kemonocode

I have some skepticism in those regards, at least unless they make use of their own crawlers.

Bootstrapping themselves with different information sources as they've been doing is good for the very beginning as then they serve as a privacy-respecting aggregator to those sources, but as the tank man incident proved, you run the risk you'll be made complicit to censorship, whether intentionally or not.

The mix of new and old here is messing with me. Censorship pandas (A relic of early-mid 00's furry sites) and free clipart banners together with Download Discord and Mastodon buttons, ha!

Seriously, decentralized, pseudonymous money that is censorship resistant and doesn't rely on any single government or organization is the killer app. That's how I'm using it, it works perfectly for my use case and even though it's a sample size of one, there's at least one person who relies on it and can sleep at night a bit more soundly knowing that their money won't suddenly be gone the next morning because PayPal or their bank looked at them funny because they were born in a spicy patch of land. Anything else comes as a plus.

Do please spare me the whole "it's boiling the oceans" and "only hackers and druggies are using it" spiel though as they're both [0] untrue [1].

[0] https://hbr.org/2021/05/how-much-energy-does-bitcoin-actuall...

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/haileylennon/2021/01/19/the-fal...

I think Jackass managed to capture the zeitgeist at the time perfectly. It hasn't aged too gracefully, but that's only because it was a full decade early. Not to mention the genuine rapport from all the members of the crew, you truly felt they were just a bunch of friends having fun. They were getting hurt, but they were having a heck of a time doing it, and at the end of the day, it was well worth the laughs.

I feel I'm taking crazy pills with all the people screeching the blockchain has no uses. They're as wrong as the people who say it has ALL the uses.

Also, a (2017) wouldn't go amiss. This article is about three and a half years old, and for a concept that's supposedly so bereft of use cases, it's managed to be pretty enduring.

HN has a strong anti-cryptocurrency bias. The comment got downvoted because it's irrelevant to the conversation.

It's always been traceable, there's a public ledger and different data analysis techniques you can perform with varying degrees of usefulness, and Bitcoin's real value doesn't lay there.

Anonymity is not the same as pseudonymity, and while you could probably trace a few transactions with a criminal source at a time, it wouldn't take that much to thwart taint analysis by a dedicated enough author.

Besides, they were able to seize those Bitcoins due to badly stored passwords, not because any inherent weakness on Bitcoin itself. Some cybercriminals aren't that great at opsec.

Blanket statements like these come from privilege. That a supposedly vanishingly small amount of people use crypto to transact and safeguard the fruits of their labor is irrelevant because, well, I know I exist.

To me, the value Bitcoin brings to the table is much, much greater than the one from countries that enforce unjust embargoes and overthrow governments only to replace them with even worse dictators... and also pollute the planet.

Also, specifically on the second article you linked: it references the first and even mentions why such runaway growth necessitated by that argument wouldn't happen.

EDIT: Before some tries to gotcha me with the same old tired memes or accuses me of building up the typical "oh, but X uses more power than the entire crypto system" strawman argument, what I'm trying to say is: value is relative. If you have a comfortable life and live in a reasonably free country, Bitcoin is very likely to have negative value to you, as its cons outweigh its pros. But that's not going to be the same for the rest of the world, and blanket bans on things are reductionist and hardly ever get anywhere good, especially when you should be looking at why such thing exists.

Interesting, I'd be willing to give it a try after I had to abandon Duplicati as it just seemed like a lost cause. Right now my backup setup consists on a UrBackup server my machines connect to, and a borg repository that is synced against the latest backup and then sent remotely to S3. It works, but could definitively use some streamlining...

A very empty non-apology all in all, and not nearly addressing what Masad did wrong. Very disappointing.

Masad, if you're reading this, get off your high horse. Bullying and scaring people into compliance with lawyers does work, but you pay it dearly in PR, especially when you're working on products oriented towards highly opinionated people.

Tether, which is the most used so-called "stablecoin" (As its value is pegged to the USD) is extremely seedy at best and has had brushes with the law already [0] or is outright a Ponzi scheme [1] and plenty of people arguing for/against crypto know and have said so already.

Personally, even though I'm a proponent of cryptocurrency in general, I wish it'd disappear in spite of any short and middle-term calamitous consequences on perceived value if that means one less "dumbed-down club" (Using dang's words) when it comes to discussing crypto.

[0] https://ag.ny.gov/press-release/2021/attorney-general-james-...

[1] https://www.singlelunch.com/2021/05/19/the-tether-ponzi-sche...

A not so insignificant part of me wishes Tether would crash already so it'd kill that argument dead for crypto detractors. It'd be interesting to see how Bitcoin's value would look after. I really doubt it'd be zero.

LocalBitcoins works just fine for me.

I can use cryptocurrencies from anywhere in the world, I can't use M-Pesa unless I'm in one of the few countries it operates, and even then I'd be at Vodafone's whims. Truly it may serve similar needs (money for the under/unbanked) but the scope is not nearly the same.

The "blatant scam" part, maybe. The fact it's Y Combinator-backed is still relevant, though.

Which is why I suspect the title will be changed, even though it is relevant to the discussion.

At best, it'll be something others will be able to leverage and make forks out of, and thanks to its permissive license, they won't have that pesky requirement to make the source code of their fork available. At worst, it'll be yet another product abandoned in a couple years by Google because it failed to meet some ludicrous goals that are out of reach for 99% of the companies in the world anyway. Such is the way people see Google nowadays, and can you really blame us?

