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All you did was wave your hands here. What trade off? What subtle disadvantages? What in PoS is weaker than PoW?

You assert these things exist without going into any of them. PoS is very new and complex and there are many differences between implementations, much more than in PoW.

Any dismissal you might have read would most likely been based on a previous version because the latest versions of PoS are quite new.

There doesn't always have to be a meaningful trade-off between different technologies that do the same thing. Is there a meaningful trade-off between a zipped wav file and one compressed with flac?

Jeez, just stop spreading FUD.

> Jeez, just stop spreading FUD.

Please edit such incivility out of your comments here, regardless of how wrong someone else is. The last thing we need is flamewars about who's fudding.

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

> The sole way a government can kill it -- any government -- is to invest >$2B into getting >51% hash power, then launching coordinated malicious doublespends for the purpose of shattering faith in bitcoin.

How much hashing power resides in China? I was under the impression that it's >50%.

It would cost the Chinese government a lot less than $2B to raid all those farms and take their equipment.

... or more likely, to just order them - but what could they do? Double spend? Transfer Satoshi's money to some new address?

Freeze any address they like. Freeze the entire network, preventing any transaction from going through, by mining empty blocks.

There is and considering how powerful the chinese government is, they could do it easily: https://medium.com/@homakov/how-to-destroy-bitcoin-with-51-p...

As far as I know is ~80% unless where I read it was spreading misinformation.

I'm sorry man, I noticed that I've been downvoting your comments recently, and it's just because they don't seem very insightful to me. I don't think this comment, that is basically "PoS is weaker than PoW" without any argument is a good contribution to this thread.

It's nice that you took out some time to write up a bunch of lines detailing your opinion, but even in your own comment you acknowledge that you can't recall why exactly it is that PoS is significantly weaker than PoW.

Now I've read the Casper papers (the ones that are on the Github repository and are not yet complete I think), and I know that there's significant challenge in making a PoS that is actually solid, but I don't think it's impossible to figure out how to do it, and there are very knowledgeable and skilled people researching this topic so it's likely a suitable PoS will arise at some point.

If you'd actually been knowledgeable on this topic, you could have pointed out one of the weaknesses of Casper or any of the other PoS protocols, and I would've upvoted your comment, and then typed up a counter to it.

Now, I just get the feeling you're defending Bitcoin, which is an outdated technology which's only use is to be a store of large amounts of value, much like gold, against the new innovative technologies that are challenging it. Without even bothering to make a coherent argument, apart from describing some property of Bitcoin that we all already know.

To clarify, I don't mind the downvotes. What's going on here is that they tweaked the algorithm to specifically whisk my comments to the bottom, immediately, no matter what. Even if I had 12 upvotes, it would still appear at the bottom.

The complaint is that this is undocumented, unfair, and I have no recourse.

I've shown willingness to alter my behavior and conform to whatever they want out of me, and supposedly this is enough to reverse most decisions. They repeatedly say "We'll unban accounts if we think there's reason to believe they'll behave." I've gone through the email system and spent roughly three weeks complaining at them and asking whether this could be reversed, to no avail. They told me to stop spamming them, so I asked once more, shortly and politely. No response for a week.

So this isn't a ban – it's a ban on my ideas. No one is aware that my comments appear at the bottom because the system is set up that way, rather than because it's been fairly decided by the community that it should be there.

This, I feel, is a problem. It should at least be explicit, especially for longstanding members who are trying to participate in good faith. The reasons for doing this were less than clear, and it's hard to shake the feeling that they're simply picking on people.

I believe them when they say all they care about is the quality of HN, so I don't want to feel that they're just being bullies. But the outcome is much the same. I'm being stuffed in a locker because people other than me have decided it's the best place for me.

And yeah, that's pretty hilarious, so I don't really expect the situation to change. Especially not with hamfisted attempts at reversing it. But at least I can make some noise while I'm locked in there, partly for others' entertainment.

By the way, if you feel as I do that downvotes are broken on HN (in the sense that they don't really have much signaling power), you can run my Tampermonkey extension to hide them and hide your karma: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14456200

Now, I completely agree that my comment was low quality. But that's exactly what you'd expect to happen if you remove someone's incentive to write well. Why would I possibly invest time in detailing any of those things you mention when it would just be pinned to the bottom anyway? May as well say something that's true but unsupported and not waste the time.

