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rudigeron Announcing a16z crypto research

The mining community cannot change how Bitcoin works. Even if 100% of miners were to change their validation logic to accept more than 21 million bitcoins, none of the nodes running the Bitcoin software will accept the change. Bitcoin is governed by the nodes running the software, not by the source code.

rudigeron PDEs you should know

The Black–Scholes equation is basically identical to the heat equation. Divide through by σ^2 and let n = σ^2 * (T - t) if you want to derive it.

rudigeron What if Bitcoin went to zero?

Already been mathematically proven[1] that bitcoin will go to zero, so it's only a matter of when this happens.

[1]: https://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/BTC-QF.pdf

rudigeron The Dao of DAOs

The description of the 2016 DAO event isn't entirely accurate. Given the huge sums involved ($18 billion at current prices), hopefully the real story will be reported one day.

rudigeron I’ve changed my mind on Bitcoin

From the article: If Bitcoin's market capitalization were to match that of gold, it would be worth over $500,000 a coin. This is why some investors are so bullish on Bitcoin.

Perhaps it's more accurate to say that investors are increasingly bearish on the dollar.

rudigeron Crypto Market Tops $1T as Bitcoin Breaches $37,000

Bitcoin has seen a 300%+ rally in less than three months[1].

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24849523

rudigeron Coinbase Pro Disables Margin Trading

To answer your question: Yes. The volatility is a trader's dream.

I've been holding a sizeable Bitcoin position[1] since 2011, but I'll acknowledge you can make a killing trading in bull markets or crushing bear markets.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2612486

rudigeron PayPal to allow cryptocurrency buying, selling and shopping on its network

Bitcoin breaking through $12,300 USD is an extremely bullish indicator: a perfect 61.8% Fibonacci retracement of the Dec 2017 all-time high.

rudigeron How Hard Is It to Generate a 10X Return on an Investment?

As Warren Buffett wrote in his 1985 letter to the shareholders of Berkshire Hathaway: "What could be more advantageous in an intellectual contest—whether it be bridge, chess, or stock selection—than to have opponents who have been taught that thinking is a waste of energy?"

rudigeron How Hard Is It to Generate a 10X Return on an Investment?

As a cryptocurrency investor, I can confidently say it's hard not to generate a 10X return.

rudigeron South Korea considers cryptocurrency tax

Yes, I'm aware that an article from January 2017 has data backing up an assertion about global Bitcoin trading volume from 2012 to 2017. What is your point?

rudigeron South Korea considers cryptocurrency tax

At its core, the current cryptocurrency craze is simply an unprecedented wealth transfer to China from the rest of the world.

Until the end of 2013, Bitcoin was predominantly traded for US dollars. However, after the crash of 2013, miners consolidated in China and Bitcoin mostly traded for Chinese yuan[1]. At the start of 2017, regulators in China cracked down on digital currency exchanges[2] and trading quickly moved to Japanese yen and, more recently, South Korean won[3].

All of the early buyers are selling. This won't end well.

[1]: http://www.businessinsider.com/bitcoin-trading-china-yuan-re...

[2]: http://fortune.com/2017/01/05/bitcoin-plunge-china-currency/

[3]: https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2017-bitcoin-volume/

rudigeron People have spent over $1M buying virtual cats on the Ethereum blockchain

People are "breeding" cryptokitties to profit from cats that "literally print money": https://mobile.twitter.com/tomkysar/status/93750568492860211...

rudigeron People have spent over $1M buying virtual cats on the Ethereum blockchain

> Right now about 15% of all Ethereum network traffic is dedicated to the game, making it the most popular smart contract on the network.

If I still had ether, this would be a pretty strong sell signal.

rudigeron Bitfinex never ‘repaid’ their tokens, they started a ponzi scheme

> There were no hardware wallets in the days of MtGox, which meant that it was extremely hard to secure Bitcoins.

It was never difficult to hold bitcoins. All you had to do was send them to an address you control with a long passphrase.

rudigeron Ask HN: Why is Bitcoin rising but ethereum remaining stagnant?

Supply and demand.

There is no limit on the supply of ETH, whereas there will only ever be 21 million bitcoins in existence.

It doesn't make sense to speculate on the price of ETH, because it's never going to be scarce. Even the current price of ETH makes no sense, except you need it to buy into ICOs.

rudigeron Ask HN: Do you hold any cryptocurrencies?

No idea. It's very difficult to time the market.

rudigeron Ask HN: Do you hold any cryptocurrencies?

Yes. I'm lucky to have invested in June 2011, six years ago, when the price of bitcoin was around ten dollars[1].

I've never sold because I still believe in the long-term potential of Bitcoin.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2612486

rudigeron Show HN: React-data sheet, Excel-like spreadsheet component

What's wrong with Handsontable? It looks pretty good to me.

rudigeron [dead]

Why not move Airbnb's message inbox tables from MySQL to a new database, like Apache Cassandra[1], that's much easier to scale horizontally?

[1]: https://cassandra.apache.org/

rudigeron The Thing King (1972)

Virtual memory is primarily a convenient abstraction to give the illusion of having infinite memory.

rudigeron Plotly.js Open-Source Announcement

Native JavaScript can be up to 10–100X than the equivalent operations done through a compatibility layer like jQuery.

rudigeron How and why Lyft rewrote its app in Swift

Since when is 75K SLOC considered large? Around 100K is pretty standard for a medium-sized app, let alone a billion dollar company.

rudigeron How we made GitHub fast (2009)

Whatever happened to BERT and BERT-RPC?

rudigeron At 78, Scientist Is Starting a Hedge Fund

He spent seven years at Renaissance, arguably the world's top-performing hedge fund management company.

rudigeron Comparison of Erlang Runtime System and Java Virtual Machine [pdf]

If you need a multi-gigabyte, read-only, in-memory data structure with support for ad-hoc querying and concurrent reads... you probably should just use a SQL database.

rudigeron Time Goes On in Erlang

Great stuff. I'd love to see the best parts of this series redone for Elixir.

rudigeron The Next Twenty Years of Java: Where We've Been and Where We're Going

Actually, Java was originally developed as a programming language for smart appliances. Its roots are in IoT and embedded systems with limited resources.

rudigeron Hello World

Arguably, the highest level of abstraction will be in the query language exposed to applications. Will it support SQL?

rudigeron Rewriting a large production system in Go (2013)

Coming from an Erlang on Emacs background, does vim not allow you to follow variable declarations to their definitions or otherwise get contextually relevant information?