HN user
...and don’t forget Loon Lang — it’s a gem: https://loonlang.com
By the way, “they” is actually just one person: Cam Pedersen — https://campedersen.com
So far, he’s shown incredible productivity (with Claude Code). I integrated his vcad into my toy project here, and it worked on the first try, which is quite impressive for such a young project: https://github.com/darwin/supex/tree/dev
Definitely keep an eye on him.
vcad was started in 2026 and has great ambitions: https://docs.vcad.io
*Supex* - Agentic coding for SketchUp.
Working on a house renovation project in SketchUp, I wanted the same workflow I use with Claude Code: describe what I need in natural language, let AI write and execute the code, iterate quickly.
So I built a bridge. Python MCP driver talks to a Ruby extension inside SketchUp via JSON-RPC. Claude Code can now write Ruby scripts, execute them directly in SketchUp, take screenshots to verify results, and introspect the model - all without leaving the conversation.
Still very early (macOS only, requires SketchUp 2026), but it's already useful for repetitive tasks and parametric designs. "Create a spiral staircase with 15 steps at 18cm rise" is more fun than drawing it manually.
https://github.com/darwin/supex https://github.com/darwin/supex/tree/example-simple-table
What about buying a dedicated machine for running agents? One macbook for agents and one for personal/private work plus a good KVM switch maybe or remote desktop.
According to the article it took him 15 years. Had been frequently visiting a single bank in Prague center (Raiffeisenbank) only with a briefcase exchanging EUR into USD in cash. Doing each time 2+2 hour round trip by train from his home town Usti nad Labem (sometimes carring up to 5M USD) .
Creators of P2P bitcoin exchange: https://vexl.it
The data is well sourced and the code is open-source. You don't have to trust or rely on their authority. Don't trust, verify!
Under BigSur > System Preferences > Accessibility > Display > Reduce transparency
Thank me later.
Has anybody a link to the actual research paper?
bazqux.com
The subscription is $30/year. I voluntarily opted in $50/year just because I like it so much.
Blockchain might be a relevant tool for a group of strangers to maintain books (a database) which cannot be easily tampered with (or it is virtually impossible). Prime example is sound money. But it could go beyond that. Say you can run a land registry or domain name system this way.
Back in the old days if the Internet, there was no cryptocurrency. I strongly believe (crypto)payments can be used as a pretty effective anti-spam measure in the future.
Doesn't really matter how you spend the money. It is a signalling thing. The money must be burnt. With limited resources it ensures you can't repeat engagement with multiple women...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signalling_theory#Sexual_selec...
Who is claiming that bitcoin transactions will be used by average person for everyday payments?
Making a bitcoin transaction is like recasting gold bars - not something you want to do often with small amount of gold. This will be done only for large individual payments or for large settlement payments aggregating thousands or millions of normal payments. Everyday payments will be performed on second or higher layers (e.g. Lightning Network)
This will be the base layer. They expect custodial wallets and payment channels on top (in Bitcoin terms exchange wallets and lightning network).
See the Libra blockchain paper, section 8:
We anticipate that many payment transactions will occur off-chain, for example, within a custodial wallet or by using payment channels [45]
For clojurists here, Nathan is the creator of the Specter[1] library. Which is a brilliant idea and technical masterpiece, IMO.
Nathan, kudos and good luck!
IMO, UX is a minor issue. Why would anyone spend hard money before fiat money? (Gresham's law) Also each spending could trigger a separate taxable event (depending on your jurisdiction) and that would be a serious accounting nightmare if done willy-nilly for casual payments.
Bitcoin is a store of value and a payment rail for significant sums. Currently it is not suitable for casual/small retail payments.
In near/mid-term future I expect new banking services to allow people to stay in bitcoin for "savings accounts" and offering traditional fiat credit in "current account" for daily spending (backed by bitcoin in savings account as a collateral). Settlement and transfers between savings and current account to be less frequent and easily trackable for tax purposes. This would allow a person to completely stay out of fiat while still having access to fiat payment infrastructure - this would cost some interest on borrowed fiat which I expect to go pretty low thanks to collateral (bitcoin) liquidity. See companies like BlockFi which are getting close to this model.
Isn't problem simply with the user (his wife)? She had enabled auto-translation and didn't notice.
Similar thing would happen to anyone with email account setup to forward all emails to a public mailing list or something of that nature.
To truly understand how bad it is, we would have to analyse the 250T figure in more detail.
There is a "free debt" component to it which was generated via seigniorage[1] and "real debt" to people, companies and other economic actors. It seems to me that many commenters here see only one part of it.
