skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Intuitively, it seems to me that the 741 kWh number for a single transaction cannot be a marginal number (i.e., the cost of the transaction itself without factoring in overhead). That's just way too high - it would be around $100 in electricity per transaction.

The difference is important because as Bitcoin adoption increases the number of transactions will increase and the cost-per-transaction will fall dramatically. But the actual marginal cost likely won't. (I bet the result would still dramatically favor Visa.)
> None of them are actually money, like in the paper-or-gold-coin sense. They're all ledgers.

Many of the other comments have pointed out how money doesn't have this quality either. This comparison is a wash: buy gold if that's your goal (at least until we find/mine a gold-laden asteroid).

The other comparison is who you have to trust to insure the value of that currency. In the case of cash, it is your government/Treasury. In the case of cryptocurrency, it is mathematics. I am originally from Zimbabwe and have much to say about trusting the government with insuring the value of cash...

That's why I have a small clutch of proof-of-stake.
There is a difference between monetary value and utilitarian value.

Bitcoin has negligent utilitarian value. It does nothing besides reward people who can consume energy the fastest.
Paradoxically, if you optimize for billable hours on your first job, you might never get to that highly-compensated 100th job. A selection effect of sorts.
The purpose of land is not exchange for goods and services.

The purpose of money is not so that you can "hodl".

I swear, this speculation bubble has melted y'alls brains.
Rents are falling slightly in dense urban areas that were already inflated from a decades long surge (65% in LA, 30% nationally [1]), but are actually increasing in suburban areas [2]. In those areas, the increases are affecting all sectors of the market:

"Overall, CoStar data show the largest rent increases have come in higher-end properties, where average rent for a vacant unit in the Inland Empire has grown 9.3% over the last year, compared with the previous four-year average of 3.8%.

In older, more rundown properties where lower-income households are likely to live, rent is up 3.4%, compared with the previous four-year average of 4.9%."

1. https://www.latimes.com/business/real-estate/story/2019-12-2...

2. https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2020-11-23/rent-falli...
> Not sure why Visa is a relevant comparison.

Because humans are deciding on whether to use BTC or another option for handling payments. This means that we must decide whether "decentralization, permissionlessness, and censorship resistance" are worth the astronomical other costs.
There are non jewish israelis in the IDF. Mostly Muslim...
Coronavirus Has Changed New York City Transit
> Economics is also statistics.

Economics is not Statistics (and definitely not statistics).

Most of the discipline focuses on testing models and making inferences on observational data. The techniques for dealing with that sort of data, of course, build on Statistics, but their nature is different enough that there is Econometrics.

A large part of economics is not empirical at all -- despite the fact that people get Nobel prizes pretending this not to be the case.

Even in the context of experimental economics, since the behavior of the observed vary depending on the mode of observation, the contexts in which the most straightforward Statistical methods designed to apply to engineering/chemistry/biology experiment type situations are not directly applicable (although it is great when they agree with the fancier methods).
Balancer Protocol Is Coming to Polkadot via Moonbeam
Moonbeam, an Ethereum-compatible smart contract parachain, announced it would connect the Balancer protocol with the Polkadot ecosystem. The integration with Balancer will add value to the growing DeFi ecosystem to Polkadot.
But why though?
You flipping subject on it's head. The US economy does not produce stuff in order for dollar to exist. The dollar (at least in theory) exists to reflect the US economy and simplify exchange of goods.
Here is something similar with more different technologies

https://xrpl.org/carbon-calculator.html (scroll to the bottom)

Compares BTC/ETH/XRP/VISA/MASTERCARD and Paper Money

I wound not interpret too much into the actual values they are unlikely to be very accurate.
Is anyone else getting this error on F-Droid?

Download failed!
The requested file was not found.
https://f-droid.org/repo/eu.faircode.email_1518.apk

How can I download this app? I use K-9 Mail at the moment, but I'd like to try this to see if it's any better.
Yes, you can buy some items online with BTC, but almost no household daily essentials. Show me a grocery store, gas station or pharmacy that accepts crypto. There are plenty of companies selling Crypto payment gateway software, so it’s clearly not a technology limitation.

