sgeisler

> there’s nothing inherent to robots that insulates them from [taxation]

If automation really takes off and entire factories can be run by a handful of people it might make sense to move them to whatever low-tax country with a port. Pay the 5 employees running it extra to fly in there for a few months a year each (like oil workers) and if it's in a lawless region add some automatic turrets that shoot at anything unauthorized entering the perimeter. Makes sense as long as extra pay+extra shipping+ammo costs is less than the hypothetical robot taxes.

It might be intentional. I noticed the accent too and it really left the impression that china is a technological leader now and might not need to adapt to the west as much anymore.

If this turns out to be true I wonder if it'd be practical (given the financial resources) to have pressure sealed rooms that you spend a lot of time in at home (e.g. your office). These could be precisely controlled (O2, CO2 levels, pressure, …) and possibly both increase current and future performance. The main problem seems the time needed to exit because an abrupt loss of pressure would be hazardous. But if you have a well-structured day it might work. This could be very interesting for high earning knowledge workers imo.

I read that all mainframe components, even CPUs, were redundant and hot-swappable and that instructions are executed on two separate CPUs to detect faults and correct them on the fly. That would make a lot of sense if your application requires high availability and assurance but isn't designed for it. I haven't heard of any standard server hardware that can give you HA or such assurance with a single machine, probably because you would not build any application dependent on that these days. It's probably cheaper to do in software.

There will never be post-scarcity, because we'll never have enough. Using cutting-edge technology always requires people to work hard to build said technology. If it didn't require work and just wishful thinking we'd already have it. The builders and engineers will always want _something_ in exchange or they won't make said tech accessible to you. The curiosity of nerds only gets you so far (see open source UX).

Maybe you won't have to work/pay for food if accounting for it becomes more work than producing it (if sufficiently automated and not resource-constrained). But if you want to live in a hip neighborhood (by definition there is limited availability), have your own flying car, go on vacation on the moon once a year where real people service you etc. you'll have to work for that. Because the ingenuity and work necessary to make this all happen will still be enormous.

Maybe you think you'd be happy with your today's lifestyle, which might be attainable for ~free. But I think the reality for most is that they'd grow jealous of their friends posting selfies from the moon and resent "the evil rich" again.

The small amount of work necessary to _survive_ today would sound marvelous to someone from even 100 years ago (clothes, food, shelter outside major cities). Mowing one lawn for 1-2h every day would probably be enough for that. But surviving isn't the point of being human, it's about stretching the limits of what is possible and that will always take as much work as we are willing to put into it.

To give some technical background: yes, using Lightning (as they seem to do) for affordable BTC payments is challenging for most. As far as I am aware that is why they rely on custodial solutions [1]. People hold their money with someone from their village they trust, which is not ideal but neither is being unbanked. Down the road I could easily see this trust being spread over multiple people using multisig wallets.

The amazing thing about all this is that everyone can become a BTC "bank". You need a bit of capital but orders of magnitude less than a normal bank would require, maybe 2k$ to get started of which you might spend 400$ on hardware and fees to open some channels. The trustless nature of lightning lets you and your users then join the global payment network without asking for permission from anyone and you can engage in commerce internationally.

I think, while we are still early, that this is an awesome experiment. It will highlight the UX problems so we can fix them. Hopefully at some point all this will make sense to the average westerner too, so we can finally have a money not controlled by anyone (states, incumbent banks) again. But that might take a long time.

[1] https://github.com/GaloyMoney/galoy#status-of-the-project

Exactly this. Just tax the value added in your country if you are so inclined (or even better the resources used to do so like land, infrastructure use, …). If you find out that's not so much you have deeper problems.

Why would e.g. an integrated software/hardware business pay significant taxes in the US if their value chain isn't strictly bound to it?

Sure, if developers live and work there you can tax their income to a certain degree before they leave and work remotely. Hardware is built abroad anyway (and probably taxed there), you can only levy import taxes at your own detriment. But if the business is successful most of the added value comes from the integration of these aspects and that can happen wherever because it's an idea not bound to a place to be executed. If something doesn't require physical presence taxing it becomes very hard and morally dubious (on what grounds would you tax it all if e.g. only 10% of your profits need physical infrastructure that is funded through these taxes?).

Globalization means that a society's most successful people aren't stuck with it any longer. They can go where they aren't seen as subjects to milk to keep the less productive happy. I don't owe my country of origin anything, they need to be competitive to keep me as I can take my business everywhere. In that sense directly investing in your population's higher education might be misguided to some degree because it creates more people capable enough to leave with the acquired knowledge, increasing the tax burden, making the country less competitive.

