It's notable that Colin Percival pioneered memory-hard key derivations functions with Scrypt for tarsnap. Scrypt became the proof-of-work function for asic-resistant cryptocurrencies suchs as Litecoin and influenced Ethereum's ethHash. (Besides many other applications).

In this post Colin casually speaks out against proof-of-work, without taking any credit for his significant indirect influence on it.

I can't exactly take credit for litecoin (and others) using scrypt, given that they did it without my knowledge, endorsement, or advice. (If they had talked to me I would have pointed out that limiting scrypt to using 1 MB of RAM eliminated the entire point of scrypt.)

That is interesting - I guess by using scrypt for passwords you're encouraging crackers not to bother brute forcing (it isn't worth your time), wheras in a cryptocurrency you're actively encouraging that behaviour? Well spotted.

I wonder how much Colin made from the Bitcoin rise. It seems amazing that one could have made a little fortune by just deciding to accept Bitcoin as an experiment few years back.

Looks like the US cutting off Wikileaks from the credit card system in late 2010, forcing them to set-up bitcoin very early, and Wikileaks keeping the coin because of fear of bank account seizure, might have netted it $25 million or so[1]. This is really a classic case to point to for the problems(or strengths, if one is in control) of the current banking/fiat system that was part of the claimed reason why Satoshi created Bitcoin.

[1]https://www.thedailybeast.com/where-did-wikileaks-dollar25-m...

It is up to him, but most people/companies immediately convert to USD, because they just want money for their service not to gamble.

Yes, you could have made a lot of money with bitcoin, same of you would put all your money on 7 black in roulette. Hindsight is always 20/20.

Precisely $0.00. I have never held bitcoins or any other cryptocoins -- Stripe abstracted that away for me.

That makes no sense, businesses that have been accepting Bitcoin generally charge the USD price at the current exchange rate and convert that back to USD not long after the transaction, for fear that Bitcoin would turn into funny money. We're talking business here, not investment.

Yeah, business. So about those transaction fees... you can save money by grouping your transactions and clearing them in blocks.

Now you're dangerously close to figuring out that you can make more money by waiting for the best time to clear the block.

Once you've crossed that bridge, if your business has any margin at all, it's not hard to imagine that keeping some of the exchanged crypto currency back from each clearing block until the next block, or even longer, during any bullish run (that we've seen on more than one occasion) can result in a measurable margin increase with a fairly low (or at worst, quantified) risk profile.

That would still be investing, business would pay taxes on the Bitcoin value at the time of purchase as revenue, regardless of conversion to fiat in whole or part.

I know, so you pay your taxes and now you might as well have been a day trader for the levels of complexity that adds to your tax accounting burden.

Not sure what my point was really — that's just about exactly how this plays out.

50 Cent begs to differ:

https://www.theverge.com/2018/1/24/16930010/50-cent-rich-bit...

> It seems amazing that one could have made a little fortune by just deciding to accept Bitcoin as an experiment few years back.

In terms of what you might have made, there is no difference between 1) accepting Bitcoin as an experimental payment method in an existing business; and 2) accepting cash as usual and using that to buy some Bitcoin as an experiment.

What would have been much easier is 3) buying some Bitcoin as an experiment outside of the operation of a business. Because you wouldn't have had to worry about how to handle it in your business accounts, or set up an automated payment flow for it, and so forth.

You might as well be asking "I wonder how much people made from the Bitcoin rise".

Stellar is looking very good for lots of use cases. That's the only one I follow though. What else is good from tech as well as how the coin has been performing?

Communities for coins are important.

E.g small coins like sucr or madcoin target specific populations (here south america and maroco). Monero is used by the darknet community. Ripple by the gafas and big financial entities. Ethereum is loved by start ups and geeks. Lightcoin is nice for traders to transfert funds between exhanges cheaper and faster than with btc. Etc.

If you just want to make money however, you target stuff that have a strong chance of going back up in the next month, but is currently very low. Philscurrency is an example of that, with the masternode going from 2.7k to 13k and back to 3k. Having a good rythm and patience is key. But phils has no specific advantages over other coins. It just looks a lot like alqo, and may follow the same path, being now at 23k for one mn. But why does it move that way ? The community on bitcointalk or discord is a big factor.

