craigc

Care to provide some examples? Are you talking about buying things in order to rent them out to other people?

> I agree with what you are saying but you can't compare jQuery and React - they are very different tools.

I am well aware. It was mostly a joke :]

It doesn’t. I was referring to the idea of new technologies eventually circling back to old and saying that I think that is true in the design world too.

Yup. Everyone wants to use the latest and greatest, but there is a reason that certain things like SQL have stood the test of time.

I think the same could be said of the design world. There was a time not too long ago when designs actually felt polished and had real shapes, shadows, gradients. When you clicked on a button you actually knew you were clicking on a button. Then iOS 7 came along and everything became white and flat and buttons were replaced with text with no borders. I think we are slowly moving back to where we were ten years ago.

PS How long until people start ditching React for jQuery?

Very very true. A lot of people make extremely poor decisions with their money. Perhaps there could be a threshold then? Like you are allowed to invest x% of your income/savings? I don’t really know the answer.

I think the cup example may actually be more to prevent restaurants/cafes from lawsuits vs. to actually protect their customers from burns. I suppose it could be a combination of the two though.

> For example, I used to be skeptical about accredited investor requirments. Turns out, they're super necessary!

This is one area I keep going back and forth on in my head. On one hand, obviously scams are bad, and the fact that people are throwing their life savings into some of these companies is awful.

That said, I am not sure it should be up to Governments to decide who can and can’t invest in early stage startups and how people should be allowed to spend their money. Much of the reason that crowdfunding (Kickstarter, Indiegogo, ICOs) has become popular is because of the lower barrier to entry for contributing to projects/startups. There are a number of companies I would love to invest in, but can’t because I am not a millionaire. I do not really find that fair.

Creating an open market around funding will teach people a lot of hard lessons about money. VCs know that 90% of startups are going to fail. I don’t think it is that crazy to believe that regular people can learn that as well. All it takes is one really bad investment to learn the lesson.

Haha what do you know. Another day, another anti-crypto article on the top of Hacker News.

In this case, I agree with the overall sentiment. I don’t think these companies are actually “dying” though, but rather they were probably created as get rich quick schemes, so they took the millions of dollars they raised and then sailed off to some island somewhere.

From the report

> We use intensity of tweets from the cryptocurrency official Twitter account after the ICO to estimate that the survival rate for startups after 120 days (from the end of the ICO) is only 44.2%, assuming that all firms inactive on Twitter in the fifth month did not survive.

Not sure how I feel about that methodology, but probably many of these companies never planned to actually issue a product in the first place so it may very well be accurate.

Well clearly you just glazed over what I said which was also what I expected.

I personally find the idea of having complete control over your own money, being able to program it, and being able to send it to anyone in the world fairly quickly and cheaply without any intermediary revolutionary. It doesn’t hurt that it is impossible to counterfeit, and your money can be stored completely in your brain.

If you don’t find those ideas revolutionary that is fine, but I think 10 or 20 years from now you may be surprised.

Outside of any of the technical feats, there is also the fact that Bitcoin is the best form of money in terms of the properties of money. Limited/fixed supply, divisible to 8 decimal places, can’t be counterfeited, easy to transact with, etc. I don’t see how anything else can even compare.

I am also curious why you think burning crap-tons of electricity to run the current financial system where you have to trust everyone is any better?

Based on your reply, I am fairly convinced you have already made up your mind so it is somewhat pointless to spend my time trying to convince you otherwise, but I will say a couple things.

For one, while our civilized world is built on trust and you may trust Banks, Governments, Tech companies etc, the majority of millennials do not trust Banks or Governments. Numbers outside the US are even lower. For more information about this I would recommend watching this presentation:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GGberGnxiJk

I believe money is something that you should be able to have full control and ownership of. Governments and banks can lock or seize accounts/funds for any reason. Banks can limit deposit/withdrawal/transfer amounts. I don’t think that right now this is a big problem, but in the future, imagine banks getting hacked and funds stolen or even a bank run. There are a lot of scenarios where I can see our financial system failing. If inflation rates increase then it will drive more people towards things like Gold and Bitcoin. Look at what has been going on in Venezuela.

As far as the electricity use, please consider taking a look at this article:

https://medium.com/@dergigi/bitcoins-energy-consumption-6dd7...

It also links to a couple of other sources that show how gold mining, paper currency/minting, and electricity used from the banking system all use orders of magnitude more electricity than Bitcoin mining does. If ultimately Bitcoin can replace banks or even gold, then it will have done the world a favor. Most miners also use renewable energy such as hydro and solar which would otherwise just go to waste.

