skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
One thing I learned since learning about cryptocurrencies: NEVER trust "something you read somewhere". A lot of them are propaganda or people who have no idea how it actually works scratching the surface.

Do your own research if you're curious about it and don't want to feel left out. It's never too late to make an actual informed decision afterwards. I've seen so many otherwise intelligent people just keep dismissing Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies without even knowing how they actually work. Don't be those people.

Try to read some books about the actual technology that runs Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies and THEN make a decision whether you think it's a scam or not. Even if you think you think it's a scam or a bubble or whatever, at least then you'll be actually making an independent judgment on a new piece of technology that nobody--including the inventor him/herself--fully understands.
How does a government stop it? And if they could, could they also stop illegal file sharing in a similar way?
Be careful. There is evidence that certain parties are issuing fake dollars called USDT / Tether from which they buy cryptocoins (incl. BTC) to artificially increase the price:

https://mobile.twitter.com/bitfinexed (One of the people monitoring the situation)

https://np.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/7g5yml/my_investigation... (Some more info)

Make sure you are able to get out on time if needed. Investigate and decide for yourself. There is a lot of censoring and vote manipulation going on. I am not going to point fingers, but just that you are aware.
The only problem is that Satoshi's coins are watched like a hawk. Satoshi can't liquidate any of them, or even really move them without causing an immediate reaction in the community. Exchanges might halt trading, whilst it would immediately give away his or her identity. If the price of bitcoin doesn't crash following a coin movement, Satoshi's life is most certainly at risk. If it does, then the coins are worth nothing.
Because there's no reason for a democratic govt to shut it down. The only reason they would is to prevent capital flight (not to mention it's very hard to shut down in any case)
"The feds" can't just shut down whatever they want; there is a process.
If bitcoin wasn't good for transactions, then each block wouldn't be full of them. Maybe it's not so great for processing a country's volume of transactions because it hasn't scaled. Maybe it's not so great for small-fry transactions but those happen too... Online merchants often give you 24 hours to get your first verification. Your fees can be very low if you don't need your confirmation in the next ~10 minutes. (It will appear unconfirmed in the pool almost immediately.)
An interesting way to look at human thinking patterns. Is there any book on it?

I never completely figured out Aikido with it’s joint locks and levers. Maybe talented aikidokas have a grater capacity to visualize/fill this type of activity?
"Ordinary people globally understand why a decentralized asset is the ultimate safe haven."

Ordinary people have never heard of bitcoin. I have relatives working in finance who don't understand bitcoin.
A notable distinction is to be drawn between a personality (indefinite subject) and personality (adjective).
Christopher Alexander the architect? He's not a political theorist.
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But nowhere as impressive looking as a hockey stick graph.
That's the part that gets me. Bitcoin has scaling issues, is slow and transaction fees are outrageous. Still, I have no doubt some form of crypto-currency will eventually win out.
There's a deeper fish in the sea
Why would Satoshi's life be at risk?
Oh, I'm well aware of how Bitcoin works. All the way down to the cryptographic constructs.

I studied it for a while, and it lead me on to some more interesting topics, but the currency itself doesn't interest me.

Understanding Bitcoin to assess "whether it's a scam" makes about as much sense as learning about the mechanics of an electronic exchange to figure out whether it's a good idea to invest in Facebook.
I could imagine a number of reasons including

1. Crypto currency has potential that outweighs it's threat. Being able to transfer funds to people in other parts of the world is of interest to several government agencies. Perhaps crypto currency could help them do this better / more efficiently / whatever than today.

2. They will have to be extremely on top of the situation in order to be able to bring down a crypto currency.

3. Even if they kill one, three others will rise to take the place that it had.

That being said, I guess they could just ban crypto currency and perhaps most people would comply and the ones that were angered couldn't do much else than to watch it crumble.
Yes, military glow sticks use the same basic chemistry: hydrogen peroxide, diphenyl oxalate or analogs, various excitable dyes that actually produce the different colors.
I've been following Ben Thompson for a few years. His comments are usually insightful on both his blog and podcast.

