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I went through this as well and kept throwing out "Sharper Image" as a name, one for the homage to the Simpsons' "Max Power", and two because it'd be hard not to confront that name as "not my identity". It's hardly even the identity of the products distributed by the now defunct company.

Thankfully I would never get my way on this. My first born's name fits the criteria you listed almost exactly. The idea of naming them after an older family member is growing on me for similar reasons - it's fun to say "oh you're just like Grandpa <name> in this way, but not in this other way" I guess.

The later zones (of Vanilla Wow) were pretty boring and ugly, assumedly because they ran out of time to develop them further. They definitely put a lot of iteration into the earlier zones and it paid off.

Looking back, there just wasn't anything that looked like WoW, but a lot of that included the perspective of running around in a comparatively polished world with a ton of comparatively polished game systems, with friends. The first long flight I took from two major cities across most of a continent (that I was familiar with from experience with the IP) was absolutely nuts to me.

What's stopping me from declaring that people who have normal clothes drying habits are unethical compared to my proposed alternative, devoid of any attempt to understand its potential externalities? I'm not a butthole.

It's not a safe assumption that other forms of money exist that are less problematic than Bitcoin. People can and can't buy things using certain kinds of money largely because of the results of war or the threat of war. I'm always amazed at people that are confident the US Dollar machine is more ethical than Bitcoin.

There's simply too much to consider to know for sure, and the experiment of making a better version of money is probably at least worth as much as drying clothes, especially when you consider it's as equally opt-in.

We use almost as much energy to dry our clothes. You have to argue that Bitcoin isn't useful as well to argue that it's wasteful. Most people do this by saying there are alternatives to Bitcoin, but none of them have the same security profile. They're not equivalent.

As someone who would be fine in recyclable coveralls a la The Dispossessed, I think clothes drying is a waste. Thankfully I'm not the arbiter of what's useful to everyone.

I guess it doesn't fit in besides I've seen it be used for microservices where microservices don't apply

I've seen millions of dollars spent on infrastructure to support what Heroku could do for a few thousand a month. Not to mention the egregious dev heartache caused by having to work against it. Anyone who argued it was a waste of time and money just "didn't get it" apparently.

I'm a huge fan of all the cool container stuff, queues, stream processing, all the weird topologies for apps built with node, Golang. I'm with it, kids. But for an MVP, just use Heroku, GAE, a Droplet with SCP for god sakes.

If you need to do something more complicated, growth will tell you.

> People you like would have signed profiles that tell you where they publish so that you can subscribe. You can follow their interest graph but use your own algorithm to filter and rank content.

Solving custody and permissions issues in a scalable way hasn't really been doable here, not in a way that isn't massively out-performed by The Platforms. I believe the semantic web makes sense for this, but people have demonstrated that privacy, and positive vs negative externalities concerning data, aren't as important as core functionality.

Another thing to consider is that content is fairly commodity compared to being apart of the reaction to that content. Configuring your own web to allow for this is a lot more work - the Facebooks curate this for you, as a matter of engagement.

I love your comment though, this is where my thoughts have been for a while now. If people could serve, or have served, their own interest graph and activity, that would be the basis for a lot of interesting things, including qualifying organic activity, and real sentiment.

Every time I leave a job, there's suddenly the money I was asking for available. If someone was asking for a raise and you couldn't give it to them, and then they turn in their notice, and then there's onus to retain them at their original ask, the only thing to say is "congrats, we definitely regret not making things work for you here".

> The actually hard parts aren't about moving money around

Yes, they are, if you're trying to be censorship resistant and scale transaction throughput. Do you have any examples, or was your original comment about showing us there are no possible alternatives to the full feature set of existing payment processors at their current price point?

Bitcoin. "Crypto enthusiasts" and the uninitiated will argue that "Bitcoin doesn't scale to Visa levels", but it does through the Lightning Network.

Most critiques assume that you don't need the graph of liquidity-weighted edges that Lightning Network requires to achieve cheap transactions at high throughput. I seriously doubt this isn't necessary without handing over control to a central third party and thus creating something with the same properties as VISA.

