skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
But that’s not it use anymore. Yes it was called a Peer to Peer cash system but it failed at that. Somewhere around 2013 the narrative shifted to it being a store of value. And that has stuck.

It is the ultimate store of value.

You think people will let governments destroy their store of value so that the world can use electricity for other uses? Let’s explore that shall we.

One third of the world farmland is desertified, today.

Insects are dwindling and other species are experiencing an extinction on unprecedented scales today.

Fossil fuels are being extracted at rates that are not stopping anytime soon. We never switched to electric cars yet.

We couldn’t even switch to biodegradeable plastic and instead polluted all the bodies of water on earth.

You really think humanity will be able to stop this runaway economic effect designed to get bigger and bigger until it consumes the world’s use of electricity? Why is this any different?

PS: with exponential growth, by the time you note the electric use is one quarter of the world, it’s too late.
I should have explained the "BS" part at the beginning of my comment in a different way.

I think that comparing Bitcoin energy consumption with a country (it used to be Chile, now Argentina), while technically correct, misses the big picture.

I also avoided a discussion on the true cost of having a global currency like the US$, which one might argue pollutes far more (military, etc).
Yeah, see how in the article, the guy is planning to 'spend his next 1-2 weeks fighting this case' instead of giving Amazon the ultimatum that if they don't fix this quickly, he's going to take his business elsewhere !
That's a non-issue.
The code is simple, but don't overlook the level of effort in producing the, yes, hand-drawn, images that all align with their neighbors in a weird way.
The last years were the strongest indicator that bitcoin will not become any kind of usable currency. Seeing that it is as volatile as ever I'm honestly not sure what bitcoin can even still become except yet another abstract plaything to "invest" (bet) money on, the very thing it has been for a while now.

Also while it is decentralized, the reality of how it is used is very much not. The typical use case is buying and selling it via an exchange, not much else. Depending on where you live you have to reveal more information about yourself to "just buy bitcoin" than you have to when opening a bank account.
If you've seen the PGP/GPG code you'll know what a trash fire it is, and if you follow its development you'll see how unfriendly the maintainers are when bugs are pointed out.

Adding dependencies on PGP just makes everything worse.

X.509 PKI for code signing is also terrible and very very complicated and error prone.

Also consider the community nature of development. You need to handle all sorts of painful crypto issues now.
Not only small companies do, but big ones, too: https://2020.stateofthemap.org/sessions/SPRQVZ/
For large transactions.

Small transactions can be done on sidechains and other chains.
Fight the bitcoin climate crisis:
https://senatusspqr.medium.com/fight-the-climate-crisis-usen...
You are right in your intuition that government and science are not the same thing. Politics deals with power and subjective perception of values. Safety versus liberty is not something you can prove one way or the other, different people have different expectations from society and we try to develop political and leadership systems that account for those preferences.

When you go overboard is using politics to decide on issues other than values. For example, we have widely decided that poisoning people is bad. Some amount of harm is inevitable in the real world, and we have set (purely political) limits on acceptable risk, say, one in a million that you get cancer.

Once that value decision is made, the job of politics stops, 1 in a million cancer risk from Asbestos is the same as 1 in a million from second hand cigarette smoke. It's irrelevant how many people work in the cigarette industry, it's importance to the GPD, how well connected politically are the cigarette manufacturers etc. The risk becomes a pure scientific fact that is not amenable to political negotiations.
The reason Proof of work is set apart from its POS clones is because the inflation/emission brought to market every day has real costs to obtain... Fiat being printed cost 1% of its nominal value to create, which is devaluing every single dollar already in existence, POW psychologically adds more value to existing coins, because each new coin cost even more to mine than the one before it.
It's going to take some pretty big balls to dump your money into bitcoin instead of gold or cash the next time the stock market crashes. Then we'll see how good a store of value it is.
Yes I meant on a cost basis. Renewables do throw a wrench into it of course.
I was trying to buy a Nintendo Switch yesterday here in the UK, and it said 'Sold by Amazon' and 'Dispatched by Amazon' for the one I chose. So then I clicked that item, went through to the checkout and it said "Sold by Mila AG".

