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Reilly
Mountain climber
The Other Monrovia- CA
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Jan 22, 2018 - 09:44am PT
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^^^^^. Well, do enlighten us as to the reality, good sir. And while yer at it do explain why this
is not a huge waste of energy and its commensurate contribution to global warming.
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stevep
Boulder climber
Salt Lake, UT
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Jan 22, 2018 - 09:49am PT
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I think I'm pretty much with Ed here. Bitcoin provides a pretty decent proof of the potential utility of a blockchain. But it's pretty useless as a currency and really is more of a speculative investment and money laundering device at this point.
But the blockchain concept has other potential uses. One big one is healthcare records. There are very strong reasons to make healthcare records available to the individuals and easily transferable across the system, while still maintaining security and privacy. There are a lot of folks in the healthcare industry that feel like blockchains might be a good way to do this.
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Tom
Big Wall climber
San Luis Obispo CA
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Jan 22, 2018 - 05:28pm PT
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^^^^^^^^^^
The blockchain is a great invention. A secure, robust database that is maintained by a network of independent computers could wind up being THE killer application of the internet.
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stevep
Boulder climber
Salt Lake, UT
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Jan 22, 2018 - 07:53pm PT
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Side track from the bitcoin topic, but you are correct Jim. We burden our clinicians with too much other stuff. From complicated EMR systems to too many quality measures. Most these things are well-intentioned, but they sometimes have negative effects.
That said, the cost of unneccessary medical tests could be as much as $200B. And adverse drug-to-drug interactions are frequently caused by not all of a patients medical records being available.
The trick is to figure out how to address some of these issues without placing too much additional burden on the clinicians.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Jan 22, 2018 - 08:02pm PT
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I think the speculation in Bitcoin is hard to understand because there doesn't really seem to be a point to the blockchain associated with it, or the applications.
the NYTimes had this wonderful "what if:"
The blockchain world proposes something different. Imagine some group like Protocol Labs decides there’s a case to be made for adding another “basic layer” to the stack. Just as GPS gave us a way of discovering and sharing our location, this new protocol would define a simple request: I am here and would like to go there. A distributed ledger might record all its users’ past trips, credit cards, favorite locations — all the metadata that services like Uber or Amazon use to encourage lock-in. Call it, for the sake of argument, the Transit protocol. The standards for sending a Transit request out onto the internet would be entirely open; anyone who wanted to build an app to respond to that request would be free to do so. Cities could build Transit apps that allowed taxi drivers to field requests. But so could bike-share collectives, or rickshaw drivers. Developers could create shared marketplace apps where all the potential vehicles using Transit could vie for your business. When you walked out on the sidewalk and tried to get a ride, you wouldn’t have to place your allegiance with a single provider before hailing. You would simply announce that you were standing at 67th and Madison and needed to get to Union Square. And then you’d get a flurry of competing offers. You could even theoretically get an offer from the M.T.A., which could build a service to remind Transit users that it might be much cheaper and faster just to jump on the 6 train.
How would Transit reach critical mass when Uber and Lyft already dominate the ride-sharing market? This is where the tokens come in. Early adopters of Transit would be rewarded with Transit tokens, which could themselves be used to purchase Transit services or be traded on exchanges for traditional currency. As in the Bitcoin model, tokens would be doled out less generously as Transit grew more popular. In the early days, a developer who built an iPhone app that uses Transit might see a windfall of tokens; Uber drivers who started using Transit as a second option for finding passengers could collect tokens as a reward for embracing the system; adventurous consumers would be rewarded with tokens for using Transit in its early days, when there are fewer drivers available compared with the existing proprietary networks like Uber or Lyft.
As Transit began to take off, it would attract speculators, who would put a monetary price on the token and drive even more interest in the protocol by inflating its value, which in turn would attract more developers, drivers and customers. If the whole system ends up working as its advocates believe, the result is a more competitive but at the same time more equitable marketplace. Instead of all the economic value being captured by the shareholders of one or two large corporations that dominate the market, the economic value is distributed across a much wider group: the early developers of Transit, the app creators who make the protocol work in a consumer-friendly form, the early-adopter drivers and passengers, the first wave of speculators. Token economies introduce a strange new set of elements that do not fit the traditional models: instead of creating value by owning something, as in the shareholder equity model, people create value by improving the underlying protocol, either by helping to maintain the ledger (as in Bitcoin mining), or by writing apps atop it, or simply by using the service. The lines between founders, investors and customers are far blurrier than in traditional corporate models; all the incentives are explicitly designed to steer away from winner-take-all outcomes. And yet at the same time, the whole system depends on an initial speculative phase in which outsiders are betting on the token to rise in value.
