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Comment by art2 | Hacker News Reader

What is staggering is that one would assume that this service was created with the aim of helping open source developers, but when the developers ask personally to make a reasonable change to how the site is functioning, the owners decline. So the reason the site exists is something different. I don't think it's fraud. It's probably the weird culture of the (younger) part of the Bitcoin community, for whom the Bitcoin is more like cultural revolution. It's hard to rationally explain why liking Bitcoin leads to liking tip4commit's approach, but surely the Bitcoin revolutionists like to place themselves above the rest, and don't see themselves as a part of the "old" world (legal, financial system etc.).

For example, the currently highest-voted comment on /r/bitcoin for the story [0] says "I disagree with him [mitsuhiko]".

[0] http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/2kz9x0/please_remov...

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I think it's fair to say that the vocal majority of BitCoiners have a very naive view of some basic economic concepts.

Well, the vocal majority of EVERYONE has a very naive view of most basic economic concepts.

Fully agreed -- but I'm not trying to do very much with economics other than save money and pay taxes. For the things where I'm trying to act towards specific social change (e.g., privacy and security, in my case) I make an effort to be well-informed about, technically, socially, and legally. I don't have any illusions that the status quo is good, but there are also things that you can't be naive about when changing.

I think there are a lot of broken things about how currency works, but there are also quite a number of good things, and setting the whole thing on fire without understanding which parts are good and why is a recipe for hurting people and also failing to get your idea to succeed.

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html

http://xkcd.com/592/

Also that they like ramming it down everyone's throats.

Given the value of BitCoin relies on desire and the only way they can possibly convince people that they want BitCoin is to spam it until they believe it...

I think it's fair to say that's a blaming statement. Comments by people who appreciate the value of the blockchain are not all naive. I'd say the vast majority of people don't quite understand the ramifications yet, and would rather talk about what we all focus on: money. That's not what I think the value of Bitcoin is, however.

>a very naive view of some basic economic concepts.

Which concepts in particular are you referring to?

For one, there's a massive disconnect in distinguishing between the value of the currency and currency as a medium of exchange. For example, most sites and discussions focus on the value of BTC vs USD. Very few look at volatility and transaction volume.

>Very few look at volatility

That is fair. Do you think this is an insurmountable disadvantage?

>and transaction volume.

I don't know about that. Bitcoiners have been very vocal about the regularly increasing transaction volume since its inception. See https://blockchain.info/charts/n-transactions-excluding-popu...

Using Bitcoin is basically, like using a foreign currency, with the only difference, that in case of a the conventional currency you might actually live in the country it is used.

In other words, whenever you use Bitcoin you take on FX risk. This means, that Bitcoin is something you wouldn't want to store value in for the long-term.

Hedging that risk will also prove a major headache, since there aren't that many Bitcoin contracts out there, and the ones that are, carry some major credit risk with them.

>This means, that Bitcoin is something you wouldn't want to store value in for the long-term.

I can think of a reason you would want to. Bitcoin is strictly supply-limited, and all fiat currencies are not. One might decide that, despite Bitcoin's volatility, the expected change in unit value over time is higher than that of any (inflationary) fiat currency.

With the difference that other fiat currencies are spectacularly unlikely to be declared illegal in your jurisdiction. There's a non-zero chance of your "bitcoin stored value" being about as desirable as a few suitcases full of cocaine, if your local laws fall that way.

I wonder if tip4commit have even considered whether any of the unsolicited donations they're collecting for are intended for residents in any of the non-green countries here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legality_of_Bitcoin_by_country ? If you're a contributor to an open source project and you live in Bangladesh, this is about as welcome as receiving illegal drugs in the post in return for your open source project commits. (Yeah, a bit of hyperbole there, but still...)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legality_of_Bitcoin_by_country

>With the difference that other fiat currencies are spectacularly unlikely to be declared illegal in your jurisdiction.

So we've gone from "it's volatile" to "it's maybe, potentially, illegal at some point in the future"?

Well, there are a few reasons I wouldn't be worried about this. A) It's not likely that Bitcoin will be banned outright in most countries. B) If it were to be banned outright, you'd likely have plenty of notice and be able to sell it before the laws took effect.

Also, it is not as if the project is actually sending Bitcoin to the developers; it is simply making it available for them to claim. A more comparable analogy would be if a sweepstakes in Colorado told me I had won some free marijuana; even though marijuana is illegal in my state, I am not legally culpable unless I actually claim the winnings.

