PierreRochard

There were many developers quite interested in larger block size for many years

Yet, they weren't around when it came time to make it happen.

Segwit2x had over 90% of the hashpower of the bitcoin world voting for it

Yet, it had a deeply flawed software development process.

it is still the best measure of consensus and support the network has

Yet the miners stated that they would only mine the fork for 12 hours, do you know why? Because they would have been mining at a (relative) loss. Really undermines this measure of consensus. Maybe the best measure is the market price of the coin.

I think that the survival and modest success of Bitcoin Cash eroded the initial overwhelming support for Segwit2X.

Basically, Bitcoin Cash is what Segwit2x should've been: an honest, replay-protected coin for people who think a money's value comes from its base layer payment system's transactions per second.

Excellent writeup! I came to the same conclusion a few years ago with Thiers' Law: good money drives out bad, http://nakamotoinstitute.org/mempool/speculative-attack/

That seems to imply that there are no grey or black markets for currencies. This is contrary to what has been observed in history and in some countries today.

Wow, so this really was a catastrophic failure on multiple levels. Lotta of self-reflection for some in Paris this weekend!

Shouldn't this be a government expense, and not a campaign expense? Do candidates pay for their own physical security?

Wow! This is interesting. I thought the "WMDs in Iraq" was fake news, turns out the "no WMDs in Iraq" is fake news! So much fake news, hard to sort everything out.

And then there's everything in between. That's where the actual debate is. Was "WMDs in Iraq!" fake news in 2002, 2003, or 2004?

TIL! I just saw "Laurelai is an independent journalist"

Thank you for the educational write up! Bitcoin literacy is sorely lacking among journalists, and yet they often forget to contact experts such as yourself...

I could not disagree more. We should adapt to climate change as it happens.

Besides, all of the resources we pour into forcing the climate to not change (which would be unprecedented!) are all for naught when that asteroid hits.

No reason it couldn't be a mix of both.

Why? You don't think managing infrastructure composed of open source components is providing a valuable service?

That's a trade-off. Is the cost of learning and context switching between languages/frameworks less than the benefit of using a tool that is X% more appropriate?

$400,000,000 per year to produce audio content? Seems high. NPR is at $140,000,000.

Article you linked to is about passive investing in commodities pushing commodities prices up. I agree this is a negative externality. But we're discussing passive investing in equities pushing equities prices up, which have positive externalities in the economy. This is good.

They weren't outsourcing software development work, they were outsourcing the manual task of checking PDFs against XLS files. The quality wasn't the problem, the throughput and cost are. I wrote an app that parsed the PDFs but no manager wanted to learn Python to review the code, so they told me to move on :(

When I worked at Deloitte they made a similar decision to outsource to India instead of training staff to learn Python and automate the time consuming, low value work. That's when I decided to leave, best move of my career.

Yes.

Why?

The conclusions you've reached are not uncontroversial in the academic literature: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Actor%E2%80%93observer_asymmet...

Awesome product, awesome team. Very excited to see how fast adoption happens and where they take this.

Getting content producers paid by viewers rather than advertisers is crucial for the future of humanity.

Sounds like we should change how electricity is produced?

Most miners sell their bitcoins to buy more hardware and pay their electricity bills...

Why go through the trouble of running a mining rig instead of just buying the coins sold by miners in the market?

It is true that the majority of Bitcoins are held by a few early adopters (NB: not today's miners!). They will diversify out as time goes on. Wealth can come from skill, hard work, luck, politicking, etc... Rejecting Bitcoin because it enriches a few people in a manner that you find objectionable is... myopic.

Look around you, almost everything you do enriches one capitalist or another. Many intelligent people have tried finding a way around that, with limited to no success. Good luck.

Those are the technical questions. The big picture economic question is, how does bitcoin mining transition from block reward revenue to transaction fee revenue ( see http://nakamotoinstitute.org/bitcoin/#selection-185.5-185.39... ). Discussion with Gavin on this subject here: http://bitstein.org/blog/pierre-rochard-and-gavin-andresen-d...

See here: http://www.dfs.ny.gov/about/press2015/pr1505071.htm