The reality is there is no consumer demand for crypto as a means to purchase things.
This article is literally an ad for the Brave browser. Telling us to not trust google when Brave has done even worse things than Google is hypocritical as hell. Its like when oil companies paid for scientific research to prove climate change is not real. Google is doing just fine, and will continue to do so. They have some of the smartest engineers in the world. The confidence in the company is also reflected in its share price. While ads is its core, I think google also knows it needs to diversify and is doing so with bets like Waymo. This article is nothing but an ad for Brave wrapped in hyperbole. If anything Brave is not to be trusted due to its many scams that it had to apologise for.

Edit: For those who dont read all of the article, you can read the discalimer at the bottom, the author admits he owns BAT tokens. Im sure he is definitely unbiased in his opinion. facepalm
> … if implementations and restrictions are wildly different?

What if we can all see implementations that are not wildly different?

https://benchmarksgame-team.pages.debian.net/benchmarksgame/...

https://benchmarksgame-team.pages.debian.net/benchmarksgame/...
The data in an Excel file can be exported as CSV, but the value in an Excel file is the dependencies and formulas that have been built up into a representation of the business rules. The problem is that this often becomes the only representation of the rules, and auditing it or puzzling the data out of that Excel sheet after the fact is like pulling teeth.

A business might want to get to improve, say, their quoting accuracy. I've seen lots of places that write quotes using Excel. They use a complicated spreadsheet to estimate "We need $4500 in parts from vendor A, but in previous projects with components from vendor A often needed rework, so we multiply their quotes by 1.5 to account for the risk and for someone (typically Bob) to rework them; Bob's workload is over 90% and he's less efficient when he works overtime, so multiply his total hours by an additional 1.25, we also have to adjust his hourly rate by 1.5 to account for overtime..."

It's a Hard Problem to convert the quoting process from one of a few engineers who also do quoting by copying and modifying the blank Excel template and years of human domain expertise into a process where data entry techs input stuff to a CRUD webapp. This is fraught with peril because the Javascript/SQL guy you hired to write the webapp (or, heaven help you, the SAP consultant) hasn't been reworking gear from Vendor A for 15 years and sees what looks like an error when the formula for actual cost from vendors B, C, and D takes their quote price multiplied by 1.1 (for shipping? margin? ) and vendor A's quoted price is multiplied by 1.5, and, hold on, the VBA macro separately takes the the estimated dollar amount purchased from Vendor A, divided by 2000, and adds it to the head of maintenance's estimated hourly total for the project?

Making business decisions about logic tied up in Excel formulae is hard. Writing logic in something other than Excel where you can more easily see the business logic is probably harder. Convincing non-technical decision makers to learn VBA to evaluate their vendor selection is probably harder still.
But visa doesn't provide most of the functions of bitcoin infrastructure. Visa does need to hold the balance of my account. Visa does need or make available all of my equity worth of assets for me to transfer. Visa does not custody my assets. This is literally apple to oranges (or visa to bitcoin)
... it's relevant because to the end user, moving money from place to place is moving money place to place.

Bitcoin is the defacto main cryptocurrency and Visa is one of the main payment processors.

A cryptocurrency not attached to anything else is useless. I'm sure you could easily beat Visa too by having a little app that "processes transactions" on some modern 5nm scale mobile device. But it wouldn't be real world useful.
> Statistics can tell me the likelihood of a crash

Statistics cannot tell you any such thing.
> I had expected the same thing to happen to Amsterdam, but it looks like it managed to hold up better.

Well... many of the German tourists only come to Amsterdam for smoking pot on a day or weekend trip, and the French additionally for a night in the brothels since sex work is banned in France, so all you need is a lot of cheap hotels with beds, no stuff like beach resorts or other... more high-class venues to deal with these people.

