyor wrote:https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/28/tech ... egram.html
Having predicted that bigtech would eventually try to co-opt this I'm not shocked. That'll be the end of bitcoin you'd imagine.
The only surprise is the number of credulous fools who are prepared to give their money to somebody else based on a nice website and some clever sounding jargon.etherman wrote:So they got into the dead Quadriga guys laptop, and found out he had already cleaned out all the accounts.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-47454528
The sort of folk you could sell "magic beans" to.A5D5E5 wrote:The only surprise is the number of credulous fools who are prepared to give their money to somebody else based on a nice website and some clever sounding jargon.etherman wrote:So they got into the dead Quadriga guys laptop, and found out he had already cleaned out all the accounts.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-47454528
Total scam. No offices,no bank accounts, no employees, co founder a convicted felon ( Michael Patryn/Omar Dhanani ) and the guy carries around 190 million Canadian in his laptop..!! Files a will 12 days before his death. FFS if I were ever going to scam my own demise, India would be top of my list to do it in.etherman wrote:So they got into the dead Quadriga guys laptop, and found out he had already cleaned out all the accounts.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-47454528
Yep. Unless you're really focused on what is happening in the world of digital currency, you're still riding horses.Harveys wrote:Bitcoin has been rallying hard the last five weeks, up 20% the last 7 days.
Do you still think this spells the end of Bitcoin?paddyor wrote:Who would've guessed a big co would try and co opt the "new tech"
https://twitter.com/Nouriel/status/1140750182373568514
I tend to subscribe to the view that all the Co's that paid in 10m did it just to be sure they wouldn't be missing out.
Because theres never been any fraud in the closed shop banking system.Yourmother wrote:Lightning just adds a bodge on top of the horrible inefficiency of bitcoin, and then loses the security.goeagles wrote:First, quite a bit of the energy used to mine Bitcoin comes from places with unused renewable energy, like hydro in Sichuan province, that would otherwise be wasted. But beyond that, just because you think Bitcoin is a waste of resources does not make it so. I happen to think, at the very least, it's an important hedge against a) the hyper-surveillance that will come with a cashless society, b) increasingly experimental monetary policy either being implemented (QE) or proposed (MMT) in developed nations and c) living under an authoritarian regime.Yourmother wrote:What a staggering waste of resources.goeagles wrote:Azlan Roar wrote:It now costs more to make bitcoin than the cryptocurrency is worth according to an analysis by JP Morgan Chase, published in NS
It might cost more than $3500 in most places, but Bitcoin mining has been remarkably efficient at finding the cheapest unused power sources. Also, the price has been around this level for a couple months. I doubt people are going to mine at a loss for months. When those with higher mining costs end up having to stop mining, the difficulty adjustment goes down and it costs less to mine.
In a world where we try to build tech to do things more efficiently, use less resource, and waste less energy, I present to you bitcoin.
Edit to add that Bitcoin could be more efficient but you basically have to trade security/vulnerability for efficiency. If you think of Bitcoin as a base settlement layer with other layers built on top of it, you want it to be very secure. Then you let layer 2 solutions like Lightning increase efficiency, without sacrificing anything on the base layer.
And speaking of security, simple open source code shared can lead to massive fraud, as has occurred.
But in the bitcoin world there is no recourse.
It’s a complete mess.
He is talking rubbish.Nabberuk wrote:Because theres never been any fraud in the closed shop banking system.Yourmother wrote:Lightning just adds a bodge on top of the horrible inefficiency of bitcoin, and then loses the security.goeagles wrote:First, quite a bit of the energy used to mine Bitcoin comes from places with unused renewable energy, like hydro in Sichuan province, that would otherwise be wasted. But beyond that, just because you think Bitcoin is a waste of resources does not make it so. I happen to think, at the very least, it's an important hedge against a) the hyper-surveillance that will come with a cashless society, b) increasingly experimental monetary policy either being implemented (QE) or proposed (MMT) in developed nations and c) living under an authoritarian regime.Yourmother wrote:What a staggering waste of resources.goeagles wrote: It might cost more than $3500 in most places, but Bitcoin mining has been remarkably efficient at finding the cheapest unused power sources. Also, the price has been around this level for a couple months. I doubt people are going to mine at a loss for months. When those with higher mining costs end up having to stop mining, the difficulty adjustment goes down and it costs less to mine.
