You're misunderstanding Kin. Kin is not "controlled by Kik" it is an asset that will be exchangeable in and out of the Kik ecosystem. Furthermore, Kin balances will be kept on a public ledger and any other company could build extensions and uses of the currency.
It would be as if your Walmart dollars actually had an exchange for other currency. I would see this as a good thing. Then the poor worker who is being paid in Walmart dollars can know exactly how much they're being paid.
Kik is holding onto the majority of said asset, which has no demand - so no real value. They're hoping to create demand and so there is is value - because demand seems to dictate the cost. That will make the portion they are holding have value - that will give them buying power that they wouldn't otherwise have, I'm not sure that is fair or a good thing.
Without reading the whitepaper (so I don't know the rules of the currency), if they are able to issue/withdraw coins as they wish, I doubt it will become a trusted coin.
So people won't be willing to pay too much for it, nor will they want to build apps with it as a base currency....at least I won't
Considering the core algorithms behind proof of stake have been around since the 80's, and that Bitcoin's core contribution is usually cited as PoW, there are probably some good parts.
It's a weird concept to accept but actually the really interesting and useful property of PoW is that you can provide a proof that you destroyed physical resources (provably wasting electricity) which are committed to one and exactly one interpretation of history.
Stake based systems lock or burn or manage coins, but there's no provable tether from those coins (defined only within the system) to the real world.
PoW has an undeniable tether to the real world in the form of waste.
> useful property of PoW is that you can provide a proof that you destroyed physical resources
Thought experiment:
Say there's a PoW currency A, and PoS currency B.
Alice mines A.
Now Bob wants currency A, but he can't afford to mine currency A, because he needs special hardware.
So Bob exchanges currency B for currency A with Alice. Alice now holds some currency B, and Bob is happy with A. Now the question is, would Alice see that she "destroyed physical resources" for currency B? (Yes, to Alice she had to destroy physical resources)
Later, Alice wants to transact with Charlie, who also holds currency B. She transfers her B to Charlie, that was bought using A. Would Charlie care that Alice had to "destroy physical resources" to get B? (No, that information is useless in a PoS system)
Some time in the future, currency B becomes very popular (as it's just as secure and not wasting resources like currency A). Alice wants more B too, so she exchanges her B with the masses. Eventually, currency B takes over A in popularity, and by that time, Alice has exchanged all her A for B. The question is, would Alice now view that to get B, she had to "destroy physical resources"? Would that fact matter if she continues to transact with Charlie?
>Bob exchanges currency B for currency A with Alice. Alice now holds some currency B
There is no reason for Alice to want B, a less secure money than A which they already hold. If Alice were perfect mathematician, this exchange would never occur.
I'm failing to see your point. I do not know why, nether don't care, why Alice wants to buy currency B. Maybe she just wanted to buy some coffee from Charlie, and she was comfortable that her transaction didn't burn thousands of dollars of electricity to verify it? Maybe it was early in the morning? Faster block times means she'll get her coffee sooner. If that was the reason, let's hope she was satisfied with her coffee.
I also do not care why currency B got so popular, but I suspect it may have been because of the coffee ICO ;-)
Oh, and then there were cryptocurrencies C, D and F too, but that's a different thought experiment.
Yeah, it does seem fairly healthy, but one has to admit that Boston would be a very different place today if Microsoft and Facebook (and YC) had stayed. At this point Kendall Square really is all about the biotech (aside from the research offices of big west coast firms like MS, Amazon, and Google.
Also troubling about Boston startups is the frequency with which the best get bought by SV companies. Seems to me that this also tends to limit local growth. So not bad at all, but not what might have been either.
You basically just said what I'm saying, but in a different way. If you're not biotech, you're not particularly interesting to the Boston VC community. Not to say that you can't start a company without VC. But if you need VC, the Boston non-biotech venture-backed startup ecosystem is dying a slow death.
This notation has developed over tens to hundreds of years before we had the capabilities of autocomplete and formal typing where a computer can help us write longer names more quickly. This is why single letters became prominent, they were simply easier and faster to write.
But anyone who is serious about writing maintainable code today should be using an IDE where the benefits of susinctness are entirely relegated by intellisense-like tools.
Trading readability for conciseness is near the top of my list of "crimes against future maintainers."
So I had never thought about this in the context of mathematical symbols, but this makes total sense and I'm strongly in favor of relegating mathematical conciseness in favor of readability and specificity.
