skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Issue isn't that crypto users more than this or that other thing.

Issue is that any other thing becomes more and more efficient with time. Crypto pow will eat literally any sized cake and waste it.

We could invent fusion and crypto would eat that too.
To be fair, that statistic is an indication that something does not add up. There are plenty of other countries with similar or less access to modern medicine (modern ICUs, mRNA vaccines, etc.) due to sheer poverty that fared better, at least on paper.

* Perhaps the way US counts covid death numbers overinflates them compared to other countries.

* Perhaps the way other countries count covid death numbers underestimate them, if only for lack of proper testing.

* Perhaps modern medicine is too successful in US, keeping a larger share of close-to-death people alive than in other countries.

* Perhaps US population is too old / obese compared to other countries.

* Perhaps US work habits lean workaholic, and people are not quarantining when they get cold/flu symptoms.

* Perhaps air travel is too common in US, spreading the virus far and wide.

* Perhaps wide-spread air conditioning promotes airborne virus propagation.
Here's one that does/doesn't!

https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speciaal:Filter/10
With localbitcoin and similar exchanges you can convert the btc to usd peer to peer with strangers.
A better title would be "Mythbusting the idea that C++ is faster than Rust" or something like that.
Every Ponzi scheme seems like it's here to stay, right up until it's not.
No, similarly, I wouldn’t work for employers that act like that.
Its possible to have the right idea before the world is ready to receive it. That includes good ideas where the technology just isn't there yet.
The argument is that as a commodity that is consumed to produce jewelry (52%) and industrial (12%) that there is baseline demand for it, and thus it does have intrinsic value. I don't consider it a worthwhile investment, however.
People how hate naggers don't like levenshtein either
You are so hungry to start something here, you've posted this exact same comment 3 times.
Wouldn't you have more fun on 4chan?
It depends on the time you make the transaction and how fast you want the transaction to be confirmed.

If you don’t pay enough it can take hours for your coffee to be paid for.

So every time you buy a coffee with Bitcoin the transaction fee is different and sometimes will cost more than the coffee itself.
> a persons ability to transact while not quite a human right, isn't too far from it either.

it should absolutely be a human right in this age.
financial news media is a superset of the crypto financial news media; my statement remains true
Dr Shai Efrati seems to believe it's what allows salamanders to regenerate limbs. Having access to more oxygen allows generation of pluripotent stem cells (which apparently look for damage and repair said damage).
For sure though, let the same people who thought tharanos was a good idea come and bash something that is at least feasibly something you could access relatively inexpensively, should you want to be anecdotal evidence.
Man. I remember making little mids on a flip phone in the 2000s. When you're playing with the silly toots and beeps you imagine them so much bigger. These covers are how it sounds in your head when you're writing one.
>By that definition, stocks too are ponzis. No. Stocks have an external source of revenue, namely the profit that the company makes by selling its products and services to customers (not investors); and these profits eventually return to the investors through dividends or cash buybacks.

There are companies that never made any profit yet their shares increased in value. There are companies who made some small profits but their shared increased much more because there are high expectations.

By the definition in the article any asset which can be speculated is part of a Ponzi scheme: land, stocks, bonds.

If you buy and sell land, increasing its price, without other means to derive value of that land, such as agriculture or rent, it fits the definition of a Ponzi scheme.
Prior to the iPhone you could buy a $5 a month unlimited data plan addon from AT&T. The revolution was AT&T increasing unlimited data to $20 a month for the OG iPhone and $30 a month for the iPhones thereafter.

It's weird to look at this in the context of Google and T-Mobile almost shipping the first Android devices with a $10 a month unlimited data only plan...
When I wrote C++ code, hands down Visual Studio + Visual Assist any day of the week. Its not that it had any unique features that are impossible to get anywhere else, its just the ease and simplicity of using a proper cohesive GUI toolset gave my productivity a big boost. And also how well it integrated into API documentation, etc. This was well before C++11 and all that jazz, so does anyone have any suggestions for modern C++?
You don’t seem to have reflected on the article. If it’s wrong, surely it would be trivial to rebut even one of its points.

