It's hard to listen to recently, he's suggesting working out and eating vitamins instead of a vaccine. He still has an influence on people and he's spreading misinformation.
Rogan is against wearing masks but demands all of his guests to be tested for COVID-19 before going on his show which is kind of contradictory.
> This seems like a pretty flawed idea and an attempt to justify the incredible amount of electricity required by bitcoin.
It's not "required", it's only that high because it has so much success. Bitcoin would be working with only one miner running, the first blocks were minted on a private computer.
Sorry but that's BS, It absolutely requires the energy. If it would be running on a privet computer still then anyone with such a computer could double spend which would make it useless regardless of success.
That’s not the point, I didn’t say that it would be a good idea. The point is that it would work with just 100 or a 1000 miners if no one has 51% of computing power, hence the computing power is a consequence of Bitcoin’s success.
But you are wrong, it would absolutely not work.
The only way to make sure no one has 51% and no one can simply get 51% (buy cloud computing for example) is if the 51% is more than what feasibly can be bought or it would at least need to cost more than what you could gain from a double spend.
Also its about hash power not number of miners, that's completely irrelevant. 100 or 1000 miners that means nothing.
To put this in perspective, YouTube (243.6 tw/h) uses about double of Bitcoin's (124 tw/h) energy consumption, but there is no outrage about that. People care about the environment if it doesn't take away their comfort, airconditioning use is about 2000 tw/h globally, expected to triple in the next 30 years, some of the outrage on Bitcoin is being written in airconditioned rooms by people that drive combustion engine cars.
If you compare Bitcoin's environmental footprint to the whole financial system with air cooled offices around the world, with equipment, server rooms it doesn't come close.
A positive side of Bitcoin mining is that it's geographically independent and it can move to where they have too much energy which cannot be stored. In some cases the abundance of energy would be wasted through gas flaring which puts more CO2 into the atmosphere. Now they can get rid of their excessive energy and store it in the form of Bitcoin.
That's because this is a coordinated smear campaign that started shortly after US finance started signalling that they don't like BTC. I don't remember who it was. There was an official conference. Ever since then those BTC caused global warming are popping up every other day.
I guess the terrorists and drug cartels angle is dead since Elon has now btc.
How many people use YouTube and how many people currently own bitcoin? The difference is probably currently several orders of magnitude.
If Bitcoin truly does become the new money to which everyone benefits from, the price will probably go up by several orders of magnitude and so will the hashing power.
That's a straw man argument, you can't change the discussion of YouTube vs Bitcoin to rice fields vs private jets. If you have the freedom to view Bitcoin as an unnecessary luxury I can view YouTube in the same way. Why is no one talking about banning YouTube to save the environment? The price of Bitcoin is suggesting that people see merit in it's use and the hashing power is being used to keep the network safe. It can only be viewed as waste if the argument stands that Bitcoin is unnecessary and I would argue that it's very necessary and more efficient than the current financial system.
That was hard to read, it doesn't feel like someone who is mentally stable, clinging on to an idea he once had. Sometimes you have to listen to the world, adjust your ideas and move on, maybe he should have listened more to the world instead of expecting the world to listen to him.
I understand what you meant, and it makes sense to majority of people. However, I'd argue that the ones who actually change the world are those who do not listen or adapt to the world. This is true because in the end most of us adapt to whatever is given or presented to us by the world.
What I use to switch git identities is direnv (https://direnv.net/) which automatically loads specific config based on the dir that you are in. You can use it to switch AWS profiles, proxy settings, npm settings, maven settings, git configuration and so on.
To be honest, at the start of this epidemic it wasn't that clear how dangerous the virus was or how easily it would spread. First it happened to Wuhan and we all thought that it wouldn't happen to us, then it happened in Italy and we still thought that we would be fine.
Thinking that it won't happen to you won't make it go away unfortunately, your country isn't special, if no drastic measures are being taken like full quarantine this will happen to you too.
My country is in full lockdown and still a lot of people don't see the gravity of the situation. People dismissing it as less dangerous than influenza are misinformed.
This pretty much describes the approach Japan is taking. We’re special, it doesn’t apply to us, it won’t happen here. Deeply ignorant approach. I’ve got a family - including a mother-in-law with a pre-existing lung condition - to worry about.
How do you measure "less dangerous than influenza"? Honestly I think it is likely in some jurisdictions to be in the final analysis less dangerous (raw population wide deaths over the season) than influenza. But I think it's worth being cautious (and am contributing and setting an example by self-isolating), because there's a small but worrisome chance it's way worse than influenza.
