cyphertruck

You’re right, you’re not going to be %30 more productive in a private office. You will be %100 more productive.

In some cases, %300.

That you are willing to sacrifice %70-%80 of an employee’s productivity to save %15 of their salary shows the problem.

That you don’t realize it is because “management” is no longer drawn from those that do. Instead “management” has become clueless MBAs who can't do either job.

That's not a warrant signed by a judge. I'm not judging you but I want to clarify, this was merely a request from a prosecutor, with no warrant covering it?

Sounds like a violation of 18 U.S. Code § 242. Deprivation of rights under color of law - https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/242

and 18 U.S. Code § 241. Conspiracy against rights - https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/241

I’m not taking offense wt your statement, but do want to say: You are being unkind to Somalia. I’m serious.

The perception of Somalia is skewed heavily by western news for the simple reason that the Somali people rebuffed the attempted invasion by US & UK proxy forces. (Guessing you most Americans don’t know that even happened.)

Somaliland isn't somewhere I would want to live, but I would pick it over the Bay Area. With an arrangement with the tribal elders, one would be safe, and property crimes like this would be dealt with by a judge. Unlike in SF.

These harmful effects are intended. That is the strategy.

Its important to understand why. Your life depends on it.

Notice your entire response is a downvote and the assertion “that is total rubbish”. Not a rebuttal. Not even an attempt to address the point, followed with a personal attack.

Telling me I need a time out is exactly the kind of personal attack that is really just your confession that you are anti-intellectual and you are upset that I pointed out the hypocrisy.

And of course you want me to take a “time out” because the last thing you want is to be confronted with facts that undermine your bigotry.

Linking to fake news repeating the same spin is not supporting a fake news article. The plants serve retail customers. The “just to mine bitcoin” is a lie told to try and bash bitcoin.

Reality is bitcoin is being mined with stranded natural gas, waste energy etc. Not with expensive high demand electricity— because that electricity is way too expensive.

That has worked terrible with the war in drugs. How do you think its going to work when no smuggling us required and anyone with a solar panel and a satellite dish can mine?

Bitcoin was as created to resist censorship— hence Wikileaks was able to raise money after visa et al banned them. It was created to resist debasement- as a result it maintains its value as inflation ramps up.

Thus you would actually not want to buy things with bitcoin, and instead spend rapidly depreciating USD.

It’s sad you refused to mount an actual argument and instead are engaging in ad hominem based on a strawman you erected.

But that’s fine, keep believing bitcoiners are dumb and keep bashing bitcoin.

That’s actually better for me. HFSP

It seems that way because you are not aware if how it is being used in practice. As a savings vehicle, holding for 4 years has never been a mistake. Globally, and for half a decade, it has been protecting poor people by giving them an exit. Millions of Venezuelans have avoided starvation by using it to avoid massive inflation destroying their savings. It is held in every country and every community.

I remember comments just like yours in the past 4 years who pretended like everyone got in at $20k (a price that existed for a day).

Average price over past 4 years is way below todays price. And todays price is only down due to this coordinated FUD attack.

PS— I am the only one who made a substantive comment on this thread and am being heavily down voted.

HN isn't a place of ideas, it is a place where where only a narrow, anti-human rights, ideology is tolerated.

The irony of this joke is very intense, but you won’t get it.

The thing that is most clever about bitcoin is that hating it only affects your well-being, it doesn’t affect bitcoin.

Bitcoin will continue, it is inevitable.

If you tax all CO2 emissions you will not “incentivize clean energy” because “clean energy” produces more CO2 emissions.

You will incentivize nuclear, though, which is the cleanest energy.

A much more efficient way to do that, though, would be to simply cut the science denying red tape.

This is basically fake news. The plant serves regular customers, and since it costs a lot to fire it up or shut it down, during the period where there is excess supply of electricity it is used to mine bitcoin. Unless you have a huge expensive and unavailable (due to constrained supply of cells) mega battery pack you cannot store that energy.

