The blockchain is like the internal combustion engined (ICE). Bitcoin is like a particular make and model of car that uses ICE technology.
Yeah we know how it works, but it's 1927 and some people are saying Ford is a scam. Ford is here until something else better takes it's place, and when that happens, investors will move with it.
Just hoping it will go away and screaming bubble is not a great strategy.
You seem to be confusing me with other posters. My argument is that Bitcoin's current dominance is no different than the Ford Model T's dominance in its day. Its transitory. This is why Bitcoin is not a currency, rather it is a high speculative investment vehicle. Its a Wall Street darling for now, and many home investors are jumping on the bandwagon. This is not to say Bitcoin is not useful, its a great way to transfer money, today, if one is in no hurry. On top of this it has design flaws, its a v1.0.0 technology, a modestly successful experiment. Modest? Yes, because success is defined by its use in commerce not what speculators are willing to pay for a coin.
Its not quite that simple. First mover is only an advantage if there is some sort of switching cost. Since consumer use involves holding little bitcoin, and any held bitcoins can be easily traded for other coins, there is little to no switching cost.
Switch to what? Unless you're going to make the argument that BTC is a scam but every other Crypto is ok, then the only option is switching back to fiat. We're already past that point, just like how we're not going back to VHS progress moves forward
Lets try that all time favorite of slashdot, the car analogy. The blockchain is like the internal combustion engined (ICE). Bitcoin is like a particular make and model of car that uses ICE technology. Blockchain technology is the future, it is poised to revolutionize industries as the ICE did in its time. However bitcoin is just one user of blockchain technology, as a particular make and model car is just one user of ICE technology. Sure its popular now, it will likely still be around in a few years, but in 5-10 years people may move to a different make/model car or crypto currency.
Bitcoin has some design failings. Newer coins address these unforeseen problems. Newer coins also offer additional capabilities. If people or industry find these newer coins/blockchains interesting they will switch. There is little cost to doing so. There is no established network effect to keep people on bitcoin. Various "retail communities" switched from bitcoin to monero with no problem, they wanted more "privacy". Etherium is getting a lot of attention from wall street types due to its capabilities. Are these going to replace bitcoin, I don't know. I'm just pointing out that from small specialized user communities to large industry groups there is nothing "sticky" about bitcoin, no network effect increasing the cost of switching. Hence switching to another coin is easy. What it will be, when it might happen, I don't know. I just know there is nothing special about bitcoin, its just the currently popular coin and that can easily change. Especially so given the various flaws mentioned earlier in this thread. Bitcoin's initial success is no more meaningful than the initial success of the Palm PDA or Rio MP3 player.
They opened up their ERP system and looked at where most Apple IDs home or work addresses are locacted and though to themselves: would it be more convenient for our customers and better for our bottom line if this cluster of users had easy access to a Apple store?
Maybe now but initially it was where are the upscale malls and similar venues located that will establish our brand as a "status symbol". The stores started in the "beleaguered Apple" days. When they were still thought of as a computer company. Those stores going up in boutique locations signaled:
(1) Hey, we're not dead, neither is the Mac.
(2) Your wealthy, you can afford a $600 iPhone, amaze your friends with a PDA that can make phone calls. Keep in mind that these are 2007 dollars and an iPhone that did not have 3rd party apps. No App Store yet, just the factory apps.
Bitcoin's current spike in price is largely due to wall street speculation.
Or popularity. Remember the only thing that counts is supply and demand. Supply is finite, demand is increasing, so there is a tipping point where prices take off which is now.
The popularity is primarily one of speculation, trading, not consumer use.
BTC might be replaced but that won't happen overnight. Being first mover they have the benefits of incumbency, and if you follow the crypto tech you'll get a better idea of how the competition is faring.
Its not quite that simple. First mover is only an advantage if there is some sort of switching cost. Since consumer use involves holding little bitcoin, and any held bitcoins can be easily traded for other coins, there is little to no switching cost.
The user base and the miners are two very different things, which is sort of the problem with bitcoin since its algorithm is not ASIC resistant and CPU/GPUs can not contribute. Also by the time a coin is in a position to replace bitcoin its not likely to be very small anymore.
The steel, rail, and electric companies all saw similar growth rates during their infancy.
In the infancy of those industries there were many failures and many investors wiped out.
Disruptive technology is disruptive.
