The whole article took about a minute to load because apparently it’s being loaded from some decentralized network called lbry.
I would rather be the product and get a great user experience than a shitty user experience that sells itself based on some ideal that probably will not work economically in the long run. If a decentralized network you invested a lot of your life in becomes irrelevant, it’s worse than using a centralized network that actually stays around. And most “decentralized” networks have failed to show enough traction for me to feel secure about their future.
> would rather be the product and get a great user experience than a shitty user experience that sells itself based on some ideal that probably will not work economically in the long run.
Well that depends on how many sheep we get. People don't care about principles until they are the ones being deplatformed, and abused. I sincerely hope that eventually you will figure out that the only way to have good things in a capitalistic society is to have competition. Odysee is that. Considering it has some high-profile you tubers switching over, I'd say it has potential to make Youtube irrelevant: it makes just as much money, and a decentralised system, means there isn't a single entity to bring it all down.
I see the “ipfs less” terminology as similar to the term “serverless”. Just like how serverless still has servers but the point is that you don’t have to maintain your own server, ipfs less does make sense in that you don’t have to run ipfs node to use it. But also just like how many people hate the term serverless, ipfs less will be hated by many as well. I guess at the end of the day what’s important is whether something provides value, and I think this is pretty cool technology in that sense. Just my two cents…
The project looks useful and great, but I very much hate calling it "IPFS-less". Not only is it incorrect, it increases confusion regardless of how technical of a user you are. It is also unattractive - if it isn't IPFS (except it is), tell me what it is or does instead!
Really terrible branding; consider that the currently top-voted comment has read the site enough to formulate an alternative design and still has completely misunderstood how this relates to IPFS. The rest of the site is neat, though! I hope the author reconsiders!
How would you know which stock photo was used for training? Someone may take a whole bunch of images they buy on a dark market, create a huge train model, and dump it on the public internet over torrent or something. And there would be no way to know which images were used to train the model
Perhaps as this technique becomes more and more used there will be regulations on the source data set, such as the requirement to prove you own all of it (or that it is in the public domain).
If BTC price doesn't recover soon and falls further, Microstrategy is what will kill BTC. I don't know why BTC investors are so crazy about Microstrategy buying BTC (This would have never happened back in the early days of Bitcoin), but if BTC price goes down further, Microstrategy will be forced to sell their BTC by their shareholders. Otherwise the Microstrategy stock itself will crash. Also when Microstrategy loses too much money, they may finally have to shut down because they borrowed so much money from people just to buy BTC.
When Microstrategy crashes, along with them, the public sentiment for BTC will go to shit, and that will cause the crash of BTC itself since the whole recent price climb was based on the "institutions are buying up BTC" narrative. This is the scariest scenario. Once the downward spiral happens it will be unstoppable, it will be like the crash Mt. Gox caused, but like 100 times harsher.
Michael Saylor, the CEO, holds 70% of the voting shares.
All the other shareholders can kick and scream all they want, but Saylor controls the ship. The only power others have is to exit the ship by selling.
Every indication is that Saylor would hold bitcoin into the ground, unless he's totally full of shit. Their main business is still generating enough cash to pay the loans, so where's the pressure to sell?
They will have to sell if the Bitcoin price goes down enough that their measly revenue from their obscure enterprise software can't cover the loss from their Bitcoin investment.
He can keep holding, but it will lower the morale of the employees as well as himself. Unless you think Microstrategy has completely become a hedge fund, they have products to build and they will even lose what's left of their customers if things go bad. You really think the guy can keep holding when he lost hundreds of millions of dollars through BTC? (At the moment he's still in the positive even after the crash, but I'm talking about when it goes down further) Also he can and likely will get into trouble with the SEC when things get bad.
We get into the same conversation every time people buy at the top and the price sinks 60-80%. And for the past decade it has only bailed people out. So I don't see any reason speculating what will be the demise of Bitcoin because so far every single cycle has created more HODLers at pretty much any insane price valuation.