Globally, bitcoins’ entire energy usage is equal to just 1/6th of the surplus energy that is THROWN AWAY.

All this Bitcoin energy usage nonsense is FUD to keep people oppressed and using a currency that the politicians can inflate at will.

Due to the cantillon effect it is very profitable for wall street and politicians like congress to steal from the masses this way. This is the primary cause of wealth inequality.

Bitcoin fixes this, it gives regular people an escape, so they publish FUD against it.

Your statement about history is probably correct, but I don't agree about energy efficiency. Bitcoin is more energy efficient than gold. Most bitcoin power use is waste power— eg power generated which exceeds instantaneous demand, and bitcoin’s entire power usage is still 1/6th of what is currently thrown away... if bitcoin ever fails to deliver utility beyond its power cost, the network will reduce mining because mining will no longer be profitable.

Cheers!

When you cannot rob from the poor via inflation then it becomes harder to oppress them.

The Great Depression was caused by the government making gold illegal, effectively confiscating the nations wealth and replacing it with massive fiat inflation. It was a period of monetary inflation that caused and economic contraction.

One if the ways inflation is used to indoctrinate people against their best interests is demonizing “deflation” by conflating it with the contraction in the Great Depression.

A grandma on fixed income shouldn’t have her prices go up %30 because politicians wanted to spend trillions to pay off bribes, as we have seen in the past year, where our monetary base was increased by $7T (or more) with only a fraction going to benefit Americans.

There is nothing yet discovered that can replace proof of work. There are a lot if people selling scams who think proof if work is a weakness, but they are always centralized (ethereum, dash) or PoW masquerading as something else, or simply not a cryptocurrency (ripple).

Blacklisting doesn’t change fungibility. It just means some exchanges are refusing to do business with people who believe in privacy.

A government can scream and shout but they cannot block a bitcoin transaction.

I cannot believe I forgot one of the requirements for money. Thst is scarcity. In this regard bitcoin beats everything else, and especially beats baseball cards. Unlimited dollars can be printed and baseball cards rven more so.

Gold is genuinely scarce but there is %1 inflation and the asteroid mining risk.

Meanwhile bitcoins inflation rate gets cut in half every 4 years until it becomes zero in 2140.

This article is knocking down a squadron of strawmen. First off, bitcoins key attribute is not “privacy” but censorship resistance. It’s why wikileaks has been able to keep operating all these years after being cancelled by the mainstream payments industry. Not to mention many smaller, politically oppressed activist organizations, and much of the marijuana industry.

Secondly, the attributes of money are, according to Rothbard from memory:

- hard to counterfeit: bitcoin has this better than anything else.

- a store of value (not price stability.): It’s doing this great, just don’t buy late in the post halvining revaluation period. (Bitcoin haters don't seem to know the halvening exists. Bitcoiners are not worried about “price stability”.)

- divisible: down to 1/100,000,000 of a bitcoin, further possible with lightning. This rnables micro transactions.

- immune to spoilage: bitcoin can’t dissolve in water like salt (a previous form of money) and is quite robust, and can be backed up!

- easy to transport: bitcoin can be stored in any number of ways, more portable than paper money even.

- fungible: bitcoin is pretty fungible, but anti-freedom forces are trying to change that.

- liquid: bitcoin is extremely liquid with a global exchange network and ATMs all over and multiple p2p exchange services like localbitcoins.com to serve even places like the Sudan. Is paypal easy to use in the Sudan? Bitcoin is a more liquid form if money than anything other than the US Dollar and is competitive even there.

What bitcoin IS NOT, is a collectible like baseball cards. Baseball cards are absolutely not fungible— that is what makes them collectible! A babe ruth rookie card in mint is worth a lot more than last years random rookie card.

The author of this piece doesn’t understand what money is, or why bitcoin is the way it is, which means they haven’t done basic research.

I understand, certain people really hate bitcoin— and for good reason. Bitcoin will eventually obsolete the fiat inflation system which has created the wealth inequality in much of the world. The system that lets politicians buy power and escape responsibility for violating rights.

