skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Since not a single comment agrees with the premise, I'll say: yes. Heck yes & obviously. A limited supply of increasingly hard to miner tokens is a clear & obvious indicator of a ridiculous scheme. There's very few examples in the world of the utility of a thing continually decreasing while the valuation ascends, yet Bitcoin has ascended pointlessly to a tens-of-thousands-of-dollars price-point.

There was a time when bitcoin was a possible way to either encode data into the blockchain, or to make financial transactions. These uses are still possible but at vastly less available price points.
That's the first place I looked. They're not on that page, I don't know why you linked it.
We don’t have data and what if they convert back into fiat? Would you say that foreign workers who get paid in USD and send money back home only use USD as a ponzi?
> profits are derived from legitimate investments

Exactly, crypto doesn’t even claim to have legitimate investment profit. All of it is from newcomers pouring money into the pot…
I am the developer of HACK which is a HN client for iOS, MacOS and Android and I support account creation too:

https://apps.apple.com/ca/app/hack-for-hacker-news-developer...

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.pranapps.h...

I have no idea what happens to third party apps as Apple doesn't specify.
The anti-Bitcoin sentiment on HN is frankly baffling to me.

It's one of the most exciting things happening in tech right now, and HN is at best ambivalent and at worst openly hostile to Bitcoin.

Why wouldn't the tech crowd be excited about digital native money which is perfect for the Internet?

Look at what's happening around the ecosystem with the Lightning Network, Impervious.AI, RGB etc.

https://rgb-org.github.io/
https://www.impervious.ai/
Bitcoin is nothing new. See Rai stones: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rai_stones

It's the people invested in it that gives it value. Just like fiat, gold, art, stamps, useless antiques, etc. As long as it has value to someone, then it has value. I can't see it disappearing anytime soon. Yes, it might fall and rise in value but to disappear like any other Ponzi scheme? Don't hold your breath. Bitcoin is more than a decade old now. It will be the longest running "Ponzi" scheme. Be back in a decade to say I told you so. Bye!
The average P/E ratio of U.S. stocks is 38, meaning if the value of a stock really is primarily based on its ability to produce an external source of revenue, it would take 38 years for an investor to recoup the cost of a share of a company. When you adjust for 2% inflation, it would take 117 years for someone to recoup the cost.

Since that exceeds the lifespan of well over 99% of the population, it must follow that people are not investing in stocks because they expect the company to produce some external source of revenue that will eventually repay the principle. There are a host of complex reasons why people invest including wealth preservation, a desire to support a company they are interested in, speculation, a belief that investing is smart and the right thing to do... these are all fine reasons, but they have little to do with some kind of fundamental valuation that some people think stocks intrinsically have.

The vast majority of gains from the stock market have next to nothing to do with external sources of revenue.
There are plenty of other metals or “creations” like time pieces.
According to the linked article, it seems like it would be 40.
There is silver, and platinum, and tungsten, etc. etc. It’s the same thing just in a physical format.
Thanks. I'm in Canada and I'm very happy here. I've not encountered here anywhere near the amount of xenophobia that I did in Britain.

Australia was actually an alternative I considered but the tech sector was stronger in Canada at the time (late nineties)
In my 20s, I got paid $50 to be part of a focus group on young men's attitudes toward Foster's Australian lager. Of the six of us in the room, five of us drank maybe 3-4 beers a week. One guy (call him Tony) admitted to drinking a whole case -- 24 beers per week.

Our hosts jokingly said: "Maybe we should send the rest of you home right now, and spend the rest of our session figuring out how to get Tony's business."

Facebook's gravest problem (which OP doesn't yet confront) is that its business systems are built to get maximum engagement out of every Tony on the planet. And that can have catastrophic implications. Truther cults of all sorts flock to FB private groups. Young teens with body issues obsess on Instagram. Trolls, bots and the agitators behind them soon embrace Facebook as the garden they never leave.

