javert

> So then just don't respond to me...?

This comes across as an admission that your earlier comment was not genuine, but I can't believe you actually mean that. It's also gross behavior, because you've encouraged me to enter into a conversation with you and then blamed me for doing it and walked away.

There is nothing weird about anything I've said in this conversation about proper forum interaction. I've gone to great pains to explain my perfectly normal forum behavior to you, which you raised a nit pick objection about. You are the one who casually thousands of people of hypocrisy without appearing to be aware of it. Accusing me of weird behavior is completely missing the mark.

No, this conversation doesn't explain the disclaimer on my profile. The disclaimer is there because I'm often outside the Overton window of much of the Silicon Valley crowd. I don't think that's the case in this particular conversation.

> "Many people say" this because they aren't the ones with the power.

You're literally saying that here that everyone who makes the argument that bitcoin creates a positive transformation of power---which is at least tens of thousands of people---is only pretending to believe that because they want to transfer power to themselves. You are calling them all hypocrites. And I know that's wrong, because I know lots of people who actually believe this, including myself. Your argument here is not even an argument; it's not even remotely, distantly believable.

Now, I suspect you don't understand your comment the way I do, which is why I'm taking the time to respond to you. But I think that's what is implied by what you have written.

I'm radically dismissive of dishonest arguments, or arguments that are blatantly and obviously wrong. I don't think it's correct to respond to them as if they are real arguments. The most effective thing is just to dismiss them. Honest readers understand what you are doing. That's the most effective response.

For example, if someone says "I think you missed the point," followed with a total non-sequitur, which creates a false appearance that I missed the point, when I did not miss the point, I'm going to just dismiss it out of hand, and I'm not going to discuss it.

I think that's totally appropriate. You don't give people an honest, serious response when they are playing games.

The 6 year old cousin analogy is apt. If someone acts like a six year old, I respond appropriately for that age. If someone acts like an adult, I respond appropriately for an adult.

By the way, I'm not rude. I'm never rude. Saying "I didn't miss the point" is the most polite thing you can say to the kind of blatantly wrong comment I got in that instance. All it really signals is that I disagree with what was said and don't want to discuss it further. That is fair.

> "Many people say" this because they aren't the ones with the power.

No, they are saying it because they believe it. To use my prior example, they think it's better to transform the kind of power Dick Cheney or Bernie Sanders or Donald Trump could have, into the kind of power Bill Gates or Warren Buffett or Jeff Bezos could have. That makes a lot of sense.

You can just accuse anyone you disagree with of being a hypocrite, but that's straw-manning them when you should be steel-manning them. You don't win arguments with the tactic you're using, and you don't win hearts and minds. You also don't win when you're just plain wrong, as you are in this case.

Uh, the bitcoin community has come out unilaterally against the concept of premining and ICOs. Bitcoiners fucking hate that shit and have been heavily criticizing it from when it first started. Which was substantially after bitcoin started, i.e. literally years later.

What you need to realize is that the bitcoin community != the crypto community.

Bitcoin was not premined and did not have an ICO.

It's weird to talk about "Satoshi's net worth." Satoshi may not have been a single person, may be dead, and anyway, it doesn't look like those coins will ever be spent, so if Satoshi is alive, he hasn't profited financially from the coins he mined and is presumably living a poor or middle-class life, unless he happened to be independently wealthy before---but we'll probably never know.

I'm definitely not missing the point.

I see what you're saying, but I think that's too narrow of a reading of his comment, but it doesn't really matter.

> Crypto is "cult by design" in much the way all greater-fool scams are.

If you study the history of bitcoin (or were around and paying attention), it wasn't at all designed as a cult or a scam. So this is factually wrong. However I think it's true of a lot of the later coins.

> I dont think anyone has ever yet explained how this is meant to function as a currency.

People have, like a zillion times, including on this forum. If it matters to you (it shouldn't), even professional economists fall into different camps on the nature of money. If you can't see that there is a real and genuine argument on both sides, you aren't trying.