Hopefully I can figure out a way to get this reversed, but shrug.

Part of the irony is that after I was slowbanned back in early December (deservedly so, that time), I actually emailed them asking "Hey, while you're at it, will you tweak my comments so they show up at the bottom too?" I think I was just curious what it would be like, or if quality could stand on its own merits. They refused at the time, saying that it would be a bad idea because a good comment should be up at the top regardless of anything else. And Scott was right about that. This sucks, and when you remove the upvote incentives the whole system breaks. I have no reason to write anything here anymore.

The unsettling thing is that this seems like their objective. It seems true to say that they pick out people that they don't want to be on HN, and then crank various knobs until HN is just unfriendly enough to get them to leave. Them, specifically. Yummyfajitas seems like an example of this. But I'd rather assume that this is just a silly corner case (ha).

Regarding Bitcoin, I think Satoshi spent a lot of time figuring out a simple system that was impervious to shutdown. The tradeoff is energy. It's the first time in history that the byzantine generals problem (with sybil resistance) has been solved. And we should be careful not to stray too far from that fantastic success – not without carefully understanding and proving there are no unexpected tradeoffs.

The key aspect of Bitcoin is that you don't have to be too smart to understand it. A reasonably intelligent person can sit down with bitcoin.pdf and come away understanding exactly why it works. It takes maybe an evening of thinking to fully grok why it can't break, and the implications.

That doesn't seem true with PoS. And that seems at least worth being skeptical of.

If we find out that a state has spend billions in SHA256 equipment, and is censoring transactions, there will be a unanimous switch to another PoW algo, like SHA3. So there is really nothing a government could do to stop Bitcoin. It's a cat and mouse game and the cat has to have unlimited money just to stay in the run !

Kick the door in and physically shut down the equipment? Or more easily, cut off the power supply somewhere upstream?

Not wise to presuppose a State actor will play by the limited set of rules requiring them to spend billions on hashing equipment to shut down a crypto operation.

> The sole way a government can kill it -- any government -- is to invest >$2B into getting >51% hash power, then launching coordinated malicious doublespends for the purpose of shattering faith in bitcoin.

I am not a bitcoin expert at all, I'm actually only starting to look at these things, so I am a bit surprised you sound so confident when saying $2B, because my reaction was: that's all, 2 billion US dollars is all it take to take down Bitcoin? That's pocket money for the US government, and easily achievable for most private banks, very rich individuals and even organized crime.

> That's it. There's no other way.

Also, it seems to me that Bitcoin is based on softwares. Softwares have vulnerabilities. I guess of course if something big happens, like SHA256 being broken, we would have bigger problems than Bitcoin.

> 2 billion US dollars is all it take to take down Bitcoin?

Right -- this is one of the reasons why some people think PoS is better than PoW. Much more expensive to permanently attack in this manner.

Realistically, if Bitcoin were attacked in this manner, the community would probably respond by switching its proof of work function. If attacks continued, it'd probably end up doing PoS. So an actual attack might be much more expensive/likely to fail.

Weird, this seems like a valuable comment. I wonder what's going on. I hope you keep commenting.

Government regulation could drive Bitcoin underground inside a given country. Wouldn't be hard to imagine globalized regulation, a la the US treasury sanctions list.

It'd be tough to enforce a ban on cryptocurrency, but doesn't strike me as impossible. It's not hard to take out exchanges like Coinbase. Then could do sting operations to try to catch people willing to transact with Bitcoin in person, etc.

One exception: it might be very difficult to enforce a ban on using cryptocurrency to purchase services that are purely digital and don't require identity. No way to run a sting.

Weird, this seems like a valuable comment. I wonder what's going on. I hope you keep commenting.

It was intentional. I would love to write more comments like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7602457, but as of now there's no incentive. Exponentially less people see comments at the bottom, because everyone uses the [-] collapse button now to navigate between topics. Why would I spend 30 minutes (or sometimes an hour, it's a fun hobby) to write a good comment when it's simply pinned where <5% of people will see it after an hour or so?

My penalty stemmed from writing https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15884820. Some sort of penalty may have been warranted. HN probably isn't the proper place for that kind of discussion.

But they reacted – I think – by visiting https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15884400 and adjusting my "gravity" until that comment was near the bottom, or halfway down. And since that comment had ~20 upvotes, that means anything I write with less than 20 upvotes has absolutely no hope of getting anywhere near the top. Meaning it won't even gather any steam anymore.

