With the increasing frequency of civil aviation issues, one can't help but wonder what the future of air travel looks like. It may not be as business-as-usual as many today anticipate.
If Apple had their foresight of yesteryear, they'd realize the electric car market is already beyond reach and move on directly to hydrogen powered jetliners. Replacing Jet-A with liquefied hydrogen is the next great market behind EVs.
I wonder what a YC application with such an idea might look like. Design the plane and the fuel containment/loading systems at 2 airports. Start America's first "carbon free" aviation route. Maybe move freight instead of people at first for an easier regulatory pipeline. It's absolutely crazy and would almost certainly fail but so are most of the revolutionary startup ideas that deal with earth heating in any meaningful way.
We can basically have "carbon free" aviation today if we want it by manufacturing synthetic liquid hydrocarbon fuels using renewable power. The US military has already run successful experiments. It works fine, it's just more expensive than burning fossil fuels.
Securities in a cash account can't be lent out by the broker without the written agreement of the customer. The necessary language could theoretically be put into the standard account agreement, so if you care you should read it. However, it is not common business practice to include that in retail customer account agreements. Also, the broker is required to notify you whenever your shares are borrowed, and this requirement cannot be waived by the agreement. So if you haven't been notified about lending activity, your broker is not lending your shares. The same requirements hold for fully paid securities held in a margin account, so even if you have a margin account, if you're not actually borrowing money from them, they're not lending your shares without your knowledge.
Patio11, I have much respect for your work and _love_ reading your email digests, but your comments of late about Bitcoin have such a decidedly negative slant that they become hard to digest at face value.
Yes of course businesses built around the Bitcoin protocol will melt down occasionally, as many businesses do within the course of operation -- but don't you see how your attempt to conflate Bitcoin businesses (Exchanges, specifically) with a discussion about the new model of trust employed by the p2p network is probably a bit deceptive?
Yes, Bitcoin is scarce and therefore commands a market price. Commanding a market price has some qualities that suck. One of them is that you have to deposit assets in a market to keep an order book to discover a price. This is fallible. But it has nothing to do with how we (the human race) have discovered a way to create a scarce and transferrable peer to peer asset over the internet. Perhaps you should stop and consider how you can personally deconstruct some of the negative bias you have against Bitcoin in your public discussions of such.
> Commanding a market price has some qualities that suck. One of them is that you have to deposit assets in a market to keep an order book to discover a price.
You don't _have_ to trust a counterparty with your money for price discovery. Take Counterparty for example: a P2P derivatives and stock market using Bitcoin as the transport layer [ǂ]. It enables trustless betting on anything from asset prices, to weather events, to Superbowl results [ɵ]. Two companies have already issued publicly tradeable shares [ɸ].
Data feeds are a public, competitive market:
Order: give 55.0 XCP for 0.5 BTC in 11 blocks, with a provided fee of 0.0001 BTC and a required fee of 0.005 BTC (bcf02fb66565d984a136fc55e1085f5cc782e8630dcfdbe9bbddb3312beb8f2c) [valid]
Broadcast: ‘Block Hash (0000000000000…cdbe902b4698e) Even/Odd’ = 2.0 from 15cdAQmmBrz1BEVtipaQ1dVHtTwmfcxzw5 at 2014-02-20T20:00:03-08:00 with a fee of 0.1% (7bd292f02c41740150b2ed2e7cf739566c900092e892e4a3a5d7dd142c00df8b) [valid]
Broadcast: ‘CoinDesk BPI USD’ = 555.26 from 1CeQHd59TFKWQzsWYDXc9NDX2ooMSRpiqi at 2014-02-20T22:00:03-08:00 with a fee of 0.1% (65c7162d69664008e4e0fe3be9122fb02c3e98901cd975d6d179e85a945fd916) [valid]
I think what patio11 is saying (and I agree) is that too much is being made of the ideals behind the Bitcoin protocol and paradigm, but it doesn't really translate when met with the hard test of practical reality.
I noted your argument, along with many others on the GP's sub-thread which make this very distinction between Bitcoin as a concept and Bitcoin as an actual thing. In so doing, you suggest that failure to make the distinction is misleading and you align yourselves with the idealistic praise heaped on by the original article.
But, I would agree with patio11's insinuation: i.e. that the real fallacy is in this praise. It's misleading, because at some point, the protocol must be implemented in the real world, consisting of exchanges, wallet services, payment services, etc. These are all points where bad actors can attach. To say, "well, that's not the Bitcoin protocol" is to point out a meaningless distinction. When you find a way around these implementation limitations, then it matters.
TL;DR: as implemented, Bitcoin in practice solves exactly none of the problems espoused by the article. We need look no further than real-world events to see this.