Bitcoin is not the disruptive technology. Blockchain is the disruptive technology and bitcoin is merely one user of the blockchain. Its also a quite flawed user. Its design relies on a large diverse group of miners for security but what we have is a small group of miners consolidated into pools that make 51% attacks feasible. In 2014 a mining pool reached 50%. Mining is also geographically centralized in China, about 70% of hashing in 2016, and thereby vulnerable to government influence. Bitcoin fees and transaction verification time make it ill suited for small and quick purchases. Recently technical limitations involving block size have caused transaction verification to take a day, fees ranging from $2 to $9 if one wanted transactions to verify "quickly". "Quickly" not matching a timescale where one might buy a coffee, a burger, etc. There are few users and their switching cost to move to another coin is negligible. Users tend to convert fiat to bitcoin as needed, only holding small amounts of bitcoin at a given time. Bitcoin's current spike in price is largely due to wall street speculation.
The blockchain will be part of our future but bitcoin could easily be displaced by another digital coin.
if your investment strategy is long term, short term dips are meaningless.
If a person delayed purchases at the time of the 2014 spike they could have purchase at 1/4 the price. Today those patient suspicious people have 4x the value of those who purchased during the spike. 4x is a meaningful difference. We are currently in the midst of an even greater spike. You can not time the market in general but "in general" is not including times of fast exponential spikes in prices.
Well there are also the thank you's to buyers from those of us selling at $8,000. We'll talk again at $2,000.;-)
Or $20k. That's the funny thing about the future, no amount smugness will make you any better at predicting it.
Because its only smugness that would make one suspicious of a fast exponential spike in price from $300 to $8,000. Its not like bitcoin didn't have one of those in 2014 where it spiked to $1,000 and then crashed to $250 and sat there for years.
Will it go to $20K, quite possibly yes. Will it go there without a substantial drop between now and then, not likely.
"I don't think Ford needed a bailout, they had cut costs and taken out loans prior to the economic crisis"
I've been trying to find out the terms of Ford's loans for a long time & have come up with pretty much nothing.
I've heard that it was a sweetheart deal backed by insiders but have no proof one way or the other.
The amount of loans they got back them was over $20 billion at a time when that 10x their net income
I have faint recollections that they were quite aggressive with putting up things as collateral. I think they even used the "Ford" brand name as collateral.
Tell me again how the Too-Big-To-Fail competition is still alive today?
I don't think Ford needed a bailout, they had cut costs and taken out loans prior to the economic crisis. They supported the bailout legislation because they feared GM and Chrysler's failure could affect Ford suppliers too.
Some people argue Ford took government money due to low cost loans related to the development and production of hybrid and electric vehicles. The government was trying to jumpstart this technological switch. However this is quite different than needing money to cover your daily operations.
This also leads to another overlooked point. Which is easier for a hostile programmer to infiltrate, contributors to a FOSS project or a commercial development team like Powerpoint's, Word's, etc? A hostile programmer being someone intentionally introducing an exploit. A designed "zero day".
No it doesn't. When someone dies, unless their wills says otherwise, any copyrights go to their estate. It is up to their heirs what happens after that.
Irrelevant, its open source so someone forks the code and continues on. What the relatives want is irrelevant, all they have is an old project name. Well that and possibly the right to dual license it. But the existing open source recipient lose nothing even if it gets dual licensed by the new copyright owners.
Of course it damages perception, but the integrity can be regained by others having more PoW than the attacker.
Once the illusion of security is broken it cannot be regained. Few are currently aware of the 2014 50% pool because nothing resulted from it. Should a group attain 51% AND cause fraudulent transactions that will become widely known and not forgotten. Bitcoin would never be the same.
The same is not true for PoS. Once the stakes cannot be trusted you cannot regain the trust.
If your argument of getting PoW below 50% restores trust then getting stake below 50% also restores trust. You can't have it both ways.
More importantly increasing use tends to diversify ownership of coins. Large stakeholders are more of an issue at early stages of a coins life. If a coin starts with PoW and switches to PoS once it achieves a certain level of diverse ownership a lot of the problem is avoided. We'll see how things go with Etherium.
It's all about perverse incentives. The MBA can make a year's salary in a year by playing it straight, or a year's salary in a few days by being dishonest...It's not even a contest, is it? It's just rational behavior.
What makes you think perverse incentives are something specific to MBA types? Any company can f'up their incentives and MBA and non-MBA management and regular employees will take advantage. The problem is with the person and business school does not change the person's inner core.
