agorabinary

1. LN works on testnet right now.

2. Bitcoin without LN isn't nearly worth its valuation, but bitcoin with LN is worth many times its current valuation so we're settled somewhere in the middle.

3. I'm inclined to trust Brahm Cohen more than your flawed analysis of LN routing: https://medium.com/@bramcohen/in-this-analysis-nodes-arent-b...

Whether your wallet or your privacy, you are being robbed regardless.

There is a huge amount of non-public information out there that insiders can use for profit, and it will always be the case no matter what regulations you enforce.

"it has to solve a few problems first (transaction fees/time and anonymity)"

Bitcoin Lightning currently works on testnet ... give it a few months and those problems will be solved. The price is exploding in anticipation of events like this.

Responding to problems with this article as they appear:

1. Coinbase buckling is a failure of a web application grappling with unprecedented load. Not with bitcoin.

2. The dark web mostly uses Monero, which would not exist without Bitcoin coming along first. Also the notion of a $65 fee on a $250 tx is ridiculous, not to mention a 24 hour wait time.

3. The existence of exchanges and dark web websites that allow you to convert fiat to bitcoin and facilitate trades (middlemen as the authors calls them) is a failure of Bitcoin? Building a centralized exchange/facilitator will ALWAYS come before a decentralized alternative because decentralized apps are hard.

4. Applications that provide immeasurable convenience at the cost of a little privacy and security are an inevitable step in the road towards a better system. This is the equivalent of RMS bemoaning the existence of Ubuntu because it uses a few propriety programs, when whatever free distro he recommends is straight out of 1992

5. "retains none of the exciting features"? Rapidly increasing prices does not remove the most innovative features (smart contracts, off-chain transactions, etc) of the crypto world. It accelerates them if anything by providing the capital to finance their development

Feel free to attack Bitcoin for its shortcomings, but don't act like things could have easily gone differently. Bitcoin still has tremendous potential for privacy, security, and everyday use --- if you get past the clickbait headlines.

"with no fundamentals whatsoever"

It's a sad state of the HN community that this post isn't already downvoted into oblivion.

edit: Oh look, a throwaway account!

Looks good. I want a different pointer for the dropdown menu at the top though.

I encourage anyone working in these fields to find other engineering work. It's a great relief to not be working on advancing Skynet.

Clearly, you are oblivious or willfully ignorant of the massive amount of innovative development occurring in the space.

I think it should assume the reader is fairly educated on what Bitcoin is, as most newcomers to Ethereum are probably coming from the Bitcoin space, and then differentiating the two coins.

- What makes it potentially more powerful than Bitcoin?

- What are Ethereum Dapps/smart contracts good for and what are they not good for? There are definitely limitations to coding apps on a distributed network where every node has the code

- Developer intro

There's a lot of marketing gimmicky material out there jumping on the buzz word train ("Distributed! Consensus! OSS!") without offering any real value. Something with real substance that is presented effectively would be awesome

I agree, Ethereum needs better reading material. I bought an Ethereum book by Henning Diedrich and it's pretty light to be honest.

Despite having a higher hashrate than expected, the price of BCC is crashing towards 1/10 of a bitcoin. The network effects and name recognition of Bitcoin are too strong.

>The takedown of this large virtual currency exchange

I haven't kept up to date on exchange volume. Was btc-e still a popular exchange (up until this takedown of course)?

These specs seem like overkill to me for some simple development work

A nice metacognitive cheat sheet.

Missing a couple interrelated mental models I find very important:

- emergence: a process whereby larger entities, patterns, and regularities arise through interactions among smaller or simpler entities that themselves do not exhibit such properties

- decentralized system: a system in which lower level components operate on local information to accomplish global goals

- spontaneous order: the spontaneous emergence of order out of seeming chaos. The evolution of life on Earth, language, crystal structure, the Internet and a free market economy have all been proposed as examples of systems which evolved through spontaneous order.

Well if you have $50k capital then 20% gains = $10k is about fair. Luckily for numerai they have $1mil capital so the rewards are a bit higher...

