kgraves

How does this compare to Onfido?

Right, so Bitcoin failed in its original purpose then no?

In reality, nobody actually cares about the tech, Not even the VCs care, they're just buying into a project for an exit.

The general public are even more oblivious to the tech, all they want. to know is 'How do I 100x my money? When is coin X going to the moon?'.

They all want the 'moon' more than the tech.

> I’d say 50% is far less then the single-entity in a centralized solution.

So even with concrete evidence, you still cannot even admit this fact that Bitcoin is currently centralised?

Maybe you should read about the 51% attack [0] and then come back to me and say with a straight face about Bitcoin being decentralised.

You mean the 'unbanked' can use digital wallets like M-Pesa and Paytm?

What's wrong with that?

[0] https://academy.binance.com/en/articles/what-is-a-51-percent...

> I've personally used bitcoin to send money between my brother and myself (he was in Australia at the time, I was in the EU) because it was both faster and cheaper than a bank transfer or western union.

You do realise Bitcoin is unable to scale with a large volume of transactions, grinding it to almost a complete halt.

So even if Bitcoin reaches critical mass, your brother will be waiting a very very long time to receive their funds, all with extremely high fees. Questioning the use of Bitcoin would start and by then the BTC price would have gone down had a mass sell off occurred.

Not hypothetical by the way, actually happened only months ago. [0]

So how is this better than Paypal or Western Union?

https://www.techradar.com/uk/news/massive-bitcoin-selling-sp...

You have Transferwise and Western Union for this, the latter being there for over 100 years and still in use.

Before you argue about WU fees, Bitcoin's fees are no better than Western Union's, hence Transferwise.

> You present a strong claim that they "ARE still centralized and manipulated, especially Bitcoin". Please present concrete evidence.

Princeton University concluded in a study that the bitcoin network is 50% controlled by 5 of the 6 bitcoin mining companies [0] [1] so how is Bitcoin decentralised If it is becoming more centralised by mining organisations and if most of the hashing power is centralised in China?

That seems to be that means that Bitcoin isn't really decentralised then no?

[0] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-01-31/bitcoin-s...

[1] https://arxiv.org/pdf/1810.02466.pdf

> People have been saying this about crypto for 10 years and bitcoin 30x'ed despite all the negativity, with tons of big institutions loading up on it behind the scenes. It's here to stay.

The main goal of bitcoin is to be a decentralised peer to peer cryptocurrency, it has completely failed in its original purpose to become that in 10 years.

And when more people realise how inefficient it is in terms of energy, transactions, fees and utility, the quicker the price will go down.

So Clubhouse has gone pretty well has it? Considering that Twitter, Discord, Reddit, Spotify and even Facebook is getting in on Clubhouse's format.

Also, every time a VC comes along and does this with cryptocurrencies, there is almost a guaranteed complete dump in the price coin, only hurting the general public.

Well, what are the upsides? I can't think of any that our existing system can already do.

Well there isn't, and I mean it. They do way more harm than good.

There isn't anything wrong with using existing secure and regulated methods (Paypal, Bank Transfer, etc), Cryptocurrencies claim to be decentralised when underneath they ARE still centralised and manipulated, especially Bitcoin.

I will only admit it has been a good run, but now it is time to for the regulators to step in.

We have Paypal / Bank Transfers to send money quickly, BTC is a slower way of sending money.

What is your point?

How can you create a coin, get investors into a private token sale (or even allocating pre-mined coins), hype the trojan horse onto the public to get them involved, then getting the coin on main exchanges and then investors dumping the coin causing it to be worthless. All this being unregulated by the way.

This happens all the time with these projects most recently ICP (Internet Computer) and just one of the reasons why this is all a complete scam.

There is a name for this type of rinse and repeated scheme.

There is no reason why this can also happen to Solana, rendering cryptocurrencies even more worthless than real money.

This is how the scam begins, the downfall of Solana. It is yet another pump and dump just like all of these coins.

Cryptocurrencies must be stopped, there is absolutely NO benefit to having them.