True - like I said, I was being hyperbolic...

I still think the "potentially illegal at some point in the future" is a real consideration in the discussion about using Bitcoin "to store value in for the long-term".

As for the difference between "sending Bitcoin to developers" vs "making it available for them to claim" - think about how you'd feel if someone in Colorado was running a website saying "Donate marijuana to wyager for each of his upvoted HN comments!", then had your local police come round to your place asking you about"your" 7oz of illegal drugs? However "in the right" you are, being put in that position without being asked, and having "that guy" argue about whether he needs to stop doing it when you complain... I personally wouldn't want to be involved in those arguments, nor would I be at all happy about other people supporting :that guy"'s rights to keep doing it.

> If it were to be banned outright, you'd likely have plenty of notice and be able to sell it before the laws took effect.

Ah, but who would want to buy Bitcoin in that scenario?

People in countries where it was not going to be outlawed, or customers who planned to use it for illegal purposes anyway.

Bitcoin is strictly supply-limited, but there are an unlimited number of altcoins.

(I see Bitcoin advocates pushing people to stop using altcoins. It's unclear to me what force they can put behind this admonition.)

True, if we expect the BTC FX risk to be lower, than the inflation risk of the best possible fiat currency choice, then BTC would be the superior choice.

It's different than most other foreign currencies in the sense that it's variance in value is MUCH higher than your usual currency. I would consider storing my personal fortune in CHF, JPY, USD, or even EUR but never in BTC.

Exactly, the volatility is why people wouldn't use it as a store of value.

P. S. I like how you went "...or even EUR" ;)

Friction, lowest friction tends to win and bitcoin demands friction to run the blockchain. I don't think electronic exchange mechanisms are daft, but I do think the bitcoin model is.

>bitcoin demands friction to run the blockchain

It requires (electrical) power. I don't think this could reasonably be called "friction". When I think "friction", I think of burdens imposed on users. Bitcoin has relatively few of those.

Cost per transaction of $19 is a fair amount of friction - https://blockchain.info/charts/cost-per-transaction

>Cost per transaction of $19 is a fair amount of friction

Haha, I have no idea what that chart is talking about. It might be in cents. Even then, it seems expensive.

My phone client uses a ~$0.05 fee, I think.

All fees are optional. Your transaction might just take longer without one.

There are about 500 transactions per block; each block contains 25BTC + fees (the fees are negligible at the moment). At the current price of $350/BTC that means that the revenue per transaction is 25*350/500 = $17, which means that the cost per transaction should be around that area. This means that the low transaction fee is actually massively subsidized by the fixed block reward.

Yeah, just thinking about that fee graph. I have no idea of the transaction size it is based on and without that it is pretty useless.

The failure, nay the pigheaded refusal, to learn from history.

BitCoin is faux money and will likely be recorded as the "Dutch Tulip Bubble" [0] of our times.

Intentions and wishful thinking alone are not enough to create revolutions. Crises are invariably required to change such fundamental concepts as value of currency in the public's mind, and it has to happen on a massive scale in a tiny span of time. BitCoin will be no more than the butt of jokes in another decade unless it finds it's destiny in a crisis made for it to shine.

[0] http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_mania

You haven't actually mentioned any economic principles; you've just compared Bitcoin to a historical bubble (of which there were certainly many) without any evidence supporting this comparison.

>BitCoin is faux money

Could you expand on this? How do you define "faux" money?

OK, you're making 2 different claims. The first claim is that Bitoiners refuse to learn from history. But the second claim is that crises are required for revolutionary change (history says, I presume). So how are Bitcoiners refusing to learn from history? By trying in the first place? Or by failing to manufacture a crisis?

And really, linking to the wikipedia page of tulip mania, as if we haven't heard that trope 10,000 times?

I don't think the second part of your comment is correct and the fact that this situation about tip4commit and discussions around it makes it to seam correct forces me to dislike it [tip4commit] even more. I mean, there isn't really "two armies" fighting each other: "old world" vs "bitcoin-ish world" with completely polar ideologies, there's no black and white. So when someone on one side is doing some ridiculous nonsense it doesn't make the other side automatically "the right one" and vice versa. Even not being part of Bitcoin community I personally think there's quite real need in "cultural revolution" of some sort, because what you are calling the "old world" isn't really "old" one as you surely understand yourself: it's quite significant part of the only world we are living in, and it is as full with nonsense as the "new, revolutionary" one.