To illustrate it, let me give you an example how "free debt" can be generated by a government. Imagine for a second that we have one world government (WG) and one world currency. And assume that we are in a peace time when collective world productivity grows 3% every year. World's central bank (WCB) targets 2% inflation. Also assume that velocity of money[2] is constant and in general people's behave the same in time. This effectively means WCB can "freely print" 5% of new money without causing any real problem. But who should get the new money? Instead of simply printing it and directly giving it to someone, they have pretty sophisticated/obfuscated mechanisms how to introduce the new money to the system. Typically part of that new money is given to the WG in exchange for WG's bonds. The new money is effectively introduced as an interest-bearing debt. But please note that this debt is "free" for WG. WCB will never want to repay the debt (by allowing WG's debt to always roll over). And also note that WCB is part of WG. That means the collected interest WG formally paid to WCB is then given back to WG.
Of course WG can also sell bonds to people, companies and other actors. This debt is the "real debt" which must be paid back. But let's assume WG is prudent and does not do that.
You can observe that WG can continue this as long the world productivity is growing better than -2%
The problem with "free debt" comes when the growth is even worse (e.g. in war times) or when velocity of money gets faster suddenly (or there are other inflation pressures or shocks). WCB should reverse this mechanism in this bad case. It has to "pump excess currency out of the system" by selling its bonds and destroying the currency to hit the 2% inflation target (technically it would do it by not allowing complete rotation of WG's debt).
Of course real world scenario is much more complex than that. And real governments additionally take "real debt" where usual rules apply. The question for us is how big part of those 250T is the "real debt".
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seigniorage [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Velocity_of_money
What about the number of deaths caused by possibility for governments to finance war efforts via money printing? Most notably both world wars.
No, mining gold is not cheap. And if by "traditional money system" you mean fiat then I must argue that it is not comparable. Comparing bitcoin to fiat is like comparing gold to paper.
A few years back I wrote something similar for ClojureScript: https://github.com/binaryage/cljs-zones
The drawback was the need to manually wrap all participating async functions into a special macro (zones/bound-fn). With async_hooks this could be automated I believe.
You should be asking the opposite question. Why does anyone choose to have children?
I would think that the opposite question does not need much explanation because we have some DNA programming to spread our genes and to "make offsprings". Assuming a healthy person and all the social/cultural/economical/philosophical influences aside if one decided not to have children, they must fight their own hormones in the first place. And to do that successfully they must have a strong reason and be able to stick to it because that signal is pretty strong. That's why the question "why not" is more interesting for me.
Intrinsic value of bitcoin tokens is the ability to use them to append a hash value into immutable eternal excel spreadsheet with no censorship possible. You can use this to prove some data existed at some point in time (proof of existence) or that some data was published (proof of publication). With these primitives you can build some interesting digital infrastructure (ledgers, smart contract platforms, etc.). That is exact equivalent to industrial use of gold as gold's intrinsic value.
Bitcoin token's (secondary) value is the right/ability to write a new row into a global eternal immutable append-only decentralised censorship-proof spreadsheet table (blockchain). It is valuable not only in economic context to create a border-less cash-like digital commodity. It could be used for proof of publication or proof of existence and in many other useful ways (smart contracts).
In other words, owning a non-dust amount of Satoshis gives you some useful property. Anything scarce and useful will have value and market will price it. Anything with a price and good properties to become means of exchange, unit of account or store of value could under some circumstances become a form of money.
Similar as with gold. You can use it in electro-industry. That's its secondary value for people who see value in electronic devices. If you were to explain why gold is valuable in electro-industry to a member of native african tribe, he would not see that value, because electricity and electronic devices is something not considered in his mind. You are in the same boat with Bitcoin here :-)
Use blockchain :-)
Making bitcoin transactions is digital equivalent of melting and recasting gold bars. You should not try this at home if you don't know what you are doing. This base-layer Bitcoin is not suitable for average Joe and I doubt it will ever be. Average people will have to move to upper layers where they will work with something more convenient backed by those gold bars. Hence Lighting Networks and/or Sidechains.
Maybe you are right and it would be technically feasible to bump the block size limit 2x, then 2x again and maybe later 2x again... Basically every time people demand extra cheap block space for their transactions someone would have to lead the charge and coordinate a hard-fork (probably with a lot of drama). But then we (as a community) would set a dangerous moral hazard there and be like the U.S. Senate increasing the debt ceiling limit every year or so.
For reference this is a year-old article from Gregory Maxwell, a prominent Bitcoin Core developer, explaining his view: https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/438hx0/a_trip_to_t...
I think Greg is right. And at least this scaling situation puts a lot of pressure on Bitcoin blockchain and accelerates whole ecosystem to quickly develop and deploy layer-2 solutions like Lighting Networks or parallel 2-way-pegged solutions like sidechains. Which is in my opinion a good thing even for the price of hampering Bitcoin growth in short-term.
And from technical point it is beneficial that Bitcoin Cash folks forked the chain and will experiment with their own scaling solutions. It will be interesting to watch future technical developments on both sides.
2-of-3 fragmented backup of the private key using cryptosteel costs ~$300.
I just preordered Trezor T (hardware wallet) and paid with bitcoins. So your statement "no one uses bitcoin to buy anything anywhere, ever" is provably false.