What do you mean "recover soon"? Two month? One year? Three years? Ten years? BTC has survived so many crashes, why do you think this is it, the final straw?
Every cycle converts more people, people who will never sell. These are also the same people who will buy hand over fist when the price approaches anything in the ballpark of their cost basis.
This might be a better argument for the crash than any of the 7 the author presented. (later edit: except for the 70% voting rights that Saylor still has – just read this further down)
Your answer only rephrases the question. The only way for it to hit $0 is if nobody is willing to buy the stock. This seems unlikely, given that the Bitcoin they're holding, even at 50% of present value, is still worth significantly more than $0.
Their Bitcoin holdings seems to add up to about half their current market cap, so that seems to make no sense.
EDIT: From [1]:
> “As of June 21st, 2021, MicroStrategy holds an aggregate of approximately 105,085 bitcoins, which were acquired at an aggregate purchase price of approximately $2.741 billion and an average purchase price of approximately $26,080 per Bitcoin, inclusive of fees and expenses.”
From [2]:
> Market cap: $6.08 Billion
So ~half, and average purchase price is still substantially below current BTC price.
> - No covenants -- no one can force a sale of $BTC
> - $MSTR is allowed to raise more debt at the unrestricted BTC co which would be structurally senior to the $3.4B (so original convertible bond holders are potentially getting primed).
>This $MSTR secured bond is just a standard secured bond that has very little to do with $BTC.
> Bondholders basically sold a call option (for 6.125% yield) and a put option... MSTR walks away with a ton of upside optionality, and it has a marginal impact on #Bitcoin
> [5/N] Their main business makes about ~50M in net profit - basically, Saylor makes enough money to cover the annual interest by 10X.
> - This means that from now till 2025 at least, Saylor CANNOT be liquidated as long as he pays the interest on the 0.75% 2025 bond.
> [6/N] But oh no! what if the board forces saylor to sell?
> Saylor himself owns 25% of microstrategy but he also owns the majority of Class B shares which have 10x voting power giving him 72% of the voting power. I.E
Saylor CANNOT be forced by anybody to sell.
> [8/N] In conclusion
> 1. The latest round of purchase will not have the ability to liquidate his previous holdings
> 2. The interest payment on his bonds CANNOT liquidate him
> 3. Nobody has the power to force him to sell. At All.
What Osaka did has nothing to do with ambition, she did it because of the changing landscape of the media. Unlike the old days where athletes had to rely on press conferences to get their story out, nowadays they can directly broadcast their messages through their social media like Twitter, Instagram, TikTok or whatever, and shape the message JUST THE WAY THEY WANT, instead of getting tricked by sketchy reporters to be quoted in uncontrollable ways.
The author starts from this completely incorrect assumption (based on her own personal bias) and then writes a whole article about how people "should not be ambitious", which is her true agenda. Osaka has nothing to do with this writer's agenda, the writer simply "used" Osaka as a tool for her own agenda.
Ironically, this kind of idiotic "journalism" is EXACTLY why people like Osaka decide to not deal with the press. There's nothing to gain by giving these people the power to put words in their mouth, just to write articles that they were already going to write, only using you as a narrative tool and often times hurting your reputation to achieve their agenda.
And no, ambition is NOT a cult. It's the main reason why the humanity was able to evolve as fast as they did, and it IS a virtue. It's not for everyone, but telling people to get rid of their professional ambition while writing that on the NYTimes to promote themselves (ambition) is the most hypocritical thing ever.
It's kinda funny how this whole drama is for copying some "intellectual property" that anyone can easily build.
If you don't want your virtual cloud sandbox app to be copied easily, build something that actually is novel. For example see Stackblitz https://stackblitz.com/ I think they're going to completely destroy all these Replit-like models.
> However, decentralized immutability means that nothing can be done should an unintended action occur with your account.
All that's needed is an elegant identity system that privately ties identity with transactions so that only the stakeholders can share their transactions while the ledger itself is public.