In a world where we try to build tech to do things more efficiently, use less resource, and waste less energy, I present to you bitcoin.
Edit to add that Bitcoin could be more efficient but you basically have to trade security/vulnerability for efficiency. If you think of Bitcoin as a base settlement layer with other layers built on top of it, you want it to be very secure. Then you let layer 2 solutions like Lightning increase efficiency, without sacrificing anything on the base layer.
And speaking of security, simple open source code shared can lead to massive fraud, as has occurred.
But in the bitcoin world there is no recourse.
It’s a complete mess.
I remember getting a lecture from a young eighteen-year-old in a computer repair shop on the inherent vulnerability of open source software due to anyone being able to get the source code and write viruses and how the Windows security through obfuscation model was greatly superior to Linux for that reason.sorCrer wrote:He is talking rubbish.Nabberuk wrote:Because theres never been any fraud in the closed shop banking system.Yourmother wrote:
Lightning just adds a bodge on top of the horrible inefficiency of bitcoin, and then loses the security.
And speaking of security, simple open source code shared can lead to massive fraud, as has occurred.
But in the bitcoin world there is no recourse.
It’s a complete mess.
You'd think that someone would realise that open source software generally has less vulnerabilities due to it's codebase transparency.Rinkals wrote: I remember getting a lecture from a young eighteen-year-old in a computer repair shop on the inherent vulnerability of open source software due to anyone being able to get the source code and write viruses and how the Windows security through obfuscation model was greatly superior to Linux for that reason.
Still, I suppose it does provide an element of logic to the still-unformed mind.
I'll be happy either way.kiwinoz wrote:Next few days will be interesting. I expect a "lord giveth and lord taketh away" week or so.
sorCrer wrote:I'll be happy either way.kiwinoz wrote:Next few days will be interesting. I expect a "lord giveth and lord taketh away" week or so.
I'm sure you willsorCrer wrote:I'll be happy either way.kiwinoz wrote:Next few days will be interesting. I expect a "lord giveth and lord taketh away" week or so.
It will be interesting to watch, if we break through 11.6k and find support, well there are not many supports left to test before ATH.kiwinoz wrote:Next few days will be interesting. I expect a "lord giveth and lord taketh away" week or so.
FOMO will outweigh any people cashing in their profits. The speed it went from 9900 to 10400 was alarming.Harveys wrote:It will be interesting to watch, if we break through 11.6k and find support, well there are not many supports left to test before ATH.kiwinoz wrote:Next few days will be interesting. I expect a "lord giveth and lord taketh away" week or so.
But yea, some are sitting on good profits, id be surprised not to see some profit taking soon.
It will follow. The alts normally do. Hope so anyway. Edit: No need to be so open.Harveys wrote:XRP is having a lot of trouble breaking past .46.
.465 nowHarveys wrote:XRP is having a lot of trouble breaking past .46.
XRP & XLM have done fudge all this run, apparently XRP is always late to the party but still I expected it to be back at a dollar by now.sorCrer wrote:.465 nowHarveys wrote:XRP is having a lot of trouble breaking past .46.
Yep. XRP is like that but it's starting to move now. Stellar is too.Harveys wrote:XRP & XLM have done fudge all this run, apparently XRP is always late to the party but still I expected it to be back at a dollar by now.sorCrer wrote:.465 nowHarveys wrote:XRP is having a lot of trouble breaking past .46.
Been following Bitfinex and the Tether issue for years and it is very problematic. Bitfinex is a stable business though and appear confident that they can handle the tether loan repayment. Worrying yes, end of the world? Probably not.massive_field_goal wrote:I suggest any fan or speculator of cryptocurrencies, especially bitcoin, endeavour to read the following document at their own leisure:
https://iapps.courts.state.ny.us/fbem/D ... ystem=prod
I'm concerned about Tether and whether it's propped up. Have been since 2017.massive_field_goal wrote:"stable business"? that's not the impression I get reading that writ above!
i'm convinced they played/play a central role in manipulating prices higher - in fact it's almost a given. seeing as they are supposed to front up to court in less than two months with a bunch of documents disproving this, and so far they have only provided screenshots and twitter posts, it is highly likely they are having one last horrah before a shit load of money goes missing.