relyio

I'm actually describing the process, which is what OP asked. I figured that the SEC doesn't seek legal advice from randos on HN.

>They claim they had a large team working on the project for 4-5 years full-time.

Can you cite that claim please? just curious :)

In early July, the Tezos foundation ran a fundraiser to fund the project's development (R&D, Bizdev, etc.). At the time it did not have funding (or very little). Its current treasury comes from that fundraiser.

It is an "ICO" because in exchange of your donation, the foundation will recommend a token allocation for you in the genesis block. Nothing prevents anyone to create a "concurrent" genesis block with different allocations though. It's just that the chances are people are going to follow the one the foundation recommends.

So, in that sense... it's an ICO. Although not quite like an ERC20 token sale.

I'll edit my post. I have donated what I could afford to donate at the time ($200). Thanks for the heads up.

It's still an interesting project, even if drama like this sucks.

Of course, I'd have preferred to see a technical article about the engineering backing the project. Rather than one about a bad apple making its way to a foundation board member sit and caught self-dealing by the rest of the team. But, it's not the end of the world. I hope people will move on soon. Guy was caught. He has been suspended. I guess his removal is pending modulo some legal process.

That being said, I'm a bit surprised the project hasn't had much more interest from HN readers though. Why is that?

It's going to be one of the largest commercial application of OCaml, alongside Jane Street's. There's lots of cool hacking going on and software engineering challenges associated to it e.g replacing wasteful Proof-of-Work with PoS, hot-swapping protocol upgrades (voted on by stakeholders) safely, figuring out constitutionalism etc. (https://github.com/tezos/tezos).

Among the thing that I'm most excited about is the inflation-funded innovation.

Every voting cycle, you can submit an amendment to the protocol alongside a potential token issuance (i.e an amount of tokens that will be issued to you if the amendment is accepted). That means you get directly rewarded for the added-value you bring to the protocol.

That's a great positive feedback loop. Right now, I believe that there can only be one amendment approved every cycle. So, the "great engineer quits menial technical job to work on state-of-the-art amendments to the Tezos protocol" scenario isn't quite feasible on the short term horizon. I'd wager that is a limitation that will be eventually engineered out. It has so much potential.

Disclaimer: author donated to the Tezos fundraiser.

There were lots of disclaimers saying:

>"Every potential participant in the fundraiser is responsible for determining the legality of participation within their jurisdiction."

You're telling me that a feature exists which technically fits my request. Cool

I tell you it only does so nominally. I didn't fully develop its specs but you could have inferred that they weren't matching the existing one's. The topic feature is half-baked, poorly thought-out and integrated.

That's not what I am talking about though. Topics work with the recently introduced "tags" that you can add to your repo's description.

No one or few people self-reference their repo with something as broad as "systems engineering" or "systems programming".

The closest thing that exist on Github is the explore tab which lets you browse random repos by categories (e.g open government). Such feature would require Github to do the appropriate groundwork to become great at technology-discovery, namely: interest maps, automatically infer a repo's category based on its content, description and the profiles that star or fork it, for starters. They can even make their search engine relevant and pleasant to use if they feel like treating us.

And I'd want that to be integrated in my feed. Right now, I follow around 150 active users and it is still pretty sparse: it's not uncommon for me to see "X started Y 2 days ago". It would be good to add more (good) signal.

I want to see more of what better programmers are starring.

>Risk becomes a vehicle by which privilege reinforces itself – only the privileged can take risks and only risk is rewarded.

That is a pretty absurd leap to take. By its very own definition, there is no guaranteed pay-off yielded by risk-taking. And by risk-taking, I mean an individual going off the beaten, risk-minimal, path. In this economy, it is starting a company or joining an early one. So yes, of course, that "risk" is rewarded. But only some of the time for some of the people and that alone makes it insufficient to back the thesis that "Risk becomes a vehicle by which privilege reinforces itself".

If richer folks are able to go off that beaten path more easily or often, that is only because there "risk-taking" is less risky (amortized) for them than for anyone else. But again, that makes the reward neither guaranteed, systematic or easier to obtain.

Poor execution on a great idea imo.

To me it feels like they sacrificed functionality for aesthetics. It's not the right trade-off to make for a professional tool. I don't want my Github feed to be Facebook-like. I'd rather have it be compact and useful. A feature that'd let me browse by "topic" (e.g systems programming) regardless of language would be welcome as well.