That way "Decentralized Immutability" can co-exist with mutability through law in case something terrible happens. You don't need to change the history, you simply need to make a court order to create an additional transaction that reverts the disaster. Just like how when a hacker gets caught stealing money, they are forced to send the money back (additional transaction) instead of deleting the original stealing transaction from the bank account and rewriting as if nothing happened.
The thing is, pseudo-Turing complete blockchains like Ethereum (and all EVM-like blockchains) are not really fit for this purpose because the entire logic is on chain. UTXO based blockchains like Bitcoin is optimized for this since each transaction can act as evidence trail.
How does a 3rd party (a court) make that transaction happen without either physically compelling the criminal (not necessarily possible in other countries), or having some kind of master key (which breaks decentralization).
With a bank, they have a financial incentive to stay a part of the international banking system at least.
Public and irreversible doesn't have to mean decentralized. The court orders the bank to reverse it on their ledger just like they reverse it today in the accounts - only the ledger requires a public and immutable reversal.
"If a greedy attacker is able to
assemble more CPU power than all the honest nodes, he would have to choose between using it
to defraud people by stealing back his payments, or using it to generate new coins. He ought to
find it more profitable to play by the rules, such rules that favour him with more new coins than
everyone else combined, than to undermine the system and the validity of his own wealth."
As the article explains, those who would want to attack Bitcoin would not care about the costs involved, since their goal is to destroy the network, not to make money off of it.
The big caveat is obviously the word "greedy". A state need not be greedy, nor for that matter needs a group of politically motivated people running a LOIC against any Bitcoin node they may find.
Unlike Proof of Work based blockchains which require seizable factory infrastructure to break even, Proof of Stake doesn't need one.
Most Proof of Stake supporters see this as a good thing because it means there's no electricity waste and higher degree of "censorship resistance".
However what will actually happen is this "censorship resistance" is what will make the PoS blockchain as a whole get "censored", ironically.
Proof of Work blockchains, while wasting a lot of energy, can be regulated easily because the government can simply regulate the large miners in their countries. However Proof of Stake, because it can't be traced easily, the regulators will have to try to stop the entire blockchain as a whole.
Of course, it's impossible to completely stop it, but the governments can do a lot of things in their "anti-decentralized tech playbook" to make sure the adoption never goes mainstream. (See Tor, BitTorrent, etc.)
dammn... now I wanna see the play book.. I can guess some of them, but feel like I am missing some. And I really think centralization has massive systemic bugs that have caused(and continue to cause) a big worrying set of problems.
> Unlike Proof of Work based blockchains which require seizable factory infrastructure to break even, Proof of Stake doesn't need one.
This isn’t inherent to PoW consensus. In 2010, Bitcoin was CPU mineable on any ordinary Windows PC. It wasn’t until Bitcoin commanded a significant market value — which wasn’t guaranteed in the slightest — that industrial scale mining operations came into the foray.
> Most Proof of Stake supporters see this as a good thing because it means there's no electricity waste and higher degree of "censorship resistance".
Your understanding of censorship resistance is gravely mistaken [1]:
Overcoming censorship is not possible in a PoS system, as the censor
has acquired majority stake and cannot be unseated. As such PoS
systems are not censorship-resistant and the theory is therefore
invalid.
If 51% of the stake — even if owned by separate entities — were to deliberately engage in censorship, the general public would have absolutely no recourse. Conversely, in Proof of Work systems, new miners could join the network at any time to challenge the majority miner censor. That is simply impossible under a Proof of Stake model with network censors.
In addition to being vulnerable to total censorship, Proof of Stake consensus suffers from the misfeature of not even having a quantitative fork ranking protocol — i.e. it lacks a way to objectively compare the truthfulness of divergent blockchains. Under adversarial conditions, the PoS chains pos1, pos2, and pos3 cannot be quantitatively ranked by hashing power the way the PoW chains pow1, pow2 and po3 could be, as there is no hashing power in PoS. Instead, there is only “phone-a-friend” consensus, which Vitalik Buterin has euphemistically referred to as “weak subjectivity”.
