skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think many people in these comments are bound to talk past each other when the real answer is:

Yes, Bitcoin is a Ponzi scheme (by virtue of people making it so), but that does not, nor should it, imply that the only thing Bitcoin is, is a Ponzi scheme.

Bitcoin is a Ponzi scheme in the same way that sociopaths exist in the game of geeks, mops, and sociopaths:
https://meaningness.com/geeks-mops-sociopaths

It's part of the ethos but does not describe the whole ethos, and trivializing Bitcoin to a Ponzi scheme is the wrong answer. As, honestly, is trying to defend that Bitcoin is not a Ponzi scheme.

Irrespective of how value is in practice (or volume) making its way through the system is different from the system itself.

There are several promising elements of Bitcoin which contribute to its value. One is sheer access and connectedness (e.g. Metcalfe's law). People use facebook (its valuation reflects this) or pay for a phone plan because connecting to the Internet is a synecdoche for ubiquitous access. Creating a fabric where people in any country may work for a company, irrespective of its location, is a paradigm shift from what we had previously. Today, working for a US company from Taiwan is a legitimate challenge & deterrent.

There are many such examples, where transparent ledgers for instance may increase trust between parties and give people more confidence in financial robustness. All of these things have intrinsic value, just as the architecture which is PageRank has value for Google.

A common mistake I hear is for people to point to these advantages as if to suggest that it is without flaws or incapable of flaws, when we -- the people using the system -- are quite fallible and driven by prisoner's dilemma-type incentives which may by no means be long-term efficient or equitable (given we're all in the same boat). And I think these social challenges should be noted and not discounted on behalf of "technology being good enough".

So, I think this is a case of "Yes and".
TVL Across Multiple DeFi Chains Nears $200B – Ethereum's TVL Dominance 69%
That's a simplistic view of one type of tax. If everyone in a community wants the city government to build a recreation center, and then government levies a tax on the citizens to pay for building/operating the center, are they being punished?
What Do Women Want?
No, that's all bullshit.

The purpose of blockchain is decentralised consensus for the Bitcoin protocol. It has fulfilled that function very well for the last ~12 years.

There MAY be other legitimate use cases, but the majority of them right now are varying degrees of money grabbing scams or cargo-cults.
I am reading these articles for 10 years now..
The balloon animation was great, but text fade in animation and was even better imo.
I mean focusing on whether it's a Ponzi scheme in particular vs the entire breadth of reasons to like or not like Bitcoin brings up whether it should attract _more regulation_, the question of free choice to participate or not is moot because it's considered misleading and fraudulent.
That objection is addressed, with its own subsection, in the post.
Shrug whether or not they've missed the boat or are sanguine on the future of crypto and it's all a house-of-cards filled with hucksters doesn't matter. I just don't see why we need to beat this on the head over and over and over and over again, despite no new news. The anti-greenwashing is the one that really gets my blood boiling because of what a large distraction it is to real climate change issues.

This whole thing is just bringing the level of discourse here down, and I've been on HN for a long time.
You can still mine ETH on a (high-end) GPU and make a profit. BTC mining is way too advanced for that, it's done with mining-specific chips. Mining with a GPU gives you too little hash rate for it to be profitable.

Going a bit more in-depth: Mining is a competitive activity. Your chance of being the person to mine a block is proportional to the fraction of the hash rate of all miners you hold. Therefore, if everyone is using super advanced mining hardware and you go in with a GPU, you hold an insignificant fraction of the hash rate and have next to no chance of actually mining a block, while you still spend on power and hardware maintenance - which will probably make mining a net negative for you.