> One reason they're terrible is they transfer power over the economic system to early-stakers, as they have all the wealth

This is a worst-case view of the situation, but many would say that even this worse case is better than giving "democratic" institutions unlimited power to print money. So again, there is a genuine argument on both sides.

> So crypto people, sitting on a lot of coins, who urge adoption arent trying to "free" the economy, they're trying to own it.

And there are also crypto people who are true believers, even if they do have a lot of coin. In fact, the people who got into bitcoin early but weren't true believers couldn't believe how much money they made when they sold out at $30. The distribution of true believers vs. get-rich-quick people in bitcoin is grossly different from what you imagine and portray.

> any corporation which accepts bitcoins is thereby recognising an essentially feudal type of economic power.

You're really conflating economics and government. For example, in the US, Bill Gates doesn't have the same kind of power as the two political parties, who control armies of soldiers and domestic enforcers. When I say "kind," I mean that literally; it's not that Bill Gates has less power; it's that he has a different kind of power. Bitcoin transforms some of the kind of power wielded by government actors into the kind of power wielded by Bill Gates.

i got these Bose QuietComfort noise cancelling earbuds, and they are like magic, cancelling out bass noise from nearby outdoor stereos. i can't believe how well they work. I live by the beach where people play loud music---the concrete walls do OK for the midrange and treble noises, but not the bass.

sounds like literal torture. i don't think you are joking, but it's hard to be sure.

Ah, thank you.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601#Ordinal_dates

Looks like I'm using the second format (YYYYDDD) with the first two year digits truncated.

As I stated in my comment, I use this in tooling made for myself only.

I noticed on his websites that he likes to write dates in a format like "2009-121" or "2006-257", i.e., year and then day of year (1..366).

I also use that concept, though I write it as XXYYY where XX is years post 2000 and YYY is the day number. For example, today is 22100.

Why do I like this? I find this is more "mentally ergonomic" to use for software tooling I have made for myself only. I usually don't care about the month or date of the month; I care about offsets (e.g. tomorrow is 22101 and ten days from now is 22110). If I'm computing an offset in my head, I don't have to account for wrap-arounds due to month (e.g. 10 days from March 25 is April 4 because March has 31 days.) The XXYYY format is about as concise as you can get (i.e., takes up minimal space on the screen) while still capturing all the information I care about. XXYYY sorts easily (though that's also true of YY.MM.DD which is my second favorite format).

I haven't burned myself in any significant way (i.e. seriously), but apologies for an admittedly imperfect example.

Here is a better example: "Live by cooking, expect to die by getting burned." That's the kind of argument OP is making and it's unsound.

That statement is just blatantly illogical. It's like saying, "if you cook using heat, you can expect to burn yourself sometimes."

If you make a living under a strong copyright system, you should expect to be perfectly fine as long as you don't copy someone.

Sure, there can be weird exceptions, and as in any complex system, we should adjust the system over time to account for them, rather than immediately throwing out the whole system. For example, when a plane crashes, we don't rush to abolish the FAA, or to ban aviation.

Teach Yourself David Deutsch’s Constructor Theory in 21 Days

The problem is that political comments lead to unpleasant flame wars. Sure, people can express excitement. I didn't speak against that. You're doing a bait and switch by presenting it that way. Expressing excitement is very different than starting a political flame war.

Instead of having new accounts post empty pro-union comments and the anti-union people having to argue against them, it's better if we just not talking about that---unless it's an intellectually substantive conversation, in which case it's fine.

That's all I'm asking---I know it's too much for you to give.

I don't think the conclusion you reach follows from the premises.

There is unfairness in the world. That does not mean that HN is obligated to be a soapbox for all unfairness.

Anyway, comments on HN should be intellectually substantive. That one was not.

Yes, we should discuss this on HN. No, we should not have brand new accounts posting cheap opinion comments that are devoid of intellectual content.

Seems like you are agreeing with me?

HN is not a political forum. I get that we like to talk politics here, and that's all well and good. But having someone make a brand new account to make a political opinion post that has little to no intellectual content seems like it should be unwelcome.

