skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The analysis in this article is so flawed that it's hard to take it seriously. A more balanced analysis might have helped. Sure, bitcoin has several terrible characteristics that have been exposed over the past few weeks (volatility, tons of speculation, new users don't understand wallet security, etc.)

But to insinuate with absolutely zero understanding that the creators of bitcoin did this to get rich is just plain nasty. Maybe they did want to get rich (in dollar terms) but there is nothing obvious on the block chain that proves that they cashed out. The argument seems to be that they can't cash it all out so they are waiting for something. Well, they haven't cashed anything out yet as far as anyone who looks at the block chain can tell. It's already possible to cash out $5-$10MM easily over bitstamp which would represent a fraction of their holdings. Why not do that and make sure your future is taken care of? At least that?

Furthermore, for several years it did not look like bitcoins were going anywhere. However, the people behind it continued to work on it, and still continue to do so, but under much new pressure because suddenly they are evil ponzi dealers.

Applying old school economics and psychology is great, but I must ask this question. What kind of value appreciation did gold see when people suddenly for no reason decided that it was worth a lot? Following this value appreciation did people not use it as a means of exchange as well as a store of value? Why can't bitcoin be thought of as gold 2.0? We started valuing dollars, pounds, euros, airplanes, cars, oil, and those didn't exist for much of human history.

Bitcoin isn't like something we've ever seen before and that includes Ponzi schemes. It may end up crashing and burning and it may end up doing really awesome stuff.

I just wish the naysayers would come up with better researched arguments instead of this crazy witch hunt.
> You use many assumptions too (..)

No I didn't. I pointed yours.

Furthermore, you inferred my position on the matter simply by me pointing out your assumptions. I could too want a better world less dependent on fossil fuels for all you know.
This headline doesn't ask any question.
This isn't just the case with BTC.

I live in the UK and generally think in GBP,
but if I'm addressing an international audience,
I'll usually refer to prices in USD.

(note: I agree with the general sentiment of the article, I'm just saying that people refer to USD because its a true global currency)
Why/How would Verizon track down my new phone numbers with T-Mobile?
Had a very surreal experience yesterday.

My wife could receive phone calls on her new phone with her new T-Mobile number fine but was also receiving phone calls on the same phone from our cancelled Verizon number as well. This despite never ever mentioning to Verizon what our new numbers would be (we didn't want to or try to port over the Verizon numbers to T-Mobile)

I call T-Mobile (new company) and they say to check with Verizon. Verizon says that someone put in a call forwarding setup with our brand new numbers. Here's the thing, I anticipated some shenanigans with Verizon (for other reasons) so I have a recording of the phone call when I cancelled with them. Not only do I clearly remember but b/c I have proof I very clearly did not order a call forwarding setup.

Somehow Verizon tracked down our T-Mobile numbers and continued service with a call forwarding setup. Of course I have this second conversation recorded as well and the rep went from "You must have ordered this" to "I can't see in the system when it was setup" when I pressed for more details.

Has anyone else had this happen?
You clearly have no idea who Gary North is.
> Do we actually know how many large mining groups we need to make up 51% of the processing power of the block chain

Two. GHash.io and BTCguild make up 27% each, for a total of 54%.

https://blockchain.info/pools

GHash.io had actually been acting maliciously according to some users on Bitcointalk, but the operator claims that was a rogue actor inside that has been dealt with. Double spends against betting sites in particular were involved with this one.
>relate to bitcoins we use what we know which is Dollars.

I don't think this says anything about Bitcoins as a currency. When the Euro was introduced in Germany, most restaurants, newspapers, politicians etc. kept on listing the Mark price alongside with the Euro price as a point of reference. After a few years this practice stopped when people got used to estimating the worth in Euros (my parents still translate everything into Mark).

I think that if Bitcoins ever become stable (who knows when - maybe once all coins are mined?) people might stop comparing USD to Bitcoins once they're used to the Bitcoin "worth", who knows.
I truly don't get this "BTC is a Ponzi scheme" thing. And "Social Security is a Ponzi Scheme" in the third sentence really doesn't endear me to this writer...