In this update, the three culprits are the font-size, the spacing (so much space wasted) and the (slow) auto-load. It wasn't great before but this is most definitely worse.

Dear Github, please make technology discovery efficient rather than pretty. I spend hundreds of hours on your platform. You could save me a lot of time focusing on the right stuff.

It's a shame because there's so much potential there.

To me a good engineering culture isn't a "nice" engineering culture, it is one where the company consistently delivers outstanding work that is on point with business requirements.

It's an easy pitch. Not for all industries or markets, but broadly speaking, removing the need for trusted third-parties is a major leap forward.

And that's how those (trustless) decentralized ledgers should market themselves. It only needs to come down to that one simple thing: they increase the surface on which supply and demand can interact. The resulting friction generates wealth.

Lots of markets remained untapped because of that third-party need. Forgive the punctual essentialism, but increasing "capitalism"'s reach to those uncharted territories is good. In fact, it is precisely why I think it will take-off: the derived utility from an economic point of view is too high to be ignored.

Sometimes you don't need it to be trust-less or permission-less because some industries only have a handful players who already trust each other. That's not the full picture.

Obviously, there's an efficiency trade-off. But, don't make the mistake to throw the baby with the bath water. No system is perfect. No complex system behaves like it should. Bitcoin is imperfect. There are lots of bullshit and koolaid. Nonetheless, I believe the trend since Satoshi, with the long historical line of research he has built upon, published the Bitcoin paper is clearly upward. It should continue. Satoshi was the spark. Now (r)evolution will be incremental.

That's another matter entirely. Yes, authors don't always bring equal contribution and effort into an academic work. But, here it's someone claiming that not being first author is a major deal, or bears any significance at all, when in fact it doesn't.

That's not always true at all and varies greatly from one sub-field to another. I have read countless top-conference papers where the authorship are obviously attributed in alphabetical order.

Well, we don't know that. It hasn't been studied.

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead_and_crime_hypothesis.

My thoughts exactly, the space has seen considerable growth... and yes, there's some bad stuff but the market gets smarter and less vulnerable with time. It's overall a large win imo.

>Cryptocurrency anarchists

Can you please elaborate on what you mean by that? Or is it a proxy-word for anarcho-capitalist?

> then the answer is unquestionably that you should both buy and store you coins on coinbase.

That is such terribly bad advice that I cannot ignore your post. Storing any amount of coins on an exchange is a liability that is far more considerable than keeping your funds on an encrypted USB-key sized device that you can keep at your home, or at the bank, or anywhere you think it will be reasonably safe. It has fail-recovery procedures built-in so that even in the event of a hypothetical hardware failure, you can recover your funds. If you're even a tiny bit technical it won't be a problem at all.

Your argument boils down to your one single bad experience with a hardware wallet that you dub the "nicest one" despite popular knowledge and maybe because of its price alone. And that's despite being able to recover your funds safely as advertised. And the rest of your post is split between audacious comparisons between banks and exchanges that I won't bother to address; and appeals to authority ("exchanges know better!") that has been debunked over and over again in very recent history. I don't ask you to believe me, for every high-profile case you hear of MtGox, Bitfinex, BTC-e etc. there are many more smaller exchanges that (just like the big ones) sink with their customers' funds.

I think you would make a stronger case if you actually provided any arguments. There's literally nothing complicated about using a hardware wallet. It is a well documented, well thought out procedure that shields people from 99% of the reasons people lose their money (lost keys, theft, exchange bankruptcy, hack etc.).

I'm really curious to hear what's the rationale behind your post. Please elaborate.

0. Purchase a hardware wallet

Pro-tip: Go for a Ledger Nano S (https://www.ledgerwallet.com/products/12-ledger-nano-s), it is (IMO) the best hardware wallet available. Had a terrific experience using it, it is a genuinely great product.

1. Pick a high-profile exchange

Pro-tip: I had an absolutely terrible experience with Coinbase. And a far better one with GEMINI (Although I have issues that are +30 days old still open with their customer support. I'm pretty disappointed).

2. Get your account verified (KYC)

Pro-tip: If you are concerned about your privacy, you can always buy bitcoin for cash on localbitcoins. They have an escrow system.

3. Purchase cryptocurrency of your choosing.

Pro-tip: look at historical charts (both Linear/Log scales) and do your best to "time" your order, of course it is hard.