Not only that, but I was originally slowbanned as well. There's a certain penalty that the mods use to discourage certain types of authors, where you can't post more than 5 comments every 3 hours. This is totally undocumented and took much experimentation to even figure out that's what the specific limit is. Imagine going to a bar and being able to only say 5 things every 3 hours.

Meanwhile I counted ~23 tptacek comments within a span of <2 hours. ~13 jacqusm comments within 3 hours. Etc. So I suddenly felt like I couldn't even respond to people anymore.

I sent a bunch of emails (often angry ones) to hn@ycombinator.com, and I don't blame them for basically writing me off and ignoring them. What incentive do they have to bother with one specific person? So I see their side of it too.

But I'm worried this is a trend. I used to periodically see hellbanned commenters complain about HN censorship and that they were excluded specifically for their politics. And I thought that was fine, and they should be. Their hellbanned comments certainly made it seem like HN would be better off without them. Good mods!

But I see now why people write like that after being penalized. You just sort of... Give up. What's the point in writing quality when no one will see it? There's no competition anymore, no fun. And it sucks that someone in the world with power decided that you, specifically, suck, and suck enough to merit exclusion.

I miss yummyfajitas. The mods made him feel unwelcome at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14116601 and talked down at him https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14124379. And I don't really blame him for leaving. When it feels like the whole community wants something other than what you want, you migrate communities. I wonder where he's at now... Wherever it is, it's probably interesting.

FWIW I've been careful to frame all of this as fairly as possible. And in the spirit of fairness, here are the responses I received:

I took the rate limit back off. I put it on a few days ago because the subthread starting at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15884820 was problematic. You're not solely responsible for that but commenters who create the initial conditions for these things carry more responsibility than the others, since the seeds of the problem are nearly always present in the initial conditions.

It's not a great idea to barrage us with emails because there's a lot Scott and I need to take care of and often we're just under load. As a good programmer you know what sending many messages into a system under load does. In addition to that, it makes us less rather than more interested in replying to you, because it feels like it would be unfair to the other emails who respect normal channels. I'm not saying this because it's in any way personal, just reporting how the dynamics work, since you said you find more information helpful.

Daniel

--

When I asked why this is fair or whether they simply don't like me,

You’re close. A lingering issue with your comments is that they can be more personal than the medium affords. When you’re writing to a large group of people on the internet, they’re not going to hear you in the way that people need to be heard. That needs to come from somewhere else. They’ll only be able to approach what you say from the group’s shared reality, and gaps get filled in with whatever’s going on in the reader. This is what dissolves discourse, and what we need to prevent on Hacker News. It’s why we say ‘substantive’.

Warmly,

Scott

--

Now, I'm pretty sure I'm just an idiot, but I have no idea what this means. All of this could have been avoided by simply saying "Hey, your comments on this topic are kind of annoying and not really a good fit for HN. Could you knock it off?"

I'd be like oh yeah, you're right, that makes sense. Sorry.

But no, apparently people are "not hearing me in the way people need to be heard."

So... shrug. Whatever. There are better things to worry about anyway. And really, I don't matter much, and neither did yummyfajitas. HN will go along fine without us. But it sucks to be sidelined.

The thing is, it was fun to write for HN, and to compete here. It was fun to have my ideas challenged and to find out I was mistaken. That's the whole point! There's no better place to figure out the truth.

But apparently mistakes are not allowed, and the response to making a mistake is to be gaslighted by putting your comments at the bottom without telling you and slowbanning you without warning until you just give up and stop coming back. I sent two more emails and got no reply.

I can only imagine how hard their job is. HN has exploded in popularity, and Dan and Scott are probably the only two people who are allowed to have access to hn@ycombinator.com. The emails sent to that address can be extremely sensitive at times. But that means it's a big scaling problem: judgements have to be swift, correct, fair, and balanced. And even at five minutes per email, they are probably spammed with a hundred emails every week. That adds up.

So yeah, I get why this happened. Really. I'm not really trying to make a fuss or complain much. This is just pent-up energy from missing HN. I've been on this site since I was 18, and it felt like a second home. Being "marked" as inferior by someone you respect is disheartening.

FWIW, this 1000 word, entirely offtopic comment that you whinged up the opportunity to post sort of speaks for itself.

