devishard

Whoa. The way you're using those stats doesn't make sense. Trade volume is heavily skewed toward the use cases of those who make trades often; i.e., day traders. A user who makes a $100 trade once a month comes out to affecting trade volume an average of $3ish per day. Meanwhile a user who makes $100 trades 10 times per day is going to affect trade volume by $1,000 per day. So trade volumes could easily overrepresent a day trader by 33,333%. In other words, a day trader could easily have 333 times as much effect on trade volume as a once-a-month investor.

So maybe people who make frequent trades are doing it between cryptocurrencies, which makes sense, because if you're day-trading cryptocurrencies it makes sense to trade for other cryptocurrencies, as that avoids regulation. But we don't have any data about what percentage of users are day-traders. If anything, the fact that Eth/BTC trades are only the percentages they are on that chart indicates that this isn't the case.

And incidentally, people who make frequent trades are the ones least likely to pull their money out of the exchange to somewhere safe, because it's going to be the biggest PITA for them, since they'd have to do it so often.

> Really fantastic achievement and a really down to earth take on food - good to see Michelin not adopting a stuffy elitist stance on their awards.

This is kind of late to say this.

EDIT: This is also why Ethereum's recent hard fork is such a ridiculous idea. Now Ethereum has all the downsides of centralization without many of the benefits.

> most people aren't selling bitcoin for national currencies when they are using an exchange, they are trading between altcoins and other cryptoassets.

I'd actually like to know if this is the case. It certainly isn't what I'm doing. I did hold some Litecoin/Peercoin for a while, and I still have Namecoin, but I have enough Namecoin that I'll probably never have to buy one again to keep my .bit domains, and I haven't held anything else except Bitcoin in over a year. So my typical use-case for an exchange is just to exchange national currency for cryptocurrency.

I suspect that I'm not the only one, but I don't have any evidence for that. If you have evidence that my use case is actually the 5% use case as you claim, I'd be interested to see it.

Look, I'm a big Bitcoin enthusiast, but Bitcoin isn't easier than traditional banking.

I sent ~8 checks at the beginning of the month without doing literally anything, because they were set up with automatic bill payment. When I get paid it goes directly into my account, again without me doing anything. Unless you're going to claim that Bitcoin is easier than literally not even thinking about getting paid or paying my bills, ease of use is not really a selling point for Bitcoin.

There are real reasons to use Bitcoin that aren't provided by traditional banking. We don't need to persuade people it's easier, especially since it's not easier.

> I think the key phrase here is "in the long term". Who says Bitfinex is in it for the long term? They say it? Why do you trust them?

Assuming they don't plan to die tomorrow, Bitfinex is on the hook for a lot of money to a lot of people right now, and they're likely going to be sued. If they were only in it for the short term, they weren't in it for short enough; they didn't get out in time. Where does Bitfinex benefit from this? If their intent was to scam their users, they've also scammed themselves through their own lack of understanding.

I get what you're saying, but it just doesn't work out, even as a short term scam, for reasons that are obvious to anyone who understands decentralization. Bitcoin centralization can be a way to execute a scam (see various darknet markets that have exited with all their users' escrow Bitcoins). But Bitfinex didn't use centralization to execute a scam. They just failed because they didn't understand how decentralization would affect their business.

It's a bit annoying, but there are benefits to decentralization, too. If the banking system collapses, my Bitcoin are safe. If I get arrested, the government can't seize my assets. If I travel to another country, I don't have to pay any different fees to transfer my money there.

Agreed. This is pretty much how I use exchanges.

> Businesses understand this really well and they are using this to their advantage, there's not much regulation around crypto-curruncies as of now, so these companies can operate in a legally gray area. It is the customers of these businesses who has no idea what is going on.

I specifically said, "businesses that don't understand this" to talk about the subset of businesses that don't understand decentraliztion. I didn't say that all businesses didn't understand decentralization.

There are many businesses that do understand decentralization, but centralized exchanges like Bitfinex definitely don't. If they did, they wouldn't be holding the money of thousands of users. Lack of regulation around cryptocurrencies is only one implication of decentralization, and for that matter, it's one that isn't permanent. Decentralization makes regulation hard to enforce for individuals, but large centralized businesses are going to have a hard time avoiding regulation in the long term.

You're right, they do try to hang their hat on anonymity, but when they do that, it's pretty much an outright lie. Centralized Bitcoin services are regulated and tied to other financial services. Coinbase knows exactly who I am. And while you can break the identity chain with tumblers etc., that requires going outside centralized Bitcoin services.

Bitcoin isn't trivially anonymous, and centralization almost universally comes with regulation that prevents it from being anonymous.

