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alcio

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Any application that could be done on a blockchain could be better done on a centralized database. Except crime.

In a weird way, this quote is a good explanation of why cryptos exist: they give the possibility of creating systems evading state controls.

Crime is a relative thing: moving money outside of certain countries is prohibited, in others it's owning property for certain category of people.

Excited to see this new release. Seems to me this would (slightly?) negatively impact query performance for recent data (when the query concerns data is both in O3 and persisted zones), is that the case?

Proof-of-stake coins lack one of proof-of-work coins most important properties: censorship resistance.

In both consensus systems, a censor is someone that has amassed 51% of the currently available stake (in PoW stake is mining machines, in PoS it is outstanding tokens).

In proof-of-work systems, a censor can be unseated by censored parties allocating more capital to mining machines until non-censoring parties own 51% of all machines.

In proof-of-stake systems, it is impossible to unseat a censor: since it owns 51% of tokens, it will also owns 51% of newly minted units in perpetuity (assuming it doesn't stop censoring and doesn't run into issues that would end up slashing some of their stake).

"miners somehowd eviate from the conventional wisdom or the norm, which dictates that transactions are prioritized for inclusion based on the fee-per-byte metric"

Miners prioritize by fee-per-byte, except that the on-chain fee only accounts for part of the fee paid for some transactions.

Over the years, many services have popped up where you can pay an out-of-band fee to a miner to include your transactions first.

Of course, this is detrimental to users not using these systems as it biases the algorithms used to determine what is the current best fee-per-byte to pay.

Using a full node, you not only sync the history, but also validate it. In recent days, on a modern machine with a good internet connection, it takes less than 12hrs to achieve this.

If you don't care about validating the history, I guess using BigQuery would work but I don't know how to achieve it.

According to the complaint, the defendant:

- went back to the US several time after traveling to the DPRK despite being warned not to by the US state department

- had several consensual interviews with FBI agents

- consented to a search of his phone

It's hard to read this and not think that he brought this upon himself. If you really want to do what he did, get a lawyer, don't travel back to the US, don't speak to law enforcement.

How is the USD worth anything after some many bank robberies?

Bitcoin itself worked as expected, and the fact that no one can easily reverse transactions is one of the features described in the original whitepaper:

"Transactions that are computationally impractical to reverse would protect sellers from fraud, and routine escrow mechanisms could easily be implemented to protect buyers"

What is it giving you that's worth the enormous montain of precaution that you need to take to secure yourself?

It's giving you precisely the opportunity the Binance hackers seized: doing transactions that no one else wants done. You don't have to ask permission nor trust anyone but Bitcoin itself.

It's funny that the USDC website doesn't list the main use of stablecoins (especially Tether) these days: arbitrage.

When moving fiat between two exchanges can take days and flag your accounts for suspicious activity, moving the same value using Tether is much much faster (~30 mins to 1 hour).

If one observes how does USDT flows, you'll find that it flows between the 3 or 4 major exchanges that use it, with almost no use elsewhere: no major wallets, no merchant acceptance, etc..

Mastercard/Visa do thousands of transactions per second and charge a single digit percentage fee on top.

Bitcoin does 3 to 5 transactions per second and charges a fixed fee per byte of transaction space.

Which is fairer? Speed has a cost that many people ignore.

Recently our industry’s lack of care for efficiency, simplicity, and excellence started really getting to me, to the point of me getting depressed by my own career and the IT in general.

Loading this website resulted in 5.3MB being downloaded over 42 requests.

One of the most important thing to learn when trading is risk management, how to preserve your capital. Being wrong is part of trading, staying wrong isn't.

It's especially interesting to see it happen to someone that actually worked as a risk manager in his early days ; especially so close to the anniversary of Lehman's demise.

the idea that money could be independent of government (and hence those that own the government) is very dangerous

that's how things were quite recently (before the ~19th century)