Additionally, over the last years many of the "coffee shops" (weed shops) have closed down - in the early 2000s there were 280+ in Amsterdam, now there are 166. The government wants to introduce a "weed pass" that's only for Dutch citizens to further crack down on weed tourism: https://www.tagesschau.de/ausland/corona-coffeeshops-101.htm...
Why is proof of work so much more popular than proof of stake?
Do you think the entire us economy would disappear if bitcoin became the dominant currency of global trade? People will still want to trade the same goods and services.
Retracing a Donner Party Path, Nearly Two Centuries Later
That's not equivalent to commenting out the code block, it's just equivalent to

if (my_var == 'some value') { ... }
Thought question here. What if we hyped up bitcoin to 10X its current value? Wouldn't that mean that per real-world transaction / per unit dollar value it would use 1/10th of its current amount of energy? For example something that would normally cost 0.1 BTC would now cost 0.01 BTC.
This would be a pretty long topic to discuss, but in general monetary policy is something that governments really do want to control. If a national economy is not doing well or there is little demand for their goods or currency, the value of their currency is lower, making their exports cheaper and allowing them to participate in the global markets.

One example of having monetary policy out of a country's control is the EU, which has both strong economies (eg. Germany) and weaker ones (eg. Greece). A strong Euro works well for Germany, since they get more effective purchasing power out of their trade surplus. For Greece, a strong Euro means that their exports are probably not competitive price wise.

If these countries had their own currency, the Deutsche Mark would be a strong currency (making their exports relatively more expensive) and the Greek Drachma a weaker currency (making their exports relatively less expensive), giving them a push towards a more even trade balance. As citizens tend to transact in local currency, this also encourages Greek citizens to seek more local goods (eg. Greek tomatoes grown on Greek soil with Greek labor) as foreign goods are more expensive, hence further stimulating their economy.
Short of giving away some of our secret sauce and analysis pipeline, what we do is sequence the nucleic acids in your saliva in a de-identified fashion such that only Bristle scientists can match your sequence data with any potential identifiers. As data comes off the sequencer, we use a bioinformatic pipeline to remove 98%+ of human genetic data prior to any analysis such that its impossible to derive meaningful genetic information from the sample. The end result is that we effectively store only microbiome sequence data and not your personal genetic data. We store all of your data in accordance with HIPAA guidelines.

Your de-identfiied data (metadata and microbiome data) may be used in aggregate analysis to mine for novel biomarkers of disease, and to develop novel therapeutics targeting the oral microbiome for the treatment of disease.
For a full picture, however, you would need to count the total number of VISA transactions and compare that to the total number of Bitcoin transactions. I would guess the absolute energy foot print of VISA is still considerably larger.

But I am not trying to defend the energy usage of PoW, here. A single Bitcoin block can only fit about 3500 transactions and all miners of the world compete for being the first in solving the emerging Block‘s cryptographic puzzle. This is where the insane energy consumption comes from.

Other cryptos work differently in that respect and, hence, are way cheaper.
Interesting read but they start International Association of Privacy Professionals (privacyassociation.org) and have a cookie popup with "Accept" and "Manage cookies" but no Reject cookies (except hidden inside). One would think that an organisation who is made by and for "International Privacy Professionals" would not have less interest in privacy than what GDPR gives you (as easy to opt out as in). Not very trustworthy if that is the level they aim for.
https://twitter.com/real_vijay/status/968854238095753216?lan...

1/ There are four stages that all market-based monetary goods pass through in their evolution to becoming a fully fledged money:

1. Collectible
2. Store of Value
3. Medium of exchange
4. Unit of account
It makes total sense; OTOH I'm kind of cracking up here because isn't this what a web browser has become? A portal for viewing a remote application state, that can be serialized into a blob of semi-structured XML and JSON?

It's hard to imagine that retrofitting such a serialization onto the total wild west that is desktop applications could be any more successful or consistent than what the web has already got.
Thanks. I dug around for the answer I was looking at.

