Second, Nakamoto designed Bitcoin so that the work of maintaining that distributed ledger was itself rewarded with small, increasingly scarce Bitcoin payments. If you dedicated half your computer’s processing cycles to helping the Bitcoin network get its math right — and thus fend off the hackers and scam artists — you received a small sliver of the currency. Nakamoto designed the system so that Bitcoins would grow increasingly difficult to earn over time, ensuring a certain amount of scarcity in the system. If you helped Bitcoin keep that database secure in the early days, you would earn more Bitcoin than later arrivals. This process has come to be called “mining.”
This is a kind of "pyramid".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyramid_scheme
A pyramid scheme (commonly known as pyramid scams) is a business model that recruits members via a promise of payments or services for enrolling others into the scheme, rather than supplying investments or sale of products or services. As recruiting multiplies, recruiting becomes quickly impossible, and most members are unable to profit; as such, pyramid schemes are unsustainable and often illegal.
In this kind of business there is always an "intermediary".
It has to be one.
No currency or bitcoin is safe. Just check how private banks open arcades of private people who are found to be dictators or drug dealers. Privacy was violated. currency, gold and jewelry confiscated, etc.
If you use a "password" the one who accepts it can decipher it.
The internet for business started with lots of troubles. In early days, in the Clinton administration, the success of online shopping was faked. In reality didn't work the first years, but faking that was a success caused it to grow. The "scandal" of the lie was soon diminished when people started to shop online years later. But, actually the system of buying "by mail" was already a success from decades ago, it was just doing the same shopping avoiding the use of USPS stamps in envelops.
This is an analogy that confuses me. It doesn't sound right, or better to say, it is not how Uber and city "transit" works. It sounds more as Trivago works.
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.
This is the part that makes me more skeptical.
Bitcoin or Ethereum: $80 billion, $25 billion, whatever,” Dixon says. “That means if you successfully attack that system, you could walk away with more than a billion dollars. You know what a ‘bug bounty’ is? Someone says, ‘If you hack my system, I’ll give you a million dollars.’ So Bitcoin is now a nine-year-old multibillion-dollar bug bounty, and no one’s hacked it. It feels like pretty good proof.”
How do we know if that "proof" exists when there is no way to investigate if any hacking has happening?
If you are a victim of hackers, where are you going to make a complaint? You must give your password to check how it happened, the stolen amount, your IDENTITY of course...
The article implies this is playing with "pseudo-money", so I wish them the best. I love new technology, but I'm too busy to get into something that for me is not my way of living, perhaps others might enjoy the benefits of Bitcoin.
