What I really look forward with BECs (although simple atomic interferometers based on ultracold atoms would do, too) is super-sensitive magnetic field detection.
One can detect magnetic fields from a shielded laptop, even many meters away, and figure out what's happening inside (e.g. leaking secrets etc).
I think, not a terribly difficult experiment, but nobody has performed it: need ultracool physicists and hackers in one lab room
Sometimes I cannot buy legitimate stuff without them. Just today, I bought some books for which US credit/debit cards refused to work. And I see that every week.
I usually don't go out of my way to pay with bitcoin, but recently needed to buy a PSN prepaid card and every website I tried either declined my 2 credit cards and paypal outright or requested some ridiculous verification (record myself on camera holding a passport to my face? To buy a $10 prepaid card? No thanks)
In the end I stumbled upon a shop that accepted bitcoin and got my PSN card in the time it took to get one network confirmation.
Sorry, but this looks like a completely uneducated opinion.
There were many attempts to create virtual money which cannot be shit down, and all of them dated before Bitcoin failed due to government intervention. Bitcoin solved that, and the simplest solution was the wasteful proof of work.
Of course, when someone is using the same principle for something centrally controlled, which can be done by a database, that is a different story.
You know, my first foray into the world of Big Corpo people was when I met this guy studying at <pretentious arts uni in London>.
He was looking for ways to use blockchain to help regions with unstable currencies. Well, he was doing his Ph.D, actually on that topic.
So he would approach people and suggest they all meet up and have this think-tank somewhere in North London.
Now imagine you've got about 20-30 people sitting in the same room: and they are all engineers, regional managers, financiers. Not a single person has _any_ idea what blockchain is.
They were all meeting weekly to have this hours-long discussion about how they could possibly apply this thing blockchain to solving issues in the third world countries.
> There were many attempts to create virtual money which cannot be shit down, and all of them dated before Bitcoin failed due to government intervention. Bitcoin solved that, and the simplest solution was the wasteful proof of work.
One of his ideas was to create virtual money. But they forget that _secure_ proof-of-work-based money would require the same amount of initial investment (mining hardware) as if you simply went and bought several tons of gold and then issued a currency supported by that gold.
Bitcoin didnt require initial investments of mining hardware, initially it was mined with normal computers. Mining hardware is more like a running cost that goes up with usage/value.
The security of the Bitcoin network isn't a function of its hashrate or the number of nodes, though these things correlate; it's a function of the cost of running it.
Regardless of whether the network is run on specialized hardware, old desktops, or TI-83s, the network is only secure so long as it costs enough to run that any motivated attacker would have to spend more money than they can leverage to attack it.
There is even a site that tells you how much money you'd need to run 51% attacks on different cryptocurrencies. (It looks like the site used Nicehash payouts as a data point but Nicehash is down/being updated so those values are no longer there, but I found an article with a screenshot from May last year.)
I know a handful of people who benefited a lot from Bitcoin by just speculating with it. They got wealthy, some even rich and now they have much better living standards. That group fits into the niche that were quite well "served" by Bitcoin.
Just pointing out that "scammers and criminals" is clearly not the only ones benefitting from Bitcoin, and I would suspect it is also minority.
Commodities can be sold and consumed for some real economic purpose. Cryptocurrencies can't. It's like gold except you can't see it or make jewellery from it or use it for anything.
It's an arithmetic consequence of there not being any intrinsic return. The money won from cryptocurrency trading can only come from other traders, because there are no coupons, dividends, or physical deliveries.
Well, this doesn't look right to me. Imagine that the moon is actually a filter at the path of the sunlight.
Sun's temperature is 6000 K. Moon's surface is pretty black: it reflects only 12% of the light.
So, effective temperature of the Sun reflected by Moon, considering that thermal radiation is proportional to T^4, is 6000 * .12 ^ (1/4) ~= 3500 K. That's quite enough to light up some fire! Of course, the spectral composition of the light will be not thermal etc, but the estimate should be close enough.
Why doesn't the Moon itself heat up like that? Well, the rocks on Earth don't heat up to 6000 K either... I think, it's partly that they are "not surrounded by sun", partly that the Moon is a giant cold heatsink
All right, but if the coin is inseparable part of the resource, it cannot be a security. There is a thin line here.
True, but then you're limited to things which can be stored in a blockstream in the space allocated to a single coin. There aren't many useful resources that could fit into that space, even fewer that would scale.
Now imagine Ethereum. It was ICO'd, talking in today's terms. Is it a security? (hint: SEC just admitted it's not)
Unless there is something about Ethereum that I'm not aware of, it does not represent any sort of ownership interest in another asset, it is the asset.
The SEC's position on the DAO was that they were not going to apply their guidance retroactively to that one. Going forward, though, they're cracking down.
> Now imagine Ethereum. It was ICO'd, talking in today's terms. Is it a security? (hint: SEC just admitted it's not)
I didn't see any admission like that. Quite the contrary. I think the statement pretty clearly places the ethereum ICO (as distinct from the functioning network after) as a security.
RegA+ companies don't require SEC proxy statements, director and 10% stockholder reporting, SOX independent audits, SOX internal controls documentations, or SOX CEO certification. Pretty much all they're required to do is create a quarterly audited financial report. How is that "obstruction, not protection"? What kind of company that ordinary people should invest in can't produce an audited financial report? Charities and nonprofits product audited financials!
Thanks for bringing this up. I didn't realize just how lax the rules regarding being a Regulation A Plus company are.
You don't need to be an accredited investor to invest in one. You just need to limit your investment to no more then 10% of your salary, or net worth, whichever is greater.
There are currently over 150 Reg A+ companies in the United States. I am eagerly waiting for people lambasting how the accredited investor rule keeps out little people... To explain why little people aren't falling head over heels to invest in RegA+ corps.
One can detect magnetic fields from a shielded laptop, even many meters away, and figure out what's happening inside (e.g. leaking secrets etc).
I think, not a terribly difficult experiment, but nobody has performed it: need ultracool physicists and hackers in one lab room