“You think about the ’90s internet bubble and all the great infrastructure we got out of that,” Dixon says. “You’re basically taking that effect and shrinking it down to the size of an application.”
You could imagine the same thing for a "Credit protocol" where your credit information is stored in a block chain and you asked "I need a loan for so many $'s, who's interested in lending me that amount?"
Your credit information is your own, contained in your block chain, and the application members, the lenders, could have access to it for the purpose of deciding whether or not they want to make a proposal. They would have access to your credit record at that time with your permission, you control access to it, it is yours. They are assured you haven't hacked your credit record because it's encoded in the block chain and can be verified.
No worry that Experian/TransUnion/Equifax will collect this info without your knowledge or explicit permission and could loose it all in a security breach.
This creates markets for the tokens, and those markets would be more stable because the entire reason for the market is completely understandable.
You could imagine a "Health Care application" that does the same thing.
The point being that you control the information and can transfer access to anyone you'd like. "I need an X-ray" and you get bids for them on your app, the radiograph is encoded into your block chain and available to some other healthcare provider you choose to treat you next.
that's an amazing economic model
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Mark Force
Trad climber
Ashland, Oregon
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Jan 23, 2018 - 07:08am PT
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Warren Buffet wanting to buy a Put says it all.
Ponzi would have a good laugh over his new iteration.
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Banks
Trad climber
Santa Monica, CA
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Jan 23, 2018 - 08:10am PT
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While Buffet has obviously done extremely well on his investments, he is notoriously reluctant to invest in new technology. He even admits that his greatest regret is not investing in Google and that he never even considered investing in Amazon. I would take his bearish view of Bitcoin with an El Cap sized grain of salt.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Jan 23, 2018 - 09:16am PT
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it is, of course, impossible to see where this will all go.
those of us old enough to have actually lived through the technology development of the internet know this all too well.
certainly through the first decade that it existed, Google was criticized for its lack of a business plan, in the sense that no one then knew how it was going to make money. that was the period between roughly 1998 and 2008. there was absolutely no one who thought it would be the dominant player in the global economy in 2017.
the preceding decade saw the transition of an ad hoc distributed network built largely by the research community using government funds to a commercial network (you're welcome) used for commerce. the USG certainly had no idea what was going on for most of that time.
if you take the annual revenue generated by the internet in the US alone, it exceeds the total amount of money spent on high energy physics research for all time, including building major laboratory facilities like Fermilab, SLAC and Brookhaven. that's not a bad return on investment.
so whether or not Bitcoin as a currency actually makes sense, blockchain technologies have the possibility of transforming the economy. transforming to what is the question, and the answer to that question will make and break fortunes.
the motto of this new world has got to be "In Code We Trust"
pick your favorite utopia, or your most odious dystopia, reality will be so much more strange than anything we can now imagine
and remember, we live in a time when the Star Trek communicator is considered obsolete technology, just ask Siri (or Alexa, or whatever), "computer, plot a course to the future"
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Reilly
Mountain climber
The Other Monrovia- CA
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Jan 23, 2018 - 09:32am PT
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And how is all this gonna benefit ‘the people’ when we can’t buy computers that don’t provide
a direct conduit from our precious date to the crooks and furrin gubmints?
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Jan 23, 2018 - 08:30pm PT
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xCon, I couldn't parse you question.
in the "Transit app" described above, the developers create an application that uses the block chain technology to provide information about the people who desire transportation and the people who provide it. Both of these groups "buy into" the app using real currencies to purchase the Transit tokens.
The tokens are also mined, that is, the network supporting the block chain validation for the app is creating finding more tokens.
The block chain for the parties of the transaction provide information about their past transactions. In particular, fares can be paid in these tokens.
The notion is that as the app gains popularity, the tokens become valuable, and speculators might by them as an investment, betting that the tokens value exceeds what they paid for them. This supports the application.
Those who were first in see the value of their tokens increase. The increasing value of the tokens supports the application. The success of the application attracts more investment to expand it.
And you don't have to give all your information to some company, it is attached to your digital identity which you have control over. The increasing number of independent computers validating your block chain get paid by mining tokens that can be sold to those who want services, and increase the security of that information in the process.
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Tom
Big Wall climber
San Luis Obispo CA
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Jan 24, 2018 - 08:31am PT
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The original idea of the blockchain was that it would be funded by "miners" earning Bitcoin while providing the infrastructure. The blockchain, here, is intimately tied up with the cryptocurrency.