I'm a technically proficient developer who's very careful about where I spend money online. If you're not very internet savvy, it'd have been really easy to miss that. In the end I've ordered from a national chain retailer which are doing click and collect nearby.
Isn’t that the point of Corda?
No it doesn't, since the primary purpose of mining is processing transactions, not creating new bitcoins. The created bitcoins are merely an incentive to mine.
I use it as a currency for years.

Especially for large transactions internationally, where my bank asks me+the other party to fees like $30 and it takes 3 days if everything goes well.

In comparison with that, BTC for those years, gave me on average 40 minutes and $1 fee.

This is thirty times better than what my bank provides.
I want Banks and Regulators involved when I buy a house. I understand that these 3rd parties can make things take longer or add extra fees, but that gives me legal protections I don't get with bitcoin.
Wild scenario and a good play by TikTok. Defend and stall until a favorable politician takes power.
Debugging Go in Vim
It's volatile because it is exposed to a fuckton of markets, but 1btc will always be 1btc.
People don’t want conversations about Bitcoin, they want to defend their financial positions.
"the value of mining rewards is only going to continue rising" is not consistent with the design of Bitcoin. There is a finite number of BTC left to mine (15% of the eventual total?) and the amount of BTC received from mining is designed to halve every four years, so in the long run BTC processing will have to be funded more by transaction costs and less so by mining.

"How would governments even begin to stop it" - I don't thing that governments will choose to try it, but if they did want to do so, a simple ban on all sale and barter in BTC would work. It wouldn't stop all trade, but making exits difficult would reduce investment interest sufficiently to get a huge decrease in price, especially since current price seems mostly defined by "store of value" i.e. investment arguments, not based on usefulness for transactions. If many investors can't exit, then it ceases to be a good store of value for them, reducing the demand.

For example, Tesla $1.5B purchase was a big pressure upwards; but if it's known that no such purchases are ever coming again, and that Tesla's holding is now worthless (unlike some small-scale drug trader, a US company like Tesla can't really use a black market or person-to-person transactions to exhange it for anything), that would kill the short-term price; this would mean that the mining costs much more than their electricity costs (there is an inherent lag in block difficulty adjustments that's potentially huge in case of a rapid slowdown in mining rate) which may cause many miners to cease mining.
These either weren't available at all in 2000 or very new and much harder to set up. You need to consider the state of things 20 years ago, not how they are today.
There might be some concerns (eg. "wow gold mining is dirty, we should do something about it"), but I personally haven't seen anything close to "we should ban gold".
Did people directly add permissions to CA on their accounts? I got the impression they were mislead and wanted to add some different applications with different features.

An app to help you find out "which Game of Thrones characters you and your friends are" can arbitrarily claim those data points, and then use them to discover which Game or Thrones character you and your friends are. On that case, even storing the data looks like a violation, even more sharing it with anyone.
Money is a speculative asset.
Unity has a c# scripting api, layered on the core c++ foundation. Unreal, on the hand, is C++ top and bottom.
> I'd rather not have it on my system because it's just extra bytes used up on my disk

I'm assuming you're talking about your development system/workstation.

Why would 2MB matter? It has no dependencies that aren't installed by default in every distro.
If I understand the system correctly, the vast majority of bitcoin energy consumption comes from the mining process, which is not strictly required (at least not anymore, with 18+ million BTC now mined and in circulation). I can spin up the bitcoin software on my home PC to participate in the network, sending and receiving bitcoin, and confirming some transactions, and the power consumed would be low. Much less than running a 4k graphics 3D game.

Because of that, banning bitcoin ownership and trading seems to be overkill or missing the point... Just regulate/limit mining, or even better put a capacity on electricity usage or have tiers where the more you use, the more expensive it is, making mining not worth it after a certain point.