Nowadays BTC mining is advanced enough that the only way to make a profit is with big specially-designed rigs located in places with access to very cheap energy sources.
one thing in particular resonated with me in the article. and, if i may paraphrase it, it's that these platforms in their quest to connect the last billions are amplifying problems we already have in society.

maybe we not ready to be massively connected. maybe we need to step back and think about how we are connecting people and not who to connect next.

the current way is simply not working.
Got it. Thanks for the heads-up! My hope is that CloudFormation will keep getting faster and easier to troubleshoot. And that the investment in CDK will pay off... but I'm going to start dabbing with terraform on the side... (although I rather my infrastructure as code to be in, well, code, I don't think yaml / json counts as code, but I won't let that distract me...)
The evidence that regenerative agriculture / soil carbon sequestration actually works is really thin. The only way you get functional sequestration over any meaningful time period is for the carbon to subsist below the plow layer of soil (50-60 cm and below). There is little actual evidence this happens.

Just shoving carbon into the soil doesn't mean it actually stays there. Definitely an open question not settled science.
ANZ Bank, in Australia - and I'm assuming the others of the Big 4 do as well (CBA, NAB and Westpac, that is).
It's been added to the App for some account types over the past year or so.
I'd bet that cryptocurrencies are much more vigorously tracked than US dollars. The fraction of cryptocurrency transactions related to scams, fraud, money laundering, tax evasion, and other financial crime must be at least a couple orders of magnitude higher than that for real money.
How does remote control work?
Interested in learning how remote control feature in zoom or Teams works. Can someone shed some light or point me to some resources
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=NUSmi1Xz59M

I like the idea of a network for money separate from an asset presented here.
And with all the red tape and shifting priorities, they all got it wrong unless scoping down.
Hey Tupperware makes hella money off Tupperware too! Reusing your customers as your sales force, marketing, and distribution channel is hugely profitable.
Urbit for starters (which technically you could say isn't NOT about money, since entities are de facto tradeable. But the main purpose for identity being on the Blockchain is reliability and decentralization, with the inherent benefit of them being in effect utilitarian NFT's). I use it every day, and it's one of the technologies I'm most excited about seeing evolve in the future. I'm not trying to evangelize or proselytize Urbit--just being frank.

There's also interesting things going on in the NFT space towards MMORPGs based around an economy of in game items being themselves NFT's. It's not all stuff and nonsense and jpeg millionaires lol :)

Some of it is, surely, but as time goes on more and more technologies will use it to greater effect with more utility beyond merely, "prices go up".
I have been reading these articles for 10 years now and i am happy to be reading them for the next 10 years.. sigh
It's okay maybe things will change the 600th time. /s
English tends to describe things as they are. To me the key principle is the constant use of the words "invest", "investing", or "investment" when it comes to crypto assets.

I don't invest in a credit card for spending. I use a credit card, though.
Generally people participating in a Ponzi scheme do not view it as such. The tactics deployed by truly oppressive regimes make anything easy to confiscate including bitcoin.
"The Library is unlimited but periodic"

Or, the library is limited but lives on closed and circular universe.
FWIW, I found your past comments articulate and well-supported. Please don't take the downvoting herds too much to heart – there was no "fuck up" on your part :-)

BTW I upvoted a bunch of your comments right now, but apparently with no effect to your karma. You (or I?) may have angered the HN algo gods.
The simplest way to defang your criticism of "just quit" is to say that people who aren't privileged enough to quit and land in a comparable role elsewhere simply shouldn't quit. The people who do have that privilege, though, should indeed consider it. There are a lot of them.
Sounds like double down on all the fun!
And of course it's not just toxic; the fire risk is the other reason you don't want to fill a room with pure O2. As NASA sadly learned in Apollo 1.
> to make sure random base64 didn't contain profanity

I would have said "why bother" until this happened to us.

A customer rang us up in a fury because some demo/ random data that we generated happened to have the word "penis" in it. They were convinced we must have put it there because we thought he was a cock. It was very difficult to defuse the situation.
Ethereum already has quantum resistant algorithms ready to go for each part of the system but they perform worse so it doesn't make sense to start using them until quantum computers are more real. There is no long term threat from quantum computing to Ethereum or other systems like it.
Gore writes about this in one of his books, I believe in reference to one of his Tennessee campaigns.