I don't buy it. Yeah, Satoshi owns a stack. But if he sold out, the price would drop so hard it'd make your head spin... and I doubt Satoshi would be able to be rid of all of them in time before they bottom out. The market isn't large enough yet to pull that sort of scheme off.

Now, Bitcoin still seems like a good idea, with an implementation that seems to have some issues, and rampant speculation is going to stop the better ideas that it could embody from happening for a while. But a "Ponzi scheme"? Done deliberately for that reason? You're telling me that Satoshi knew it'd hit $1k per BTC? Pfft.
Most Norwegians do not care that much, but there have been some small discussions and newspaper headlines lately discussing the ethics and double standard of exporting oil/gas while trying to be green. Many people just shrug and say it's better the world burn oil/gas than chinese brown coal.

And you know the old saying - don't get high on your own supply..
Appears so, the page is already gone.

Or maybe they stole linus' key? Anyone cloned the repository before it was deleted? If so, i think the repo could help in figuring out how it was done.
The individual who sells the Ponzi scheme makes money by siphoning off a large share of the money coming in. In other words, he does not make the investment. But Bitcoins are unique. The money was siphoned off from the beginning.

Only true if we see Satoshi spending his Bitcoins.

We have an online store selling baby products and really want to accept Bitcoins but we can't at the moment since Bitcoin is not widespread and price fluctuates madly. Once everybody got some and price is predictable in the short run, we'll show the finger to the bank, the real one siphoning from our pocket as commissions without actually providing any reasonable service.
In that context, you might want to think about metrification, and how USA-localized articles always convert "about xyz hundred kilometers" into miles, usually upgrading the number of sig figs from perhaps 2, to however many digits the calculator has. Or somewhat less common, but more hilarious, inadvertently defining pi to be 4, or whatever.
I might have read too quickly but from what I get the argument boils down too: too much volatility is bad, so it won't be used as money, so it isn't money.
I don't think that is a good argument. There are many examples were currencies are highly volatile yet still function as money. On the oder side, after the 2011 crash, bitcoin hovered around 2-3dollar for months.

I don't know if bitcoin will succeed. I don't know if it will be used as everyday money. I know quite a few people who use it to buy drugs or takeout food. I know vast amounts of people who have never heard of it.

I don't think you can say anything about bitcoins future as money at the moment. Just that (as I explained in an earlier post) national governments might at some point have an incentive to restrict bitcoin, if it gets so successful it might make their financial policy ineffective. But this point (if it ever comes) is still far in the future.
Is it possible to use one for uploads and one for downloads?
Just for the record: that's an internal comment, not part of the documentation.
> Shakespeare from around 1600 is rewarding but pretty much needs a translator into English to be understood by moderns.

Nobody in 1600s England spoke the way Shakespeare wrote. Shakespeare was writing poetry. His plays are famous for their use of iambic pentameter especially, which is beautiful to hear and read but not a natural part of English prose.

To pick another example more-or-less at random from the same era, the work of Thomas Hobbes is much less poetic and, therefore, substantially more readable. The major stylistic difference I can see is that they were absolutely addicted to what we'd now consider overlong, or even run-on, sentences.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Hobbes

Leviathan: http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/3207
Hi, this is a small security issue I found. I have already reported this to github.
In short: misunderstanding ECDSA, or just writing a bad implementation, revealing their private key by signing twice with the same r value (it should have been random).
Don't services like bitpay absorb the price fluctuations for you and pay out USD?
This article is unfortunately mostly right. Bitcoin's are 95% a ponzi scheme investment, and will at some point crash spectacularly. The question remains, however, whether from the ashes of that crash a useful product can remain, that can still succeed as a currency, or whether the psychological damage will prove to be too much to move past. If it can survive, it may even eventually return to the same high prices, but this time, based on its frequent use as a currency, and not based on rampant speculation.

