rothbardrand

Unfortunately, pointing out the fact that this sort of faux scaling will lead to centralization is never going to be popular among the tech illiterates at this site who believe Roger Ver over listening to people who actually work on the bitcoin code.

LOL! I wasn't talking about guns, and no, guns are not safe, every year more and more guns are banned in this country. T he idea that guns are not being banned is just a lie that is told to pretend like not banning all of them outright isn't banning them.

But my point was that just because you have responsibility for inebriated people doesn't mean that drunk driving can't happen-- we should ban bars.

OF course the thing is, most people who go to bars don't drive drunk. They have the freedom of choice.

That's what's scary to HN people... who have been brought up to worship government and believe tyranny is a good thing.

I'm not being sarcastic in the least. I'm being downvoted because this is a site where critical thinking is not tolerated and it's overrun with millennials who have never had to use their brains.

They delete content all the time... and they ban people all the time, without regard for whether they have done anything wrong.

Of course, since they delete the content you can't see the record of their actions.

I've seen dang insult someone, calling them names, while telling them they need to be civil. Total hypocrisy.

And that's why you never get any decent discussion here..... it's an echo chamber.

See anything in my comments that deserve a ban?

People are already leaving the country, and at an increasing rate. The rate of renouncements of US citizenship has been rising for the past 20 years but sharply under Obama. They have started making it HARDER to renounce, as some sort of attempt to keep people in-- one of the pieces of advice you will see often regarding renunciation is to never tell them you are renouncing for tax reasons.

That's one of the reasons they will refuse (yes, you have to beg permission to be let out of your slavery, er, citizenship)..... so the old saw of "you owe taxes because you choose to be here" is false..

More and more americans are leaving without renouncing, just going off the grid in asia or wherever, showing up only to renew their passports.

Once some country is smart enough to offer citizenship to educated americans, the trend will become a tide.

One of the great things about bitcoin is it gives libertarianism a business model... and it's right out of SEK3's New Libertarian Manifesto--which was written in the 1970s-- SEK game theorized out what would happen with the Soviet Union, and proved to be correct 20 years later... now we are seeing the exact same game plan here in the USA with bitcoin and this law. But they are too late. Most likely outcome is this will get reversed or widely ignored.... but if they are successful, everyone smart will start leaving the country... or they will create an arab spring like response here, eroding respect for the government and police.

Gay rights couldn't be resisted in the age of the internet when everyone knew their cousin or that guy they went to work with was gay.... will be the same thing with bitcoin.

Question is, just how violent and authoritarian the tyrants in DC want to get.

I suspect money laundering is already there.... they don't care, its all selective prosecution anyway. The purpose of the laws is not to stop crimes, but to make so many things a crime that if you resist tyranny they can discredit you and jail you.

Yes, it is a terrible idea for terrorists.

And currently, bitcoin is too hard to use for terrorists or most criminals. You have to be relatively sophisticated. Yah, you may have gotten your grandma a wallet, but that's not the same as mastering the level of opsec to fund a clandestine organization using cryptocurrencies...

And further, since every transaction is recorded forever in the blockchain if any future address is compromised, the entire network can be compromised instantaneously....

Bitcoin is really worse for terrorist financing than good old USD.

And we "lost" trillions of USD on Pallets in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

And freedom. Remember, freedom is scary.

To the downvoters: Seriously it is. For example: Can you imagine what would happen if we allowed people to have bars? People are expected to DRIVE to a BAR and DRINK! Can you imagine what people would do then, if we legalized the existence of bars? People would drive home drunk!

Banning bars is obviously the right thing to do!

Exactly, its' hugely popular in Venezuela and Zimbabwe and other places where government messes with peoples' money.

But then, remember, Charles thinks that pepe is a nazi symbol! He's not exactly among the rational.

There are lots of reasons to be concerned about Tethers, formost of which is that they are centralized.

But with the massive on boarding of new customers (coinbase releases customer stats regularly and are having record new accounts created) ... you would expect that the number of tethers in circulation would go up as some people decide to adopt the tether for whatever purpose and more need to be created.

Not quite sure whether they are all backed or not. (and I don't know how to tell at this point.)

This is a great policy, all exchanges should adopt it. If you can only buy bitcoin and only miners can sell it, everyone will make a lot of money!

I’m kidding, of course.

BTW- it takes about ten days for a new account to buy bitcoin in Coinbase— we are having a post thanksgiving rally... it may continue for another 5 days.

This isn't bitcoin you're looking at, this is an attack on bitcoin.

This repo is the financial institutions and "CEOs" pushing for an arbitrary change over the objections of the engineers, and in many cases their very own CTOs, and the travesty of how terribly poorly it was written and non-tested shows that bitcoin should never again entertain this kind of nonsense.

This was never about scalability-- the actual on chain capacity more than quadrupled in August and Lightning ads a nearly infinite increase in theoretical capacity.

This was always about the self important CEOs wanting to take over the project and force the engineers into their will.