The extreme electrical consumption that Bitcoin requires to maintain its blockchain doesn't have to be an inherent feature of the blockchain concept itself. Bitcoin has an added burden of making the "money" difficult to obtain. Also, Bitcoin mining has built-in competition, such that the guy with the biggest server farm (and highest electrical bill) wins the race and gets the Bitcoins.
Maintaining a distributed database network wouldn't need to have the same computational overhead.
Etherium, which is ostensibly a blockchain proponent first, and a VaporCoin vendor second, has said they are looking into reducing their blockchain technology's electrical demand.
Real Bitcoin miners, today, are the people who go back ten years into their old hard drives, to see if they might have bought $20 worth of Bitcoin as a lark when it was trading at five cents on eBay. The Holy Grail would be finding a valid private key to the blockchain in a long-forgotten text file: 32 ASCII characters, or 64 hexadecimal numbers. Good Luck.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Jan 24, 2018 - 09:15am PT
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"The extreme electrical consumption that Bitcoin ..."
do we have any idea what the total energy consumption of that sector of the economy that block chain would replace consumes?
I think not, but when "gasping" over the "vast amounts of power" used by block chain technology we might consider that what we already do is probably not very efficient.
how many Joules/transaction?
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Reilly
Mountain climber
The Other Monrovia- CA
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Jan 24, 2018 - 09:25am PT
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Let me get this straight. We’re all sposed to drive a Prius and only shower once a week but it is OK to ‘mine’ something completely useless, if not actually harmful?
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Tom
Big Wall climber
San Luis Obispo CA
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Jan 24, 2018 - 11:57am PT
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There is no question that modern computer systems consume a great deal of electricity. Big data means big server farms. Mechanical engineers in Silicon Valley make good money keeping those server farms cool, and their refrigeration systems consume even more electricity. Microsoft was looking into running their servers completely immersed in seawater to combat overheating.
But, Bitcoin's blockchain scheme is especially consumptive of electricity. The iterative numerical solutions necessary to validate and update each block are currently clocking in at about 50 trillion hash computations per second. Each new Bitcoin consumes as much electricity as an American family uses in an entire year (say, $800). The current rate of new Bitcoin production is 12.5 Bitcoin every ten minutes. So, that would be $10,000 of electricity every ten minutes, or about 100,000 kW-hr every ten minutes, or about 600 MW continuous consumption. That is just Bitcoin, and doesn't include Ethereum, VaporCoin, or the rest of the cryptocurrency schemes.
The Bitcoin blockchain mining and payment scheme has a lot of redundancy in performing the expensive operations. Only one server, out of thousands, is the first to solve the math problem, and thereby earn Bitcoins for updating the blockchain. All the other servers consume a similar amount of electricity, which is essentially wasted. The competitive process of updating the blockchain requires more than a thousand times as much electricity as the actual task itself, which is power-intensive in its own right.
The logic, here, can be compared to mailing a letter across town, but first there has to be an Indy 500 race with a thousand cars all burning up a thousand gallons of fuel. The winner receives the letter, and takes a victory roll up to the recipient's mailbox.
The blockchain concept requires multiple servers to ensure the validity of each new block in the chain, but the computational load doesn't need to be so intense. Some sort of voting scheme among numerous computers could ensure accuracy and validity in updating the blockchain.
There is Nothing Virtual About Bitcoin's Energy Appetite
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Jan 24, 2018 - 02:26pm PT
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Gotta presume there is something here if it keeps Reilly posting.
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Banks
Trad climber
Santa Monica, CA
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Jan 25, 2018 - 01:13pm PT
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A simple wager for the Bitcoin bears, doubters and haters. In the unlikely event that BTC is up a year from now, I get paid( in Bitcoin of course) the difference from today's price. And if it crashes as the hyper inflated Ponzi scheme that it is, I pay you the difference. Who wants some EZ money?
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Jan 26, 2018 - 10:13am PT
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block chain technologies were not initially intended to support anonymous transactions...
that is an added layer to the protocols
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Banks
Trad climber
Santa Monica, CA
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Jan 26, 2018 - 10:29am PT
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The wired article is nothing new. Contrary to public perception and the perception of many on this forum, Bitcoin is not anonymous. If you conduct illegal activities using Bitcoin, you are a moron. There are privacy coins available if you choose to partake in such activities.
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Jon Beck
Trad climber
Oceanside
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Jan 27, 2018 - 12:07pm PT
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All I know is what I see and hear. Just heard that a Japanese crypto currency exchange just got ripped off for 500 million bucks.
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