The difference is that any "51% attack" (which in reality needs to be ~80% or so) is temporary with PoW. In PoS any catastrophic breakage in trust cannot be gotten back.
How is a successful 51% attack upon bitcoin not going to damage trust? How is the fraud/damage going to be undone?
The future is the blockchain. Bitcoin is just one of many users of the blockchain, bitcoin is as replaceable as other coins. It is not established, its use beyond speculators extremely rare. For the average consumer using bitcoin the switching cost from bitcoin to something else is very low.
Even now the top 4 pools control over 50 percent. From a country point of view, miners from China control over 80%
And its not like the government over there can exert undue influence over those commercial mining operations, operations largely dependent on government run hydroelectric projects offering very low rates.
As bitcoin mining in increasingly centralized on expensive specialized ASIC hardware, as individual/small miners increasingly host remotely (where they don't have physical control of ASICs) where electricity is inexpensive, bitcoin insecurity is increasing.
Bitcoin was designed with the assumption of distributed mining. With many small players contributing to the blockchain, as in the early days when CPU and GPU mining was practical. That assumption of bitcoin's design has turned out to be false, bitcoin is vulnerable.
Yes. Proof of Stake requires almost no electricity at all, as the blockchain is determined by who puts up the largest stakes. The reason Proof of Stake isn't popular is because it's a "rich get richer, poor may as well not play" system, just like capitalism.
No, the "rich" and the "poor" experience the same percentage increase in wealth. The problem with proof of stake is getting started, the distribution of coins from the founders to the masses. In proof of work there is a basis for coin distribution, "work", but for proof of stake?
Also note that "stake" is not simply how many coins you have. The age, the amount of time you have held those coins, is also factored into the "stake". So those who hold coins get a little extra compared to those who just trade.
One strategy may be starting with proof of work to get that "early" distribution of coins and then switching to proof of stake. Bitcoin may have sufficient coin distribution to switch to proof of stake. I believe Ethereum is adopting such a strategy and eventually switching over.
An MBA's role is not to make a profit. An MBA's role is to *maximize* profit. That's where the destructive behavior comes from.
Not to the extent of "destructive behavior" that harms the company. For example if a CEO at a publicly traded company makes a short term decision that is destructive in the long term the failure is not in their MBA training. Their MBA training actually teaches them not to do so. Interestingly MBA training considers CEOs (or any employee) acting in personal self-interest rather than in the company's interest. An MBA would say that the incentives are wrong. They are taught that if you reward bad things you will get bad things, even from otherwise good people. Again, Dilbert is much beloved in business school too. Wally and his minivan are likely to come up while discussing this topic. http://dilbert.com/strip/1995-...
I started in the 80s too. I had similar views to what you just expressed. Actually, its not an MBA thing. How I found out such views were wrong: https://games.slashdot.org/com...
Is this one of these MBA things where you try to get the optimum short term benefit at the cost of long term investments?
No, because in business school MBAs are taught not to manage for short term benefits. That such a path likely leads to the demise of a company.
I know that sounds confusing to many. I once believed as you suggested. I spent decades thinking I knew what MBAs were about. Then I went to business school and learned the truth. Part of the fun of business school was laughing at how wrong I was in my various beliefs.
Let me try to explain it in a different way. Image how technology, science, programming, hacking, etc is portrayed in TV and movies, how journalists describe things in the main stream press. Pretty disappointing huh? Guess what, their portrayal of business and MBAs is just as bad, just as inaccurate.
So, here's the secret to what an MBA program is. Its not like a normal Masters program where you take a deeper dive in core subjects and a deep dive into some specialty. Its actually a shallow dive into many different unfamiliar topics. Topics that cover a fairly complete range of activities across a company or organization. You take a few accounting classes, are you now an accountant, no. You take a few strategy classes, are you now a business strategist, no. A few management classes, a few marketing classes, a couple economics classes, a product development class, an operations class, an information technology class, etc. Are you now an expert in anything? Not anything you were not already an expert in before you started the MBA program. So what the hell, what's the point? The purpose is that all these different specialties within a company/organization have to coordinate. To better coordinate it helps if they can talk to one another effectively. So a person who was an engineer before the MBA program is still an engineer afterwards. However all those shallow dives into other areas allow the engineer to see things from the perspective of non-engineers. If that engineer has to communicate an engineering issue or need to these others he/she can do so more effectively, can be more persuasive, will likely get the engineering issue/need greater consideration. And conversely when an issue or need from the outside is "more important" he/she is better prepared to understand why. This better understanding might lead to finding a better alternative. So an MBA is really about better coordination and better communication between teams that normally would be somewhat isolated from each other. This can lead to a healthier and more successful company.
