tCfD

'investment' from a company (consensys) with an enormous stake in promoting blockchainism to a mainstream audience is a pretty tangible gain.

Then these so-called 'lite' wallets should be referred to with a much more contextually pertinent description such as 'trustful' wallets.

I wouldn't beat yourself up over it. As other commenters have pointed out, nobody knows or could have known where Bitcoin was going to go, unless they were in control of substantial liquid leverage and knew that they could constrain supply indefinitely.

And even then, holding a corner on supply of an untested asset is still no guarantee it will perform. Sergey Brin and Larry Page tried to sell Google to excite.com for a paltry $5MM ... and Excite turned them down. Even they, who of all people should have had the utmost confidence in the future (and control over supply)of their own brainchild asset, didn't fully understand the significance of what they were sitting on.

Iirc they acquired that nickname because early rainbow tables, which were in plain text or another simple uncompressed format, looked very much like ASCII rainbow patterns in a text editor due to the iterative nature of the key, salt, and hash stepping.

* ot: the HN android app could use a preview/quick-edit function :/

The SEC forms do not say anything to discharge, invalidate or answer the question of whether these funds were moved from one group of anonymous parties largely back to that same group in order to generate a bunch of transaction churn on the eth blockchain with whivh they can attach bubble-inflated dollar amounts to. How is the SEC going to know that, for example, the 80 individuals identified in one filing didn't move 850 Million worth of etherium to the 90 in the other filing, and vice versa?

There is no direct association between individuals and addresses on blockchains. This is the problem with ICO evaluations constantly being tossed around and irresponsibly promoted by careless or indifferent finance and tech journalists. tossed around. It's gas, vapor, the same money being search related over and over again to convince mom and pop speculator that there's a stability of large numbers in these things. Can you make money on it? Yes, I have, and so have lots of people. That doesn't mean it's something that should be endorsed or suggested is legitimate to an unsuspecting public.

To who? ICO schemes have been using the cover of anonymity and obfuscation of ownership flows due to sock puppet and Dutch bidding since they began on bitcointalk years ago.

There is no way to tell in this or any other ICO which uses wallet addresses whose ownership id hidden behind layers of anonymity (in other words, all of them), how much of that 'sale' was merely the same old ethereum token market makers, hedge funds or even regular oldpump-n-dump groups moving quantities of token from one pocket to the other.

It's absolutely in their interest, and within the capacity of their not inconsiderable leverage, to generate breathless speculator excitement around all of the wildly extrapolated dollar figures that come from the combined effect of the bubble and the order (or two or three) of magnitude which some of the biggesr players in this market can bring to bear on these extremely close-held assets.

In his Journal of Researches as well as the condensed recount found in The Voyage of the Beagle, a young Charles Darwin describes his considerable astonishment at the constitutional robustness of the indigenous peoples he encountered in Tierra del Fuego in the 1830s. At that time they were called Fuegians, though in more modern times they are referred to as Yaghans.

Despite their homelands being situated among the harshest, most inhospitable climes on Earth, with year round temperatures frequently near or below freezing and constant powerful circumpolar winds from the 'furious fifties,' they were able to tolerate such extreme conditions despite their traditional attire consisting of little more than a loincloth and an occasional loosely draped shawl. They frequently went without protection on their upper body and lower extremities altogether. Darwin describes a vivid scene where a Fuegian mother is standing in a shallow boat that approaches the Beagle in order to conduct raid. She's wearing nothing but newborn nursing at her breast, and she and her child both seem indifferent to the the snowfall and freezing rain melting on their skin.

They did not use permanent dwellings, and basically lived as gatherers using simple temporary makeshift huts with one side facing the wind and the other side open, and of course a fire, which gave the region its name. But it was not uncommon for them to spend days foraging for mussels, drenched in the frigid crashing breakers of the Southern Ocean.

This is 30 years before he published the Origin of Species and long before he had developed an articulated concept of natural selection, but The experience did inspire him to remark how it made intuitive sense that as the population of mankind spread across the Earth, that it would have differentiated and adapted to different climates in accordance with whatever underlying principles had driven the same process he had observed this happening with other species.

If curious, Google around for Jemmy Button and York Minster, these being too individuals who had been kidnapped from Tierra del Fuego and taken to England on a prior Beagle expedition, and returned on the one accompanied by Darwin.

Or the epicycles of the heliocentric era, where the focus then as now was on futile ever finer retweaking of conclusions to fit unexamined and faulty premises.

It's been around for several years, probably originating on bitcointalk.org, but it was/is popular on the r/buttcoin subreddit

Don't forget this was also peak Ghostbusters era

Edit to my above comment, since my client doesn't seem to allow previewing or editing unfortunately....

'side effect of settling them with ascertain' should be 'side effect of saddling them with a certain'

Also I think the original articles proposal of a non-profit solution is Noble but the bigger facility for moral hazard is lack of transparency, and lack of transparency is as much a problem of compressing complexity so that the information made transparent is digestible to most of the users in a reasonable amount of time, without introducing biases through that compression which skew the interpretation of the information. There's a lot of information about how the power in society is conducted through structures of influence, but making this information accessible to people so that they can avoid or associate with portions of it as freely as possible is a basket of paradoxical UX and ethical snakes to untangle.

Getting the critical mass of public spirit necessary to sustain any self-correcting decentralized trust system is going to run smack into the individual tendency to optimize one's commitment of personal resources toward their own personal objectives.

