jasonisalive
jasonisalive on Hacker News
The problem of credit cards is that when you make a payment, you have to give away your private key. No amount of securitisation will take away this fundamental flaw.
This is one of Bitcoin's evolutionary advantages in this space. To send money with Bitcoin, there is no need to expose one's private key. A massive corporation could take millions of annual payments and their paying customers needn't be concerned about their money being at risk. If the entity has poor security, the only people they endanger are themselves.
Great, so you're concerned about some people being more competitive than others in the free market. So what's your response? A monopolistic ostenisbly communally-controlled central power to oversee and address alleged abuses? Excellent, you just created a superbly manipulable tool of power for society's most capable individuals to wield. You just made problems of fundamental unfairness much worse, not better.
And the irony is that people like yourself, chasing phantoms of unfairness in the free market, support the extension and entrenchment of coercive governments, an institution which is and always will be eminently corruptible, an institution whose history is a litany of abuse and overreach.
Uber offers a certain deal to potential drivers, they either like it enough to accept it or they think they can get a better match for their skills and circumstances and they keep looking. Uber has no responsibility to try and offer a deal which matches your sense of fairness. No one is being coerced and no one is being exploited.
So what, some people have urgent needs, different parties in economic transactions have access to different information. Welcome to the free market. They're still choosing to work for Uber. No one is forcing them. Uber isn't forcing them. Uber is just offering an opportunity that they are deciding to accept.
The entire economic system is built around people trying to get the best deal possible for themselves. You can try and paint that as inhumane and abusive if you're commited to emotionalising economic dynamics, but it really doesn't make any sense. At the end of the day as long as the transactions are consensual, there's no need for this rhetoric of abuse. Uber drivers know the deal and they can take it or leave it. No one's holding a gun to their heads. Likewise, it's not Uber or anyone else's job or responsibility to guarantee anyone or anybody a certain standard of living.
You might as well vilify people for choosing the potatoes which are 10c/kg cheaper at the supermarket, isn't that a case of those wealthy enough to buy potatoes victimising helpless potato farmers?
If by illegal images you mean child pornography, there's a few key differences between CP and Bitcoin. Namely: very very few people are into CP, while practically everyone who isn't an enthusiast is violently opposed to it. Therefore, law enforcement has a practical free reign to track down and destroy the lives of CP-sharers, and are actively supported and even acclaimed by the wider public for their actions.
The excuses for the prohibition of free financial services on the other hand are all basically covert attempts to protect the sovereignty of state military/police institutions, and do not actually align at all with the interests of regular folk. Plus absolutely everybody needs and enjoys high quality, unrestricted financial services.
So I see the chances of government attempts to suppress Bitcoin succeeding as more or less 0. What would be the grounds for it? Where would they gather the support that would allow them to openly violently suppress great swathes of people to try and keep it from happening?
It's even less likely to succeed than efforts to suppress copyright-breaking, because with Bitcoin there are no legitimate victims, it is only the state who will lose out.
Alternative advice from someone with an anarchistic bent: ignore the law and join the resistance against government. The more people who do it, the less power they have to stop it. People convincing themselves that they need to stay out of trouble and play by the government's rules is what Nietzsche would call internalising the slave mentality, and Foucault "self-policing."
Hello, I'm a Bitcoin community member, I can help clear this one up for you:
1) Bitcoin is claimed as a legitimate alternative to cash money insofar as: Bitcoin proponents believe that, if the world valued Bitcoin, it would function superbly as a money. So "legitimacy" here means "workable" or "beneficial" - it has nothing to do with legitimation by governments.
2) Many Bitcoin proponents are of the opinion that governments destroy wealth and hamper economic progress by trying to restrict and control the actions of people, in so doing preventing more organic and consensus-based mechanisms of social organisation emerging. Thus the argument that Bitcoin should not be subjected to existing cash laws is a) an attempt to prevent Bitcoin from early smothering by suspicious governmental authorities and b) an early-game strategy, the end game of which would be the significant or total disempowerment and/or disestablishment of government.
It's almost as if the government as a social institution continuously and inexorably acts to expand and reinforce its power over society, regardless of any constitutional or rational or utilitarian grounds for its expansion... as if the people in government seek to reinforce and expand the job security and fiscal prospects of being an agent of government, regardless of whether their actions are welcomed by or beneficial to the people they are ostensibly meant to serve, or actually just ever more patronising and controlling overreach...
/s
Why would you say that? There are attempts to regulate them, but those attempts so far are mostly just succeeding in ensuring that the regulating districts become uncompetitive and virtual currency businesses leave for somewhere with better promise.
How are you supposed to regulate these services when anyone can open a Bitcoin bank and serve anyone anywhere in the world with an internet with an internet connection? If they couldn't stop movie piracy, how are they supposed to stop free global financial services? They have even less of a legal case to make for intervention than piracy!
The USD is a pretty lousy global currency. You can't exactly use it anywhere in any sort of transaction. I've only ever heard of a handful of places outside of the States where the local currency is terrible enough that local people prefer to hold and transact in USD over long periods of time. A true global currency would be one that you could use to buy practically anything, anywhere, whether it was a very large or very small transaction.
Regardless, Bitcoin has several advantages. For one thing, you're not dependent upon continually obtaining a flow of paper notes from a foreign country that may lie halfway around the world. For another, you can divide Bitcoin to extremely small and precise quantities - the dollar on the other hand doesn't scale as well to economies where a penny may start to approach a significant individual unit of money.
There are of course many other advantages of Bitcoin that make it attractive for people in many different countries to adopt. The fact that you can transmit and receive it to and from anywhere in the world, with the same certainty of transaction confirmation as cash in hand, without the need to either physically ship cash or rely on a network of physical cash shipment, is a pretty good one, especially as the world grows ever smaller.