Right now, the truth is that a negligible percentage of Bitcoin users care about its use as a currency (with the biggest exception being silk road type illegal uses). Almost everyone is focused on the price appreciation, and when that finally falters, it will collapse.
> I volunteer in a mentorship program that gets young people - especially young women - involved in technology. How many of you go out and actively try to increase the number of women in the field?

Do you go out and actively try to increase the number of women in the field?
Why users uninstall apps?
Right now the largest pool is 29%. And you actually only need 33% to trigger the 51% problem if the controlling pool withholds blocks for a couple seconds after solving them to give themselves a headstart on the next block. So in theory the currency is only days or weeks away from collapsing.

I do think bitcoin solves a legitimate problem. But I don't think bitcoin itself will become the winner. Litecoin is vastly better than bitcoin because it solves the 51% problem and several other issues, but odds are litecoin will eventually be replaced by something better also.
Yep. There's absolutely no risk for a vendor setting prices like this.
Was it an iPhone? Did you deregister the number from the Messages app? I don't know that that's what's happened here but that's one route.
Ray Kurzweil Believes He Has an 80 Percent Chance of Living Forever
I don't think you can create a github repo over ssh.
_If_ linus' key was stolen, he has bigger problems than just a fake github repo.
Oh true. What kind of issue, XSS or something else? (just generically, not specifics)
The author completely omits the two main advantages of Bitcoin over traditional currencies/banking:

1) it's blazing fast. Ten minutes and someone deep in African desert can wire money to a researcher on one of those scientific outposts. Try to do that with a bank.

2) If done right, Bitcoins are anonymous like cash. In light of the recent NSA scandal, I don't believe a second that the NSA/other governments will reduce their programs. If I wire a thousand dollars to Pakistan, I bet I'll land on some no-fly list, even if the money was support for my family. With Bitcoin, this would not be possible.
Hi,

I suggest that you check out bitpay.com

They will bill your customers in bitcoin and will transfer out USD to you so that you don't have to worry about the exchange rate at all. You setup your items in USD as well and they handle the price fluctuations.

They do daily payouts to 30 countries in several currencies. I've been using them since April and it's amazing!

Sincerely,
A happy bitpay customer :)

Edit: oh and I must add! They used to take 1% commission but have introduced new packages that have 0% commission from $30/month! Also, the daily bank withdrawals are free.
PC crap.
> Interestingly, in Serbian, "person" has female grammatical gender, so the whole sentence comes out in that gender, but as I said it's still semantically neutral.

It's the same in German and the pronoun for "Person" is consequently "sie" which is the female pronoun. Yet everybody thinks of a person as being genderless. Language gender has very little to do with real gender.
Not XSS. I will disclose more once it is fixed.
Trolling sequence done.
"price fluctuates madly"

Look at it as training if you ever branch out into selling in (hyper)inflationary markets.

For example, in the 80s, people in Argentina continued to pop out kids and would theoretically be a market for your baby product store... if you have the infrastructure to handle "difficult market conditions" then you have an inherent competitive advantage in the future over your competitors.

About the only thing that's really certain about the future of hyperinflation is it'll continue to happen, so a return on the investment seems guaranteed; although when you'll get the return and if that makes it worthwhile is unpredictable. Perhaps you'd totally own the baby products market in .mx in 2017 or .us in 2020, who knows.
Not directly related to the article, but recently I have heard few complaints about limitations of converting Bitcoins to us dollars (or any other official currency). If these complaints are true, how come these limitations exists? it affects the true value of the coin and works against logic & advantage that Bitcoins has to offer.

Anyone can share some information about the Bitcoin selling limitations?
Quoted from the discussion:

Posted by dman on December 9, 2008 at 7:00am

Hm.
First convince all hardware manufacturers and retailers to
stop labelling their cords and sockets by the grossly un-PC
terms "Male" and "Female".
Then get photographers and graphic artists to remove the
clearly racist words "Black" and "White" from their
vocabulary.
Next we can get backup, archive and filesystem listings to
stop using the horribly discriminatory ageist terms "older"
and "newer".

