Whats missing is proof of delivery, and thats the most important thing. I'm not just paying AWS to store my files, I'm paying them to deliver my files.
Maybe this could work as an alternative to glacier. But even then, I doubt it. I'd take Amazon with an SLA any day of the week.
That's the other way you get paid in Filecoin, payment channels for retrieving files. Although it's not technically "mining" it's easier to think about Filecoin having two types of miners: Storage and retrieval. Since it's incentivized there's a good chance you'll get your files back quickly if you're willing to pay more or if it's a common file.
As long as Filecoins is traded on a market, and not tied to actual cpu/bandwidth/storage costs, then if will ALWAYS be more expensive then AWS (and alternatives).
If I go out and spend $20,000 on a a 480TB file server and I were charging AWS prices ($0.023/GB), I could get $11,040/ month. After two months my investment would have paid for itself. I'm not sure why you think markets are inefficient and somehow AWS is superior, but folks could be getting paid 10x less than AWS and still making money on their investments.
Inversely, people could be storing their files for 10x cheaper than on AWS.
Because Filecoin being a tradable asset as well as a utility confuses how it's valued. If it rises quickly, it's better to sell then spend. If it drops, it's bad for those running servers. Both ups and downs are being driven by forces which have nothing to do with cost of services, that's the problem. Unless they fix the price of Filecoin against the USD to make it a real utility, it's a get rich quick scheme.
Not sure how thats true, If you and I can negotiate a price we are willing to pay for a given thing, it doesnt matter what the token is tied to or traded on.
You see Sia's Skynet announcement yet? It is the only technically 100% decentralized product and Downloading stuff from skynet is fast. check out their announcement that is on skynet.. 4k vid in there showing the speeds. It is impressive. https://siasky.net/GADwbULtGj2NuBXJrQPBkivr6etO5uD4BSToixUUS...
I gave a presentation at Berkeley a few years back, right before Bram Cohen (BitTorrent) presented his Chia proof, Proofs of Space and Time (before IPFS ripped the name from Bram).
You wrote that tokens in the safe harbor will need less registration and disclosure, but no comment on what that registration or disclosure will entail, or why it is less than sufficient.
In politics, there's a huge incentive for insiders to appear to be a kingmaker. Names like Shadow and ACRONYM play into that stereotype of a behind the scenes puppet master, that politicians will pay big dollars to get them / keep them in power.
At a larger level, it makes understanding whats happening really difficult. Its hard to tell who is actually corrupt and who is "peacocking" corruption.
Not a coincidence, an inevitability. Bill and Hillary Clinton have been in politics for many years, Bill Clinton was President for 8 years and Hillary ran for President twice. Anyone who is anyone in the Democratic party would want to work for them at some point.
That’s a fair point. Although... when you think about the idea of peacocking that you are a kingmaker, it just flat out reminds me of the hubris that lost Clinton 2016 and that her staffers had to bear some of the blame.
Now here we are years later and there are “app voting irregularities” from the people that swore up and down Russia was hacking our elections, you think those people would be more cautious if they actually believed those claims themselves.
Thinking about it some more, I guess this is probably a “attribute to incompetence, not malice” situation, but as amusing as I found it, really was just made for the conspiracy theorist!
Go to any political environment, everyone tries to swagger like they are the best connected in the room. Hell, go to any convention anywhere and see the same thing.
State Democratic parties are cheap and obstinate. Most of the money is siphoned off by salaries and contractors. They don't work together nor work with the national party. When the deign to do so it is because their offered a lot of funding or favors.
dApp is kind of a flexible word, but the typical unifying feature is that the user has custody of a private key they use for signing transactions on a distributed ledger.
Most dApps (at least the ones you access through a dApp browser) have UIs built using regular web technology, and served over http.
As for why Google/Apple are doing this, I can only imagine that it threatens their walled garden by giving web users more access to payments that they'd rather monetize.
For those unaware, Uniswap is a decentralized exchange without an order book. Rather than matching orders to buy and sell, it has a liquidity pool. As users buy/sell from the pool, the price to buy/sell automatically adjust to maintain a certain ratio.
The lack of an order book makes it extremely simple (and transaction cost efficient).
The down side is that to "bootstrap" a market, you need a liquidity provider willing to put up twice the value of the asset. There's also slippage costs and front running concerns.
How does the lack of an order book make the process of trading simpler and/or more efficient?
An order book that could handle 1 million TPS could be written in Java and run on a single cheap (sub $1000) piece of commodity hardware. And it wouldn't require much development effort - the mechanics of automated order matching is really very simple - almost trivial and implementations have been around since the 1960s.
In the context of all the inefficiencies and frictions in financial industry, the cost of actually matching orders by computers is effectively zero.
I don't think simple here necessarily means simpler in backend implementation. I'll even argue that the implementation of a decentralized exchange on Ethereum is far more nontrivial than implementing a conventional order book exchange.