4. Move back funds to your hardware wallet.

Pro-tip: Whatever HW wallet you choose, do not leave your funds on the exchange. Just don't do it, accounts get hacked all the time (even with 2FA), exchanges get hacked all the time, remember MtGox and learn from others' mistakes.

I haven't had the longest career, but the little I have see empirically confirmed to me that there's actually a strong connection between engineering culture and business success. Of course, a great engineering culture alone is not enough, but it can act as multiplicative factor.

Pretty much this, and I have only crossed the channel a handful times to visit friends. Same experience in France when trying out legacy taxis, they are supposed to take cards, they display it on their car, yet, some will refuse it and cause trouble if you try using it.

Basically, it comes down to lack of serious customer support and accountability system. Setting new rules from top to bottom in a legacy industry that has decades of industry malpractice under its belt cannot be effective if you aren't able to enforce those rules.

I guess it would depend how sophisticated the scam is. When I wrote that, I had outright thievery in mind.

I'm by no means an expert on the matter, but I believe you're thinking of running Casinos specifically. For example, scratching games or lotteries are legal in almost every state in the US. And for those states where casinos are allowed, no one will ask you questions as long as you are +21.

It doesn't bother the government when the middle class spend its hard earned money in gambling, sport events or entertainment. Somehow, there's suddenly a moral imperative to protect those poor sheep from doing as they please with their property. But, wait, only if their capital inflow will dilute the returns of established investors.

It's to protect the middle class of course, though one can only wonder why the blatant double standard. I have no idea!

The "accredited investor" regulations are a sham, an unfair and artificial barrier to entry that ought to be removed. Yes, some people will get abused. This might even create local instability. But, that is clearly the long-term optima. Those who lose money to scams can leave it to law enforcement to do their job. Others who invest more they can afford to lose into bad apples will learn that you should always hedge risk. As a whole, society gets smarter when it is allowed to make mistakes, even costly ones. Smarter and less fragile.

Mirror: https://pastebin.com/Wk61SMir

>That's a useless definition of an economic system because it grounds itself into a narrow category excluding others when instead it you want it therefore excluding others instead of being as general as possible.

should be:

That's a useless definition of an economic system because it grounds itself into a narrow category excluding others when instead you would want it to be as general as possible so as to be the common denominator between different economic schools of thoughts, or even eras.

Bitcoin could hard-fork to a memory-hard algorithm (like Lyra2RE), or even change to any hashing algorithm for which ASICs don't exist yet.

Even if they switched to Scrypt (from SHA256) for which dedicated hardware exist, it would cost them millions of dollars and require months of manufacturing re-organization to get to their share of hashrate.

Of course, the miners would still be able to mine the old fork and at that point it is more likely that an altcoin (like Ethereum, Litecoin or Vertcoin) would eat up Bitcoin's marketshare.

No, that's not the argument made. It is a little bit more subtle than that. OP says that the roots of the first ever recorded bubble were in inept regulatory action. He adds that it was financial instruments underlaid by bulb prices that were inflated, not the actual bulb prices. The subtext here is that the analogy used by the article is not fitting since they are talking about bitcoin's price, not some financial instruments that takes them as input.

Nowhere does OP says that a Bitcoin bubble is impossible. He merely explains that it is interventionism in free markets that has historically been the root cause of many bubbles. Government intervention for which government intervention is required to correct the nefarious effect, in return begging for even more intervention, and so on... ad nauseam. There's a big difference between this thesis and the one you comment.

>Economic systems are a combination of markets and regulatory frameworks

That's a useless definition of an economic system because it grounds itself into a narrow category excluding others when instead it you want it therefore excluding others instead of being as general as possible. A better one would be simply: "an economic system is a configuration in which the five factors of production interact".

> you can't always blame regulations when the economics say things you don't want them to.

Again, that's not what OP says. He never said that free markets are precluded from doing harm. Only that government intervention is even more inefficient and harmful but in ways which are far greater to anticipate until it goes boom. Why? Because artificially changing the parameters of a complex systems creates tons of side effects, including hidden incentive feedback loops which prompts some actors to adopt behavior that are locally optimal but takes us into directions we do not want.

__

The name is poorly chosen imho. This is going to create confusion with an existing high-profile cryptocurrency project (Tezos, written in OCaml).