Someone has to feel sorry for Btc. Many people are going to lose money. Bitcoin has value. It is only Btc people that took a very nice technology and crippled it. The put a cap in it's block size, and they removed instructions of the Bitcoin Script language.
Bitcoin's usage lies in it's use as an immutable ledger, that no one can change the past. We can put other information inside it,alongside with the money transactions, and we can be absolutely sure that no one messed with that information. An infinite number of use cases.
For example say a cop makes an arrest. How can we be sure that the arrest was legitimate? A random person with a video camera may record the arrest, go to his home, edit it however he likes, upload it to the internet, and boom huge civil unrest! The solution lies with the cop recording the arrest by himself, uploading the information right away to the blockchain, and no person on the planet, no state, no goverment, can mess up with that information. The timestamp of the arrest is important too!
I don't understand how "uploading the information right away to the blockchain" changes anything in this situation. Arrest information is already logged somewhere, and even if it was logged in an immutable public ledger that doesn't mean that people wouldn't immediately distrust arrests depending on the circumstances regardless of a blockchain being involved. It really seems like this post is just another example of vaunting the all-powerful all-knowing blockchain without it being clear and specific as to what the blockchain actually DOES for us in this situation.
If a person distrusts always anything, from anyone, from anywhere then it is true that blockchain doesn't provide any solution. However blockchain can make it more difficult, for a corrupt official to change some official documents, or in some cases to make them disappear completely. The timestamp of the arrest is of the utterly most importance. When a cop that may be corrupt or not, we don't know, upload the arrest after 10 hours, then something fishy might going on, the video might be edited. People around usually witness the arrest, and they know around what time it took place. If the data is uploaded 10 minutes after the arrest, then we are more sure of the legitimace, than after 10 hours. That's all.
From what I've seen of police misconduct, the general form of misconduct is that the police officers generally just blatantly lie. The problem isn't that they're editing records of things that happened, the problem is that they're lying about the records in the first place--and I think the George Floyd protests make perfectly clear that they are more than willing to lie even when they know that hard evidence (in the form of other people recording the scene) contradicting them will exist.
That's the basic problem with blockchain: it only really provides nonrepudiation (someone can't back away from a statement they made previously). It doesn't have a solution for people willing to commit perjury, and when you look at all of the social situations where official records are distrusted, the main reason for that is that officials are known to be committing perjury and face no repercussions for it.
Yeah, i confess there is a tiny little probability that blockchain doesn't solve all of the worlds problems. But when we can have documents that absolutely no human can alter, then that human doesn't have absolute power, so it means, this less than absolute power, corrupts less than absolutely. A step to the right direction maybe?
But how do you know that the thing that is uploaded is legitimate? You can move information into the blockchain but the actual use of that information still happens in the real world so I don't see blockchain changing things that much.
Well, when there are some official documents that spawn huge controversy, in a big company or a nation or whatever, and no one ever does destroy some evidence, or distort them in some way beneficial to him, then indeed blockchain isn't much of a use.
Sponsoring of open source projects is a problem that bitcoin aims to solve. That and many others. The electronic cash bitcoin not the currency bitcoin. The owners of the project will be able to construct an electronic company, and any value that a user gives, will be shared to the shareholders, in line of the shares any shareholder has to the project, i.e. how much he has contributed. A user wants a new feature or a fix of a bug? He gives coins to the open source company, and they will implement it. This will give incentive for programmers to increase the quality of the code, better documentation etc.
Besides the fact that existing systems work fine for this, the idea that users pay for a fix or feature is ludicrious.
Users are terrible project managers. They report things as bugs that aren't bugs, they request features that don't improve the product, they in general have a low hitrate in terms of providing successful direction for a project.
Setting up a system where users pay for a _specific_ thing to happen is just asking for trouble.
Users paying for development they already find useful, or for concepts that they believe have promise - that's the way to do it.