> which have of course shown that Bitcoin is not a ponzi

What are you referring to here? This would be a rebuttal if it exists, but to my knowledge no such thing does

> Just let Crypto users be

This is your main point of substance. But as another user pointed out, the collapse of the Albanian ponzi started a war and devastated a country.

Bitcoin, if it is the ponzi it appears to be, is the biggest ponzi in history.

It is unwise to merely leave ponzis alone. They’re illegal for a reason
Three different threads, all relevant. 4chan is where this was leaked/found out.
You are correct that bitcoin is heavily dependent on miners. That said, I don't think you can simply "take away the Bitcoin miners". An excellent example of this is China's recent ban on bitcoin mining, which quickly dropped the network hash rate by >50%. Today, only a few months later, the hash rate has returned[1], and those miners are back online on the other side of the world. Don't underestimate the power of incentives.

[1] https://www.blockchain.com/charts/hash-rate
A country that made its fortune ( and still does ) largely by oil has the money to quickly jump on a green-washing trend. Hah. Who figured
Why is all of this implemented in SQL? Wouldn't it be better to do it in code with dedicated methods to filter stuff out? IMO logic inside of SQL queries just adds unnecessary complexity, implementing this in code would've been maintainable and testable.
People say "they buy bitcoin", and they don't mean they buy technology.
As per gold: I agree with that common objection. If bitcoin is a ponzi, so is gold.

> First, few if any gold investors have expectations of profits. They generally invest in gold as a hedge -- a "store of value" -- that they hope will retain its value in case other assets go sour.

First, this does not negate the comparison. Bitcoin could also be like that, and therefore not a ponzi. Second, I know a long of gold investors who would disagree with this opinion. Third, the market cap of gold is over 4x bitcoin, indicating that gold has already reached saturation, whereas bitcoin has space to grow.

> Second, as a commodity, gold HAS a source of revenue besides the investors; namely, the purchases by consumers like jewelers and industry,

This is a point that always gets brought up in discussions of gold. It is wrong and practically dishonest. Gold as jewelry does NOT drive the value of gold, by and large. And even if it DOES, the valuing of gold as jewelry material over any other similar-colored material is itself non-intrinsic/socially constructed. People like to own gold jewelry for the same reason people like to own bitcoin.
But the GP is saying they registered their apple id with a non apple email. Why can't your delete the apple id associated with that email, then create another apple id using the same email?
There is intrinsic value to being insured, even if one doesn't end up making a claim, the peace of mind is gives is a rendered benefit.
I try to use HN or Reddit or whatever on occasion, but I never get any points to speak of, never feel like part of a community in the slightest, and...

whenever I see something that I want to comment on, it'll be from 19 hours ago, or three days ago. And if you don't get there in the first two hours by hanging out there ALL DAY LONG, no one will ever know you exist. But I somehow can't bear to hang out all day long in hope of something coming along that I have anything I wish to speak my piece on.

Edit: I see that I got distracted in my thinking based on how everyone was talking about HN addiction, etc. and didn't even mention the topic, Facebook. But I've never had an account. So.
I tried out localbitcoin a bit before the pandemic. Absolute shit show. Nobody wanted to actually trade. Seemed like most participants were phishing for personal information, probably for identity theft.
What are those? It is a chat app that got popular by providing free texting in a world where SMS costs were high and working across a wide set of phones.
Nope, people do not hold USD because they expect a gain.

They are willing to pay the inflation penalty because holding the dollars in question provides them something. Generally that means either a sense of security or liquidity on short notice.