> Vitalik proposed a theory...

That is not at all original to Vitalik. It pre-exists in the bitcoin community and maybe is even older than that.

> Spotify has been publicly advocating for platform fairness

Big companies arguing for "fairness" is absurd and in the long run it will blow up in their faces.

In a society that prioritizes "fairness" over capitalism, Spotify and Google are not allowed to exist.

> Bitcoin is not a viable currency. It's value is not anywhere near stable enough.

It can't go from zero to stable overnight. It has to start somewhere and gain stability over a long period of time.

> It's honestly incredible that you haven't even thought of the very first problem with using bitcoin as a currency.

You're behaving like a troll. There is an absolutely obvious objection to your prior sentence, but rather than see that, you pretend like it isn't the case, and attack me personally. You don't know me and you don't know my thinking.

You're also behaving as a troll because you've totally changed the topic instead of answering my direct objections to your prior comments.

I'm done talking to you. I assume your next comment will also be trollish, and I hope people see through it. But please just don't answer.

My comment explains in detail the specific mechanism I'm concerned about in a way that everyone can understand it. Your comment regurgitates something from a textbook that people have on reason to actually trust. I don't have a problem that you disagree with me. I have a problem that it's an argument from authority.

Also, I wonder if you're conceding that the Fed steals from the economy in general and gives to the super wealthy, and simply think that that's a necessary side effect of having a well-functioning economy. It seems like it.

It's because US monetary policy has created an enormous transfer of wealth to the wealthy and out of the general economy. They do this by extending credit at low interest rates with the collective understanding that the value of the dollar will continue to be printed away. The wealthy (like me...) buy stuff on credit now and pay it back later with much cheaper future dollars.

COVID threw a wrench in the scheme temporarily and caused a lot of that money to start trickling down, which is why we're seeing wages rise rapidly and high consumer-level inflation.

By the way, bitcoin fixes this.

I don't think it's inevitable, but bitcoin can be audited and transferred immensely more easily than gold.

The fact that historically, foreign countries kept gold in vaults in the US, speaks to this.

Also, gold gets mined at a faster rate when its value goes up. In that sense, bitcoin is a "harder" money.

There's also the possibility of people mining gold from asteroids, which could destroy the scarcity and value of gold.

> It means nothing to keyboard warriors here. (entire comment)

This kind of insult (you're referring to me, but have probably misconstrued what I said) is not OK on HN. There is no intellectual content at all in what you said.

Flagged.

So what if it feeds his narrative?

"The teacher punishing the bully feeds the bully's narrative that school is unfair."

"Feeding a narrative" is never a reason to not do the right thing.

It's not a misnomer.

And, asserting NATO air dominance in Ukraine is easy and guaranteed to succeed with de minimis cost (in lives and/or military equipment). Whereas creating land dominance with tanks is another matter.

A no-fly zone is an easy win for NATO and would make Ukrainian civilians safe from aerial bombardment.

> On a pedantic level

Well, if you're going to be pedantic:

There's a fundamental distinction, which you're missing, between initiated force and defensive force.

When someone robs or murders, that's initiated force. When the police use force to stop a robber or murderer, that's defensive force.

A "call to violence" is only applicable to initiated force.

For example, if I say, "let's murder Bob," that's a call to violence. If I say, "The police should arrest the murderer of Bob," that's not a call to violence.

Calling for a NATO no-fly zone is calling for defensive force, not initiated force, and thus is not a "call to violence."

I hope you can see how unjust and absurd it would be to call the defense of innocents a "call to violence."

> My point was that you are actually very rarely in the case that studies are in conflict to the point that the best you can do is personal experience

I didn't make my point very clearly, but my actual view is that only the researchers who perform a study and their immediate scientific peers are able to determine whether a study is reliable and what conclusions can actually be drawn from it. I say this as someone who worked in academic research.

> To paraphrase Churchill: science is the worst system we have for understanding these sorts of things, except for all the others.

Preaching to the choir, there. I'm not arguing against science.