Why is this important? Because if knowledge authorities go around talking about severity with scary talking points, and in the end, it doesn't turn out to be so, then we wind up in a "boy who cried wolf" situation next time.
They didn't include more information because they implemented the OpenID Connect specification which is awesome. That means that you can use any OIDC library and it will work for Apple, even verifying the keys. If you want to know more you should read up on OAuth2/OIDC/JWKS.
If we ever want Bitcoin to evolve from a store of value to an actual payment method we have to come up with something that does at least better than VISA's 8000tx/s and that's just not solved with going from 7tx/s to Bitcoin Cash's ~62tx/s. We have to be able to compete with every payment method out there and we should be able to handle peak throughput during sales period.
Another important factor is the 10 minutes confirmation time, nobody wants to wait for 10 minutes at the counter before they trust you walking out. We need something with instant verification and low fees and increasing the blocksize will never do that.
It exists. It is called nano: no fees and instant transactions through the block lattice. https://nano.org/en/whitepaper
I am surprised more folks on HN are not familiar with nano considering it is one of the few teams in crypto with endorsements from familiar faces: Zack Shapiro on the core team (ex-Product Hunt), Garry Tan (YC, angel investor in Coinbase), and Charlie Lee (former director of engineering @ Coinbase).
Nano / Raiblocks is a scam in the sense it is created for free, and old users need new users to dump their nano at a profit to new bag holders.
The initial distribution of XRB was performed through
"manual mining" limited via a captcha.
The distribution rate was
17 XRB (Raiblocks) per hour per ip4.
This method was easy to automate, and easy to bypass with the plethora of VPNs and users who own hundreds of IP4/IP6 addresses. Presumably the dev team has the vast majority, millions of Rai/Nano.
If we had a token either strictly or loosely tied to real-world identity, then I too would criticize the initial distribution. I would call for an airdrop that provides an equal allocation of a new currency to every identity token. I don't believe there currently exists a good way to do a universal airdrop. The counter argument to doing a universal airdrop is that all economic systems move towards inequality of outcome, so in due time, the initial distribution is meaningless.
ICO's that promise guaranteed returns are scams. Nano is an open source project that aims to give people an alternative to government currency. https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?q=raiblocks The most interest as measured by google search activity in the world for raiblocks/nano is in Venezuela; you'll find a similar pattern of top search results coming from countries where citizens are looking for alternative currencies -- Kosovo, Cyprus, Greece, etc -- with other useful cryptocurrencies.
disclaimer: I interviewed with the team back in January and turned down a contractor role but was impressed with their mission and roadmap.
It's funny to think of all the people getting into Bitcoin in 2018 thinking they're "getting in early" when the math behind Bitcoin granted those early users nearly the entire supply for pennies and anyone buying in recently or in the future will exchange real capital in exchange for these tokens generated for nearly 0 capital effort.
Measurably less CAPEX and OPEX for the first users to run the software "securing" the least important era of the network earned the greatest percentage of the supply?
Satoshi is even quoted as to the design of the ponzi like scheme:
Satoshi Nakamoto
Thu Jan 8 14:27:40 EST 2009
I made the proof-of-work difficulty ridiculously easy to
start with, so for a little while in the beginning a
typical PC will be able to generate coins in just a few
hours. It'll get a lot harder when competition makes the
automatic adjustment drive up the difficulty.
first 4 years: 10,500,000 coins
next 4 years: 5,250,000 coins
next 4 years: 2,625,000 coins
next 4 years: 1,312,500 coins
Only for early adopters who know they'll be able to exploit late adopters. Users clearly become incentivized to market their free tokens as an opportunity at wealth, as they exit and sell them to late bag holders.
Satoshi could easily have designed the PoW to distribute more slowly, and favor long term growth as more users join the network. Instead only early adopters control the supply. The risk of this is catastrophic.
One important point: if we actually include all 7 billion
people on the earth, most of whom have zero BTC or
Ethereum, the Gini coefficient is essentially 0.99+. And
if we just include all balances, we include many dust
balances which would again put the Gini coefficient at
0.99+. Thus, we need some kind of threshold here. The
imperfect threshold we picked was the Gini coefficient
among accounts with ≥185 BTC per address, and ≥2477 ETH
per address. So this is the distribution of ownership
among the Bitcoin and Ethereum rich with $500k as of July
2017.
