craigc

If the current MacBook Pro is any indication, then I would be surprised if people are still buying Macs at all in 2020.

You are right. I am not stating a fact. It is my opinion that this guy is being used as a sacrificial lamb because I have seen things like this happen time and time again.

Also seems like a pretty big coincidence that the others sold off their shares immediately after hearing about the breach, but it was unrelated.

It is good that someone is being charged, but it would be nice if it was someone more senior.

They always make the little guy take the fall. Avoiding $117,000 losses on $1 million is nothing compared to what some people get away with.

The CEO, meanwhile, walked away with up to $90 million:

http://fortune.com/2017/09/26/equifax-ceo-richard-smith-net-...

The other executives were “not aware” when they sold their shares:

> Equifax, the credit report company hacked over the summer exposing the personal information of 145 million Americans, said a special committee has determined that none of the four executives who sold shares at the time did anything wrong.

> The high-level executives sold shares worth a combined $1.8 million in the days immediately after the company discovered the breach.

That is a pretty remarkable coincidence if you ask me.

https://www.mercurynews.com/2017/11/03/equifax-4-executives-...

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For reference, the CEO of Intel sold $25 million worth of stock after hearing about the Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities before they were disclosed to the public, and he will probably be fine.

That’s a pretty interesting perspective. I have definitely been thinking for a while that they are trying to drive the general public out so that they can accumulate more for cheaper, but I never considered the idea that they want you to use THEIR tools.

It actually makes a lot of sense cause the SEC has also been going pretty hard lately to try to shut down trading of tokens that had ICOs and to make life difficult for current exchanges.

I have always believed that Wall Street does not like the fact that the regular public got first stab at crypto currencies, and they didn’t. This could be their way to try to rectify that.

I would take any article like this with a grain of salt. There is not a lot of useful or technical information here, and I believe it is more designed as click bait and FUD to create shock value and hurt the public sentiment about Blockchain technology and investing in crypto currencies.

That said, on the flip side, a lot of people have been considering Blockchain as some kind of magic solution to all of the world’s problems, and that is also very far from reality. If it takes an article in Reuters for people to realize this than so be it.

I have believed for a while that Blockchain technology in the context that many big companies refer to it is not very useful. Usually these are the same people who claim that Bitcoin is useless and Blockchain technology is where the real value is. I think they are either mistaken or misinformed.

In my opinion, anyone who plans to build a centrally controlled Blockchain is making a mistake. Even if the data is signed/hashed and distributed, it only takes one bad actor inside the organization who has access to the nodes to alter the Blockchain by performing a 51% attack (changing the transaction data on more than half of the nodes). Therefore the entire idea of a Blockchain being immutable is thrown out the window. You would be much better off using an open source database like MySQL or Postgres or Mongo. Blockchains are expensive to run and operate and are extremely slow.

However, the idea that Blockchains are a solution in search of a problem that the article suggests is also a bit misleading. I think it’s more likely that these companies are trying to find solutions for things that aren’t problems in the first place which isn’t the fault of Blockchain technology itself. I feel pretty strongly that blockchains have already solved a few problems.

- They solve the double spending problem (the idea that the same tokens can be spent more than once)

- They allow people to store value without depending on any third party (such as a bank)

- They remove all the intermediaries required for sending payments/data from one person to another.

- They make it cheaper and faster to send any amount of money to anyone in the world

To me, those are all transformative properties of blockchains, and anyone who overlooks them is somewhat missing the point. That said, in order to check off all these bullet points, you need to have a peer to peer, decentralized network where peers are rewarded with crypto currencies for securing the network, not just a few servers running inside of a company as a replacement for a centralized database.

Will there be good Blockchain applications outside of crypto currencies? I’m not sure, but to me, there is nothing wrong with that. If, in the future, banks and cash become obsolete and everyone stores their money on their own secure, digital wallets, then I would say that Blockchain technology changed the world for the better.

So strange. I posted this exact site hours ago and now it is on the top of hacker news. Not sure how that happened since it is the same url. I guess the algorithm doesn’t like me.