Bitcoin destroys the number one tool of human oppression.

A tool which, by the way, paid money to indoctrinate people into beliefs that result in them hating bitcoin.

But bitcoin isn’t alive. The hate doesn't affect it. Bitcoin is a well constructed set of incentives.

Embrace or ignore, your choice.

This absolutely true and a good point. In fact you gave to audit the code you run too. You have to decide who to trust. So how fo we mitigate that?

Decentralization & Cryptograhpy

Cryptography allows that the person you are trusting is the only one who could have changed it. For this we can use code signatures. And of course you tun your local copy (distribution) which you can audit, and compile yourself. That makes it much harder.

You can analyze your hardware and once its left the factory it us harder for the maker to influence.

The point isn’t that you csn economically get rid of all trust, but that choosing to trust a third party is a security hole.

“A car is an internal combustion engine driving wheels via a gearbox” is not a refutation of the statement “cars are transportation technology”

Ironically you were part right: Empty attempts to score points like yoyrs are a bane on any discussion of bitcoin in HN.

Not your node, not your blockchain. Already Ethereum is centralized because there is no independent network of nodes that can do a full sync from scratch. It depends on a company hosting its servers on amazon (separate from this service) to sync.

This just adds to the centralization.

A node hosted by Amazon cannot fulfill the most basic promise of a blockchain. Censorship resistance.

And that’s why you should have read Nicks article.

I wasn't making a statement on society, I was pointing out that Amazon has and can censor. There are many examples, going back to banning wikileaks that resulted in them having to accept bitcoin in donations — and now they never need donations again.

Bitcoin routed around Amazon’s censorship.

But historically, when you are supporting censorship, you’re not on the right side of history.

Bitcoin is fixing this.

Instead of reading this press release, please read this seminal article from 2001 rebutting it: https://nakamotoinstitute.org/trusted-third-parties/

“Amazon managed blockchain” is an amazing phrase. All three words are wrong. “Blockchain” is a distributed technology created specifically for censorship resistance. A “managed blockchain” should just be replaced with a database. Databases are faster & cheaper.

Meanwhile, Amazon is a company that has engaged in censorship many times over the years.

And that’s not even addressing the issues with ethereum.

The idea that when purchasing power increases people spend absolutely nothing is the basis if this rationalization for inflation, and it isn’t supported by logic or experience.

They actually spend more and more productively, because instead of barely getting by they are able to accumulate capital and start businesses.

There is no such thing as “Proof of stake” to replace proof of work. Proof if work is a solution where you do not have to trust anyone, as the block is won by the person who finds the right math result, essentially a lottery.

Proof if stake is either really proof of work that is less secure and obscured, or more often dimply giving the creators of the coin the power and your trust.... which reverses the entire point of the creation of bitcoin.

PoW’s purpose isn't to distribute coins (though rewarding whales is the purpose of PoS).

PoW’s purpose is to decentralize control so nobody can control and make the system trustless.

Not to disagree, but to emphasize that the idea that the only way to increase bitcoin capacity is increasing the block size is in error. You didn't push that idea but others do.

Nearly every release of bitcoin over past 8 years has increased capacity or efficiency, often both.

The large backlog these days is mostly spam transactions with almost no fees. Bitcoin has increased capacity dramatically in the past decade.

Ah,I misunderstood your point because I read another reply.

You make an excellent point!

That us not the purpose of bitcoin. (There is no “blockchain technology”)

While bitcoin is a record of transactions, and as such a database, it was not created to be a database.

Did you read the OP article?

It’s a shame you spent so much time patiently trying to explain all that to me, not realizing it’s probably the ten thousandth time I’ve heard this. I appreciate the efforts, bit that view is rationalization and I tried to save you the effort by pointing out that the technology industry has not stopped like you would expect if your view were reality.

And I assure you, as someone who holds bitcoin that has greatly appreciated, I can’t wait to spend it on things that depreciate.

In fact my spending has increased now that my spending power has increased dramatically.