Andreas Antonopoulos makes the argument that it will actually help the world come up with cheaper and more efficient power by allowing people to subsidize the costs by mining Bitcoin:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2T0OUIW89II

True. Could you elaborate on why you believe that?

I do not really understand it. Posts about other technologies on here lead to civilized, intelligent conversations, but for whatever reason, any post about crypto or Bitcoin just leads to attacks and arguments.

The reason I find it more inexplicable is that when you think about just the idea of peer to peer programmable finances/money without requiring any trusted intermediary that is a huge idea. In my opinion, it is almost as revolutionary as the internet itself.

I guess we will see how things progress over the next 10-20 years.

I have read it multiple times, in fact. I am not denying that it was originally intended as a peer to peer currency, but saying it was marketed as that when the creator was publishing an academic paper of sorts and releasing it for free into the world is a bit of a stretch. Marketing implies that there is a customer you are trying to sell a product or service to.

He or she did not care about getting rich since the original coins have never actually been touched. The creator did not even know that people would start to exchange existing currencies for Bitcoin at the time the paper was published or that it would catch on at all.

I am not trying to rewrite history. I was only stating that Bitcoin is not a company. There are no big corporations controlling it. There is no sales team. There is no marketing team. Anyone who promotes it is doing it out of their own free will.

Interesting, I would be curious to see some of these ads. Are you referring specifically to Bitcoin or other crypto currencies (many of which are flat out scams)?

That said, my point was that any “marketing” was not done by a dedicated team or company. It was done by individuals who got interested in the technology and wanted to share it with other people.

I think you are missing my point. If Bitcoin is “marketed” as anything, it is by people who got interested in the technology, learned about it, and started to spread the word to other people.

You could say the same thing about many open source software programs or apps.

What I was saying is that there is no company behind Bitcoin that represents it or speaks for it. When you say “Bitcoin was heavily marketed” you mean that people explained it that way to others.

Bitcoin is not marketed as anything. There is no company and there are no marketing or sales people. That is part of the beauty of it.

The decentralized claim refers to a decentralized network where the miners and nodes connected to the network are decentralized and no single entity controls 51% of the network (if they did it would collapse). Ownership of coins is not the same as hashing power.

Nowhere do people claim that the coins themselves are decentralized.

I am well aware that most people on Hacker News hate Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies so a lot of these types of studies and articles that are negative end up making their way to the top.

It is strange that this study was from 2017-2018 and yet they only considered data from 2009-2013. Would be nice if there was an explanation as to why.

One thing I wanted to point out is this seems to be presented to shine a negative light on Bitcoin, but I have a feeling that if you were to plot the owners of any equity you would find the exact same patterns. People who get in early will own a majority of the supply.

For example take a look at Morgan Stanley stock. 86% of the shares are owned by institutional investors and of that chunk, five institutions own 58% of them:

https://www.nasdaq.com/symbol/ms/ownership-summary

I also think these types of patterns with regards to transactions probably exist with other currencies as well, but it is just that the data is not available for the public to analyze.

Unless I am missing something, this paper is referring to connections between addresses when it mentions the “Bitcoin network”. Not actual mining nodes. It does not have anything to do with a 51% attack.

Their allegations are not entirely off base. The Coinbase BCH launch was a complete disaster. The BCH price pumped for days on other exchanges leading up to the announcement. See here for some more information:

https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/pam4xn/coinbase-i...

In addition, they opened up trading on GDAX, but waited to open up buys and sells on Coinbase until Roger Ver’s segment on CNBC Fast Money (right when the price was at its highest).

That said, I do not think Coinbase should pay someone back for making a poor decision with their money. People like to deflect their own mistakes instead of taking responsibility. Coinbase didn’t make this person buy BCH at $5,000.

The fact that the data is encrypted means that it can literally be stored anywhere. You can throw it in a local file or in Dropbox/Google Drive/iCloud.

The trust issue also doesn’t matter cause if the encryption is right, then third parties wouldn’t be able to read your data even if they wanted to.

Thanks. I’m sorry too. I really hope the next generation is better.

My biggest worry is that they will “fix” the keyboard problem by extending the touchbar to the entire keyboard area and renaming it the “Touch Board”.

> If anything, the closest thing we have to data right now is what they say on their website: a small number of laptops have a malfunctioning keyboard. Is it even legal for them to say that if it really were most of them?

Is it legal to say that? It’s not a legal document so I would imagine so. I think it’s extremely misleading though. It’s clearly a defect in the keyboard itself or else Apple wouldn’t have issued a recall. It could just be that the people who haven’t been impacted have yet to get a crumb or spec of dust under a key.