I mean, there truly is quite a lot things that one can disagree with about the "old" world, maybe even somewhat forcefully, in "Gandhi's way" rather than "Kant's way". So when somebody associated with the "new" world behaves stupid he causes much more harm for the supporters of all kind of "cultural revolutions", because makes them look like a bunch of idiots no matter how different from each other their actual beliefs and reasoning may be.

I do feel some sort of kinship here with the Bitcoin attitude, but it's worth remembering that readability pulled an (arguably worse) version of this stunt in the past few years, and were called out as scumbags for it. No Bitcoin in that story.

Do you have a link to that story?

Reposting from down below: http://blog.readability.com/2012/06/announcement/

>It's hard to rationally explain why liking Bitcoin leads to liking tip4commit's approach

A currency only works if people use it. A good way to support bitcoin is to expand adoption. It seems to me that the creators of tip4commit have blinders on and only view the project through bitcoin colored glasses.

The issue as I see it is that the bitcoin movement mirrors the technology's decentralized nature. There is a general optimism and push towards adoption, but no real methods or direction towards that goal. It's a rather organic, evolving system. Things that have helped adoption have been repeated and things that cause a backlash are squashed and learned from. The latter is what I would say is happening here.

The non-sketchy version of this would only accept tips for repos that had a bitcoin address committed to a well-known location in their repo. And it would send the tips directly to that address. No possibility of scamming, and opt-in by its nature.

Is there already something like this?

That seems to go against the idea of tip4commit, the idea is that contributors (through pull requests etc) can be compensated as well automatically. Same if there's multiple contributors to a project the compensation is split between them based on the amount of commits they make.

Maybe the better solution would be to look for Bitcoin wallet addresses in commit messages. If maintainers don't like it they can scrub them on merge.

Couldn't that be fixed by having contributors creating a specifically named repo with the address in a file? Still opt in. It could be opt in for the maintainer too, following jchrisa's suggestion, meaning the maintainer could veto payments.

Except everyone knows that asking for forgiveness beats asking for permission every time.

> For example, the currently highest-voted comment on /r/bitcoin for the story [0] says "I disagree with him [mitsuhiko]".

Not true (anymore?). The top 3 comments are now:

- "I think [mitsuhiko] complaint is 120% fair..."

- "It seems like tip4commit is trying to ram a Bitcoin service down peoples throats..."

- "This has nothing to do with Bitcoin at all. It's people being jerks..."

On the other hand, the whole thread has been killed by an /r/bitcoin mod apparently for inciting anti-bitcoin sentiment. http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/2kz9x0/please_remov...

I got the exact opposite of that (or I'm misunderstanding you).. The title of the story on reddit is:

> "Please remove mitsuhiko/* (This guy is complaining about tip4commit, please help educate about Bitcoin)"

and the mod writes:

> "You are not allowed to incite brigading. Please resubmit using the original source - the github link. You are part of the problem of why people hate our community"

Seems like the mod is reprimanding the submitter of the story for the "please help educate about Bitcoin" part of the submission (which is inciting brigading).

Or maybe it's just a cool hackathon project using Bitcoin and the Github APIs...

Seriously, what is the big deal with this? The developers are more than able to simply ignore the donations. Anyone who wasted time complaining in that Github thread could have clicked "mark as spam" in a fraction of the time and been done with it.

I guess the real reason was Armin's sincere indignation (quite justified in my opinion) about some random site on the web making use of his project name in some questionable way that appears like it is encouraged by the project maintainer himself. Emails are minor nuisance as you always can create one more filter to get rid of known spam. And then "shit just hit the fan", so all discussion that follows is more about making noise and threats about throwing lawyers in each other than really trying to solve anything.

>some random site on the web making use of his project name in some questionable way that appears like it is encouraged by the project maintainer himself.

Everyone who used this tipping mechanism would have at least a cursory idea of how it works, and that's all it takes to understand that project maintainers have zero involvement with it.

But then we'd have to listen to someone complain that the "mark as spam" button was being misused by a bunch of people.

there are normal people on this thread ;)

I think you were probably referring to my comment - and for what it's worth, I'm thinking you're absolutely correct about it being a cultural difference.

The Bitcoin community is made up of predominately radical libertarians; I say that with the utmost respect, as I consider myself part of that very group. The culture is very different from that of the Python community - and one of those ways is that it is often acceptable to alienate a portion of your potential userbase.

the top comment right now is http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/2kz9x0/please_remov...

and that comment agrees with mitsuhiko

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