In short form: His polling manager tells him that if he runs this ad, at this time, on these channels, he'll get this much of a polling bump. Gore reflects to self that surely people are more complicated than that. Ad is run, polling moves exactly as predicted.

The dangers of population-scale mind control isn't that it's universally effective, but that it doesn't need to be to swing democratic elections. You can usually sway the outcome just by appealing to the lowest-thinking denominator, and micro-targeting on universal platforms is exceedingly good at that.
"It will never work" can mean so much. It will never be bigger than Twitter (almost certainly true), it will never work to spread my ideas to a wide audience, that may or may not be true.
What we want to see out is leadership on the part of people with agency to do anything about these problems, to fix them. Not fix them just enough so their corporation survives, but fix them in a human sense; actually solve them, make positive change. Zuckerberg appears to only care about doing his job as a CEO of a company, which is totally phoning it in as a human being, so he deserves all the criticism he gets.
We're in 'yet another' era of that. Back in the 30s, it was radio.

Whenever technology brings a new mass communication medium, this happens, and is corrected. This is no different.
0%* of Bitcoin holders are in it for the currency aspects.

* Within margin of error
Brazil also has an instant payments platform that recently went live (Pix) that sees more volume than Zelle in the US with ~110 million users. It’s already ubiquitous in a year of operation.
> By that definition, gold too is a ponzi. No, gold clearly fails to satisfy that definition on two counts.

> 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.

I believe Bitcoin has potential to become the "new" gold. It's better in many ways. Does that mean I can only buy Bitcoin if I want to use it as a hedge? No! I can buy it with the expectation of profit because I expect it to be commonly used as a hedge in the future, at which time it will have a much higher price and I'll have made money.
A very very minute percentage of bitcoin is used in transactions. The vast bulk of it is seen by its users as an investment. And historically there have been Ponzi schemes that allowed people to cash out before the scheme fell apart — but it was always a small minority cashing out.
You write code that specifies an outcome, and not steps to get there. That is declarative code, like it or not.
You're not too old! Embedded systems and home computers grew up together. The TI-84+ that my parents bought me in 2005 was great, especially because my parents paid for it. I feel like any device that becomes popular in schools and is repairable/hackable, will become the platform of the future. The article says "you either knew, or were, that kid" and if you think you were that kid, you probably were.

When trying to figure out when embedded systems became mainstream, I accidentally just wrote an incomplete history of embedded pocket computing.

1967: LOGO programming language developed by Seymour Papert.

1970: Sharp QT-8B calculator was the first battery-powered calculator

1972: HP-35 calculator was first scientific calculator

1974: Sinclair Scientific 1974 was affordable, programmable, moddable, repairable. 400 functions in library.

1976: PIC microcontrollers released.

1976: Zilog Z80 launched.

1977: Tandy TRS-80 released, using Zilog Z80 chip.

1977: Apple II released, with colour graphics.

1980: Epson HX-20 released, a laptop with receipt printer and screen. (my dad wrote his Ph.D. thesis on one)

1981: BBC Micro released, targeted at education.

1982: Commodore 64 released.

1984: Apple Macintosh released.

1984: Psion Organiser, 1984 added database, calculator, clock, diary, alarm clock, a-z keyboard. Programmable in OPL, became Symbian.

1985: LEGO/Logo (later Mindstorms) began, with hardware turtles drawing lines using a pen.

1989: Nintendo Game Boy released.

1989: Macintosh Portable released. First laptop with a GUI and mouse (trackball).

1990: ARM founded, as a joint venture of Apple, Acorn (BBC Micro) and VLSI.

1993: Apple Newton 1993 used handwriting recognition, custom ASIC, name PDA. Popular in medical field.

1996: Palm Pilot 1000 in 1996 brought dimensions down to 120x80x18 mm.

1996: TI-83 calculator got added to high school curriculum.

1999: Apple iBook released, targeting education.

2000: Garmin eTrex handheld GPS device introduced.

2000: Nokia 3310 mobile phone released, 126 million units sold.

