rawtxapp

are you mostly asking for us to verify 3rd party bank accounts via microdeposit instead?

Yes, I'm fine waiting a couple days for the initial setup if it means I don't have to let Plaid see every single transaction coming in and out of my account (and see my password in plaintext and all that). If you'd support USDC deposits, that would be even better (instant settlement with no reversibility, so no risk to you), but I'm guessing that might be a stretch. Regardless, Mercury is a very nice service as is, thank you!

Mercury is awesome! Not sure if this is right venue for feedback, but if only you could offer ACH without Plaid (which feels like a huge invasion of privacy), it would be even more awesome. Wire transfers cost 20$ each, depositing by check feels like the 1990s and takes time to clear.

You can close a channel whenever you want, for whatever reason.

When you fund a channel, the Bitcoin is still yours, you're not giving it away.

With batched channel open/closes, it'll be super cheap to open and close channels. The only cost you'd pay is the opportunity cost if your counterparty isn't sending transactions, so you're not collecting routing fees. If that's the case, you can just close the channel if you need to fund another channel and don't have spare Bitcoin for it, but that's about it.

Yep, and obviously any kind of transportation like that will be tracked and easily traced, with exact weights and sizes.

By hopping on the lightning network, you're essentially anonymizing your payments as well as making them practically free.

Has it?

Bitcoin is bigger than ever before. It's far more valuable, it has far more users, processes hundreds of thousands of transactions moving billions of dollars worth of value every day on-chain alone, has very healthy L2 layer growth (1ml.com), has hundreds of exchanges worldwide, it ticks every 10 minutes and will keep ticking for the foreseeable future. We have a small country that adopted it as a legal tender with more countries coming on the Bitcoin standard potentially this year.

People only see the fiat currencies and forget that we've run on gold standard for thousands of years and fiat currencies are barely 50 years old and riddled with financial crises left and right. Bitcoin is digital gold, strictly better than gold. But anyways, we'll see what happens in the future.

I think last year alone had more than a billion dollars worth of crypto hacked on defi, there's some trackers out there [1]. On one hand, you have amateurs that leave their private keys on cloud services and try to cash out while living in a place like NYC, on the other hand, you have people who know what they are doing or perhaps live in places that actively encourage those activities [2].

1: https://cryptosec.info/defi-hacks/

2: https://www.bbc.com/news/business-59990477

I would disagree, in my experience HN has been pretty anti-crypto for a long time, starting with Bitcoin's announcement thread [1].

Personally, I think people are just tired, as a proponent I'm tired of arguing the same stuff over and over again, I can imagine the other side of that too. At this point, time will decide who's right and wrong, I think that what anyone of us thinks doesn't really matter in the grand scheme of things.

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=599852

Exactly this, it's a very adversarial environment with huge stakes for those that can exploit it. Even projects that have been around for months, years can get exploited which is why I'd recommend waiting a long time before putting non-trivial amounts into any smart contract or crypto related projects.

That's also a big plus for Bitcoin, because it's been around the longest and because it's so much simpler than more complex chains like eth, it's as secure as it gets.

Look at it this way, if x = number of total users, routing nodes will grow O(log x), not O(c^x). The users can grow exponentially, the routing nodes won't because the marginal cost of processing an extra transaction from an end-user is very close to 0.

Most end-users won't be acting as payment gateways, they'll all have private channels, so they won't appear in the routing graphs. The number of routing nodes would be many magnitude smaller than total number of LN users. It's working fine for now with growing adoption (1ml.com) and I believe it'll only get better with time.

It's L2, but you can have different types of L2s. With lightning network, you're opening and closing channels with a counterparty using on-chain transactions, so each channel can be tied back to an on-chain transaction.

Before someone points out that it would require tons of on-chain transactions to onboard everyone onto it, you can batch thousands of channel open/closes into a single transaction with new protocol upgrades.

I would also highly recommend i3 + i3-gnome combination [1]. It adds a lot of gnome features out of the box to i3, like sound control, notifications, etc.

1: https://github.com/i3-gnome/i3-gnome

I think once you get used to a tiling window manager, like force yourself to use it for over a couple weeks, it's very difficult to go back. Somewhat similar to vim.