When OP talks about Facebook's Competence as a political problem, he's using the most opaque language possible to talk about what's really a moral problem. The people inside Facebook aren't immoral, but some (many?) are profoundly amoral. Being really good at connecting people raises grave issues when some of those people are uniquely vulnerable to being drawn into an ever-tighter net of connections that could mess up many lives.

Parallels -- and pushes for regulation -- abound. In the finance industry, wisps of regulation try to prevent account-churners from trading Tony's accounts to zero. The same issues come up with the gambling industry, and its seduction of compulsive gamblers. Team Zuckerberg hasn't really found its conscience yet. And so, the list of Tony fueled troubles keeps growing.

Here's hoping that OP's second version of this essay digs a little deeper into the problem of competence. Will Team Zuckerberg find a conscience? Will regulators install one instead? Lots of unresolved questions to get settled in the next 5-10 years.
If you're talking about the division in the US: that comes from being authoritarian not from being connected. Disagreement isn't a problem when you're not forcing your ideas on eachother.
How about the stock market?
Everyone I know that invested in stocks did so hoping to trade it back later on for more fiat than they paid.
That certainly isn't what they claim as their major selling point to advertisers. Do you have any evidence or documentation for this statement?

What Facebook offers to advertisers is the ability to choose who sees their ads very accurately and for a very granular set of interests and demographics. Nothing more, nothing less. Advertisers like this because it means they are not spending money showing ads to people who are unlikely to be interested in their product in the first place. That's it.

The idea that Facebook has figured out a way to achieve "population scale mind control" and that they explicitly offer this as a product to advertisers is beyond ludicrous. Again, do you have any evidence for this? Can you show me a screenshot of the Facebook ad buying interface with the "mind control" box checked?

I can see why people would wish this were true. The US is in a downward spiral of political polarization and dysfunction that may well be heading us towards civil war. It would be nice if we could blame this on some kind of mysterious, greedy, rapacious AI-driven boogeyman (like Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook) that we could simply eliminate to return us to normal. I think a lot of the pushback against Facebook comes from people wanting to believe this is possible and not wanting to face the actual root causes of this
dysfunction.
Agree, the system is uniquely approachable for low level. The simplicity is beginning to be a problem for Texas Instruments who faces competitive pressure from other companies who have a more modular codebase and can just drop in Python support. TI is heavily invested in their z80 assembly codebase and can't get things like CircuitPython to build on ez80, leading to hacks like shipping a totally separate ARM microcontroller to run the Python environment, with the z80 playing dumb terminal.

A smarter solution would be to virtualize the z80 portions on basically any other architecture and slowly start moving to C wrappers for TI-OS functionality.
lmao, I am dying at this.
You don’t need data to see plainly that the vast majority of goods are obtained with fiat. As such, someone selling goods for crypto has no choice but to use fiat as well.
My apps for HN do allow account creation. I guess I will have to wait for some developers to complain to Apple to figure out how to handle third party clients.
Tell that to my coworkers who converted all their euros to usd.
People absolutely invest in USD, in expectation of appreciation. South Korean banks sell saving accounts denominated in USD as an investment product. Money flows into it when USD appreciates and flows out when it depreciates.
You are quite right.

However, we cannot also completely deny that they have had some foresight/smarts (and a large dose of luck) in managing their Oil boom.
Just as all Americans are deeply racist and seek the downfall of non-white races, am I right?

Yes, there are abuse cases, some which are particularly bad. No, this is not the norm, at least as far as my social circle's expectations are, and at least one or two hops out.

Singapore has a pile of issues, and I'd include "not a true democracy" in that, but normalized abuse of maids is not one of them. It makes the news for a reason.
It's all about being close to the money/equity.

Sales people will always be close to the money, by definition, and C-suite will always have the most equity (because they carry the most risk by dint of them being the face of the company).

The markets were white hot during COVID, and while lots of businesses suffered, lots went to the god damn moon
I can exchange dollars for either other dollars or gold. Neither of which necessarily need the goodness (or greed) of society to constantly care and feed it.

