lui8906

I hold a decent chunk of change in stable coins most of which I lend out to earn interest. Sometimes I top up a VISA card with those stables and then buy groceries.

You might reply "you're just using a proxy of USD the original currency, its not new".

That's true my reply to that would be:

Having the USD be on chain allows very efficient lending. For eg. I can use a lending aggregator that is constantly polling many lending sources and moves my money to the best source of yield regularly. How would you do this with traditional banking?

I expect over time for the volatility to smooth out as more of the expectations are realised and we figure out a widely agreed fair price for most cryptos (for many this will be zero).

I have found these two to be useful:

> https://github.com/lsmod/proof-of-history-explained

> https://www.shinobi-systems.com/primer.html

> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rKGhbC6Uync

(I know I know it's an hour long, but honestly watching 3 geeks having a good natured session contrasting their systems in real time is a joy)

> 1000 validators is very centralized. All you have to do is bribe 2/3rds of them control the chain.

The network can be halted when 1/3rd of the nodes collude. To my knowledge this allows you to halt the network but not reorg blocks or double spend.

> Solana scales through centralization, not new ideas in blockchain scalability.

Nonsense. They made different tradeoffs than Ethereum and a number of innovations were made possible by those different decisions.

Source: https://medium.com/solana-labs/7-innovations-that-make-solan...

> Solana’s consensus protocol isn’t responsible for its performance, it’s the fact that they mandate higher performing machine SKUs and at least 500Mbs (recommending 1Gbs) internet speeds.

While it's true that Solana nodes have higher requirements than Ethereum full nodes (though not sure about validators?) I think it's incorrect to say that Solana's consensus protocol is not responsible for the high performance performance. Solana's consensus protocol (Tower BFT) works tightly with Proof of History. These two elements coupled together allow that the validator leader can be rotated asynchronously allowing performance increases in block propagation, throughput and ledger storage. Have you really had a good read of how Solana works? For eg. Sealevel allows for parallel contract execution, something which to my knowledge no other chain is capable of. All these innovations combined with the higher node requirements allow for TPS that no other chain is even close to and the Ethereum Modular vision will not achieve for quite some time (assuming it works).

> They also had to largely centralizing and have around 1000 validators.

Not sure what you're pointing to here. There was 600 validators a few months ago. Now there is 1000. 2000 additional validators are on devnet and would likely go onto mainnet in the coming months. How else should a blockchain decentralize then to add additional validators and try and spread the delegated stake around to reduce the number of nodes required to halt the network?

The fact that Solana went down for 17 hours not too long ago and there was nothing Solana labs could do to bring it back shows the validators are not run by themselves.

> Ethereum’s fees and performance are due to a push for decentralization instead of cranking up the max gas per block to a level that wouldn’t be feasible for someone at home to run a node.

Ethereum's fees are due to its wild success + it's very low TPS on the L1 because it was more or less the first of its kind. Subsequent chains like Solana have made thousands of small or large alternative engineering decisions that in sum allow for much higher throughput and lower fees. Solana doesn't use gas, perhaps you're thinking of BSC or AVAX?

> What's the point of a distribute ledger that can only be used within a game controlled by a centralized company?

The game is made by a centralized company. The items and economy in the game are on chain. Gamers can sell their items to other gamers. Or items can be interwoven into multiple games because the items / economy share the same "backend".

And Zcash is not private by default (though can be shielded). Monero is private by default and is also available on Kraken and others.

I can settle up to about 500k USD in stable coins on Solana for a fraction of a cent with minimal slippage on Orca.so or Saber.so.

The best price my friends could get sending fiat from country a to country b recently was 10 euros (with Wise) other options were 30+ euros. Keep in mind, this was for a few thousand. The fee would go up the higher the amount was.

* "This will decentralize ownership of a currency." Nope, it will move from having government control to having oligarchic control.

-> While not perfect, look at something like DAI. You can buy MKR and then be involved in the process of managing the DAI currency. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dai_(cryptocurrency)

* "A strict limit on the number of tokens means that the value isn't stolen away by inflation." If the supply of currency doesn't keep up with demand, the price skyrockets. This discourages investment, since you get more value just by holding onto it.

-> Not all cryptocurrencies have a max total supply. There is all sorts of experiments going on.

* "These are anonymous transactions." On a public ledger, the most you can do is pseudonymous. Just like TOR, you only need to monitor the exit nodes to map pseudonyms to actual people.

> "Is using monero gui (not through a remote node) safe from tor exit nodes?

> The exit node will see that there is traffic on the XMR port and where the destination > of those packets is (an XMR node). But they won't know where it came from, and with regard to the transaction, they won't know the sender, the recipient, or the amount. Short answer: yes."

https://www.reddit.com/r/Monero/comments/5umdut/monero_safet...

