The US Government Just Paid a Crypto Startup to Explore Digital Dollars (futurism.com) 49
"The U.S. federal government just awarded a grant to the blockchain startup Key Retroactivity Network Consensus (KRNC)," reports Futurism.com, "to study the feasibility of integrating cryptocurrency into the economy."
That doesn't mean that the U.S. is going to pivot to a digital blockchain dollar, CoinDesk reports. Rather, the National Science Foundation funded KRNC because it's interested in exploring new ways to improve the security of digital transactions.
The protocol KRNC is developing would meter out a new cryptocurrency in proportion to a user's existing wealth, CoinDesk reports, instead of requiring them to purchase or actively mine new crypto. In other words, it wouldn't make people richer, but it would grant them an alternative means to transfer funds online.
"Bitcoin, which runs on the principle of Proof-of-Work, is wasteful," KRNC CEO Clint Ehrlich told CoinDesk. "It requires people to waste money and computing power solving pointless problems."
The protocol KRNC is developing would meter out a new cryptocurrency in proportion to a user's existing wealth, CoinDesk reports, instead of requiring them to purchase or actively mine new crypto. In other words, it wouldn't make people richer, but it would grant them an alternative means to transfer funds online.
"Bitcoin, which runs on the principle of Proof-of-Work, is wasteful," KRNC CEO Clint Ehrlich told CoinDesk. "It requires people to waste money and computing power solving pointless problems."
Yurp (Score:2)
What's the exchange rate with the petrodollar?
"That doesn't mean the U.S. is going to pivot..." (Score:3)
Re: "That doesn't mean the U.S. is going to pivot. (Score:2)
Okay, tinfoil hat person. You do know your financial transactions can already be traced, right? Unless, of course, you setup a series of offshore shell corporations to funnel money through. Even your cryptocurrency transactions can be traced!
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It takes some effort, but dollar bills have serial numbers.
Yes, they can be tracked, if someone really wants to bother. Pain in the ass to do so, but doable....
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Another reason my theist retirement benefits are entirely untrackable.
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Re: "That doesn't mean the U.S. is going to pivot (Score:2)
Thats why he said its a pain in the ass to do. You can do it, but you have to get known serial number bills into the hands of the person you want to track, then try to pick it back up further along the chain. Anything as simple as going to a casino, converting all your cash to chips, playing one hand, then cashing out would throw that whole tracking out the window.
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Large cash transactions are tracked. It's why you can't buy a new car for cash, the paperwork is just too much. Basically, only auction houses allow large transactions, because they've has so many decades to adapt to their perfectly legal roll in money-laundering. Large deposits and withdraws often have the bank scan every serial number, so that large transfers can be tracked in that way as well.
The underworld used diamonds for years for large transactions. Wonder if they still do now that most diamonds
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It's why you can't buy a new car for cash, the paperwork is just too much.
Last year I bought a new RAV4 for cash. No eyes batted.
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Not in the US, you didn't, or that was a very odd dealership indeed to accept a briefcase full of 20s.
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You can walk right into any major auto shop here in California and plop cash right on the table for a vehicle. I've also done it in Tennessee.
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Why on earth would you not write a check? You buying cars with street money?
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Unless things have changed you can walk in to a stockbrokers office with a footlocker of cash and buy anything you want.
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Okay, tinfoil hat person. You do know your financial transactions can already be traced, right? Unless, of course, you setup a series of offshore shell corporations to funnel money through. Even your cryptocurrency transactions can be traced!
Let me explain the whole concept of cash transactions. /s
In fact many times you can negotiate for a better price offering to pay cash instead of credit or debit cards.
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solving pointless problems (Score:2)
If they're going to maintain central
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Proof of Work is expensive because provably fair, distributed, decentralized consensus is difficult, and has a baked in cost. How you represent that cost is up to you, and whether or not that cost is close to the value you put on to provably fair, distributed, decentralized consensus is also up to you.
Good luck to PoS evangelists who will get eventually excoriated by current (naive) PoW critics when said critics find out how similar to a ponzi scheme PoS is.
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Maybe stop right here. POW is a digital currency method. The US wants credibility, auditing, identity, and blockchain can be used for that without POW or any of the intrinsic value generation stuff.
Indeed, Swift is under pressure to modernize in response to systems such as Ripple, and it's both speed and security, ACH will soon have to give in and either adopt blockchain-like tech or at least perform on par.
No Ponzi scheme necessary. Just secure, reliable, and quick. Today there is no real excuse for even o
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What they are doing is creating a illusory theatre to steal an idea that is already out there and claim it as their own. The idea of energy backed crypto currency. A central exchange with regional exchanges that covert energy supplies into crypto. A power station can sell a part of it generating capacity and covert it to and exchangeable crypto currency, which can be used to buy energy off them or exchanged on the market. The market can also issue a collective crypto, which would be a percentage of the tota
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Gold has industrial, medical, space, and military use.
Bitcoin have any of that? Nope.
Hell, I can at least wipe my ass with a piece of gold foil. Can't do that with Shitcoin.
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And gold can be tangible. You can buy a piece, put it in your pocket, and transfer/trade it physically, in a way cryptos cannot be.
Yes, it can still be stolen, and even undetected, and once taken, hard to identify if the thief cares to exert themselves minimally.
Nice headline (Score:1)
Headline: "The US Government Just Paid a Crypto Startup to Explore Digital Dollars"
Summary: "That doesn't mean that the U.S. is going to pivot to a digital blockchain dollar
I know headlines are meant to excite, but when they're contradicted in the summary, something ain't right.
