dsterry

Implement a no workslop policy. Reputation will take care of the rest. Basically an educational task.

Found Pieter and his books a couple years ago and it make a big impact. The Collective Code Construction Contract is a brilliant piece of community engineering and should be adopted/adapted by every FOSS project on the planet. We can accomplish so much more together if we have C4 and similar methods of coordination. Next time you hear of a burnt-out maintainer, have them read https://rfc.zeromq.org/spec/42/

The problem with chat is the interruptive, thoughtless nature of it. In a large organization, you want durability that you won't get from chat.

Internal Q&A, forums, and email all work because you can have long-form conversations on them but an important consideration is discoverability. If a new user wants to find out why X is true for some service, they'd better be able to do that without interrupting someone else.

There's no theoretical limit to it's divisibility. The total supply is known ahead of time but the world will never run out of Bitcoin to transact.

Yup, such a disaster it's died a thousand times.

Yep, such a disaster it's died a thousand times.

Posted my reply here: https://davidsterry.com/blog/2020/09/on-difficult-free-softw...

Posted comment on your blog, should be awaiting moderation, but let me know if not.

Good point. I'm going to comment on the site itself!

This is a follow-on to my previous article http://davidsterry.com/blog/2015/06/arguments-in-the-bitcoin... which failed to even contain the word consensus as helpfully pointed out by a reader.

OP, how did you hear about this company? Can't find any stories mentioning it.

It's a good question. I haven't seen them in the Counterparty forums or Bitcointalk thread. I own some XCP but no MC. My reasoning is because XCP had proof of burn and has seen steady dev progress. Sometimes, millions in funding cause more problems for a project than it solves.

Looks like they're using Counterparty which runs on the Bitcoin network and blockchain.

Shipping the USB key isn't 100% fraud-proof.

If you think the point of Bitcoin/Litecoin is being able to transact with it quickly and easily over eBay, you might want to look into the other things you can do with these new currencies.

You should really look into the history of altcoins because I'm positive one with a constant mining release schedule has been done. One issue with some of them has been premining but if it wasn't premined and was reasonably well-known at launch it probably stands as a good test of whether something like it will ever work. Funnily enough the altcoin that has done the best has changed very few parameters.

This is kind of like saying you won't invest in Facebook or Google or Apple until their price stabilizes. Either it's worth it to you or it's not. Stability is overrated in a world where pricing updates can be automated. If you're concerned about exchange rate risk, what you do is keep your funds in a more stable asset (like USD) but ready to be converted. Put a small amount of USD in an exchange and you'll be able to buy when you want to without this exchange rate risk.

No need to conflate spending with savings/investment. Just keep some USD in an exchange and convert it to spend it.

Spending a Bitcoin doesn't mean you have a net decrease in the number you have. You could and probably should keep a spending balance in USD at an exchange and buy specifically to make purchases. This is actually more beneficial to the Bitcoin community since it shields it from being overly damaged by Bitcoin price decreases. I spend and accept bitcoins because it's a very easy way to transfer value.

Storing BTC balances as floats is something a few services have done in the past so it makes sense to ask/bring up. Since BTC have 8 decimal precision, rounding can become noticeable very quickly even in addition and subtraction even though in real, today's value, it's not such a big deal.

Well there is Bitcoin which has no chargebacks and for a face-to-face transaction there would be little need for an addon escrow service.

There are already a number of merchant processing systems for Bitcoin including MtGox's payment api and Bit-Pay. Neither one supports instant transactions coming via the Bitcoin network (MtGox is instant if buyer and seller both have funds there), but the cultural aspect of helping Bitcoin users sell their wares easily was also an attractive one for this project.

Still, it's a great suggestion and will be considered for future development.

Also, this post was originally titled "CoinDL enables Bitcoin purchases in seconds (link to eBook example)" so your post was more on-topic than it seemed. Today I learned, titles can be renamed by somebody else on Hacker News.

New blocks are created in a lottery process (mining) that could take seconds to hours for someone to win. We are using unconfirmed transactions but are willing to take some risk while developing strategies to mitigate that risk. Orphan blocks don't concern us so long as the transactions we are honoring make it into the greatest-height chain.

> Is the proposed value-add here a kind of content discovery service a la App Store?

Yes, the goal is to make it as easy as possible for artists and authors to sell their downloads for Bitcoin. We could make shopping cart software and charge 1-2% but we're covering fulfillment, support and everything else about the process to make it easy for both sides.

>> pay in 48-72 hours

> Surely this can be optimized?

The reasoning behind this is to be able to deal with any complaints, in the app store model there is usually a short return period and in order to be able to provide that we need a little time. The delay also may serve to deter scammers who might want to list someone else's work, promote it heavily and run with the money.

Thanks for the investment comment. This is ycombinator so I thought I'd throw it out there.

Sorry, subby is slang for submitter. I am the developer of the linked site.

Confusing? or genius. 80 chars or less means the line is often blurred.

Subby here. For a demo of how the purchase process works see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sVBxvnQEy9o&hd=1

In the first couple weeks we have added 40 suppliers and 100 downloadable items. We take a competitive 20% of sales and pay in 48-72 hours. We're looking for feedback on who to approach for supplier relationships, startup mentoring, and funding.

What do you do with the excess heat in space?