danielpatrick

You're misunderstanding Kin. Kin is not "controlled by Kik" it is an asset that will be exchangeable in and out of the Kik ecosystem. Furthermore, Kin balances will be kept on a public ledger and any other company could build extensions and uses of the currency.

It would be as if your Walmart dollars actually had an exchange for other currency. I would see this as a good thing. Then the poor worker who is being paid in Walmart dollars can know exactly how much they're being paid.

What do you consider the good parts of PoW to be? (serious question)

Or use PoS to avoid the situation entirely.

To counter your arbitrary experience with my own, the Boston startup scene seems to be thriving.

This notation has developed over tens to hundreds of years before we had the capabilities of autocomplete and formal typing where a computer can help us write longer names more quickly. This is why single letters became prominent, they were simply easier and faster to write.

But anyone who is serious about writing maintainable code today should be using an IDE where the benefits of susinctness are entirely relegated by intellisense-like tools.

Trading readability for conciseness is near the top of my list of "crimes against future maintainers."

So I had never thought about this in the context of mathematical symbols, but this makes total sense and I'm strongly in favor of relegating mathematical conciseness in favor of readability and specificity.

This problem is every bit as much a political and cultural problem as it is a technological one. So I largely agree.

But from a technological perspective, even if 2016 is the high water mark of the "centralized" internet, a new internet is forming. That which you lament is the natural result of a centralized system. It's something that the early creators of the internet have warned about since its inception. But now as the incumbents centralize control, a new generation of technologists (helped by many of those early creators) are constructing the underpinnings of "Web 3.0", a decentralized internet built on Ethereum, IPFS, WebTorrent, BigchainDB, SOLID et al.

There is plenty left to do, it is still a newborn child... nobody knows where this goes. But come 2030, I agree we'll look back on 2016 as the high water mark of the centralized internet. But instead of longing for how things were in the 1990s and 2000s, we'll say "good riddance".

All that said, the battle needs to happen on the political front at the same time, which makes EFF, FFTF, and ACLU so important.

This is a tactic used by authoritarian governments and is a distinct reason why laws that are poorly enforced are bad laws.

A poorly enforced law provides a tool for executives (the law enforcers) to legislate (make their own laws) without any say from the real legislators. It's a loophole of sorts in the US's separation of powers.

Take marijuana. It's illegal to smoke marijuana. It's not illegal to be black. Yet the selective enforcement of the marijuana law allows authorities in any given district to shape policy on race without ever having to explicitly put a law on the books.

This is why the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act is so dangerous. It is broad enough to be used as a tool to enforce laws that would be too unpopular to explicitly pass.

It's also why threats from the US government to "ban encryption" should not be taken idly. You think to yourself, "Certainly they couldn't ban encryption, nothing would work without it." But they wouldn't enforce it across the board, only selectively.

Those that dig and present quality, fact-supported stories.

Under normal circumstances 80% would begin to get the Antitrust drums beating.

Check out Brave (browser) with built in payments. Of course, this doesn't solve your problem of who's signed up, but Brave has a protocol for that scenario and they reach out to sites and offer them the money before returning it back to you.

I'll add some color here.

The complexity you're referring to may be the runtime? It is more complex than, say, Bitcoin because it has for most purposes a Turing complete language baked into the protocol.

Bitcoin is a blockchain that forms consensus on the state of a specific implementation of a data structure (somewhat arbitrarily, a list of transactions) and it has a very limited set of operations to manipulate that data.

Coming to distributed consensus on a transaction ledger is ultra-useful, as we have come to know. But there may be other data structures that may be useful for distributed consensus as well. Rather than building a blockchain for each one, why not build that flexibility into one protocol so the developer can choose?

Ethereum is a blockchain that forms consensus on the state of a more general set of data types, with a Turing complete language to operate on the data.

More complex? Yes. But the hope is that this flexibility drives a rich developer ecosystem, where innovation can happen within the network, rather than having to build your own network from scratch.

As for decentralization leading to fragmentation? This is a feature, not a bug. It is the feature that allowed Ethereum to grow in tangent with a thousand other blockchain mechanisms. Maybe fragmentation will bring its demise, but it as breath of fresh air from our rapidly consolidating tech industry.

There was a comic in XKCD recently that asked everyone to preface their inspirational speeches with a disclaimer about Survivorship bias. You should read that.

lol. What?