> It is easy to make fun -- and I do make fun -- of bitcoin/blockchain enthusiasts for naively re-creating everything that has existed for decades or centuries in the traditional financial system.

From a "blockchain enthusiast"'s perspective, this is exactly why Bitfinex and other centralized Bitcoin businesses are idiotic. If we're just implementing centralization on top of Bitcoin's decentralized structure, Bitcoin has literally no benefits over the traditional financial system. It's actually worse, because when a major traditional financial institution gets hacked, they reverse the charges instead of going bankrupt. Bankruptcies happen all the time in the Bitcoin world because creating a centralized Bitcoin puts a target on the business that grows as the business grows, and the damage when they get hit is irreversible.

The benefit of Bitcoin is decentralization, and businesses that don't understand this are always going to come across as naive. Sometimes so naive that they fail.

Perhaps people worship wealth and power, yes.

On what basis are you claiming that his ventures have an extremely high likelihood of failure?

> He's definitely not in it primarily for the cash.

I don't see any evidence whatsoever for this assertion.

> I think I just don't come across situations where I find myself needing generics in the software that I typically write.

You don't need generics, sure. You can write working code in assembly, too. But abstractions catch more of your mistakes for you.

> There is a workaround for it, though. Basically you write a template and do code generation off of that to sort of approximate generics. I've never done it myself, though.

So, basically slightly more powerful macros, like in C, with most of the pitfalls and dangers associated with them.

There are better approaches to these problems.

True, but given the entire point here is to have interesting conversations, I think that's a higher priority than civility.

I think in both cases, yes, they should reveal that they got the stuff for free.

I don't really see any ambiguity here. Just ask, "Would I want to know about this if the celebrity's actions were a factor in my purchase?"

How does this differ from surfing shows on the internet?

The identity verification is essentially a phone call for most CAs, which verifies nothing. Some CAs do better, but it only takes a few bad apples, and in this case it's not a few bad apples--it's mostly bad apples.

I think the line can be unambiguously drawn at whether or not the celebrity is receiving money as payment to post something. In the example you've described, things posted before the band had a deal with Ernie Ball don't need the endorsement line, while things posted as part of the contract do.

The point here is to give people true information to make an educated buying decision. People can look back and see that you used Ernie Ball strings when it wasn't part of a contract. And now that you have a contract with Ernie Ball, they can make an educated decision whether they believe that you're still using the product because you like it or whether you are just using it now because you are paid to.

This creates an incentive for companies to create a good product that people will promote on their own, rather than creating a bad product and paying people to promote it.

> Tying real world identities to public keys is very much a part of crypto. Windows does it with package signing and EV, Debian does it with people holding up their passports at Linux events, and web sites do it with EV HTTPS.

This would be a legit argument if EV HTTPS actually achieved that goal. They don't, though: the identity verification around EV HTTPS is a joke.

> That is not what it means: http://philosophy.lander.edu/oriental/charity.html

I'm aware of what it means--I'm saying that the principle of charity doesn't apply. The principle of charity doesn't mean you get to actually change what the person is saying, it means you assume the best when there's ambiguity.

> People have different backgrounds and and experiences. It's reasonable for a person to think "fully statically typechecked" to mean "a program which is statically typechecked, and it does so to the entire program". That would apply to languages such as C, C++ and Go, which are statically typed, but give ways to subvert the type system.

But in the cases of C and Go, it's not just that--you can't use generics or templates, so you're stuck writing generic-like code with void* or object, respectively. That's not subverting the type system intentionally, it's just not type checked and there's no alternative. So these languages are not fully type checked, even if you don't subvert the type system. So even by your charitable definition, it's not fully statically type checked.

The word "fully" has a meaning that's not ambiguous. There's not an interpretation of "fully statically typechecked" that includes Go, even being charitable. Every nontrivial Go codebase has sections that are not statically typechecked and can't be modified to be statically typechecked.

> We're here for interesting discussion. Derision is not a part of interesting discussion.

I'm here for interesting discussion, and I don't think that an interesting discussion starts from obvious falsehoods like "Go is a fully statically-typed language". Derision discourages making such statements and increases the average interesting-ness of discussion because people are afraid to say dumb things. People should think before they make claims.

> You're relatively new here, so I figure it's worth explaining this explicitly.

I'm not new here, I just delete my accounts every so often.

Cable television is a worse experience than watching video on the internet in every way. I really don't understand why people are still doing it.

> The entire point of bitcoin is to avoid financial institutions? That sounds like a pretty big disadvantage compared to other forms of money that work well with financial institutions.

It is a huge disadvantage for some purposes, but there are plenty of advantages to avoiding financial institutions.