Now some of you are surely thinking about some manager with an MBA who was a complete a-hole, or a pointy-haired boss (FYI, Dilbert is beloved in business schools too). Well, that person was likely an a-hole long before they went to business school. That PHB, likely clueless long before they went to business school. Again, business school doesn't really change who you are, its just supposed to give you new tools and new perspectives. Can it fail to do so, sure, like any other degree program there are ticket punchers who manage to graduate without retaining very much.
"Linux" commonly refers to a complete operating system, not necessarily just the kernel. Usually people can distinguish between operating system and kernel by context. Using ChromeOS/Android, operating system, hosting ChromOS/Android, kernel. From Linux.com:.
What is Linux?
Just like Windows XP, Windows 7, Windows 8, and Mac OS X, Linux is an operating system.
The OS is comprised of a number of pieces:
The Bootloader
The kernel
Daemons
The Shell
Graphical Server
Desktop Environment
Applications
I think you're the one playing with semantics. What the hell does "Linux hosted" mean? You've got the kernel and you've got userland; tell me what the practical difference is.
The difference is what I explained earlier. You installed a Linux userland on a chromebook/chrombox. Chrome OS is as it was before, a non-Linux userland hosted on a Linux kernel. The fact that a Linux userland is also hosted on this same Linux kernel does not change Chrome OS, Chrome OS remains not Linux.
The chromebook/chrombox is merely running two independent userlands, one Linux one not Linux.
Slashdot Mirror
The blockchain is like the internal combustion engined (ICE). Bitcoin is like a particular make and model of car that uses ICE technology.
Yeah we know how it works, but it's 1927 and some people are saying Ford is a scam. Ford is here until something else better takes it's place, and when that happens, investors will move with it. Just hoping it will go away and screaming bubble is not a great strategy.
You seem to be confusing me with other posters. My argument is that Bitcoin's current dominance is no different than the Ford Model T's dominance in its day. Its transitory. This is why Bitcoin is not a currency, rather it is a high speculative investment vehicle. Its a Wall Street darling for now, and many home investors are jumping on the bandwagon. This is not to say Bitcoin is not useful, its a great way to transfer money, today, if one is in no hurry. On top of this it has design flaws, its a v1.0.0 technology, a modestly successful experiment. Modest? Yes, because success is defined by its use in commerce not what speculators are willing to pay for a coin.
Its not quite that simple. First mover is only an advantage if there is some sort of switching cost. Since consumer use involves holding little bitcoin, and any held bitcoins can be easily traded for other coins, there is little to no switching cost.
Switch to what? Unless you're going to make the argument that BTC is a scam but every other Crypto is ok, then the only option is switching back to fiat. We're already past that point, just like how we're not going back to VHS progress moves forward
Lets try that all time favorite of slashdot, the car analogy. The blockchain is like the internal combustion engined (ICE). Bitcoin is like a particular make and model of car that uses ICE technology. Blockchain technology is the future, it is poised to revolutionize industries as the ICE did in its time. However bitcoin is just one user of blockchain technology, as a particular make and model car is just one user of ICE technology. Sure its popular now, it will likely still be around in a few years, but in 5-10 years people may move to a different make/model car or crypto currency.
Bitcoin has some design failings. Newer coins address these unforeseen problems. Newer coins also offer additional capabilities. If people or industry find these newer coins/blockchains interesting they will switch. There is little cost to doing so. There is no established network effect to keep people on bitcoin. Various "retail communities" switched from bitcoin to monero with no problem, they wanted more "privacy". Etherium is getting a lot of attention from wall street types due to its capabilities. Are these going to replace bitcoin, I don't know. I'm just pointing out that from small specialized user communities to large industry groups there is nothing "sticky" about bitcoin, no network effect increasing the cost of switching. Hence switching to another coin is easy. What it will be, when it might happen, I don't know. I just know there is nothing special about bitcoin, its just the currently popular coin and that can easily change. Especially so given the various flaws mentioned earlier in this thread. Bitcoin's initial success is no more meaningful than the initial success of the Palm PDA or Rio MP3 player.
