HN user
I failed basic reading comprehension. The first sentence of the abstract clearly says "It has recently been shown that the mere presence of one’s own smartphone on the desk impairs working memory performance."
So while the presence of a smartphone does indeed seem to impair the working memory, they found "no overall effect of smartphone presence on short-term and prospective memory performance".
It‘s easy enough to believe, but newer research says that the mere presence of a smartphone does not have a measurable effect on cognitive function.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S10538...
Maybe they invented their holdings of commercial paper as well.
Pretending to be fully backed by USD didn't work out, so now they pretend to hold equivalent assets.
Maybe a bank run on Tether for some other reason than the SEC? It would require a lot of people to lose trust in Tether at the same time, which surprisingly still doesn't look likely. But it might happen.
To fund a Lightning channel you have to pay fees on the Bitcoin network, which can get quite high. Up to 50 USD during times of high demand.
To send to someone who's offline the recipient either has to run their own always-on node, or use a custodial service.
Routing small payments (one of the goals of Lightning) is unreliable with a high chance of failure. See http://essay.utwente.nl/82015/1/Satcs_BA_EEMCS.pdf
I always hoped that Bitcoin would become "the people's currency" but currently it does not work as cash anymore. Lightning might become great, but the engineering needed just to send to offline nodes makes me sceptical, not to mention that the cost of funding channels is always handwaved away.
I wonder, does HN hate the "Bitcoin Cash" fork as much as BTC? It's the closest to the technical specification that made me interested in BTC in the first place.
Yes please, an API!
Also there's a recurring theme/running gag on NTS Radio that it's faster to find releases on Bandcamp through Google than through the internal search. I've witnessed several times that linking to releases is crowdsourced to the NTS chat because the DJs can't find it fast enough.
And they are pushing Bandcamp a lot, with whole shows dedicated solely to music available on Bandcamp. Mostly on the "no-fee fridays".
So an improved search or an API to enable external discovery tools would be great!
Besides the obvious speed, Sublime has the best-looking font rendering of all editors.
Might be a minor detail, but all text always looks great.
Yeah those are hard to find.
One of my favorite games is “Nuclear Throne Together”, although it is quite hard, and more players make it much harder.
A current good and accessible one is “Vectronom”, a very stylized rhythm game where you play as cubes moving through levels morphing to electronic beats.
Mainstream games Rayman and Overcooked are also very good and fun and instantly accessible even to “non-gamers”.
Another one I discovered which is quite fun is “Hidden In Plain Sight”, where all players look like NPCs and most modes revolve around figuring out who is a player and who is CPU. It can be really intense because of the psychological terror.
“Lovers In A Dangerous Spacetime” is fun but gets tedious because of the huge levels.
Most of those those don’t have mich of a story though, except maybe Rayman. But that doesn’t detract from the games being fun.
The same way I organize my whole life, everything is either new and unprocessed, being processed, or done.
- unprocessed, unsorted, new information: /Downloads
- currently being processed or worked on, otherwise empty, synced to NAS: /Documents /projects
- processed / finished / rarely accessed: /archive on NAS, indexed, backed up to backblaze
/archive also contains all media in a neat folder structure, but indexed (by the NAS) and searchable through Finder.
This way my work folders stay clutter-free except for current projects/work
Nearly all „large“ cities in Switzerland now have fibre.
Symmetrical 1GBit/s is pretty much standard, price is between 60 and 120 CHF (about 60-120 USD)
You can run anything on it as long as it‘s not commercial, there are no filters or blocks on it as far as I know.
I’m a beginner with python as my first language.
I used it to write an arbitrage trading bot. I learned python and asyncio just for this, and it is working as intended.
Asyncio with aiohttp is used to capture price data from 4 websockets and handle requests to exchanges via their APIs.
Python was easy to learn with “learning python the hard way”, asyncio was also easy to learn thanks to lots of available material online, and it looked less confusing than threading.
Again, speaking as a beginner, I quite like asyncio because to me it looks just like synchronous code. To me it’s easier to think about and keep track of the control flow and shared data than with threading.
