An irreversible permissionless way to send funds near-instantaneously to anyone anywhere in the world is pretty darn good at a lot of perfectly legal use cases. My personal favorite example is that I once used Bitcoin for an emergency so my (then-homeless) friend could receive cash in hands from a Bitcoin ATM, in a matter of less than 1 hour, on a Sunday, while I was vacationing remote. Nothing, and I truly mean it because we searched, nothing else would have worked that fast: try setting up a new Western Union/MoneyGram account online on a Sunday, and have it verified and activated... nope. Fun thing is my friend had never used Bitcoin before that day. Bitcoin ATMs are a very convenient gateway to "cash in hands", when needed.
Can do this for free in Canada with Interac as long as both parties have Canadian bank accounts. But for international transfer theres not a good solution AFAIK.
Bitcoin ATMs are an interesting example because they involve at least one trusted third party - the Bitcoin ATM operator.
Wise (previously Transferwise) can do international transfer within seconds. If you're in Europe then payments between any bank in Europe take seconds (SEPA payments).
Wise wouldn't have worked as my friend was among the 10M American adults who are unbanked. Also I doubt him and I would have been able to do account setup on a Sunday, within 1 hour, which is the time it took us to do the transfer, despite this situation being his first time ever using Bitcoin.
I opened my Wise account in 20 minutes. The ID verification is all automated so it's really quick. I haven't heard of anyone who is unbanked before though, what would be a reason for that?
Interac wouldn't have worked even if him and I had been Canadians. My friend was unbanked due to past financial issues (which is also the reason he was homeless at the time.)
This is one significant advantage of Bitcoin, that it works for the unbanked.
I have not used the online version but you could have just as easily walked into a western union and done the exact same thing for substantially less fees.
Nope. The closest Western Union/MoneyGram/similar services to me were hours away by car. Hence why we tried to do it online. We tried MoneyGram because my friend was banned from Western Union. But even MoneyGram wasn't possible quickly online.
I’m straining to see the relevance of that, especially since at one point in my life I was a member of that statistic.
One thing I definitely didn’t need any more of back then was glamorized systems of financial predation and exploitation targeting me because of it. There’s no version of the world where the cryptocurrency ecosystem as it actually is, rather than how it is idealized to be, would have made my plight better had it existed at the time.
In any case, it still seems like a non-sequitur.
I’m just laughing at the premise that the many, many, many billion dollar investments and valuations of cryptocurrency firms, and the unending deluge of fraud and scams they reliably leave in their wake is meaningfully offset by the total amount of money transacted in the niche of homeless friends who need fast cash from their wealthy friend who is half way around the world outside of normal business hours. I mean, if that’s the case, then it would really behoove Western Union and MoneyGram to keep a few locations open on the weekend.
pretty sure the only time I ever used Moneygram I managed to send funds from my UK bank account without any MoneyGram account. Was a really easy way to get cash in a city that definitely didn't have Bitcoin ATMs
That's much closer to being true now than it was when bitcoin started getting popular, in no small part because it scared financial institutions into competing on convenience. But really, who says legality is the arbiter of greatness anyway? Are you really prepared to say that every illegal use of blockchain should never happen? I'm not.
> nothing legal it can do that something else can't do better
Eh, Treasuries should probably be traded on a blockchain. Cryptocurrency is nonsense. But the tech has legs. It just needs to, ironically, clear its way of the crypto/web3 crowd first.
I tend to think highly of most of the comments I see from you man, but you are quite confused about how this stuff works if you believe that the pay-to-play aspect of a cryptocurrency can be divorced from the blockchain used to track it. They are no more separable from one another than front is from back or up is from down.
A blockchain without the economic carrot-stick power to protect its own integrity and internal rules, power that comes from aligning the behavior of otherwise unrelated and even mutually antagonistic custodial participants by incentivizing their common interest in getting rich (or at least not losing their existing wealth), is no more than a database with superfluous "decentralization theater" yak shaving bolted on.
If defecting from the game doesn't cost you a meaningful penalty (and such cost is defined by a fixed unit of measure, in order to distinguish in-game gains from losses) then you are not compelled to follow its rules except by your own conscience. This would be noble, but it would not be a blockchain.
