BBO Discussion Forums: alternative currency - BBO Discussion Forums

If you don't know what vanity means, read the link. Here is an extract -
1: something that is vain, empty, or valueless

the quality of people who have too much pride in their own appearance, abilities, achievements, etc. : the quality of being vain

something (such as a belief or a way of behaving) which shows that you have too much pride in yourself, your social status, etc.

a bathroom cabinet that is covered by a sink and a countertop

So where do you think they are going to find the money for vanity projects that benefit mankind a big fat zero?

Anyone actually believe this crap about Participation and Funding of CERN? The list for 2012 includes Greece, Italy, Spain and Portugal - all countries under severe financial austerity measures. So where do you think they are going to find the money for vanity projects that benefit mankind a big fat zero?

The situation in Greece is so bad that Greece is to sell off historic buildings to settle debt.

Higher up I said that 9 billion Euros had already been wasted by CERN on projects like the LHC. Read the whole article - the annual LHC running cost is $1 billion. Seems like I got it hopelessly wrong. According to this article, published on July 5 2012, Finding the Higgs Boson cost $13.25 billion. Another two years has almost passed, so we need to add another $2 billion to the total cost. And still they only "THINK" they have found the Higgs Boson, something they need to give credence to all these stupid THEORIES of theirs. How about someone updating the Wikipedia article with actual cost until 31 December 2013, plus the budget for 2014?

The squandering of money to this extent to give credence to a THEORY is truly apalling. You come and tell me - How do these THEORIES benefit mankind?

I am really looking at this more from a risk management point of view. The risk or harm is far greater plunking all these billions into one project rather than spreading it out over hundreds.

Some questions can't be answered with small experiments. If you really want to find the answers, you need some skin in the game.

The squandering of money to this extent to give credence to a THEORY is truly apalling. You come and tell me - How do these THEORIES benefit mankind?

If you are convinced that science and knowledge are evil, why are you using a computer? And the electricity to run it? These are possible due to science. So you had really better stop.

Further, I am sure that you have never been to the doctor, because medicine is all about science, and I hope that you will remain true to your convictions if you ever get really ill and need to see one. Or are science and knowledge OK when they benefit you personally, and no other times?

True, but I wanted to be scientifically accurate. The discovered particle has been shown to have the expected properties but that does not automatically mean that it is the same thing. Science tends to move slowly - that is why the discovery of this particle is generally regarded as so important; and why I found 32519's statement particularly unusual.

True to yourself you have not answered my question, “The squandering of money to this extent to give credence to a THEORY is truly apalling. You come and tell me - How do these THEORIES benefit mankind?” The theory we are talking about is the BBT. Instead you refer to electricity, computers and medicine.

But taking your example of medicine – if there were 10,000 scientists (the number working on the LHC) with a budget of $15.25 billion (the amount wasted to date) to find a cure for HIV/Aids and/or cancer, I’ll bet you a BBO dollar any day that we would probably have had a cure for both by now. That would benefit mankind!

More than 40 years after the war on cancer was declared, we have spent billions fighting the good fight. The National Cancer Institute has spent some $90 billion on research and treatment during that time. Some 260 nonprofit organizations in the United States have dedicated themselves to cancer — more than the number established for heart disease, AIDS, Alzheimer’s disease, and stroke combined. Together, these 260 organizations have yearly budgets that top $2.2 billion.

"The space program was a political boondoggle and a waste of money." - so say some anyway. Yet out of the space program we got many improvements to our lives that would have at best taken a lot longer to get to.

Don't ask me for examples - you're here, you know how to google.

Henry Farrell has a truly brilliant essay on how the evolution of Silk Road, the dark-web trading platform for forbidden transactions, can be viewed as an experiment in political philosophy. I can’t do better than his own blurb:

The Silk Road might have started as a libertarian experiment, but it was doomed to end as a fiefdom run by pirate kings.

It’s an awesome read.

...Until now, digital transactions have always gone through some sort of central authority that can move the money and update the records on both sides — as PayPal and Visa do for many online purchases.

The Bitcoin network, on the other hand, is run by a decentralized network of users who jointly keep track of transactions and update the records in real time, with no single user or company in charge. The records of all transactions are kept on a public ledger — essentially just a big, publicly available spreadsheet — known as the blockchain that is visible to anyone and has, at least so far, proven impossible to tamper with.

Much of the work being done inside banks, and in other industries, is looking at whether the blockchain technology can be used independent of the Bitcoin virtual currency, which was the first thing to be recorded on the blockchain ledger.

The music publication Billboard recently wrote about how several start-ups are aiming to use a digital ledger like the blockchain to keep track of musical downloads and distribute the royalties to artists without relying on a central record keeper.

Vermont’s state government commissioned a study in June to look at how a blockchain could be used as a legal method of record keeping under state law; it is one of several governments, many of them outside the United States, looking at the technology.

But the most intense work is being done by financial companies like the Nasdaq OMX Group, which has several programmers in Manhattan preparing software that the company plans to roll out this year.

