jackstraw14

I think this is so much more interesting than all the yelling about these currencies that are not even being used like currencies. Why do people feel so personally and emotionally invested?

I mean here in this thread l’m running around trying to correct toxic misinformation, but what’s making me doing that? And what’s making the guy who brought up Cardano casually mention the rankings on coinmarketcap as if that means anything except to instill FOMO. I hope we see more articles on the psychology and sociology behind fear cycles in crypto.

No, the market was unprepared for an application that is still in alpha.

IOTA made the announcement on their official blog, so as far as I know it's the source. If you're saying you don't trust the devs, then I guess we're talking about something different than I thought.

Here's the quote from the Microsoft guy involved, that caused the confusion:

> We are excited to partner with IOTA foundation and proud to be associated with its new data marketplace initiative. This next generation technology will accelerate the connected, intelligent world and go beyond blockchain that will foster innovation real world solutions, applications and pilots for our customers. --Omkar Naik

Citation for your claim? The story I've read is that the IOTA Foundation will hold your funds so you can reclaim them.

So then it goes without saying that you reported this bug, before calling people nefarious, bad-intentioned crooks?

> So… Your response to why I’m wrong is that you’re going to change everything in the future?

Well, you got a reply from Come-from-Beyond who wrote the damn thing. You've got some attention from the developer and you couldn't handle your emotions, so I'm not sure what your angle is here. Do you mind if I ask, why didn't you engage them and evaluate your own understanding? Why did you resort to a snarky one liner?

> It still doesn't work on Linux

What are you talking about? I haven't used the wallet on anything but Linux, and I've had no problems.

Microsoft claimed the partnership with IOTA -- not the other way around: https://blog.iota.org/iotas-data-marketplace-setting-the-rec...

The quote that set off this confusion:

> We are excited to partner with IOTA foundation and proud to be associated with its new data marketplace initiative. This next generation technology will accelerate the connected, intelligent world and go beyond blockchain that will foster innovation real world solutions, applications and pilots for our customers. --Omkar Naik, Microsoft

I'm just beginning my recovery from whatever makes "us vs. them" turn into "everyone vs. me" at a young age, I guess.

I'm pretty sure this way of thinking isn't being instilled systematically from the top down, but it is happening at a very large scale. What's creating this "us vs. them" which kids often interpret as "everyone vs. me," is that there are so many easy ways out of feeling pain (and thus, ways out of learning how to live as a basic human) that we're in the process of forgetting how to deal with our emotions. We opt for solitary escape early on, because that's how our parents dealt with their issues too (their parents likely believed in pulling up bootstraps, or something). And then we/they continue to opt for escape via any sensory experience available in consumer capitalist society, most recently in socially acceptable life-escape games like Facebook and Twitter. We know it's not an authentic social feed, that it's actually designed to be a game you play with yourself where your social circle makes up the characters. What happens if that real-life game turns against you though, or if your mind simply starts to think they're turning against you? Mass shootings[1], terrorism[2], and Trump[3], I think.

If the horrors of modern American childhood don't happen at home, by the hand of adults who also sought solace from their fears in similar ways, these horrors usually happen in school, where they spend the rest of their time. From fellow classmates who figure out that bullies get their way, and clever bullies get their way even more. Us vs. them happens very early on, and when kids seek out solo escape via phones, games, whatever, well that's the beginning of a neverending search via consumer society for some answer that can allow them to live with the thoughts in their head.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_shootings_in_the_United_S...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrorism_in_the_United_States...

[3] https://i.imgur.com/crG3EeQ.jpg

That's a good point about open source software not always being supported. I guess it's no coincidence that the large organizations where I've worked were all .NET shops, but all the Linux boxes ran Red Hat Enterprise. And the biggest complaint I've heard about about Microsoft not supporting old products was a discussion about Windows Server 2003 (In 2016...).

I don't think that "all companies are in on it" necessarily, but there's a reason for that kind of loyalty to customers and it's not because it feels good. I'm not going to knock Microsoft too much because while I do feel like they're off the mark in some areas, they're improving their developer support a lot recently so I'm excited to follow what happens. But I don't think it's a coincidence that they're rapidly increasing developer support either (we sat through the app-less wonder of Windows Mobile for quite a while). They are also of course a publicly-traded company, at the mercy of profit-demanding shareholders.

I would like to see a world where the people who use the products have an equal opportunity to contribute and improve it. Not someone behind a wall squeezing money out of pockets, or throwing candy at developers so they'll make their platform more appealing for them. Or at least as appealing as the other guys', else they go under. I'm hanging onto an ideology, I know.

