HN user
Thank you for the detailed and interesting comment. I wish I could maintain my productivity for extended periods of time like you do. Unfortunately I find that my cognitive abilities drop-off very quickly when become tired.
Also you talk of an 'intelligence switch'. Could you explain what you mean by that?
Or perhaps these people simply aren't hedonists that orientate their lives around momentary pleasures. Instead, they derive pleasure from achievement and building things.
Recreational drugs, on the other hand, have ruined millions of people lives. You are being disengenuous to suggest that they have a positive effect to most people.
Finally, no one "intended" drugs to be anything. They are simply tools that humans have discovered. It is ludicrous to suggest that they have specific intention.
If I was interested in such a discount, how would I contact you? (Also, how much is a "large amount"?)
a link to the white paper. no idea what this does/use case
From the white paper:
"Velocity is an automated system for hedging risk on asset prices. It allows anyone to establish and participate in a marketplace on publicly accessible price feeds. The platform enables hedgers and speculators to take part in a market that reduces the threat of systemic risk."
Hedging against exposure to fluctuations in asset prices is very useful and necessary to many businesses.
The community that already understands it isn't doing a very good job making it so that others can reach it
Where I disagree is that I don't believe that all ideas/concepts can be made "easy to understand" to a general audience. Many concepts - especially those technical in nature - simply require a large amount of background knowledge to understand.
You can be the best mathematics teacher in the world, but you won't be able to (and no one expects you to) make the Riemann hypothesis widely understood to the general public. It's just not feasible. And I posit that Bitcoin (whilst maybe not as technical as the Riemann hypothesis) similarly requires a large amount of background knowledge and is not an "easy" concept to understand in 30 minutes.
The good news is that there are millions of things that people use every day that they don't understand - cars, computers, TVs - in fact, due to the specialization of knowledge, most things people encounter they do not fully understand. I don't think this is a big deal.
Noun, 1. money laundering: Concealing the source of illegally gotten money.
Do you have any evidence that suggests that all users of mixers obtained their Bitcoin illegally?
This HN post is a criticism of the privacy of Bitcoin transactions. Mixers can improve the privacy of Bitcoin transactions. I don't see how your comment adds to this discussion, unless you think financial privacy is a crime - in which case your statement applies equally to cash transactions.
Well if you don't want to be connected to the Ethereum blockchain then you probably should just use a webserver. The advantage of using a blockchain like Ethereum is that it is very secure and very reliable compared to a webserver - also it is perhaps less work maintaining a DAO than a webserver.
So if you want to issue tokens for your hackspace, it would be nice if they existed on a public blockchain so that users could trade then and see their balance at any time - no need to worry about server uptime or vulnerabilities.
I find it amusing that you spend so much time commenting on every Ethereum post on hacker news. For someone who is so dismissive of Ethereum as a technology, you sure spend a lot of time criticizing it.
But more directly to you post: forking an altcoin would be a terrible idea for this person's usecase. Do so not only requires more work (creating and deploying clients) but also is completely insecure as such an altcoin would have no mining power behind it.
Creating a token on an existing blockchain, like Ethereum, would be a much better idea since the clients would already exist and the network would be much more secure. Moreover tokens on the Ethereum blockchain are light-client friendly and have access to smart-contract functinality.
I noticed last year that ubuntu.com - despite being the source from which most people download Ubuntu .isos - has no HTTPS capability and doesn't offer any checksums or gpg signatures on their download page. I believe you can find gpg signatures if you scratch around on their ftp server, but it is ridiculous to assume users will do this (especially when Ubuntu is trying to be a user-friendly distro).
Anyway, as a result I ended up emailing their webmaster asking why Ubuntu.com has no SSL cert. and I haven't heard anything back yet. I think it is pretty poor that a company like Canonical can have such a flagrant disregard for basic security practices, especially when it likes to market Ubuntu as a 'secure' OS.