Then, maybe, we can come up with a new pair of words that
signifies "the one that gives orders" and "the one that
does what it's told". Or maybe in new-speak it should be
"committee enabler" and "co-operator". :-/
Whilst history is punctuated with previous ponzi schemes, it is also punctuated with periods that required a store of wealth outside of a national currency.

I shared the author's view when BTC == $30, I'm tempering that now and starting to view it as a maturing alternative wealth store.

It may always be extremely volatile. However, now it has achieved a level of confidence, it will likely become another safe harbour in times of local currency disruption.
I never said any of those were implausible; only that somehow, they were all taken for granted in the current discussion.

Position 1:

"We would be better off with pipelines..."

Position 2:

"No! (assumptions 1 ---> 2 ----> 3 ---> 3 ---> 4) fossil fuel is bad, so we shouldn't build a more expansive fossil fuel infrastructure, even if it costs some human lives."

Excuse me, but that's a pretty big quantum leap in argumentation.
Server comes from servus which is the latin word for slave so I cant see the improvement.
Please proofread your submissions before you post them.
Should I read past "It will never rival Social Security, however"?
Curious, how does Litecoin solve the 51% problem? Is this related to its 2.5 minute confirmation time, vs. Bitcoin's 10 minutes?
The Quietest Place on Earth
> someone who made a decision to exclude gender-neutral language specifically.

The pull request reviewer made a decision against small commits that don't fix errors in the code.
Bitcoin is only a Ponzi to those that don't actually understand Ponzis.

Which scammer is paying me for my bitcoins out of someone else's promised profits?
I'll check out Bitpay, thanks a lot.
Why not just disclose it responsibly to github without using it on other people's accounts?
There are limitations because the exchanges are not that liquid. There are no hard limitations as such. People have been converting $2-3MM from bitcoins easily but larger numbers will still be hard to convert at the current price.

This conversion limitation however should not affect the average joe.
We need digital currencies that can only ever be mined efficiently with a CPU, and there need to be many more blocks with lower rewards so that people don't need to join pools if they don't want to. They need to be able to earn "something" (not zero) even with a low-end CPU or when the difficulty gets too great, and close to the point of reaching the maximum number of coins. I think there weren't even 10 percent Bitcoins on the market, and CPU's already became obsolete.

Yes, I know about the scrypt-based ones, but unfortunately they can still be mined 10x faster with a GPU, and I don't think that's much more preferable either. It needs to be CPU-only, because most people get as fast CPU's as they can, usually, but they don't really care about the GPU performance, other than needing it to support HD playback, which is a very low standard for a GPU these days.

I'm not sure how it can be done, but some of the ones that claim to be CPU-only are using multiple hashing algorithms and ciphers at once, presumably to ensure that the task is too complex for anything less "general purpose" than a CPU (at least until they start making chips with accelerators for each and every one of those hashing algorithms?! Maybe something to prevent that could be built-in).

The point is to make mining as decentralized as possible. I realize the danger of botnets, too, but I think the trade-off is worth it. I'd rather have that, than a few groups of people or governments owning a ton of ASIC's, or perhaps a few very expensive quantum computers in the future, that they can use to manipulate the currencies. At least if it's CPU only, everyone can have a say in it, in aggregate, which is really the whole point of decentralization, and empowering the individual in the Internet world.
Is this the same Gary North who predicted the collapse of society from the Y2K bug?

> North predicted a Y2K catastrophe in print and online,[31] and predicted that a Y2K date-rollover failure of the global Information Technology (IT) infrastructure would precipitate severe disruption and the complete collapse of the international economy, leaving American Christians to restore society following the collapse.

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gary_North_(economist)#Y2K_ca...

