This is really misleading. ETH may handle more than the top crypto m by market cap, but Steemit and Bitshares dwarf all of these combined by number of transactions.
Title: Ethereum Now Handles More Transactions Than All Digital Currencies Combined
Digital currency does not require decentralization, not sure why you and others keep bringing this up. They aren't claiming to be the biggest decentralized, they're claiming to be the biggest digital currency period.
You may be correct from a strictly technical point of view but then "digital currency" becomes a meaningless term. After all, one could argue that USD is a "digital currency" as well, given that cash transactions are a minuscule part of all transactions.
Also, I can easily devise a "digital currency" which handles billions of tx/s...between address A and address B.
One could argue you can stretch any term to mean something and then it becomes meaningless. That doesn't make the argument valid.
In your case, you're wrong because Digital Currency means "Only Digital", where the form of exchange is of information not something physical. FIAT currencies are pretty much all excluded by definition.
Digital currency is the criteria THEY specified. When making vague hand wavey claims to your superiority, you should expect people to point out how silly it is to make vague hand wavey claims and how that usually means the claim is BS.
If they wanted to compare to decentralized blockchain based p2p currency then they should have said that. They didn't, so any digital currency that beats them in transactions proves them wrong.
Its really not that hard to make truthful statements. "We're the highest transaction decentralized digital currency on the market". One additional word to clarify and no one here is arguing this point.
You consider Ethereum to be decentralized? I don't see its governance structure being any different than neoliberal central banking. Hence Ethereum Classic.
I really enjoyed your post and look forward to reading the series. I would suggest you try out Steemit.com as this is their business model as well, they already have a large community, and this type of post/series would be like catnip over there.
In my opinion this is the greatest, television series of all time. The way every loose end is tied up and they show that really nothing has changed, the cycle just repeats itself... it's a master stroke. I moved to Baltimore years after the series ended, but it could still have been made here today. Just with smartphones and encryption. The players are stil the same and the city is pretty much unchanged in terms of the underlying issues.
And my apartment is across the street from stringers copy shop :)
I agree that its the greatest TV show of all time. I used to watch the entire thing once a year and always saw something new that I had missed before. I initially didn't like season 2, and its still my least favorite season, but after finishing the series you realize how important the season was to the overall story in fleshing out the world.
It's got some clumsy moments, but yeah absolutely essential to show the interconnectedness. Just one example: If you lose those livable-wage blue-collar jobs, you're absolutely gonna have yourself some thriving criminal enterprises including the drug trade. Does Wee-Bey go to work as a Barksdale soldier if he can easily get a good-paying job at the port or in some kind of manufacturing? It's been the story of every "de-industrializing" US city for the past 50 years.
After he forced the lieutenants to read Robert's Rules of Order.
My favorite part of the series is when String realizes he's been conned by Clay Davis, and tries to put a hit out on him. Avon intervenes and scolds String, saying "what I tell you about playin' them fuckin' away games?" Avon (and later, Marlo) understood that they could never go legit, because going legit is just another unfair game with a different set of rules.
The only character that escaped their fate was Bubbles.
One of my favorite moments in that scene is hearing Avon say "You'd need a day of the jackal motherfucker for that" and Googling that phrase and discovering and watching the amazing movie of the same name. Thus realizing even more just how perfect that line was in context.
The Wire definitely took attention to detail seriously.
Agreed, I really didn't enjoy Season 5 and it was a disappointing end to what was otherwise an epic TV series. McNulty was always an edgy character, but planting evidence and feeding it to the media just felt a little too contrived.
season 5 made sense given that everyone was getting what they wanted. Policemen who would otherwise question the weak case were happy to get paid. Everyone knew it was bullshit, they made that clear.
Well, except for Daniels, lol. But he was promoted way too fast.
I actually didn't have a huge problem with McNulty's arc or twist. It was outlandish but it feels organic not just from a character perspective, but from the rift between homicide detectives and the medical examiners office. In Simon's book, "Homicide", there's a chapter focusing on a death that the coroner declines to classify as a homicide. The detective, however, keeps pursuing the case, which is problematic because there are plenty of active homicide cases to spend time on. He eventually cracks the case but it's presented as the detective going above and beyond given the politics/concerns of the department.
So a "good guy" detective like McNulty fabricating evidence seems like an extreme twist, but not so much the idea that a good guy detective feels that some homicides aren't given enough attention. And McNulty, by this point in the show, feels like a character who is tired of all this shit but also has seen how he's gotten away with being a self-righteous dick who bucks the bureaucracy (from the very first episode). And the difference in opinion between the medical examiner and the police can be very problematic, since the former's designation is what ultimately makes a case a homicide or not.
IMO, the 5th season is the worst because of the newspaper setting. As a journalist, it wasn't particularly compelling to me. I mean, it may be the most realistic depiction of a newspaper on TV, and maybe familiarity breeds contempt, but the core problem is that it's not well-developed. The key flaw is that the "villains" of the newspaper setting, Scott Templeton (the reporter) and his enabling editors, are given no qualities beyond being caricatures of bad/evil journalists. This is the same reason why I feel Lieutenant Marimow (named after a Baltimore Sun whom Simon despised) is also a very weak character.
Compare the shallowness of the 5th season bad-guy journalists to the 3rd-season bad guy politicians, like Clay Davis. Davis is most definitely a corrupt character, but besides having an amazing catchphrase ("Shiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii-iiiit!"), he's still got some moral complexity behind him. I think this is best shown in the hilarious scene in the 5th season in which he takes the stand in his corruption trial with such dramatic finesse that he gets acquitted. Davis may be corrupt, but you can see why his community loves him. [0]
I'm not sure how you could make the 5th season journalists interesting, and I'm not sure Simon could either. His rants against the real-life Marimow and the Sun are lengthy and legendary [1], and this was after he was famous for The Wire. Simon is a die-hard defender of the sanctity of journalism and I think he let that overtake his sensibilities when writing the 5th season.
Multisignature wallets mean that you can beat the credentials out of a person and still not be able to access the coins. You would have to figure out who else had keys and beat then too. Raising the difficulty a non-trivial level.
For the wallet to be useful, the person you are beating will either know who else needs to be beaten, can be compelled to withdraw their funds under duress, or in the case of a centralized counterparty, like a bank, can be trivially compelled by a government bearing a lawful order, to sign off on a money transfer.
If none of those means of getting you to pay work out, they can always leave you to enjoy your internet money in jail.
The issue is that they have no idea how much money you 'actually' have.
If someone threatens you with a wrench, you simply do what they ask you to do and provide a password to your "account" that conveniently doesnt have much money in it.
"yes officer! I have done exactly what you asked me to do. Here is all the electronic money that I own. "
Could the need to manually refill water periodically be replaced by a condenser that constantly pulled ambient moisture out of the air? The total amount of water they are talking about is not very much. This seems like it could be solved without constant topping off.
Seems possible in theory, and a car's A/C system already does just this. They'd just have to collect the water that normally drains from the A/C evaporator.
Could be some issues with contamination though - you don't want dirty water being injected into an engine...