Banks existed long before the internet did, and in a post-apocalyptic crunch we could always go back.
> Thus the investors, as a whole, are always in the red, and their collective loss only increases with time

How is this true of bitcoin investors? When bitcoin price action is near all time highs, most bitcoin investors are not in the red.
After looking through it quickly it seems to do the same as most profanity checks with Dutch: it doesn't block "kut" (a crude word for female genitalia) but it does block "kunt" (third person form of "can")
Shiba Inu cryptocurrency rises 367% in one week
I find it very manipulative to use people suffering as an excuse to pump speculative assets.

Sure, there’s very tiny amount of people who use Bitcoin as you described. But so there’re people who get benefits from smoking.
AAAARRRRHHHH! Reading the link I saw the solution I missed decades ago when I tried to use POV to make my PET create a colour display. Just reading the section on how they did 4 levels of grey scale was an eye opener. Yes, I got some colour by flashing squares on and off but it was unwatchable.

I did the flashing for the entire screen together! Just by breaking up which squares flashed at different times I can now see would have made a big difference. Almost 40 years to learn what I did wrong.
Comparing all those ERC20 tokens to Bitcoin is like comparing a Wix website to Google / Facebook
This is plain whataboutism. I have no intention to defend my compatriots' xenophobia. That issue is orthogonal to what's been happening to me in Britain. And for what it's worth I didn't settle in Poland but again that's a non-sequitor and has no bearing on what's being talked about.
> This is not the case with gold.

Silver, platinum, palladium, rhodium, copper...

Just as people have generally centered around gold, people have so far generally centered on Bitcoin. There's a great deal of other metals and a great deal of other cryptocurrencies, but if nobody really cares about them, then they are not relevant to the conversation.
> Doesn't Bitcoin provide a more convenient/less expensive way to send money between countries

The current bitcoin transaction fee is more than 100x what my bank charges, so no, not really.
A lot of people on HN seem to have 'strong opinions strongly held' about things.
There’s also the Scala Metals language server and bloop. Plenty of options outside of eclipse.
"This means that we will support Republicans, Democrats, and Independents - as well as candidates identifying themselves as Forward Party members."

It's not a party. It's more of a organization to fund politicians who align with their "core values".
Current State of Lightning Network Privacy
If you want a handheld console with these specs that is fully modular it will be the size of a basketball.
Because OAN is not really just the other side of the coin. It's for the most part pure factless drivel. I'm all for a broad range of views. There's a difference between being unfair to one side and just blatant lies. OAN doesn't seem to fact check at all and their interviews of conservative candidates are so laughably propagandistic they would make a North Korean news anchor blush.

And no, I do not think that any of the other mainstream outlets are just as bad or even close to as bad. The right needs more smart, good faith analysis on the airwaves, but OAN ain't it.
There are an infinite supply of magical numbers. There are a limited supply of precious and rare metals easily minable on earth.

E.g. The price of copper has been going up over the past century (adjusted for inflation)

If you want to mine more magic numbers just add another digit to the search space and you'll easily have another 10 times more numbers.
Yes, Bitcoin is a banana.

1. A banana is yellow

2. A banana starts with B

Bitcoin is usually represented by a yellow coin with a b in it, and it starts with B, therefore bitcoin is a banana.

----

The article just redefine the word Ponzi so it loosely fit Bitcoin. But it is missing one key feature of the common interpretation of a Ponzi scheme: the fraudulent part.
There are two ways to increase the partial pressure of oxygen: either raise the overall pressure, or increase the concentration of oxygen (at the expense of nitrogen concentration, surely). Assuming a change in nitrogen partial pressure isn't going to interfere with things, I'd have to agree, there's not an obvious difference between the two. Maybe the researchers used a hyperbaric chamber just because they had access to a hyperbaric chamber.
Wait what? Are you saying you don’t get spammed by people who tell you it’s going to the moon?
I didn't know that, and you're right. For anyone who's interested, I found the following references regarding the $8.39 additional fee for a .com registration:

https://itp.cdn.icann.org/en/files/registry-agreements/com/c...