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I've never understood "explore" to mean "pivot to". Didn't seem contradictory to me.
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picking and choosing (Score:5, Informative)
Bitcoin has a variety of characteristics that were all chosen to work together for a specific purpose. If you take away some of those characteristics, you dramatically change the nature of the product and the end result.
Blockchain is a solution to the problem of trust. Mining is a solution to the problem that governments expand the money supply.
If you pick and choose some of the features of bitcoin and rejecting others you run the risk of re-introducing the problems bitcoin was attempting to address in the first place.
Of course the entire blockchain could just be a single SQL database IF there was a centrally trusted authority. And if there is a centrally trusted authority there isn't much point in using blockchain at all. And instead of mining, you could just have a fixed money supply. But then the problem is that the central authority will eventually print money and there is not much anyone can do about it.
The supposed inefficiency of bitcoin is all part of how the system protects itself from monetary authority intervention.
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Most economists are not afraid of printing money. (I don't mean it literally either... FED doesn't actually have to print anything). The basic idea is that people who hold dollars should be against money printing because the printing dilutes the value of the dollars they already have. Economists have argued about this extensively and I doubt I can add anything of value. But if you want to give that school of thought a fair trial, take a look at the Austrian School economists. You can also watch some Marc Fa
We already have digital dollars (Score:3)
Most of our money is numbers in a computer.
the thing about cryptocurrencies is not the crypto but web of trust for transaction authentication. One can divide this into categories:
1. Fully distributed, no central authority or controll. (e.g. bitcoin)
2. Fully centralized, all transactions cryptographically appoved by a central authority
3. Trusted delegates. The is a central controller but they can delegate the appoval authority to others as they choose.
4. SOme thing else such as a distributed approval system but one central authroity that can add or remove currency into circulation.
The problem with #1 for most governments is that there's no chance of a central bank. While some people like that, it's a non-starter for the Feds.
Number 2, is even more restrictive than our current money system which currently allows banks to do what they want as long as they follow certain rules and report transactions. It looks like china is testing out this model right now.
Number 3. just a tweak on #2. Kind of like what we have now but much more control since paper money doesn't exist and transactions can occur whether they are blessed or not.
Number 4.... Now this would be interesting. I don't think it's been invented yet but there are some currencies that could support this. These are the ones that require the destruction of the originating key so that no one knows it. (because if you know it you can print money). But one could imagine that you could say the key is known but only to the fed. Then we get a distributed system where the feds cannot approve or deny transaction, is anonymous, but still allows the central bank to function.
the problem with the ones I know about in that category have the flaw that if that key was ever stolen then everything is completely sideways and the economy collapses.
Most dollars are already digital (Score:2)
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I complain about the fees associated with Visa and Mastercard, too. Freaking companies that set themselves up to get a few percentage points of money out of every damn transaction that takes place, in the world. It's good to be the kings. That said, credit card companies look fantastic when compared to bitcoin.
I can't see any cryptocurrency working until you can actually use it without the crazy fees and volatility.
The only thing bitcoin is good for is speculating on the value.
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"I complain about the fees associated with Visa and Mastercard, too. Freaking companies that set themselves up to get a few percentage points of money out of every damn transaction that takes place, in the world. It's good to be the kings. That said, credit card companies look fantastic when compared to bitcoin."
There's a fundamental misunderstanding here. Visa and MasterCard, And Discover, and American Express are not constituted to derive fees from transactions. They are, most specifically in the case of
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Sounds fishy (Score:5, Informative)
Re: Sounds fishy (Score:3)
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If it is just a way to award taxpayer money to two people who aren't really going to do anything with cryptocurrency I am actually relieved. Better than abolishing cash and switching to E-dollars as I am sure many would like to do (and will eventually happen).
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That actually sounds much more legit than some of the Pentagon contracts. The Pentagon is required to list all contracts awarded over $7 million, originally they were printed in the Wall Street Journal, but now they have a web page.
https://www.defense.gov/Newsro... [defense.gov]
I've been watching them since the early '80s, and about once or twice a year you'll see a group of 6-12 identically worded contracts awarded for something vague like "Engineering Services", normally for just under $100 million (the level at which
Meters out? (Score:2)
Not Technically Superior (Score:2)
Economists have been suggesting a much easier and fairly trivial solution to this forever. Grant individual Americans accounts at the Fed just like big banks. This would make transferring money straightforward and not require building a whole new system. There are a bunch of ways to do this if you don't want them to be on exactly the same terms as the big banks but cryptocurrency is a silly way to do it.
The primary thing that makes it different than an account at a central bank is that it's anonymous (no
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The "it" in the second paragraph meant most popular cryptocurrencies not the specific one being developed here.
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Economists have been suggesting a much easier and fairly trivial solution to this forever. Grant individual Americans accounts at the Fed just like big banks. This would make transferring money straightforward and not require building a whole new system.
You don't even need an account at the Fed level. If there's a nationally endorsed and mandated real-time transaction platform, then individual banks can compete to provide access to that.
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wasteful (Score:2)
"Bitcoin, which runs on the principle of Proof-of-Work, is wasteful,"
Ridiculous, in fact. I think that a digital currency should be based upon personal fitness. "Proof-of-Fitness", if you will. For each kilocalorie of work you sweat out, you earn a 'pittance', which is a unit of wealth. 1,000 pittances come to be worth a significant amount as others join the pyramid.
This takes stress off your computers and the internet and the global energy troublinka. It saves the environment, saves your flabby body and ma