snitko

I should also add I watched Mr. Navalny speak and he is:

1. Not a good speaker. 2. Very populist. 3. Doesn't understand economics. 4. His whole campaign is based on criticism of the incumbents and he has very little to show for how he would actually manage the country or solve problems. 5. He is against returning Crimea to Ukraine (which is understandable, given the general sentiment in Russia, he'd lose a lot of votes)

This video is actually based on the book.

What really pains me is that people participating in such protests don't understand neither the dynamics, nor history and are thus unnecessarily hurt. Any leader stays in power so long as he knows where the money is (controls money flows), pays his key supporters and the army/police.

Money in Russia is primarily oil money and this source is not drying up any time soon. More importantly, the people fighting for changes are rarely the ones who can later be in power, but are rather used by others to get in power. Even if they get in power, it's very unlikely they are good at managing economy and the country as a whole, since they didn't understand the dynamics of political power in the first place.

For those interested I highly recommend reading "The Dictator's Handbook: Why Bad Behavior is Almost Always Good Politics". It's eye opening for anyone who thinks protesting or voting can change anything.

I'm the original author of "Straight", a stand-alone opensource Bitcoin payment gateway - a software that allows you to accept Bitcoin payments: https://github.com/MyceliumGear/straight-server

It is now part of the Mycelium Gear project, which is a hosted commercial version of it, and I don't work for the company anymore, but the team behind it that I hired and worked with is really great and they keep working on the product.

I believe the best one is "Mastering Bitcoin" Andreas M. Antonopoulos: https://www.amazon.com/Mastering-Bitcoin-Unlocking-Digital-C... It's fairly technical, but gives good explanation of how everything works.

In terms of philosophy, I grasped Bitcoin only after I read enough of the Austrian school of economics.

In my experience, 99% of people who talk about the blockchain innovation have absolutely no idea what they're talking about. They also have no idea (or pretend to have no idea) why Bitcoin was invented in the first place: it was invented to avoid the need to ask a permission to send value. That's why a blockchain and proof of work were needed - so people who don't know each other could exchange value on the network safely and without intermediaries. It was not invented to make AML/KYC easier or to make banks richer.

One thing this article and many so called experts don't "get" about the blockchain is that it's pretty useless without the currency, namely Bitcoin. There has to be an incentive for lots of decentralized parties to verify (by spending energy) transactions on the blockchain and agree on the history - that incentive is mining currency that has value. If you "invent" your own blockchain, not many people (if any) are going to mine it, making it de-facto less secure than Bitcoin.

If you have a number of financial institutions (who already trust each other) that need to process transactions, send documents etc. you don't need a blockchain - you need a database and a messaging system. Blockchain is going to be a less effective and more expensive way to do the same job in this case.

Here's a small diagram to help you understand whether you need a blockchain: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Cn2zMbTWYAAQA6i.png

Not directly answering your question, but I've actually gotten interested in D because I wanted to learn something I can code hardcore stuff in (I mostly do web: js, dart, ruby, bitcoin in js). So I started learning D and thought I should try myself writing a simple Terminal emulator - this idea intrigued me because I didn't know where to start and how it all comes together. Then someone pointed me to a terminal emulator written in D: https://github.com/gnunn1/terminix - I decided I should probably study it and understand how various parts come together. From the description and the looks of it, it looks great.

Without going into a lengthy discussion, I respectfully disagree with the author: adaptability is NOT more important than immutability. If you don't have immutability, it means there is a potential to avoid consequences for your actions, which, in turn, means the evolution goes in the wrong direction. In fact, even in nature, you cannot evolve back: creatures evolve, try new things, if they don't stick - the branch dies off.

What is being suggested by Ethereum is that you can try an evolution path, see it's not actually working and then rollback - it seems like a good idea at first because you can supposedly iterate fast. But I think Ethereum would lose confidence of investors either way: 1) if you hardfork, you set a precedent and now no one is sure what can be rolled back, when and for what reason 2) if you don't fork - then money is stolen. I seriously see no way out of this. It probably was a good decision to fork, because that at least allowed to save the face and the investment short-term.

Not being happy with React or Angular, I wrote a very clear and concise solution in Dart (with components as the main idea), I hope someone finds it useful: http://nestui.romansnitko.com/

It's not obvious from the website, so I'm curious what problem does it solve?

In case you didn't notice, it's not about fingerprints. It's about the principle. It's a fight between business and government. Government wants money and control, businesses show they can't be blackmailed like that and pull out. There is literally nothing Uber or Lyft did wrong. They have all the right in the world to take their business elsewhere.

If I believed in democracy, I'd say people should be voting better next time, but I don't.

If a business feels like regulations created by the government are not reasonable, it has all the right to decide to stop doing business. Government shouldn't be regulating such things in the first place, but since it does, it surely can't force businesses to continue working under them.

