skilgarriff

We have a Rust implementation in the works: https://github.com/UrkelLabs/rsd

It's not a full node implementation yet, but will be there soon!

1. I have to admit, if you are going to be so vehemently angry against anyone who even talks about Bitcoin as being potentially useful, I'd suggest you do at least 5 minutes of googling. Channel Factories -> https://www.tik.ee.ethz.ch/file/a20a865ce40d40c8f942cf206a7c... Cool stuff, I doubt you'll actually read it, but there's the link anyway.

2. Whoa look at that -> You can pay your taxes in Ohio in Bitcoin. So apparently "how on earth would they pay their tax bills" means send them BTC if they live in Ohio :). Suggesting that because you can't pay taxes or pay suppliers right now with Bitcoin, and therefore it will never be useful or capable of those things is such a silly argument. I certainly don't believe we live in a world where you can buy anything with BTC right now, but like I said my statement was about us trending in that way (Still waiting on all those graphs showing the opposite by the way).

3. Damn, I forgot I can't use anecdotes to influence my opinion. Thanks for reminding me.

4. Don't ask me -> ask the data. https://coin.dance/volume/localbitcoins/VES/BTC "35,000 Bitcoin (worth around $127 million at today's prices) was traded for bolívar on the LocalBitcoins crypto exchange over the entire course of last year." Maybe they would be better off with dollars, but Bitcoin is much easier to transfer across borders, and much easier to hold on your person without signaling that you are carrying thousands of dollars.

I'm happy to talk more about crypto with you, although I'm not sure you are open to actually talk honestly about it - seeing as how you took the time to negatively respond to every post I made on this subject. If there is something that has made you so angry about Bitcoin, I'd be happy to learn it to see if I'm supporting something that I shouldn't.

I'm certainly not arguing that Bitcoin is the perfect solution, nor that it's super helpful or accessible today. But, I don't think absolutely denying any use is a smart strategy, and I'd rather have you make legitimate counter arguments where you've actually spent the time to learn things rather than the lax effort you've put in so far.

I don't disagree with you at all -> In fact most people who I read about in the space actually want high transaction fees.

I think that's what makes Lightning Network very exciting. I've used it a few times, and it's a very pleasant experience although definitely still early - only has a capacity of about 3 million at the moment.

In fact I am paid in Bitcoin -> On my weekends I accept code bounties for small amounts of Bitcoin for fun. I've used that Bitcoin to buy coffee at my local coffee shop and have lunch with my friend in Japan at restaurants that accept Bitcoin (which is actually what got me into it in the first place).

I don't have any graphs as like I said it's just my opinion. I'm really only basing it off of 4 things.

1. The general excitement around Lightning Network on Twitter with Jack and tippin.me, as well as this website: https://lightningnetworkstores.com/

2. Coinbase's reported 48,000 merchants/partners reported here: https://www.coinbase.com/clients?locale=en-US

3. I frequent similar places everyday - 2 out of the 3 places that I frequent almost everyday are now accepting btc within the past 3 months - My coffee shop and bar.

4. Musing about Venezuela from crypto podcasts, and articles.

I'll admit I'm biased as I do think it's a good invention, and tend to support Bitcoin. Despite that, I am open minded and would happily check out any information that would propose things are tending in the opposite direction.

You are assuming they can't pay for services in Bitcoin - which they can. There are a number of things that currently accept Bitcoin, and that number is only growing imo.

The same way that I secure my transaction when I pay the waiter for my meal in cash by giving it to them when I'm done eating.

I've paid for a lot of services in Bitcoin and been paid in Bitcoin. It's generally been a very smooth and enjoyable process.

1. First these are totally different points.

a. If you do not currently own Bitcoin and want to own it there are many ways you can get it. They range from fast (generally more expensive) to slow (generally less expensive). Sure, if you want to buy Bitcoin on Coinbase you can do that and you will pay them a fee for that service - which I've done. You can also mine it - which I've done, be paid it in - also done, etc.

b. Secondly you are assuming that my friend can't pay for services in Bitcoin. We have both had lunch together at a restaurant in which we paid for the entire meal in BTC.