Asyncio looked like the easiest and fastest way to accomplish my goal, and it worked.
Miners are nodes and therefore verifying transactions, and they're the only nodes writing transactions to the blockchain.
Non-mining nodes can only verify transactions for themselves , which helps them stay on the chain of their choice but does not extend any chain.
There is no "intrinsic value", but the subjective value of Bitcoin is that could be a better money than any money that has existed so far.
Strictly speaking "intrinsic value" does not exist, there is only subjective value placed on things based on their properties and usefulness to humans.
Gold only has "intrinsic value" because we value that we can use it to build machines or shiny jewellery. But that is only valuable because we value machines and shiny things. Even air is only valuable to us because we require it to survive, but anaerobic lifeforms don't care. So the value is not intrinsic, but only subjectively "intrinsic" because most people value staying alive.
So the subjective value of Bitcoin is based on its its properties. Humans happen to use money, and the properties of Bitcoin could theoretically make it "better" money than any money that has existed so far.
Anything can be money, but is judged on how "good" a money it is depending on several criteria such as:
1.) Scarcity: Only a select group can create money.
2.) Durability: Should be resistant to aging and natural elements.
3.) Divisibility: Can be divided into smaller sub-units.
4.) Transportability: Easy to transport and transact in.
5.) Recognizability: Should be difficult to counterfeit.
6.) Fungibility: Any $1 bill is equal to any other $1 bill.
Bitcoin could theoretically be better in every category.
However, it is still suffering from lots of problems.
Currently "portability" is often suffering due to network congestion and high fees, which also impacts "divisibility" as it becomes impractical to move small amounts.
However, there's still a good chance that either Bitcoin Core or Bitcoin Cash or any other of the current cryptocurrencies will find a way to scale and retain good portability and divisibility.
tl;dr Bitcoin has no "intrinsic value", nothing does, but the subjective value is that it could be better money than any other.
Yes, the number of coins in circulation decreases over time.
But the precision can be increased from the current 8 decimals. Even if all but 1 Satoshi/0.00000001 BTC is lost, it could still be split into smaller units, or used to bootstrap a chain with higher precision. It can be fixed as required.
Volatility decreases as the number of users and therefore liquidity increases. It should decline further with rising use of the network for payments instead of a pure store of value.
I agree that "viability as a payment system" is where Bitcoin is stuck right now, but scaling the system is the stated goal of all current Bitcoin developer groups. One of them will get it right eventually.
Do not leave coins on an exchange. Any digital currency is only yours if you control the private keys.
All recommendations are for Bitcoin.
Most secure: A hardware wallet like the "Trezor" or "Ledger". Good balance of security and usability. Gives you a backup phrase in case the device is lost. Backup phrase fits on a piece of paper, can be made as secure as required. Keep backup phrase in multiple locations.
Cheap and secure: (encrypted) paper wallets generated from https://www.bitaddress.org , with backups stored in multiple locations. Bad usability, but can be made as secure as you want/require.
Easy, reasonably secure, not for large amounts: "breadwallet" for iOS/Android. OSS, user friendly, but not recommended for long-term storage. As most modern wallets do, this one also gives you a backup phrase to be stored on paper.
As for exchanges, I'm in Europe and trust bitcoin.de. On Reddit there have generally been no major complaints about Bitstamp, a few about Coinbase, and a lot about Kraken.
There is utility in Bitcoins ability to transfer value worldwide, without middlemen, only requiring a cheap smartphone.
Strictly speaking nothing has "intrinsic" value, but Bitcoin can be valued because it has many qualities of "good" money like being transportable and durable, doing some of them theorically better than current monies.
They do seem to have at least 82k left, visible on the blockchain and verified by their "spokesperson" here: https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/4wiw3q/bitfinex_has_72...
https://btcvol.info/ shows the volatility over the last few years. Still very wild, but looks like it is decreasing.
Probably "not at all".
I can only assume that the number of buyers using both Bitcoin and a VPN to buy cheaper games is too small to worry about.