Tax competition is what keeps governments in check. Taxes are just fees for services in the territory of the state (e.g. security, market access, infrastructure, …). If these services don't warrant paying the fee anymore people and companies should of course leave for better-run places! Nothing else will make governments become more competitive than voting with one's feet. We should really become less sentimental about countries, they are just crude constructs to provide services that need coordination which markets can't as easily provide. Choosing the best service provider is something good as it increases overall efficiency as only sufficiently efficient systems survive in the long run.

Wanting a global minimum tax is like one mafia asking the others to increase their protection charges so their clients don't leave. Such collusion is frowned upon for good reasons in free markets as it leads to worse outcomes due to reduced competition.

I'm hopeful that this idea will not work due to the profitability of breaking the deal and the big number of countries that exist. The US also shouldn't overestimate its importance which seems high but ever-declining.

That only really works for stable countries anyway. While shit is hitting the fan there will be enough incentive not to care about some silly rule as long as breaking it is not easily detectable. In the worst case trading moves from centralized exchanges to decentralized OTC trades. I don't think any government can really stop Bitcoin at this point.

It's certainly a nice tool if your country is falling apart. Nearly every other asset class is less accessible, transportable or secure against seizure than Bitcoin.

When countries descend into chaos or go full on authoritarian the best option is often to leave, but there might already be capital controls. So what can you take with you? Stocks: good luck if held by a broker in the country. Physical gold or cash: good luck at the border/customs. Foreign accounts: hard to come by for most people even in the first world due to regulations. Any serious amount of money is very hard to move between jurisdictions, especially in times of crisis, through traditional means.

If you believe your host country doesn't own you and you should be able to relocate to wherever you are treated best, Bitcoin can be a good tool if you were unprepared so far (e.g. because you didn't think a crisis could hit _your_ country). This might not be a use case for you today, especially if you are happy with your country and it is stable. But don't discount that the situation of others might differ.

Thx for the pointer, nice to know the name of the theory. Although it only covers a part of my argument. My concern was also in regards to how much military tech could be built on short notice inside the US if it came to a prolonged war and most of the existing toys were destroyed after some months. That was what I meant with a war being nonviable (would end in a nuclear MAD scenario imo without the capacity to rebuild conventional weapons).

Am I the only one who is worried every time such a news drops? Achieving high-tech autarky is a first step towards a war with china becoming viable. Not that the alternative would be much better: a war being nonviable and the west bending to their wishes. But still, I think it shows there are real concerns on the highest levels and it is considered an actual possibility. Scary.

The correct way to do this would be using OP_RETURN imo. This special opcode is meant for committing to data like this. So for example one could commit to 4 bytes representing the IP address. To ensure that only authorized parties can update the IP the client should only accept transactions that were sent from a certain address, meaning they are automatically signed with the authorized-party's key.

Definitely an interesting use case for BTC to route around such censorship.

Well, the problem with that strategy is that there are many such explorers and returning wrong data isn't in their best interest. Remember that the recipient address doesn't need to be owned by the attacker, it could be one of a big exchange which is of interest. Also the whole process of getting stuff blocked fine granular enough to be viable may slow down blocking enough to be very profitable.

It seems to be a static site, which seems reasonable since it aggregates a lot of data and might encounter high load when something goes wrong, so generating it live without caching is not viable. So maybe the server that normally updates it is down too (not that this would be a good excuse)?

> Instead of collaborating though I see IntelliJ continuing on the path of their custom implementation.

I haven't checked in a while, but RLS was sub-par for a long time (feature- and latencywise). Tight integration has its benefits if you can afford it (and apparently they can). So I guess as soon as they can get the same properties from RLS as from their own implementation they'd switch. But if it meant having to rewrite a lot of stuff that suddenly also becomes available to competitors that seems like a dumb move.

As a former BlackBerry 10 user (QNX based with C++/QT native apps) that's something that annoys me endlessly about Android. How can a simple action like displaying a small, locally cached playlist take any noticeable time at all?! There is no inherent reason for building Apps in JS+HTML adding a dozen additional layers all costing precious time. Even some "native" (Java) apps seem slow at times. Also switching between apps often causes these to be effectively closed, adding startup time when reopening them (are they really that memory-hungry, why?!). I never had these problems with my BB 10 phones even though these had half the RAM (2G, current Android 4G) and way less cores (2 vs. 8). I wish they hadn't discontinued this awesome platform.

> You could periodically increase the block size

It's unclear if that would solve the problem. If BTC becomes a global store of value (which it seems to be in the process of), the avg. transaction value goes up and with it the fees that can potentially be paid. The block size cap ensures that there is a fee market if there's enough demand for transactions, so that not everyone simply pays the minimum fee. If you increase the cap this market might disappear and leave miners with _less_ income.

> The cap of 21 million bitcoin isn't a fundamental unit, it can be changed if a majority of the mining pool decides to.

No.

1. It is one of _the_ fundamental selling points of BTC. 2. A miner majority isn't sufficient to force such changes, the mined blocks would simply be invalid for any validating client. So you need to get users on board too.

