This is worrisome, mainly for one reason. Maybe one of the many ICOs might turn out to derail Facebook's centralised + ads approach. With this Facebook is basically attempting to prevent competition - or am I totally off?

That hypothetical one magic ICO to derail Facebook would surely not have to rely on Facebook ads to succeed. And besides that, I'd consider Facebook to be "sufficiently evil" to individually black out an advertiser they secretly consider a threat, of it ever came to that.

This move is easily explained by the long term cost of being perceived as the place worth the shitty scam ads. The existential threat Facebook is trying to avert is people thinking "I would not have lost that money if I had not been on Facebook all the time, reading all those stories about bitcoin geniuses" one day. Everybody likes to blame the messenger.

I think it's more due to the fact that most ICOs are fraudulent.

IMO you're totally off. ICOs and the ad market are pretty tangential.

I'm more referring to Mark Zuckerberg's new year post about investing in decentatizlized tech and the power it provides. Will be interesting to see if FB will do an ICO themselves or at least built there own blockchain to address some of the data centralization concerns.

That is incorrect. It just depends on Windows how you call the Win32 API and what parameters you specify. Many options there - in the end it's just an object in the NT kernel space.

GDPR has what is called extra-territorial applicability.

If it’s outside their jurisdiction, they can claim whatever applicability they like: the law is simply not enforceable outside that jurisdiction.

Technically yes, laws only apply within sovereign borders, but this is where trade agreements come into effect. EU is a big enough market that most countries will likely agree to uphold the rules for European citizens. It has been a big focus for online retail in Australia lately, and for good reason.

The law can be enforced against people who are, or have assets, within the jurisdiction, whether or not the alleged violation occurred there.

You can also have some very weird legal definition of a nexus, like this bank that allegedly opened a nexus in the US because they used US dollars for a transaction between two non-Us countries.

And there is also the case that the US army just land in your country and arrest anyone they could not kill.

> And there is also the case that the US army just land in your country and arrest anyone they could not kill.

Unlikely; its a lot easier to kill people than arrest them, especially if you are the US army, which is optimized for the former over the latter.

Minimum value would be the work/energy needwd to create blocks that enable safe storage and avoid double spending. So there is that.

Why is it better?

What Ethereum for instance did is genius. It distributes storage and compute across the world to those willing to share their resources and you get paid by doing so. It's a way to drive decentralization, because there is an incentive for mining. Is it perfect? Not quite yet for various reasons (performance, privacy), but its an interesting new paradigm.

Its not closed, since the data and code is out for anyone to use typically, you could even fork and create your own. What is different is the incentive to provide storage and compute for others. Over simplified, you lend your storage and compute (that's called mining) and get paid in crypto tokens in return.

Looking at the market cap, it's about half Google. Probably much larger (2x) by and of year according to Tom Lee.

You should reach Satoshi' s whitepaper to understand that.

Can you provide a summary of Satoshi’s argument here? I’m failing to see how the usage of electricity, which is an entropy-losing process, leads to added value through bitcoin

I think I understand Bitcoin well enough to detect that you don't know what you're talking about.

One could argue that a higher current difficulty increases trust in very recent transactions, thereby raising the unitility of Bitcoin as a medium of exchange (ha!) and thus affecting the price.

But that effect is small and we're talking about the difficulty during the last 10 blocks, at most.

Anything before that is for the past.

I have, please elaborate.

Nothing todo with crypto, all Wavecrest prepaid cards impacted. New law in effect in Gibraltar since Jan 1.