Bots and cheating are in a similar category but considered different things. Cheats unfairly enhance a player's ability to raise their rank while bots sell the lowest-level accounts to people who don't want to spend time grinding in-game points (in League's case, IP to buy Champions or Experience Points to hit level 30, the bare minimum to participate in ranked play).
Theoretically ETH can easily replace bitcoin as a payment method for anything that can be bought with BTC currently. I would imagine some people investing in ETH are expecting that to happen.
My BofA account has a whole spending habits section with graphics and charts and a ton of features, for free, which comes with my debit account. Why would I want to do all this myself?
The only real answer is privacy, but I would just use BTC instead of USD if I wanted privacy anyway, and BTC is already programmable.
Because this locks you into BoA. Hence why they're doing it.
If you have a BoA, Chase, Citi, and Fidelity account, then unless there's a push towards exposing data for third party uses your only option becomes trying to look at 4 dashboards.
To illustrate only one problem. There's also others, including portability: what can you take with you when you decide to switch your 10 year old BoA account to another bank?
Another would be that a third-party could write the code that performs the analysis, you should be able to just download (or purchase, I suppose) their script and use it, so you don't have to do it yourself anyway. This also means it becomes possible to have competition within this space, right now, you can only ever use your bank's analysis tools, if they're great, fine whatever good for you. But for some people it'll have limitations one way or another. Competition is not a bad thing.
Besides, it can be fun to look at your financial data with your programming tools. It's an interesting data set to play around with, analysis, data visualization, budgeting, even if just for learning.
I haven't used BofA for a while, but in general the problems I have with these features are
1) inaccurate classification and no way to fix it
2) exported data does not include all of this, so if I move banks or want to do analysis I'm sol
Yeah definitely. The classifications of transactions is generally poor. Even with Simple, which is very generous in allowing you to (re)assign arbitrary tags on the fly and provide nice data metrics, I'd still like to generate different graphs than they choose to present.
The ability to aggregate the data from all my accounts would be amazing...
In most publications editors select headlines for all stories in an issue. The writer does not have a say in what is printed as the title of their own article.
Using a blockchain to enforce scarcity and authenticity of digital objects is a cool idea on paper but only actually becomes effective under one of two scenarios:
1. Everyone simply agrees and acts accordingly thereby giving the ledger value. See: US dollars.
or,
2. There are real-world repercussions to violating the rules. This implies some form of hybrid blockchain/real-world-contract with trade via blockchain and enforcement via the real-world law.
There are advantages to trading on a blockchain. To make the claim that a digital item (can be simply copied with a screenshot) is "rare" because it's one-of-a-kind on the blockchain only works if everyone agrees that ownership via blockchain is as important or more important than the pixels that make up the image.
The definition of "works" in my previous statement is up for discussion, considering this idea is silly on its own merits, it might be working just fine as far as the creator intended.
That is valid, but tokens also have value from managing real scarcity in the underlying protocol. For example, bitcoin as a p2p protocol can only transmit so much information reliably. Bitcoins fundamentally have some value in relation to that bandwidth. The value may be relatively small compared to the value as financialized bubble asset, but it is still there.
This is more apparent in a token like Huntercoin. HUC plays a role in a game that is played by following the Huntercoin protocol (ie, on the "blockchain" though I hate to use that term). One could trivially clone this project and build Froggercoin or whatever, but you would give up the real network effects from humans playing the Huntercoin game.
This could become a more interesting dynamic as people come up with bitcoin-like protocols that (a) do more interesting things aside from merely publish tx sets, and (b) are not protocols that could exist as federated services without a scarcity token.
As blockchain industries begin to deliver on some of their promises, then the real-world impact of owning a token on a blockchain starts to increase.
Consider a promotion where you receive a 20% discount while purchasing a new game on Steam using Bitcoin if you hold a specific Rarepepe token. This is a real-world benefit that can be enforced by the blockchain with technology available today.
These are early days. We will see many more crazy, fun, and, yes, useful tokens emerge over the next few years.
There are real-world repercussions to violating the rules. This implies some form of hybrid blockchain/real-world-contract with trade via blockchain and enforcement via the real-world law.
A blockchain backed by legal requirements could then be used to authenticate chains of custody. This would actually be useful in legal proceedings and for the tracking of things like medical records.
The more confusing thing is what will happen when the userbase finds out Ethereum "smart contracts" aren't good for anything except online gambling which certainly will not be allowed on the TokenBrowser app. Also, I shook my head when I saw your screenshot, that is certainly not a good first impression.
Isn't the history of technology riddled with inventions that "aren't good for anything except ..." which turned out to be good for lots of things.
From the top of my head the following examples come to mind.
1. Early criticism of the tablet was that nobody would use them because they didn't have a keyboard.
2. Early criticism of the internet was that nobody would ever purchase anything over the internet.
3. Early criticism of dropbox mentioned elsewhere in this thread, "they're just re-selling S3, why would anyone use that".
Disclaimer that I'm pretty deep in the Ethereum space so my perspective is anything but objective, but it is informed as I know the space quite well.
Smart contracts are capable of big transformative change to how we do a lot of things, but they are REALLY new and we're only just starting to learn how to use them and what we can use them for. Here are some examples.
1. Look at [ENS](http://ens.domains/) as an example of what DNS might look like if it weren't centralized.
None of these things are likely to blow up into massive mainstream adoption tomorrow but they are illustrative of what is possible and there are a lot of people working very hard to make these things ready for mainstream adoption.
>how smart contracts can remove middlemen from financial transactions.
These sorts of things are trivially gamed and have been since they were first proposed in the bitcoin space. Besides that you don't even remove a middleman for this example since you still need the courier to act as the middleman.
That's not true at all though. Smart Contracts are being used in a wide variety of great projects.
In my opinion what's really missing is a fiat currency token, that can be legally recognised as actual money for a lot of business to be able to go massive.
Well that depends in what's truly different for you. A quick example, because I'm on my phone, is [1], which is enabling donating to specific people around the world with total transparency through smart contracts
This is a perfect example of what I was talking about. It is a nice idea. However there are no problems charities face that existing FIAT currencies or bitcoin or standard real-world contracts don't already solve. Unless there is a case to be made that censorship or centralization is a problem for contracts in the charity space, this app is a solution looking for a problem, in my opinion.
It is unclear how blockchain smart contracts contribute any value to the users in this case.
There are a number of Islamic charities that have been prosecuted under suspicion of funding terrorism. Of course, as soon the government thinks Ethereum is being used to send money to ISIS, anyone associated with the project will be swiftly conveyed to Guantanamo Bay.
It's not only a free-market solution, it's also the solution that doesn't involve giving your ISP plaintext data and trusting them to do nothing wrong with it because the government said so.