https://www.icann.org/en/system/files/correspondence/stewart...

https://www.icann.org/en/announcements/details/icann-and-ver...
There are good reasons why gold and silver became the main medium of exchange for thousands of years. Most other metals failed imported criteria to make them as useful for this purpose.
You're just hating on crypto and finding reasons for it. Crypto has uses cases that people are using at the moment and it's not up to you to decide how people should decide to use systems. If they want to own some NFTs because it's part of a game or simply to hold some generative art, that is their choice.

The issue is with Apple being Apple as usual.
“It’s going to the moon”
I would be absolutely shocked if Bitcoin's value ever dropped to zero.

I can't see any conceivable way that happens at this point. Even a coordinated effort by the world's governments to "ban" it (they can't really ban it) would not drive its price to zero... if anything it might even have the inverse effect.

Can you provide any conceivable way this would actually happen? Maybe an asteroid hitting Earth and wiping out all human life on the planet?
This year Ethereum has so far settled over $6 trillion in value on chain.

And the system has revenues. Ethereum did around $35 million daily in fees this last week. Uniswap did around $3 million. https://cryptofees.info/

No doubt there's something to it.
There's plenty of factless garbage reporting on CNN.
My gosh, all the red flags go up for me. Non SSL page, sourcefourge, yahoo email contact address. UI from a really long time ago? Then I see it was made in 2003, ahhhh ok, makes sense -- and now I'm really impressed. They have updated it every year since 2003!!
I signed up for Steam because they gave away Portal.
I assume with a good legal team that he can probably afford, they would not advise him to state what he did since he could incriminate himself further. The situation is probably not that serious for him to be stating that in public. Or hes crazy.
At least you can now tell CFN not to rollback on failure… definitely helps when developing your CFN.
I think the ideas hold up pretty well there even if I wrote that a while back. The same economic factors are still in play.
I don't see anything wrong with that quote. Can it be expressed more "softly"? Sure. But that person is expressing his opinion and I don't see any problem with that. You could also argue it lays the foundation for further escalation but that's on whoever chooses to engage in it IMO.

There seems to be a more general trend going on, some think themselves or others must be protected from "harshness" (even though I consider the above quote to be only a mild example - see the rest of the internet...). For example Linus Torvalds gets a lot of flak for his opinions on some pieces of code he doesn't like but every time I read those emails, I feel like people are blowing it way out of proportion. I'm sure it's not fun to be on the receiving end but his arguments are typically sound and likes to write a lot to really drive his point home. I'd rather be told I'm working on a dead end than a "nice comforting letter" explaining how my patch can't be accepted _right now_ because of x and y with wording that could be interpreted as "it could be accepted later" just to be friendly even though the code is structurally bad and needs to go back to the drawing board. It would give hope where there is none and I think that is worse than "no your code sucks because of x y and z".

I think in this case here it was ok for disappointment to be expressed.
Lots of people invest in USD, especially in countries where local currencies are less stable.
Starting with a stripped-out Linux kernel and a standard toolchain (whether gcc or clang) would start you light-years ahead of Plan 9 and still permit you to do the kind of research a lot of us (including former 9fans) would love to see. This really depends on an expansive view of "operating systems" (i.e. kernel + a lot of other stuff), but most of what you're saying is not exclusively the domain of the most privileged code.

As a bonus, you'd get a vast array of device drivers and be able to run actual computer programs used by more than a handful of people, which I hear is neat for attempting to build an innovative research operating system with some relevance.

I'm not going to argue that a standard Linux distribution is not a giant mountain of cruft, but imo it's the user space and system software that's alarming, not the kernel per se. And to the extent that the kernel is crufty: well, it's supporting orders of magnitude more things that Plan 9 ever did, and that's a good thing.

I share your irritation at all the things you outline, but you don't need to be running a wacky Thompson C codebase on top of an old kernel to fix any of these things.

