brndnmtthws

In NYC it's pretty common to see people watching them and taking pictures of them.

I never really understood why people hate rats, but love squirrels. I think rats are cool too.

Your troll comments are garbage. Kindly take your shit elsewhere.

Sounds like a terrible idea.

Figuratively dispose (i.e., reinstall the OS).

"Smart luggage" seems like a dumb idea. If I want a battery I'll just buy a battery. I don't see what you gain from having your battery physically attached to your suitcase, aside from the gimmickry. Unfortunately there are a lot of people who love gimmicks and will probably buy it anyway.

I gave up trying to run geth and switched to parity instead. It works, for now, but it takes longer and longer to catch up each time (I only run it occasionally for metamask).

I would just dispose of my computer if were hacked. All my valuables are backed up anyway. If my machine becomes compromised, why on earth would I want to continue using that machine?

IOTA has a few red flags:

- partially closed source

- has its own custom crypto

- uses a bizarre internal trinary digit system, instead of binary

- I've heard that it doesn't actually work, as in, you can't perform transactions

In terms of the top ~25 coins by market cap, AFAIK RaiBlocks is the only feeless one which acutally works. Regardless, it's worth watching these coins to see how the economics work out.

AFAIK RaiBlocks is the only coin that has tried to build a compeletely feeless cryptocurrency. Whether or not it will actually work, I don't know, and the current implementation has a lot of issues. But it's interesting if you're in to crypto. Furthermore, Lightning Network could provide a similar feeless system (excluding the settlement TXs).

The spammers have been 'caught' on a few occasions. The patterns definitely look like transactions which have been generated by a script with the intention of filling the mempool to push up fees. I've also seen screenshots of Telegram chats where people discuss doing this on Reddit and elsewhere (although I can't find it now, and there's no way to verify authenticity).

Coinbase passes the fees directly onto their customers, and they don't seem to care much. They also don't let users change the fees. In fact, Brian has started shilling Bcash on Twitter, so one might guess they're intentionally pushing up fees to push an altcoin (Bcash).

Protip: GDAX pays the TX fees, so it's possible to workaround the TX fees by moving your coin to GDAX.

That's how they're pitched, yes. But what's actually happen with Bitcoin currently, is that miners have started spamming the mempool with small transactions that never confirm just to bump the TX fees. Furthermore, exchanges like Coinbase haven't implemented TX batching and Segwit, which further compounds the problem. Coinbase is one of the biggest contributor to the 'spam', by forcing fees higher and higher.

So in practice, it appears not to be working as theorized.

Most VCs think about equity compensation like this: "How can we complicate the process, and use the most opaque language in order to screw the lower level employees and avoid diluting our holdings?"

I'm not entirely convinced that cryptocurrencies require fee incentives to stay secure. Most people using a currency aren't interested in the 'value' of a transaction, but rather, they want to perhaps pay a vendor or simply hold a balance. The miners (or stakeholders, in proof of stake) act in order to earn a profit, and may not actually act in the best interests of currency users (including holders and vendors). Miners and stakers are, in a way, just siphoning off profits, and it might be true that actors in the system would still behave honestly without the mining/staking incentives.

I wrote a blog post about this: https://medium.com/@brndnmtthws/questioning-assumptions-do-c...

If you want to lose money, this is a good way to do it.

You're better off buying what you believe in and holding it. It's easy to fit a perfect model to historical data, but it rarely works going forward, unless you have insider information.

For me it's 2 things:

1) it seems incredibly unlikely, and

2) these systems haven't really been tested adequately for me to have much confidence in their utility.

LinkedIn is a complete joke, but also somewhat necessary. It's become the new resume. I personally maintain a parody of myself profile (check it out if you want: https://linkedin.com/in/brndnmtthws) but I'm considering deleting my account altogether because LinkedIn seems to only be used as a spam delivery mechanism these days.

I live in New York City and I felt a small degree of panic when the reports showed up on Twitter. However, my initial instinct was "either the system doesn't work, or someone messed up".

If someone started firing missiles at the US, the risk that we'd start shooting them back seems high, and I think NYC would be a city that would get pummeled in retaliation. This is probably true for a lot of major coastal cities, especially Seattle, Vancouver, SF/LA, NYC, Washington DC, and Boston.

Fun NYC fact: the city is littered with fallout shelters: https://www.google.com/maps/d/viewer?mid=1Zm18xuBxp8kSysodfr...

In hindsight, it was poor taste, so I edited it out. However in this case I think the character of the individuals involved is material.

It's an attempt to co-opt the Bitcoin name/brand.

I'm not convinced. Is there evidence that the parent/child bonding only occurs if you share DNA? My personal experience suggests otherwise, especially given that my mother was adopted.

Some of the rats in NYC are quite big, I'm not sure cats would go for them.

Those are my thoughts, not the thoughts of the author.

Edit: I should clarify, my 'good for them' comment was about how it's okay for people to have regrets about having children, even though it's culturally taboo. If more people acknowledge this, then perhaps fewer people will take on the burden.

It's strictly subjective.

Good for them. I really dislike a lot of the cultural dogmas that exist (at least in the first world) about stuff like this. We have too many people on this planet already, and no you don't need to breed unless you and your partner are some sort genetic miracle. I think nurture is more important than nature, and if you really want to parent you're better off giving an underprivileged child an opportunity through adoption than breeding.

My dog loves hunting rats. Why don't they just get some dogs?

Thankfully the rules of math still apply and it's never been easier to use encryption just about everywhere.

The question for me is: at what point will people begin to reject this farce of a ruling elite that exists today?

What worries me is the 80 year old judges (and other clueless participants of the judicial system) who don't understand how computers work and will ultimately be responsible for deciding people's fate regarding this stuff.

Sure, but pretty much all software qualifies as 'AI'. However most people think about Hollywood interpretations of AI, which is a thing that doesn't exist. It's strictly a matter of interpretation, and figuring out where on this spectrum a particular piece of software exists is basically the equivalent of throwing darts at a board.

'AI' is such a meaningless buzzword that you could simply rename a product to sidestep any pointless regulation.