...Many in the financial industry hope they can find a way to use the blockchain concept — what is often referred to as a distributed ledger — without using the blockchain associated with Bitcoin.

Although the bankers working on the idea disagree on how this will happen, they show surprisingly little disagreement on whether it will happen. One of Goldman’s top Internet analysts, Heath Terry, said in a recent company podcast that “the whole blockchain tech behind Bitcoin has massive implications for really any kind of asset — and the ability to transfer ownership of digital goods.”

“It’s hard to see a world where that blockchain technology doesn’t end up changing the way we think about asset ownership,” he said.

The virtual currency Bitcoin hit a new record over the weekend, surging past the $4,000 mark. As of press time, one Bitcoin is worth $4,250. It's an astonishing rally for a currency that was worth $580 a year ago and has risen 300-fold over the last five years.

It's not clear what's causing the currency's value to rise so rapidly.

One likely factor: last week, the Bitcoin network officially accepted a long-debated upgrade called segregated witness. The Bitcoin network limits the size of blocks on the Bitcoin blockchain, which in turn limits the number of transactions the network can process each hour. For the last year, the network has been bumping up against this limit, leading to congestion on the network and high transaction fees. Segregated witness aims to relax this bottleneck by moving part of each Bitcoin transaction outside the blockchain, allowing more transactions to be squeezed into each block.

Another possible factor: earlier this month, the Bitcoin network forked, creating a spinoff currency called Bitcoin Cash. Many people expected the schism to undermine confidence in Bitcoin, but that doesn't seem to have happened. The spinoff went smoothly, and the mainstream Bitcoin network continued working as well as ever.

The value of one Bitcoin has risen about 50 percent since the split happened on August 1. Perhaps Bitcoin speculators are simply relieved that a contentious fight is over and nothing catastrophic occurred.

Finally, there's an ongoing boom in "initial coin offerings"—sales of new, Bitcoin-like cryptocurrencies for a variety of applications. Last week, for example, a company called Filecoin raised $187 million in a single hour selling a not-yet-created cryptocurrency that will be used to purchase online storage space. Another virtual currency called Tezos raised more than $200 million in July. A third, called Bancor, raised $153 million in June.

These exotic new currencies are often offered for sale using Bitcoins, since it's often easier to exchange one cryptocurrency for another than to directly sell new cryptocurrencies for dollars. So people who want to invest in an ICO often need to get their hands on bitcoins (or ether, the currency of Bitcoin competitor Ethereum) first. With hundreds of millions of dollars pouring into these ICOs, that translates into a lot of demand for the most famous virtual currencies.

In this whitepaper, we introduce a global, decentralized credit protocol, Bloom. Bloom addresses these existing limitations in lending by moving credit scoring and risk assessment to the blockchain.

Bloom is a standardized, programmable ecosystem to facilitate on-demand, secure, and global access to credit services. Bloom presents a novel approach to credit risk assessment allowing both traditional fiat lenders and digital asset lenders to issue compliant loans on the blockchain while increasing competition to lower fees and improve borrower experience at every layer of the credit issuance process.

The Bloom protocol presents solutions to the following problems:

1. Cross-Border Credit Scoring: Credit histories are not portable across coun- tries, forcing individuals to re-establish their credit track records from scratch when they relocate.
2. Backward-Looking Creditworthiness Assessment: Credit systems rely on historical debt repayment information and therefore cannot easily accommodate users who are new to credit. This is especially prevalent among minorities, the underbanked, and the youth[5].
3. Lenders Have Limited Ability to Expand and Offer Loans Globally: Borrowers in markets with less developed financial and regulatory infrastructure struggle to access credit as lenders have limited identity and scoring data to base credit decisions.
4. High Risk of Identity Theft: Borrowers must expose all of their personal information when applying for a loan - the same info an attacker can use to open new lines of credit.
5. Uncompetitive Credit Scoring Ecosystem: Credit data is centralized. In most markets, a single provider scores credit, resulting in an uncompetitive ecosystem for evaluating credit risk. FICO was checked on 90% of all U.S. Loans[2].

Protocol Components

There are three main systems which comprise the Bloom protocol:

1. BloomID (Identity Attestation): BloomID creates a global secure identity, allowing lenders to offer compliant loans globally, without forcing borrowers to expose personal information.
2. BloomIQ (Credit Registry): BloomIQ is a system for reporting and tracking current and historical debt obligations that are tied to a user’s BloomID.
3. BloomScore (Credit Scoring): The BloomScore is a metric of consumers’ creditworthiness. This decentralized score is similar to FICO or VantageScore score, but with updated models.

The Bloom protocol improves the current credit ecosystem by creating a globally portable and inclusive credit profile, reducing the need for traditional banking infrastructure and opaque, proprietary credit scores. This means both traditional fiat lenders and digital asset lenders will be able to also securely serve the 3 billion people who currently cannot obtain a bank account or credit score.

Bloom decentralizes the credit industry while lowering rates and increasing security. Bloom makes it easy for lenders to transition to the blockchain by offering a new, compliant way for them to access new markets.