He has a different advertising model. He has one advertised at a time. His last advertiser MailChimp sponsored the podcast for an entire year.

He also has a decently popular paid email newsletter. The only time he spoke about the number of subscribers was about two years ago and he had a little over 2000 then paying $100 a night.

He's worked at Microsoft and Apple.
I think zeep actually just means "this time the price is actually $10k", not "now bitcoin is legitimate"
I like your username, lol.

You are right though and I am being a little sarcastic on purpose. People have argued that Gold has real intrinsic value which it does have its uses but no more or no less than any other important precious metal we use.
I'm sorry, but I'm not seeing where in that list says it is looking for arbitrage opportunities. What you quoted is just the list of restrictions on the kinds of investments the fund can make. The "targets" part, which you didn't quote, says the returns should attempt to follow the USD. And it seems to be working: the total return over 5 years was 73.92%, while the USD over 5 years increased 73.95%. That is, had I bought USD 5 years ago and sold it now, the return should be about the same as that fund. Which is the point: it's simpler to invest on that fund (or others like it) than to buy USD directly.
Disclaimer: I do own BTC.

But I really can’t see how this is not just an instrument for some people to get very rich in a very short amount of time on the back of others.

Can it reach 100k? Absolutely. 1M? Who knows. 10M/BTC? Someone on Reddit said it will get close. But in the end I do think it will be remembered as a global mania instead of the creation of a new asset class.

I do believe in block chain and the value of crypto currency in general, but I just don’t see how BTC will be the winning asset in the end, if anything Etherum has a lot more solid foundation and is a lot more scalable technically.
You hit the nail on the head. I think if Bitcoin had started out with the private and untraceable transactions from ZCash or Monero, governments would have banned it long ago. I still expect ZCash and Monero to be banned eventually. Bitcoin is actually much less private and more traceable than cash, and so governments seem willing to tolerate it. (Though China did ban it...)
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Just don't call sys::stack_overflow::exploit(); and you will be fine.
I just wanted to point out that you essentially want a way to avoid laws you consider unjust.

The price, of course, is that the 1% pay 10% less tax.
>
Bitcoin is not even good for transactions, its supposed primary purpose, right now.

How so? I buy lunch with Bitcoin and a few weeks ago I paid for a car repair with it. If I need more, I just
go to a bitcoin vending machine near by.
I agree, but with this system you'd still need to update all the "implicit" blocks (which surround every function which passes on the implicit argument) to add the new flag. I'd love to see something closer to full dynamic scope, where you don't even need the "implicit" blocks.
It's considered to be beautiful because it's expensive and valued. The causation is in the other direction than most people think when it comes to gold and beauty.

It's the same with expensive paintings. A painting is considered to be beautiful (some are actually ugly) and have some deep meaning only after it's sold for a lot of money.
I think one big reason is that regulators don't want the US to miss out on a large wave of value creation. If Bitcoin becomes a mainstream currency, it could be a very good thing for the US. If US citizens own a large amount of the BTC in circulation that could lead to more investment in the US economy and a larger tax base.

Beyond Bitcoin, if crypto tokens begin to supplant public stocks (which I'm not saying they will), it would be incredibly foolish to cut off US citizens from those markets
This is nonsense. This is being driven by speculation / minuscule interest rates / greed. Very little of the demand for btc in the past year is due to lack of faith in institutions.
> Why has the government taken such a hands off approach?

Because it's something like win-win-win for them?

1. They don't stifle a new technology for no reason.

2. They can always regulate it later, with the added bonus that they'll be able to stick a bunch of people they want to investigate with non-compliance charges for failing to register at the appropriate time. Similarly, how many people do you think are doing their taxes right on BTC? Easy arbitrary audit material if you can ever link their accounts.