Encryption enforces privacy. In a world with no privacy vulnerable people are easily abused by people in positions of authority. Also note that the legal system is not a perfect mapping to human morality - things that are are legal are not always moral and things that are moral are not always legal. Hence it is dangerous to have a world where right and wrong is determined only by an all-powerful legal system.
In my opinion it is important for society to maintain the privacy that humans have experienced for thousands of years. Remember that mass surveillance of every conversation that you have ever had is new thing. Before the internet society had much more privacy. Encryption is a way to ensure privacy in the internet era.
There is NOTHING that ethereum can do that you can't do with bitcoin.
That is factually incorrect. Bitcoin is not turing complete, Ethereum is. Eg: You can't do loops in Bitcoin, you can in Ethereum.
Perhaps you are speculating about the potential capabilities of sidechains, but they isn't a reality at the present.
Thank you for the detailed post - very helpful for me. If I may ask, what were some of the factors that you used to determine the demand for a property in a given area?
Yeah so you just agreed with the above comment - you want control on where your money goes. So does Zuckerberg.
I don't think that would be the case. If a couple of western Governments "ban encryption" it would probably just mean that they weaken the crypto (e.g. backdoor). The traffic of weakened crypto still looks the same as the traffic of strong crypto - I don't think it would make strong crypto any more noticeable.
Also remember that crypto would still be legal in the rest of the world (China is not going to backdoor their crypto for the NSA's benefit) so you would still have heaps of encrypted traffic moving across the internet. I doubt that such a measure would do anything but make mass surveillance of western populations easier.
Taxation is not partial slavery because the money is not yours to begin with
Ah, we have found the key contention. An interesting thought is to consider a world of fully mobile people - who will move and who will stay in a country with universal basic income and high taxes?
Yes I absolutely believe that there are diminishing returns associated with arbitrage. I would personally think that exchanges should put some lower limit on the 'time resolution' of their markets to prevent HFT investment beyond a certain point.
Arbitrage definitely adds value to society. Without arbitrage, traded assets could exist with arbitrary values.
The process of arbitrage involves observing a mis-priced asset and then making a profit from that observation. By doing so, you push the asset towards its correct value. This kind of activity maintains the integrity of a market.
Yeah I presume he means 'bitcoin exchanges', since bitcoin itself is obviously still here.
who will enforce the redundancy?
Who enforced the redundancy of humans possessing two kidneys? If you are a creationist, then I guess we have different starting assumptions.
Assuming that you aren't, then you would understand that redundancy in humans literally evolved from randomness and volatility. Evolution is a hill climbing algorithm - the organisms that survive the best reproduce more and become more prevalent. For me, nature is perfectly laissez-faire, there are no circuit breakers in nature, there is no enforced stability.
A market is a system which can have temporary flaws
I guess this is where our assumptions diverge. I don't believe that a fluctuation in the market price can ever be considered a "flaw". Some people buy stocks and some people short stocks - a price increase is no better or worse than a price decrease. A market fluctuation is merely representative of a change in the opinion of the participants of a market. Market volatility merely demonstrates that there is a high degree of uncertainty amongst participants.
Hence, I don't believe there is any utility in trying to impede market fluctuations since this does nothing to change the root cause: the participants of the market haven't achieved a strong consensus.
He [Nassim] is actually big fan of slow and dull, tightly controlled systems ("antifragile")
Please watch the first 5 mins of this interview (or all of it) with him: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ehXxoUH1AlM
"Antifragile systems like volatility"
He is literally advocating the opposite of what you said. Governments are centralized and fragile (don't like volatility) hence their propensity to regulate volatility. He directly blames (large) government for the GFC - see 4:40 in the video.
Reasoning by analogy is not a sound way to make an argument. In fact, reasoning by analogy is always wrong to some greater or lesser degree. It is much better to directly address an argument.
Markets are created by humans when humans exchange things. The current market price express the current knowledge of all participants about the value of some traded thing. This is a decentralized process that often involves millions of different people with skin-in-the-game.
