quantdev

"Even as bitcoin flirts with $8,000, the price required for mining to be marginally profitable stands at a jaw-dropping $300,000 to $1.5 million by 2022 based on current growth trends and electricity use, according to Christopher Chapman, an analyst at Citigroup Inc. At that pace, the implied consumption would match that for the whole of Japan over the long haul."

This Citi analyst either doesn't understand Bitcoin or doesn't understand economics: because the protocol has difficulty adjustment and because marginal revenue will always approximate marginal cost, the cost to mine 1 BTC will always approximate its value.

Therefore, projecting the cost of mining is equivalent to predicting the price of Bitcoin. If the cost to mine 1 BTC was $1MM USD (and so $1MM/BTC), that would imply the network value of the Bitcoin ecosystem would be well over the USD M1 supply (tens of trillions, in fact). Bitcoin would have effectively replaced fiat in that world and perhaps all the cost it eliminated would be worth the mining.

In any event, from what he said, I doubt this (equity) analyst understands that he can't project $1MM BTC mining cost without at least $1MM per BTC price.

Or maybe it's because, somewhat depressingly, IQ is highly hereditary, as research has shown for decades and new gene research is currently confirming, and people with lower IQs tend to have more children.

The looking 10 or even just 5 moves ahead thing is overstated and this is not actually how it works most of the time. Most GMs only calculate that far in the endgame. Before that, often looking 2 or 3 moves ahead is sufficient based on strategic elements or opening theory (which can't easily be understood by 'looking moves ahead'; they're things like, "this pawn is passed" or "my light squares will become very weak" which are can be substitutes for looking 30+ moves ahead).

Often positions resemble historic or previous games, so pattern recognition here and the themes (e.g., "this particular structure will make it easier to get my rook on the 7th rank at some point") of the old game are important.

In fact, Capablanca, a former World Champion and endgame expert has a famous quote claiming to only look 1 move ahead.

Thinking 'blockchain', which is just a linked-list with hashes, is going to solve anything is silly. It's even sillier than thinking internal intranets or TCP/IP would create huge value, when really the Internet, something much more than internal intranets and TCP/IP, was the innovation.

Bitcoin is an open, borderless distributed network with an economic and social system built on top of a data structure called a blockchain. The real innovation has very little to do with the 'blockchain' hype corporations are pushing.

I'm pretty sure this guy was just making a joke about how slow computations on HE data is and you all are taking him seriously about generalized AI.

I suppose, though it would be very strange and disingenuous to leave off the most important implication.

I don't understand what you're trying to say. How would his abstract be different if he wasn't trying to get as many people to look at it?

Many results in math establish a famous theorem by proving something more abstract that "easily" implies the famous result, like with Fermat's Last Theorem.

For a fixed confidence level, it looks computationally light weight: a dozen or so multiplications and divisions plus one square root, which could be approximated if needed. There is no inverse normal needed at run time.

Fair, but I doubt the probability of the exchange getting hacked in 5 weeks is meaningful. I agree that you should never leave your coins long term on any exchange, just to be clear, but there is a reasonable amount of risk you can take.

Standard momentum strategy, sure, but there's no way you can claim this outperforms buy-and-hold for certain.

You're somewhat missing something. Take the Exchange Gemini: I send USD to Gemini and then I purchase BTC on Gemini and am charged a 0.25% fee on my purchase. So far I haven't paid any transaction mining fees and it's because Gemini isn't actually settling these transactions on the blockhain.

Now, if I were to move these coins off Gemini, then I would pay the mining fee of $2. However, I could just wait 5 weeks and only pay that once, since the fee doesn't scale with the transaction amount.

Yes, you're correct -- my mistake. Bittrex's fees are 0.25% of each trade.

My point about doing 30 trades every week manually is a lot still stands though. Maybe I'll try scripting this with Bittrex's API. It would be cool to have an option to scale each trade size by the current relative market cap, so you can have your own crypto index fund.

Manually? So every week you do 30 separate trades on Bittrex? Seems like a lot of work and also you have 30 transaction fees (including the spread cost) for only $100.

I like this idea, but only if it's scripted and for more than $100 per run.

Not very much, but only because those are byproducts of a cryptocurrency hack. If they didn't control centralized private keys and thus implicitly have one of the biggest bug bounties, I would be less worried about people hacking my SSN, ID, etc. from Gemini.

That said, I also don't care as much if those get hacked as I can recover from stolen identity, while it's impossible to get back stolen bitcoin.

I don't see how this is a valid argument. So what if Mt.Gox was worse? The point is there are many better exchanges than both Mt.Gox and Coinbase nowadays from a fees, customer-support, and reliability perspective.

Coinbase has three major advantages: (1) incredible marketing, (2) flashy and good UX, and (3) (claimed) safety via cold storage.