It's actually the other way around. Mathematical notation used to be very much language-like and tedious to read. As time went by (and math became more complicated) notation was developed to make it more succinct and easier to understand. (And sometimes the more succinct notation helps to develop new insights. The change from Roman to the Indian/Arabic number systems made calculations easier for everybody)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_mathematical_notati...
Compare the two following statements:
One from Euklid's elements (written 2.5k years ago):
"Given two straight lines constructed from the ends of a straight line and meeting in a point, there cannot be constructed from the ends of the same straight line, and on the same side of it, two other straight lines meeting in another point and equal to the former two respectively, namely each equal to that from the same end."
And my attempt of translating the above, in what should effectively be Hilbert's notation (19th-20th century):
If there are two triangles ABC and ABD where AC=AD and BC=BD and C and D are on the same side of AB then C and D are the same point.
Proofs by picture arent proofs though. And how would you even convey by picture that two line segments are of the same length. Or that if you drew C and D as separate points they turn out to be the same point?
Those look more like proofs with pictures, than proofs by picture, but I'm too lazy to get involved into the obscure notation of that book and check whether a random proof from the book would be equivalent to a modern proof from a standard textbook.
Altough, judging by the old timey language of the book, it's possible the book predates Hilbert's axiomatization of Euclidean geometry and the proofs in it were good enough for the standards of its time.
In modern mathematics proof by picture generally means you've drawn / pointed out a single example, possibly wrongly or in a way that doesn't generalize, and because you've shown that one example holds you assume all possible examples hold. That, obviously, needs not be the case.
If you're talking about mathematically rigorous programming, conciseness and readability go hand in hand. It's actually easier to read a formula with single letter components than a complex one with long descriptive names in many cases. Also, if you're doing that kind of programming, you're also doing a lot of hand or latex computation. Minimizing the visual distance between the code and the convenient handwritten or typeset notation is incredibly important.
This problem is every bit as much a political and cultural problem as it is a technological one. So I largely agree.
But from a technological perspective, even if 2016 is the high water mark of the "centralized" internet, a new internet is forming. That which you lament is the natural result of a centralized system. It's something that the early creators of the internet have warned about since its inception. But now as the incumbents centralize control, a new generation of technologists (helped by many of those early creators) are constructing the underpinnings of "Web 3.0", a decentralized internet built on Ethereum, IPFS, WebTorrent, BigchainDB, SOLID et al.
There is plenty left to do, it is still a newborn child... nobody knows where this goes. But come 2030, I agree we'll look back on 2016 as the high water mark of the centralized internet. But instead of longing for how things were in the 1990s and 2000s, we'll say "good riddance".
All that said, the battle needs to happen on the political front at the same time, which makes EFF, FFTF, and ACLU so important.
This is a tactic used by authoritarian governments and is a distinct reason why laws that are poorly enforced are bad laws.
A poorly enforced law provides a tool for executives (the law enforcers) to legislate (make their own laws) without any say from the real legislators. It's a loophole of sorts in the US's separation of powers.
Take marijuana. It's illegal to smoke marijuana. It's not illegal to be black. Yet the selective enforcement of the marijuana law allows authorities in any given district to shape policy on race without ever having to explicitly put a law on the books.
This is why the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act is so dangerous. It is broad enough to be used as a tool to enforce laws that would be too unpopular to explicitly pass.
It's also why threats from the US government to "ban encryption" should not be taken idly. You think to yourself, "Certainly they couldn't ban encryption, nothing would work without it." But they wouldn't enforce it across the board, only selectively.
This is very specifically a tactic used in Russia to exploit control over policing powers into corrupt control or exploitation of businesses. They make byzantine laws that are extraordinarily difficult to comply with, then provide unofficial licenses to ignore those laws to those who remain in their favor. (And even if you did manage to comply with the laws, your corrupt competitors don't, and will out-compete you).
I remember reading a story of a multi-billion dollar corporation in Russia being sold for pennies on the dollar, essentially at gunpoint. Otherwise, they'd prosecute it for being run illegally, since essentially all corporations are run illegally, because that's how Russia's legal system is set up.
Last I checked, encryption _is_ banned in the U.S., isn't it? So it's already the case that the government could selectively jail people for using encryption, as it sees fit.
Check out Brave (browser) with built in payments. Of course, this doesn't solve your problem of who's signed up, but Brave has a protocol for that scenario and they reach out to sites and offer them the money before returning it back to you.
It would be as if your Walmart dollars actually had an exchange for other currency. I would see this as a good thing. Then the poor worker who is being paid in Walmart dollars can know exactly how much they're being paid.