Hacker News Reader

Comment by mettamage | Hacker News Reader

I wouldn't know an answer to it, but it would indicate to what extent the wisdom of the HN crowd is a wisdom one should follow.

Edit: I'm listing projects already talked about in the link of OP for convenience.

Bitcoin first time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=463793

Bitcoin second time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=599852

Redis: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=494649

Summarizing from other comments (yep, I'm bored):

ReactJS: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5789055

AirBnB: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=426120

DuckDuckGo (arguably): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=460877

Dropbox (seems to be received quite well? Hmm...): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863

Researched but turned out to have good responses:

Github: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=124553 -- query: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=github&sort=byDate&prefix&page...

View on HN

The age old Dropbox response: "For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. From Windows or Mac, this FTP account could be accessed through built-in software."

> Well this is an exceptionally cute idea, but there is absolutely no way that anyone is going to have any faith in this currency.

Not entirely inaccurate :)

It's true that not everyone has absolute faith in it, but there are quite a lot of people who have quite a lot of faith in it.

The claim was that no one would have any faith in it though ^^

"No one" in casual claims is not the absolute quantifier ("absolutely no one").

It just means "very few people".

Else we could never say "no one" in casual conversation for anything, because even the vilest/stupidest/most paranoid idea still has one/some proponents.

(And by "even the" I mean, "most", not "absolutely each and every vile/stupid/paranoid idea has one/some proponents").

Arguing the semantics is a moot point in this instance. Bitcoin was once transferring about $5bn on-chain daily and hovers over $1bn today. By comparison Western Union moves $80bn in one year.

The original comment was unequivocally wrong. People obviously trust it.

https://www.blockchain.com/charts/estimated-transaction-volu...

https://corporate.westernunion.com/annual-report/highlights....

Each day ~5 trillion dollars are moved.

Doesn't that mean that Bitcoin remains irrelevant -- (and 5 times less relevant today than when it was $5bn/daily).

So much for the future of currency...

I agree with this and my comment wasn't trying to use "no one" in that strongest possible "absolutely no one" sense

Then again, a lot of people had faith in David Koresh.

Wow...this comment really did not age well at all, even worse than the classic Dropbox comment:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=124594

Frequently people cite comments that look foolish in hindsight. But some people are able to gauge things well too.

Github:

> This really is a very cool little community . . . they're going to make a killing when they start charging.

Dropbox:

> This is genius. It's is problem everyone is having, and everyone knew it (http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/lazybackup ). If it really works as well as it looks in that demo then they nailed it. I'm both envious and inspired. I'll be surprised if YC does not fund them.

By what metric does one assess Bitcoin's success?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com