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jwblackwell

968 karma · joined May 11, 2011

Twitter: @jwblackwell
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jwblackwell··on When Bitcoin miners take over a town (2018)
Isn't this basically the case with github now? i.e all the cryptos have their code public on github so if I wanted to start mining, I'd have to go there to get the code
jwblackwell··on BTC Endgame
Get in now while it's still early!
jwblackwell··on Bitcoin’s Overnight Collapse Probability Is About 50%
It would likely cause a short term shock, especially if people were forced to sell quickly. Essentially a lot of shorter term traders would quickly exit the market.

Though in the longer run, assuming the network stays up (I see no reason why not), I also think it would strengthen the case and we'd see prices continue to climb.

jwblackwell··on Tesla buys $1.5B in Bitcoin, may accept it as payment in the future
Bitcoin is essentially unique in that you cannot double spend it.
jwblackwell··on Tesla buys $1.5B in Bitcoin, may accept it as payment in the future
Greed is natural. Embrace it.
jwblackwell··on India Should Buy Bitcoin
Thanks for moderating dang
jwblackwell··on India Should Buy Bitcoin
Based on this logic aren’t all countries speculating on gold?

How do you view sovereign wealth funds?

jwblackwell··on Nigeria Central Bank Orders Cryptocurrency Accounts to Close
Something in the region of 13% of the U.K. population already own crypto. I expect it’s similar in many other countries.

What happens if the government forbids owning crypto in that situation?

My best guess would be capital flight. Anyone with any money, in crypto or not, would immediately start to look at options to get money out of the country.

Many governments just haven’t realised this and will learn the hard way.

jwblackwell··on Solid Project: All of your data, under your control
How is this really any fundamentally different from say GDPR then?
jwblackwell··on Face retouching settings should be off by default
Why is that?
jwblackwell··on The Ecommerce Surge
Are you in the US? Ocado here in the U.K. is great.
jwblackwell··on Idea Generation
The best ideas are fragile; most people don’t even start talking about them at all because they sound silly.

I hear this expressed quite a lot and there's certainly some truth here. I think it can be quite misleading though.

Many good ideas also just sound like pretty good ideas and turn out to be great businesses. Not every idea has to be completely crazy sounding. Perhaps this is even more true in B2B software / boring industries.

VCs and Accelerators are incentivised to encourage the craziest "moonshots" because that's how they make money. If you're just looking to get rich selling software you don't need to go to mars.

jwblackwell··on Overthinking it and the value of simple solutions (2019)
This entire product should just be a rails/laravel/django app with a mysql db hosted on a single server
jwblackwell··on Show HN: Userbase – Add user accounts and persistence to your static site
End to end encryption is not a feature most regular users even understand, let alone want.
jwblackwell··on Ask HN: A New Decade. Any Predictions?
NodeJS / Javascript finally matures. A true, robust Rails like framework appears and becomes the new default for web dev
jwblackwell··on Everything Is Private Equity Now
It's crazy, that's almost £1.5M of debt per restaurant. I expect the independent pizza place next door has less than 10% of that on average
jwblackwell··on Electron 6.0
Who really cares about 500mb on a laptop?
jwblackwell··on Why Codeless Software Is Doomed to Fail
Code is simply the best UI we have for building software
jwblackwell··on Defeating Feature Fatigue (2006)
The iPhone is really a platform
jwblackwell··on Ask HN: Did any Show HN posts turn into successful startups?
Yes! We launched BuzzSumo 5 years ago almost to the day: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6437712 and we were acquired by Brandwatch last year.
jwblackwell··on A tweet storm explaining the history and state of Ethereum's Casper research
I would trust these tweets to still be visible in 10 years more than one individuals blog being around
jwblackwell··on The Business of SaaS
It’s not easy to get an exact figure but you can fairly easily split out customers who arrived via an ad vs those that didn’t. Likewise it’s easy to split out those customers who arrived via cold selling
jwblackwell··on Apocalypse now: London’s property crash has begun
I think the top of the market is falling as foreign buyers are deterred for various reasons. You are right though, there is so much demand for entry level homes a substantial crash is unlikely
jwblackwell··on Apocalypse now: London’s property crash has begun
This is generally only the case if you buy a leasehold property (which tends to be the case for all flats/apartments granted). Most houses are sold freehold.
jwblackwell··on Apocalypse now: London’s property crash has begun
Having been observing the market closely for a few months, it does look like the asking prices for many £1-3M properties are being reduced. When you consider inflation is running at 3% in the UK currently it's easy to see house prices fall by 10% this year.

On the high end, it's easy to see that figure reach 20-30%. At the entry level of the market though, there is still so much pent up demand for housing I personally can't see any significant falls, just growth flatlining.

jwblackwell··on We’re Going to Need More Lithium
You’re assuming OP wants to invest all of his money in Lithuum. And that past performance remains the same
jwblackwell··on We Analyzed 100M Headlines
Yep, most of these charts are based on Facebook engagement. If you anayzed the top trigrams of headlines posted to HN I think you would get quite a different picture, though some similarities as you say.
jwblackwell··on [dead]
What if you only know how to write Javascript?
jwblackwell··on How to shoot on iPhone 7
A lot of people have no idea you can take a photo with the volume buttons. I frequently see people struggling to take selfies with the touchscreen button.
jwblackwell··on You might not need JavaScript
Does anyone else feel that a site called "You Might Not Need Javascript", probably shouldn't use Javascript?
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