1. There is never going to be an opportunity for this to be on-topic. Someone expressed that they hoped I would continue writing, so it's not quite "entirely off-topic."

2. There is no recourse for those who have been banned or penalized.

3. I have tried to go through the normal channels and ask for an explanation.

4. I've been a member here for a decade, and typically that means something. Not a lot, but a little bit.

Part of HN's strength is its fastidiousness to these rules. But it's also a weakness. Isn't it convenient that the perfectly crafted ruleset just so happens to exclude any possibility of critiquing HN or asking "Hey, I'm in a situation that sucks, what should I do about this?"

So yes, feel free to simply not empathize. That's your right. And it's my right to continue causing trouble and escalating the situation until I get myself banned as a protest to overreaching moderation policies. I would rather go out fighting than be kicked repeatedly until I just get tired and quit.

(And whatever you say, you try writing HN comments when all of them immediately get whisked to the bottom and tell me it doesn't feel like a small kick each time it happens. Especially if you put effort into your writing, or care at all about quality.)

Oh, I just don't put in any effort or care about quality.

A serious suggestion: for a couple weeks, try evaluating every paragraph you are thinking about posting and deciding whether it is "meta" or not and then just omit the ones that are. See if this makes your HN experience worse.

Why would you totally dismiss his thoughts and secrets about HN as if they are farcical? I didn't know about the slowban or the other types. And now that I think about it.. similar things have been going on with my account. I think its gross to silently downmodulate people as if they are hormones in a bid to shut out their ideas. Maybe you take everything too relaxed and see HN as more of entertainment. In that case you should ignore his post. He said very meaningful things and shared little known knowledge. That means something..

My tiny protest is to simply upvote comments like yours. I often go looking through the post history to use my judgment whether it's trolling or someone who has sinned by expressing a controversial opinion. The official forum guidelines say "Be civil", so I use that as my rubric.

I can understand that you feel frustrated. That said, even just reading your comments here, some things are clear:

You do have recourse (email the mods), which you've used, and abused, both in quality and quantity by your own admission.

You've acknowledged that you've behaved in ways that are against the guidelines, and have ignored the feedback you've gotten and continued to post in ways that are against the guidelines.

You seem to be aware of these things yet apparently haven't taken them to heart or believe that they really don't apply to you. You've event acknowledged that if you continue behaving the way you are that you'll eventually get banned. Is that what you want to happen?

Posting on HN is not a right: it's a privilege.

Yet you can still potentially redeem yourself.

- Don't just post everything that comes to mind. You mention a few times in this thread that you spend time on your comments: spend more time, reviewing especially keeping in mind the feedback you've received with respect to behavior that's gotten you penalized. Do a dedicated review pass only for this, if necessary.

- Give yourself a month or two where you err on the side of not posting.

- In particular, besides keeping to the guidelines, in particular don't comment on downvotes or your penalties.

- Refrain from emailing the mods about your penalties during that period.

- Perhaps use the "delay" so you can give yourself more time to review and perhaps retract a comment before it's made public.

This might all across a bit harsh, but I do think you need to take what you yourself have written to heart and change your behavior if you want to continue posting on HN. And I hope you do! You appear to care deeply about this and are passionate about things you believe in. Those are good things when properly directed. It'd be a shame for you to be banned when it's important to you.

Every one of your points is true, and it's not that I disagree with you. It's that fighting fire with fire isn't ok.

If I was doing something they saw as an act of aggression, the answer isn't to then have a policy of acting aggressively towards me. Shoving my comments to the bottom automatically has certain implications, and it basically removes you from the community and turns the mods into bullies.

And I get that what I did may have warranted some sort of punishment, but at this point it's unclear what precisely triggered this or whether any of what you say is true.

If I deserved to get banned, then they should just ban me so I can move on.

Do you believe that a completely in-the-open forum would be manageable? By this, I mean things like:

  - Everyone gets to see...  
    - who does the up/down votes.  
    - what any moderators' decisions/actions are  
    - what the algorithms for viewing real estate  
    - etc.

Some other aspects:

  - The "forum" (and all inter-user communication) lives on a block chain-like merkle-DAG.  
  - The real estate algorithms would be customizable, i.e. you have varying views on the same data.  
  - The "forum" would also act as chat rooms, todo lists, picture galleries, and more...

This is a fascinating topic worthy of several blog posts. I've spent many years thinking about why HN and Reddit managed to succeed when all other communities failed. Much of it has to do with inertia, but part of it is design.

