Augur was one of the first ICOs. They promised a decentralized oracle and prediction market protocol (with dispute resolution) and that's what they delivered.

Their REP token sale was in 2015, they spent a few years developing their smart contracts while providing weekly updates and contributing a lot back to the Ethereum community, and finally launched in July 2018.

https://www.augur.net/

https://augur.stackexchange.com/

To see the prediction markets without setting up the Augur client, you can use the following site:

https://predictions.global/

Aliens? Yes. UFOs? No.

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2008/11/25/al...

I used telescopes for some times, indeed Venus or ISS are often interpreted as UFO. Venus is visible in daylight and ISS has truly something alien with its apparent magnitude and majestic speed.

But when someone looks through a telescope, she sees less than half a degree wide, often only a few dozens of arc minutes, so her field of view is less than 1/10,000 of the sky. It is unlikely she will recognize a fast moving object, plane or whatever.

I also seen something strange in mid-day with naked eyes, I thought it was an Iridium flare, but when I checked there was no flare possible at that place and time.

You'll need to support a lot more than just importing Coinbase transactions. The site bitcoin.tax lets you import from 17 different sources and, despite its name, handles nearly all digital currencies, not just bitcoin.

However, nothing currently exists that seamlessly handles scenarios like cryptokitties, or when tokens are automatically bought/sold behind-the-scenes of a dapp via 0x, etc.

This has already been submitted and discussed here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15464778

The Verge has an article about The Third Thumb where they state "[...] the aim is to re-imagine what we think of as a prosthetic — something that adds capabilities, rather than just replacing those lost."

So much effort is put towards getting people back to baseline, and rightfully so. But it's the creativity of extending ourselves past baseline that gives me a child-like excitement for the future.

Good perspective. That started for me with the Nintendo Power Glove even though I never owned one. :)

This is also helpful: How to Build A Space-Time Crystal https://www.technologyreview.com/s/428334/how-to-build-a-spa...

Thanks for both those links.

That article is from 2012 and quotes:

"If that’s the case, we ought to be reading the details about the first space-time crystal sometime in the days and weeks to come. "

Was there something non obvious they had to overcome that took the extra few years to produce these space-time crystals?

(I use the term non obvious as if this was not all way beyond my ken!)

The 2012 article said they were using beryllium ions, Wikipedia says in 2013 they were planning on using calcium ions, and now the 2016 article says they used ytterbium ions. Without more content to go on, we can only guess about these changes.

In any event, they sure seem to have made a lot of progress in just a few years. I look forward to reading more about this, as well as listening to Neil deGrasse Tyson describe it in his infectiously enthusiastic way.

Need several banks to manage several tokenized assets?

https://www.ethereum.org/token

Ethereum and Bitcoin can, and should, coexist. Both have something to offer to one another.

For example, check out btcrelay.org. While you're waiting for Bitcoin to "snipe the features from the small competitor", that small competitor can lend a helping hand to Bitcoin.

Global electronic cash is a zero sum game. Money is pure network effect and only one unit of account can have 90% global market share at a time. I want that to be BTC. You want that to be ETH. Let's just agree to disagree?

I want BTC to fulfill our need for global electronic cash and Ethereum to fulfill our need for a developer-friendly Dapp environment.

The bigger Bitcoin becomes, the more we all benefit from a stable universal currency. The bigger Ethereum becomes, the more we all benefit from a rich set of shared resources for developing apps that use BTC in ways that we've been dreaming of for years.

Bitcoin's killer apps might be Ethereum Dapps. That wouldn't mean that Ether "failed" as a currency or that Bitcoin "failed" because Ethereum was used to build the killer apps. It'd mean both are succeeding!

Life is more colorful when it's not just black and white.

To help with #3, Google lets you help them fine-tune the ads they show you:

https://www.google.com/settings/ads

Sounds like you're talking about Westport Video Mania. A couple friends and I go to that store about twice a year to browse around. Each time we're there, nearly all other customers that come through the front door go straight to the back room. After a few years, we finally decided to see what was on the other side. It was like the Tardis of porn...I don't know how they fit a whole other video store in there.