Uniswap is simple in the sense that for liquidity takers, the UI makes it feel like you're not trading, but rather that you're buying/selling coins at an offered price, with an assurance that the transaction will be canceled if it's not possible to fill the order without exceeding a certain amount of slippage. Almost like buying from a decentralized Coinbase. Yes, this is essentially just a market order, but you can have unrestrained slippage concerns in limit order books (especially in crypto where spoofing is commonplace), and beginners need to be taught about limit orders to avoid those pitfalls.
For intermediate traders and beyond, it's simply another exchange that can be used, but this paper does give validation that their pricing mechanism is competitive.
I guess the difference here is that a decentralised order book on the block chain would be run by every node, which is why compute in the blockchain (gas) is quite expensive.
I'm not sure why a blockchain is needed for this. Can't they just have an API where certain posts are "flagged" and hidden in the official UI? If you want to opt-out, you simply use a UI that doesn't hide flagged.
Yeah, but then they could be ordered to take it down. I think the idea is to be censorship resistant in such a way that the company itself cannot make exceptions when pressured by a court, but I'm forgetting if that's me reading between the lines or if Dorsey explicitly talks about censorship resistance.
I guarantee you that if you tell a judge you can't take something down "because you use blockchain" the judge will not care and just sanction your company.
To the degree that you provide a service the courts can order you not to provide it. If you've built something which makes it necessary to remove all content to remove any content, that's on you.
Telling the government "I know you've told me to take it down, but we specifically designed it in such a way that we can't take it down" sounds like an incredibly good legal strategy that will definitely not backfire.
So far, the "we can't do that" defense has worked for companies that provide E2E encryption. The government may change the rules, of course; they keep talking about it.
It is not enough because the true goal of moderation is not to hide content people don't like, but to lock out people the majority of people don't like so they can't communicate or work together to spread their (probably hateful) message.
Putting it on a blockchain is abdicating responsibility for any and all content, saying "hey, we just wrote the code, we don't store or propagate any of this ourselves."
Putting it on a blockchain doesn't magically remove responsibility. Twitter would still likely end up hosting that blockchain, since nobody else is going to foot that cost, and then they would still have fully responsibility over it.
If they just want to decentralize & use peer-to-peer instead they could also do that, and a blockchain still wouldn't be a useful aspect there. That's just a mailing list.
> Putting it on a blockchain doesn't magically remove responsibility.
I'm still kind of amazed that the government hasn't cracked down on bitcoin miners for hosting child pornography yet; every full node is hosting it. If the government ever wants to crack down on blockchains they have a valid legal excuse. The longer they go without cracking down, the more it seems like we as a society are accepting the existence of a censorship free medium of communication.
I'm not convinced that nobody else would host it. If they really made a blockchain anybody could post to it would seem difficult to stop other companies from making frontends for it.
> I'm not convinced that nobody else would host it. If they really made a blockchain anybody could post to it would seem difficult to stop other companies from making frontends for it.
How are those companies going to make money from hosting tweets? Are you letting blockchain hosts inject things? If so that's a security & privacy nightmare just waiting to happen. If not, it's financially insane to host it unless twitter pays people to do so. And if they do that then hey they're simply contractors for twitter, and twitter is again bearing the full burden of responsibility.
The same question can be asked of Twitter. Twitter serves up other content alongside tweets, and makes a profit doing it (as of last year). Is this a privacy nightmare? Yup. Is it more of a privacy nightmare if a different company does it? Depends on the company. Maybe a given user will trust a given provider more than they trust Twitter, or maybe they'll like their ad policy more, or maybe they'll be willing to pay a premium to not be served ads, or maybe they'll want to search through tweets using more specific filters than Twitter allows. To me, choice of provider sounds like something that should increase security for those who desire it and educate themselves. For those who don't, there are other tradeoffs they can make.
This all assumes I'm interpretting Dorsey's statements correctly, and of course I may not be.
> Twitter would still likely end up hosting that blockchain, since nobody else is going to foot that cost
Why do you assume that? Modern blockchains are not proof-of-work, and the only info you need on a blockchain are permissions and encryption keys to data on other distributed storage networks (e.g, IPFS.)
So the cost isn't really very high, and probably worth the tradeoff for groups that feel alienated or disenfranchised.
Modern blockchains don't host images and face twitter's level of traffic, either.
Bandwidth & storage isn't free. Why would anyone voluntarily just do that for Twitter? Even if it's literally entirely free to setup & host, that's still someone's time & motivation to do so. People do this for blockchain because they're trying to get rich off of it. There's no money in hosting tweets.
The author of this article is turning inches into miles. SAFTs aren't dead. The SEC is alleging Telegram has failed to deliver the promises it has made, so the SEC is pre-emptively stating they need to halt delivery. Presumably, once they complete their promises they'll be able to deliver Grams.