2001: iPod brought 5 GB disk space, rapidly doubling. Rockbox custom firmware released for Archos in 2002,
iPodLinux in 2003.

2004: TI-84 calculator introduced, with USB OTG.

2004: OpenWRT firmware for routers.

2005: Arduino project began.

2007: iPhone decreased disk space compared to iPod but gained capacitive multi-touch screen.

2012: Raspberry Pi released, targeted at education.

2014: ESP8266 released.

2016: iPhone 7 finally exceeded storage of iPod Classic, but removed headphone jack, increased physical dimensions.

Embedded hacking involves hardware and software, which makes it hard to specialise. I took LEGO/Logo after school in 2000-2001, then extra ICT classes for IGCSE 2004-2005, then Computer Science for IB 2005-2007, and Electronic Systems Engineering in university 2007-2011. There's plenty more devices and emulators to explore!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Custom_firmware#Other_devices
Gross daily trading volumes are a poor gauge of how much capital investors have deployed in a particular market, seeking returns. A single international transaction may induce several forex trades, such as when the sale price of goods is denominated in USD or some other non-local currency. Combine that with the complex, usually leveraged hedging strategies employed by banks and multinational firms, and it’s easy to see whence such a massive figure comes.
And no one is going to change their mind at this point. People have far too much ego invested in their opinions of crypto now.

I'm in favor of a blanket ban on crypto discussion here. It's all noise at this point.
Rupee Tales – Comics to teach kids about finance
That and the later drives were made cheaper and click-of-death was beginning to become an issue. My 100MB SCSI drive still works and reads the old Maxell disks no problem though.
But ETH is still tied to the dollar and that's where it gets its value, is in the comparison to the dollar. I don't accept ETH for a used car I'm going to sell. I accept dollars, though.
> OS/2 was very popular with multi-line BBSes back in the day for its accessible multitasking on x86-based systems (x86 Unix wasn't really a thing yet),

It was before my time, but according to Wikipedia:

"SCO XENIX for the PC XT shipped sometime in 1984"

"The first version of OS/2 was released in December 1987"
Thank you. I love the idea of cryptocurrency for its utility… but it seems to me that this idea that crypto is an asset will eventually spectacularly collapse.
It totally does? USD appreciates when people want to hold USD more, i.e. when new investment money is flowing into USD.
Sure, it might help, and we can imagine reasons for it to work, but the point was that this experiment might not be good evidence for it working.
Don't forgot the part where the author of the patch left the company a year ago, or even worse the entire team got dissolved/reorganized, which tends to happen quite regularly in a bigco. No amount of carrots will help there I'm afraid.

Herculean effort indeed.
Tires last too long to make this practical, I think. Let's say a set of tires lasts 30,000 miles. California's current gas tax is 67c/gallon. Let's assume a very efficient 40 mpg. That's 1.6 cents / mile. You'd need a $500 tax on a set of tires to compensate. if you did that, though, you'd need to prevent people from importing tires from other states, which is tricky to do.
gold has no value to typical people. i can’t walk into a store and buy with gold. i can’t use gold for any purpose in day to day life. it’s an asset
Right but I know Yamaha OPL sound when I hear it.
You're being downvoted but I completely agree.

It's funny how people on HN which are likely some of the first people in the world to know about bitcoin (eg. since it was only at $100 or less) keep upvoting articles like this for years now.

I think these people deep down know that they missed an amazing chance by not investing in bitcoin (and other cryptocurrencies) years ago, so articles like this make them feel better about it and lets them justify not investing in bitcoin to themselves.

But then in a few years bitcoin 5xs again and then they realize if they bought it at todays price would still have made them massive profit.

But then they see a new article saying bitcoin is a ponzi and upvote it and feel good about themselves again.

Oh but they have to downvote any comments like yours too.
The fact that you can name notable exceptions is only reinforces the general rule
California is shutting down its last nuclear plant and replacing it with natural gas.
What percentage of the current value of Bitcoin do you believe is driven by demand from people with that outlook?
> in exchange for goods

Generally speaking, the people who provide the goods, use fiat for production of the good, and convert the crypto back into fiat to realize profits.
I am the developer of HACK (Hacker News client for iOS, MacOS and Android) and have no idea what happens in my case since HN doesn't seem to offer account deletions. The guidelines doesn't seem to specify what happens with third party clients.