In any case, I have been a Mac user my entire life. I too have one of the 2016 MacBook Pros and I have to say I hate it. I previously owned an iBook, two PowerBooks, a MacBook Pro, and a MacBook Air. This is by far the worst Apple laptop I have ever owned. My parents needed a new Mac laptop and I recommended the 13 inch air cause it is the only usable one in their entire product line now.

I was thinking of writing a similar post about all the issues I have but the main thing is the keyboard. What good is a computer that you can’t type on. One spec of dust or one crumb and your keyboard is done. My space bar sometimes inserts two spaces and sometimes inserts spaces between letters. My left command key doesn’t register half the time which is insanely frustrating since I use keyboard shortcuts for everything. Some days I feel like throwing it out the window. The sad thing is I actually prefer the FEEL of the keyboard and the travel to the old one, but the issues with keys not working correctly are too much to overcome. In addition I have talked to a lot of people who have a new MacBook Pro and I haven’t found one person who hasn’t had an issue with the keyboard. I’m honestly shocked there hasn’t been a class action suit yet. It probably wouldn’t matter anyway cause Apple would just give me a free can of compressed air and blame me for eating over my keyboard.

I previously had an 11 inch MacBook Air and it was perfect just missing the Retina display. Apple went ahead and did all this stuff they thought people would want without understanding that no one cared, and they ruined a perfectly good product.

This article is probably true but this is just typical clickbait from CNBC.

The author begins by saying

> Admittedly I'm green with envy for failing to foresee the explosive rally in the price of bitcoin when it was first brought to my attention several years ago.

That should be enough to stop reading right there.

I don’t know how articles like this make it to the top of hacker news.

Just because Warren Buffet doesn’t think crypto currencies don’t have a future doesn’t mean they don’t. He also still uses a flip phone, and didn’t invest in tech stocks at all until recently. He admitted to not understanding crypto currencies at all.

Also the dollar as reserve currency is the weakest argument I can think of as to why Bitcoin can’t be a global currency. I personally trade crypto from time to time, and I care much much more about the Bitcoin (satoshi) value of my portfolio than the dollar value. In the crypto world, Bitcoin IS the reserve currency. Most other tokens trade vs. it. It’s not that insane to imagine a world where people’s net worth are expressed as a number of Bitcoin. Do I think that is likely? No, but it is certainly a possibility.

Just because CNBC and other mainstream media outlets use dollars to explain net worth “Winklevoss twins are first Bitcoin billionaires” that has less to do with Bitcoin as a currency and much more to do with explaining things in a way that is easy for regular people to understand.

The earliest reports I can find claiming that North Korea may have been involved were from the middle of May:

https://www.theverge.com/2017/5/15/15643226/wannacry-ransomw...

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/may/15/wannacry-...

There is nothing conclusive there though

If this is not the most convenient way to justify going to war with North Korea then I don’t know what is. It is almost as if the hackers WANTED to get caught by reusing code that was previously used in an attack initiated by North Korea.

Also we shouldn’t forget that it was an exploit developed by the NSA to begin with.

Weapons of Mass Destruction anyone?

> Stocks are a different story altogether. You are buying equity in a company that has value. The stock market might be under or overvalued at any given time, but it is still tied to the value of the companies.

I would say stocks are valued by the perceived value of the company and/or the potential future value. They are somewhat speculative too. Look at Tesla or Amazon for example. They have insane values despite not even turning a profit for long periods of time.

I get your point though. Bitcoin has no intrinsic value tied to anything specific, but I still don’t think that makes it a pyramid scheme. Bitcoin has A LOT value to people in countries that are on the brink of economic collapse due to inflation. Even in the United States, the FED prints over $200 billion a month. So in theory Bitcoin should hold value over the long term better than the US dollar.

I read someone else who wrote about this before. One question I have is why you think that specifically about Bitcoin and not about other things like gold or stocks?

People who purchase stocks early do so expecting the price to rise when more people buy in later for higher prices. Same thing with gold. People say stocks have value because they provide dividends, but when was the last time anyone made significant income due to dividends? I think most companies do not even pay dividends.

If Bitcoin was actually a pyramid scheme then the early investors would be eager to cash out at the expense of everyone else, but many people involved in Bitcoin truly believe in the technology and the idea of a global currency that exists outside of government/bank control. Those people are not eager to part with their Bitcoins, and I don’t know why that would change all of a sudden.

