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martindale

Re:PayPal to support Ethereum and Bitcoin on Tuesday September 16, 2025 @12:03AM (#45257912)
PayPal deleted my account in 2017 for having a relationship with Bitcoin-associated banks. Fuck you, that was war.
Re:Stripe Launches L1 Blockchain: Tempo on Thursday September 04, 2025 @05:03PM (#45132155)
Ah yes, the fight you phase.
Re:I miss using em dashes on Monday September 01, 2025 @10:29PM (#45098513)
Why stop using them now? If they are the correct mark, use them.
Re:God Created the Real Numbers on Friday August 29, 2025 @09:56PM (#45071277)
Poelstra probably has a lot to say on the subject — but I think the natural order is the simpler and more "divine" variant.
This sounds so exploitable I almost want to enter the job market again.
Re:Lies. Damned Lies. P-value thresholds on Wednesday January 01, 2025 @01:48AM (#42564394)
Astroturf on HN. Never thought I'd see the day.
Re:What Happened with the Web Monetization API? on Wednesday February 07, 2024 @12:11AM (#39284749)
Just start using HTTP 402 and JSON payloads. We can just converge on whatever ends up common; for me, there is already a monetary standard for the Internet.

I participated in these meetings for some time, during the rise (and rise) of Bitcoin. It's clear that the landscape of the financial web has shifted significantly at this point (for better or worse, in many ways), but standards, as usual, lag the market.

Earlier versions of Caddy were just a single binary that accepted signals to reload; the newer versions add a bunch of process management stuff that just got in the way of our existing tooling (...why remove the signals? ugh!) so we just switched back to Nginx.
Re:Microsoft Works on Monday September 04, 2023 @07:30PM (#37386196)
I wasted many hours in my pre-teen years converting documents from Works to Word and back again. Made me the town wizard, they did.
Re:Stablecoin Mechanics 2: We found the Tether-Celsius loans on Monday October 17, 2022 @05:18PM (#33239622)
It's mostly Bitcoin, actually.
Re:No-Token apps: an alternate vision for the blockchain on Thursday July 07, 2022 @10:47AM (#32014791)
When creating a startup, you have to solve a problem for your users. When creating a token, you now have two problems — solving your users' problem, _and_ launching a new currency.
Agree completely. I'm practically one new-tab-opened-without-me-asking away from forking a browser just to remove this behavior.
Re:Carl Akeley’s fight to the death with a leopard (1923) on Saturday February 19, 2022 @02:25AM (#30395085)
Can you explain what about "that sort of thing" is so repulsive to you, perchance?
Re:Where did the web archive go? on Thursday August 19, 2021 @03:05PM (#28237930)
First thing that came to mind as well.
Re:Regulators should treat stablecoins like banks on Wednesday August 11, 2021 @02:59PM (#28146177)
Stablecoins reinforce dependence on the State, as they further entrench the fiat system that Bitcoin was meant to replace. It seems to me that this, and the rest of the "Decentralized Finance" movement is not intending to replace the current financial system, but rather reinforce it.
Re:How to Be an Amateur Bot Hunter on Tuesday July 27, 2021 @03:35AM (#27969664)
Build a reputation network.
Re:Shorting Bitcoin on Tuesday June 29, 2021 @03:26AM (#27672896)
If your conviction is so strong, why proxy your short instead of just shorting the asset itself?

I look forward to your prompt report in December...

Re:A from-scratch tour of Bitcoin in Python on Wednesday June 23, 2021 @11:44AM (#27605832)
I go back to it twice yearly
Sure, and become permanently controlled by the founders, who control 60% of the outstanding supply. Proof of Stake enables any party who at any point controls more than ⅓ of funds to rewrite the chain from that point forward, so this is an objectively terrible idea from an engineering perspective.
This difference is that in PoS, if anyone ever holds more than ⅓ of the total supply (as is the case with Ethereum's founders currently holding 65% of the overall issuance, for example), they can indefinitely control the chain through their re-org capability.
Re:Ethereum Isn't Fun Anymore on Monday February 22, 2021 @10:35AM (#26225664)
We're building this, but on Bitcoin ("Plasma but as a framework for dapps" [with a focus on developer experience]) [0]. There's already robust infrastructure for L2 contracts in Bitcoin-land, and we've already heavily optimized the L1 to prepare for the load that a global, ubiquitous solution would need.

Honestly, I see no use for Ethereum (or other Turing Complete L1s) looking forward — smart contracts can be purely peer-to-peer, with the only pressure applied to L1 being dispute resolution. By pushing complex contracts up into Layer 2, we can keep the dangerous, money-destroying, theft-enabling Turing machines away from the main chain.

[0]: https://fabric.pub

Proof of Stake not only replicates the same dynamics that Bitcoin was designed to eliminate (more wealth -> more power in system) but also can only be made secure against a maximum of ⅓ byzantine actors, compared to Proof of Work's superior ½.

As for using it for Layer 1 systems, Andrew Poelstra nailed it in his conclusion [0]:

"We showed that by depending only on resources within the system, proof of stake cannot be used to form a distributed consensus, since it depends on the very history it is trying to form to enforce loss of value."

Proof of Stake might be useful at Layer 2 (becoming equivalent to voting stock in a company), but not as a base-layer consensus mechanism.

[0]: https://download.wpsoftware.net/bitcoin/pos.pdf

Property rights are intrinsic to our natural self-sovereignty (and agency). The State cannot grant rights.
It only provides this property when you've secured your keys, preferably in an offline wallet. These were hot wallet funds, so they're vulnerable to both physical and virtual seizure.
Re:BitTorrent v2 on Monday September 07, 2020 @05:59PM (#24403300)
Has there been any progress on advancing BEP-46 (mutable torrents) [0] along the standards track? I didn't see any mention of it in this announcement, despite my hopes of seeing it as a flagship feature.

[0]: http://www.bittorrent.org/beps/bep_0046.html

Re:Congratulations for reaching a million, Gordon Linoff on Sunday August 23, 2020 @03:08PM (#24254432)
For me, finding solutions for problems with older versions of software happens on Stack Overflow more often than anywhere else. Thanks for all your work!
Re:Facebook account now required to login to Oculus devices on Tuesday August 18, 2020 @03:07PM (#24202892)
Why do I need to log in to my display device?
Much closer to what I need than previous contenders! Now, if only it were open source (compile on your own) and was embeddable (as a web component?) for easy integration into other platforms...
It's not a new idea [0], but I admit that I was excited about this referring to digital communities. Nonetheless, it's a cool way of separating one's self from the Government monopoly on money.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time-based_currency

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