3. I'm not sure the government is opposed to digital money that leaves an immutable, public record of cryptographic witnesses to transactions. The pseudo-anonymity isn't worth much against a pervasive global adversary watching all the pipes. They link the BTC to your actions, the keys to your machine, and you may as well have signed a confession.

So there's little incentive to act quickly and lots of incentive to give the radicals into BTC a chance to slip up on OPSEC.
Where in the CFR does it say you have to use physical servers or even dedicated cloud instances? AWS will sign a BAA for dedicated instances only (biz policy, not for any valid security reason), but dedicated servers are not required by HIPAA.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1lfobc/i_am_a_time...
I don't follow. By themselves means? If he wants a billion dollars he still needs someone to trade it from somebody willing to trade with Bitcoin. How is that different from Bill Gates?
As another poster noted, you forgot (4) Bitcoin in its current form has a ton of potential for surveillance and supervision.
When Amazon first got started, Walmart wouldn't have had to buy ecommerce traffic - everyone back then was spending millions of dollars to appear on AOL and Yahoo.

Even now, the ISPs aren't the companies that businesses have to worry about. Most small internet based businesses are far more beholden to Facebook, Google, Amazon, or Apple for their livelihood.
Our government is closer to a plutocracy than a democracy, and look at what happened to other people that kicked out central banks (Gadaffi, Sadam, Hitler).

The Fed swelled their balance sheet to 4.5trillion to bail out the banks. They can just electronically create money out of thin air. Everyone has a price, and when you have ultimate power you're in denial of 95%++ of people's human nature if you don't believe that power does not corrupt.
This doesn't make sense. You don't get anything for the company performing economic activity. The price of a (non-dividend-paying) stock is set strictly by supply and demand. You only get anything when you sell.. i.e. when someone is willing to pay you more than what you paid for your share.
Is that the right way to value Bitcoin? What explains the difference in price between Bitcoin and other coins?
Why Trains are so Expensive
They ban exchanging Bitcoin for fiat currencies, which completely disconnects Bitcoin from the traditional financial system. Underground and in-person exchanges would continue but at much lower volumes with higher friction and fees, and the value of Bitcoin would crash.

This is diffrerent from file sharing because file sharing does not need a connection to the traditional financial system to be useful for most people.
> In Rust, a boxed pointer sometimes includes an extra word (a “vtable pointer”) and sometimes don’t. It depends on whether the T in Box<T> is a type or a trait. Don’t ask me more, I do not know more.

For those wanting to know more about this, the idea is that types whose size is unknown at compile-time receive this two-word representation. I tend to refer to these as "fat pointers", which is terminology from Cyclone (though Cyclone's fat pointers serve a different purpose). More documentation on these can be found at https://doc.rust-lang.org/beta/nomicon/exotic-sizes.html#dyn... and in the section in the book on slices (terminology taken from Go, whose slices are similar though with an extra word) https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/second-edition/ch04-03-slices...
Where did you do this? None of the local businesses (Bellevue WA) take bitcoin that I can tell, and it is populated by lots of techies.
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It's theorised they have ~1m bitcoins, at 10k each that's a 10 billion net-worth.

Presumably that's enough for people to want to hunt them down and coerce them into giving up private keys

https://bitslog.wordpress.com/2013/04/17/the-well-deserved-f...
I wonder how many tulips you can buy with a bitcoin?
The sales periods are two times in the year. These periods are pretty long (6 weeks?).

There are exceptions for perishable goods and for products that have been rendered obsolete due to technological progress. I think there are some other force majeure exceptions.

It's a bit stifling, but it means that huge retailers can't destroy smaller businesses just due to their huge capital reserves. It helps to preserve competition in the retailing space. And worst case you just have to handle it for a couple of months.
The reason the URL parser work is taking long is not because it's complex, rather it's because it's stalled. URL parsing is complex, however all this complexity was already dealt with when the Servo team wrote the rust-url crate ages ago, so it's not a factor here.

