whoisninja9

transactions with fiat is fine, good luck storing all of your wealth in fiat (specially with worldwide QE, fiat is more pumped than anything can be) : http://www.fiatfate.com/

thanks everyone for all the discussion in this thread. Being the author of this website, I would love to hear any suggestions - I will try to add more interesting stats in the future but keep it lean at the same time. Also I hope people read FAQ section on the website, I had tried to touch upon very common questions but in a different way so that it can make people think rather than running to conclusions quickly.

Why people put money in certain things is always a discussion, well the financial markets are better representative of people's opinion. Right now it is couple of billions in market cap. I agree with you and I'm very skeptical. But they at least seem to be doing something. What about 100s of other cryptocoins, just look at their github repos - nothing at all and they're worth hundres of millions(atleast as of now).

there's a lot of talk about stablecoins. I think it is a great idea but what we define as "stable" is fiat currency. The whole idea of creating this website is to make people think if fiat is really stable? So, if we think about what is best way to create stablecoins. We should look at it from first principles, i.e. stable relative to what?(probably we want it to be stable relative to everyday commodities we consume I would guess) and how do we make sure people don't use to speculate its moves? I don't have an answer but I think it is a tough one at least for me.

not suggesting that they are not credible or anything but I think their technology shouldn't excite people that much. And may be rather than public funding this bank's side project, perhaps banks can use some of their profits to develop this on their own or with Ripple or at least may be it should be funded by large investors who have large stakes in banks. Just ponder upon, why should you fund this experiment/technology?

agree 100% :)

The reason hackernews is great is because it has some audience which wants to discuss and debate how things work. This is a very unique and good form of education, only internet made it possible.

But for large part of society they don't understand technology. Technology or science should be simple to understand, humans developed language- that is also a technology to me(do we really need a science degree to understand those things). For some reason large population thinks of tech people or scientists in general as nerds or geeks and that it is not cool to them. I think the flaw is in outdated primary education and the way we define education. And the portraying of science people as nerds or confused people on TV further exaggerates this.

We can't blame governments per say, for a democracy to work properly everyone has to participate, and part of the newer generation will eventually become the future government. In order to participate, you have to understand how things work. If people are not taught how to think critically early on and they're either caught up in making a living or watching and following bunch of trendy celebrities on twitter and tv, it is not going to happen.

Ripple is not decentralized at all. They've zero intention to bring decentralization, all they're trying to do is give banks a technology that can speed up remittances. Why do you need blockchain for that specially if you will be using banks anyways? Why can't banks speed up remittances on their own. Just do some basic search on the guy who created it, stellar lumens, mt gox, 70% tokens held by a few company individuals(although they say it is locked etc)

very valid analysis, but how do you identify "countries that have really bad money" ? it doesn't happen overnight so which countries are going to face monetary issues in next 5-10 years, hard to tell? and unfortunately general public doesn't proactively monitor(and it is too complicated for public to understand because for some reason most of the primary schools don't educate about personal finance and monetary system) so most people realize after crisis had already taken place (mainstream news is their only validation).

good point, what do you think about tensorflow, openai gym, python, apache foundation, linux foundation? you gotta have some love for open source if you're a developer. i might not be as well read as you but i would like to be corrected if my thoughts are incoherent. also i don't think it is about altruism so i agree with you, there's mutual incentive to open source things like tensorflow i.e. to speed up development.

i agree with you and i think it is a good point but just one doubt i have that liquidity argument is correct assuming that this doesn't effect the fundamental pricing and cause bubbles (for ex.[oversimplified one] if lot of people followed trend following - it keeps driving bubbles in the long run - although i know counter argument is markets actually become efficient with more trading, but it is hard for me to buy into that 100% - i hope i'm wrong though). Also I think a decent gauge would be how much open-source has been contributed back and how much of it is valuable. Other things are hard to quantify like the example you gave, but I can't prove that you're wrong either.

Also when you develop something like physics, once proved - it always works with very good precision(reason we can launch satellites accurately). Or let's say a software or database that is supposed to work a certain way. What's being done at quant funds - I can't think of something on those lines that could be useful. Lot of these things don't always work because you're still speculating with large inaccuracy but a slight edge statistically.

Some interesting links:

http://fortune.com/2016/05/11/warren-buffett-hedge-fund-bet/

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/why-99-of-trading-is-pointl...

none, their goal is to optimize profits. They haven't gotten to a point where investing in cutting edge tech only research is seen by them as a value add. Also for such projects they stay away from open source collaboration with outside world - so that would be really slow to develop something useful. Hope that will change in future.(very few exceptions - as someone commented pandas - pandas creator at two sigma actually is pushing for open-source, i think it is great but i hope it is not just a gimmick to attract better talent).

It would be interesting to see if tech community can provide more useful and technical resources in blockchain space. I plan to update this github page based on those recommendations.