Cars [0], apparently.

[0] https://blackberry.qnx.com/en/software-solutions/automotive/...

The fact it's more permissive with its license already does not bode well. Just like with Chrome, there could be a myriad of forks that can be closed source themselves and so without easy means to peek inside what they're really doing, and although many distributors did the bare minimum with Android due to its Linux kernel's license, there was something.

Capital controls, evading economic sanctions, as well as draconian KYC/AML measures that for Venezuelans can be very difficult to fulfill as you're asked for things like existing bank accounts (there's only a tiny handful of international banks that allow Venezuelans to open accounts with them at the moment) or a valid passport (can go upwards to hundreds of dollars and with waiting times in months and sometimes years) not to mention the chance you're just silently dropped only because you are Venezuelan. True, having USD would be vastly preferred for most, but it's just plainly not possible in some cases as local cash supply is very restricted and risky.

Just because most people in first world countries only see cryptocurrencies as speculative toys it doesn't mean they're without uses for the rest of the world, even if those uses can be seen as immoral or against the spirit of the law from a western point of view.

I fail to see how an economic sanction towards an authoritarian regime that ends up having a greater impact upon its people than on the regime itself will somehow fix said regime's mistreatment of minorities.

I come from Venezuela, I have family in Cuba. I know what economic sanctions look like and what they do against dictatorships. Hint: they do nothing, because they're not going to abide by your rules or meet you in the middle.

All those things were already illegal (worse yet, immoral) whether you pay for them in fiat or in Bitcoin. That's a false equivalence.

They're reaping what they've sowed, so I don't exactly feel bad about big tech firms trying to flee "wokeness" (read: performative activism that hurts its causes more than it helps them) and finding out they won't be able to do so that easily, as it's exactly the kind of environment they've cultivated and the sort of people they've catered to for the past decade. Everything you do can be construed as a political statement in one way or another, and if you make an ideological battleground out of a workplace you'll be asking for trouble down the road.

A pyramid scheme implies there's future payments to be expected if one were to aggressively recruit people into the scheme. A Ponzi scheme implies there's a central orchestrator extracting value out of the scheme and keeping it functioning just well enough to maximize personal profits before it all crumbles down.

There's no such central authority with Bitcoin and there aren't further expectations of payment either- value fluctuates but you're always going to have the same amount of coin unless you personally do anything about it. If Bitcoin is a pyramid scheme, then every penny stock is also a pyramid scheme.

I do wish these kind of posts that appeal to the lowest common denominator were less prevalent on Hacker News, as they're particularly found whenever there are big price swings so it's nakedly obvious what they're truly about.

The specific details vary on the implementation, but the analogue to mining in a Proof-of-Stake system is this: newly minted coin is distributed as a reward to whomever wins the block validation "lottery" for a given block.

A validator is required to lock up a certain amount of coin before they can start validating (their stake in the system) and based on the more coin you lock up/the longer you've been locking it up/any other variable depending on the implementation, the greater the chances you'll be selected as a given block's validator, and if consensus is achieved, you get your reward. If your node goes offline or collusion is detected, you get penalized by losing a part/all of your stake, again, depending on the exact implementation.

It makes me wonder if a decade or so down the road, we'll be bemoaning Chrome/Chromium as the new IE.

Well, you could argue we're already doing that, considering its influence and how even Microsoft yielded and made Edge Chromium-based.

You do realize the Chinese government is not just content with keeping to itself and has repeatedly trying to impose [0] its [1] values [2] on the west too, right? You could argue the west has been doing the same with China, but I'd say the Chinese government has been pretty effective at keeping the "good bits" of westernization and tossing out anything that clashes with its ideology.

Sinophobia should be completely out of the question, I agree, and some people will be blinded by rage and that's truly unfortunate as I, too, want Asian hatred to stop, but people should be rightfully upset with the CCP. The treatment towards Uyghurs has been appalling, and so the rest of the world is taking notice. Any programs that supposedly exist to help them will be seen as whitewashing. It's within our rights to condemn such treatment... for now.

[0] https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/australian-publis...

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/film/2020/aug/05/china-hollywood...

[2] https://www.aspi.org.au/opinion/chinas-influence-our-campuse...

I hope this entire ordeal makes it all clear that when a company snatches up a community project, it'll be very likely with the intention to monetize it down the road, and I really think the changes being vaguely alluded to were oriented towards that.

Any donations in cryptocurrency would be unable to be stopped, so in times like these it's when it truly shines. Sure, you can't guarantee some degree of support won't go to Hamas or any other terrorist organization, but the same can be said of cash anyway, and then you won't be having any private company getting in the way of what's acceptable and what isn't.

The difference is, of course, that exchanges want to encourage liquidity in USDT and they might not have the means to offer USD, especially if they're based in regions with tighter regulations so bank wires are out of the question. Just because they can convert USDT to USD doesn't necessarily mean they can offer the same means to everybody else.

Even the staunchest believer in crypto will have a hunch there's something funny going on with Tether, but so far most people have been willing to look the other way as Tether and other stablecoins answer a genuine need: how to represent fiat money in the crypto ecosystem when centralized banks refuse to play along with their own downfall.