Yeah, that's all true, that users sometimes think of something as useful and it is not. Nothing to be done about it, except education. But let's say some users want of an open source program to integrate some graphs somewhere. They go to a social media and they ask the users. "How many find useful these graphs?" The users hit like to the feature, and they immediately transfer a small value to the owners of the project. In case the sum of all the values of all the users is enough, the owners of the project may go forward, accept the funds and allocate resources to implement this feature.
Well if a company wants to give a large sum of money to an open source project for a feature, say a hundred dollars, or a thousand then it is the same. Electronic cash, i.e. bitcoin work better than the traditional ways of payment when there is a necessity for crowdfunding a little bit of money less than a penny, a 1/10 of a penny or 1/100, or 1/1000, from thousands of users. The reason bitcoin works better in that case, is because bitcoin is absolutely automated while in traditional payment systems a human is required to oversee the payments in case there is a fraud somewhere. That means a human is required to be paid, and humans are expensive to employ. That increases the cost of every transaction, as well as increases the minimal amount of the transferable value.
The electronic money that are known now as bitcoin, took a different turn from the white paper of Satoshi. That's why i said the electronic cash Bitcoin, not the currency Bitcoin. Some people wanted to take that electronic cash idea, and turn it into currency. That's a bad idea.
Well when bitcoin first started, i didn't have any transaction fees. Afterwards the protocol changed, forks did happen, and confusion ensued. However some programs start to emerge, about incentivizing social media users to post good content[1]. And of course open source developers should be incentivized by their users to fix the bugs, implement popular features that theirs users want etc. So some things start to happen, well mainstream adoption is a little bit far, but it will happen eventually.
Are there any movements to get bitcoin accepted by established platforms used for sponsoring development? (GitHub Sponsors, Patreon, Open Collective, Ko-Fi etc..)
Who knows where it is accepted! The things that can be implemented are for example contributing computational power. Lichess users do that [1], i use it all the time, but they do it for purely altruistic reasons. Altruism doesn't go very far by himself when the donor consumes valuable resources. That's why there is a cap on the total games someone can analyse, to avoid the tragedy of the commons.
In lichess billions of games are played each month, and lichess is accepting donations of big amounts of money, i.e. 10 dollars, 100 dollars. How about with every game that is played the players pay less than a penny, 0.1 penny of a dollar? Personally that would cost me less than a penny for each day of playing. Lichess would make a lot more money, than individual donors who pay big amounts, and everyone else playing for free.
See how ruthlessly i got downvoted, maybe it is the case that no one knows what bitcoin is. Bitcoin is nothing for free, everything is paid for. Using supercash almost infinitely divided, to small amounts. If that is implemented already in the traditional financial systems how come no one is doing it?
That is all true. Sugar is very bad, but i consider every kind of animal product even worse. I am a vegan for years. The best plants to eat for best vision are those that have the compound carotenium. Many plants compose it including carrots, but in my personal experience the most carotenium of all the plants is in the bark of the pine tree. A food source so abundant, it is almost infinitely abundant. I eat the bark every day for years now, 10 or 20 hours a day straight. Once a day i eat some other plants. The best plant for keeping your eyesight healthy, and maybe even reverse any damage.
Native American Indians ate the bark of the pine tree for tens of thousands of years. Their skin changed colour as a consequence of so much carotenium.
Bitcoin's usage lies in it's use as an immutable ledger, that no one can change the past. We can put other information inside it,alongside with the money transactions, and we can be absolutely sure that no one messed with that information. An infinite number of use cases.
For example say a cop makes an arrest. How can we be sure that the arrest was legitimate? A random person with a video camera may record the arrest, go to his home, edit it however he likes, upload it to the internet, and boom huge civil unrest! The solution lies with the cop recording the arrest by himself, uploading the information right away to the blockchain, and no person on the planet, no state, no goverment, can mess up with that information. The timestamp of the arrest is important too!