All that said, government regulation will be extremely challenging here as it would require cooperation of nearly every country on Earth, and we've seen how difficult that is.
I've been doing this in a personal project. I ended up settling on ts-node as the fix -https://www.npmjs.com/package/ts-node

Frankly - it does pretty much everything I want it to. I can write code in Typescript and have it feel like there's no build step at all.

I can use ESM everywhere - frontend, backend, buildscripts, random tasks, etc - and have no problems.

That said - It's not a legacy codebase, and it's only getting hobby level usage (currently serving a few requests a second), so there might be hurdles I'm just not hitting.
Nano coin is the answer
Calculate the Cost of Your Technical Debt
In the spirit of actually answering your question, first let’s just say that complaining about critics treating something named BitCOIN by its creators and something that has been promoted as an alternate currency from its creators to at least a decade of its supporters as a currency (Its the top cryptoCURRENCY) as currency is unfair to say the least.

The whole shift of calling it a store of value as opposed to currency that Bitcoin supporters have started over the past couple of years is very clearly a post hoc justification for its existence.

The problem, however, is that BTC isn’t even a very good store of value. Golds pricing has never collapsed 10x over the matter of months and nor has it risen 5-10x over the matter of months. As a result BTC isn’t even a very good store of value.

It’s currently, at best, a pure speculative asset. It’s like the GME trading from a week ago taken to its logical extreme. A speculative asset that has no relationship to its underlying fundamentals. Much like how GME’s price was completely divorced from any fundamentals of the company, BTC is like saying let’s do that thing, but why even bother with tethering GME the stock to an underlying company. Let it just exist on its own.

That’s what BTC is at the moment. GME if GameStop didn’t exist.
Game: Test Your Reactions (CSS and JavaScript) [YouTube Live]
Bitcoin is useful for evading the law, but of course there had a host of other issues and risks.
I teach and one of my students, with little IT experience, asked me last week about the security of package management. I found myself using the many eyeballs argument. It only takes one set of bad eyeballs.

It seems to me that down through the years ease of deployment trumps security. npm, mongodb, redis, k8s.

Or maybe sysadmin has just become outdated? Maybe front of house still needs a grumpy caretaker rather than your friendly devops with a foot in both camps.

We can now even outsource our security to some impersonal third-party so they can 'not' monitor our logs.

EOG # end of grump
It's a compromise between spacious living quarters (Feng Shui), and a cinematic experience when watching the TV.
Only turning on miners when electricity is cheap lowers your ROI.
I don't think this will work out for several reasons:

1) Peak power usage is when people are awake - this is when you want transactions to happen.

2) This wouldn't reduce the need of peak plants, since you aren't generating power when mining for bitcoin. How would increasing overall energy consumption require less energy generation? If renewables could ramp up/down quickly and not be dependent on external factors - that would remove the need for current peak plants - which is usually nat gas.
A transaction takes ~10 minutes, to ensure that the block which the transaction is included in isn't orphaned some services institute a 6 block waiting period to ensure the transaction is stable. Should the block be orphaned, the transaction will re-enter the mempool on all hosts who'd confirmed the block and should be included in a subsequent block.

The transaction cost depends on the size of the transaction and the congestion in the mempool, the cost can be set by any sender depending on the urgency of the transaction.
England lost 80% oft their forest to industrialization before fossil fuel came up.
If something ever overtakes Bitcoin in the same way that Facebook overtook MySpace it’ll disprove the entire Bitcoin thesis. Currencies have to be stable. I expect a winner take all scenario here and Bitcoin to be that winner.
And who is gonna foot the bill for the mining?
I used Pandoc for the PDF; the links don't work because it's a sample. They work in the real book.

About selling myself short: you're probably right. I'm struggling with imposter syndrome, like many, so I've a tendency to do that. At the same time, I'm trying to be honest and I don't want to deceive people.
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Just because it is used for other reasons doesn't mean it can't be used to fuck with repairers too. Apple has a long history of doing just that. I take it you are not a fan of Louis Rossmann?