One of the central aspects of HN is that humans control it, and they have good taste. I don't think you can take either of those qualities away without sacrificing what makes HN good.

And part of that implies that any HN competitor needs to have those qualities in abundance – which means allowing them to wield real power, and not being constantly second-guessed by the community.

It's a tradeoff, and it's the "good king" problem. You want someone in power who wants to do the right thing, and who is capable of doing it well. But that's extremely rare.

Dan is close, and we're all lucky to have him. Scott is a close second. But their weakness is that they don't really participate on HN anymore. Neither of them post here, and we don't get to feel connected with them like we felt with pg in the early days.

I think I'm not alone in missing that connection. So my theory is that if another site springs up with similar characteristics to HN, but with actual humans running it – people you can actually strike up a conversation with – then those who are interested in good conversation will flock to it.

That requires being capable of executing that plan, which is the tricky part.

Thanks for the extensive response. There are a couple points I'll break it down (I'm also loquacious on occasion):

> One of the central aspects of HN is that humans control it, and they have good taste. I don't think you can take either of those qualities away without sacrificing what makes HN good.

What if the user could "control it", i.e. could pick and choose algorithms of how to present views of the same data? Since everything is in the light, you could also share these algorithms - just like you share a collection of browser extensions or editor color schemes, etc. So you could have the "HN algorithm" which has the characteristics you mentioned with the slow-ban, and upvote/downvotes.

Heavily weight certain user's tags (think of voting up/down in terms of raw tags, and the repercussions of voting as an interpretation of those tags). These users would be who "HN" is - in this case the two that you're mentioning. You could also incorporate AI/ML opinions: Sentiment Analyzer A/B/../N, Some Other ML Analyzer, Bob's Analyzer. The main thing is that you have a way of associating identities with opinions, and then creating a projection algorithm that projects stories based on those identities and opinions.

So interestingly, it would be humans running the platform, but enabling each individual user to create his/her own projection algorithms.

> I think I'm not alone in missing that connection. So my theory is that if another site springs up with similar characteristics to HN, but with actual humans running it – people you can actually strike up a conversation with – then those who are interested in good conversation will flock to it.

At some point, won't the volume of interaction with any individual human exceed the ability of that person to respond? Won't the mentions, responses, etc. eventually be too much to handle? Also, isn't the up/down voting what determines in this site what the definition of what the "good" in "good conversation" is?

> That requires being capable of executing that plan, which is the tricky part.

Darn skippy. The characteristics I mentioned above I've already got well grounded with ibGib and it's taken quite awhile. It's a merkle DAG-based open-data design that I've created. Only I didn't create it to be a blockchain, as I didn't know how blockchains worked and was only vaguely aware of Bitcoin's existence. I created it to be a distributed microservice architecture (again, I didn't know the term microservice...I came up with "autonomous service" 15 years ago - still have the whiteboard). I wanted a SuperMemo-like learning algorithm, but the ability to have all of the aspects of the algorithm measurable (not an easy thing), to maximize the learning process. I've been shaving the yak ever since and it turns out to be like some understand blockchain graph data stores to act.

It's not that your idea doesn't have merit. It does. I went down this path myself, in the beginning.

But if you game out the implications of this, the conclusion is that everyone will see a different front page. And that has a bunch of subtle implications.

Reddit tried it. It could work. But it makes for a divided community, or set of communities. You see this with the various subreddit wars.

Do you have an email I can chat with you more about this? Hit me up if you're interested.

We can "chat" in this ibGib:

https://www.ibgib.com/as-chat/pic%5E6F40CA17107671491E64DB0B...

I've started to respond a little bit to your conclusion of seeing different front pages. Note that the site seems to be a little slow at the moment (I'm not much of an optimized coder, as the underlying tech is hard enough - premature optimization and all that).

This was quite unexpected, and incredibly cool. This is your chat project, right? Are there desktop notifications? Can I read more about it somewhere?

I'm a bit busy tonight with hacking, but I'll keep the tab open and check it periodically.

Oh, and also, I should say anyone interested can join that "chat" (not that there will be anyone, mind you)...

And it's especially slow today - not seen it like this before. Barely possible I'm hitting the extent of my small instance's capabilities.

Can you clarify what you find valuable about it? I find it utterly hand-wavy, it calls people "hysterical", and then goes off-topic to complain about moderation.