You see, like ̶A̶l̶ ̶G̶o̶r̶e̶ Ted Stevens said, it's really all a series of tubes. You put ten dollars in and it gets whisked away to a centralized location. Unfortunately, the location of the stuck tenner is right at the junction where all ATM transactions pass through. It's an unanticipated feature of our new centralized system.
To complain, please fill out form 27-B-stroke-six.
The "series of tubes" comment was Alaska Senator Ted Stevens, not Al Gore.
"Ten movies streaming across that, that Internet, and what happens to your own personal Internet? I just the other day got... an Internet [email] was sent by my staff at 10 o'clock in the morning on Friday. I got it yesterday [Tuesday]. Why? Because it got tangled up with all these things going on the Internet commercially. [...] They want to deliver vast amounts of information over the Internet. And again, the Internet is not something that you just dump something on. It's not a big truck. It's a series of tubes. And if you don't understand, those tubes can be filled and if they are filled, when you put your message in, it gets in line and it's going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material, enormous amounts of material."
Read the quote directly above the comment you're replying to.
There's giving someone the benefit of the doubt, then there's mocking one of the more corrupt Senators who claimed that an email was delayed by a few days due to what he was essentially calling network congestion, and using that as an argument against network neutrality -- while taking just truckloads of telecom lobbyist cash into his campaigns.
You could in theory make a sound argument about why the internet is just a series of tubes and make honest arguments about their capacity and the capital investment needed to keep up with the growth in data and increase in bandwidth requirements. Stevens did none of those things.
It's not the most coherent explanation, but the "series of tubes" metaphore was perfectly fine for it's audience when trying to explain that contention for bandwidth is a thing.
The mockery from the tech community was out of proportion.
> As a Senator in the 1980s Gore urged government agencies to consolidate what at the time were several dozen different and unconnected networks into an “Interagency Network.” Working in a bi-partisan manner with officials in Ronald Reagan and George Bush’s administrations, Gore secured the passage of the High Performance Computing and Communications Act in 1991. This “Gore Act” supported the National Research and Education Network (NREN) initiative that became one of the major vehicles for the spread of the Internet beyond the field of computer science.
It’s actually worse than that. Blockchains make you send every transaction in the world to every potential miner, and then the block size is a limited resource that they all compete for. And then everyone stores the state of everything in the world. It’s like if BitTorrent seeders stored every time. No wonder SSTORE is so expensive in Ethereum.
Jack Dorsey has the right idea with Web5, as did the ION folks at Microsoft. A middle ground is a hub-and-spoke model like Polkadot and Cosmos have, but we can get all the way to embarrassingly parallel systems.
The fact that you have to ask how many transactions per second some distributed system can support means there is a bottleneck somewhere. No one asks this about HTTP (Web) or SMTP (email) because the more computers join, the more you can support.
We are building Intercloud, which is the next thing after Blockchain. Here three years ago the CTO of Ripple stopped by our forum to discuss and debate its design:
Yes. UK 2018 TSB bank IT meltdown shutdowns all accounts for weeks:
> With clients locked out of their bank accounts, mortgage accounts vanishing, small businesses reporting that they could not pay their staff and reports of debit cards ceasing to work, the TSB Bank computer crisis of April 2018 has been one of the worst in recent memory. The bank’s CEO, Paul Pester, admitted in public that the bank was “on its knees” and that it faces a compensation bill likely to run to tens of millions of pounds.
You do realize this is not something that's unique to the crypto space. [1][2]
Seriously dislike this attitude some folks on HN has about crypto, yes there's massive fraudsters and there's lots of technical issues in this space. But so is most other spaces, fraudsters and criminals didn't happen to suddenly pop up after 2009 you know, they have been here always, everywhere. There's valid uses for crypto and the blockchain, I personally know several folks who were able to move away from war zones with some of their wealth intact thanks to crypto. I know people who send money to their parents back home thanks to crypto, minus the ridiculous fees predatory companies were charging them to send fiat before. Its not all roses sunshine and butterflies, but there's real people who are benefiting from this tech.
Did that coincide with a huge drop in the value of the Canadian dollar and happen to stop people selling CAD for other currencies like USD? Didn't think so. Your point would be more valid if that were true.
>yes there's massive fraudsters and there's lots of technical issues in this space. But so is most other spaces, fraudsters and criminals didn't happen to suddenly pop up after 2009 you know, they have been here always, everywhere
The disdain of regulation that cryptobros have and the lack of regulation results in a free for all for fraudsters and criminals, compared to regular banking/finances.