I'm also far from convinced that there's any aspect of the Plan 9 design that should be accepted uncritically for a clean sheet new OS design. Saying "nothing has moved forward" is hyperbole, and plenty of things have changed since 1990, even if we accept your claim about OS stagnation as a given. I'm far from convinced that the insights of the Plan 9 guys circa 1989 are so wonderful and timeless that they are better than what could be done with a clean sheet design on top of modern hardware and a minimalist Linux kernel now.
How about non ERC20 token? So a WIX website isn't as legitimate as Google/FB? Who is this arbiter of legitimacy?
I didn't say you did, I was agreeing with you. I recommend reading comments' tone on HN as more neutral than the average internet comment.
First off, you're hand waving over every person who has ever used bitcoin to purchase anything, which is a lot of people buying a lot of stuff.

When I started mining bitcoin no one was talking about it every have a USD value. It was just silly internet points that you could pass around to friends. I also know a lot of people who hold as a store of value believing that it will easily outlast the US dollar.

Just because all your friends are clowns doesn't mean that those are the only people that exist.
This is how Daisy Disk works. It’s a great interface- in that context.
This is arguably the same for a majority of crypto users.

I see crypto as a "digital asset". It's something you store funds in to hedge markets or get around transactional issues (either because you're doing something potentially illegal by some entities definition or because your currency is shot to shit), which basically makes it like golds or precious gems.

I'm not totally sold it'll last long term, but I don't see the comparison as a huge logic leap.
Sure, they're a racket. But they're also a handy tool.

You can plug in a bunch of arithmetic, and it just does it, but you can easily edit and redo. They can graph some functions, and do some of the brute force stuff (like newton's method etc), so you can concentrate on the thinking.

If you spend the class time writing a program to solve the homework, instead of doing the homework, you've practiced a life skill and probably understand the material pretty well.

If you get the 68k based calculators (ti-92 and ti-89), they've got a symbolic algebra system and can do a lot of cool stuff, although giving that to a high schooler may not be the best choice.
I really don’t get your distinction between fiat and crypto
My bank account is a digital store of value, in US dollars. I never visit the bank (was impossible during the lockdown), rarely handle cash, and when I do, it's inconvenient.
This comment makes absolutely no sense. It looks like you are just seeking to associate me with something you consider bad (e.g. tobacco lobbyists) by something like "tobacco lobbyists are arguing they are right, this guy argues he's right, therefore clearly they are the same". Could you address the content of my argument instead?
I have found I am terrible at understanding what new technologies are "for".

I didn't really get the iphone when it first came out. And I didn't get Facebook.

Then my "aha" moment was that Facebook was like email, but looser - you could post your holiday photos on it, without thinking who to send them to, and your friends could see them and chime in if they were interested.

Facebook was post-email. Mind blown!

But Facebook is not that thing anymore. It's now a vicious cesspool of outrage-inducing rubbish, peppered with inane vapid memes.

Obviously that's what people want, but people want a lot of things that they aren't really proud of. Most of us like a bit of gossip, even if we wouldn't like to be described as a gossiper. I personally find myself unhealthily drawn to stories about anti-vaxxers who are begging for the vaccine from their deathbeds. An unworthy part deep inside me thinks "serve you right". I am not proud of that.

Facebook now panders to our lowest, ickiest instincts.

And in doing so, it legitimises those icky instincts, and starts us feeling like those instincts aren't so bad. Then our behaviour gets worse. Next thing on the slippery slope, we're marching to the Capitol, part of an armed insurrection.

Not a lover of regulation at all, but something has to give. Our society cannot survive bottom dwelling AI leeches like Facebook.
Bitcoin is a lot of different things to a lot of different people. The fact that it satisfies a certain set of conditions of a Ponzi scheme does not invalidate the myriad current and future applications of crypto. The social security administration could also be considered a Ponzi scheme, but it still provides tremendous value to a lot of people.