So it's an unfair statement to say my transferring of BTC to my friend costs me these fees. If you want to make the statement of "transferring USD to BTC to my friend to JPY" then sure, your statement about fees is relevant. I'm not sure suggesting that a pure BTC transfer is not an "accurate comparison" is fair.

2. See the above point. There is no trust beyond math when it come to a pure Bitcoin to Bitcoin transfer. There are plenty of things that you can buy using pure Bitcoin which I, and many of my friends, have done.

No doubt that there are a lot of people selling those services, but I think they are capitalizing off the fact that a lot of people don't know/spend the time to understand where blockchain actually improves things - and it's no fault of those people.

From my understanding, blockchain is essentially "cheap trust" . You can pay the system a fee to trust math rather than a human. Once I learned that, I realized there are very few scenarios where cheap trust is needed.

So perhaps I should adjust my first statement with "people who understand blockchain" - although even that's not necessarily fair as it assumes that I "understand" it.

I suppose what I'm getting at is that I think it's unfair to look at the number of scammers/people selling "blockchain" services and make an assumption on the industry as a whole. Most of the developers in the space that I know completely write off those people and don't even consider them in the industry.

On whether money can be completely represented without recourse to the outside world -> Agreed, I should again amend my statement to say "value". There is no doubt that 1 Bitcoin represents a certain amount of "value" right now and that value has so far proven to be un-censorable. Whether it will be successful money is a different question.

I can send 1 bitcoin from myself living in Minnesota to my friend living in Japan for the equivalent of $0.46.

That's an improvement over the existing system. I don't have to trust anyone in between to get my money to him.

How would that be as possible and as "trustless" without blockchain?

Is it wasting though? Do you consider vaults a waste? Do you consider 2-3% CC fees a waste?

We already have costs built into the current system (e.g. cc fees to make up for fraud, security systems around protecting gold + cash). Electricity is just the cost of that specific system - I think calling it a waste is not necessarily justified.

I'm not sure I'd necessarily call those problems - it's a weird definition I know, but perhaps tradeoffs?

1. On Electricity - It needs to be expensive to try to cheat or steal from the system. Currently with gold you would need to hire a private army to steal from and break into vaults - that's so expensive and crazy that I don't think most people are willing to undertake that risk. Currently I think electricity is the best way to make digital native things expensive. I'm not sold on anything else yet (definitely open to new solutions, but I'm not convinced think PoS is a viable one).

2-3. I think this is an interesting tradeoff. The way I look at it you pick 1 of 2. Either you trust someone or some people to return lost funds/remove "problematic" data or you trust the system in which case those things can never be recovered/removed.

I think calling those "problems" might be premature as they could actually be "benefits" depending on how you look at them.

To be fair, I think most people who have given blockchain an honest 30 minutes of brainstorming aren't arguing for real world assets connected to a chain.

I would argue that there is potentially a use case when it comes to things that can be completely represented digitally e.g. money.

Not necessarily for or against "blockchain" in any one specific use case, but I'm curious why you would define anything that can't use contracts and the legal system as "illegal".

I can imagine that for many non-first world countries where people wouldn't trust things to the legal system or contracts - I wouldn't necessarily define those things as illegal.

Mind suggesting the economists to read, rather than just suggesting he is reading the wrong economists?

I'm admittedly naive in this subject, but the name calling doesn't help.

On the second point - there is solid evidence that, yes there are ways to pick stock besides JUST analyzing the company - see Momentum investing https://www.aqr.com/Insights/Research/Journal-Article/Fact-F...

I've seen plenty of critics of the efficient market hypothesis, and Fama himself has said that the market is not efficient.

This is a real scenario where I think cryptos will change the ecosystem in the next few years. There is a LOT to figure out in this space (ICO Madness), but I believe once the dust settles, this is a real problem that could be solved.

Caddy is pretty awesome. I use it to run my personal website (love that it can serve statically compiled Brotli assets out of the box). I maintain it's docker image here: https://github.com/ZZROTDesign/alpine-caddy :) Should be incredibly simple to set up!

If you happen to use React, I built a React component that helps you manage this! :) Hopefully it helps a bit! It also reports whether or not a user is idle, such that you can reduce cpu usage during that as well.

https://github.com/Skilgarriff/react-user-focus