Jude C. Nelson, who has a PhD in distributed systems from Princeston, critiques PoS better than anyone [2]:
PoW requires less proactive trust and coordination between
community members than PoS -- and thus is better able to recover
from both liveness and safety failures -- precisely because
it both (1) provides a computational method for ranking fork
quality, and (2) allows anyone to participate in producing
a fork at any time. If the canonical chain is 51%-attacked,
and the attack eventually subsides, then the canonical chain
can eventually be re-established in-band by honest miners
simply continuing to work on the non-attacker chain. In PoS,
block-producers have no such protocol -- such a protocol
cannot exist because to the rest of the network, it looks like
the honest nodes have been slashed for being dishonest. Any
recovery procedure necessarily includes block-producers having
to go around and convince people out-of-band that they were
totally not dishonest, and were slashed due to a "hack" (and,
since there's lots of money on the line, who knows if they're
being honest about this?).
> Proof of Work blockchains, while wasting a lot of energy, can be regulated easily because the government can simply regulate the large miners in their countries.
Because Proof of Stake blockchains can’t even come to consensus under adversarial conditions without human intervention (per JCN), these “blockchains” can actually be understood as distributed append-only ledgers managed by trusted central organizations the membership to which is gated by wealth. It’s highly misleading — even outright deceptive — to promote such systems as being more permissionless than PoW-powered systems like Bitcoin.
“Green-friendliness” was never a design goal of cryptocurrency: creating a lasting store of value sans institutions, exchangeable pseudonymously over the internet, was.
> This isn’t inherent to PoW consensus. In 2010, Bitcoin was CPU mineable on any ordinary Windows PC. It wasn’t until Bitcoin commanded a significant market value — which wasn’t guaranteed in the slightest — that industrial scale mining operations came into the foray.
This is inherent to the PoW consensus. Satoshi Nakamoto himself even said Bitcoin would end up in data centers because of this property. It's not that hard to understand why this would be the case. PoW is powered by competition, and competition begets scale, just like any other industry.
> Your understanding of censorship resistance is gravely mistaken [1]:
Before making this kind of condescending comments, maybe make sure that you are not the one who's misunderstanding what I am saying? I was talking about what many PoS supporters think, not what I thought. Go ahead and re-read what I said.
Their (The PoS supporters) idea is that "because it's much more difficult to find PoS validators than PoW miners because PoW miners need to maintain a factory whereas PoS validators can just hide in their mom's basement and make money, it's more difficult for the governments to regulate PoS than PoW". And my point was that that was an incorrect belief.
My entire post was talking about this false sense of "censorship resistance", basically Pro-PoW and anti-PoS, and you didn't need to lecture me on your superior understanding of PoW. I understand everything you said, but you completely misunderstood my point. If you didn't get that by reading, maybe it's your reading comprehension problem.
Unfortunately, oweing to the fierce competition in the Bitcoin space, it’s long since become difficult for onlookers to distinguish between an argument of the form “PoW bad, PoS good, insert weakly anti-PoS sentiment as controlled opposition here to end up with a pro-PoS post”, and furtive PoS astroturfing — which has proliferated as of late.
As someone who has long been all too familiar with the various sophistry tactics commonly employed by Bitcoin’s competition, frankly that was my impression of your post. I apologize if I misread your intent.
> This is inherent to the PoW consensus. Satoshi Nakamoto himself even said Bitcoin would end up in data centers because of this property
Bitcoin wouldn’t have ever warranted industrial scale mining operations if not for BTC’s significant price appreciation. But PoW systems were never guaranteed to be commercially successful. It’s perfectly possible for Bitcoin to once again become CPU mineable on ordinary Windows PCs — assuming its market price collapses.
I would rather be the product and get a great user experience than a shitty user experience that sells itself based on some ideal that probably will not work economically in the long run. If a decentralized network you invested a lot of your life in becomes irrelevant, it’s worse than using a centralized network that actually stays around. And most “decentralized” networks have failed to show enough traction for me to feel secure about their future.