I think dismissing Bitcoin and promoting blockchain technology kind of misses the point. Sure, a lot of companies will invest in blockchain tech and maybe roll out their own blockchains, but that doesn’t make a lot of sense to me.

A blockchain without a peer to peer/decentralized network and a crypto currency/incentive system is nothing more than an over-architected centralized database.

The trust provided by using a blockchain is based mostly on the incentive for people to secure the network. Sure you can use hashing and encryption to verify transactions without it, but if it is a private chain, then one person with access can perform a 51% attack and alter all of the transactions. That is the exact thing something like Bitcoin is trying to prevent.

I agree that Bitcoin itself may not end up being the final coin that survives in 5 or 10 or 20 years, but it has the first mover advantage and strong brand recognition, and I don’t see that changing anytime soon.

How would someone classify Bitcoin’s rise from $0.08 to $31 from 2010 to 2011 before dropping to $2 or its rise from around $100 to around $1200 and subsequent crash to around $200 from 2013 to 2015?

I would say losing 85% to 95% of its value in a relatively short period of time after a large run up could be considered a bubble bursting. The thing that is interesting is that each time this has happened with Bitcoin the price settled somewhere ABOVE where it was before the last bubble.

I do think Bitcoin is in a bubble right now, but I think it could go much higher (maybe $50-100k?) before crashing, and I think the price after the crash will not go below $5k or $10k. The current wave began around $1000.

So what I think we are seeing is actually mass adoption of a new technology in waves that are increasing exponentially.

There has never been anything like Bitcoin so it is difficult to use lenses of Bubbles in the past to explain what is happening with it.

- Tulip mania was concentrated to specific parts of Europe vs. a global market.

- Tulip bulbs are perishable items that you have to repurchase when they go bad so they cannot store value.

- Tulip bulbs have an infinite supply since you can always grow more, Bitcoin has a maximum supply of 21 million and there will never be another.

- Anyone can plant seeds to grow a tulip bulb whereas mining a bitcoin has real costs associated with it ($800 to $2,000).

- Tulip bulbs cannot cure poverty and starvation in the world. Bitcoin has already been very useful in countries like Venezuela where inflation of their own currency is causing poverty. See https://mobile.nytimes.com/aponline/2017/12/13/world/america...

Also tulip mania itself is a poor comparison since it has spread like a game of telephone over the years. None of us were alive in the 1600s, and the actual events that unfolded were probably much less grand than the media plays it out to be: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/there-never-was-real-...

That assumes you have your coins on an exchange. If you have them in a wallet you would have to send them to the exchange before selling, and that process could take hours or days.

I agree. As soon as anyone starts comparing crypto currencies and Bitcoin to tulips I tune out. It is a sign that they clearly do not understand what they are talking about.

I meant that early bitcoin investors will invest in companies and put money into various organizations which will then be paid out to their employees.

For existing companies, they would need to purchase, but if a significant portion of US dollars moves into bitcoin then it is likely every company would start having to hold a portion of their cash in bitcoin as a hedge long before it actually overtakes the dollar.

I am not sure that long term BTC will actually replace USD or another government backed currency. I think it would take a LOT for that to happen. If that does happen then that means the value of the USD and every other currency will decline at the same time as the value of BTC increases which could lead to a global financial collapse.

That said, if it were to happen, I don’t think you will have to buy bitcoin from a handful of early adopters. It is more likely that your employer would start paying you in Bitcoin when it becomes inevitable. Those same early adopters who hold a lot of the wealth will likely use their wealth to invest in startups/charities/companies/etc. the same way as entrepreneurs and rich people do today.

I think people here need to lighten up. I know we are all programmers, and we are sometimes portrayed as snobby and entitled, but we don't have to live up to those stereotypes.

I understand it's frustrating when a tool you use is expected to work a certain way and it doesn't. I understand it's even more frustrating when the output could change depending on the time of day. That doesn't mean it is our place to gang up on an open source tool that is designed to make our lives easier.

I think we should be allowed to have some fun every once in a while, and this "gimme gimme gimme" easter egg is awesome.