They opened up their ERP system and looked at where most Apple IDs home or work addresses are locacted and though to themselves: would it be more convenient for our customers and better for our bottom line if this cluster of users had easy access to a Apple store?
Maybe now but initially it was where are the upscale malls and similar venues located that will establish our brand as a "status symbol". The stores started in the "beleaguered Apple" days. When they were still thought of as a computer company. Those stores going up in boutique locations signaled:
(1) Hey, we're not dead, neither is the Mac.
(2) Your wealthy, you can afford a $600 iPhone, amaze your friends with a PDA that can make phone calls. Keep in mind that these are 2007 dollars and an iPhone that did not have 3rd party apps. No App Store yet, just the factory apps.
Bitcoin's current spike in price is largely due to wall street speculation.
Or popularity. Remember the only thing that counts is supply and demand. Supply is finite, demand is increasing, so there is a tipping point where prices take off which is now.
The popularity is primarily one of speculation, trading, not consumer use.
BTC might be replaced but that won't happen overnight. Being first mover they have the benefits of incumbency, and if you follow the crypto tech you'll get a better idea of how the competition is faring.
Its not quite that simple. First mover is only an advantage if there is some sort of switching cost. Since consumer use involves holding little bitcoin, and any held bitcoins can be easily traded for other coins, there is little to no switching cost.
The user base and the miners are two very different things, which is sort of the problem with bitcoin since its algorithm is not ASIC resistant and CPU/GPUs can not contribute. Also by the time a coin is in a position to replace bitcoin its not likely to be very small anymore.
The steel, rail, and electric companies all saw similar growth rates during their infancy.
In the infancy of those industries there were many failures and many investors wiped out.
Disruptive technology is disruptive.
Bitcoin is not the disruptive technology. Blockchain is the disruptive technology and bitcoin is merely one user of the blockchain. Its also a quite flawed user. Its design relies on a large diverse group of miners for security but what we have is a small group of miners consolidated into pools that make 51% attacks feasible. In 2014 a mining pool reached 50%. Mining is also geographically centralized in China, about 70% of hashing in 2016, and thereby vulnerable to government influence. Bitcoin fees and transaction verification time make it ill suited for small and quick purchases. Recently technical limitations involving block size have caused transaction verification to take a day, fees ranging from $2 to $9 if one wanted transactions to verify "quickly". "Quickly" not matching a timescale where one might buy a coffee, a burger, etc. There are few users and their switching cost to move to another coin is negligible. Users tend to convert fiat to bitcoin as needed, only holding small amounts of bitcoin at a given time. Bitcoin's current spike in price is largely due to wall street speculation.
The blockchain will be part of our future but bitcoin could easily be displaced by another digital coin.
if your investment strategy is long term, short term dips are meaningless.
If a person delayed purchases at the time of the 2014 spike they could have purchase at 1/4 the price. Today those patient suspicious people have 4x the value of those who purchased during the spike. 4x is a meaningful difference. We are currently in the midst of an even greater spike. You can not time the market in general but "in general" is not including times of fast exponential spikes in prices.
..... from those that think they missed out.
Well there are also the thank you's to buyers from those of us selling at $8,000. We'll talk again at $2,000. ;-)
Or $20k. That's the funny thing about the future, no amount smugness will make you any better at predicting it.
Because its only smugness that would make one suspicious of a fast exponential spike in price from $300 to $8,000. Its not like bitcoin didn't have one of those in 2014 where it spiked to $1,000 and then crashed to $250 and sat there for years.
Will it go to $20K, quite possibly yes. Will it go there without a substantial drop between now and then, not likely.
..... from those that think they missed out.
Well there are also the thank you's to buyers from those of us selling at $8,000. We'll talk again at $2,000. ;-)
"I don't think Ford needed a bailout, they had cut costs and taken out loans prior to the economic crisis"
I've been trying to find out the terms of Ford's loans for a long time & have come up with pretty much nothing. I've heard that it was a sweetheart deal backed by insiders but have no proof one way or the other. The amount of loans they got back them was over $20 billion at a time when that 10x their net income
I have faint recollections that they were quite aggressive with putting up things as collateral. I think they even used the "Ford" brand name as collateral.
Tell me again how the Too-Big-To-Fail competition is still alive today?