Like digitalsushi said, this .NET job will let me retire but it still sucks. It could suck a lot worse though.

It's a trust issue. I think it's a major leap to auto-enable new features without letting the users know what's going on, but people don't seem to have a problem with it these days as long as it doesn't raise any red flags in their mind or on social media. If we're auto-enabling stuff like this, don't users stop asking the questions? And is that consent?

That's not even going into who is making these decisions, the corporations who only stand to profit from you enabling these features. They will roll it back if there is enough public outcry, but burying the option in the system settings is one way to avoid mass public outcry. Convenient, isn't it.

Sure another major corporation is doing this with their products, but that doesn't make it right. None of this is an acceptable reason to continue sneaking it into their products. Plus the data collected has a potential for even more profit, which is where I just peace out and use an OS I trust. Why in the world would I give Windows 10 the benefit of the doubt?

I hear what you're saying, but none of it makes me feel better about using Windows 10. It's not high-quality HN discussion, though here's a Reddit thread about it: https://www.reddit.com/r/Windows10/comments/31rxsv/disable_k...

You've told me three things that I can disable in Windows 10. Why is this stuff enabled by default in the first place? How do you know this is everything I need to disable to address these concerns? Or better, why isn't user consent requested before any serious "diagnostic tracking" like this? The answer, I think, is that it's too complicated for the average user. Once this "diagnostic tool" is effectively hidden from the user, and enabled on all devices, the tool either has to be monitored regularly (to make sure more features aren't auto-enabled like these were) or eliminated completely. I've spent too much of my life "monitoring" closed-source software to give much consideration to that option, at this point.

I guess I should have noted that I do all my C# dev work in Windows 7 and run Arch VMs for everything else. My Windows 10 setup won’t be much different, but I just don’t trust Windows 10 and won’t be running my VMs on it.

I haven’t followed up on whether this “feature” made it into an actual Windows 10 update, but I remember reading about keylogging to the cloud as a way to pre-load your start menu with things that might be relevant to what you’re doing. Maybe it’s just being a developer and knowing what this kind of casual abstraction can cause, but I’m not okay with the philosophy that gets it into a test release of Windows 10. Microsoft is doing cool stuff these days but they still haven’t won me over.

I used Qubes for a few years and don’t remember running into that, but I’ve used Vim keybinding extensions in the browser for a while and may not have noticed. It’s that way in all browsers for you?

I work in the public sector and our sysadmins have actually made a game out of tricking people into updating to Windows 10 (and allowing them to take back admin rights in the process). Like offering Office 2016 upgrades, but only if you upgrade to Windows 10 too.

I understand it’s much easier for them to manage things this way, but they’re not going to have the results they want by going about it this way. When my Windows 10 “upgrade” comes, I’ll just be dedicating one of my monitors to my own Arch (maybe Qubes) box where I can actually get shit done. I’m a C# dev too, which makes even less sense, but requesting permission to install simple dev tools is not going to happen. Life is too short for this nonsense.

Where does sitting in your computer chair, criticizing the positive blips in a sea of moral decay fit into that worldview?

Have you read David Lipsky's "Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself" or seen The End of the Tour? It may not change your opinion of DFW much, but it shows what it was like trying to get answers from him on some of the stuff you mentioned (not the ethics stuff as much as what his style means, maybe). It's a pretty detailed account of a Rolling Stone writer (Lipsky) following and interviewing him right after Infinite Jest was published, but it ends up mostly being about the stuff in the last few lines of your comment.

I agree. Most of the issues you describe are related to the terrible experience of what to do with your currencies after you've bought them. None of them are very useful at the moment, so there needs to be a safe way to store them, and the easiest thing to do is just leave them sitting in your exchange accounts. There are ways store them properly (hardware wallets, which aren't perfect either), but there's no way any non-tech/non-determined folks will consider a free solution like a paper wallet. I'm looking forward to seeing what Omise comes up with on their multi-currency wallet and supposedly instant conversion via a decentralized exchange.

However, I think the real hope for this (and yes, a community-driven approach rather than government-controlled) is what's already changed the world in my lifetime through open source communities.