I think the solution will be L2/L3 transactions for payments and L1 transactions for settlement and large transfers, so that each L1 (=on the blockchain) transaction has enough economic value to afford high fees.

Isn't that exactly what the submission is about? It seems to be a tool to convert any newsletter into an atom feed by creating a fake inbox. This lets everyone consume the content in their preferred format. Sure it would be nice if newsletters were available as news feeds too, but in the meantime this is a nice hack.

Probably an unpopular opinion on a VC site, but to some degree recessions are good and needed to weed out underperforming and utterly useless companies to free up resources. The lack of such and bail-outs/rescuing attempts by governments to "save jobs" [1] have delayed necessary restructuring for way too long. Also, if recessions are the norm rather than the exception I'd expect people and companies to be more prepared (e.g. by being less leveraged, keeping more savings), so that the actual event isn't as bad on a personal level and it's just about capital reallocation.

[1] an especially bullshitty argument, since ideally we'd want to get rid of jobs that don't add (enough) value to make the economy more efficient. I think the wasted human resources and ingenuity are the greatest tragedy.

Thx, I must have missed it (it admittedly is very small ^^)!

Which platforms are actually supported? I didn't find that on the landing page. Seems like an interesting product if it works on linux and with Signal etc.

BUT: Stating "Privacy first." as a goal and then requiring to sign up with google is … inconsistent at least (I get that it's easier though).

I mean, sure, if all you need is some marketing fluff I can see how this might work. Most landing pages seem to actively try to keep me from finding out what I need to know about the product or service (specs, prices, features, …). But is this really the future? I hope not.

Don't get me wrong, AI text processing is awesome. But I'd rather see it work for instead of against me. I'd love to see a tool that can provide me with executive summaries of longer texts or just to optimize information density (which would otherwise take the writer more time he might not be willing to spare).

This seems like a huge failure to correctly price products if there are actual shortages and people standing in line (except maybe on launch day, that might be good publicity). The gaming market seems very elastic on the demand side, few people actually _need_ a new rig urgently, so an increase in price could effectively limit the initial demand and get them to people who need/want them most while increasing margins for manufacturers or sellers.

As it is now private middlemen take that profit, presumably by standing in said lines wasting a lot of time. And buyers now have to trust some rando on ebay to actually ship a 2k$ graphics card. That is not an optimal outcome.

That's a very bad idea. If there was to be a super cheap/free tier it also had to be rather limited in bandwidth, barely enough for e.g. remote school to remove these barriers. But if it was too good you'd essentially kill off private providers giving the government even more control over people's communication. Right now they at least need to pass laws and face backlash to force ISPs to censor stuff. If your government was your ISP they could just censor whatever they want without much oversight since there'd be little competition left to challenge them. Private companies have at least some incentive not to do so (they'll loose customers).

I doubt this will _always_ be the case, but it is for now.

If we ever want to go beyond earth we'll have to figure out how to live independently from natural habitats and their ecology. One puzzle piece will probably be hydroponics (another HN frontpage thread from today). Others, like efficient temperature management adaptable to hugely different environments and high density and long term energy sources (e.g. fusion), have yet to be developed. I actually think researching these technologies is more important than saving earth. By all means, slow the decay so we get there, but eventually someone will fuck up anyway and we'd better have colonized the solar system by then.

In such a future clean air would be as much a tradable commodity as water and food are today. There are two ways of dealing with tragedy of the commons: remove the tragedy through coordinated action or let the market remove the commons. Looking at our history coordination and selfless cooperation are just not really a viable option long term, they only work intermittently.

I wonder if this will eventually lead to even more efficiency (less people involved in per output). Vertical farms lend themselves much more to standardization than conventional ones imo (many small machines instead of few big ones). If all the often-failing parts could be built in a way that they can be replaced automatically I can imagine a giant farm being run by a single guy who's main task is receiving replacement parts and sometimes untangling messes the bots don't know how to manage.

The other big benefit of being independent from environmental factors might also come in handy in space or as a cheaper alternative to fighting climate change.

First and foremost I think it will stick around. It's too useful a tool and it would be very hard to kill. It's money for enemies, no one controls it, everyone can use it.

China might currently be the only country in a position to attack Bitcoin as a protocol (not from a legal angle) but I think it's not in their best interest to do so. They are a rising empire, eventually they will have far less problems with capital flight than others that are declining, so it might make sense for them to let it go on, potentially causing a speculative attack on USD [1]. China's dominance in mining is shrinking, so at some point that won't be a problem anymore imo.