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCl2mFZoRqjw_ELax4Yisf6w
What’s your opinion on Corda? It has a different view on trust, than other cryptos (and it is not even crypto if we are being pedantic)
Bitcoin mining is resistive heating using semiconductors as the heating element.
I've come to the conclusion that economically cryptocurrencies are like art works. In the same way that Tracy Emin's bed can be valued as art if sold in the right way so can Dogecoin be valued. It's a function of fame and perceptions. In the same way that well known artworks have remained valued for centuries, some crypto may endure.
> Not really sure what’s point is for Tesla

Speculation and free marketing I expect
You are one for three.
https://archive.vn/Oh4Zh
It's a lack of consideration for tradition. nano is spelt all lowercase, and starts sentences a lot; I think it'd be harder to read if sentences alternated between initial capital and initial miniscule.
Poor people don't. Many rich people do.
But it doesn't have any value. Except that some people think it has. In times of truly global trouble, nobody will accept bitcoins as payment for bread.
Better lawyers would advise you to keep your nose clean so you didn't need to devote as much budget to paying them.
This works just fine in Node.js 14.15:

// test2.mjs
console.log("works!");

// test.mjs
const m = "./test2.mjs";

import(m)
Eventually my brain turned off the zoom effect and switched to the feeling I was flyin/floating down a path. It felt more like forward motion. Weird but cool!
Setting up a project that could either be bundled with webpack et-al, or simply hosted direct on GitHub proved tricky!
I'm not an expert, but I've got the impression the dying out of the samurai class was pretty much because they weren't really needed any more, and such a special class wasn't really in line with the modernization and westernization efforts that were being made in Japan at the time.

Of course any endeavour can meet an early end due to carelessness or because of not stopping and considering whether what you're doing is actually a good idea. But carelessness would probably not have been held in high regard by the samurai, and I generally fail to see a simple connection between to the samurai class becoming outdated and a preference for "quick" thinking.
This is built on top of a tool that is highly unreliable at speeds over ~100Mbps. Data: https://web.archive.org/web/20201014061733/https://github.co...

I would highly advise using the official speedtest.net CLI.

The dev of speedtest-cli nuked the issues page of his repo due to complaints about this, and refuses to acknowledge it, leading to people using this tool without understanding its limitations.
Bitcoin has a halving mechanism, every 4 years the rate of new BTC mined drops by half, so that BTC will take over a century to actually reach 21 million (2140).
Cool idea. I wonder if the effect(s) could be achieved solely with CSS?

edit: the page says the transforms are done locally, but maybe you could also offer a hosted API so screenshots can be replaced automatically.
http://archive.is/iGTj1
The funny thing is that there is 117x more Bitcoin on Layer 2 ETH in WBTC[1] than in the lighting network[2].

$5,793,513,475.00 // WBTC (Bitcoin on Ethereum)
$49,173,964.59 // Lightning

[1] - https://wbtc.network/dashboard/order-book

[2] - https://1ml.com/statistics
Aliens Cause Global Warming
If only Nano had first-mover advantage! I'm rooting for it though, it's everything BTC should have been.
If you know what Vim is called, yes.
The example is not just destructuring though. It's actually matching against a data constructor and in another branch binding a name to a value. Those are classic hallmarks of pattern matching.
You don't understand the system correctly. Mining bitcoins is also confirming transactions, which is the sending and receiving of bitcoins. Yes you could use your home PC but you would never find a block and so never confirm a transaction.
Mining Bitcoin is a necessity if you want to transact, so you can't eliminate it. Basically, validating transactions is very costly, so people doing it get rewarded with "mined" bitcoin.

