bachback

thanks, but I don't think hetzner is cloud based. most hosters still speak about servers as physical machines as in 2005.

Google is not as general as AWS and therefore has serious vendor lockin. Azure only recently has decided to support docker and is not rooted in opensource.

The big downside of AWS: to difficult to use for many. It seems to me a new entrant which combines easy of use, embraces opensource, would have a good chance in the market.

+ Rackspace. But like many these don't come from the cloud market and still think in terms of servers mostly.

1) Read the original blockchain article: http://szabo.best.vwh.net/securetitle.html

2) Longest lecture Nick Szabo, inventor of blockchains, ever gave was in the money museum in Zurich: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tWuN2R2DC6c

3) Study the original source code (bitcoin version 0.0.1).

4) https://github.com/bitcoinbook/bitcoinbook

Yes, absolutely agree. In LISP its obvious.

1. Every function is a tiny VM already. Every macro is a layer on top of a "compiler" to let you redesign a language. LISP gives much more power, precisely because every program is its own DSL, and all power of the language within that DSL is available. http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html

2. In SICP they show how to build anything from LISP constructs. The elegant thing is that LISP actually only needs very few machine primitives. https://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/full-text/book/book-Z-H-30.htm...

The most powerful constructs I've seen is a combination of these 2: Clojure/async is a macro which transforms any program to state machines. I think that kind of power gives you 20-30x advantage in business type applications. In fact I've seen C++ programmers spending a decade on discovering similar things by themselves. I strongly believe everyone should know at least a little about LISP.

ever heard of cryptocurrencies? no banks are neeeded, and identity on blockchain will actually happen.

How should ZeroMQ replace TCP? Internet runs on TCP/IP (last time I checked). In private networks many problems of public networks don't appear. I'm aware that organisations use it for their internal systems. As soon as one bridges to the outside world, one is going to hit with a problem.

ZeroMQ wants to be a neutral wrapper in any language but in the end its a C++ library enforcing C++ concepts. You can't map in a straightforward way process concepts from C++ to other languages (also the OS and VM sits in between that). In the end its just mapping programming logic to state machines. There are much better ways to do this and end up with something much more powerful (with first class meta-programming).

With ZeroMQ I had the worst possible results and experience. Honestly much of what it claims is bogus. It is highly optimized for certain cases and utterly useless for distributed systems. Try and find out in PUB/SUB what the IP addresses of the subscribers are. Not possible. In many cases you will be much better off learning TCP/IP yourself. In the mentioned case you simply iterate over the vector of subscribers - much more powerful and the sane default. It seems at some point people confused internal networking solutions with the Internet.

SQL is horrible for many use-cases. have a look at http://datomic.com

other approach is issued ColoredCoin by banks - Lykke.com does this. then you get pricing of assets. fiat money are already "settlement coins", the question is about liquidity, risk and openness.

Great question. An optimal strategy doesn't exist, because it is so circumstantial. The employee and founder (the seller) need a good idea about the price and probability of success. Making a buy/sell decision either way certainly effects outcomes, independent of the ultimate success. It really depends how the seller values the stock, and how that differs from the buyers valuation. Knowing a lot about (startup) stock valuation will certainly help. Probably its more political than anything, because the price of a 100M$ company can fluctuate wildly, and so being in similar situations should help as well. I don't know much about Silicon Valley, but there you have a lot of investor driven companies (people raising money to push the value, to raise more money, etc. without a real business seems much more common). The 10B$ outcome is exceedingly rare, so the employee should think really hard about the value (see Moskovitz talk about it here at 36:00 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CBYhVcO4WgI)

Usually 1M$ will be much more valuable when going from 0 then the next 1M$. In the example it seems irrational not to sell for 1M$, if the employee doesn't have already a lot of money. But usually people are not given the choice and need a liquidity event (IPO or acquisition). If one assumes that shares could be liquid from day 1 the dynamic changes. Most likely options will have vesting.

The real issue here however, in most cases, is that there is no liquid market until very later stages. So the company might be worth 100M$ in its entirety to sell, but employees can't sell options. Also simple options might actually not be the best instrument, but it is too costly to customly define an instrument for every employee. Say an employee could be an option which maximizes wealth for 0-1M$ (1%). If the total value hits 100M$ the other owners could buy out those options cheaply, and both sides win. Having only one strike price makes the potential value curve extremely steep, making startup shares more like lottery tickets.

To consider an extreme case - Google. Page almost sold Google for 1.6M$ in 1997 Luckily he didn't. In many cases it really depends on the belief of the founders/employees/investors. For employees it seems that their problem is more that they can't sell earlier than the liquidity event, which is due to the fact that IPO's are so expensive.

