You're not missing a thing. Bitcoin is sound in theory. In practice, though, humans are very flawed and they tend to submit to authority more than is healthy. In the case of Bitcoin in particular, the Core implementation has been declared the de facto reference client. Meaning, whatever they say goes. This has proven to be detrimental to Bitcoin as Blockstream, a private corporation is the employer of (or was cofounded by) the most influential Core contributors. Those who disagreed with the direction Blockstream wanted to steer the project to, were removed from their authority position. Now as a result, Bitcoin is unable to scale. Blockstream keeps delaying a simple upgrade that would do just that and at the same time, keeps pushing competing solutions like LN and Liquid. I think Bitcoin as an experiment in human behavior was very interesting. But as a revolutionary technology, not that successful...
> This has proven to be detrimental to Bitcoin as Blockstream, a private corporation is the employer of (or was cofounded by) the most influential Core contributors.
This is a false narrative peddled by BCash supporters. The bottom line is that the market had a chance to decide if they want to go the BCash route or the Bitcoin Core route, it chose the latter, now the supporters of the former are salty.
I'm so blown away by the clarity of speech! After hearing him talk like that, hearing the normal bird noises almost sounds strange, like a human mimicking a bird, or like he's gotten impatient and wants us to understand his native language.
If you haven't watched it already, you should check out 'Dancing With The Birds' on Netflix. Maybe I'm biased being a huge bird lover, but man that movie left me in awe. This scene in particular...
https://youtu.be/Eg0iSIHIK34
You might enjoy the superb lyre bird imitating sounds as mind boggling as a chainsaw--and when I say imitate, I mean I couldn't have distinguished the lyre bird sound from a real chainsaw. It's really mind-boggling to me.
Many compress quite a lot before uploading. For gaming for example, I noticed significant improvement if I uploaded the 100Mbps raw data from Shadowplay compared to say a 25Mbps intermediate version.
I also think the depth of field is helping a lot. By blurring out the background the bits can be spent encoding the details of the plumage.
That’s probably a simplistic view?
An ICO obviously introduces trust in a third party (the company issuing the ICO). Does that mean all ICOs defeat the purposes of crypto? To the degree that your view of crypto is that it is all about decentralized, quasi anonymous money transfer yes. To the degree that you consider the other benefits of crypto assets, no.
To add weight to the latter view point, I’d argue that Ethereum was the first ICO. Is the whole “purpose” of crypto negated with Ethereum? That’s a hard position to defend imho.
There are probably a lot of in-between cases where a cryptocurrency can be used convert trust in a well respected 3rd party to trust in someone unknown.
For example to have an "account" at a national reserve bank, you basically need to be a bank. A reserve bank could promise to honour certain cryptocurrency transactions between registered banks. But the blockchain as a whole could serve include both reserve-compatible-account-ids and arbitrary users.
Whether that would be good for anything is another matter. In particular you need a well respected 3rd party who actually wants to back a cryptocurrency. That's not a big set intersection, and Venezuela is not in a position to make it larger.
I wonder if anyone's done any old-west historical fiction with a mild-mannered, quiet, but well respected general store owner who is actually a scheming Machiavellian underneath?