Personally, I have 2-3 external 32" 4k monitors and I want to maximize the real estate that's used, tiling wm (specifically i3 in this case) makes it very easy to move windows around, to switch between different screens, to move screens between different monitors quickly. Dragging a mouse across that relatively high screen real estate is a huge pita without i3.

Yeah, let's privatize the gains and socialize the losses because the banks are too big to fail. What a great system! But hey, at least it's stable.

Not having a central single governance is the whole point of the exercise, it's a trustless system driven by mathematical rules and decentralized consensus. You can't stop a transaction, you can't kick anyone out (good or bad), the rules can only be changed by decentralized consensus and certain rules are pretty much guaranteed to not change (for example, any Bitcoin chain that has more than 21M Bitcoin issued wouldn't be called BTC, it would be treated like a fork, etc).

It's pretty wild cryptocurrencies are still legal in many parts of the world.

I think there's a few reasons for that, one is, it actually makes money (ex: Coinbase generating billions, tax money generated from all the capital gains, electricity paid for by miners, etc), capitalist systems won't ban money making machines. It's also impossible to ban, you can ban on/off-ramps, you can't ban Bitcoin from running and transacting, by banning on/off-ramps, you'd lose any visibility into what's actually happening on the pseudonymous network. And last but not least, if this ends up being the next big thing, nobody would want to be left behind, so there's some game theory mechanics as well.

That's very "pigeonholey" way of looking at things though, no? Just because you're good at something doesn't mean you can't become good at something else too. If you're super knowledgeable about very technical things, learning other hard sciences is feasible as well given enough time.

At the end of the day, if you create anything that's worthless, it will be worthless independent of whether you're an insider or outsider.

Yes, they call it Argo Tiered Cache under Caching tab.

TPUs are amazing, but in my experience, debugging issues with them can be a bit tricky. Since nvidia's gpus are more common place (especially outside gcp), you can find a lot more information when you get stuck, it's also more battle tested, etc.

Does it really matter it? If this new supercomputer means that ML engineers can iterate x% faster which in turn increases FB's profits by even a small y%, I would think this would have already paid for itself.

Just pull up some order books from exchanges, 10-100M$ worth of market orders would move the market in a meaningful way, you can't do the same in a more established market 40x the size.

Bitcoin gets a lot of press, but in the grand scheme of things it's still very tiny.

No need to go until 2012, Bitcoin price has been above current price for only like 6 months in it's whole existence. So if you bought at anytime outside of those 6 months, you're in the green.

This isn't the first or the last time that'll happen. There are multiple 50-80% drops in Bitcoin history and we famously went from 20k to 3k in 2017 cycle.

For reference, sp500 also dropped like 10% since december. Since it's market cap is like 40 trillion, that 10% drop is worth like 7-8 times the market cap of all Bitcoin. Smaller markets with lower liquidity moves more.

If you use argo caching on Cloudflare, it should reduce origin server load even more. Essentially, instead of going directly to your origin, cloudflare endpoint will first reach to it's root node to see if it's cached there and only that node is allowed to communicate with your origin. I see like ~95% cache hits with that turned on.

It has healthy growing adoption: 1ml.com.

You'll buy it dirt cheap to cover your short position and keep the initial capital you got from the short sale. Pretty dangerous though, even if you're right in the long term, short term anything can happen and you'll get liquidated.

Bigger market caps means bigger market makers with far more liquidity, so an average trade is much smaller in the grand scheme of things. When there isn't as much liquidity and smaller volumes, the market will move more quickly.

I think it comes down to the fact that at the end of the day, your software runs on real hardware, which isn't perfect. So rather than hide these imperfections behind an opaque surface, AWS let's you peek behind the scenes to optimize your software, debug issues, etc. It's really useful if you're working at a large scale.

They also have things like Lightsail if you don't care about the details and just want the packaged solution.

Majority of Americans live paycheck to paycheck, if that's not dire, I don't know what is.

You can evaluate Bitcoin by how many users it has, how many transactions it facilitates, what kind of new concepts it enables, the usefulness of un-censorability, how many countries are adopting it (or likely to adopt it), etc.

If you're going to use athletes past performance for betting, you can always use Bitcoin's past performance of 300% YoY appreciation for forecasting it's price too, but we both know that's useless.