-> Maybe it goes down a rabbit hole of semantics but I think for most people the above (sender, recipient and amount are unknown) constitutes anonymous.

* "Irreversible transactions are a feature." They're definitely a bug. If I buy a TV with a credit card, and receive a box of rocks, I can do a chargeback. If I make that same transaction with cryptocurrencies, I'm SOL unless a fraudster suddenly decides that they really want to make good on it.

-> I think this is pure opinion. I've never charged back something. If it's something you do often you as the user can decide whether it's a feature or bug.

* "We don't need banks anymore." is absolutely hilarious when coupled with "Off-chain transactions solve the throughput limits." If there's an organization that holds money in their on-chain accounts on behalf of others, manages a balance of those off-chain accounts backed by deposited assets, and facilitates transactions between those off-chain accounts, that sure sounds like a bank to me.

-> I assume you're referring to something like Tether or USDC. You are correct for now. Chains like Solana can do 50k TPS today. UST (TerraUSD) is currently securing 2 billion USD equivalent completely on chain. We have the tools to transition but you're correct that we have not transitioned yet.

* "Sure, there's a high electricity cost, but compare it to the entire banking system that it's replacing and it's minimal." This one manages to be both inaccurate and false. A proof-of-work cryptocurrency must at all times expend energy proportional to the value represented by the cryptocurrency, or else be vulnerable to attack. As such, the more it expands in usage, the more much be expended to secure it. We've seen how Bitcoin alone now dwarfs entire countries, let alone the banking sector. And even if the statement were true, it is misleading to compare a payment processor to the entire banking sector. Even if the entire banking sector ran on cryptocurrency, you'd still need somebody to underwrite loans and mortgages.

-> A chain like Solana is running on Proof of stake and uses a fraction of the energy that BTC uses. They currently have around 700 validators and rising fast. Undercollatoralized loans are another challenge which many teams are working on. Keep in mind, the challenge is to replace a system that has been solving issues it ran into for hundreds of years. Cryptocurrencies / DeFi are very new and there is much work ahead.

I understand you're skeptical and have a negative opinion. It's great to be skeptical. Why I firmly believe that there is a big future ahead for these technologies is because the trend I can observe around the globe is a trend towards more technology in everything. Why have a dumb phone when you can have a smart phone? Why have dumb money when you can have smart, programmable money where lending, sending, purchasing can be streamed, fractionalized, automated and whatever else we come up with. Technology has a habit of making tools more performant. I anticipate the same outcome in this area.

Hashpower was concentrated in China. It takes time for the miners to relocate and setup shop, I'd be surprised if the hash power is permanently reduced. I don't think anyone reasonable is claiming that BTC is completely safe against state attackers. That's the mission but nothing is 100% certain.

It's a common joke ("this is good for bitcoin"). But in this case I would say it is actually good.

I would correct your statement: 1. Greater hash power makes the system more secure from attack 2. A large amount of hash power geographically concentrated is a weak point 3. More geographically dispersed hash power is better. 4. Ideally a large amount of globally dispersed hashpower provides the best security.

-- Disclosure: I do not currently own any BTC.

If your end goal is to get to cash it's quite difficult without doxxing yourself. For eg. imagine you do a ransomware hack, you have a BTC address with the BTC on it. Law enforcement as well as the company hacked both know the address. From that point they can follow where the money goes, it really doesn't matter how many different ways you elaborately transact.

You might try and run the BTC through a coin mixer however these attract attention and afaik are unreliable against an opponent like Chainalysis.

You can send the BTC to an exchange like Binance where you have not done KYC, however two issues with that. Firstly, law enforcement can contact the exchange and request halting the account. Secondly, without KYC you'll have very low daily limits and it will likely take a while before you can swap the BTC into something more private like XMR.

All your examples don't consider that we can trivially follow a wallet, get notifications when it does something and follow where the money goes. Yes law enforcement could absolutely knock on the doors of organisations that receive tainted BTC.

Speaking of global fracturing, partially true but I would still ask how do you intend to cash out? The only way that would work would be on a p2p website where you can directly sell to other users. This won't work if your somewhere off the map where there is not a lot of wealth. And somewhere where there is wealth you open yourself up to being caught if you have many large swaps.

When will this myth die. Do you have any evidence of this? See below a report from a firm whose task is to find bad behavior on the blockchain.

Key points:

- 0.34% of tx in 2020 were illicit - Of that 0.34% it is almost all scams and darknet market tx

In 2021, the large darknet markets either only accept Monero or accept BTC and Monero. Large ransomware gangs like DarkSide prefer Monero (they offer discounts for it). It's reasonable to assume that the percentage of BTC tx that are illicit are even lower as Monero assumes more of the activity.

BTC is not a 'currency' of the black markets.

- https://blog.chainalysis.com/reports/2021-crypto-crime-repor...

