debugunit

Public speaking. I joined Toastmasters [1] at the start of the year and highly recommend it. Friendly, supportive atmosphere. Challenging, assuming you're not currently comfortable speaking in front of groups. Lots of people who've been there a while comment on howit's improved their careers. One of the most useful bits is learning to evaluate other people's speeches, a skill which can be applied in a variety of situations, and (so I'm told - I'm still learning) leaves a very positive impression on people.

[1] https://www.toastmasters.org/

"...Lynch Mobs - if enough of the players agree, they can send someone to prison, remove their assets, or even eject them from the game"

AKA democracy ;-)

See also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7949183

Douglas Adams satirised precisely this point with his Zaphod Beeblebrox character in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. To quote wikipedia[1], his was "a role that involves no power whatsoever, and merely requires the incumbent to attract attention so no one wonders who's really in charge, a role for which Zaphod was perfectly suited"

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zaphod_Beeblebrox

I had one of these as a teenager and loved it. Learned Pascal with it, and did a lot of assembly language programming with it (Z80 apparently - I'd forgotten if it was that or 6502). It finally gave up the ghost a few years ago. Makes me quite nostalgic.

Thanks for the Calculus Made Easy reference. It's here, to save anyone googling. http://www.gutenberg.org/files/33283/33283-pdf.pdf

The prologue is great:

"Considering how many fools can calculate, it is surprising that it should be thought either a difficult or a tedious task for any other fool to learn how to master the same tricks.

Some calculus-tricks are quite easy. Some are enormously difficult. The fools who write the textbooks of advanced mathematics (and they are mostly clever fools) seldom take the trouble to show you how easy the easy calculations are. On the contrary, they seem to desire to impress you with their tremendous cleverness by going about it in the most difficult way.

Being myself a remarkably stupid fellow, I have had to unteach myself the difficulties, and now beg to present to my fellow fools the parts that are not hard. Master these thoroughly, and the rest will follow. What one fool can do, another can."

Isn't it the double-spending solution that requires all those resources, not the simple ledger?

This has been posted before but hasn't attracted much attention (not since 4 years ago anyway).

This is unrelated to the topic at hand, but Sam Altmans' blog has, at some point in the past week, been blocked by the corporate firewall I'm behind (large international bank). How long till they block HN, I wonder.

Submitter here - guilty as charged. Apologies.

They quote a "Maximum fair market value" of $1300 based on a couple of different methodologies.

In my (limited) experience, when banks forecast prices (for stocks, indices, FX rates etc) they always quote a number within a reasonable-sounding percentage of the current price, because not to do so risks being wrong and looking stupid.

This means that most of the time they are not far out, and when it really matters (eg 2008) they are miles out (and so is everyone else).

So even if BofAML actually thought that the "maximum fair market value" was significantly higher than $1300, I doubt they'd have said so, simply to avoid the reputational risk.

I agree. I was merely answering the question posed.

The CNY price dropped from around 7000 to below 5000 briefly, as I was watching it on www.bitcoinaverage.com. That's a 28% drop in a few minutes, which surely qualifies as a plunge. It does seem to be recovering, which makes sense since the announcement wasn't particularly aggressive.

Perhaps a different title wouldn't have been upvoted sufficiently to get us all reading about and discussing the issue. It strikes me there's a strong element of direct marketing in getting from the New page to the front page. Once you're on the front page, of course, your content speaks for itself.

Awesome article. Can we see the perl script that wrote it?

Am I missing something significant? If my wayward indebted 19 year old (not that I have one of those currently) can get hold of the encrypted key, he can take its money. So I'm putting total trust in the security/honesty of the lawyer or whoever who is storing the protected key. So they might just as well be storing the unprotected private key. I'd rather not put total trust in anyone, but reasonable trust in several (disinterested) people.