campbelltown

But point a and b in you're assessment of gold's value are two of the most common arguments for crypto, specifically bitcoin, as well.

a) crypto holders believe that the value will hold because as more individuals use it to store their net worth, the harder it will become to manipulate. ie. a history of price growth/eventual stabilization will occur in time.

b) its algorithmically-enforced scarcity, which many people believe is as valid as physically-enforced scarcity. So long as hash-based cryptography always works.

It appears the hacker has begun moving ether from the account. The number presented in this link will no longer match the amount in the title. There is currently 83K ether remaining.

Sorry :) I didn't want to link anything that had potential for bias. Just the account with the amount. But, wow, this post blew up.

This is true. But mastercard facilitates the liquidation of this credit via their payment systems, which people will continue to use. Initially people will likely use ether as a store of value/hedge against the traditional economy. Also dapp fuel, as we all hope.

Furthermore, take a look at coinbase as an example of a company profiting heavily on this new payment system. Mastercard has an opportunity to capture some of the new value being created in the ecosystem. They don't have to fall off the map if we all start using ether. If they do, they failed to innovate. I suspect their execs understand this.

Exactly! Could you imagine if we could watch a live twitter fueled debate about how to upgrade our central banking system? It's a beautiful sight. Flawed, but beautiful.

Even further, there are no gatekeepers...

I've found this to be my experience as well. Although, I've witnessed a few cases of co-workers taking advantage of the freedom. I suspect the software engineering field is less prone to employees taking excess advantage of their employers, mostly because the field selects against people that don't actually like the work, more so than in other fields. Spending an entire work day on a bug that later turns out to be trivial and then being asked why you didn't finish the specs in time is only worth it to the people that love it too much to give up. Obviously, this happens less and less the more experienced you become, but those first few years developing your craft are incredibly rough.

I'm not even laughing because this will happen

The first thought after going through all these photos was: incredibly stilted. It's amazingly impressive, but the human photographer will always be able to capture the subtleties that AI will miss. But very cool nonetheless

Permissionless ownership.

Not all good things come in beautiful packages. This is the economic consequence of creating a system that no one entity can fully control. Without a central backing, it's value cannot be manipulated and, therefore, the supply cannot increase equally with demand. This has the harsh consequence of facilitating excess reward mechanisms amongst early adopters.

I agree. It does sort of suck when you realize that the rich are again getting richer, but the point of Bitcoin, and crypto as a whole (minus the scams), is not to redistribute wealth, but rather, make finance open and permissionless. The question is, are the economic consequences of adoption worth the benefits of it's mainstream use? I, and many others, believe so.

Blockchains only improve the efficiency of permissionless system. If you're going to create an in-house currency, it would be idiotic to use something as un-scalable as a blockchain.

The colossal compute power goes up when more fiat enter the system and traders speculate the price up. It is a security mechanism, not a throughput mechanism