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mudluson It's time for us in the tech world to speak out about cryptocurrency

Here's how you defeat Bitcoin: code a client that a majority of the network uses that changes the consensus protocol to what you think is a good idea.

If you don't want to do that, and you want to wax poetic about shitcoins being evil, ffs, please keep in in the drafts, salty nocoiner. Especially during a bull cycle where people who already don't trust "tech nerds" are going to read this and want to buy the shittiest of shitcoins.

mudluson Amazon acquires MGM for $8.5B

All hail Plex and torrents.

mudluson Coin Carbon Cap – PoW cryptocurrencies ranked by energy efficiency

This chart is nice, but you need to include the difficulty of the algorithm (difficulty to attack), the size of the blockchain (hard for anyone except rich people to participate if you need a server farm just to verify a transaction), developer activity, and each coin should have a collapsable subset of “layer-2” options (eg. Lightning and liquid for Bitcoin), and their statistics as well.

Most importantly, A “transaction” on a blockchain is not a “transaction” in the colloquial sense.

mudluson Coinbase from YC to DPO

Poorly regulated casino for the information age.

mudluson Update on beta testing payments in Signal

God I hope they abandon this.

mudluson Click

I suspect this is using GPT-3 or something

mudluson Click

Same here, had to switch off of Firefox

mudluson When Should I Interrupt Someone?

When and how do _you_ decide when it's a good time to interrupt a dev on your team, though?

mudluson Spaceship Earth

"Nowadays, this idea has a dramatic name: Spaceship Earth. And the idea there is that outside the spaceship, the universe is implacably hostile, and inside is all we have, all we depend on, and we only get the one chance: if we mess up our spaceship, we've got nowhere else to go. Now, the second thing that everyone already knows is that, contrary to what was believed for most of human history, human beings are not, in fact, the hub of existence. As Stephen Hawking famously said, we're just a chemical scum on the surface of a typical planet that's in orbit around a typical star, which is on the outskirts of a typical galaxy, and so on.

Now, the first of those two things that everyone knows is kind of saying that we're at a very untypical place, uniquely suited and so on. And the second one is saying that we're at a typical place. And, especially if you regard these two as deep truths to live by and to inform your life decisions, then they seem a little bit to conflict with each other. But that doesn't prevent them from both being completely false. "

https://www.ted.com/talks/david_deutsch_chemical_scum_that_d...

mudluson Ethereum on Amazon Managed Blockchain

With all do respect, "connect corporate IT to Ethereum" is the most depressing thing I've read all day. Enjoy socialism for the rich.

mudluson Coinbase is a decentralized company, with no headquarters

It would be infinitely easy to do this with Bitcoin, you could have and all anonymous all remote workforce. Wait, that's already how open source works for the most part.

mudluson US central bank payment system down for 'hours'

Bitcoin is never down

mudluson Square buys $170M worth of bitcoins

If that happens you're worried about Bitcoin? lol

Besides, the algorithm in question here is Shor's algorithm, it WILL be used to break some basic encryption. If Satoshi is dead, his coins will be hacked (they are old P2PK outputs). But there is no algorithm for breaking P2SH outputs (eg Native Segwit wallets). There could be, but Bitcoin has the ability to adapt if necessary. Bitcoin is not a static thing.

More importantly, quantum computers actually allow for something better than encryption. If you are having a secret conversation over the quantum internet, not only can no one listen in, BUT you will KNOW if they are listening. I read about this in David Deutsch's "Fabric of Reality," which I HIGHLY recommend and is freely available on archive.org https://archive.org/details/TheFabricOfReality/page/n1/mode/...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_cryptography#Mistrustf...

mudluson When Bitcoin miners take over a town (2018)

Perhaps Bitcoin is a decentralized consciousness: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26217834

mudluson If Materialism Is True, the United States Is Probably Conscious (2015)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26213693

If America is conscious, it stands to reason that Bitcoin is it's offspring

mudluson Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

There's no energy index for the US military industrial complex, the entire US police force--but the primacy of fiat is based on the ability of an authority (for most of the world an authoritarian regime) to protect property through violent cohersion or violent force.

Bitcoin changes that. How much energy is a non-violent property protection commons system worth to humanity?

mudluson Robinhood is limiting purchases of stocks: AMC, Blackberry, Nokia, and GameStop

This is the only relevant thread in this ongoing class war.

mudluson Robinhood is limiting purchases of stocks: AMC, Blackberry, Nokia, and GameStop

Buy Bitcoin

mudluson Bitcoin emissions alone could push global warming above 2°C: study from 2018

Moral Panic FUD

mudluson ‘Tokenized’: Black Workers’ Struggles at Coinbase

Coinbase sucks for other reasons besides racism and libertarian ideals that suddenly are complacent with authoritarianism when it involves property law. Ask any libertarian like Brian Armstrong if they want to defund the police. Coinbase believes everyone should have equal access to an un-regulated digital Las Vegas, despite the understanding that humans have irrational behaviors associated with gambling (i.e. the sunk-cost fallacy).

Bitcoin NOT Coinbase.

mudluson Psilocybin and migraine: First of its kind trial reports promising results

The purpose of science is not prediction. The purpose of science is to find better deeper explanations for reality.

The key to the experiment was this: "Initial studies at the time seemed to suggest psychedelic drugs that activate 5-hydroxytryptamine 2A (5-HT2A) receptors could significantly reduce headache burden in chronic migraine sufferers."

