Hacker News Reader

anoniskoon Lucid Motors agrees to go public with $24B valuation

I should add, keeping companies private could also be a scheme for throwing a wrench into the rising calls for a wealth tax. How you value property that has no liquid market (like private company shares) is one of the issues that makes a wealth tax extremely difficult to implement in practice.

anoniskoon Lucid Motors agrees to go public with $24B valuation

I have a paranoid fear that keeping companies private MUCH longer than previously normal will be the status quo going forward now that the general public has easy access to active stock trading.

A truly open market strips away a lot of the advantage insiders and old money have enjoyed for a long time, and keeping growth companies in the private market is a way to prolong that privilege.

anoniskoon Nvidia Limits RTX 3060 Hash Rate

There are more people who already own some bitcoin than you'd probably want to believe. Many of them believe bitcoin is on balance a good thing.

There are at least a couple of bitcoiners currently in Congress, including the new Senator of Wyoming who is publicly all aboard the idea that bitcoin is an important, long term store of value that the US needs to jump on board with.

How many politicians do you think already hold some bitcoin quietly, just in case?

anoniskoon Nvidia Limits RTX 3060 Hash Rate

Assuming the crypto bubble pops catastrophically and never recovers, yes we'll be left with a lot of worthless ASICs and GPUs, but also a ton of newly freed energy sources and chip manufacturing facilities, the development of which will have been funded or subsidized by the crypto speculative craze.

A world with more access to energy and cheaper silicon chips is probably necessary to address the immense challenges civilization is facing.

anoniskoon Nvidia Limits RTX 3060 Hash Rate

> Games don't exist without players.

Of course they do. Just because a game isn't being played doesn't mean it doesn't exist. Or at least, the rules do.

In a world of 7 billion humans, all you need is 2 to be the first movers and start playing. If the game is rewarding to the players, then it will continue to attract more players and grow until the size of the network of players itself becomes a huge part of the value of playing.

Games are just a protocol. And if the protocol is useful and better than other protocols, or has some first/second mover advantage, then the network using the protocol will grow until it saturates the addressable nodes.

anoniskoon Nvidia Limits RTX 3060 Hash Rate

It's definitely not this simple.

How would you execute an exchange ban politically? Any politicians who did this would be responsible for instantly vaporizing tons of value owned by an increasingly non negligible fraction of the population that spans a broad spectrum of political affiliation.

An exchange ban also wouldn't stop bitcoin, because the network would still continue running and anyone cutoff and stuck with bitcoin can still use it as a medium of exchange, and it could kick off its development as a direct unit of account. An exchange ban might even make using bitcoin as currency even easier, because if it's not legally exchangeable for fiat, how do you tax cap gains on it?

Stopping bitcoin is a REALLY hard problem. It would require a massive coordinated crack down by every government on the planet. And then you're left with a prisoner's dilemma. What happens if China or Russia publicly go along with such a ban, but secretly keep supporting it and buy up coins for themselves, preparing for a day when it will be the global reserve currency that dethrones the dollar? It's a similar game theory problem to why we will likely never live in a world without nuclear weapons.

The reason this will probably never happen is because every government will think through this game theory, and realize the risk of being on the wrong side of a potentially ineffective ban and hamstringing your nation's citizens and companies from participating and developing on the new global financial system, is greater than the cost of just capitulating and adapting to live with it.

anoniskoon Nyan Cat on the Blockchain

We don't value a copy because machines (or humans acting like machines) can do that for dirt cheap without thought or creative breakthrough.

We value the original.

We value the thing that represents that initial spark of something brand new in the world that latched itself in our collective consciousness. We value that because everyone else values it. It gives people a sense of awe to learn that you own an ORIGINAL Picasso. It's a display of wealth and power, but also tickles something deep and almost spiritual in the human mind.

I wouldn't be surprised if we learn to treat original NFTs the same way for digital art. Maybe first we need good ways of displaying our ownership of them.

anoniskoon Nyan Cat on the Blockchain

Money laundering for sure. But also just a store of value.

A Picasso is like a savings account. You can hold one for decades and it will preserve value relative to inflation so long as people still value them the same.

Another way to think about rare art, is that it is a game. It's a game of trying to predict (or promote) which art will stick long term in some collective consciousness. The Mona Lisa is valuable because literally everyone in the western world knows it. Nyan cat is a modern example. It's a piece of art that is locked into the consciousness of at least tens of millions of younger people who are now starting to have money. If a piece of popular art exists in a form that is ownable and verifyably original, then it will trade for tons of money.

anoniskoon Nvidia announces mining GPUs, cuts the hash rate of RTX-3060 in half

Development of domestic chip manufacturing might even start to become a national security concern, leading to even more money flowing in on top of the money coming from crypto miners.

anoniskoon 'Sexual favours were the norm in music industry'

It's a lot more common than most people want to believe.

anoniskoon Nvidia announces mining GPUs, cuts the hash rate of RTX-3060 in half

That would suck in the short term, but it would also be a HUGE incentive to massively ramp up chip fabrication capacity, leading to long term cost decrease due to economies of scale.

anoniskoon 'Sexual favours were the norm in music industry'

Sleeping with a professor for academic advantage is definitely not a common trope, so this makes sense. /s

anoniskoon Passwordless Logins with Yubikey

Cool. Now where's the guide to embed NFC enabled yubikeys in your hand?

anoniskoon Bitcoin surpasses $50K as major companies jump into crypto

All currencies are volatile against other currencies.

