rms

not a YC company? they maintain a monopoly on job hiring posts on this site, you can however make the "monthly" hiring thread and post there

Appeasement card: https://i.redd.it/n9zqxbbhfar31.png https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/dexong/cool_new_car...

Right. I imagine a future where AI capital entities just hold bitcoin and never do anything with it other than hold it forever to secure the things they're doing on the advanced financial platforms of the future.

In the USA at least, it still exists, and it's called cash.

If cash were invented today, it would be illegal. For most small payments if not large transfers, in the USA consumers actually have the right to transact anonymously. Tracking micropayments publicly forever on a blockchain seems like a step backwards. Being able to track large transfers on a blockchain is one of the benefits of living in the world where the Byzantine General's Problem has been solved.

The white paper says it uses the Stellar consensus protocol but doesn't specify that the coin is on the Stellar network.

For what it's worth, we also trust the NSA to have written and verified our most important cryptographic hash functions, leading to the first rule of crypto -- never roll your own novel hash function.

I see this as the start of a community effort to verify Intel SGX. I imagine that the process of rolling out a consumer facing high stakes product on SGX involves external verification of SGX beyond what it's gone through before.

Bernie Madoff is reportedly quite popular in prison, if anyone was wondering.

I lost a bank account last year and was unbanked for a little while. I really hate my customer service interactions with banks and would be quite happy if I could unbank myself.

Life pro tip:

If your Charles Schwab broker emails and says that they're wondering why your retirement savings are nothing but medical marijuana penny stocks and if you'd like to come in to talk about healthy portfolio management strategies, you should go into the local office and not ignore that email.

Consumer micropayments is one of the most basic possible applications of this technology and that it hasn't been implemented yet is sad. I'm not a fan of the customer experience of Venmo and Paypal and Apple Pay that require me to have a bank account or a credit card. They work in the first world for transfers over a certain minimum but there is really clearly room to innovate still.

Do you see a future where blockchain technology exists but consumers don't use cryptocurrency? I do also. Who is to say that WhatsApps's implementation of Mobilecoin has to use their own proprietary cryptocurrency instead of letting users denominate transfers in local fiat currency?

Your github led me to https://turtlecoin.lol/ which makes your point and undermines it at the same time. Turtlecoin launched with an incremental and a catchy name and no ICO and on the surface sounds like it achieves a lot of what Mobilecoin attempts to.

Ultimately though, Turtlecoin is a parameter tweak and relaunch of existing coins that doesn't solve the core problem of consumer payments. Mobilecoin is at least attempting that, and for $30M, they should at least get a fancy mobile UI, hopefully one that filters up to an improvement of the Signal UI also.

It's right to be skeptical. Blockchain applications aren't being delivered. Still, the promise of blockchain convergence requires us to believe in a future that we can't quite see at hand where applications start being delivered all at once and the ecosystem hits critical mass. I'm now in the business of skeptically predicting the future and I've basically started pre-rejecting all ICO pitches if it's not being delivered imminently.

MobileCoin still stands out as a clever, simple design where the economic value comes from one trusted crypto anarchist saying that we as a society can in fact use Intel SGX for critical applications -- like a simple implementation of consumer micropayments. I, like many others, didn't believe this until Moxie said it was ok, but I believe in this because Moxie is in fact the most trusted person in Silicon Valley.

I'm curious about your blockchain side projects beyond Turtlecoin hacking, feel free to email me if you have any interesting code running...

Also I recommend Moxie's English language writing to everyone; it's sublime. https://moxie.org/stories.html

Pessimistically, they won't.

Optimistically, they solve consumer micropayments by allowing the unbanked to send and store money via WhatsApp.

The main difference is that MobileCoin trusts Intel's SGX to create a platform that should be able to scale quickly on mobile. It also has a solution to allow for private key recovery in case you lose your phone.

Zcash is more provably secure as it doesn't require trusting Intel's SGX but it's untenable on mobile right now as it's too computationally intensive. Monero and Dash are effectively anonymous for small transfers but for very large movements of money, the deep state can crack their tumbler algorithms. They provide good enough rather than verifiable anonymity.

As CEO of the Signal Foundation, Moxie is in a unique position to encourage Signal protocol chat services to adopt something like MobileCoin. I would imagine that progression would go Signal -> WhatsApp, and that Signal would only reject MobileCoin if Moxie himself rejected MobileCoin. I think there isn't really a first use case other than an existing Signal protocol service adopting it.

I don't see nearly as much use case for humans and cryptocurrency as for AI and cryptocurrency.

I think in the future, the average technologically savvy person will be just as confused about what bitcoin is and does as they are today and it will mostly be used to securitize options and derivatives of unprecedented complexity.

I see cryptocurrency as a harbinger of AI, which is the real revolution. Blockchain is just a tool. People get really confused trying to understand and develop pricing models for the current state of the world but I see a lot of cryptocurrency value as reflecting the adoption of AI.

The author's equation produces low valuations at high velocity and this suggests a use case for low valuation, high velocity cryptocurrency as a medium of exchange if not a deflationary store of value. I don't think this currency exists yet, though I get lots of pitches for things that want to be this while also trying to justify their own value into the future.