> but it doesn't seem entirely outrageous that the drivers of buses, taxis, and similar transportation services should have them.

It is outrageous. I mean, it's a vehicle. Not a spaceship, for gods sake. This person has licence and good rating in the app? Good enough for me. If it's not good enough for you, don't use Uber. What right do you (or government, for that matter) have to tell other people what to use or not, I really don't know.

I think you misunderstand the purpose of Bitcoin. It's not meant to be a payment system, but rather a settlement layer.

I'm absolutely fine if the world at large doesn't use Bitcoin. People who understand the value of it will continue using it. And the fact that bitcoin is used for illegal purposes marks it as a success, rather than a failure. You see value in governments, regulations and monetary systems controlled by central banks. I see value in the absence of those. I think Bitcoin is an enormous success in that it gave people who value the latter an instrument to actually exercise their beliefs. No one is forcing you to use Bitcoin and no one ever will and that is the best thing about it.

Don't speak for most people. Most people know nothing about Bitcoin just yet. Can you be more specific about where the financial experiment of Bitcoin has gone wrong and why?

What you're trying to do here is to project your hatred for Bitcoin using fraud as somehow representative of the ideas embedded into Bitcoin, which have nothing to do with that fraud.

Yes. And that's why things like Bitcoin make it more costly for governments to collect said taxes. Less money collected means less funding for another round of collection and the cycle continues.

The problem with your suggestion of moving to Somalia: if you want government, move to North Korea. Do you see the absurdity?

> And re: crypto making government "irrelevant", to use your word, that's not how it works.

It makes it irrelevant by making it more costly for government to remain in control, not by making physical extortion impossible. If you can't easily tax people by just looking into their bank account and finding out whether they owe you tax money, then you need to physically send a police officer to each household to check for Bitcoin wallets or gold or whatever represents value. That's costly.

> If you want good governance that respects individual freedom, you have to work for it. "The price of liberty is eternal vigilance."

Work != voting and believing in democracy with all its bells and whistles. Work means respecting other people's freedom and being able to protect your own. Thinking only government is able to protect people's freedom is like thinking only a slaveowner can provide food and shelter for the slaves.

Oh, and you're more likely to end up in jail for political activism than for inventing things.

No, I'm just a bit exhausted from talking about it. Yes, I think government and democracy in general are bad concepts. Yes, i think people would be much better off without both. If you want to explore the idea, you just need to start asking yourself the right questions and if the only answer is "nope, can't be done without government" you're not thinking hard enough.

Perhaps temporarily, yes. You can outlaw cryptography, but the more governments resist it, the faster it will take over.

I really don't understand people who think politics is something we need. Why? Why do you need a select group of people to tell the rest how they should live their lives?

The solution is to make it extremely difficult/costly for them. It is never democratization and lobbying, because for a person to see any kind of change in the direction he wishes, it may take years. And even then it's just asking your masters for permission. Technology gives us a quick way to bypass government, make it irrelevant.

Actually, (b) is exactly the opposite. Instead of voting for certain economic policies and hoping "my guy wins" I can just use Bitcoin, which has the qualities I need, here and now: for instance, I can send money to anyone in the world without any of the KYC and AML bullshit and I don't need to wait and vote in just the right politician who promises(!) to easy the said regulations.

I can certifiably tell you that I AM better off because I started using bitcoin. And it's not because of the exchange rate, but because of the freedom to do what I please with my money.

This small example shows the true nature of any democratic government: if you vote the way they don't like, they will not submit to it. Voting is useless.

People don't need to make those decisions. Currently, safety decisions are made by the government, which really doesn't have any competition and thus is not incentivized to improve its set of regulations. If you had 2-3 companies providing market review for the passengers, I'm pretty sure the situation would improve, not deteriorate. Perhaps some regulations simply don't make any sense and do not improve safety, but you'd never know that until you have one agency managing it.

Apologies, you're right. But I don't think he's right about the fact that a pilot cannot fly three types of aircraft either.

I don't think the system where airlines sponsor pilot's education/certification is the only viable one. Other institutions, such as banks, can offer student loans. Another point you made about the fact that pilots cannot fly multiple airplanes is simply false. The older the pilot is, the more chances there are he flew multiple types of aircraft working for different companies. I know at least one who flew b737 of various models, b757, b767 and then b777 and he's nothing out of the ordinary.

Not really. There are airlines who hire young low paid unskilled pilots, there are pilots from various countries with different English skills, there are pilots who didn't get enough sleep last night. Then there are airports that have different standards for security, different border-control waiting time, different luggage waiting time & equipment, different ground-crew serving the airplane. All this information is obscured from the passengers, but it doesn't mean it's not affecting safety, because it is.

I hope I don't sound arrogant, but a short way to put it is that it turns out social and professional obligations meet you!