jafaku

I'd think you'd be insane to miss an investment with such a disproportionate potential returns / risk.

"danielweber"

If you don't see the difference between a currency that can regulate its price artificially by printing more of it and Bitcoin, then you have definitely misunderstood it.

If you don't feel comfortable comparing it with stock, then compare it with gold. Even after thousands of years, and a market capitalization of 8 trillions of dollars, it still has price fluctuations.

Bitcoin has only ~7 billions of dollars of market capitalization. It's comparable to what we call a "penny stock". Anyone with a few millions can move the price. And even with hundreds of thousands of dollars, you could move the price in one particular exchange.

If you still don't understand it, watch this video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qHUPPYzzZrI

You realize Bitcoin and the USD are quite different things, right? One has its price regulated artificially by creating more of it, while the other depends solely on the whims of the free market. And besides, Bitcoin is much smaller, and therefore it fluctuates the same way startups' stock fluctuates.

So one could say this: If a startup's stock flucuates like this, it's the most normal thing in the world. But if it happens to Bitcoin, it's something we should criticize!

But still, they could have asked 10% more if they used Bitcoin.

> How else do you propose to create a distributed concurrency?

That's the point: No one knew how to do that before Satoshi.

> The traditional approach would be a public ledger mantained by the 'miners' aka a block-chain.

Are you joking? If you knew about the blockchain and miners before 2008, you could have simply created Bitcoin yourself and become multimillionaire.

> The the issue is that's not anonymous, but while a lot research went into creating an anonymous currency bitcoin was a MVP which took off.

The issue was no one knew how to create a trustless consensus mechanism. And Bitcoin is not anonymous, it's pseudonymous. True anonymity only became possible after Bytecoin's innovation in the use of ring signatures. Nowadays the most popular coin with true anonymity is Monero (created in 2014, as a fork of Bytecoin with a fair distribution).

> the innovation was in the specific implementation not the overall idea

Clearly you don't know what you are talking about.

> Bit torrent

What does that have to do with anything? Bittorrent doesn't use a blockchain.

Yes, Bitcoin price fluctuates.

Why is this on the frontpage?

The blockchain is a creative leap, not an "improvement".

What about the idea of a blockchain? Because that's the creative leap.

I'd bet 0.05 BTC he watches anime.

How can you say that with a straight face? That's like saying Bitcoin was being given out freely just because there have been a few faucets running for some time. You are a scammer by any standard.

A non-profit organization that is accepting money and sending it straight to its founders' pockets.

And of course those founders are always here on HN ready to downvote any criticism.

And only scammers say that pre-mined != scam. Else explain why you tried so hard to remove all the Ripple references from Stellar's code, and market it as a completely new system (after selling all your ripples of course and crashing its price).

Except the network can adapt by modifying the code, so calculating the cost of destroying Bitcoin is not trivial. The security of the network is not static, because it's also made of people with economic incentives, the same way any other system is also made of people, eg: When a website is under a DOS attack, their administrators will do various things to mitigate or completely stop the attack.

Again, not a problem.

Why not use coloured coins (Bitcoin) or something like that instead of the Ripple/Stellar scam?

But HTTPSB is only for Chrome? If so, meh.

> can solve any problem in computing

Maybe you should have phrased that differently, because it's obviously false.

Every time Bitcoin makes a first step, haters will ask "but where is the second step?".

By the way, Overstock is now holding bitcoins (about 3% of their Bitcoin sales). I wouldn't be surprised if Newegg did the same after some time.

I think they were using the "last price" instead of the "weighted average", or some stupid mistake like that, and obviously without any sanity checks. Meaning someone could manipulate Coinbase's price by placing a tiny buy order for a very high price or a tiny sell order for a very low price.

Does that frighten you?

Kind of offtopic: As a professional of web development and operations with ~10 years of exp... Any ideas where I should start if I want to learn game development? I want to be able to create something by myself, like the Dwarf Fortress guys. Not sure if something with better graphics is even possible as a one man project.

Where else can I ask this question without being treated like a noob or a "gimme teh code plz" beggar?

I started using these recently:

set -o nounset

set -o pipefail

set -o errexit

set -o xtrace

I added them to all my scripts, and I also added all except errexit to ~/.bashrc

The first one would save you from unset variables.

Y u no source version control?

svckr 2 hours ago | link [dead]

Reminds me of the "most stupid thing" I ever typed into Terminal.app. I somehow managed to create a subdirectory named "~", and decided it was a good idea to do this:

    rm -rf ~

It took me about 5 seconds to realize the command should have returned immediately, and frantically press Ctrl-c. But that was all that was needed to ruin two week worth of code.

If you want to try a fun little experiment, type this command into your colleague's shell and see what happens (and how long it takes):

    mkdir ./~

For a currency with true decentralized anonymity, check out Monero:

http://monero.cc/

Yeah, my grandma has also run into some troubles when trying to send an email. She had to:

- Investigate which PC she should buy

- Find someone willing to sell a PC at a fair price. This is a problem because PCs get old really quick, and some vendors will try to sell you old PCs at their original prices. I don't know how they expect PCs to be useful if they go down in value so fast. Why buy a PC today, when you can buy it at half its price in a year?

- Ask someone for help to connect all the wires

- Fail to send an email. Learn that she also needs an internet connection

- Investigate which ISP she should hire

- Etc...

With traditional mail, she just writes the letter and drops it in the post office.

The free cryptography courses at Coursera. I have seen the videos uploaded somewhere, maybe you can find them.

I was being serious, I don't know the entire history of every country. Thanks.

> you still need a very well oiled and consistent automated testing

I would say this is true for any professional team. Nowadays I don't even develop personal projects without continuous delivery. The idea has been out there for years, and this year in particular there have been lots of articles explaining how to do it.