Because not everyone is scummy, and it's obvious that they would be in the wrong? I also imagine something attention grabbing like a western politician will get more care taken than some random educational company in India.
You really don't think permissionless, programmable money has any utility?
And while Bitcoin may have some flaws, there are subsequent coins that solve most of its issues.
Think of any story where PayPal froze someone's assets because they didn't like the type of business or because they mistakenly thought it was suspicious activity.
Think of a system where you can invest your money in a share of land, a fraction of a house or a share in a fleet of a car-riding service without paying 10-20% of fees to realtors/brokers or other middlemen.
Think of ebay, but where you only pay for the product if the whole supply chain can provably demonstrate that no child labor was used. Bonus: no counterfeits.
Think of a community that can run its own credit cooperative without depending on any bank.
Think of the idea of being able to provide micro-credit for people in developing countries without worrying that your funds might end up in the hands of some corrupt tribal leader or siphoned out by some corrupt NGO board member.
That's what "permissionless, programmable money" is.
"Trustless" is not about solving anything. It's about enabling new interactions that do not require a central coordinator - aka, trusted party. That is it.
Of course you can have "trustless" systems that are malicious or potentially abused. No honest advocate would claim otherwise.
Programmable money sounds the worst. Because it’s final, irrevocable and written in software. Not a day goes by without a smart contract losing all the money in it. Most of the entire worlds Ethereum was lost in the DAO (remember that?) — it was so bad they had to make a whole new Ethereum and start over. I guess transactions are final for Grandma’s life savings but if it affects Vitalik, different rules apply. Just 3 days ago stablecoin OUSD lost all its money, $7M, and was reduced to begging scammers to please give it back. Same with hospitals getting hit with ransomware.
Permissionless just means it’s a haven for criminals and terrorists. North Korea has built up a sizeable stockpile of permissionless crypto. [1] this is the definition of the reason currency has permissions. So it doesn’t get used by hermit kingdoms to finance their nuclear weapons programs.
The first thing I notice is their Brain Flakes (TM) looks exactly like something I played with at school as a kid some 25-30 years ago (albeit the pieces were a little larger)
Deelie Bobbers by Parker Brothers [0]. They're smaller, 1" but there's no question that it's essentially the same thing. There's a patents US2984935A [1] and US3177611A [2] from 1959 and 62.
So I suppose the question is, how can you make money as a distributor of an over 50 year old product?
The article seems to suggest that they created this toy and that patent protection is an option, which seems at very least disingenuous.
Copying a 20 year old product may explain why Brain Flakes are supposedly popular and why so many companies were comfortable with cloning the product, which makes it seem even more disingenuous.
The only legitimate gripe that I see are a few other companies ripping off the marketing materials. Even so, the example of Brain Flakes vs. Creative Flakes is, IMHO, the only one that I would label as creating confusion among consumers.
You can patent an improvement or tweak to a previous product. E.g., someone could patent a pencil, then someone could patent a pencil with an eraser, then someone could patent a pencil with a pyramid-shaped eraser. So they possibly are trying to patent some small inprovement to the older product.
Then the copycats can bypass your tweak patent by not implementing your tweak.
In theory. But having a patent lets you sue your competitors in a very expensive way for them, even if they win by invalidating your patent as straightforwardly as the legal system allows.
Funny how that works. I guess when the OP said you need a lawyer, it was more of a threat than friendly advice.
After her sentence was commutated by Obama, otherwise she would be in prison until at least 2045.
She was recently placed back in jail for refusing to testify against Assange (instead referring the prosecution to her prior testimony), though she was released again after a year.
I wouldn't take a bet against her ending up back in jail for a similar attempt at intimidation once the sham court in the UK sends Assange to the US to be executed for distributing the above video to the world.