@dang is there a way to delete accounts on HN?
There are many cryptocurrencies who are nearly identical to Bitcoin, except that most don't have the widespread fame and support. In 2019 alone, 90,000 new crypto-currencies were created. Yes, there will only be 21 million bitcoins, but there are already countless, nearly an infite amount of copycat coins.

This is not the case with gold.
I cannot even fathom the evil required to kill a real life human being just for a sick moment of "fun" or whatever it is. I'm almost hoping that they've got the wrong guy and that the real one is alive so they can catch him and execute him.
I was amazed/saddened that they laid off the Servo team. That seemed like the one really worthwhile improvement Mozilla had bet on in a decade. I use and appreciate Firefox, maybe it's partly nostalgia for when FF pushed the web experience forward.
> he also said BTC can scale to millions of transactions per second which is impossible

He's probably referring to the lightning network, which is theoretically capable of handling millions or even someday billions of bitcoin transactions per second.
Jorge Stolfi has been a bitcoin doomsayer for years.

The author published these in 2014:

https://ic.unicamp.br/~stolfi/bitcoin/bitcoin-beggar-1024.pn...
https://ic.unicamp.br/~stolfi/bitcoin/2014-03-02-ShortHistor...

Bitcoin ended 2014 around $378.

I think it's proved it's staying power. Let's move on.
For now. Wayne Gretzky has a quote about this.
It doesn't explain which horse wins in the 4th race at Churchill Downs, either. Major financial markets do attract scams and gambling-like behavior the same way picnics attract flies. The reputable exchanges work to shut that a lot of that out, of course, because it's bad business.

Tesla unfortunately undermines your argument. Has it been hyped to the moon? Definitely. Is there a good chance people will lose a lot of money on it? That too. But they make actual cars that get actual people actual places. That is the kind of actual value creation that underlies most stocks.
Ok, since I have to spell it out for you:

I have not included any such theories because I have not found them useful. The links are to say something simple: my entire epistemology is pragmatic. That is, true knowledge should lead to effective action. If I cannot apply it and get results, then it is useless to me, and irrelevant when writing up notes for other practitioners.

I have noticed that your claim is that 'here is some theory that is well established and rigorous and old'. I have also noticed that your claim is not 'here is some theory that I have found useful, and <insert notes from application>.' I pay attention to arguments of the latter form, because it usually indicates something that I can integrate into my practice. Because you have not included notes from actual application, I am not particularly interested in your argument.

(But if you can provide an applied account, I’m all ears!)

That is not to say that org theorists are useless, or that research is useless. I have found Herbert Simon's work on organisational decision making useful as a lens on practical rationality, for instance. I’ve also spent a lot of time digging into expertise research for applied ideas.

I think the bar I use is simple: when reading a theory, I ask myself if there are actionable handles. If so, I tend to pay attention. If not, or if I’ve applied it and it doesn’t work particularly well, I discount the research.

That said, I have noticed that good organisational builders — with a track record of actually building orgs — say different things from organisational theorists. And I think the reason for why is interesting: I suspect that org builders are interested in actual org outcomes, while org theorists are too far removed from actual application; they are interested in tenure.

(Edited to soften tone.)
Aren’t people conflating two different things? Merging a PR when repeatedly asked not to until it got approved, and Microsoft moving repos?

Merging the PR is a personal failure for which she explicitly apologized for.

Microsoft moving repos is something that the organization has always said was possible. There’s not much to apologize there for. That has always been explicitly stated the rules.
I'm not sure I understand. You could denominate ETH in dollars, yen, euros, gold, or any other form of money/currency.

Although USD might be your preferred, many would happily sell a vehicle for compensation in BTC, ETH, silver, gold, euros, etc.