My family and I have owned around 15 Macs over the last 20 years, and the 2016 MacBook Pro is by FAR the worst Apple computer I have ever owned. I can’t even think of another one that could even compete for that title.

Everyone I have spoken to who has a butterfly style MacBook (Pro) has also had problems with their keyboard.

My guess is that percentage wise when you compare the total number they have sold with the number that came in for repair it works out to a small percent, but that could also be because people live with the problem and don’t want to pay for a repair or give up their computer to Apple for a week to have it repaired.

I lived with my busted keyboard for about a year before finally bringing it in around a month ago to have it repaired.

Also keep in mind that a lot of people assume when technology is not working how they expect it to that it is something THEY are doing wrong (vs. a fault in the product or design) and they may be embarrassed to admit it or bring it in for repair.

While I am happy about this ruling, I feel like it does not go far enough at protecting our privacy. Call me cynical if you want, but there are two things that are causes for concern for me.

1. The article says “Roberts noted that the decision also allows for warrantless cell-tower location information searches in emergencies and for national security purposes.”

This leaves the door open for any agency to claim that any historic GPS data was obtained for “national security purposes”.

This is troublesome because if the government is abusing their power there is no way to hold them accountable since they do not have to explain the specific reasons for accessing the data if doing so will “compromise national security”. It is a bit of a loophole in my opinion.

2. Another article (https://www.cnet.com/news/supreme-court-says-warrant-necessa...) mentioned “While the decision sets a ruling for historical GPS data, the Supreme Court said it does not apply to security cameras, business records or real-time location tracking.”

This means that any other data can still be obtained without a warrant under the CLOUD act which passed just a couple months ago.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/03/responsibility-deflect...

I should have clarified. I meant no proof that they have been lying about the 1:1 dollar backing.

I agree with you the fact that they claim they are audited and never are is a sleazy business tactic.

> I don't like being lied to, especially when billions of dollars are at stake.

That’s totally understandable and fair. I also agree it is partially on them to prove that they can be trusted and I think this report today is a step in the right direction.

That said, there is still no hard proof that they have been lying and I like to believe they are innocent until proven guilty.

Also Tether can’t fully explain the run up in prices last year since Tether only accounts for some of the crypto trading volume, and many people still paid USD to buy Bitcoin and other cryptos last year.

Thank you for not ripping my head off. I too am skeptical. I just think the other way is also not super likely.

On Bitfinex tethers are not used for actually purchasing bitcoins. US dollars are. Tethers are only issued when you want to withdraw funds from the exchange to, for example, take advantage of arbitrage opportunities with other exchanges that offer Tether trading pairs.

Why is that idea so unlikely? Crypto was in a bull market last year and lots of people were trying to buy. If I saw the price was cheaper on an exchange that offered Tether pairs but not USD pairs I would probably convert some USD to Tether to buy there as well.

Just because I was wrong about that one thing doesn’t make what I just said any less true. You have yet to provide any evidence that they are not backed by USD. Just because they haven’t had an audit doesn’t prove any of your allegations.

Why do you have it in for Tether so much in the first place?

I hope you do realize that the idea that the two large numbers were randomly chosen to represent funds in a bank account that doesn’t exist, and a law firm founded by three formal federal judges (one who was a former FBI director) reported and lied about it to mislead the public, is many many times more improbable than the idea that the Tether actually holds this amount of US dollars.

That is one thing I find so crazy about the entire thing — the fact that they are backed 1:1 is the simplest possible explanation and yet the conspiracy that they were created out of thin air to artificially prop up the price of bitcoin is more believable to many/most people here.

Just so you know money is created out of thin air by the federal reserve every day and much of it is used to prop up the stock market. I’m not saying that to defend it or imply it is happening here. I just think it’s ironic cause no one is claiming that the stock market is overly inflated or that the federal reserve should go to prison even though there is proof there that it happens.

FWIW the stock market has a market cap around $30 trillion. Bitcoin alone is around $115 billion. Big price fluctuations are much more likely with a small supply and small market cap.

I see (sorry I skimmed it before). From the looks of it it seems she got a lot of support though because of that.

It’s a little different too since she was actually selling products with her logo on them vs. developing free software, but good point.

No. That’s the opposite. That’s a small company taking on a big one and winning. The OP that I was replying to was talking about big companies going after minnows.

Is that true for open source software that is not making any money? I would be very surprised if a big company went after someone maintaining an open source project.

That would be some pretty terrible PR:

“Billion dollar company X sues open source developer because the shade of blue used in their logo is too similar.

A spokesperson for X said that ‘Although they are releasing this software for free to help the community, we can’t have people being confused about the shade of blue they used.’”

It almost sounds like an Onion article to me.