A final advantage would be that you are never hostage to the political dangers of a nation-state controlled currency (i.e. a small group of rich white men can at any point decide to devalue your savings, to the point of destruction, by printing an unlimited amount of the currency.)
FYI that vulnerability was fixed already by the time he wrote that post. He brought it to Trezor's attention, helped update the firmware, and published the article after the update was pushed.
What are the killer advantages of using a distributed ledger for storing contracts as opposed to centralised ledgers?
Are you going to spin up an altcoin or are you planning to try and stuff your contracts into Bitcoin transactions?
Tried travelling in a third-world country where you don't speak the language?
You can't send perfectly divisible quantities of gold halfway around the world in seconds. You also can't store gold in your brain and thus move unlimited quantities of gold across national borders undetected. Furthermore, unlike gold, Bitcoin storage and transaction signing needs can and will be satisfied by low-cost dedicated computing units, opening the freedom to store bitcoin to any who wish to use it, and the chance of possessive governments successfully trying to prevent people from doing so is about as likely as governments stamping out smartphone use.
Try veganism, it's life on Hard Mode.
As usual, Gates gets the true problem completely wrong. The real issue here are the numerous and significant unpriced economic externalities associated with animal flesh production, whose impact is rendered enormous by the scale of this industry. Animal rearing produces a major portion of global greenhouse gases, rivers of faeces, pollutes waterways and overtaxes water resources, not because of a lack of capacity to technologically innovate cleaner solutions, but because collective interests in these resources are not being properly acknowledged and protected through the negotiation and enforcement of pricing.
This is a classic economic problem. Bill Gates does the issue no favours with his starry-eyed techno-optimism or his attempts depict food supply as a selfless global communal endeavour. No, food supply is a market of profit-seeking individuals using their resources to generate goods considered valuable enough to trade by other individuals. There is simply an overproduction of these goods because they are being sold without their externalised costs being factored in. Food producers can make their products too cheaply, so too many are made.
Tackle the pricing problem and technological development to minimise environmental impacts will naturally emerge. Absent this step, efforts to develop and promulgate technological improvements will never get far.
Money is always overvalued, because money is the technology we use to delay the completion of an economic trade. Money is where we "store" our pending transfers of value. Money is the bubble that does not burst.
People should focus instead on something that has worsened, not improved, with scientific intervention and technological development - the enslavement, brutalisation, and mass slaughter of billions of land animals (not to mention the treatment of sea animals and ecosystems) due to the continued maladjusted cultural preference for animal products. How can people winge and moan about their wounded sense of aesthetic purity (the same people driving this trend by picking the brand 10 cents cheaper on the supermarket shelves) when countless numbers of living, sentient creatures are brought into being by us, for the sole purpose of living miserable, dreary lives, punctuated by sickness and episodes of violence, capped off by a final often-horrific experience of slaughter, simply so that we can treat them like small factories, extracting products from them, then eating their body parts or furnishing our cars and bodies with their skin?
Why not be simply thankful that you have freedom from pain, sickness, confinement and slaughter. To complain of the food we eat, as if we are the victims of our own preferences for convenience and low cost, while billions of animals are subjected to treatment tantamount of instituionalised torture, is the height of entitlement.
When people start writing contractual obligations in quote marks, things are getting bad.
Even if you just rebuilt banks as they exist today on top of Bitcoin, you'd still get some pretty huge advantages, potentially massively increased security, speed, reduced costs, among others. Another big one is that these banks can service the entire global market, massively increasing competition among and hence quality of banking services.
Mmm, I hope you got some value from him when he made this pearler: "By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet's impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine's."
No, I'm talking about something which has the potential to be the world currency.
Cool story. It's not vegan though so it's useless for me. Plus I would far prefer to buy from a company (eg Soylent) that has a vision of clean, futuristic food production, rather than a company that stupidly accepts the dirty, nasty way we make food now.
Why don't you let people make their own decisions about what is good for them? It's none of your business "knowing better" than people.
And if you think Soylent's raison d'etre is "disrupt" then you're really stupid. Read Rob's blog. He writes a lot about the problems in contemporary food production and how he wants to tackle them with Soylent. If you ignore that in favour of portraying him as a blind hipster then you are not just stupid, but willfully so.
Let's not forget either that Rob and many others have been living healthily off of Soylent for years now.
I already did:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8887167What if Ensure had a cool name and didn't carry connotations of age and disease? What if it was sexily marketed? What if it was easy to flavour and make delicious? What if you signed up for a subscription and never thought about it again? What if you got it from vending machines that were everywhere you went and recognised you as you approached, having a glass perfectly formulated to your tastes and needs at that precise moment ready? What if it came out of a tap? What if your home 3D printer could form it into a multitude of shapes and textures (bar, cookie, cereal) and it would still be nutritionally balanced? What if it was surrounded by a devoted and inventive community of DIY hackers? What if the creator of Ensure was rapidly iterating it and discussing engineering microbes to produce pure versions of it?
Oh, or is it easier, instead of using your imagination and a bit of enthusiasm, to point to how it's similar to a crappy product that nobody bothered to market, and imply that it won't be sucessful - because we all know the success and impact of a product has nothing to do with the creativity, perserverance and vision of the creators, right?
Here's a fascinating concept... if you don't like the product/don't trust the company... don't buy it. Boom. Go back to buying whatever crap new vanilla melto-choc insta-coffee sachet Nestle thinks they can get a 4% ROI on. Or buy some unmilled wheat and chia pods from your local Spirit Journey Nutritionist and spend an hour making artisan flatcakes. Whatever you want really, it's a free world.