Holding dollars is paying a fee for liquidity.
Inflation protection for long-term savings is a huge use case.
It provides a decentralized ledger.
If we go by this logic some could claim that the "Dollar" is a Ponzi scheme

1. People invest thier time/effort for "Dollars"
2. When someone "buys" something they are effectively cashing out the worth of the "Dollar" through trade (someone else's time/effort)
3. "Dollars" do not nessarily create more labor (time/effort)
4. "Dollars" are just effectively pieces of paper or digital bits if people stop actually working. It is worth something because people are willing to work, invest time/effort, for "Dollars".
5. Printing money effectly dilutes the existing pool of labor, etc. "taking away money".
For me The Silver Searcher (Ag) has replaced trying to memorise various grep flags. Its defaults produce largely what I'm looking for without needing any flags.

On occasions where I do need more advanced features such as excluding file patterns or directories, I find the man page to be pretty easy to understand.
Only C++ programmers will appreciate this joke.
Unimaginative. Make the airship really big. Put an airstrip on top. Turn it into the wind. Have commuter planes doing STOL on top of it :-)
> - no mechanism for synchronous access to actors

That is presumably intentional, since if you could access actor state synchronously it wouldn't really be much of an actor. This sounds a lot like a "doing it wrong" kinda problem.

> (but without compiler validation of resource sharing at this point in time)

Not sure how you'll do this without garbage collection (like reference counting, which is what Pony uses iirc).

Honestly I suspect if you continue forward you'll probably walk away with much more appreciation for Pony's design decisions.
I've been using CF for a few years now with minimal complaints but I just hit a create changeset endless timeout (2 days to finally time out).

The worst part is that there are no error messages. When it fails and I click "Details", it takes me to the stack page and shows 100% green. Support ticket seems slow to get a response too.

That aside, my overall experience has been positive!
I replaced my Facebook addiction with HN. Much better here and I learn useful things during procrastinating.
Currency evolved from barter > to bartering with set mediums of exchange > to coins representing exchangeable goods > to coins stamped in precious metal > to paper representing coins > to notes representing gold or silver > to being redeemable exclusively for gold > to the end of the gold standard.

Money’s value has been dictated by how much of something a currency can buy – which is dependent on inflation and economic performance.

I would love to have seen/heard the conversations that were had around the changes that people had to go through and if the conversations were similar to this day. Because I would imagine that back then, considering that money is just an agreed upon invisible force a la Bitcoin, people probably hard a very hard time understanding the intrinsic value of this metal coin/paper money.
Might want to normalise for income here. Having a high cost of living but high median income would be a bit of a misrepresentation.
iMac G4 with an M1 Chip
> They do not pretend making your money work for you by some magical scheme.

No. They instead take your money, buy coal, and burn it. Nothing is left.

As you say, Ponzi schemers take money for themselves and keep it. Most of what Madoff stole was recovered, for instance.

Whereas virtually 100% of all money invested into crypto has been burned by miners. This is pretty easy to model.

So there’s nothing left to recover if new money collapses. Bitcoin is worse than a typical ponzi in this respect.
There is no nipping this in the bud. That's the point. It's already too late.
Most games are entertaining because they improve overall fitness so we're rewarded with a dopamine hit for positive reinforcement:

toys - develops mental capacity of infants

sports - improves health outcomes and/or teamwork

playing poker - trains models of decision under uncertainty

Now, Bitcoin mining - ?
Thank you for laughter.
Rust really is such a special and welcomed language, I hope it’s able to pick up even more market share than it has already, particularly in game dev!
Someone was telling me that the general problem with HN is that they're all very technically capable, so they look at Bitcoin, understand it from a technical perspective (not always true) and deem it as inferior to other technical solutions, like a centralised database.

The bit that's lacking is an understanding of money, and what makes certain types of money sound or unsound. It's easy to overlook the problems of fiat money because its all we've ever known.

What was it about gold that made it the dominant form of money for literally thousands of years? Why was it abandoned? How does Bitcoin solve the problems of gold and fiat?

Vijay Boyapati (ex-Google engineer) does a pretty good job of outlining this in his article.

https://vijayboyapati.medium.com/the-bullish-case-for-bitcoi...