In what kind of situation would a thresholded metric like
this be interesting? Perhaps in a scenario similar to the
ongoing IRS Coinbase issue, where the IRS is seeking
information on all holders with balances >$20,000.
Conceptualized in terms of an attack, a high Gini
coefficient would mean that a government would only need
to round up a few large holders in order to acquire a
large percentage of outstanding cryptocurrency — and with
it the ability to tank the price.
With that said, two points. First, while one would not
want a Gini coefficient of exactly 1.0 for BTC or ETH (as
then only one person would have all of the digital
currency, and no one would have an incentive to help boost
the network), in practice it appears that a very high
level of wealth centralization is still compatible with
the operation of a decentralized protocol. Second, as we
show below, we think the Nakamoto coefficient is a better
metric than the Gini coefficient for measuring holder
concentration in particular as it obviates the issue of
arbitrarily choosing a threshold.
...However, the maximum Gini coefficient has one obvious
issue: while a high value tracks with our intuitive notion
of a “more centralized” system, the fact that each Gini
coefficient is restricted to a 0–1 scale means that it
does not directly measure the number of individuals or
entities required to compromise a system.
Specifically, for a given blockchain suppose you have a
subsystem of exchanges with 1000 actors with a Gini
coefficient of 0.8, and another subsystem of 10 miners
with a Gini coefficient of 0.7. It may turn out that
compromising only 3 miners rather than 57 exchanges may be
sufficient to compromise this system, which would mean the
maximum Gini coefficient would have pointed to exchanges
rather than miners as the decentralization bottleneck.
Conversely, if one considers “number of distinct countries
with substantial mining capacity” an essential subsystem,
then the minimum Nakamoto coefficient for Bitcoin would
again be 1, as the compromise of China (in the sense of a
Chinese government crackdown on mining) would result in
>51% of mining being compromised.
Why do you have such a strong emotionally negative response to cryptocurrencies? It is pretty clear you are communicating disingenuously. The reasons for ending BTC support for many merchants and platforms were high fees and long tx confirmation times, which is what many altcoins have focused on addressing (eg Ether, Stellar, Litecoin, Nano)
Because most of the cryptocoin projects are designed as way to scam other users.
Why doesn't Nano Raiblocks allow more users to generate new Nano/Raiblocks? Would that hurt your investment if every user had equal access to the production of the supply?
Why are you so emotionally invested in trying to sell these beanie babies to other people? Is it because you need to profit off other buying into your scam?
Still no list of businesses accepting Nano/Raiblocks?
I am excited about the technology. I had taken a light look at the space 4-5 years ago and did not form a strong impression. I didn't take a look at the technology again until last September.
One of the topics I enjoyed deep diving on the most was the lightning network. The two pain points I observed for lightning were: (1) It takes a non-trivial amount of energy to understand hashed time lock contracts well enough to be able to prove the concept to yourself. Not having as easy mastery of a topic off the bat leads to feeling less secure about one's ability to reason about security. (2) The specter of rising on-chain fees for commitment transactions to open payment channels.
With regard to Nano, I was happy to see a different approach to the same problem that was more intuitive. I run a small business and am waiting for the desktop and mobile wallets to come out of beta before I offer the ability to pay with Nano.
I'd be happy if something came along that was better than Nano. I have it on my todo list to look into Byteball Bytes. I am optimistic about larger scale benefits that society will enjoy from the cryptocurrency space if certain projects are successful (eg improved ease of financial auditing, information-sharing platforms with strongly reduced odds of astroturfing, disappearance of credit card fees, increased financial transparency, reduced exchange fees when traveling, banking for the unbanked, etc). Since I am optimistic about the societal benefits from the space as a whole, I want to see more developers interested in getting involved.
It's a weird space. I see the general concept behind cryptocurrencies as bringing the same benefits you've outlined and from a technology and software perspective these projects are fascinating.
My contention with most of these projects and users is that in these specific implementations nearly every single one of the cryptocoin projects are designed to enable oligarchical wealth extraction from downstream investors - especially in the case of uninformed users/speculators who join the network later.
The question becomes of sustainability - if there's no underlying value to the asset and it relies on speculation and the supply is heavily centralized among a small pool of early adopters than there will likely be a point where buy pressure runs dry and most of the late adopters will be unable to exchange the same amount of wealth they traded into the system.
And Charlie Lee is a scam artist, so no surprises there.