The first (1) is a counter argument in my book, (2) is irrelevant, and (3) only matters if you let them control your private keys, which is stupid and the antithesis to Bitcoin.

I, too, have had terrible past experiences with Coinbase and I no longer use them. I now buy on Gemini for fiat -> BTC and use other exchanges for altcoins. That said, I no longer keep any crypto on any exchange, including Gemini. The whole point of Bitcoin is that you are your own bank via ownership of your private keys. By giving them to Coinbase, you centralize the system, concentrate the risk, and create honeypots for hackers. Remember, the government doesn't insure Bitcoin balances like it does with USD in banks and so much Bitcoin has been lost via exchange hacks in the past few years.

Don't let centralized authorities keep your private keys.

Are you kidding me? Do you have any proof for this claim or do you think 3 million people illegally voted because Trump's ego tweeted it one day?

The fact that USD is "backed by the full faith and credit of the US government" is not the reason for its value. There is nothing the US government can do if everyone decides GBP or milk is worth 10,000 more relative to 1 USD. Things like USD and Bitcoin both have no intrinsic value and their market value comes from the collective fictions of society.

The collective belief in the value of intrinsically useless mediums with certain properties is one of the major technological breakthroughs of humanity. Currency is the bubble that seemingly never pops. Bitcoin and its future incarnations aim to improve it.

Proof of work has nothing to do with giving Bitcoin value. PoW is the cost the distributed network pays for trustless consensus, nothing more.

To understand your fundamental misconceptions, I would start by reading the seemingly unrelated but actually very relevant book Sapiens by Noah Yuval Harari.

Finally, Monero solves the privacy problem of Bitcoin if that's the kind of transaction you want to make, but this is another topic.

Trying to understand risk by looking at historic data alone is wrong when you're talking about catastrophic ruin and uncertain tiny probabilities. Add the word weapon in the headline quote to see what I mean,

"Contrary to popular belief, nuclear weapons are the safest modern weapon"

Arguments that nuclear power are safe need to prove that while assuming the worst-case scenario, since the probability of such a scenario is a-priori unknown despite what much of this comment section seems to be claiming.

Solar is knowingly much safer because it is much easier to reason about.

This was very interesting.

As a mathematician with no comp-sci type knowledge, my only understanding of inheritance is the "is a" rule. Using this, I realized that a subtype of the set of functions from Dog to Dog must be a set of functions such that each function could be treated as a function from Dog to Dog under an appropriate restriction. This would be the only way for such a set to satisfy what felt like the "is a" inheritance rule.

In other words, a set of functions from A to B where Dog is contained in A and B is contained in Dog would be a subtype of the set of functions from Dog to Dog. So Animals -> Greyhound works.

It's more complicated than this, unfortunately. Imagine an int variable x and two expressions f(x) and g(x) of x. Now imagine an if statement with condition f(x) < g(x). Precisely because incrementing the largest int is undefined behavior, the compiler may be able to simplify the if condition because, for example, it can assume x+1 > x is always true. So it's not necessary for the line to be useless or wrong for undefined behavior rules to trigger compiler optimizations.

As someone who believes in cryptocurrencies, let me just say, wow, this ICO is just absurd. From that purchase agreement,

“EOS TOKENS HAVE NO RIGHTS, USES OR ATTRIBUTES. The EOS Tokens do not have any rights, uses, purpose, attributes, functionalities or features, express or implied, including, without limitation, any uses, purpose, attributes, functionalities or features on the EOS Platform. The company does not guarantee and is not representing in any way to Buyer that the EOS Tokens have any rights, uses, purpose, attributes, functionalities or features."

If marking the blockchain (ledger) is not the same thing as transferring bitcoin, then there is no such thing as transferring bitcoin, because there are no actual 'coins' stored anywhere (digital or otherwise).

"The embrace of Bitcoin is largely driven by dissatisfaction with the modern banking system but the designers and proponents of Bitcoin have made the fundamental and fatal mistake of believing that the problem with modern banking is that paper and digital money have no intrinsic value. Since digital coins must be created out of thin air the creators of Bitcoin developed an ingenious method of making coin creation take computational power, thus imposing a cost on creating new coins, and allowing them to limit the total circulation of coins. These measures give Bitcoin an intrinsic value (the cost of creating a new coin) and make inflation impossible by setting a hard limit on total currency issue."

This is just filled with misunderstanding. The purpose of mining is not to give intrinsic value to Bitcoin. It is to economically incentivize a fair system of transacting without centrality. The cost of mining is the price the Bitcoin system pays for distributed, trust-less consensus.

Just like fiat, Bitcoin has no intrinsic value. Just like fiat, Bitcoin is a bubble that seemingly never pops, because it is a collectively imagined means of transacting. A discussion of the disadvantages or advantages of Bitcoin should start with this understanding.

