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tomhschmidt

587 karma · joined May 28, 2012

[ my public key: https://keybase.io/tomhschmidt; my proof: https://keybase.io/tomhschmidt/sigs/QwlVV34lWRMa1cbQLoJCQgKRBlwlEPifjpAAla7Ctac ]

tomhschmidt.com

meet.hn/city/us-New-York

Interests: Blockchain, Cybersecurity, Data Science, Investment, Technology

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tomhschmidt··on Web Scraping and Crawling Are Perfectly Legal, Right? (2017)
This article is a bit dated. AFIK the latest in web scraping legality is LinkedIn vs. HiQ, where HiQ was scraping public LinkedIn profiles. LinkedIn issued a C&D under CFAA, but HiQ received an injunction that allowed it to continue scraping. This was supposed to be tried in the Ninth Circuit court over a year ago, but not sure what happened

https://www.eff.org/cases/hiq-v-linkedin

tomhschmidt··on Scooter Madness
> Last month, the inevitable happened: Brady Gaulke, a 26-year-old Nashville man, was killed in a collision with an S.U.V. while riding a scooter. His grieving parents have launched a petition to ban the devices in Nashville. “[E]-scooters are unsafe at any speed, and we are calling on Mayor David Briley and the Metro Council to ban them from the streets immediately,” the petition reads, arguing that Mr. Gaulke should be “the last victim of an epidemic that the e-scooter companies and local government both refuse to acknowledge.”

Imagine being gaslighted by the auto industry so hard that you think scooters are the problem here, not the car that actually hit and killed someone.

All of the problems that are discussed in this article are artifacts of a culture and cities designed around cars, period.

tomhschmidt··on Hedgehog Ethereum wallet: Build DApps like apps, without centralized keys
This is so badly needed in the Ethereum space. Metamask is a massive drag and a known onboarding blocker -- Hedgehog seems like a huge leap forward. Congrats team!
tomhschmidt··on 0x Launch Kit – Launch your own cryptocurrency exchange or marketplace
Hi John -- sounds like you might be interested in 0x Instant, which lets you offer one-click token-to-token swapping on your website or inside your app. https://0x.org/instant
tomhschmidt··on 0x Launch Kit – Launch your own cryptocurrency exchange or marketplace
Sounds like you're referring to security tokens, which place a securitized asset's cap table on a public blockchain. 0x works with all tokenized assets, so we're not opinionated about which assets people want to trade -- other companies like Harbor (https://harbor.com/) offer tokenization services. You're right that placing bearer instruments on a public blockchain presents some issues and the jury is still out a bit.

An alternative might be found in protocols like UMA (https://umaproject.org/), Augur (https://www.augur.net/) or MakerDAO (https://makerdao.com/) which allow you create synthetic tokens that trustlessly track the price of a real-world asset by creating financial incentives to rebalance the price of the minted tokens. MakerDAO has already been used to create over $80MM in a synthetic USD token called Dai (https://makerdao.com/dai/) and UMA has created a synthetic S&P500 token, allowing anyone anywhere around the world to get exposure to US Stocks (https://medium.com/uma-project/announcing-us-stock-index-tok...).

tomhschmidt··on 0x Launch Kit – Launch your own cryptocurrency exchange or marketplace
Great questions!

First question is about decentralization. What is off-chain relay in this case? Is that a centralized part of the system? Are there centralized parts of the system?

Off-chain relay is how parties find each other facilitate a trade. As a maker, I can create an order off-chain, but I still need to find a relevant taker who is interested in filling the order by sending it to the 0x smart contracts on-chain. Relayers pool together these off-chain orders and serve them up through a website, so that it's easy to find people to trade with. Note that this process is optional -- you can still trade peer-to-peer if I send you the order over email, SMS, etc. While relaying is centralized, relayers are non-custodial, so your funds are never at risk. We also have plans to make some parts of relaying less centralized in the future through 0x Mesh: https://blog.0xproject.com/0x-roadmap-2019-part-3-networked-...

Can this be used to implement more robust margin trading?

As for margin trading, yes, you can trade dY/dX tokens on 0x relayers, or combine 0x orders with any on-chain lending protocol such as Dharma or MakerDAO to get leverage.

What settlement speeds can be expected?

All trades currently settle on-chain, so the Ethereum block time is our bottleneck. Look for some updates on this near future :)

tomhschmidt··on 0x Launch Kit – Launch your own cryptocurrency exchange or marketplace
If you want to list the same assets as everyone else with the same interface in the same markets, then yes, it's hard to compete. However, we see a world of tokenized assets coming online that will need unique markets for exchange. Something like Radar Relay (https://radarrelay.com/ for ERC-20 commodities) is totally different from Veil (https://veil.co/ for prediction market shares) is totally different from BoxSwap (https://boxswap.io/ for trading collectibles). Even within ERC-20 commodities exchange, there are many different models of exchange within different markets that are sufficiently differentiated.