Asking people, or even tricking them through hype, to voluntarily deleverage themselves (through agreeing to a set of voluntarily sharing constraints encoded as rules in a 'trustless' network protocol, ie blockchain) will never work at global scale, until a global scale referendum of some sort addresses and settles very basic questions about what we prioritize and value as a civilization. Such as "are centralized systems of governance so hopelessly broken that the only remedy is to devolve trust back to individuals, which has the side effect of settling them with ascertain decision cost premium that they have hitherto instinctively tried to optimize away by outsourcing it to specialized custodial agents?" "Are people really willing to pay a decentralization premium that isn't subsidized by a hype and speculation casino game?"

Until this discussion occurs (and I'm not holding my breath), every nominally 'flat' system of governance that is sold as a solution to centralized control will merely serve the opposite goal, by obfuscating its underlying informally centralized hierarchy of leverage and influence.

These are fig leaf constraints which do nothing to curb the ability for highly leveraged, anonymous individuals in the ecosystem to severely and without warning or accountability alter the purchasing power of the Bitcoins in circulation.

> creating money outside state control

Which if successful enough to constitute a counterweight with enough force to push back against "the state" will yield merely... another state, but conveniently one with "Our Guys" in control of all the economic leverage.

You call yourself non utopian, yet Bitcoin - a tool to deleverage the state by sapping its power of taxation - is a nakedly self serving utopian project. And yet tax rent (in the form of landowner's premiums like mining rewards and tx fees, and soon by lightning network channel brokering fees, not to mention off chain but indispensable infrastructural scaffolding like exchange fees and fiat ramps) doesn't just disappear, it merely flows to the pockets of a different cabal composed of early adopters and wealthy latecomers who were able to buy large tracts of influence and infrastructure in bitcoinland.

> cannot be reproduced for free

Only if you opt into the particular set of constraints that define what that property is (as set forth in the base of protocol code most commonly used to define it).

If you don't, as innumerable forks of Bitcoin have demonstrated, you certainly can reproduce it for free. I suspect there is a hypothesis of "property" at work here that is being subject to some very privileged and Protean interpretations.

Their adoption comes as a consequence of their temporarily uncensorable ability to facilitate open speculation and gambling, so the adoption curve is merely following the well worn grooves laid by ancient vices.

In Trust we trust!

Blockchain is actually a technological shadow cast by a sociological proposition, which is then you can trust people to voluntarily deprive themselves of leverage for the sake of the greater good.

Blockchain is essentially a tool for measuring how much leverage different nodes have in a network system. All of the functional premises of blockchain depend on the assumption that the only leverage that exists in a blockchain network is that which can be represented by the various metrics exposed by the protocol. Obviously this is not the case, networks are often stacked with multiple layers, not all of which are visible to instrumentation, and many are deliberately hidden or informally created as the opportunity arises. Cliques form, whether by design or merely as a consequence of some underlying structure or geometric boundary domain, influence builds around them, and sooner or later someone finds the ideal geometric position from which they can become the center of decentralisation.

This is essentially another instance of goodhart's law, which states that the moment any given metric becomes a useful target for optimization, it ceases to be a useful measurement. Or another variation of this same observation, the McNamara fallacy, which can be summed up as the belief that the only factors in a system that count, are those that can be counted.

Japanese takes exactly this sort of 'embrace and extend' approach to building on top of the Chinese character base, with hiragana for native construction, katakana for foreign loanwords, and furigana (more of an orthographical sugar than a separate symbol set) to bridge the systems for the sake of easier learning..

Not the most in depth HN comment, but my user ID - tCfD - stands for The Center For Decentralization, an intentional oxymoron which I sometimes use in casual conversation to call attention to the fundamentally paradoxical (and the closer you get, the more they confound) premises of this subject.

The problem is not with blockchain, the problem is that harder one tries to define how decentralization can be made into a self-sustaining reaction (rather than merely a transitional phase from one centralized regime to another), the more the concept evaporates. Blockchains are just the latest attempt to turn the base metal of conflict into the noble gold of cooperation.

It took centuries for the fundamental hermetic assumptions of alchemy to be questioned, and it had to come from 'insiders' (like Boyle and Newton) rather than total skeptics. Even then it was never refuted in any official sense, it just sort of faded out of fashion as its surrogate children, the sciences, took over more and more of its academic spotlight. Blockchain-ism, the alchemy of the internet age, will probably have to follow the same arc, though sped up by an order of magnitude thanks to the much improved knowledge-sharing network of the present day.

"But flippancy is the best of all. In the first place it is very economical. Only a clever human can make a real Joke about virtue, or indeed about anything else; any of them can be trained to talk as if virtue were funny.

Among flippant people the joke is always assumed to have been made. No one actually makes it; but every serious subject is discussed in a manner which implies that they have already found a ridiculous side to it."

- Screwtape

Especially if the majority are all named "sybil"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sybil_attack

> running out of tax havens

But they are just getting started moving into bitcoin and cryptocurrencies, in the nick of time

Think pre paid debit card split between two people

What happens to the engine trustless selling point of bitcoin when the only plausible scalability solutions entail reintroducing trusted third parties?

That's brilliantly stated. A natural first cousin to 'a lie told often enough becomes the truth'

> epitome boffin

Speaking of which, he's first cousin to Magnus Pyke - the guy usually remembered in the US (if at all) as the Professor shouting "science!" in Thomas Dolby's "she blinded me with science;" both on the song and in the video. In the UK he was, like his cousin Geoffrey, much better known for being the quintessential boffin, though Magnus self consciously played up this stereotype in his long television career. Sort of like Bill Nye on the outside but Carl Sagan on the inside.