If miners stop mining, you cannot transact in it, at least with the current "proof of work" approach. There are some alternatives, like proof of stake, but they are not mainstream yet.
>VISA handles $30B/day
>Mastercard handles $11B/day
>Bitcoin handles $10B/day

Impressed. I didn't know Bitcoin transactions accounted for such huge volume almost as large as MasterCard. I use MC almost every day for almost everything. Is there people like, entirely living with BTC?
Although I am not a fan of cryptocurrency popularity (mainly because of the potential to destabilize the macro economy), and I don't know much about this company: https://qarnot.com/en/home/, but I find they have a great name suggestive of thermodynamically optimal computing, Carnot being the father of thermodynamic efficiency. Carnot came up with thermodynamics to optimize steam engines, maybe making him the most steampunk of scientists. Thermodynamically optimizing bits is an echo of that for the cyberpunk age.
I could think of several reasons why regulation would not be a good idea. Cutting into pieces? Maybe, but how would you cut pieces of FB or Amazon that credibly resolve the problem? Remember that lobbying for antitrust splits will be pursued by someone with enough political ambition to offset the pressure in a long run. What would be their benefit?

For now I think that voting with your feet is still a recourse, complemented by vocal messages on social media to maximize hit-back.
tldnr is that Rust guides the programmer only halfway to the solid engineering solution, the programmer is on their own to make the arena solution safe.

its a pedantic nitpick, as is his way. also keep in mind that of late Blows focus has been single player video games made by very small very talented teams. A domain where the benefits of Rust are very small, possibly even a net loss compared to the fast compiling language they use now.
Will anyone criminalise the US army because they use lots of energy? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_usage_of_the_United_Sta...

The answer: they might try, but good luck with that.
The Right-Sizing Problem in Cloud Computing: Reasons and Solution
> "There shouldn't be a problem if you disable the collection of IDFA"

Exactly. I hope this is true as this is exactly what I'm planning to do.
It doesn't. Bitcoins themselves will eventually be migrated of the bitcoin network so that they can be used with the rest of the defi ecosystem.
yeah, but also a usable currency
The mining process is _how_ transactions are verified and recorded. Bitcoin doesn't work without it. Mining is a misnomer. You aren't finding bitcoin. It's a reward for solving a problem that proves you participated in helping record transactions for the network.
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The fuck? It is an in house design and hase three USB-C ports, two USB-A ports, all connected through a USB 3.2 Gen 2 hub
> If citizens are not allowed to carry guns, that default assumption changes.

I am not sure this is entirely correct. Generally speaking, law-abiding citizens are not the ones that police have to worry about anyway (regardless of if they are carrying guns). Citizens that are not law-abiding (criminals), on the other hand, are the people that police generally need to be concerned about. It does not seem like a great idea to assume these people are not armed simply because they "are not allowed to carry guns."

Admittedly, the absolute saturation of American culture with guns is not making the cop's jobs any easier, but the answer to these problems is way more complicated than disarming law-abiding citizens.
Actually, the opposite. Call me an old crank but I feel like Python should stay Python and not try to (badly) tack on ideas from ML.
For many BTC enthusiasts the store of value narrative has been in place for a very long time.

“I see Bitcoin as ultimately becoming a reserve currency for banks, playing much the same role as gold did in the early days of banking. Banks could issue digital cash with greater anonymity and lighter weight, more efficient transactions.” - Hal Finney (2010)
There is no problem, energy is "free", but still, the source of the electricity should always be a concern not just for bitcoin but for everything. Nuclear, solar, wind? good. Hydro, natural gas? less good but ok for now. Carbon, oil? we need to replace those plants asap.

Bitcoin or anything really should be allowed to use however much energy it is economically feasible. The real question is, why is there no better use for that electricity than to compute numbers? How our economies became so stagnant the best return for capital investment is bitcoin?
> Just regulate/limit mining, or even better put a capacity on electricity usage or have tiers where the more you use, the more expensive it is, making mining not worth it after a certain point.

Isn't that the exact method used, electricity is metered, the more you use, the more expensive it is.

Yes it drives up the price for everyone else because there's demand, but by that argument we would need to look at other energy intensive activities, like heating and driving, which feels like a step backwards.
HN is moderated isn't it?
What "Bitcoin thesis"? Nakamoto had no such assertions in the original whitepaper that other cryptos would never outcompete Bitcoin.