We think of 0x more like Stripe: an under-the-hood technology that allows entrepreneurs to move more quickly and easily add exchange to their product. The concept of "tokens" and "exchange" will become very abstract in the near future.

tomhschmidt··on 0x Launch Kit – Launch your own cryptocurrency exchange or marketplace
We call it "Zero Ex"!
tomhschmidt··on 0x Launch Kit – Launch your own cryptocurrency exchange or marketplace
You don't have to trust! 0x Exchanges are non-custodial -- you hold onto your funds and atomically execute trades through the 0x smart contracts, which are open source and audited.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WSxphhWcLxk

tomhschmidt··on 0x Launch Kit – Launch your own cryptocurrency exchange or marketplace
There's a bounty on the 0x smart contracts, but not on this sample exchange codebase https://blog.0xproject.com/the-0x-v2-bug-bounty-f8981f322dd7
tomhschmidt··on 0x Launch Kit – Launch your own cryptocurrency exchange or marketplace
Tom from 0x here. Happy to answer any questions about Launch Kit or 0x more broadly!
tomhschmidt··on Will MySpace ever lose its monopoly? (2007)
What exactly is declining? Their MAU, Time Spent, # Advertisers, and Revenue numbers are all increasing (https://techcrunch.com/2017/06/27/facebook-2-billion-users/). Maybe they're just declining in eyes of SV bubble residents.
tomhschmidt··on FedEx reserves 20 Tesla Semi all-electric big rig trucks
How would it be lousy? The cars can now go anywhere and dynamically route instead of being stuck on rails and the infrastructure costs are orders of magnitude less.
tomhschmidt··on The risk of nitrites and nitrates in bacon
The most worrying part of this article for me is that processed meats that are advertised as "nitrate-free" really just use natural nitrates from celery salt, which aren't much better, if at all.
tomhschmidt··on Spotify Form F-1
+1. Ability to upload music on Google Play Music is also keeping me from switching to Spotify. I have a lot of tracks that simply aren't in the Spotify catalog. If they add that, I'd switch tomorrow.
tomhschmidt··on US Electric Car Sales Report
https://electrek.co/2017/12/19/tesla-breaks-new-records-norw...
tomhschmidt··on Show HN: A blockchain alternative to Airbnb
Origin has a testnet dApp https://demo.originprotocol.com/
tomhschmidt··on Show HN: A blockchain alternative to Airbnb
Not really a 'blockchain alternative' -- just a clone of Airbnb that lets you pay in cryptocurrencies. Kind of a shame when there are other actually decentralized home sharing platforms like Beetoken, Origin, etc.
tomhschmidt··on Hacker News Transparency
Reddit is a YC company and HN is just a free service provided through YC (not a company), so it doesn't really seem like they have the incentive to do this.
tomhschmidt··on Where’s the Next Silicon Valley? VC Is Betting on the Midwest
Not sure what you're implying -- Adidas is German and both Adidas and Columbia pre-date Nike.
tomhschmidt··on Amazon cuts Whole Foods prices
"PC guys are not going to just figure this out. They're not going to just walk in."
tomhschmidt··on The Incredible Shrinking Airline Seat
Google Flights actually does a great job at this, displaying seat width and pitch and calling out when it's above or below average.
tomhschmidt··on Tesla raises $1.8B
Most likely going for another Tesla playbook where wealthy customers (what's $25k on a $3MM+ house?) buy in and subsidize future development.
tomhschmidt··on Birkenstock CEO accuses Amazon of ‘modern-day piracy’
You're assuming that vendors are selling these counterfeit products unintentionally. There are fat margins to be had for counterfeit merchants on Amazon / eBay / Aliexpress.
tomhschmidt··on Chinese umbrella-sharing startup loses most of its 300,000 umbrellas in 3 months
These umbrellas have a lock in the handle and a QR code that presumably gives you the code to the umbrella once scanned.
tomhschmidt··on Buying Lotion on Amazon.com
I also found Amazon to be increasingly difficult to navigate, which is why I made nugget (http://nuggetapp.co/). nugget uses a mix of machine and human curation to pick out awesome stuff at great prices from Amazon.
tomhschmidt··on Ask HN: As a skilled developer, how do you make pocket money with little time?
https://www.moonlightwork.com/ ?
tomhschmidt··on [dead]
Tried one of these a few weeks ago and it was awesome. Tasted great (kind of a watermelon-like flavor) and woke up refreshed in the morning. Sounds like they're pretty popular in Korea.
tomhschmidt··on Sears reports $748M net loss [pdf]
Many other large brick-and-mortar retailers have spun up relatively successful eComm businesses (Target, Walmart, Macy's). While those aren't to the scale of Amazon, I really don't think this is an excuse.
tomhschmidt··on Almost 80% of Private Day Traders Lose Money
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Opposite
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