The URL parser integration was a proof of concept. It doesn't really improve stuff (aside from a slight security benefit from using Rust) so there wasn't pressure to land it; it was just a way of trying out the then-new Rust integration infra, and inspiring better Rust integration infra.

One of the folks on the network team started it, and I joined in later. But that person got busy and I started working on Stylo. So that code exists, and it works, but there's still work to be done to enable it, and not much impetus to do this work.

This work is mostly:

- Ferreting out where Gecko and Servo don't match so that we can pass all tests. We've done most of this already, whatever's left is Gecko not matching the spec, and we need to figure out how we want to fix that.

- Performance -- In the integration we currently do some stupid stuff wrt serialization and other things; because it was a proof of concept. This will need to be polished up so we don't regress

- Telemetry -- before shipping we need to ship it to nightly in parallel with the existing one and figure out how often there's a mismatch with the normal parser

It's not much work, but everyone is busy.
Isn't each transaction costing you a few dollars?
Totally. We can add things like million dollar paintings such as this one https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barnett_Newman#/media/File%3... and expensive old postal stamps to that list.
I connected to the internet with a 14.4k modem and I'm connected to fiber today. Bitcoin is in its infancy. It's a matter of time until it reaches the levels we require for handling all the transactions that we want to happen.
Aren't the transaction fees now measured in dollars?*
You're paying $10 for lunch and $5 in miner fees. That's not practical.

* https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/bitcoin-transactionfees...
This is the story that's missing here. When one of the major exchanges is starting to look insolvent and USDT is getting scarier and scarier by the day, a flight from USDT into Bitcoin is not surprising...
> I hope we can start seeing WebAssembly-pluggable codecs in all of the video/audio paths in the browser.

Oh great, one more thing to help ad networks to crank CPU usage of my browser to the extremes. Hope I'll be able to also disable that through about:config. :/
There is no such implication. Yes, if golf were cheaper, it would be used more often in electronics, and because not much of it is essential, users of gold for productive purposes can get by with higher prices. However, gold’s price is driven 100% by its use as a speculative fiat store of value, not for its utility or even for its ornamental use.
It’s good for anonymous worldwide transactions. It has proven itself there and there will always be some demand for that.
How do you transfer Bitcoin into fiat currency? There was a Bitcoin ATM in Portland, OR a while back but I'm not sure how it worked and haven't really heard of other ways to liquidate BTC.
In this particular case, I am grateful for the early disclosure that I can fix it right now instead of waiting. For a huge bomb like this, I think you really can't blame the messenger.
> Still, I wonder if there is still a place for MDI that we are missing out on because it is out of style.

Image editing is the obvious example. Most image editors use tabs and this is annoying because you often want to have multiple images visible at the same time - especially when you are painting something and want to have references or have a palette in a separate window that you pick colors from. Also it is useful to have two or more views of the same image in different zoom levels visible at the same time (some applications provide a special case for this, but really is just a hack for not having true MDI).

FWIW Krita has a MDI mode, although it implements the functionality itself (well, Qt does it, but that is details) and it is sub-par to the native functionality (e.g. when moving or resizing windows you always get an outline like in Win3.1 instead of having the window follow the mouse).

Another example is chat programs - i always loved how i could tile multiple channel windows in mIRC, for example (all other - graphical - IRC clients i've used over the years only allow a single channel to be visible).

Text editors are sometimes good, although this probably needs to be paired with a tabbed interface. But over the last few years i actually ended up using an old C compiler (Borland C... well, it also does C++ but i don't use that :-P), partly because of its compilation speed but also because i like the MDI interface [1] (although i dislike the ugly Vista theme... i think one of the reasons people stopped using MDI is because of how ugly the theme looks and how big and wasteful the window borders are) because i can overlap and move windows around.