If (which is a big if) a "speculative attack"-type scenario happens the hyperinflation and resulting turmoil will leave a shock and I hope [2] we could actually see new hard currencies emerge. Some of them might be BTC backed as it is a harder money even than gold (at the expense of being younger, not as lindy). If that happens in the form of federations as I mentioned or well-known centralized solutions: who knows? I'll work towards a future with many different, but freely interchangable, uncensorable, private and fully backed BTC-based "currencies". I still like gold in case we nuke ourselves into the stone age, but I try to be an optimist.

Even if Bitcoin doesn't become a predominant store of value (because it gets widely banned, unlikely at this point imo) I think it will at least establish itself as a means of breaking economic sanctions and fleeing failing states. While I don't mind the upside potential in price I'm primarily in it for the freedom, I think either way Bitcoin will increase personal sovereignty by giving people the option to opt out.

That being said, take my opinion with a grain of salt. I'm a libertarian working in that space and quite young. While I try to compensate by reading about history and economics (Dalio has been a great influence) my life experience is very limited. I just try to navigate the uncertainty of this world the best I can, preferably at my own terms.

[1] https://nakamotoinstitute.org/mempool/speculative-attack/

[2] I know that "hope" might sound cynical given the prerequisites, but given the direction we ("the west") are headed it seems inevitable. So the best I can hope for is a better state afterwards: given that too much debt and printing money got us into the dire situation we are in in the first place, my hope is to take this capability away from governments for the foreseeable future to hopefully enable a more sustainable, less leveraged growth.

I'm not commenting on the 1M$ price prediction, but rather the technical challenges and possibilities.

> Last I heard bitcoin was not technically able to be used as a payment processor subsitutes. My impression then is the whole affair is a bit of a playing-chicken racket.

The fundamental features of Bitcoin are its limited supply [1], programmability and not being controlled by any single entity, not allowing policy enforcement on-chain. While it is true that on-chain (layer 1) Bitcoin transactions provide very limited throughput, there are other approaches to provide scaling that are built on top of Bitcoin (layer 2) using said programmability.

To date there are two major approaches for trust-minimized L2 systems:

1. Payment channel networks (Lightning [2]) that basically use the blockchain only when joining or leaving the network or on conflicts/fraud attempts. In theory millions of transactions can happen on Lightning without ever needing an on-chain transaction. The main limitation is the onboarding capacity, which (with Bitcoin's current limits) is not sufficient to make Bitcoin a global retail currency. There are also some logistical issues with running a Lightning node that make still trustless, but semi-centralized apps preferable (e.g. Phoenix [3]). Don't get me wrong, Lightning is awesome and the best solution for retail Bitcoin adoption we have right now, but I think if Bitcoin is going be used in retail by everyone globally then that will require other solutions. Luckily that won't happen over night.

2. Federations are another way to scale Bitcoin. Fundamentally they are just a group of entities that jointly hold Bitcoin in a wallet such that transactions can only be made if a quorum is reached (using m-of-n "multisig" wallets) and enforce certain rules on those coins.

One example of such a Federation is Liquid [4], which is a federated sidechain by Blockstream (full disclosure, I contract for them [6]). One can transfer in and out bitcoins to and from this sidechain and transfer the bitcoin-backed sidechain tokens. Such federations allow for easier upgrades (only federation members have to agree), so Liquid is used to test ideas that can't be implemented in Bitcoin (yet?) such as Confidential Transactions which hides transaction amounts through homomorphic commitments.

But other federations that don't run their own blockchain are also imaginable (e.g. based on chaumian e-cash). The fundamental idea stays the same: they create a more efficient, cheaper way to transfer tokens verifyably and fully backed by real bitcoins that are redeemable at any time. The fact that multiple entities enforce the rules and hold the collateral jointly makes them relatively resistent to few of these going rogue. While this sounds a lot like early banking verifyable backing and permissionless, potentially anonymous founding of such federations makes it more robust against regulatory capture imo.

So I think there is a good chance that Bitcoin will at least capture some of the market share of gold, and potentially some of the failing nation state currencies (they always fail eventually because it's too tempting to print your way out of recessions until it doesn't work anymore [5]). You can do the math on where that would put the price.

[1] Some economists disagree that it's a feature for a currency on the basis that it's bad for the economy as a whole. I'd argue that at least on an individual basis a money with little/none and predictable inflation is preferable.

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightning_Network

[3] https://phoenix.acinq.co/

[4] https://liquid.net/

[5] https://www.principles.com/the-changing-world-order/#chapter...

[6] If you are wondering if that's why I'm slightly critical of Lightning, it's not, it's just my personal opinion/observation (as is this whole post), Blockstream also develops a Lightning node implementation https://blockstream.com/lightning/

Runtime metaprogramming is mighty, but also dangerous. I view compile time metaprogramming as a much saner thing. The type system can still help you avoid potential problems and if in doubt you can just look at the generated code. While it doesn't solve every problem solvable by runtime mp it's good enough in most cases (e.g. building serializers for classes as done with serde in rust).