Blockchain is not a technology in the sense of being a better "how" for some existing problem. blockchain is before anything else, a social contract based on the premise that everything humans care about ('value') really does boil down to "voting with money," and thus requiries enforcement of such economic consensus through technology. It is sufficiently removed from expectations people normally have about how they relate to one another that it would require quite a revolution indeed to be adopted in the capacity in which it is intended to function as intended, that is, to become the ultimate source of truth for every transaction on Earth.
It's a back door attempt to fundamentally rewire how value is routed through society, and in the abstract this _might_ be a good thing (perhaps too generous with that 'might') in practice it cannot possibly happen due to physical constraints on consensus formation at the global, realtime scale that it would have to happen. As a result shortcuts are taken (or appear organically, i.e. exchages) in the form of centralized nodes of consensus settlement (what the promoters like to call Layer 2, sharding, or similar), and it's the people controlling these centralized nodes who end up becoming the new kings of this "revolutionized" system, the trust-me-bro's of trustlessness. I've met some of them, and they are not people who I would ever want to have anyone I care about to be under the thumb of.
No disagreement here, not a fan.* but so many arguments miss this point. the problems with blockchain are rooted in the why; the how is mostly a sideshow but admittedly much more expedient to criticize in comparison.
* were not for HN's character limit my username would have started with the word 'block'
Its sad to think web 2.0 so long ago was a move towards more human centric websites, UI's, AJAXy sites, etc and now web3 is just a marketing term for fraudsters, exit scammers, shady VC's, and criminals. The late-stage capitalism of the internet is obvious to see.
Web3 never had anything to do with the web. It was always a vain attempt to cash in on the aura associated with web 2.0 by sounding like a legitimate heir to the heritage of the WWW. It is however, as you said, just a convenient marketing term for crypto bros and blockchain scamware.
Web 3.0 as Tim Berners-Lee envisions it might have some legs, but web3 was a always an empty marketing vessel.
Blockchains are a fun tools, i really like some ideas (ipfs, etherium and solidity), but i want to separate it from the cryptocurrency nonsense. Luckily, almost all grifters and zealots started talking about "web3", to re appropriate the term (like they did "crypto", which mean cryptography for old and cybersec people).
Hence i associate web3 with the grift, and blockchain with the technology. Probably gp does the same.
I can't speak for the other commenter, but I don't think they said that "web3 is responsible for all the crypto nonsense". My impression is that they're just hinting at a relationship between the two.
I'm getting a really nice smooth experience on my Intel HD Graphics 620 (7th gen intel integrated graphics, old and slow). Also just looking at the default ball scene, and I was really impressed how smooth it was on my system. I'm using chrome.
I suspect this is possibly down to the use of readPixels and how slow that is on various devices. The engine seems to run in a worker and render to an offscreen canvas then transfer the image data in JS to the main thread before drawing it to a canvas there.
The transfer of image data only happens when we yield inside the engine which only occurs when you hit a breakpoint in script. Otherwise we're just rendering to the OffscreenCanvas and letting the normal flow blit it to the screen (not doing any copying).
I just did some profiling on Firefox and I feel like the profiling result doesn't quite make sense but it's saying that the majority of time is spent calling Performance.now() from the clock calls in C++. I'm wondering if that's because we're calling it too many times and maybe we should just call it once per frame.
It used to be any railroad that wanted to carry US Mail, so all of them, was required to hitch at least one passenger car onto their trains. The railroad executives insisted that this was so burdensome it would put them out of business so the law was changed. But before that change you could take a train to literally anywhere in the USA where freight trains go, which is basically everywhere including many small towns.
E.B. White wrote a marvelous essay on the subject called The Railroad.
Yes. _Fit_ is right, specifically in this context. Re-read the comment you're talking about. In fact, either work fine. I'm taking issue with the pedantry we're engaging in here (while admittedly adding to it).
I thought the same but I just tried on firefox desktop (Windows) and spun up a new google account with email, password, fake first+last name and fake bday. Really, I was expecting to be stopped at "Phone Number required" but it is indeed optional.
