Tech layoffs more than double in Bay Area

Re:Tech layoffs more than double in Bay Area by mahyarm on Friday May 13, 2016 @02:08AM (#11688896)

Bitcoin or some derivative is better as a foundational bank reserve currency or wire transfer replacement than the actual direct thing you use. Someone else will build the next equivalent of visa on top of it.

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Re:Tech layoffs more than double in Bay Area by grey-area on Friday May 13, 2016 @05:25AM (#11689419)

Someone else will build the next equivalent of visa on top of it.

For the reasons given above I find that highly unlikely. Proof of work and distributed consensus are at odds with the requirements of a global real-time processing network.

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Re:Tech layoffs more than double in Bay Area by jcfrei on Friday May 13, 2016 @07:00AM (#11689663)

Some people have mentioned this before but I forgot who they were: The blockchain is very likely to disrupt the financial sector, specifically the whole industry which is now in place for settlement/clearing when transferring financial contracts (shares, bonds, CDS, etc). A unified API and single public ledger could really bring costs down for those transactions and that's what a lot of financial institutions are interested in. I don't think it will have much value as a reserve currency, especially since it relies on computational power (so the amount of control is mostly based on economics - ie. the availability of cheap electricity and APUs) rather than political power.

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Re:Tech layoffs more than double in Bay Area by daemin on Friday May 13, 2016 @06:38AM (#11689594)

I don't like the fact that bitcoin basically relies trading electricity for money in a nonsensical way. Having large exchanges built on it seems like a terrible idea, where financial places will be required to gobble up immense amounts of energy just to operate. It just won't make financial sense to do this as I can see it now.

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Re:Tech layoffs more than double in Bay Area by CyberDildonics on Friday May 13, 2016 @07:27AM (#11689765)

Mining resources are not correlated to scaleability.

Once again, whatever people's views on bitcoin at least realize that mining hashes don't dictate how many transactions can be processed by a miner. They mine a block, then they include as many transactions as they think they can get away with and keep the latency low enough to propagate. Right now they are capped by a block size limit which is the real next hurdle. Some people think there should be no block size limit - latency already becomes a limit in itself.

To hammer it home - someone using bitcoin does not need to use any more electricity than a computer and internet connection. The miners use the electricity and the amount of transactions they process is not directly linked in any way.

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Re:Tech layoffs more than double in Bay Area by stale2002 on Saturday May 14, 2016 @02:41PM (#11697484)

The amount of money spent on electricity is a rounding error on top of a rounding error, when compared to how much wealth/money the current financial system uses to make it run.

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Re:Tech layoffs more than double in Bay Area by te_chris on Friday May 13, 2016 @03:17AM (#11689095)

The banks already are working on blockchain based interchange, at least from what I hear in the UK

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