Edit: looks like he has a long history of claiming the sky is falling:

http://www.wired.com/culture/lifestyle/news/1999/01/17193
Not as we define them. As we define it, a job is an exchange; the employee puts in work and they get back money and the like. What they have (as described in the article) is a legal requirement to be at their assigned place of work and do their assigned task, without getting back money and the like. That's more akin to slavery.
The same way it's always done, by exploiting a bug somewhere? Anyway, I wasn't trying to sound hostile, I was genuinely wondering whether hacking BSD is considered to be much harder than hacking anything else.
"Companies will not sell goods and services based on Bitcoins. Bitcoins have to have stable purchasing power if they are to serve as money, and they will never, ever achieve stable purchasing power."

More & more companies announce that they accept Bitcoins on a daily basis, thus it has purchasing power & it creates value to the end consumer.
Train derails in New York City
Shor’s algorithm and the future of cryptography
If you have a bank account number and the routing number for the bank, you can place a "demand draft." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demand_draft
I see all these people calling themselves libertarians arguing against BTC but I have yet to see why BTC would fail.

I hate this "BTC is not money" argument because the core foundation of liberalism states basically "money is what people voluntarily choose to use as money". So if they are convinced that BTC works (works at least better than some alternative) , why shouldn't they use it as money?

Volatility is not an argument. Before "adoption" of USD and gold as money, they most probably were volatile as well...
Yes, and much as that specific "law of headlines" exists, I'm proposing another unrelated "law of headlines" which is also almost universally true.
Bitcoin is not an investment scheme. It's a payment system. Unfortunately people are looking at it as an investment scheme.

Even if it was an investment scheme it hardly fits the definition of a ponzi scheme. In any new investment whether it's a startup or bitcoin the early investors make out better than later investors. That is not the definition of a ponzi scheme.
Austrian economics are so painful. Its amazing to me how impervious to contrary evidence its adherents are... their blind faith in their core beliefs are so unshakable. Every time I read one of them say that money arose from markets I wonder why they don't sponsor a bill that sets up an agency like NOAA that watches for dangerous conditions in this primeval force called "the market" so that people can be warned when "the market" is angry and another virgin needs to be tossed into its going maw in an act of propitiation.

Just the idea that markets pre-date states is so ingrained.
> "Robot" is etymologically derived from a Slavic word for slave ("Rab" in Russian, apparently).

More immediately, it's Czech for 'worker': Karel Čapek, the person who coined the word as it's now used in English for his play R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots), was Czech.

Karel Čapek: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karel_%C4%8Capek

R.U.R.: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R.U.R.
Yet again somebody writing about bitcoin who hasn't even read the FAQ, https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/FAQ#Is_Bitcoin_a_Ponzi_scheme.3F in particular:

"In a Ponzi Scheme, the founders persuade investors that they’ll profit. Bitcoin does not make such a guarantee. There is no central entity, just individuals building an economy.
A ponzi scheme is a zero sum game. Early adopters can only profit at the expense of late adopters. Bitcoin has possible win-win outcomes. Early adopters profit from the rise in value. Late adopters, and indeed, society as a whole, benefit from the usefulness of a stable, fast, inexpensive, and widely accepted p2p currency.
The fact that early adopters benefit more doesn't alone make anything a Ponzi scheme. All good investments in successful companies have this quality."

Back to the article:

> somebody owned a good percentage of the original digits.

Ok, this sounds just like bitterness from somebody who didn't buy in early. See also https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/FAQ#Doesn.27t_Bitcoin_unfairly_be...
I find no problem in being politically correct, and it presents a good opportunity to adopt more precise terms since technical language full of anachronisms is clubby and corny. It is all part of making our realm more widely suitable.

"Primary" and "secondary" or "coordinator" and "processor" may be more descriptive.
Yep. When I said it's interesting, I meant in the context of this controversy, it's gender neutral in meaning and it's grammatically female so it satisfies PC rigour from two sides.
An Austrian economist predicting the end of the world? I'm shocked!