It seems the maintainers didn't realize that this easter egg was affecting a command that was designed to have a predictable output so that is the real issue here. Just a simple bug. If this was output on some help screen or something like that then no one would be complaining.

Exactly. I meant Bitcoin or other crypto currency

But if you spend all your money on goods and then you need something else in a week or two then what do you use to buy it? Sell/trade the goods you already purchased? I think it makes sense to hold on to some form of currency.

I'm not saying it SHOULD be worth more. Just saying that market behaviors don't always make logical sense.

Right now most cryptocurrencies trade against Bitcoin. If that were to change it would require all exchanges introducing new trading pairs against some other coin. Not saying that won't happen, but it would take some time.

Also, yes those companies have revenue, expenses, earnings which can be used to value them. My point was let's say tomorrow I release my own uber competitor. Even if it is better in every way than Uber: Better UX, faster, easier to make payments, all robotic cars (debatable if that is better :]), etc, etc.

That does not mean that my app will gain adoption and end up becoming more valuable than Uber. Some of it has to do with brand recognition, first mover advantage, press coverage, etc.

A lot of people thought Ethereum would take over as the dominant cryptocurrency cause it can arguably do everything bitcoin and more, but that didn't happen and Bitcoin is still going strong.

When Bitcoin was $10 a $1 move in price was a 10% change.

When Bitcoin was $100 then a $1 move in price was a 1% change.

When Bitcoin was $1000 then a $1 move in price was a 0.1% change.

If Bitcoin gets mass adoption then the price per Bitcoin could be $50,000 (assume $1 trillion market cap) or higher. At that point a $1 market movement would be a 0.002% change. To get the same 10% movement as at $100 would require a $5,000 market price swing which while possible is less likely.

It means a lot more money would have to be bought or sold to cause the same percent movement in price.

Bitcoin is already much less volatile today than it was in the past.

I have used Bitcoin for purchases in the past. I try not to do it so often because of the exact thing you mentioned, but I feel like this is something that could improve with time.

If Bitcoin does get mass adoption and becomes THE worldwide currency then that also means that the volatility will decrease significantly to the point where I wouldn't have any problem transacting using Bitcoin.

I realize the idea of that actually happening is pretty insane and it is probably more likely that the value will go down to zero, but it is hard to predict the future.

This same question could be asked about many technology startups.

Why should Uber be valued higher than Lyft?

That's a pretty crude comparison, but I'm just pointing out that just cause someone comes along and makes a clone of something doesn't mean it will be worth more than the original even if it is technologically superior.

It's true that forking a cryptocurrency required much less work than starting a company, but I don't think that the value comparison is that different.

If people believe Bitcoin should be valued higher than a clone of Bitcoin even if the clone is better, Bitcoin will be valued higher.

I encourage you to read the Bitcoin white paper if you haven't.

https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf

I think you are a little off base in the original intentions. It was designed to solve a real problem, and its creator was likely someone who had a background in academia although we may never know for certain.

It is true that maybe a lot of the proponents today want to bring down central banks, but I think it's a little unfair to imply that that was the original intention.

I was confused. I thought chia was going to be also a storage mechanism. I was pointing out those coins that are built around the idea of storage.

That said, Filecoin does use some form of proof of storage:

https://filecoin.io/proof-of-replication.pdf

Ahhhh. I somehow missed that while reading the article. Thanks that makes more sense.

When I saw Bittorrent and storage I think my brain immediately jumped to the storage based tokens.

Curious to read about and see how that works

There are already blockchains that do not require proof of work (Lisk, Nav, Dash, NEO, etc) and already storage based blockchains (Filecoin, Storj, Sia, Maidsafe, etc).

It is unclear to me what Chia brings to the table that is really new.

If this isn’t clickbait then I don’t know what is. There is no new information here, and I don’t see anywhere where it says that the SEC supports ICOs.

I do not know the author, but this is kind of an embarrassment to be considered journalism.

A much better read would be Fred Wilson’s thoughts on the matter:

http://avc.com/2017/09/the-china-ico-ban/

Okay I think we are actually arguing the same thing though. The original argument was why I thought currencies/platforms like BTC and ETH should be considered more valuable than random altcoins (independent of if they are ERC-20 or not).

I am not trying trying to argue about if BTC or ETH is better.