brndnmtthws

I didn't make that claim with regard to China, but I see your point. I've also never been to mainland China, so I don't really know how things are there.

That's more of an example of human corruption, IMO. Counterpoint: people use various technologies (VPN) to bypass the great wall.

Right, that's the scary part. A double edged sword.

That's true, but they are still deterministic and can be designed to be egalitarian.

Humans, on the other hand, cannot be trusted in the way that a computer can.

What's interesting to me is that governments are becoming less and less important in society. With Google, Facebook, Uber, and Bitcoin, we're moving closer and closer to a world where human-based systems (government) are being supplanted by computer based systems (technology).

I for one believe this can be a good thing, since humans corrupt but computers are strictly deterministic.

:)

The boring simple solutions don't garner much attention. People want magic pills or cool tech.

That would work if people saved money, but they've been taught to spend rather than save. Most people believe that if they earn $1 they must spend that $1 as soon as possible.

The theory with Signal is that you might verify their identity in meatspace, or some other way. But yes, it's definitely an interesting chicken and egg problem. As far as the thought exercise goes, it might be worth limiting your scope at this point.

The most interesting part of this (to me at least) is that even our 'secure' messaging systems rely entirely on trusted entities. I don't think Signal is immune to this problem either, as you still need to communicate with their servers. As a distributed trust system, WhatsApp and Signal are single points of failure.

Messaging is analogous to money in a lot of ways. Perhaps we'll see a good distributed peer to peer messaging protocol at some point in the future.

Something to consider is that people like Buffett stand to lose the most from a completely egalitarian financial system, as is professed by Bitcoin idealists (such as myself). Another perspective here is that Buffett does understand Bitcoin, and wants to protect his own interests by maintaining the status quo.

It's always good to see the same hot takes rehashed over and over on HN. I'm sure Bloomberg appreciates the ad revenue.

Buffett (with all due respect, and I have a lot of respect for him) doesn't understand Bitcoin, and doesn't add anything of value to the discussion. He's never been much of a technology investor, so this should surprise no one.

How can a thing which never existed to begin with vanish? There wasn't $100B sitting around in a bank account waiting to be claimed, which then suddenly evaporated.

Also investopedia isn't exactly a high quality source.

The point is that no one really knows the actual value of any asset until you've sold it. You can only measure value in the past; future values can only be guessed (excluding things like future contracts).

This is true regardless of whether we're talking about Bitcoin, stocks, metals, houses, chickens, or seashells.

Most of these stupid market movement predictions are equivalent to astrology and only exist because WSJ and others have nothing interesting to say. The daily market fluctuations are pretty much random, and this has been proven many times over.

Wrong. The market value is only what you get for it when you sell it. It's a subtle but very important difference.

A good analogy is comparing the advertised price of a used car versus what you actually get for it. You might think it's worth $5k, but there's only 1 person who wants to buy it and they're only willing to pay $4k, so it's actually worth $4k, not $5k. It doesn't matter if someone else sold theirs for $5k.

It's facetious (and bad 'journalism') to claim $100B vanished. It was never there to begin with: market cap isn't something you can cash in on. It's merely the result of price multiplied by supply. If you owned a significant portion of all the coins in the world, and tried to sell them all at once, you wouldn't end up with number_of_coins * price, it would (realistically) be a smaller number given the market slippage.

I might start caring about Google/Apple pay if they add support for Bitcoin and lightning network payments. Until then, there's really nothing new or innovative to be seen here.

News outlets generate income through sensationalism, and that's the storyline that they need to drive the most traffic.

Strangling? No. That's like saying Amazon's success is strangling retailers.

Alternative perspective: maybe cryptocurrencies are valuable and represent real innovation?

It's probably mostly accidental clicks. Facebook doesn't care (in fact they love it), because they get paid whether the clicks are intentional or not.

So it sounds like a workaround is to avoid storing any data locally on the device. I wonder how effective that would be in practice. It might raise some suspicion if you unlocked your phone and they discovered you were logged out of everything, and there was nothing on the phone.

Can someone tl;dr this without all the medical jargon?

In certain cases, perhaps. But that's the exception, not the rule. You can't simply apply a neural net to every problem and magically get great results.

What about what about

Given enough time, energy, and computing power, you could just precompute every possible outcome and call it a neural network. You'll be praised as a genius.

More gimmick than magic. At best they can do a crappy job of emulating specific human behaviours on carefully curated training datasets.

Anyone who has actually built software using what the masses think is 'artificial intelligence' knows exactly how artificial and overhyped ML and AI are. Neural networks are a far cry from the magic they've been made out to be, and are nowhere close to as sophisticated as the brains of most animals. Cherry picking results makes for good marketing material, but that's pretty much where the usefulness ends.

We still don't even understand how exactly brains work.

Fair enough, it is indeed just an amplifier, but what I was trying to say is that the noise becomes quite visually apparent when you increase the ISO.

How you weight the entropy sources should be a function of the entropy sources, making it much more difficult to predict.

Cameras are actually a fantastic source of entropy because the CMOS sensors produce high quality and very random data in the form of noise. You can crank up the sensitivity (ISO) and get even more.

You pretty much just mash everything together, then feed the output back into itself, and do it again, and again, and again...