I don't think Ford needed a bailout, they had cut costs and taken out loans prior to the economic crisis. They supported the bailout legislation because they feared GM and Chrysler's failure could affect Ford suppliers too.
Some people argue Ford took government money due to low cost loans related to the development and production of hybrid and electric vehicles. The government was trying to jumpstart this technological switch. However this is quite different than needing money to cover your daily operations.
This also leads to another overlooked point. Which is easier for a hostile programmer to infiltrate, contributors to a FOSS project or a commercial development team like Powerpoint's, Word's, etc? A hostile programmer being someone intentionally introducing an exploit. A designed "zero day".
It becomes public domain
No it doesn't. When someone dies, unless their wills says otherwise, any copyrights go to their estate. It is up to their heirs what happens after that.
Irrelevant, its open source so someone forks the code and continues on. What the relatives want is irrelevant, all they have is an old project name. Well that and possibly the right to dual license it. But the existing open source recipient lose nothing even if it gets dual licensed by the new copyright owners.
Of course it damages perception, but the integrity can be regained by others having more PoW than the attacker.
Once the illusion of security is broken it cannot be regained. Few are currently aware of the 2014 50% pool because nothing resulted from it. Should a group attain 51% AND cause fraudulent transactions that will become widely known and not forgotten. Bitcoin would never be the same.
The same is not true for PoS. Once the stakes cannot be trusted you cannot regain the trust.
If your argument of getting PoW below 50% restores trust then getting stake below 50% also restores trust. You can't have it both ways.
More importantly increasing use tends to diversify ownership of coins. Large stakeholders are more of an issue at early stages of a coins life. If a coin starts with PoW and switches to PoS once it achieves a certain level of diverse ownership a lot of the problem is avoided. We'll see how things go with Etherium.
It's all about perverse incentives. The MBA can make a year's salary in a year by playing it straight, or a year's salary in a few days by being dishonest...It's not even a contest, is it? It's just rational behavior.
What makes you think perverse incentives are something specific to MBA types? Any company can f'up their incentives and MBA and non-MBA management and regular employees will take advantage. The problem is with the person and business school does not change the person's inner core.
The difference is that any "51% attack" (which in reality needs to be ~80% or so) is temporary with PoW. In PoS any catastrophic breakage in trust cannot be gotten back.
How is a successful 51% attack upon bitcoin not going to damage trust? How is the fraud/damage going to be undone?
The future is the blockchain. Bitcoin is just one of many users of the blockchain, bitcoin is as replaceable as other coins. It is not established, its use beyond speculators extremely rare. For the average consumer using bitcoin the switching cost from bitcoin to something else is very low.
Even now the top 4 pools control over 50 percent. From a country point of view, miners from China control over 80%
And its not like the government over there can exert undue influence over those commercial mining operations, operations largely dependent on government run hydroelectric projects offering very low rates.
The energy spent *MINING* a bitcoin is not at all close to the energy spent *TRANSACTING* a bitcoin. Why is this even a metric?
Mining subsidizes transaction fees.
Mining is sort of like a fixed cost, transactions fees like a variable cost. You have to factor in both.
Contrary to a PoW-chain absent a +51% cartel
In 2014 a single mining pool reached 50%.
https://www.coindesk.com/51-at...
As bitcoin mining in increasingly centralized on expensive specialized ASIC hardware, as individual/small miners increasingly host remotely (where they don't have physical control of ASICs) where electricity is inexpensive, bitcoin insecurity is increasing.
Bitcoin was designed with the assumption of distributed mining. With many small players contributing to the blockchain, as in the early days when CPU and GPU mining was practical. That assumption of bitcoin's design has turned out to be false, bitcoin is vulnerable.
Yes. Proof of Stake requires almost no electricity at all, as the blockchain is determined by who puts up the largest stakes. The reason Proof of Stake isn't popular is because it's a "rich get richer, poor may as well not play" system, just like capitalism.
No, the "rich" and the "poor" experience the same percentage increase in wealth. The problem with proof of stake is getting started, the distribution of coins from the founders to the masses. In proof of work there is a basis for coin distribution, "work", but for proof of stake?
Also note that "stake" is not simply how many coins you have. The age, the amount of time you have held those coins, is also factored into the "stake". So those who hold coins get a little extra compared to those who just trade.
One strategy may be starting with proof of work to get that "early" distribution of coins and then switching to proof of stake. Bitcoin may have sufficient coin distribution to switch to proof of stake. I believe Ethereum is adopting such a strategy and eventually switching over.