> Each cell covers 324.29km^2 on average.

https://github.com/sebsebmc/starlink-coverage
> So now what about the energy consumption of the whole VISA company?
Visa has 19,500 employees

Ok - but then you need to include all the exchanges and wallet developers etc.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visa_Inc.

Does Bitcoin employees 19500 people full-time to work? Time is interchangeable with money and money with electricity/CO2 emissions

Maybe, when you include all the miners and the other parts of the ecosystem needed to make Bitcoin available for use.
> Bitcoin seems like a huge Ponzi scheme

Can you please point out which previous ponzi scheme / bubble / tulip mania has gone through so many cyclic wave pattern and held up it's value despite all the crashes?

"Bitcoin is going to crash" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XbZ8zDpX2Mg
Submissions without a URL automatically go into https://news.ycombinator.com/ask That's confusing.
https://mobile.twitter.com/dhh/status/1368957511118843908

True?
From GitHub:

"We only track the first page the user views, this is again more privacy friendly and additionally also results in substantial less HTTP requests the server has to handle. As a result of this strategy, Counter is able to show top landing pages but not top pages"

May not be big for some people, but that seems to be a very big consideration folks should be aware of.
Interesting initiative. I must say, I find it a bit amusing that a project that seeks to “reduce or eliminate central points of control on the web” uses GitHub, even to tell me this. The entire point of GitHub (which I use when I have to) is to take an utterly decentralized and distributed tool, Git, and turn it into a (largely inferior) central point of control.
Well new X540-T2's are usually available for < $100 from various sources. For a newer design the Aquantia/Marvell boards are generally in the ~$90 range too, although I don't know if anyone has mac drivers for them.
I think the scenario for pasting formula is the same as for pasting values: paste what was there at the time of copying. Is there a situation where this doesn't make sense? I'd be fine with it being kinda-wrong in situations like the original cells referred to another cell but now there's been a new row inserted and those cells are elsewhere and the clipboard hasn't updated. That's what I would expect a copy to do. Excel allows references to cells in other spreadsheets and if you edit the other spreadsheet, then the references in your first spreadsheet don't update to reflect that, so the clipboard would just act like another spreadsheet.

Edit: the better way to say this is that "copy (do something) paste" should always act the same as "copy, paste on a new blank spreadsheet, (do something) and then copy and paste that onto the original spreadsheet".
While I'm not sure how much the modern methods are amendable to napkin math as stated in the article a lot more methods use simulation which if you can code are pretty straightforward to get working.

Jake Vanderplas's presentation https://speakerdeck.com/jakevdp/statistics-for-hackers can give you some concrete ideas of how far you can get with just a random number generator.
The energy usage of Bitcoin or similar projects like Ethereum are derived from the “mining” aspect which is not connected to transactions or transaction volume.

For example, early Bitcoin was generally, for purposes of discussion, about the same transaction throughput as we have today. But there were very few miners, so the energy costs were very low. Was Bitcoin truly many orders of magnitude more efficient back then? No.

It’s simply that there are many many more miners competing for rewards, because Bitcoin is valuable. There’s an energy lottery built into the Bitcoin protocol that emits new currency.

This lottery is directly related to the security of the network but not the number of transactions or usage. Unfortunately it’s hard to find an exact parallel but something like the military protection of the dollar would be a more valid comparison than Visa’s transaction volume.

Consider this: even if the blocks were empty, which means no transactions, the energy usage would be the same.
This sounds like to remove human greed we must embrace human greed and expend a lot of energy.

In what future world are we not trying to create more Bitcoin?
United Nations Whisteblower Says the Tor Is Great for Human Rights Work
Bitcoin's primary use case isn't the same as Visa's.

Visa is good at processing many small transactions.

Bitcoin is good at storing value over time, across borders, without censorship.

Since Bitcoin is useful without many transactions, it's deceptive to measure its energy usage per transaction.