Is it a smaller problem? It is fairly trivially traced on a transparent blockchain whereas cash is not.

Living in Germany here. Many traditional banks charge a monthly fee of 10 euros for maintaining the bank account.

Additionally, my parents wanted to send me some money from another country and the cheapest fee they could find was $10.5 (Wise) most other options were from $30 to $100. This was for transferring roughly $2000.

I can agree that for a simple in country tx I've not had to pay living in Germany, that is largely because of smaller banks challenging and whittling down fees.

Things have changed since your study. Chainalysis released a report in February (they are a company who specialise in tracking illegal transactions). The TLDR is that illegal transactions make up 0.4% of BTC transactions these days.

> https://en.cryptonomist.ch/2021/01/20/chainalysis-crypto-ill...

> Crypto's volatility deters me from using it, simply put.

There is stable coins which have held a consistent peg against the US dollar for a couple of years now. You get all the benefit of high APY yield (relative to a bank account) and none of the volatility of a Doge or a BTC.

You could use DDG and then add "!g" at the beginning for your programming queries.

> Bitcoin mining uses a mind-boggling amount of power, and we don't get anything useful for all those emissions.

I see this take quite regularly and it seems a normal response to clickbaity headlines like "BTC has same power usage as Switzerland", but I think it misses some important nuance to the debate.

* Most studies locate miners and then assume their CO2 output based on energy use assuming a general energy mix of the country, this is not useful because energy usage != CO2 output, it depends very much what energy source is used * Miners are strongly incentivized to find the cheapest possible electricity, often means finding pockets of excess wasted energy, which is also often renewable or hydro and using it rather than letting it go to waste * BTC can be thought of as converting frequently excess wasted units of energy into a commodity which can be sold * The above might change and if for some reason coal became the most competitively priced energy source then this would be very bad for the environment indeed.

Whether or not BTC is useful, it undeniably holds value, in the literal sense that if I gave you 1 now you could sell it at a market rate

All the above notwithstanding, a lot of research is going into finding an alternative to Proof-of-Work that is less energy intensive and I would hope that in the future a secure alternative will be found.

I signed up and then got a bit confused when I had to create a hub. Might be a good idea to have an example image or video on the right side of the form to illustrate what it is and how it's going to look after I create it.

I'm no expert, my recently minted blog has one post (book review). I came to the conclusion writing is more of an exercise for myself than a venture to produce content for others. Maybe you should first think about why you feel the need to write and who your writing is for?

The jokes and memes make most reddit subs almost completely useless for real discussion. Even on tragic news events and serious topics jokes tend to float to the top.

"The carbon footprint of the latest Impossible Burger recipe is 89% smaller than a burger made from real beef, according to a science-based life cycle assessment released by the company this week."

https://www.fooddive.com/news/impossible-burger-boasts-much-...

A general rule of thumb I've heard many times is:

'Skiing is easy to learn but hard to master, Snowboarding is hard to learn but easier to master'.

You're likely to fall over more learning to snowboard but will become competent and able to carve down the mountain faster.

Other elements to consider, Skiers are usually able to go faster than snowboarders down the hill. Snowboarders will have to unstrap and strap into their back binding when entering and exiting the chairlifts. Snowboarders have many more easy trick options available. I know hardly any skiers that can do any tricks, most of my competent snowboarding friends are able to at least do small jumps of sidehits (mounds of snow on the sides of the slope).

I'm a passionate snowboarder and cannot recommend the sport highly enough, there is just no feeling like riding down fresh powder snow on a cool winters morning!

Would love intel on Bucharest. I visited last year and was positively overwhelmed with how friendly the people were and how cool the cafes and restaurants were. How is the tech scene and daily life there?

Yes sure, my mistake I should have included it in the original post. Here it is: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17729579

defaults write NSGlobalDomain AppleShowScrollBars -string "Always"

___

This setting in terminal will always show scroll bars.

Do you have any good resources for the light versions of websites?

Very true, I think the easiest place to start is with plain scams and dead chains. My idea was to provide a warning to newbies of projects you really should steer clear of.

Dutch is a combination of German and English, my Dutch friends tell me. German is a tough language to learn. The grammar diverges from English significantly. I'm using the source as myself since I've been learning for the last 2 years.

I've also learned some basic Spanish and Portuguese, I found them easier to pick up. I've heard it's possible to have some fluency in Spanish in 3 - 6 months. I think it would be very difficult to achieve this in Germany.

In the end it depends on the learner as well. My experience learning languages is that it's hard no matter what!

Though this has been a feature of the vast majority of cryptocurrencies, it is not inherent. For example Monero has an inbuilt tail emission once the initial supply is exhausted that will continue indefinitely. See more here: https://getmonero.org/resources/moneropedia/tail-emission.ht...