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Cryptocurrency Classes Are Coming To Campus (nytimes.com)
While the price of Bitcoin has dropped since Christmas, the virtual currency boom has shown no signs of cooling off in the more august precincts of America's elite universities. The New York Times: Several top schools have added or are rushing to add classes about Bitcoin and the record-keeping technology that it introduced, known as the blockchain. Graduate-level classes this semester at Carnegie Mellon, Cornell, Duke, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Maryland, among other places, illustrate the fascination with the technology across several academic fields, and the assumption that it will outlast the current speculative price bubble. "There was some gentle ribbing from my colleagues when I began giving talks on Bitcoin," said David Yermack, a business and law professor at New York University who offered one of the first for-credit courses on the topic back in 2014. "But within a few months, I was being invited to Basel to talk with central bankers, and the joking from my colleagues stopped after that." For a class this semester, Mr. Yermack originally booked a lecture hall that could fit 180 students, but he had to move the course to the largest lecture hall at N.Y.U. when enrollment kept going up. He now has 225 people signed up for the class.
Obama would literally wipe the floor intellectually and physically with any Republican contender. He fucking owns you bitches and you know it.
That's why you really hate him. The black man made you look like inbred retarded yokels who turn out to be frauds, actual traitors, as you die in prison.
Enjoy bitch. You earned it.
Nothing special to understand.
Do you want a database with built in 'proof' of integrity (with some generally exploitable caveats), then you can attempt to make blockchain work within its current limitations.
But so far I dont see the point and it appears to have significant problems scaling amongst other glaring problems, 51% attack, or if the database does have a central record like many do for speed and convenience then many of those are just plain stolen or hacked and who cares what the blockchain says.
The most interesting use for blockchain that I have seen so far is 1 time records of voting, which seemed workable but challenging if there are not good public records of who can vote. I'm sure there are other possibilities as well.
If we are just talking about cryptocurrencies:
The best description of cryptocurrency at this time is a greater fool bubble.
The most charitable view of cryptocurrency at this time is unregulated gambling.
It seems likely on the order of tomorrow's sunrise that educating the public about the Bitcoin would certainly not lead to more folks purchasing it.
Even if they are educated, folks still will speculate in Bitcoins anyway. It's like gambling, alcohol, tobacco and opiates. People like to mess with stuff that they know is bad for them.
I can understand why there is high interest in Blockchain among students. Even if it is riddled with scams right now, Blockchain skills are good to have when applying for your first job. That and Automation and AI.
Bitcoin is going to run its course, and a lot of folks are going to make a lot of money from idiots during that run. Hell, even Beanie Babies made money for folks . . . for a while.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
People do the same shit with stocks and all sorts of other shit. Just because you don't understand the value in crypto currencies does not mean that no value exists for other users. Not everybody is an investor. The people using it as a currency have moved away from Bitcoin to Dash and Bitcoin Cash and probably soon Zen Cash. Dash fees are super low. Less than a cent a transaction. The technology is interesting and valuable as a replacement for intermediary payment processors, bank wire fees, etc, and those whom aren't a fan of government, the unbanked, those who banks/governments won't allow to have bank accounts (sex workers, semi legal state drug businesses, etc), etc.
In New Hampshire we have actual businesses taking it at retail and I regularly buy lunch with it. There are dozens of places in my small town to spend crypto. From car repairs to restaurants to gift shops. We even have street merchants taking it. There is rarely a day that goes by that there isn't a transaction conducted in crypto by me both personally and via my business if not multiple times a day. Either I'm purchasing stuff through Amazon using safe at purse, hotels, plane tickets, conference tickets, etc.
I have zero financial interest in pumping crypto over my own use of it as a currency to replace credit cards for transactions. That is because it is cheaper. I save 3% on every transaction even ones paid in Bitcoin. Its most obvious when you look at purchasing computers and similar items online where you would have traditionally had to use a credit card. Hundreds of dollars can be saved, The fees have dropped for Bitcoin and people routinely purchase high ticket items from my company with it. We don't even take any other crypto currency yet even though we are working toward accepting Bitcoin Cash and I want to take Dash and Zen Cash eventually too. The later offers greater protection for privacy and anonymity. More so than monero. Zen Cash is based on the Zero Coin protocol which is basically not a crypto currency but rather the math behind privacy and anonymity. It's the real deal and has been in development for years- it's finally solved the privacy/anonymity problems that crypto currencies have only really been able to make difficult to untangle as opposed to real anonymity and privacy.