It would be equally useless to cite Visa's 10-year stored value percentage gain vs. gold, because preserving value over time is not what Visa does.
Doesn't Instagram and such also track users using ultrasonic tags in media?
>> CPI (it doesn't include housing..

Uh no, housing is 32% of the CPI.

Source : https://arbor.com/blog/how-does-rent-factor-into-the-consume...

It doesn't track well with the experience of people on this forum because young professionals tend to live in cities with crushing rental markets, especially Silicon Valley. But the whole country, particularly thoseliving in houses not in New York or California, have a different experience.
Eth 2.0 is running right now. It is 100% PoS.
On the other hand, that energy has to come from some place and this set up negatively impacts someone no matter where the coal plant is located. Maybe the coal comes from the cascades and it makes more sense to put the plant close to the source, rather than somewhere near LA and have to freight in the coal from the mines and deal with those externalities that might be worse than simply running a wire to LA.
How can you interpret "No, thanks" as a ruling? Doesn't the thanks part imply you're rejecting an offer, not refusing a request?
I have no problem with requiring ID, even if it helps basically nothing with election security, but sure, let's do it. But let's do it in a way that doesn't disenfranchise vulnerable/disadvantaged groups. So appropriate funds, have some transitory period, etc.
Ferry +1!

It looks like a commercial harbor/causeway for largish oil/gas ships, so the bridge might be a ways off.
Statistics for Hackers (2016)
I used to think this and have come to realise that this is definitely not true. The problem that a thorough automated test suite can cause is that it becomes very painful to refactor code.

As you add code, the best structure for that code changes and you want to refactor. I'm not just talking here about pulling some shared code into a new function, I'm talking about moving responsibilities between modules, changing which data lives in which data structures etc. These changes are the key to ensuring your code stays maintainable, and makes sense. Every unit test you add 'pins' the boundary of your module (or class or whatever is appropriate to your language). If you have lots of tests with repeated code, it can take 5 times as long to fix the tests as it can to make the actual refactors. This either means that refactors are painful which usually means that people don't do them as readily (because the subconscious cost-benefit analysis is shifted).

If - on the other hand - you treat your test suite as a bit of software to be designed and maintained like any other, then you improve this situation. Multiple tests hitting the same interface are probably doing it through a common helper function that you can adjust in one place, rather than in 20 tests. Your 'fixtures' live in one place that can be updated and are reused in multiple places.
This usually means that your test suite helps more with the transition too - you get more confidence you've refactored correctly.

The other part of this problem (which is maybe more controversial?) is that I try not to rely too much on lots of unit tests, and lean more on testing sets of modules together. These tests prove that modules interact with each other correctly (which unit tests do not), and are also changed less when you refactor (and give confidence you didn't break anything when you refactor).
Israel and Greece even use the same dieselhydroelectric TKMS submarines (just Israel using a special larger version with special features).
> You were both right, and it all depends on your definition of productivity

Sure, but at some point, you can pick a definition that is so far removed from what was intended, that this exercise is utterly meaningless.
It's my understanding that RemoteFX is only available in Windows Server and Windows 10 Pro for Workstations.
I went looking for an example and to save anyone else some time: Ecuador no longer uses the sucre and instead has used the US dollar since 2000. They do still have a ministry of economy and finance which has a central bank. Fascinating ty!!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ministry_of_Economy_and_Financ...
Even in terms of widgets per hour, you need to be VERY careful to include measures of quality.

1 - Underlying defects will absolutely sink your downstream production rate.

2 - If you only measure widgets per hour, the machine will make more, but smaller widgets (See Soviet Nail factory story - https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/22375/did-a-sov... )

3 - Quality has a quantity all it's own. Many times, better widgets will improve efficiency many times over their own cost of production.

4 - Your professor was real dumb.
Certainly the most important value proposition from the companies behind the established cryptocurrencies is the decentralized network for value transfers. No more "brokerage" firms. Getting rid of these feels like an emotional fulfillment; and today this beats pragmatism. Thanks for writing.