In the early days of crypto, libertarian economists predicted that bitcoin would go to the moon and the USD would undergo hyperinflation. This is clearly not happening. What I think could happen is a relatively stable USD under the guidance of the Federal Reserve and a simultaneous hyperdeflation of ETH and BTC as they become the reserve currency of distributed AI capital organizations.

Summarized on boingboing as "Public goods are REALLY good: thousands of years later, the Roman roads are still paying dividends" https://boingboing.net/2018/04/10/romanes-eunt-domus.html

I think it may be healthy to reset dopamine by doing this occasionally for a week or so at a time, but I like the cheap dopamine and connectedness of my social media connections.

I've been pretty happy using Wire lately

It just won't be the same without San Pel's bubbly sweet kick of uranium, not safe for children under two years of age.

43 bitcoins.

We got those with the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memristor

Really? I tried doing this search and can't find much. I'm pretty up on the state of the scientific literature on kratom, because I'm in the industry, curious, and have been actively working at improving the dreadful wikipedia article.

There's this case, http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0924933811... , but it's a case of one. There are some cases of simultaneous kratom and alcohol dependence, but that's not the same thing.

Even the peer reviewed evidence for kratom working for opiate withdrawal is quite weak, despite boatloads of anecdotal evidence. There are studies in mice and some observational studies, but nothing that meets the standards of an FDA clinical trial. Kratom has just not really been seriously studied.

If I'm missing some papers or a body of research, please let me know.

Absolutely. Propaganda from both sides of the debate results in confusing and sometimes harmful information. I don't claim that kratom is without harm. I claim that from a public health perspective, kratom reduces harm by trading off with drugs that cause more harm.

Tobacco and alcohol are unusually dangerous in the scheme of drugs. I don't disagree with your intention to relax restrictions behind drugs, but if this logic was followed, nearly every drug would be legalized, which is not the goal of the government of the USA.

The DEA has the power to schedule newly developed, dangerous synthetic drugs without immediate congressional oversight, the idea being that chemists can design and bring to market new, dangerous drugs more quickly than Congress is able to act.

They overstepped their authority in attempting to schedule kratom, as it is old, natural, and not particularly dangerous.

I don't think there was a conspiracy here. I think the most likely thing is that DEA is sincerely trying to do something about the opiate epidemic in America, and made a misguided and poorly researched attempt to ban kratom because they thought that would help the opiate epidemic.

Kratom withdrawal is unpleasant. Debilitating withdrawal is uncommon in people that aren't taking heroic doses to self medicate their addictions to other opiates, therefore punting the withdrawal symptoms down the road. Acute kratom withdrawal is shorter than for long acting pharmaceutical opiates, but post acute withdrawal syndrome (PAWS) can be dragged out because kratom has some poorly documented and poorly understood non-opiate-related antidepressant actions. It has unusually complicated pharmacology with interesting combinations of conflicting, competing, and synergistic mechanisms.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BwMPT92bOJKdZWM2bzlLeU5DdDg... is the letter from the American Kratom Association to the DEA, which compares the number of kratom related calls to poison control centers to calls related to supplements. Kratom seems to be at about the same level as ginkgo biloba and better tolerated than St. John's Wort.

This is surprising, and has resulted in weird errors in literature reviews on kratom, that I've spent dozens of hours trying to unpack during my efforts to improve the Wikipedia article.

Kratom seems to have a really surprisingly low incidence of severe side effects. The state of the information out there is weird. Something like someone said "Kratom is a mu opioid agonist and mu opioid agonists cause respiratory depression" in a peer reviewed paper, which then got cited in a medical textbook as "Kratom causes respiratory depression". However, primary research in mice shows that kratom causes dramatically less respiratory depression than poppy derived opioids. No case of kratom related respiratory depression has actually been documented in a human. In my comprehensive review of the literature, there was someone who had a seizure and was intubated but still had respiration in the normal range. Someone else suffered aspiration pneumonia in response to (inhaling?) kratom, but aspiration pneumonia is not respiratory depression.

Basically, kratom does have side effects, and real side effects, but when looked at as a population level public health problem, is profoundly safe for how powerful of an effect it actually has.

It feels good to still be in business at http://www.getkratom.com after all these years. There has definitely been a Streisand Effect from all of the DEA's attention but I don't think it was worth the stress.

I think I liked this article the most from the wave of press today. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/oct/14/kratom-dea-b...

I'm one of the moderators of https://www.reddit.com/r/kratom/ , check it out if you want to keep up with news and community sentiment on this topic.

http://www.lightsail.com/ has been working on this for a while now

I would be surprised if you weren't capable of "seeing" the typical colorful geometric patterns of a DMT not-quite-breakthrough with your eyes closed, and the experience of having something pass through your mind's eye just once might trigger dormant pathways.

Anyway, as a quasi-professional, my advice if you were going to pick just one to try, would be vaporized freebase DMT.

And then after Starcraft, no-limit Texas hold 'em is likely.