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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Neel Mehta
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October 22 - November 7, 2021
Visa and Mastercard combined could handle 5000 transactions per second,[219] Visa once bragged that it hit 11,000 transactions per second,[220] and a whitepaper estimated that Visa could max out at 45,000 transactions per second,[221]
The popular pickaxe theory argues that it’s hard to get rich by participating in the latest technological craze — but it’s very profitable to sell equipment to those who are.
The American GPU manufacturers AMD and Nvidia have seen their stock prices surge as miners for Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies have snapped up their chips.
(Backward-incompatible changes like these are known as hard forks, while backward-compatible changes are known as soft forks.[419]
Smart contracts can follow rules and move money, data, and other assets around accordingly.[434] They have addresses just like people do, and you can send them commands (with a small fee) to make them act.[435] In this way, they’re a bit like vending machines on the blockchain: put money in, get a predictable item out.
You can bundle together smart contracts to make more sophisticated Ethereum-based apps, known as decentralized apps, or DApps
One of the best-known such token-cryptocurrencies is the Basic Attention Token, or BAT. BAT was created by Brendan Eich, the co-founder of Mozilla (the nonprofit behind the popular Firefox browser), in 2017.
The basis for payment is attention. Brave users are given BATs based on how much attention they pay to ads, and publishers are given BATs based on how much attention Brave users pay to ads on their platforms.[496]
the three main things that hold Bitcoin back from being a viable payment system are the fees, waiting times, and volatility.
The blockchain… is the biggest innovation in computer science—the idea of a distributed database where trust is established through mass collaboration and clever code rather than through a powerful institution that does the authentication and the settlement.
In our minds, the top selling points of blockchains are that they’re decentralized, trustless, transparent, and tamper-proof.
We think supply chains are one of the killer apps of blockchain — a use case where a blockchain is head and shoulders above every alternative.
The upshot was that Xbox reduced the royalty settlement time from 45 days to minutes, letting publishers get real-time insights and make adjustments to contracts on the fly. Xbox’s finance team also reduced its workload by 70% and reduced the time needed to onboard new publishers from multiple days to 15 minutes.[693]
We think it’s quite likely that countries will tokenize their currencies in the coming decades
We think that mainstream ecommerce platforms like Amazon will eventually accept stablecoins to serve people who don’t use the merchant’s native currency or live in another country;
all kinds of companies can now build private blockchain apps now that Microsoft’s Azure,[965] Amazon Web Services,[966] Oracle,[967] Google Cloud, IBM,[968] and other cloud computing services now offer cloud blockchain solutions.