Volatility of currency goes away (or rather, gets abstracted) within the context of locales where that currency is used as a unit of account and goods and services are directly priced in it. So far, this hasn't happened yet for bitcoin, because there is no central authority forcing it upon people.

Nobody knows if, when, where, or how this unit of account transition will happen. Maybe Tesla prices the new roadster or cybertruck in bitcoin as a publicity stunt that starts a cascade. Maybe some country with a failing currency decides to issue a new currency backed with bitcoin, or their people start using it without permission and pricing emerges organically. Maybe Iran, Turkey, Venezuela, North Korea, Syria, and Cuba start using it as their currency for international trade.

Or maybe it never will become a unit of account, and bitcoin will just find a role as an inflation hedge and long term store of value like gold, which is currently 10x as valuable as bitcoin.

anoniskoon Bitcoin surpasses $50K as major companies jump into crypto

That's exactly what's happening.

Decentralized, trustless version is the Lightning Network, https://www.lopp.net/lightning-information.html

anoniskoon 50 Years Ago, Sugar Industry Quietly Paid Scientists to Blame Fat (2016)

You're forgetting a big one.

It's a cognitive stimulant that increases worker productivity.

So not only does the coffee industry have an obvious, direct incentive to promote the benefits and downplay any long term negatives, but EVERY corporate entity and even our government has an indirect incentive to downplay any negatives.

A company or society that hypes up it's young worker population on caffeine will likely out-compete organizations of humans that don't, even if major health problems show up later in life.

anoniskoon How Covid brought the future back

Like a junkie chasing that first high. You keep needing more and more but never get close to the first, until suddenly you wake up and realizing your life collapsed around you and your drug doesn't work at all anymore.

anoniskoon How Covid brought the future back

There is something different this time.

People en masse have started using the S&P 500 and other index funds as a long term store of value. Large amounts of money buy these stocks every pay period with zero regard to performance or current market conditions.

As far as I'm aware, this has never happened before. We don't know how this experiment will change the market long term or whether it will eventually collapse.

anoniskoon Fictional Cryptocurrencies

At least dogecoin has a static and predictable supply inflation and doesn't glorify slave owners and indian killers.

anoniskoon FIDO2 security key company releases hardware that's open source and uses Rust

Would have been nice to be common before USB-C started becoming standard...

anoniskoon MasterCard to open up network to cryptocurrencies

https://twitter.com/JackMallers/status/1346867753253220356

anoniskoon Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

This shouldn't be surprising. The early adopters of a finicky new technology are always going to be enthusiasts.

You can buy a Starbucks gift card on fold app using LN and currently get 3% back in sats.

But seriously, why would anyone spend a ton of effort right now integrating a coffee shop directly with LN in the first world? Traditional payment systems work fine. Bitcoin was never primarily concerned with replacing Visa. Think bigger.

anoniskoon Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

https://foldapp.com/

https://store.blockstream.com/

https://acceptlightning.com/list.html

Several major exchanges have announced that they are implementing LN support. Still very early days.

anoniskoon Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

You can't directly measure the number of transactions happening on lightning network unless every non leaf node publishes it's numbers, and even then you'd have to trust they're telling you the truth.

And it's even more complicated than that, because you'd have to take the data from every node, and reconstruct complete paths to identify a single transaction.

And yes, I personally use the Strike app + Fold app to collect satoshi rewards by buying gift cards for shopping. Strike also has a beta app that uses lightning as the rails for global p2p transfers, e.g. you can instantly send USD to EUR. https://twitter.com/JackMallers/status/1346867753253220356

anoniskoon Evidence that the FBI can hack into private Signal messages on a locked iPhone

The point of encryption and privacy software isn't to make it completely impossible to violate someone's privacy. We still have laws that most of us agree with and want to see them enforced.

The point is to make it impossible to compromise everyone all at once and stream that data into a system designed to automate the manufacturing of consent.

It has to cost something non negligible to violate someone's privacy, and that cost will demand evidence and accountability from those who are authorized to wield that power.

anoniskoon The Rise and Fall of Bitcoin Billionaire Arthur Hayes

...are we the Fire Nation?

anoniskoon Why it’s usually crazier than you expect

Musk didn't inflate Doge. He tweeted about it and a bunch of get rich quick folks scrambled to buy, driving the price up like a penny stock.

A share of stock represents a tiny percentage share in a company's assets and profits. For simplicity, let's say a company has 100 shares, and you own 1 share or 1%. If they then issue 100 new shares and sell them on the market to raise cash, your ownership in the company has been diluted from 1% to 0.5%.

That's why company shares will never be safe as an arbitrary store of value like bitcoin is. No one can arbitrarily dilute your share of the bitcoin pie.

anoniskoon Why it’s usually crazier than you expect

One caveat is that the insane valuation could let the company raise enormous amounts of cash and attract talent. Perhaps enough to revitalize the company into something with a legit growth story.

I'd say this is very unlikely, but it's not beyond the realm of possibility that GME becomes like a TSLA or AMZN that is constantly trying to catch up to the absurdly high expectations of investors.

anoniskoon Why it’s usually crazier than you expect

Except that it can be arbitrarily inflated.

anoniskoon Berty: Peer-to-peer messaging app that works with or without internet access

I believe there's some work being done to use cryptocurrency micro payments as a layer on top of IPFS to incentivize data storage.

edit; Filecoin, https://docs.filecoin.io/about-filecoin/ipfs-and-filecoin/#d...