I agree with the advice to read your standard library, because I think there's huge value to your general understanding of lower-level concepts and to knowing the available functionality of your language, but I disagree that it is the best example of idiomatic code, necessarily. For example, C++'s STL was written to be portable, efficient, and general beyond all other goals. Modern C++ style and abstractions are nowhere to be found, and if you follow the STL style, you may over-abstract (templatize), use manual memory management, and architect for non-relevant circumstances.

From that article,

"Some use bitcoins to buy Amazon gift cards, then order goods and food on the online store in the US and other countries, which can then be delivered by courier to Venezuela – where supermarket shelves are frequently empty." ...

"Farias says that many Venezuelan tech workers who freelance for companies elsewhere prefer to be paid in bitcoin. “With Cryptobuyer, we convert bitcoins into bolivars and help Venezuelans pay for daily life necessities, such as mobile phones recharges, television, water and electricity bills as well as banks transfers in bolivars,” he said." ...

"“Treating my mother’s cancer would have been very difficult without using bitcoins because my business is going bankrupt and I have a lot of debts, so bitcoins enabled me to stay afloat while our currency is collapsing,” said Eli."

First, I never said 'financial regulations.' Of course it's hard for the average person to buy cryptocurrencies, but it will become easier, and that doesn't mean there isn't a small subset of people that are currently going through the difficulty to acquire coins in dire situations, as the article I posted below shows. And it's absurd to suggest that current or past refugees are refugees because they're too poor to have savings. And whatever you think about them, it's easy to imagine future refugees could have savings, under the mattress or in a bank, that would be more transferable via cryptocurrencies which just requires memorizing a pre-private-key passphrase.

Secondly, the Euro/Eurozone is not a great comparison, because it is the antithesis of decentralization, predictability, and majority control. No Central Bank controls the interest rate of Bitcoin.

Next, currency is a means by which rules seek to control citizens, even in poorer countries. How can you dispute this? Whatever you think about the importance of physical cash, governments, like India, are already moving to limit its use, as I said, and some may go completely cashless.

Yes, Bitcoin is a public ledger of transactions, but the owner of an account is unknown from the ledger (i.e. public keys are not inherently tied to identity). When buying bitcoin peer-to-peer, which is what people in Venezuela are doing, there is no way to connect identity to a public key. Other cryptocurrencies (e.g., Monero) have made transactions themselves private via ring signatures (effectively, a set of private keys form a mathematical ring in such a way that a signature cannot from one of them cannot be distinguished) or other techniques. There's an enormous amount of innovation in applied cryptography because of cryptocurrencies and you should make an effort to google something before you claim that it cannot be solved via blockchains.

Finally, Bitcoin is more than just a technology in the same way the internet is more than just a network. It is a social and economic system, so it does solve more than just 'financial' problems.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/dec/16/venezuela...

localbitcoins

They trade it person-to-person. Sure, it's hard and maybe risky, but it's also risky to keep your wealth in Bolivars when inflation is double or triple-digit percentages.

"Some use bitcoins to buy Amazon gift cards, then order goods and food on the online store in the US and other countries, which can then be delivered by courier to Venezuela – where supermarket shelves are frequently empty."[1]

[1]https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/dec/16/venezuela...

I appreciate this article for its smart and cordial criticism, but as I've pointed out before, the decentralization of currency enables the separation of state from wealth, which will, for example, allow people in Venezuela or India to exit their national currency and take control back from their oppressive leaders. The world is already moving to digital cash (see India). The question is whether we want this digital cash to be completely controlled by a central bank or and oppressive leader and traceable by the government, or whether we want this digital cash to be global and decentralized, shared by people of all states.

If a person becomes a refugee, they can memorize their brain wallet and cross the border, keeping their digital gold and wealth intact. This is an example of a problem a centralized database cannot solve.

(these ideas originate from Andreas Antonopoulos)

With regards to cryptocurrencies, which the standard HN anti-crypto groupthink is bashing in full swing, let me just point out that most bashings I've seen on here are US-consumer-centric and don't consider the needs of countries with oppressive governments that aim to control the wealth and labor of their citizens. In these countries, cyrptocurrencies allow the movement of wealth to your family overseas, allow the store of wealth in the face of 30% inflation (Venezuela, Zimbabwe, etc.), and allow privacy and economic freedom. If your central bank wants to lower interest rates so that yields are even more negative, you can take yourself out of that system in which you have no vote or control. If you oppressive ruler wants to track every transaction and stop funding to political opponents, you can take yourself out of that system and do so if you wish.

Yes, it's not easy and not for everyone, but people in these countries go through enormous risk and effort to accomplish economic freedom.