With Crypto-finance there will be the potential to create a market for stock at almost no cost, which will change the game, because it allows to float stock from the earliest stages when the most wealth is created. It will be much more common for employees to exit early and for the wealth to be more widely distributed. Getting to 10-100M$ is magnitudes of order more common than the 1B$+ exits.

Yelp has 4154 employees and probably 50% of them write code. Imagine you have 100'000 customers who all want 2 custom features. Large organisations naturally develop large codebases. Yelp probably has 50M LOC and more. Probably most startups could do with 10x smaller codebases: http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html

yes, please! can we then also get rid of the notion that there exists a linear design space called "features", and a linear error space called "bugs"? architecture, protocols, security, etc. can all be considered dimensions.

more important if you can make revenue or not. "getting users" and getting revenue might be completely different things, and it seems to me YC was build mostly around the former, than the latter.

The point of giving someone equity is that you can't pay others with cash, assuming you have the choice. If you have the choice it might well be you would rather start the company alone. There is a very interesting dynamic between the point of some participant being a founder and being an employee - late founders and early employees can be very similar to each other. Assuming a business is already generating revenue of even profit, the dynamic changes.

The exchanges are not sophisticated at all. No single exchanges have opensourced their wallet technology. Kraken, Bitstamp and Bitfinex are using BitGo, a private source solution. The first would be to opensource a enterprise grade wallet which can be used for exchanges. And that's exactly what I'm working on. Then develop the procedures to secure funds with operational professionalism. Use of multi-sig is standard, but its not enough. Cold-wallet and transaction monitoring, deposit insurance, in combination with on-chain will develop over the next 1-2 years to keep deposits safe.

right, thanks. 90B$ in current assets and 150B$ in total book value.

yes, absolutely. they do have 75B$ in cash and another 60B$ in short-term investments. So they have 135B$ to spend. judged by that number Google is too conservative.

LN is a theory, not a production system. I much doubt it will reach full production stage ever. Bitcoin wasn't at all designed for anything remotely like it. My bet would be on a new system & coin.

why can't you face up to the fact that Blockstream is the de-facto governance body for Bitcoin? It claims it is, and you spend countless hours on the Internet trying to show the opposite. "Cryptographic votes" - duh, that's what the Bitcoin consensus should be for. I can't fathom that somehow so deeply engaged in the project doesn't understand this most obvious fact.

Yes. The actual competition takes place in the market. If you have a really good idea - make a new Coin or join any of the 100's out there.

Bitcoin works based on incentives. There is no reason to go off-chain if you're not getting paid. And OKPay is not an end-node in any system. What you "really" want is to be able to send all assets in the system integrating banks. So the supernodes will be banks, i.e. large liquidity providers with a legal framework. LN is technically interesting, but there is no plausible scenario to make it work IMO. And if, you'd be way better off with redesigning Bitcoin and getting rid of some major drawbacks there.

What do you think of Bitcoin and use of computers for money and contracts?

what an annoying post. no real content, but an author desperately trying to prove he's smart.

"To say that I was treated pretty shabbily by David Nolen on this issue almost goes without saying."

We're doing something like this with lykke.com. Fiat money are implemented as Colored Coins on top of Bitcoin. It has a range of advantages over pure fiat - tracking of issuance publicly, lower settlement times, integration with smart money capabilities of Bitcoin, and more.

Yes. Cryptocurrencies remove the needs for banks in the first place, so you're not vulnerable to a banker/politician running windows, inflating your currency, etc. Vulnerabilities of internal bank networks are rare, most of the risk lies in the e-banking frontend. Fiat banks running on a blockchain indeed could gain from the security properties in many ways.

Seem like you don't see the x^n argument. It should be obvious. Satoshi/Hal Finney were well aware of this, see the link. This has nothing to do with SPV. Producing blocks is what's important.

The problem with fiat money is that "inflation" is not visible. ECB, Fed, BoE, BoJ are all hyper-inflating and it will end very badly. Look at the balance sheets and you'll see the hockey stick growth. Has little to do with prices, but more with debt stockpiling.

Bitcoin is volatile, but its extremely useful as money (if you live in Argentina or Zimbabwe, etc.). Descendants types will be far superior to government debt as money. Deflation basically means price-appreciation versus other assets. Inflation as its currently happening is fraudulent accounting on a unprecedented scale. The blockchain by contrast offers honest computer based accounting.

huh? Computers on the Internet don't coordinate like nodes in a P2P blockchain. Bitcoin's script is limited to a simple stack language for a very good reason.

Bitcoin's technical problems are that it fundamentally does not scale. If each node has to verify all transactions that is not sustainable in the long term. Hal Finney knew this way back: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2500.msg34211#msg342... "Bitcoin itself cannot scale to have every single financial transaction in the world be broadcast to everyone and included in the block chain. There needs to be a secondary level of payment systems which is lighter weight and more efficient."