We seen them all before, ransomware becoming rampant, massive waste of electricity and resources and now the pandora's box can't be closed quicker enough.

Spy pixels are evil.

Full stop.

No exceptions, ifs or buts.

If you are an engineer using this trash in your products, emails and websites you should take a hard look at the mirror and you should feel ashamed of yourself.

I’m in full agreement with DHH to and Apple, get rid of them.

You have so called ‘whales’ controlling and manipulating the coins, only those who got in early and the institutions can control the price of Bitcoin and Ethereum.

The whole thing is so volatile a single billionaire can say anything causing the entire crypto market to crash, leaving those who got in extremely late holding a huge bag.

Bitcoin is useless and has no usecase at all and Ethereum spurred on the useless energy inefficient and vapid NFT craze which is yet another money laundering scheme. Don’t get me started on ransomware as that is for another story.

This experiment should not have been allowed to run it’s course at all and all of it needs to be shutdown.

It’s a centralised system disguised as a currency (Bitcoin) and designed to be a pyramid scheme.

Blockchain is just another buzzword that isn’t actually useful.

This is great on Apple’s part for enforcing this for every account based app, now if only HN offered account deletion…

Absolutely, I have seriously thought long and hard about cryptocurrencies and have also come to the conclusion that it is a definitive scam.

Now is the time we must shut it down. Bitcoin, Ethereum, all of it.

Even ponzi schemes have it's limits and this one has been reached and been illegally allowed to run rampant.

It was nice when it started, not while it lasted. It didn't work and now it's time for it to go.

Too late, there is no redemption for Stallman. /s

> How is that a problem? The source code for that binary is in the same repository.

OS upgrades, deprecations, maintenance are a thing that makes your binary stop working all of a sudden.

> Also 50 LOC is small enough so there is not much complexity. Making that binary grow more than needed should not be validated during code review.

I've seen bigger lines that makes the binary + Elixir approach not worth the huge maintenance effort. It's like choosing prolog in production, finding out that there is no libraries for it and then hacking together Go binary together with it.

Doesn't make sense.

until you need to change something in that binary.

This is what you get when you sell your soul to Google and rely on your competitors funding for years on end.

And what does Mozilla of today have to show for it?

A self aggrandising, navel-gazing, tone deaf, hollow templated puff piece which will cause the unfortunate inevitable sad downfall of Mozilla.

There is almost nothing left of this once innovative company, resorting to present a facade as a cover while ignoring the real issue:

Not focusing on making a revenue generating product for over 10 years.

Also, repeat extremely tone deaf in Mozilla laying off their top engineers on Rust, Servo and Firefox and not a single mention of it in this post.

Looks like all those free years of Google money caught up with them.

this is the real problem that caused this all of this catastrophe for Mozilla.

we are now in Mozilla's downfall.

Did you really expect Mozilla to care about Servo?

I'm sorry, but to them it was a experimental toy that didn't make them any money and they saw it as a cost center.

now you have two languages in your codebase that your team has to maintain :/

Isn't this just a classic case of unbundling[0], as to which Figma and Canva are just unbundling Adobe products.

Come to think of it, I also think the reverse will happen when people realise that using multiple tools in concert will cause friction and then some customers revert to a 'bundled' service with their needs accommodated in just one service/program.

Hopefully Figma, Canva and many others like them don't not get ironically acquired by Adobe and the like.

[0] https://stratechery.com/outline/bundling-and-unbundling/

Sounds like a huge red flag to me then, and loses my confidence that this service is reliable, plus it makes it a hard decision for most (even me) to go with them.

It also signals to me it is not battle tested and results in lost sales.

I'll find someone else.

who hurt you?

Seems like the monarchy cannot win either way to rectify their errors with British colonialism.

So the commonwealth is also bad as well? or you prefer it to be abolished?

Didn't appreciate the advertising, I found the article a bit hard to read, wanted to know who is using this in prod, but found nothing.

You couldn't have.

You might have had a person you know have your number in their address book uploaded to Facebook.