The most successful distributed ledgers have so far been open source. This is another sentiment, but I started using Linux in 1996 because I hit too many brick walls in Windows as a kid. Just simply learning how it works always resulted in at least one headache (I recall trying to learn C++ in windows at that time, and then seeing a friend's Debian environment, and that was that)

Since then I've seen those philosophies (more social than technical I think) creep into so many previously off-limits proprietary areas. It blows my mind what we've achieved, not just creating a system where we have more control but forcing the "evil" companies many of us hated at the time, like Apple and Microsoft, to adapt. I never thought Microsoft would open source anything, yet here we are with dotnet core and more. I don't see any reason why we can't carry that over into banking and fintech, and this does feel a lot like the clunky early days of Linux. But a well-organized decentralized movement can topple major centralized institutions, and while a complete takeover by the people probably won't happen, already every major bank is adapting to this new world. And they have much less control in this one, too.

> as a technically sophisticated HN reader, that you don't need the nanny state to protect you in this way.

Thanks for your compliments, but I think of myself more as a fairly well-informed American who graduated college in 2010, the same year I found myself in a lecture hall for a career planning class and 5 out of 300 students raised their hands when asked "Who here has a job lined up after graduation?"

So no, I don't accept that we must submit to a nanny state controlled by centralized banks, and I will continue fighting for these projects to exist and thrive. And not just for a quick buck like you seem to think this is. You can see it as "investments" and miracle money or whatever, but it's more than that. It's a way for people like me to finally say "fuck you" to the banks that have ruined so many lives (and for what, exactly?) and finally in a way that makes them listen.

Well, you can make two mistakes if you want to. Probably even three if you're determined.

I didn't mean to use growing pains as an excuse for Mt. Gox. What should come about because of this is more focus on decentralized exchanges, seeing as this was a painful example of the problems we still face with centralized exchanges. We're now seeing more decentralized exchanges coming into existence for this very reason, there are a lot of drawbacks to centralization when it comes to wealth, and all of those are felt by the people/customers and not the institutions. And they are the ones who can afford to make the rules and pay off politicans to make sure it doesn't change. You say there's a tendency to blindly idealize decentralization, but are you sure you're not missing all the very real drawbacks to centralization by taking that position?

I'm just saying, before we leap to regulations that will take decades to roll back when we actually understand what this crypto space is all about, maybe we can improve on what we have and take a different route. Which is what bitcoin, ethereum, and now the third generation crypto projects are trying to do. Incremental improvements are the only way to explore this new frontier, not regulating the shit out of it from the very beginning.

Centralized institutions do provide a safety net, but is there anything necessarily wrong with a group of people saying they don't want or need that? And isn't this better than conservative activists trying to strip those protections away from the existing institutions with the "enormous amount of benefits" bit by bit until their profit is maximized and no protections are left?

edit: regarding the Mt. Gox situation. You present it as something that should have never happened in civilized society, but I think it's growing pains on the way to something better.

I don't disagree that it's a depressing waste of existence to spend one's life keeping track of stuff. Especially if it's not even your stuff. But we've only had the computing power to take a load off us humans for a decade or two. And plus everyone needs a job (pointless or not) or the unemployment statistics start to freak people out. It's sort of the hand we've been dealt, the whole "let's work hard now for a better future we'll never see" thing.

I think the situation will improve dramatically when some of these crypto projects begin to mature. From what I can tell, blockchains are the opposite of lightweight, and personally I'm not holding my breath for one to become useful for anything besides profit anytime soon. I think something like IOTA is a better candidate to be useful (a fee-less directed acyclic graph, not a blockchain). It's more like a new communications protocol that will allow machines to conduct their own transactions with each other. The team's goal is to make it useful first, and if it's profitable too well that's great. Maybe I'm just not that creative anymore, but I can't see a production-quality future for blockchains, and would agree that giant PNW datacenters doing nothing but proof-of-work is a massive waste of resources.

That said, these are mostly just research projects hoping they have one of the big ideas that will win.

Just what exactly is your definition of an "actual, productive endeavour"?

Is it really that ridiculous that we dedicate a lot of resources to keeping track of who owns what? We're a mostly capitalist society, right? In a system where private ownership reigns supreme, you absolutely need to keep track of who owns what or we'd have even greater wealth inequality than we have now. Personally, I'd like to see some kind of anarcho-syndicalist structure but let's be honest our greatx10 grandchildren will probably still be capitalists.

This article is a little over-the-top in some spots, but the main point is correct. Cryptocurrency is an innovation in accounting: https://hackernoon.com/why-everyone-missed-the-most-importan...

Cryptocurrencies are trying to make trustless transactions a reality so we don't need a human workforce to keep it all mostly accurate. Don't get too disappointed yet, this stuff is just getting started.

Took me 30 years to think I've finally kicked that bullshit. I'm still not sure.

Like Football Manager?

Maybe at some point people will do some thinking about how their own conflicts of interest affect the hype and FUD they spread in crypto communities.

pls buy iota