The problem with micropayments in this context is that flattr lacks the impulse nature that bitcoin can possibly provide. You have to load the money in an account beforehand, but with bitcoin you could potentially just donate directly from a hot wallet on your computer. Pre-loading accounts that are designed specifically for donations feels unnatural, I think.

And self-respect. What Golden-age do UBI proponents imagine in which everyone is massively dependent on a state entity, in which young men and women grow up without an impetus to become self-sustaining adults, in which everyone is an "artist" working on their book, one Facebook alt-tab at a time.

It would begin with a basic income. And once it is in place, would voters every pick the candidate that promises to reduce or persist the current rate of free money? It's impossible for UBI to not explode in scope over the course of a few election cycles.

225 million * 2000 * 12 = 5.4 trillion per year.

Basic income arguments usually revolve around numbers. But what of self-respect? There is something very concerning about faith in a benevolent State-parent that will feed and clothe us instead of enabling us to do so ourselves, by removing policies that keep Americans poor.

Poverty is the natural state of things. Those that exist in a state of poverty exist in the natural state of things. It is only through globalization and development that some people free themselves from this natural order. This phenomenon is the only known on record to lift people out of poverty, and it so happens that this phenomenon allocates this wealth unequally. No alternative method has ever succeeded in both creating wealth and allocating it equally.

If all the effort expended on arguing about this magical "other path" to prosperity was spent on actually generating prosperity, I think we would find that many of our former grievances would resolve themselves..

The single best way to reduce terrorism, civil strife, and violence in general is greater prosperity. Keeping people poor, ignorant and frustrated is a guarantee of future terrorism.

If you had watched the video you would see the parts where he addresses your critiques. He explores the everyday life of many different Iranians, particularly those in the urban areas, and makes efforts to highlight the positive and negative attitudes towards the West.

You don't have to have a doctorate in Iranian studies to learn and understand for yourself that Western media's portrayal of Iran is deeply biased. Of course, Iran's portrayal of the West is equally biased. The key is to listen to the grievances of both sides within the context of a historical understanding and form judgments from there. This is exactly what Rick Steves has done.

Steves mentions in his video that every schoolboy and girl know of the 1953 coup and the CIA's involvement. The vast majority of Americans are entirely oblivious of this event when forming opinions of Iran. Isn't this valuable information for Steves to communicate with his Western audience?

A great lecture on Iran: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rtELk8S3dhU

Really gives some perspective on an oft-misunderstood place.

Yeah, and given the amount of cooperation the various Western intelligence agencies have demonstrated, distributing "control" over N governments is just about as dangerous as one.

The world does not need more sophisticated tools to pursue criminals, it needs more sophisticated tools to advance freedom which is ultimately the best deterrent of crime to exist.

Great job wired! Can't leave a guy in peace...

Why do we care? How does knowing the identity of Satoshi advance Bitcoin in any way? If someone wants to stay anonymous...

What proportion of Chinese energy production is coal-based? Is there any realistic scenario in which China soon adopts more 21st century alternatives?

Will this ~$45 billion go to efficient use? Based on his track record of $100 million to newark and how effective that was, I am skeptical.

Good intentions in philanthropy are a dime a dozen, actual results are less common.

In all possible worlds, bitcoin has to begin with use as a currency-of-currency before it can operate stand alone. Which isn't something you necessarily disagree with, based on your comment. But I think it is interesting because it is a natural and necessary step before the "bitcoin and bitcoin only" applications start to really develop. Bitcoin needs legacy support first before a transition to those really lofty bitcoin ambitions.

Every tragedy will be used to further the cause of totalitarianism. The contents of this article, and every identical piece that is written after every new disaster, is less worthy of HN discussion than this broader issue. Encryption is the primary facilitator of privacy in our current times, and privacy is a fundamental human right. Law enforcement doesn't understand this, they only know "getting the baddies". And in times where violence is at an all time low despite recent tragedies, "getting the baddies" is decreasingly important relative to the preservation of rights.