FreeCrypto

Excited to read this. Their piece on heroin won a pulitzer last year: https://www.cincinnati.com/pages/interactives/seven-days-of-...

Of course trust is still involved. The whitepaper specifically puts "trust" in the context of trusted third parties ("financial institutions serving as trusted third parties to process electronic payments"), and proposes a solution to the double-spend problem when they are not relied upon. It is a very unique solution that could be useful in solving some very specific use cases. There are a wide number of risks that could cause bitcoin to crumble - Core Dev Matt Corralo often says he gives bitcoin a 5% chance of success. The wide-sweeping conclusion is that blockchain is useless, though I would agree in almost all cases, it disregards the successful instances where trust minimization provides substantial benefit.

Expensive and slow seems to be the point. An attacker would need to spend an inordinate amount to change just the most recent transactions - this provides high confidence that the chain is immutable and secure. Maybe digital scarcity with trustless, secure transactions is not valuable to you (or the author), but many people do see promise there.

Additionally, the "environmental disaster" claims have always seemed shallow to me. Yes, it is a serious issue if everyone is mining with coal powered electricity, but how did it get so cheap? Isn't it on the government to not subsidize coal? The largest mining companies are finding super cheap energy in renewables (1). In the long run, I feel like mining is what can pay for further investment in renewables. For instance, see the article below about Germany paying customers to use electricity (2). Seems like government level mining might be a good investment.

1. https://globalnews.ca/news/3974083/bitcoin-mining-quebec-can...

2. https://www.independent.co.uk/environment/germany-grids-payi...

I think you're right, he seems like a super nice dude in his interviews :)

Exactly this. Kipchoge would probably be insulted that the OP uses the term "run" in describing anything that's slower than 5:15 pace.

People want a coin that can give them 1000x gains, the next iteration of "buying btc in 2010." Far < 1% of those people has ever used a cryptocurrency to make a purchase.

Related, but not directed at prev comment... If anyone actually cares about sound, uncensorable money, then they should look to the $300B network that has been battle tested and withstands constant attack. BTC has prioritized stability and security, and done very well in that regard. I understand that btc businesses, and the small minority that purchase from them, are frustrated that the digit cash use-case is more difficult right now. From my perspective though, the proven stability and security is far more valuable in the long run, and is something that other coins only talk about. I think btc has to go through a full financialization to complete its price discovery (eliminate the massive volatility) before any mass adoption of a cash use-case is practical. Luckily, futures and ETFs are incoming, and lightning network is testing on mainnet.

Sorry for the confusion, there was a spectrum. I don't think we're in disagreement here, you may be envisioning things that were not happening.

To clarify, Security Guards checking badges wore suit jackets and did not appear to be armed. They mostly said things like "please turn your badges forward", "sorry you can't go in there yet, only [X] badges right now". The few people with the bomb sniffing dogs I think were armed. The people that were very clearly armed were outside the conference standing at the vehicle barricades, there were a limited number of them.

Yep. My company paid a lot of money to sponsor a booth and make sure the majority of our interactions were with customers that we could sell to/partner with. Having a free for all would have greatly diminished the value of our time there.

I should note, I don't know which part of the show this group was trying to enter (Developer Zone, Expo Hall, Keynote Talk). As I mentioned, I enjoyed talking with a number of the STEM student groups that came through the expo hall.

Mostly agree. The Salesforce employee should have been able to escalate the issue to the right people to get it solved. Simply having a Salesforce employee vouching for them should have been rejected, as it was. There are thousands of Salesforce employees at the event, not all of them should have the power to override a guards instructions. So the guard acted correctly in that way, but sounds like they took it way too far - “Your kind don’t belong in here.” WTF!?

The event is massive, something like 180,000 total attendees. They actually shut down Howard St. between 4th and 3rd and roll out astro turf and put up fake rock formations and stages.

There are tons of different badge types depending on your role in the ecosystem (developer, admin, marketing, sales, partner, sponsor, speaker, etc.). For the expo, Monday and Tuesday are for Full Pass people only (min of ~$1,000 per pass). Wednesday and Thursday allows in anyone that registered for the free Expo pass ahead of time.

The demographics skew to middle age people. Racially, mostly white, but many east asian and indian attendees. Certainly all groups were represented. I met many people coming from Australia, Europe and India.

Because of the expense of the passes, most of the attendees are decision makers within the business which I think is why it skewed older. I would understand if the group described in the article felt like they stood out in the crowd because of the racial and age difference. Also, Monday was crazy. Lots of very confused people trying to figure out where they should be going between the 3 different massive buildings the event was held in.

Personally, I would like to thank Salesforce for a strong security presence at the event. There were bomb sniffing dogs, many security staff, and vehicle barriers with armed guards at street entrances.

Despite being a sponsor and speaker at the event, I was denied access (due to different badge type) to the expo hall to help the rest of our company setup our booth. It was frustrating, but at least the security was paying attention.

It is very unfortunate that this group had problems getting in. I would have enjoyed talking to their group, as I did with the Girl Scouts group and other non-profits that sent STEM students to the event.

The most apparent reason is that ETH does not have a set supply cap, whereas BTC is 21,000,000.