In light of the downvotes with no response, here is some reasoning. He bought in at around $30, and the first thing he did was clone BTC with minor negligible modifications. Philosophically at that time, this shows a remarkable lack of commitment to the underlying goal. Then, during the recent boom he completely cashes out of his own project while the market cap shows nothing close to the transformative goal of the creation of Bitcoin. Ultimately what he does doesn't matter, but his actions speak louder than words. In addition, the tactics employed within Coinbase for the LTC listing and his involvement in a proof of stake coin leave me completely unsurprised. This isn't to say Nano has no merit, I congratulate the team there, but proof of stake, unfortunately, results in all rewards to creators and an unsatisfying amount of control among people where distribution was guaranteed for no "work".
Cognitive dissonance among Bitcoin minimalists is quiet amusing.
You think Bitcoin is good but fear Litecoin for creating a new alternative system?
You think deregulating into a anarcho-capitalist deflationary market is good, but then complain when someone does something you don't agree with?
but proof of stake, unfortunately, results in all rewards
to creators and an unsatisfying amount of control among
people where distribution was guaranteed for no "work".
Apparently you haven't bothered to look at how Bitcoin is created? The supply is generated in such a way that a small group of users spent minimal work (CAPEX+OPEX) to generate the majority of the supply. All "rewards" of the supply went to the smallest population of the world. Satoshi just created a new system for oligarchical wealth extraction.
Not quite. Your points are very valid, but you need to compare it with the current system. The new system of oligarchs comes with new constraints. The initial creators in some ways deserve to be significantly rewarded for such an innovation, as the new constraints are that supply is limited, thereby the rising tide lifts all boats of participants. Proof of Stake does this but takes away a significant randomness in distribution and guarantees that the majority is held initially by one authority - this is not guaranteed at all with POW, and if not premined, then even better.
Your other crticism of maximalists fearing an alternative, this is really just BS. I will gladly tell you (as many maximalists will) that Monero is actually better on most fronts that Bitcoin tries to win on. Scalability is really the only thing it leads on, and this is not out of the realms of possibility for Monero. So you can choose your oligarchs, and you can choose how they are constrained. Hopefully your community will grow such that you all benefit.
Nano and other non-linear/DAG chains are interesting, but it seems more difficult to reason about the consensus properties. Have any (neutral) 3rd parties done thorough analyses of them?
Devs said they are researching for a audit company currently, but there will be a major change in the protocol pretty soon, so I guess it will be done afterwards.
Endorsements and nifty tech are nothing without actual use.
Nano suffers from the same problem that 99.9% of cryptocurrencies suffer from: no useful information on how an average person might actually USE it.
Google brings various ways you can BUY Nano in order to speculate. I want to see real world usage, I want to buy VPN/Hosting/Alpaca Socks using Nano.
PS Nano is also 100% pre-mined which means one would have to investigate on who holds what percentages of these pre-mined coins. (case in point: Ripple)
Funny fact, there is a VPN provider accepting Nano, there are hosting providers accepting Nano, there is even a sport socket shop accepting Nano (sadly no Alpaca from what I know)
In regards to premine, yes it was premined, but because 95% were distributed by the captcha faucet, 5% went to the dev fund. Since the nano protocol does not need miners it was in my eyes a pretty good idea to get even non crypto people on board.
You do not see it because you likely fall outside of the demographic of cryptocurrency first users: businesses and citizens in countries facing hyperinflation, black markets, gambling, porn users seeking anonymity, legal pot businesses in the west cut-off from traditional banking in the west, legal porn businesses cut-off from traditional banking in the west.
Bear in mind there is a lag in adoption of the best technology. Just 4-5 months ago bitcoin was still the dominant currency on darknet markets, now it is monero.
See, I remember the huge growth in merchant adoption in 2013 for Bitcoin and how for a moment in time Bitcoin was useful as a currency. I actually used Bitcoin back then from my 2011 minings.
Now I agree that there is a niche for Monero in black markets.
Then there should be a huge opportunity for some crypto currency to take over Bitcoin in the role as a medium of exchange for general public.
Thus it really irks me that I am not seeing these supposedly revolutionary crypto currencies attempt to do anything useful.
Why doesn't any cryptocurrency focus on usability for a regular audience first?
No, but if you're someone who wants to see Bitcoin succeed then you probably don't want to use a scaling solution which only works if you assume Bitcoin will never achieve mainstream adoption.
Rogan is against wearing masks but demands all of his guests to be tested for COVID-19 before going on his show which is kind of contradictory.