kobeya

No they have to re-write the history. The cartel of minors does not set the rules of bitcoin. It can only undo transactions by doing more work to write an alternate history. Even with the majority this is often unfeasible in practice.

Show me a regulator able to prevent bitcoin users who own their own keys from making transactions, or one able to reverse transactions once made and confirmed.

The problem (and advantage of) Nextdoor is that it is hyper-local. It's great for anyone in an HOA or apartment complex or whatever. It really fills a niche there.

However I wish there was more to fill the spectrum between Nextdoor, which is really just a communication tool for people that live within shouting distance of each other (there's a standup routine in there somewhere..) and Facebook, which trends too far towards the national and global.

I wish I could close my facebook account, but it's essential for asynchronously keeping in contact with friends living around the globe now (I grew up in Silicon Valley, so my friend set in particular is rather global since everyone not in tech or other high paying professional jobs have been forced out of the housing market and moved elsewhere). What about at the level of my city, county, state & region? I really wish there were more local options.

I also wish there were better tools for building social networks around specific hobbies, industries, or interests. Where are the clubs of social networks? This requires more than just a "page" with a wall and like button. The anonymous and cancerous Reddit certainly isn't the answer either.

Was that actually illegal? If it was an above-the-board campaign contribution, I'm not sure what the issue is.

As far as I'm aware, YC didn't cut ties with him. Rather, YC restructured their advisor program and he was offered a role in the new structure, which many other advisors did, but he declined for whatever reason.

Of course if you were YC trying to save face for everyone involved that's also exactly what you would do.. but I think it is ill-advised to jump to conclusions before the facts are in. It might be just what it is claimed to be: a choice by Pieter Thiel not to participate further for whatever reasons he might have. Certainly YC of today is not the same as the YC he originally involved himself with.

Nearly all of Silicon Valley post-2001 is either (a) online retailers/ecommerce, or (b) parasites hanging off of the $100+Bn/yr online advertising industry. At the top of that latter food chain sit only a handful of companies -- Google and Facebook being the big ones. So much of everything you see in IT and tech in general, from the IT worker to the graphic design consultant to analytics and "big-data" machine learning startups are living off of money that came from clicks on ads or checkout carts at buy-and-ship retailers.

Facebook "only" took in around $26Bn in advertising revenue last year. But their ads are considered more reliable and higher quality than Google's products, so admit some speculation about growth potential. With a global advertising market (across all mediums) of half a trillion dollars that is quickly moving into digital, is it any surprise that these top dogs have high P/E ratios? Those P/E's are based on anticipated future revenues, shares of a pie that is rapidly expanding in size. Comparing P/E using earnings of this year doesn't give the full picture.

That said, they're certainly not undervalued either, and this analysis does nothing to explain Amazon (WTF is going on there? Surely they don't have $200bn of inventory and warehouse property. Do they?). But 35 P/E is only 3.5x more than the 10x rule of thumb, and the entire market could reasonably grow by that amount. That appears to be what investors are betting on too.

(If I had to turn this into stock picking advice, I'd note that if the market is predicting the future accurately here, then one can also say that traditional non-digital advertisers aren't going to do well in the years to come [no surprise], and also that general tech will likely see a huge influx of revenue and capital investment as the top dogs trickle down their market share gains. Baring some black swan catastrophe things will likely be good in Silicon Valley for some time to come, even outside of the FANG companies. But you should not take this as investment advice, which I would not be qualified to give, etc. etc.)

ETA: For the record there's a third prominent SV category I forgot to include in the list, which is peer-to-peer services. AKA the sharing economy. AirBnB, Uber/Lyft, Instacart. Part of why these were so exciting in the last two years or so is because it was a gold rush on new markets that hadn't been colonized by tech companies yet. Doesn't really affect this comment in any way though, other than technical accuracy of that sentence.