Good luck getting any change into Bitcoin that isn't good for every participant of the network. The last time people tried this, users, not even those users with the most Bitcoin at stake, were able to produce enough chaos and generate enough risk that they failed. Ethereum is capable of full consensus mechanism changes that hurt subsets of the network who don't hold the majority of Eth, the latest of which just further entrenched that ability.

I personally prefer the former for that reason, but by your critique, Ethereum is practically conducive to keeping the people who control the protocol small. Bitcoin is probably headed to a version freeze this decade, which is great.

I can write code that trades bitcoins without having to ask anyone for permission. Without getting into what Bitcoin will change about banking, I'd say that's pretty different from regular banking.

Back then it was so clearly orchestrated propaganda, but it took a lot of newcomers. I'm not looking forward to this cycle's "blocksize" debate. It seems that rolling new coins is the better vector overall for such schemes, for better or worse.

Thank you for continuing the discourse all these years and keeping people informed.

What was controversial about segwit outside of a large commercial interest (Bitmain) losing the ability to leverage a patented algorithm that effectively increased their ASIC productivity? I always thought that was what drove most of the drama and Bitcoin Cash, a place where they could continue to arbitrage that mining boost, to come about.

This is likely the target for the product. Still, at a relatively small number of seats, maybe 200? an IT service administrating Chrome through the Google Apps service you're likely already paying for becomes more economical.

Bitcoin is P2P software. Every model that doesn't start there is wrong. Certainly most hype pieces start somewhere else. All critiques do. It's easy to ignore them.

Thank you for a measured response that doesn't categorize everyone on the "wrong side" of history here as inept, or miscategorizes Proof of Work.

What also seems to be thrown out with the bathwater in this discussion is that for the project of intermediary free money, with a long time horizon, the subsidy is only a small reason Bitcoin will have ever been mined.

Of the hundred+ billion humans to ever live, practically none of them were planned. Children will come, and their ability to thrive is a commons. Moralizing the decisions people make that result in kids is my goto example of how poorly a decision can be made when you defy data.

Smart Meters and Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) still have about half of all meters to go in the US. Real time pricing for the customer requires cutting through a few intermediaries designed to keep the grid and utility bills stable, much at the cost of the environment.

Texas energy markets are where all the fun on this front is really happening.

I don't want to know how complicated someone has made their life if K8s can't simplify it.

> representations of social relations

What Nick Szabo would call reciprocity, or the delay thereof.

https://nakamotoinstitute.org/shelling-out/

It's trying to solve the problem of having to involve a 3rd party in on-line transactions. Chargebacks are expensive to deal with. Jurisdictions are expensive to deal with. Standing up a multinational e-commerce site requires a lot of lawyers and accountants.

Will the risk presented by crypto always be greater than the risk of involving trusted third parties? Maybe. Maybe not.

Is there some other technology out there creating an immutable supply token better than Bitcoin that I don't know about?

It was fun to watch Congress pretend like there's something to legislate here, and to watch Zuckerberg pretend like whatever legislation Facebook helps write might be a burden.

The openness to the idea of AI modulating discourse so that we don't ever have to feel uncomfortable was my favorite part.

Since when are businesses not users of the internet?

You're probably referring to a strong 3rd party intermediary as the aggregate of our financial system when you refer to its regulatory power here, but that it reads like the bank itself has regulatory power is the critique of money provided by Bitcoin in a nutshell. Regulatory capture IS the problem of scalability with our monetary system. Bitcoin exists to prove this.

Facebook owns Whats App. It's one of the first thing they acquired with IPO money.

> For instance, I would pay for a high-quality service like Mint (I don’t use it) that kept my data private, but there is none.

Have you looked at ynab.com? I find their overall philosophy on budgeting to be more effective, the app is high quality, and it's solely about your budget, not about offering you credit cards.

It's one of the few products I recommend to anyone, and it's relatively expensive ($85 for the year I believe).

If Google is paying what Yahoo was, it's $300 million a year for the default search option on Firefox. Google pays Apple billions to stay the default on the iPhone as well.