Remember at this time the block size has already been increased up to a maximum of 3.7mb physical blocks. This is a large part of why there's discussion about what 2X means-- as commonly people think that the bitcoin block size is only 1mb but it's a 1mb "weight".

The 2x project would have doubled this to a 2mb weight but a 7.4mb physical block theoretical max.

Interesting, this resonated with me. I'm a "conservative" from the view of modern liberals (strictly speaking I'm a classical liberal or libertarian- I support gay marriage, the end of war, the end of drug wars, the elimination of income taxes, hard money, open borders freedom of speech and gun rights) ... and I will openly admit that the primary motivation for many of these beliefs is a feeling of a lack of safety.

I don't like humans being abused, physically or mentally, and I feel that happens way too much in our society, and all of those positions in one way or another are attempting to end abuse.

I know many liberals feel their positions are based on similarly wanting freedom (at least when I was a liberal that was my motivation)... which is why I think the great divide is largely due to wedge issues being shoved down our throats.

The implied power structure here is so typical.

Way too many startup “CEOs” want to sit on their ass watching TV and drinking beer (eg going to conferences and drinking beer) while their partner builds the product based on their incoherent and ever changing whims.

This is great advice. Any decent CTO will immediately be put off by this kind of interview for a “co-founder” and be spared working with someone who doesn’t know his circle of competence.

I don't think so... it slungshot around the sun, which implies that its in a very large sun oriented orbit. (eg: some random object passing bit for the first time would be likely only slightly disturbed by the suns gravity, not coming so close to it... the latter seems to imply it has been caught by the suns gravity.... or just happened to be aimed nearly directly at the sun.)

I wonder if there is a reward for the return of the painting? One could buy it and turn it in for the reward, effectively reward arbitrage. In fact, I would expect the legit owners or insurance company to bid.

Given the painting was stolen, is it better that the insurance company can recover it for some money (thus meaning that money was lost, which is easily replaceable) so the painting can continue its life (possibly including public exhibition). Money is easier to replace than a painting, paintings are irreplaceable.

Saw an analysis awhile back that over %60 of Ethereum transactions are from a mixer. So artificial.

Remember “net neutrality” is 800 pages of regulations, most of which enable spying and internet censorship... but was sold as “net neutrality” to quell protest.

Regulations are always sold as protecting consumers but rarely work out that way- the telco and cable monopolies we have now are the product of regulation.

In other words this is regulation that promises to fix the “unintended” consequences of earlier regulation.

But those consequences were intended by the companies that benefit from regulation.

Startup Options are already broken-- no liquidity, terrible employee hostile terms (eg: 1 year cliff, losing 90 days after leaving unless you come up with $xx,xxx to exercise options for a stock that won'e be liquid for 5 or more years, etc.) and on top of that the distribution is usually highly weighted towards MBAs to the detriment of the engineers who actually build the product.

So a new model has emerged: cryptocurrency tokens. While ICOs are often scammy, for startups whose business model fits in the form of a currency, this is a better way to reward employees. Liquidity and actual ownership rights... and "vesting" is easy-- just issue them a fixed number per month.

He should get nothing until after all his victims are made whole— in bitcoin, not USD.

This is the attack vector that works on people who will never read Atlas Shrugged because they read a hit piece in Salon about Ayn Rand. This will keep them out of bitcoin, which I find kinda hilarious.

Most of the people on this site are hard left, and not very much into hacking... there are junior developers and wannabe CEOs with MBAs here. You're not going to find cypherpunks on hacker news, generally.

So, anything that fits the hard left agenda is promoted, without regard to its scientific or technical accuracy, even when it's against the startup ethos that created silicon valley in the first place.

The control of money is the way society is enslaved. He may not have a complex, but we are all being exploited.

Yes. The people who hate bitcoin -- despite all it does for them-- generally are hating it for political reasons.

They may hate sound money, they may worship at the alter of neo-keynsianism and think inflation is necessary (how else will you pay for bombing brown people?)

But they will use the "its anti-environment" claim because that has gotten traction.

We already have a massive global propaganda campaign spreading leftist views of the environment.

When bitcoin defeats these people, I will be very happy.

You think we should be blocked from donating to wikileaks?

You think venezuelans should be forced to use their local currency?

You think Zimbabwe's people should go thru hyper inflation again? They are about to, and bitcoin is booming there as an alternative.

Sorry, you seem to think you know better than other people what they should value and what they should do.

Bitcoin is completely voluntary, you don't like it, don't participate.

It's also not your energy getting spent.

At the risk of sounding like a libertarian: Other people are not your property.

You don't seem to realize that blocks can be up to 3.7mb for segwit transactions.

This whole issue has never been about block size- that's the lie they tell to try and take control.

It's all about governance and an attempt for the suits to take bitcoin away from the engineer meritocracy.

I understand that-- arguing with core people is sometimes frustrating-- but at the end of the day, core is doing a fantastic job.