An MBA's role is not to make a profit. An MBA's role is to *maximize* profit. That's where the destructive behavior comes from.
Not to the extent of "destructive behavior" that harms the company. For example if a CEO at a publicly traded company makes a short term decision that is destructive in the long term the failure is not in their MBA training. Their MBA training actually teaches them not to do so. Interestingly MBA training considers CEOs (or any employee) acting in personal self-interest rather than in the company's interest. An MBA would say that the incentives are wrong. They are taught that if you reward bad things you will get bad things, even from otherwise good people. Again, Dilbert is much beloved in business school too. Wally and his minivan are likely to come up while discussing this topic. http://dilbert.com/strip/1995-...
I started in the 80s too. I had similar views to what you just expressed. Actually, its not an MBA thing. How I found out such views were wrong: https://games.slashdot.org/com...
Is this one of these MBA things where you try to get the optimum short term benefit at the cost of long term investments?
No, because in business school MBAs are taught not to manage for short term benefits. That such a path likely leads to the demise of a company.
I know that sounds confusing to many. I once believed as you suggested. I spent decades thinking I knew what MBAs were about. Then I went to business school and learned the truth. Part of the fun of business school was laughing at how wrong I was in my various beliefs.
Let me try to explain it in a different way. Image how technology, science, programming, hacking, etc is portrayed in TV and movies, how journalists describe things in the main stream press. Pretty disappointing huh? Guess what, their portrayal of business and MBAs is just as bad, just as inaccurate.
So, here's the secret to what an MBA program is. Its not like a normal Masters program where you take a deeper dive in core subjects and a deep dive into some specialty. Its actually a shallow dive into many different unfamiliar topics. Topics that cover a fairly complete range of activities across a company or organization. You take a few accounting classes, are you now an accountant, no. You take a few strategy classes, are you now a business strategist, no. A few management classes, a few marketing classes, a couple economics classes, a product development class, an operations class, an information technology class, etc. Are you now an expert in anything? Not anything you were not already an expert in before you started the MBA program. So what the hell, what's the point? The purpose is that all these different specialties within a company/organization have to coordinate. To better coordinate it helps if they can talk to one another effectively. So a person who was an engineer before the MBA program is still an engineer afterwards. However all those shallow dives into other areas allow the engineer to see things from the perspective of non-engineers. If that engineer has to communicate an engineering issue or need to these others he/she can do so more effectively, can be more persuasive, will likely get the engineering issue/need greater consideration. And conversely when an issue or need from the outside is "more important" he/she is better prepared to understand why. This better understanding might lead to finding a better alternative. So an MBA is really about better coordination and better communication between teams that normally would be somewhat isolated from each other. This can lead to a healthier and more successful company.
Now some of you are surely thinking about some manager with an MBA who was a complete a-hole, or a pointy-haired boss (FYI, Dilbert is beloved in business schools too). Well, that person was likely an a-hole long before they went to business school. That PHB, likely clueless long before they went to business school. Again, business school doesn't really change who you are, its just supposed to give you new tools and new perspectives. Can it fail to do so, sure, like any other degree program there are ticket punchers who manage to graduate without retaining very much.
"Linux" commonly refers to a complete operating system, not necessarily just the kernel. Usually people can distinguish between operating system and kernel by context. Using ChromeOS/Android, operating system, hosting ChromOS/Android, kernel. From Linux.com:.
What is Linux?
Just like Windows XP, Windows 7, Windows 8, and Mac OS X, Linux is an operating system.
The OS is comprised of a number of pieces:
The Bootloader
The kernel
Daemons
The Shell
Graphical Server
Desktop Environment
Applications
What is a "Linux userland"? BC as far as I can tell, you're talking about GNU.
The stuff above the kernel, of which GNU is only a part of, the stuff that creates a usable operating system.
I think you're the one playing with semantics. What the hell does "Linux hosted" mean? You've got the kernel and you've got userland; tell me what the practical difference is.
The difference is what I explained earlier. You installed a Linux userland on a chromebook/chrombox. Chrome OS is as it was before, a non-Linux userland hosted on a Linux kernel. The fact that a Linux userland is also hosted on this same Linux kernel does not change Chrome OS, Chrome OS remains not Linux.
The chromebook/chrombox is merely running two independent userlands, one Linux one not Linux.