Coindesk is intimately linked with blockstream,

As I said in another comment: "As far as I can tell, they both share a minor investor, Barry Silbert. And anyone who thinks that means anything hasn’t been paying attention to what went down regarding the New York Agreement, where Blockstream (standing alongside many others) opposed Barry and won."

the company that has gone to great lengths to take over the github repository,

I have no idea what this is in reference to. The Bitcoin Core repo? The release manager for Bitcoin is employed by MIT DCI. The largest group of contributors is from ChainCode Labs. Of the half-dozen or so people who have commit access (a meaningless metric since no one has unilateral authority and they operate by consensus), only one works for Blockstream, and he has some sort of special contract where he is independent and isolated in his decision making capacity and can leave, with pay, at any time for any reason.

censor /r/bitcoin,

There is no relationship I know of between r/bitcoin and Blockstream. r/bitcoin seems to like Blockstream, but that's not their fault. r/bitcoin has also had some issues with excessive moderation, but none of the mods there work for the company or are in any way tied to Blockstream afaict.

and ultimately keep the block size limit at 1 MB so that they can profit from fees on their own 3rd party chain.

Blockstream's supposed scaling solution is Lightning, a peer-to-peer protocol where the users collect fees from each other, which they are developing in an open source basis with multiple compatible implementations and no vendor lock-in. It will probably reduce the fees paid to miners for comparable levels of transactions, but with those fees being collected by users directly. There doesn't appear to be any profit opportunity for Blockstream here except perhaps consulting income in helping people and industries setup and maintain such networks, which has been their "RedHat of Bitcoin" model from the beginning.

The first is rediculous. Market cap is meaningless, especially in bitcoin where it isn’t even known well how much coin is accessible, and velocity of those coins in circulation is so low and order books so thin by comparison.

The effect is exactly comparable to how much value will disappear. That’s how many lives will be affected, people disillusioned, etc.

I honestly don’t know what you’re trying to argue in the last paragraph.

Velocity is how quickly money changes hands. Did you mean volatility?

Do you mean something other than velocity? It doesn’t make sense I’m hat context. (I’m not opening a google doc for security reasons).

Relevance? Bitcoins aren’t mined on GPUs.

We don’t know for certain how much was really stolen. We just have Tether at their word. And if more was stolen than the amount frozen, it certainly is redeemable—for bitcoin on an exchange.

There is plenty of innovation going on in bitcoin space. Schnorr signatures, MAST, lightning, client efficiency improvements.

As far as I can tell, they both share a minor investor, Barry Silbert. And anyone who thinks that means anything hasn’t been paying attention to what went down regarding the New York Agreement, where Blockstream (standing alongside many others) opposed Barry and won.

Have a shred of evidence to back up your rediculous conspiracy theories?

This isn’t Reddit. If you make wild accusations, back them up.

Mediums of exchange need to encourage usage, not hoarding.

Bitcoin was always digital gold. That was it’s value proposition from the beginning: a return to the gold standard, in digital form.

The Tether liability is about the same size as MtGox was, in dollar terms, when things started to unravel. That wasn’t a small effect.

Not all pool software was, or even still is so enlightened.

Convicted in the court of public opinion does not mean guilty.

Already passed the Sun.

You might like the book Rendezvous with Rama.

It’s a bad thing to the idea of a trustless, irrevocable, fully machine audited ledger of account.

Why not just run it in your favorite RDBMS? That way we’d at least save a bunch of CO2 emissions.

The funny part is that Tethers came into being after Bitfinex was hacked, right, as a way to help them out?

No, Tether is completely unrelated and existed (or was in the process of being stood up) years prior. It just became widely used in 2017 after some exchanges (bitfinex being a big one) switched to it for USD for a variety of reasons.

I read the patio11 post as implying very strongly that Bitfinex was responsible in some way for Tether, when in fact that couldn’t be further from the truth.

Um, PSP implements a secure enclave capability, so no that’s not correct?

If you know of one, post it in the comments.

The primary issue though is that the source material isn't digitized yet.

Mesopotamian studies is really interesting. There's a lot of intact records from archives that were found in the basements or lower levels of buildings that were destroyed in fires -- clay tablets only break under the most intense heat.

Most are administrative records, but as TFA shows even these can be incredibly interesting. Only a small percentage have been translated -- there's not that many people with the diligence to learn cuneiform! But if you want to go to Oxford and spend 5-10 years learning ancient dialects and writing systems, it could be quite rewarding.

It's one thing to lack the knowledge to use the device. It's another to lack the authority, if said knowledge could be acquired or reverse engineered. If I own the device, I should be allowed to send whatever control bits I want.

I understand the DMCA and related laws change this, but that is a flaw of our legal system that needs to be corrected.

Blu-rays and Netflix work just fine on my old laptop that doesn't support secure enclaves.

The onus is on us to make sure that a future where we are locked out of the devices we own does not come to pass.