If you want to work with financial institutions, there are plenty of ways to do that already. Go get a savings account or a mutual fund; it's not complicated.

If you want to transfer money at low fees across national boundaries, or make your money harder for governments to seize, or make your money anonymous, Bitcoin can do those things better than other financial vehicles. And that's because it's not tied in with financial institutions.

> A distinction without a difference as far as it relates to having all your money stolen.

It's a huge difference. Humans are notoriously bad at creating secure passwords. A SPRNG-generated key is far more secure.

> It makes bitcoin a poor choice for the general population since most people fall into the category of "outsiders who don't understand the tool and aren't on board with the philosophy of why Bitcoin is important"

True. The same can be said of almost any investment vehicle--most people have very little understanding of most investment vehicles. I'd also say that for example futures and options are much harder to leverage well than Bitcoin. That doesn't mean they aren't useful, it means you have to know what you're doing to use them.

As Warren Buffet said, "Don't invest in things you don't understand."

I have no problem with people investing in Bitcoin purely for speculation to make money, but I'm also not going to cry if they make a bad investment because they can't be arsed to understand what they're investing in. I wouldn't invest in mining futures because I don't know how to leverage mining futures, and they shouldn't invest in decentralized currencies if they don't understand the implications of decentralization.

If you keep your money in an exchange, you're gonna have a bad time. Lots of people (myself included) were saying this before even the Mt. Gox stuff happened, so it's not like this isn't predictable.

I don't know how you came to that conclusion.

My assumption is that they're selfish assholes who want to successfully launder stolen Bitcoins. Holding on to Bitcoins and laundering them through tumblers gradually would allow them to do that. But it seems like every time a thief steals a large amount of Bitcoin, they try to put it through a tumbler all at once or come up with some other scheme that doesn't work to launder it all at once.

Okay, why don't you assume in everything I'm talking about fluffy rainbow butterflies or something nice like that? Principle of charity, right? That way we can both go our separate ways happily.

If someone doesn't mean "fully statically typechecked" then they shouldn't say "fully statically typechecked". It's not an ambiguous phrase.

I don't understand why every hacker tries to come up with a novel way of laundering bitcoins or tries to launder them all at once.

Is there something urgent they need to spend thousands of bitcoins on right now that they can't just launder a hundred bitcoins a day through tumblers over the next few years?

> Only in bitcoin land does it make sense to blame laypeople for storing their money with financial institutions.

Uh, yeah. That's the entire point of Bitcoin.

> Only in bitcoin land is it a best practice to secure your money using a password written on a piece of paper.

God no, at least not a password intended for human consumption. That's not what a cold wallet should be. It should be a key.

> Only in bitcoin land is it reasonable to expect consumers to do a better job of keeping their money secure than corporations with on staff security experts.

No, non-expert consumers should be using off-the-shelf security solutions made by a staff of security experts that they can use locally (i.e. physical Bitcoin wallets). It's just that not many people are working on that stuff, because most of the companies making Bitcoin stuff are catering to speculators trying to get rich quick.

There are a lot of really smart people working on creating centralized Bitcoin solutions, but frankly, that's just a bad idea, as evidenced by almost every centralized Bitcoin solution having been hacked at least once. A centralized system has too wide an attack surface and too high an incentive for attackers, and defeats most of the benefits of Bitcoin anyway.

Sure, it makes Bitcoin a poor choice for speculators looking to get rich quick, but I don't care in the least. They're outsiders who don't understand the tool and aren't on board with the philosophy of why Bitcoin is important.

If you don't understand decentralization and you try to be in Bitcoin, you're going to have a bad time.

That depends very much on what you consider "working". I don't see any value whatsoever in what bronz was communicating, and any discussion that starts from that is going to be equally vapid. That's not "working" to me.

It's about what you say AND how you say it.

In the long run, I think this is good for Bitcoin. It's supposed to be a decentralized currency. Centralizing Bitcoin in an exchange makes the exchange a big target. This disincentivizes centralization and limits how much centralization can actually happen when people are foolish enough to try.

For individuals who lose Bitcoin because of exchanges getting hacked, it's because they leave Bitcoin in the exchange. This is antithetical to how Bitcoin is intended to be used. The answer is, don't do that. Make cold storage paper wallets and keep your Bitcoin there.

I can definitely see the tradeoffs of choosing between Java's bad namespacing conventions and lack of type inference, but keep in mind you're comparing to a 20 year old language. Other languages (i.e. C#, Nim) have learned from Java's mistakes. Go hasn't; they've just gone back to making most of C's mistakes (in type systems).

I've no particular love for Java's type system, but I can't criticize it as much because it was a lot more reasonable when it was released (1996). In 2016 there's no excuse for having a type system as broken as Go's.