Generally speaking i think whenever you want to have multiple views visible at the same time in a program with some elements of the program always visible (e.g. a toolbar, a property editor, etc), MDI is helpful. Docked and tabbed interfaces very often end up with elements being stretched and/or jumbled and forced to align with each other.

Of course some of that stuff could also be done with virtual desktops, but often it is useful to be able to take the entire "window group" and move it around in the screen or minimize it. Some window managers allow you to do such things though (e.g. in Window Maker - my favorite window manager - you can hide all the windows of a program in one go, select a bunch of windows and move them to different virtual desktops with the mouse wheel and move them around as a group).

Interestingly Mac OS X solves some of that by using the global menu bar as the static always-there element and the auto-hiding inspectors. Or at least did until some years ago, some of Apple's newer apps go for the docked panel approach whereas previously it would be a floating inspector.

[1] https://i.imgur.com/SPJKrjE.png
Does it include DRM?
Make it illegal and pursue legal action against anybody who allows you to ACH them money.

Hilariously, this is the type of censorship that bitcoin solves.
Thanks for the pointers and insightful comments!
I don't have any answers for you, but it's worth noting that Moz worked around the JS speed limitations with bespoke C++ via XPCOM.
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Let me try to make the case for why Bitcoin could be a useful beyond greed.

I can't really think of many reasons why you would use crypto to pay for a coffee or a sandwich if you live in the West (or frankly, even most developing nations).

On the other hand, I can definitely see the utility in a censorship-resistant digital medium to store wealth. To me, this latter use case has much, much more potential to serve the unbanked (as well as the banked).

Some use cases I can think off the top of my head:

(1) You are from Syria and need to flee war and escape into Europe – however bank transfers into Europe are almost impossible if you are a common Syrian. Bitcoin allows you to take your wealth with you, in your brain, as you escape across the border, by just memorising your twelve word private key.

(2) You are from Venezuela or Zimbabwe – The government has issued capital controls and is devaluing currency by the day. You transfer your wealth into Bitcoin in order to offset capital erosion due to hyper-inflation. When the situation stabilises, you transfer your Bitcoin back into fiat.

(3) You are Saudi billionaire Al-Waleed bin Talal. The government freezes all your assets in a political coup. If you have a portion of your wealth in Bitcoin, you could protect them from government expropriation and anonymously transfer them to associates or family members abroad.

(4) You are whistleblower Julian Assance and have been cut off from the financial system as a way to censor your speech. Bitcoin allows you to have an unbreakable digital "Swiss bank account" that the authorities are not able to reach.

This reminds me of Peter Thiel's recent words about Bitcoin [1]: "it's like a reserve form of money, it's like gold, and it's just a store of value. You don't need to use it to make payments."

Reference: [1] https://www.coindesk.com/peter-thiel-bitcoin-like-reserve-fo...
> to actually make a transaction on the blockchain

On which blockchain, exactly? On the Ethereum Mainnet you can transact for a fraction of a cent USD and it'll typically be verified (mined into a block) within a minute (often faster).

On the Bitcoin chain you choose your own transaction fee, but if you're not keeping up with market rates your transaction might take quite a long time to be verified (again, mined into a block).
Sure, that's how it started. But as the adoption increases and price skyrockets, more people will understand the value of the concept of decentralization.
Since it isn't exactly easy to send emails securely, I think this piece of advice may need some more work.

The PGP key is available here: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201214

I wonder what percentage of emails to security@... (apple.com or otherwise) are sent encrypted...
Errrrr.... Bitcoin is a fiat currency, so be careful with your generalization.

And whose job is it to investigate bitcoin fraud and theft? No one.
Satoshi is almost certainly dead. No living person could resist the temptation to talk about their creation of a 100 billion dollar phenomenon. Two plausible candidates who died at about the right time are Hal Finney and Dave Kleiman.
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For stuff like cocaine and porn maybe. I can't buy a cheeseburger or pay my rent with it.