simondlr

This is beautiful. Earth is just black though. Not seeing any countries. Is this intentional?

For remote work: I've heard good things about Sqwiggle. https://www.sqwiggle.com/.

I was watching this through the year, wondering if the decline was due to people moving over to web wallets. Clearly not. I bet this is a good indication of price. The more there is online, the more natural interest there is. I think over time it will start meaning less and less as people do INDEED move over to other wallets.

Yes. That's correct. You would've had to find a miner to include the transactions in the blockchain. However, in upcoming versions, setting output as OP_RETURN (which basically allows you to embed additional data) will be a standard transaction type, but immediately prunable. Hence, for the 'currency' part of Bitcoin these transactions won't form part of the bloat, but nodes that want to keep track of it, can (https://bitcoinfoundation.org/blog/?p=290).

Miners will still choose whether to include them or not (being a good citizen and adding a tx fee is still recommended), but now other nodes will relay them so they can find their way to a miner. Other Bitcoin developers can correct me if I'm wrong.

More and more off-chain transactions are happening as well: moving between accounts on exchanges, or moving between accounts on sites such as Coinbase.

There's similar ideas being thrown around in the Bitcoin community by using the network to create identities that is cheap for good users, but expensive for spammers, by sacrificing a portion of BTC to the miners of the network (and then showing verifiably proof). See: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=140711.0

It seems this rally has stronger market support on the downswings (ie doesn't crash completely). I'd take that as a good thing?

Considering that images were now auto-displayed, wanted to make something where you can tweet text as an image. It seems that Twitter doesn't auto-display pics from 3rd-party apps (which seems like a reasonable measure). So it is not as cool as it could've been. Source is on github if you want to play with it.

Clever little niche! Well done.

I created http://www.twimemachine.com. Costs only about $6 a month to run (S3 static costs). And I make between $70 - $100 a month from just the one ad box on it. Pocket money that usually goes into buying some more Bitcoin.

SEEKING WORK - Remote, or anywhere really. South African, just finished Masters degree in Socio-Informatics. Keen to travel.

Jack-of-all-trades. Studied computer science, business finance, marketing, systems science, organisation theory and socio-informatics.

Created http://tweekly.fm, http://twimemachine.com (for sale), and http://min.io (back-end developer). Personal site: http://simondlr.com

Currently #funemployed, reading, making music, and building a prototype for a Bitcoin micropayment channel powered service that enables autonomy of programs. Massive fan of Bitcoin contracts. So excited to see what they are going to allow in the next 1-5 years.

Looking at opportunities to continue doing this, or working on anything Bitcoin.

Besides dodging bullets, it amazes me that Satoshi had the foresight to include a scripting language into the outputs of transactions, envisioning a future where contracts could be built onto the blockchain. For a proof-of-concept, Bitcoin didn't need it. It could've just supported the ability for owners of addresses to claim outputs (in a hard-coded manner).

Love the idea of Bitcoin Agents. Been reading up heavily on schemes to automate transactions on a trust-less level, including proof of sacrifice to establish automatic identities (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=140711).

Anyone care to explain in more simpler terms?

A friend told me this the other day as well. It is rather limitless... and sounds amazing to code in. You could even have great visualizations for things such as working with the different branches of code. As in the "zone" as you can get. You can change thhe scenery to whatever as well. Dark room? Done. Wonderful vista? Done.

It's not that farfetched to imagine a future where plenty of programmers sit 'jacked' in, into an Oculus Rift to code.

Don't recall who said it, but powerful disruptive innovations are overhyped in the short term but under-hyped in the long term.

That's how I feel about Bitcoin. Circulation might not be a lot, and signs probably show that is not a lot, but it is disruptive. You also have to consider that perceived value is always reckoned into the 'actual' price. It depends on what market theories you ascribe to, but it is generally accepted that current prices reflect the market's capability to guess (and judge) futuer value. So, perceived value is often difficult to 'divorce' from the actual value, especially in the case with something like Bitcoin, where it is seen as both an asset and currency.

Another thing is the continuing trend of providing off-chain transactions (through companies such as Coinbase en Inputs.io).

You can also play arbitrage between altcoins (BTC to LTC, or LTC to XMP, or any other). On Vircurex, Cryptsy, BTC-e, etc.

Even with liquidity being lower you can see them being rather close on the different exchanges.

That was incredible to see! EDIT: It's only for iPhone 4S and 5? http://help.instagram.com/261882563951635 (damnit)

For those that don't know, Naspers also owns 35% of Tencent. They are heavily investing in internet companies in emerging markets.

Always when Twitter goes down: "Ah damn. Is it down? Let's see if people on Twitter is mentioning something about it?"

Reminds me of my university (Stellenbosch University). Also had an odd combination.

Started studying a Bachelor of Commerce in Computer Science (lots of maths, financial stats, etc). Then I switched to a Bachelor of Commerce in Socio-Informatics and Marketing (less technical programming, more applied work). However, socio-informatics is actually an Arts degree (it includes courses such as management theory and systems design).

So during my time at university I did science (maths, computer science, stats, programming), finance/business (accounting, financial planning, marketing, entrepreneurship) and arts (philosophy of systems, sensemaking, organization theory).

Loved it!

I'm unreasonably excited about it. For $25 I get to have a picture of my choosing taken in space!

It just makes a lot of sense. Interaction dynamics change at various sizes.

Worked with friend on a new idea (while also trying new tech across the board), ended up in this: http://simondlr.com/post/26360955465/dynamodb-is-awesome-but When we got traction, we wanted to change databases, but because it was just a weekend hack no one wanted to spend time doing it and eventually killed the app. It was our own doing of course (choosing new tech to work with). But yes. Work with what you know when testing ideas, unless you also want to play with new tech.

Great use of lists. News sites curate social media as it happens with their stories. It would be great if individuals on Twitter could do this. Curate tweets around a hashtag.

I like the inverse of to-do lists: a have-done list. Say you need to get a large task done for the day. That's what you need to do, but getting to the point of getting it done contains a lot of smaller actionable items (e-mailing people, setting up new servers, whatever, etc).

I then write that down as 'done' lists. Or basically, a 'what I did today' list, even if it is small stuff. You end up feeling more productive, because you often don't realise what you actually DID do in a day.

That's correct. That's why it is pseudonymous. You just have to make sure that any addresses you use can't be traced back to you.

There's been debates running now in the Bitcoin community what the new 'denomination' should be. So far, it mBTC (millibitcoins) is leading. You can still write it as 0.001 BTC, or 1 mBTC.

I'm just wondering in terms of psychology, what impact it has to write in ever decreasing denominations? Pricing something as 0.000232 BTC is much more difficult to read and understand. So, if there are more coins in circulation, this would hopefully not happen until much later. It will inevitable happen (if it is also a success). But just for adoption and ease of use in the short and medium term it will be easier to read.

If you build a to-do list app and see why it fails, you also gain understanding (hopefully).

A lot of the stuff I built in my spare time as I was learning to code failed. Afterwards I questioned why and took that knowledge with me. Probably not as much as working with real business problems, but it is not for nought.

Litecoin is currently the leading alternative. It's got a shorter confirmation time, uses scrypt as opposed to sha256, and will in the end have a larger total of coins.

All these make it seem like a better alternative for micro-transactions in the end.