From the SEC Complaint:
The Whitepaper spoke of potential future products and services that investors
could use in connection with Grams, but also made clear that these products were not available at the time the Offering began and would not be available by the time Defendants delivered Grams to Initial Purchasers.
Telegram, however, does seem to be in a pickle regarding the PoS consensus model. The SEC seems to be alleging that in order for the network to be sufficiently decentralized, having only qualified investors staking is not enough.
Also from the SEC complaint:
Defendants knew, however, that to actually implement the TON Blockchain in the real world, the project would require “numerosity”: a widespread distribution and use of Grams across the globe. Indeed, by definition, the TON Blockchain can only become truly decentralized (as contemplated and promoted in the Offering Documents) if Grams holders other than the original Grams purchasers actually stake Grams and, thereby, act as “validators” of transactions on the TON Blockchain. Stated differently, if the original Grams purchasers alone all immediately staked their holdings, the TON Blockchain would be centralized rather than decentralized and, therefore, subject to misuse and majority attacks. This fundamental need for additional Grams holders demonstrates that the TON Blockchain was designed from inception to require the Initial Purchasers to immediately distribute their holdings to the public.
Indeed what they want is an S-1 or an F-1 form filling. A security registration. That's it. The SEC has no opinion on the offering other than they think it's a security (this claim itself could also be challenged), and as such has to be registered under the 1933 act.
What are the odds that Telegram, despite believing they didn't need to do an S-1 or F-1 form filing, complied with the letter of everything that the form filing is intended to determine? They would likely have to materially change the offering so that the form filing didn't invite another action.
(author here) nah, pretty sure SAFTs are dead. The whole point of the SAFT rigmarole was to sell tokens as securities but not have them be securities on delivery, pretty much as Telegram was planning to do here - the point was not to be considered securities by the SEC.
This complaint demonstrates what the SEC think of the idea, i.e. they don't care and will look at how your token actually works and whether this is an investment contract under the Howey test.
But as I said - maybe Telegram will prevail in court! Do you feel lucky?
A SAFT allows a party to offer the delivery of tokens at some point in the future. This offering is a securities offering under US law, and therefore has to comply with the relevant regulations. In practical terms, that means filing some forms with the SEC, ranging from fairly lightweight forms if you're offering the SAFT privately without marketing, to increasingly heavy burdens if you want to market it, and the "mini-IPO" leavels of bureaucracy that would attach to a Reg A+ offering. So, it's perfectly possible to offer a compliant SAFT if you do it right.
The problem comes when the tokens are to be delivered (which was imminent, in Telegram's case). The SEC argues that not only was the SAFT contract a security, but the rights offered to Gram holders are themselves constitutive of a security, despite not being registered as such.
The SAFT is a security, but one for which Telegram appears to have been mostly compliant. The tokens themselves, which are set to be delivered to those original investors, are not registered as securities, and this is the problem, because the plan is to distribute those widely to the public, or "retail investors" as they would be regarded in the context of a securities offering.
If the Gram token were not a security, designed in such a way as to avoid triggering the Howey test, then there would be no problem (aside from Telegram's other problems, but I'm keeping the scope narrow here).
So the "SAFT is dead" argument isn't that the SAFT is automatically non-compliant, or that nobody can do a compliant SAFT offering, but instead is this: that some people in the blockchain community erroneously encouraged the belief that whilst a SAFT offering is a securities offering, the tokens that result from the investment are somehow prevented from becoming securities because the "security-ness" stuck to the SAFT itself, and that this view was wrong.
This gets tricky to discuss because the SAFT contract is basically fine, but the mistaken understanding of what a SAFT can do in practice is what allowed people to believe that selling Grams to the general public was likely to be a non-regulated activity. So, that interpretation of what SAFTs can do is dead, yes. For my part, it's not something that I ever believed, so it doesn't register as being the real news here.
What I mean by "SAFT is dead" is that the purpose they were overwhelmingly used for - which really was to try to sell token futures as a security, but have the resulting tokens not be a security - is a non-starter.
Sure you can try to construct exceptions to this - but dodging the Howey test was what SAFTs were invented for, and I feel reasonably confident in stating that this complaint against Telegram makes it very clear that this just isn't going to fly.
> they don't care and will look at how your token actually works and whether this is an investment contract under the Howey test.
This is 100% correct, but you're making the wrong conclusion. You're concluding the SEC considers the legal framework bogus, when the SEC is arguing they have not met the legal framework.
In a SAFT you sell securities for future non-securities. What Telegram did was sell securities for future securities. There's a couple of facts they use in this assertion:
1. Telegram said they would leverage their existing user base to promote the token (i.e. the success of Grams is based on Telegram's efforts as a promoter)
2. TON is PoS, and that its not possible to deliver a PoS network when the original stakers are all qualified investors
Maybe this could work as an alternative to glacier. But even then, I doubt it. I'd take Amazon with an SLA any day of the week.