altoz

Not surprising: Keynesian economist doesn't like Austrian economics explanations.

Surprising: Bitcoin part is largely left uncriticized.

I would say the author of this article is clearly biased against the Austrian view that make Bitcoin attractive to the libertarian types so the criticism is largely unsurprising.

What we do see is that the author of the critique and the author of the book can't be both right, especially about history. The success of Bitcoin does seem to favor the Austrian interpretation, though I'm sure many will disagree. Whatever the case, the experiment that is Bitcoin will continue and give us more data to make the case ourselves.

Not surprising:

Nearly everyone from Silicon Valley that's progressive/liberal thinks there's no problem or that the problem is something else.

Nearly everyone not fitting the description above thinks there's a problem and that it alienates them.

If you want to hear this article read out loud, this podcast has this article along with some commentary:

https://soundcloud.com/noded-bitcoin-podcast/noded-020

> Once a transaction gets confirmed on one chain, it's permanently able to be spent on the other.

That's simply not true. If the utxo gets spent on the other chain, the two coins are permanently split.

> Also, automated system may have no way of handling it if those automated systems are not upgraded. Which means a merchant could end up with thousands of payments that they have to manually fix. And, those merchants will be forced into adopting the new software to correct the issue, they will have no choice to o ignore it.

And incur legal liability? Businesses will gladly do lots of manual work to avoid thousands of lawsuits.

Fact is, it's really only a problem for the businesses and even without any replay protection, they can very easily split coins by using either post-split coinbase coins or any coins ever mixed with any post-split coinbase coins.

If you're transacting with an exchange or a merchant and accidentally send both coins (as a result of a replay attack) instead of one, they're going to give it back. It's not nearly the disaster this article makes it out to be.

The only case where this is a problem are business to consumer transactions and p2p txs both of which you rarely do, if ever if you use BTC as a store of value.

Opt-in replay protection was merged in a few days ago. https://github.com/btc1/bitcoin/commit/a3c41256984bf11d95a56...

In any case, if you believe Bitcoin's main value proposition is as a great store of value, then replay protection simply doesn't matter that much. You wouldn't be transacting enough to matter.

I wrote a similar article on the difference between ICOs and VC investment. In short, the investor gets much less in an ICO:

https://medium.com/p/why-icos-are-very-different-than-seed-c...

Corrected

Hi, author of the Medium article here. The block containing the transaction was mined at 4:57pm EST (21:57 GMT) on 1/26:

https://blockexplorer.com/block/000000000000000001b12145b9ba...

https://blockchain.info/tx/143a764d3fa405f428e1d0e5b9d01b88e...

This tweet showing the screenshot is clearly earlier:

https://twitter.com/evanoconnell/status/824614832691355648

There's a whole slew of designers and UX people, so whatever you see is definitely deliberate. They do a lot of usability testing, not just for the website, but the app, mobile site, etc. You would not believe how many iterations of something tiny like a slight change in the thumbs up button goes through. Everything is related to clicks and revenue, so there's a lot at stake for even small changes.

Former employee here.

It used to be a 2-person company before it was acquired. A large part, surprisingly is scale. During Black Friday to Cyber Monday, for instance, the site is hit pretty hard by all the on-line shoppers. There's also a ton of different sites they manage, of which RetailMeNot is just one (deals2buy is another, a bunch of other international sites). They also have iOS and Android apps, mobile versions of the sites and a lot of community engagement.

There's a whole department to figure out which coupons do well and which affiliates pay better than which other ones to figure out which ones to feature. There's another department to manage all the different commission rates (mostly to call those companies to pay more). There's a whole community engagement group that tries to get more users to submit coupons or more users to use the site. There's a sales department that tries to get exclusive coupons in return for featuring them. There's even customer service to deal with users that are having trouble. Finally, there's a department to acquire new properties. Also, all those international coupon sites have their own mini versions of all these departments.

You also need HR, finance, office manager, etc. The headcount goes up pretty quick. When I left it was around 400 employees. It actually hasn't grown that much in 3+ years.

Where was this article the previous 8 years?

There are a lot of reasons Bitcoin is worth more than other cryptocoins. I lay out an analysis here: https://medium.com/@jimmysong/why-bitcoin-transaction-capaci...

This reminds me why calling out a company on twitter for something that goes wrong is way more effective than calling customer support. Basically a life lesson: Public shaming is way more effective than the processes set up to handle these things.

If he really was a 10x engineer and it was a "small team" (say 6 people), wouldn't firing the other 5 have been the better move?

I'm not sure how this is a story. This startup has been around since at least 2014:

https://cointelegraph.com/tags/storj

$100k of funding after 3 years of development doesn't really seem newsworthy.

First, yes, there are large farms of miners, but that's only some of the mining power. While these mining farms can be targeted and shut down, a significant amount of mining power is actually held in places that wouldn't be easy to locate. Those miners are going to keep mining as the owners have a strong economic incentive to do so, even if their mining pool in China gets shut down. They could, for example, just connect to a pool outside of China.

Also, what would happen to all the mining equipment should a mining farm get shut down? If the shut down is permanent, you can bet the people that own those machines would try to sell those miners as quickly as possible to people outside the country that can run them.

The economic incentives of bitcoin are such that there will be significant resistance to any government attempts at shutting down.

the seen: people it helps the (mostly) unseen: the higher burden on everybody else

Is the tradeoff worth it? That's the question.

Most altcoins are bought and traded using BTC as the onramp.

The dinner choices were the worst. Where's steak or grilled chicken? Basically, the only meat options were a hamburger (with bun) or kosher hot dogs.

Well said. There's this assumption that when people don't do what you would do, that they're misinformed, when in fact, they may very well have the same information, it's just that they disagree with you. In other words, different people have different values and vote accordingly.

tl;dr

Your software sucks because you don't have enough technical talent. + sales pitch to develop technical talent at your company.