There are now more than 1300 altcoins, 10% of that only really have something technically unique (having masternodes or dark send is very common nowaday) or a good project (zencash, wagerr, stellar, kryll, etc. are exceptions, not the norm). But because we are in a bubble, most of them are economically very active anyway. So betting on the community is a better metric.

Of course it takes time to get in touch with each of them.

One fundamental problem at this point is that coin sponsors and the enthusiastic coin owner-boosters want massive price growth so they can strike it rich. But as a medium of exchange price stability is a very nice property.

In terms of price stable crypto-currencies there's tether, which is looking very much like a scam, and some kind of complicated ethereum contract token the name of which slips my mind at the moment.

The stellar network is supposed to be able to be used to make payments without necessarily involving stellars (except to fund the transaction). But the anchors and trust web needed to do that don't exist (yet?)

You are looking for the « DAI token » maybe?

Not sure why this is grayed out, that’s what I couldn’t think of.

Time for other cryptocurrencies to shine. "Starbucks Chairman Says Cryptocurrency Will Be Big — Just Not Bitcoin" - http://time.com/money/5121644/starbucks-chairman-bitcoin/

Too bad they're not creating their own coin, starbucks would be a pretty catchy name.

sounds like a recipe for confusion

“Do you want to meet up and pay me in Starbucks?”

“Sure where do you want to meet?”

“Starbucks”

“yeah i know you are paying me in starbucks but where you wanna meet?”

Is there a cryptocurrency equivalent of "buy 10 drinks get one free" yet?

Burger King introduced WhopperCoin in Russia: https://www.cnbc.com/2017/08/28/burger-king-russia-cryptocur...

Ethereum smart contracts should let you put loyalty cards on the blockchain, right?

Looks like all the chains will have their own money, also known as gift cards or store credit.

Unfortunately I think that's where we're headed. They will copy the tech, call it "crypto", and now they're in the cool kids club.

Bitcoin, however, will remain king because it's the first (Lindy effect) and it still offers more than any of the clones.

Don't all the chains need their own currency? I was under the impression that both proof of stake and proof of work required that there was some form of native currency so that there was some incentive to secure the network.

Not necessarily. There are also some coins which use methods of securing the network which don't require incentives (ex: RaiBlocks).

Then how does RaiBlocks plan on paying the bills of running a node.

The proposition is that free, instant transfers are so awesome that people will voluntarily run nodes.

I like Raiblocks. It really functions the way that people want Bitcoin to function (free, instant, complete [no dust] transfers).

I suggest you read the white paper if you're interested: https://raiblocks.net/media/RaiBlocks_Whitepaper__English.pd...

It doesn't offer more. It actually offers much less.

I certainly see Bitcoin as a viable "middleman" for trading and arbitrage between all the altcoins. Right now that seems to be the biggest use case.

That's only trading on an exchange though. That doesn't use the protocol.

Not really because transactions in BitCoin take forever to clear.

Your opinion is irrelevant. The market has the last word, and the market has already decided Bitcoin is the most valuable and useful. You can verify this by looking at hash rate, market cap, and distribution (amongst other things). You may not like it, so feel free to downvote me, but the facts are indisputable.

Well thank you for that. Noted. I'm going to give you an upvote just so I can have the satisfaction of seeing other people downvote you for being an asshole.

Yikes, please don't be uncivil even if someone else is, or you feel that they are. I'm sure you realize that it's against the rules here, and that we ban accounts that do it.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Do what brings you joy in every day.

Could you please stop posting flamewar-style comments to HN?

I would suggest you don't.

Possibly the Lightning Network on Bitcoin will help with these kind of problems, once its up to speed. See discussion on the stripe announcement thread:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16218056

1st of April is a strange date to stop or announce anything. April Fools, really?

April 1st is the first day of the second quarter for businesses whose fiscal year is the calendar year.

It generally makes sense for changes that affect accounting to start on the first day of a quarter.

Announce? Yes. Stop? Not really.