Soylent now accepting Bitcoin for preorders

You don't want the high calorie versions because people are going to be chugging this stuff to avoid feeling hungry.

Wouldn't want to actually stfw or anything.

Soylent sounds like it's made of soy, but the name essentially means cannibalism. I'd expect the former to kill enthusiasm from the energy drink market (where the cannibalism angle makes it sound more extreme) and the latter to put off everyone else.

So far we have people selling stuff telling us "it's okay".

I'd be really interested to see what the FDA has to say about Soylent. Have any of the Soylent team got legal advice?

No, because "Big _____" is a Progressive catchphrase that is normally used to villify whatever their target is and rationalize taking away some freedom from the marketplace, wheras "mass produced" just means "mass produced."

Of course, some people might use "Big _____" in a useful way, but it's definitely like a code smell but for English.

"Big Food" is a meaningless scare phrase. It literally means nothing in the context of the comment I was replying to. On the other hand, "mass produced" has a very clear and well-established general meaning that I'm pretty sure most HN readers understand (and one that can easily be found online or in a dictionary; when I try Googling "Big Food", I just get a lot of random sites that use it as a buzzword without ever bothering to define clearly what they're fighting against).

> Take out that hedgey "necessarily" and you've answered your own question.

The question was rhetorical, and the point was to illustrate how absurd the phrase "Big Food" is. My statement about mass produced food was intended to show that I'm not defending major corporations that produce unhealthy food, but pointing out a rhetorical and logical flaw in tlb's post.

> To say that Ensure is excessively sweetened to make people buy more, while Soylent isn't, sounds like an argument to me.

tlb didn't include any sourced information about Soylent (other than "it's not sweet", which means nothing about its sugar content), so that's irrelevant. My point, again, was that calling anything "Big Food" is a meaningless, bullshit scare tactic and I was calling it as a saw it.

Just because I sell something doesn't make me exempt from the legal consequences of my actions prior. If I negligently claim that a product will make you healthier and it cripples you, then you can sue me regardless of whether I still own the product. Similarly, I could be prosecuted for dishonest advertising type offences (which aren't wiped clean simply by selling a business!).

You might be talking about a products liability type claim.

Only an incompetent acquirer would take liability for any latent claims in a target acquiree. Most likely they will get strong warranties from the seller about the existence of claims and rely on their own due diligence to ensure they aren't buying a product which is likely to cripple people in the future.

In 90% of cases the seller will retain liability for incidents which pre-date the sale of their business.

And it certainly doesn't make a product whose only improvement is marketing something worthy of equal attention to a product that actually improves some other aspect.

For comparison, consider the definition of security used in this recently published paper:

http://eprint.iacr.org/2013/443

The definition is long, but very clear. Probabilistic polynomial time Turing machines are used as a model of computation; the adversary is given more power by being allowed to be non-uniform (i.e. the adversary can be a different machine for different security parameters). The security properties are clearly defined in terms of this model of computation, and a construction is given and proved to meet the properties (under certain hardness assumptions).

Note that there is no possible way that Bitcoin could meet the security definition given in that paper, because that definition requires the existence of a bank that issues the cash. This is true of previous work on digital cash as well, including the work that preceded Bitcoin. That is why it is necessary to develop a security definition that makes sense for systems like Bitcoin -- digital cash systems in which there is no bank. That is the complaint I have: no satisfactory definition has been given.

"This is not part of any proir school of economics, but it's close to common sense, and is strongly supported by the success of bitcoin thus far."

Economics often defies common sense, so I would be wary of using common sense as the basis for a currency.

1. It makes proofs of security possible, which make us a lot more confident about cryptosystems.

2. It allows us to be clear about what it means to "break" a system. If we are not clear about this, someone could claim that their system cannot be attacked by simply defining security to be the exact behavior of whatever they created. This is analogous to having a falsifiable hypothesis in a scientific experiment.

The original Bitcoin paper did not have such a definition. I am aware of one attempt at making such a definition, but it resulted in a very weak notion of security that placed unrealistic restrictions on what an attacker could do (basically, the authors were trying to find some definition that Bitcoin could satisfy; see point 2 above). In general, Bitcoin's security is highly suspicious, since by design the honest parties must scale their work in proportion with the work done by the attacker.

"Countries can be attacked too. I don't know what your point is here. If bitcoin survives its infancy, it could become more resilient than any other currency."

If you are admitting the possibility that an army might attack a country, then you are allowing Bitcoin to be fractured by an army destroying the outgoing Internet connections of a country. In the past, countries have been cut off from the Internet by accident (e.g. anchors being dropped on undersea cables). You could keep an attacking army outside of your territory and still wind up unable to communicate with the rest of the Bitcoin network. This is not a highly convincing argument.

Of course, this is all irrelevant, because a polynomial time attack is not the same as an act of war. There are a lot of organizations with the resources needed to perform the "51% attack" on Bitcoin and no compelling reason to think that a faster attack is not possible. You could attack Bitcoin by performing a lot of computation locally, without ever needing to step foot out the door. Bitcoin also does little to prevent attacks based on sending malicious messages into the network, despite the fact that cryptographers began developing techniques for dealing with that decades ago and despite the fact that almost all that work is freely available.

"3. Could you explain it in practical terms?"

Sure. Let's start with a thought experiment: I have something very rare, which has no practical uses but which is easy to give to others. Will you give me your car for a big pile of it?

Unless you are crazy you would not give up your car. The reason is that you are receiving something that is useless in exchange, and that you would have to go find some other person willing to take a pile of useless (but rare) items. Would your landlord accept some of these rare items as a rent payment? Would the bank accept some as loan repayment? Would the government accept it as a tax payment (let's just pretend that you are a law-abiding citizen who pays their taxes)?

How is Bitcoin any different? A lot of hype was generated about it, but at the end of the day you will not be able to pay your taxes with it, banks are unlikely to accept it for loan payments, and the majority of businesses that claim to accept Bitcoin payments actually accept payments in fiat currency via a Bitcoin exchange. Bitcoin currency has no practical uses (it is basically an energy sink) so the Austrian school does not support it, and it is not legal tender nor is it accepted for tax purposes by the government so modern monetary theory does not support it either.

"why should I care about what theorists say?"

For the same reason you should care about what cryptography theorists, physicists, and doctors have to say.

"we have never seen anything like Bitcoin taking off before."

That is because Bitcoin is the first of its kind. It is the first attempt to create a currency without a legal system. Even gold had value as currency because of a legal system.

"Yeah, I have seen a lot of people raging. How is that evidence of anything, other than fear of the unknown?"

You are calling the informed opinions of dozens of experts in cryptography and economics "raging" because they are saying that the system you love and support is based on dubious technical and economic ideas. It sounds more like you started out believing that Bitcoin is the future and are not willing to accept any argument that concludes anything else.

5. Printing paper money wastes way more resources. And how is using energy to create something of value a bad idea anyway? Bitcoin doesn't even require that you use a contaminating type of energy, for all I know you could be hashing with solar energy.

The argument that inflationary expectation is better than deflationary expectation because during period of deflation purchasing stops because 'it will be cheaper tomorrow' is flawed because such periods of deflation are short lived, and the market returns to a price where people are willing to re-enter the market and purchase to gain utility from the goods and services.

Just be careful believing people who "know anything about money" without thinking it through.

For more: http://www.zerohedge.com/news/guest-post-if-you-want-help-po...

But adding a deflationary currency to an ecosystem that also contains inflationary currencies isn't the same thing as having a deflationary currency be the only currency available.