I wish more people on HN would read it with an open mind.
Looks like a drone with legs more than a walking robot that can fly. I’m sure there is a use case where this type of agility is required, but I’m not really seeing a vast advantage over a drone or a legged robot for most usages.

Most took manipulation requires a solid base for leverage or lifting. I suppose if you set it ups as a drone with deplorable legs that could be useful when extra stability.
> And I wouldn't envy you trying to explain why you shouldn't be continuously fined for GDPR violation in the EU, either

This is kind of a bizarre thought to me. You think anyone who provides software that - without involving any services hosted by that person - should be liable for what users do with this software? If this were to hold up in court (which I'm confident it wouldn't), then open-source software would be done.

Or is this a problem of terminology? In the scuttlebutt case, there is no actual "account" - just a key. Maybe one should simply replace the string "Create account" (if there is such a string) with "Generate key/identity".
Ah right - yeah it seems like some services are up to date but others really so lag so different ownership explains it.
Sweden, Denmark halt Moderna jabs for younger people over possible side effects
Seems very similar to [1] from a few weeks ago. Iirc the prevailing conclusion back then was that the sample set was way too small, and was absent a control group. And seems like the same is true here.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28508070
Cursive brings it some Lisp Machines development workflow love as well.
I was expecting a "whole home" sized UPS, which some people do in the form of gas fired generator, or some such.
'We connect people' lol
I guess that's why it's fallen in value so much relative to the USD over the past decade.
> It's clear that the HN crowd does not like Bitcoin. So why keep reiterating similar arguments all over?

When we take a closer look at crypto it appears to be as corrupt or even more as the institutions it was trying to replace. Tether, of course, is the poster child of crypto corruption.
> There's a real benefit from having a public registry that everyone signs up to.

Is there? or is there a benefit from having a communications platform that is easy to use.

if there was a public utility that allowed you to contact anyone on the planet and all you needed to know was their userID would that not meet 80% of the functionality without these scathing problems? Maybe you could use some kind of federated system that allowed operators local to each cohort of people to moderate abuse properly.

(I'm joking of course, this is somewhat how the phone system works).
To that I might add what the OP also mentions, that is how FB leveled the playing field when it comes to advertising. You can launch a new business competing with big corps with as little as a 100$ ad budget. It wouldn't have been possible 20 years ago. Without Facebook, many SME owners would be in serious trouble (see what happened with iOS 14).
I would call Microsoft Research part of a MEGACORP.
In certain circumstances, maybe. But most people also want to smile, laugh, and to be entertained by the conversation. Evoking those responses requires charisma.
Oh wow. This is unbelievably bad.

Bitcoin may be a scam on so e level, but it is not a Ponzi scheme. The linked article seems to miss the most important property of such a scheme:

Incoming capital is misrepresented as returns and passed back to investors. Bitcoin does not pay dividends. There are no returns in Bitcoin, only pure capital speculation. As there are no returns, there is no misrepresentation of capital inflow as returns and no Ponzi scheme.

Bitcoin is more like a tulip...
> Instead of using 4,500 watts for 45 minutes (.75 hours), a hybrid hot water heat pump uses 350 watts for 3 hours.

I saw video of a guy installing one in his off grid house. He was mostly stoked with it because it only drew about 300W. But had a problem because it would do a check of the heating elements on startup which would crowbar his inverter. He fixed that by installing lower wattage elements.
I have been involved in crypto since 2013, I get it. But I have given up engaging in these conversations. You either get the anti-statist thesis and economic liberation angle or you don't. If you don't then OK, best of luck.

I like having spending power that isn't immediately based on CIA organized crime or boomers at the Fed/Treasury
Indeed this is a new form of Ponzi scheme, and I agree with the authors use of the "quacks-like-a-duck" model.

> But if one wants to know whether bitcoin is a good investment, or just an old type of investment fraud with a new coat of paint, the legal definition is irrelevant. One must use a quacks-like-a-duck definition, that describes the mechanism through which fools and money are separated and the reasons why it is a fraud.

