There's been a few products like this recently on iOS and Mac (by like this I mean things that could improve my productivity, workflow etc.) that I would like to try but aren't willing to pay for upfront. I won't know if they work for me until I try them. I know it's not a lot of money, but it is if I only use it once and find out it's not for me.
It's more hassle to implement but a free with iAP is surely a better monetisation model for a 'utility' app like this?
I'm not sure how Apple does this, but with the Play Store, you have 15 minutes (I might be wrong on the time) to get a refund after purchase, so that you can make sure it works on your device, that it is what it says on the box, etc.
It's common for iOS and OSX apps that are tool oriented/helpful to the user to have a price. Frankly, I'd rather pay $2 than wait 5 seconds for some random full-screen advertisement in the app every time I open it.
This was apparently pretty typical for English law hundreds of years ago. As I understand it, wealthy people had a lot of influence over the government and were able to lobby for extreme punishments to protect their fortunes. Many of the death sentences were not even carried out by the executioners, because they were so common.
> As I understand it, wealthy people had a lot of influence over the government and were able to lobby for extreme punishments to protect their fortunes.
"A federal jury Thursday found a 32-year-old Minnesota woman guilty of illegally downloading music from the Internet and fined her $80,000 each -- a total of $1.9 million -- for 24 songs."
(After long battles in courts, the penalty was ultimately settled at $222,000).
I believe that Thiel is saying that the current structure of higher education, in tiers of increasing eliteness, bundled with a living and partying arrangement over an essentially-fixed time period, is bad, not that the course material or content is bad. I'm a CS student at a very prestigious university in the UK, and I'm not going to claim that I would have learned all of the same things that I have learned if I had self-taught, but I totally didn't need the whole living arrangement thing, and I'm not really sure why I had to fight with thousands of other students for my place, when most of the teaching easily parallelises if you just record the lectures and open up the course notes.
I'm not sure having better predictors of what businesses are good is necessarily a good idea. Part of the attraction of silicon valley is that it takes some of the risk out of trying new things, even if they might be bad ideas. This culture of trying things leads us to find the occasional really good idea. If we sit around all day plugging our ideas into models to see if, statistically speaking, the will succeed, we won't find the really novel ideas that look bad but are actually good.
The UK is one of the wealthiest, stablest, most developed countries in the world. Pointing out that its banking system is relatively effective as if that reduces the value of Bitcoin is like saying toilets and public sanitation is great in the UK so why are these entrepreneurs bothering building cheap toilets and menstruation technologies for India and Africa again? In other words, unbelievably naive and borderline arrogant.
Entrepreneurs smell an opportunity[1] to roll out one of the many, many new energy technologies that have developed in the meantime in your area (which somehow was overlooked until this point.)
[1] An opportunity made possible by the ability (created by Bitcoin) to profitably and efficiently collect micropayments in poor regions of the world
So your solution to the problem of bitcoin being unusable without power(and internet access) in a region is that in the future bitcoin will enable people to develop new technologies that don't currently exist? And they will be able to invent these new technologies because the only thing holding them back is in the inability to collect micropayments(which they can currently actually do using cash)?
No, Bitcoin will help make it profitable to roll out new technologies. Roll out != invent. It will also stimulate the development of said technologies. Because it lowers the cost of taking payment.
As far as cash, try collecting cash payments for your grid of micro-generators recharging cellphones in the Amazon, see how well that works out for you. Let me guess, you're gunna fly some drones in to pick up the payments...
What are these new technologies that are just waiting for roll out?
>As far as cash, try collecting cash payments for your grid of micro-generators recharging cellphones in the Amazon, see how well that works out for you. Let me guess, you're gunna fly some drones in to pick up the payments...
Try removing your micro generator from the community after you've installed it when they stop paying your rent. See how that works out for you.
I'd collect the payments when I delivered the fuel btw.
Maybe the "entrepreneurs" will in fact "smell the opportunity" and move in and save the day, but for what? What's the gain? Why design critical infrastructure so that its survival is based on a hypothetical market scenario, when it can be done right in the first place?
I don't have a problem with understanding why capitalism works, or even why it worked so well for us in the last century. But "straightforward application of basic logic", as well as simple observation of the world around us, clearly shows that the "invisible hand" is pushing us toward a very unpleasant future. We would do well to reconsider how much we want to follow that hand, because we don't share the goals of its owner.
But hell, we're dealing with incentive structures here, and people change those only when they're incentivized to do so. So maybe we really need to wait for Bitcoin or something similar to throw us back into XVII century (only dirtier) for people to realize that maybe, just maybe, they shouldn't have been treating feedback loops as benevolent deities.
That won't be wire transfers, that'll be some kind of local interbank transfer. A wire transfer is still complicated (paper forms), slow and expensive to send to other countries.
You also have to give your name and address to the recipient bank to somehow prove you're not laundering money or funding terrorism.
The UK has some of the worst banking in the developed world - not the best.
The quick-transfer system is only available for certain transactions. Most payments still take a while, and anything that involves a paper cheque still takes at least a week.
As for money laundering and terrorism - it's been proven over and over that it's easier to get a bank account for both than it is to get a bank account as an average Joe.
Not a few banks are knowingly involved in illegal transactions of one kind or another. So giving Bitcoin a hard time for the same thing is hypocritical.
Banks are certainly going to be killed by a global digital currency sooner or later, but it's going to need some kind of independent OpenMoney initiative.
BC is not that initiative, because the creators seemed to believe that starting a digital goldrush was more important than creating a rock-solid and secure peer to peer infrastructure for all transactions.
I doubt banks will still be around fifty years from now. In an all-digital economy they're not just parasitic, they're irrelevant.
If you're a business with the right initial approvals, you can initiate wire transfers online. There are all sorts of monitoring and checks that the run in the background, but an innocuous wire can go end-to-end without little or no human intervention. It's just folks like you and me who rarely send wires and have to go through all the paperwork.