The argument against government regulation follows from this: regulation distorts the market from an equilibrium price. If this is a temporary measure then regulation is only delaying the inevitable and you should let the market reach equilibrium sooner. If it is a permanent measure, then you have a situation where the market no longer reflects the current knowledge of all participants, and at this point you start to lose the core value of a market.
By the way: markets aren't analogous to smallpox and wildfires, and regulation is not analogous to doctors and firefighters. Although this is an interesting insight into your world-view ;)
great if you want to extract money other's productivity but not so great for the market as an economic structure
No this is not correct. Options are derivatives that are traded on a secondary market. When you buy an option (or two options - call and put - in the case of a butterfly spread) you are buying from someone who is selling the option(s). Hence you are not "extracting" money from others, you are engaging in a voluntary bet with another person.
Derivatives are very important tools in a modern economy. They are frequently used by businesses and individuals to hedge their exposure to volatility and uncertainty. For instance, if you are close to retirement and still own some stocks, you could hedge your downside risk by purchasing put options. This behaviour has no negative effect on the primary market.
If you extract wealth without improving the market itself how are you a participant?
You are a participant in a secondary market, not the primary market. You only gain wealth if you bet correctly - you still have risk like any other traded asset.
Laissez-faire economic systems are in no way capable of keeping themselves stable.
This is the point - Laissez-faire economic systems function well on their own, it just happens that humans prefer systems that are "stable". Hence, regulators try to limit the volatility of markets meet their stability preferences. Whether this is ultimately beneficial is an ongoing debate.
I would point out that in many cases enforcing artificial stability on markets can have negative outcomes. Recently, the +/-10% limits on daily stock price movements in China created situations where many stocks increased by 10% every day for over 100 days [0]. Such illusions of stability likely played a role in the recent bubble/crash in China. It could be said that attempts to regulate 'stability' into markets merely leads to a masking of tail risk, which can be very dangerous.
Creating new government regulations or the removal of old government regulations?
I would posit that progress in an industry gets 'stuck' due to large companies using their resources/influence to encourage regulation that hinder competition. It then takes very significant advancements in technology to create businesses that are so different that they can compete with incumbents in ways that have not been preemptively regulated.
In fact I would suggest that regulation is the opposite of an 'extinction event'. Regulation is not a random shock and it inherently targets smaller industries/organizations. For instance, "too big to fail" is an example of regulation preventing a mass extinction event. Without "too big to fail", many of the least innovative companies (large banks, GM, etc.) would have gone bankrupt and there would be drastically more progress in these industries.
Amusingly, this is a good example of the behaviour that this essay is discussing.
"Unwilling to engage in productive, open, mutually critical conversations with people they disagree with"
+1 Syncthing is super handy for my core files (~10GB) synchronized between all my devices.
It more convenient than cloud storage in that I don't have to worry about sensitive information being stored on remote servers, but obviously is restricted by the storage capacity of each device.
It's most likely the case that all western AV companies readily respond to National Security Letters and/or Warrants - providing the NSA/GCHQ with all the information that they need. Kaspersky on the other hand, is probably more difficult for the NSA/GCHQ to secretly coerce, hence they need to exploit their software.
Is it common practice for a newspaper to essentially reprint an article from another publication, without seeking a response from the (accused) parties?
I would expect at the very least for the BBC to seek a response from Snowden/Greenwald/theGuardian/etc before publishing this article with subheadings like: >'Hostile Countries' >'Huge Setback'
I for one don't use Pocket because they have a very poor privacy policy. For me the integration of a 3rd-part service like Pocket goes against everything Firefox says it stands for: free, open, and private internet.
I was enjoying the Firefox reading-list feature because it allowed me to save webpages and sync across my devices without having to put all that information into a proprietary 3rd party service. I thought the reading-list was one of the best features added to Firefox for years, and now they have scraped it. I really can't understand how Mozzilla executives came to the conclusion that this was a good idea.