We still need to do more studies and experiments and change our explanations to test those new explanations. That's all they've said. And here the initial comment was just going to cancel it outright because, probably, it didn't fit their internalized cultural moral landscape.

The experiment in question was testing an explanation, there is a HUGE lack of understanding of things that are banned, like Psilocybin--because they are banned.

See also: The Fabric of Reality by David Deutsch

mudluson What Bitcoin’s White Paper Got Right, Wrong and What We Still Don’t Know (2018)

It definitely was wrong about being digital cash, but it may provide the basis currency for an economy which has a form of cash. Bitcoin could be your savings account, and then there are a plethora of options for consumers directly using their Bitcoin: stable-coins, lightning network, hell even Bitcoin Cash, that work like checking accounts of functions of apps like CashApp and Venmo.

mudluson Ruby on Rails in a week

Now that Rails has StimuluseReflex / ActionCable (which is kind of an additional learning curve), it's got some incredible potential. I was skeptical of WebPacker at first, too, but also have grown to love it.

mudluson Tokyo’s internet Jesus uses secret creed to command CEOs

The better comparison was the zaibatsu (which was actually legitimized by the emperor [a Shinto God] at the time)

mudluson Kraken Wins Bank Charter Approval

Funny this was like the day before this article about how banks have corrupted the governance of the world came out: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24535241

I thought banks were the enemy of Bitcoin? Guess it's market cap is high enough that it too must be corrupted by the powers at be.

mudluson Coordination, Good and Bad

Still tons of misunderstanding in this space.

The financial system is supposed to have regulations that protect everyone in an economy. But, what they've ended up doing over the years is only applying to small players and retail (everyday) investors.

Trump and his friends front ran the market crash. Then, after a records stimulus was passed, profited as over 200k US citizens died. That's just America (though America is the defacto reserve currency since WW2). They don't get punished, and they are just the _obvious_ cheaters in the game of international finance and crony capitalism.

The USD is also the de-facto currency for: child pornographers, international hits and murder contracts, paying for military grade weapons, enforcing sanctions on entire economies, drugs, money laundering, literally everything--because it is _the_ reserve currency.

Enforcement is for the people at the bottom, not the top. Ethereum can't change that, it's just offering the same financial services that crony capitalism offered but with a MORE oligarchical rules set. That's why it's funny his "ideal" and "realistic" pictures for success in cooperation both have pictures of castles.

Bitcoin is anarchist money (for now) because it uses entropy to secure instead of force/violence (all fiat currency requires a military to secure). It questions the some of the base authorial structure of all human society/nation-state economics. It is built with disorder in mind. It has built in distrust of authority. Authority is(or requires) force (to enforce). It's important to question authority--that's the only way to progress, no power/responsibility/trust should be given indefinitely. With that in mind.

Ethereum is a new form of authority, just like Bitcoin. But, it does some different stuff with the responsibility that is bestowed upon it. Ethereum owners (people who design, say, "smart contracts," or whatever), have already abused their power, this makes it more dangerous than Bitcoin. Recent SushiSwap stuff. Eth classic is constantly getting 51% attacked. There has been rollbacks. The devs change the inflation rate at will. They are constantly trying to move at a breakneck speed, so it's scary for people who want to hold money long term because you never know what you're gonna have to adapt to, or whatever. It is designed to play with new trust models, it's totally different than Bitcoin. Could be fun, but is designed to be more of a wild west than Bitcoin. If anything it's really better to see it as another layer to Bitcoin. If it surpasses Bitcoin in value, something will surpass it. If Bitcoin fails, it will likely fail since it is tied to the Bitcoin economy (wrapped Bitcoin, code similarities and cryptography standards used). If you're interested in Ethereum, there's already a better Ethereum, it's called TRON. And what about Polkadot. etc etc.

If you're interested in going down this rabbit hole. Start with tech deflation.

IMO, On a macro level we're seeing the same thing that happened after the industrial revolution, leading up to WW1 (though historians still argue about the cause of WW1--I think it's clear they'd have a lot to argue about if we had a WW3 soon, as well). It's called tech deflation. Of course, I'm not a historian or an economist. SO TAKE THIS ENTIRE DIATRIBE WITH A GRAIN OF SALT.

Deflation is political suicide because business money goes where there is promise of a strong consumer base and labor force. But inflation is also effectively gaslighting citizens of the inflating nation-state. That's why we see such disparity through asset bubbles and pops every decade. The problem isn't inflation, though, it's that there isn't another legal option for all people. Money is a good that is consumed like anything else. You can keep fiat AND your Amazon gift card AND have some Bitcoin. Accept deflation into your life. Bitcoin is an anti-inflationary anti-censorship (Ethereum is not) choice, it is the best option for an equally distributed access to deflation that humans have right now (better than gold, or whatever, anyway). Honestly, believe it's the best first step to preventing a third world war.

Ignore Vitalik's grains of salt, ignore my grains of salt

Buy Bitcoin

mudluson Ruby adds experimental support for rightward assignments

Comprehension follows perception

mudluson What Satoshi Did Not Know (2015) [pdf]

This is pretty dated. Segwit has been implemented. The lightning network is growing. No mention of sidechains like Liquid. No mention of Taproot.

Satoshi is great proof that you don't need to know everything to understand something enough to make something, read some David Deutsch.

mudluson Ask HN: What Happened to Larry Page?

It's not a company, it's the a virtual state.

mudluson Most-favorited Hacker News posts

Was just thinking this as I liked it.