It's the world's first decentralized Ponzi scheme, where each participant cell need not understand the whole picture to achieve the end result. It's a financial cancer.
It was outside of most people's awareness at that time
Many years ago, when working on at a company with a huge legacy C/C++ codebase, one of the coworkers recommended I try out Source Insight[0]. After tweaking a few of the settings, it blew any other IDE out of the water. The ability to just click on a symbol and immediately see all the xrefs at the bottom was super helpful. IIRC it's also commonly used by security researchers to find their way through a new project.

[0] https://www.sourceinsight.com
You do not need to consume, and only invest?
I really appreciate the wuality of discussion here. Every time.
I'm talking about real technology. I think I owned like 100K of these at some point lmao
You are not wrong, but neither is MLM in and of itself.
If they ran at constant speed they would be even more polluting though.

I found myself responsible for a yard for the first time recently, because it was the only housing option that met my needs. Battery operated everything is the way to go these days.
That’s incorrect. One btc = One btc. Its value relative to fiat or usd is irrelevant. No one takes your btc away from you to give to another when you have custody of it.
To begin with, let me say I'm very sorry this happened to you, and I think it sounds like an example of a really broken system. This should never happen to someone randomly, and I think you should have been compensated a lot for the troubles and stress it must have caused you.

However, I think we should be careful with drawing the conclusion that technology for circumventing our institutions' ability to regulate altogether is the natural solution, when perhaps fixing the institutions would lead to an overall better outcome. If we all moved to Bitcoin, then we would no longer have central democratic control over who is allowed to transact or not, and I don't think that leads to a better society.
Consumer products made in China. Advertising.
A few years ago I was upvoting such articles myself, probably out of annoyance that I had known about Bitcoin since 2010 but had no financial interest in it. What got me into it was the open source aspect.

I expect that many users on HN have known about Bitcoins since the beginning and are upset that they didn't look into it years ago. Many will find their niche in it(smart contracts, NFTs..), younger people more so.

Stateless P2P open source currency is an incredibly powerful combination of words.
First check speed/memory usage. Then the one which is easier to code in. And then third : easier to integrate with the OS and build library functions which will be consumed by other apps written in higher level languages.

These are the three things that matter most.
No one view a dollar as a speculative investment asset they expect to rise in value though. That’s the whole point of a ponzi scheme, and also why most people buy bitcoin: they expect it to go up.

You can reliably expect a dollar to decrease in value, by contrast. People may hold it as a hedge but no one expects a dollar to 10x.

You have hit on something useful: dollars are just a claim on the real economy, but if the economy stops dollars are worthless. But this isn’t the same as the dollar (or any type of savings) being a ponzi
Bitcoin is only 13 years old, and is still a very unproven technology to the eyes of the many. However, the "value" being provided by this (admittedly large amount of) power is in the securing of a global, decentralized payment system. That's what it's designed to do.

Beyond that, no, there's no _additional_ value.

If you can start from the position of assuming Bitcoin is a thing worth existing (which may be asking a lot, but bear with me), then this security, and the power usage that enables it, is a required element of the overall thing.

ie. if it's worth Bitcoin existing, then it's worth the power usage to secure it so it can continue existing.

Having said all of that, and I've said this before, I think Bitcoin's Proof-of-Work as security is what will bring it down in the long term. Ethereum, the next biggest cryptocurrency, is moving (glacially, but right now we're the closest we've ever been...) towards Proof-of-Stake, which radically sheds a massive percentage of the power requirements to secure the network. There are other potential drawbacks to PoS, but that's a whole separate loaded discussion that I'm not across well enough to engage in.

I believe Bitcoin will have to move to some less power intensive security method in the not-too-distant future in order to remain viable. This has been accelerated by the fact that COVID is messing with supply chains and semi-conductor availability, meaning the value of Bitcoin mining equipment is increasing (from a supply / demand standpoint if nothing else).
You don't really need a room to do it...