Indeed. In an era where hot tech companies don't go public until they've eclipsed $20B (if ever!), the accredited investor rule feels like the rich & powerful making sure they can keep all of the best opportunities to themselves.
I messaged the CEO on LinkedIn to indicate interest in funding them. No response :(. A "No, thank you. We have bigger fish raise from" would've been nice.
Yes. XCAT is definitely the way forward for transactions that involve only XCAT-compatible chains. Especially as it can be implemented either in a pure P2P fashion or with trustless exchanges, resulting in zero or very low fees.
P2SH addresses can be brute forced several orders of magnitude faster than P2PKH. The attacker needs to generate 1-of-2 multisig scripts in the following form:
A new compressed pubkey must be generated every 2^24 iterations.
You compute a sha256 midstate from the first 64 bytes, then restore and compute over the rest of the script for each subsequent iteration, then ripemd160 the output. Very easy to GPU accelerate.
The slowest part of address generation is the elliptic curve math, and this avoids it entirely for most iterations, only needing to to refresh the public key when the counter rolls over.
Not true. Mining at later stages will provide miners with transaction fees which will be significantly high enough for them to focus on keeping the network secure rather trying to find colliding keys
Unless you have a hidden advantage, the cost of mining and the reward for collecting transaction fees will converge. The capital required to become a miner is very small, and the amount that a user can offer for fees is easy to change, allowing the market to be very efficient.
A good amount of companies operating in the space are private, guarding their financials as much as possible, so the field is not well covered by analysts, especially in emerging markets. I guess there's not enough incentive for an analyst, investment bank or brokerage house to pay for such research until someone in the field goes public. So unfortunately, we're restricted to random news articles.
"On top of all this is competition. Uber faces an aggressive and well-funded Indian rival, Ola Cabs, which operates in 100 cities and offers a wider range of services than Uber does."
"Russia's most popular search engine has not only beaten Google on its home turf, but has now left Uber in the dust in the Russian taxi market. The company has announced that its online-taxi services’ revenue has tripled in the second quarter of 2015. The Yandex.Taxi fleet has more than 15,000 vehicles in Moscow compared to 10,000 for its Israeli competitor Gett and America’s Uber with 3,000."
Analysis of Singapore market suggests that the playbook consisting of lowering the prices to undercut the taxi establishment works well in countries with expensive taxi services that limit medallions, not so well in countries with dirt-cheap and readily available taxi services http://sbr.com.sg/transport-logistics/news/sorry-uber-and-gr...
"the extremely high taxi penetration rate in Singapore means that it is less difficult for commuters to get a taxi in Singapore than in other cities, making it harder than elsewhere for Uber/Grab to get jobs for its drivers during off-peak hours."
Dude realized "hey, you own your content, not Facebook, even after you post it on Facebook. So with users' consent, I can download their data from Facebook and display it on my own website, right?" Thus he wrote something where people would enter their Facebook and other social network logins, and the site would aggregate their data. Basically a cross-platform social network.
Facebook was the only website to respond at all. They sued them for downloading data. (You own it, but when you try to get it out, you can't.) Facebook called it "spamming" and "hacking". The courts didn't really understand the topic (the article claims) but finally in the 9th district court the spam claim got thrown out and Facebook said they won't challenge that decision because there is still the hacking claim to be fought over.
How asking someone to give you a password for a specific purpose and then using that password for that specific purpose is hacking is beyond me. But then the article is fairly one-sided so I don't know the full story. The legal battle continues.
