vanzard

Let's be serious. No one reads twitter over sms anymore. This isn't at all the reason twitter continues to limit to 140 characters.

(Before some smartass replies "I do read over sms", well even without sms merging, twitter could still split a tweet into multiple sms. 99.9999% of their userbase wouldn't care.)

  "adding cloudflare would work much more reliably"

This can't work. The author requirement was to have self-hosted comments without javascript. So his html pages change every few minutes, and cloudflare is just not designed for this.

Yes, perfect use case for Bitcoin! Many VPN providers (and big ones, not small alternative ones) already accept Bitcoin for this very reason:

https://www.expressvpn.com/blog/expressvpn-now-accepts-bitco...

https://www.astrill.com/pricing.php

https://doublehop.me/

Etc.

To be fair we shouldn't look at Bitcoin as "just" computing hashes. Its impact is already wider than that. The OP pointed out:

> the bottom line is that investing a hundred+ megawatt in a system that creates thousands of jobs is a valuable economic move, not a waste

Given Amazon's history to NEVER involve law enforcement in outrageous cases like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10966164 or even the OP, I doubt you would get arrested.

Yes Google is just showing ads. They collect data about you to target their ads well, but that's basically all they do. They don't send your info to the NSA, they don't send you SPAM, they don't sell your info to private investigators. Their end goal is just to show you targeted ads. That's it.

This counter is completely inaccurate. I used to work for a company that was doing email marketing (I quit because I disagreed with their practices). My employer was buying about one /48 per week. What does this mean? We alone exhausted 2^80 ip addresses per week, or 2e18 addresses per second (that's 2 quintillion!). So this counter showing 2 addresses exhausted per second is wrong by an order of 1 quintillion.

In fact, with the proper paperwork you can still relatively easily buy an entire /40 or maybe even /32. With these practices, IPv6 WILL run out of addresses within the next 100 years. Well, to be pedantic, it will run out of allocatable subnets, but the vast majority of their addresses will remain unused.

> So what you're saying is that Twitter withheld their MAU because the figures were poor?

No I am saying the exact opposite: figures where great, but they withheld MAU due to competitive reasons or business sensitivity.

> 350K per month for 2013, 100k per month for 2014, 50K per month for 2014

Ridiculous, your figures are all wrong. Growth is the same as in 2013. Here are the correct ones:

- 65k/month in 2013

- 90k/month in 2014

- 65k/month for the last 6 months (december 2014 to june 2015)

Unlike you I have sources to back it up: 30k user accounts as of https://web.archive.org/web/20130113061404/https://coinbase...., 834k user accounts as of https://web.archive.org/web/20140122052815/https://coinbase.... (note that at the time they changed the name of this metric from "users" to "consumer wallets"), 1800k user accounts as of https://web.archive.org/web/20141201063703/https://www.coinb... (at this point they split the metric, there are slightly more wallets than users), 2200k user accounts as of today (https://www.coinbase.com/about)

If you knew anything about Bitcoin, you would know there are always truckloads of people signing up on exchanges whenever the price is very high. It was above $500 per coin for the first half of 2014 so this pushed user account creation to 90k/month overall for the year. Now we are back to 65k/month which has been quite constant since 2013 with the exception of the bubble craze.

You call growing from zero to tens of millions of MAU in 4 years "very weak"?! Ridiculous. You are wrong, nobody seriously outright rejected Twitter was growing. The worst critics said was "Twitter is not growing as fast as they claim, but they ARE growing" or "growth has slowed down, but there are still growing".

I can use any other example to prove that not releasing MAU doesn't mean something needs to be hidden. I quoted Gmail earlier because this is a good case of a growing product whose MAU needed to be kept secret due to competitive reasons.

Yet Twitter experienced phenomenal growth, going from zero to tens of millions of MAU in their first 4 years, proving your logic wrong (paraphrasing you, you said "if growth was so great surely a company would release MAU"). So if you apply the same criticism you make against Coinbase to Twitter, you would have said in these first 4 years "Twitter's metric are all vanity metrics" and you would have rejected Twitter's claims of growth. Well you would have been misguided, as we now know for certain Twitter WAS growing during these first 4 years.

This is why you look stupid to reject exchanges' claim of growth. Yes we know MAU is less than number_of_wallets. It's mathematical. But still, it's silly for you to reject their claims of growth as you have no basis for it. Not releasing MAU doesn't mean you are not growing, as Twitter demonstrated.

> For starters that address is empty. The coins from it are on the list at ~174,000 now.

Doesn't matter. This one addresses alone represents hundreds of thousands of customers of Bitstamp that you are completely ignoring in your math in your previous posts. I am just pointing out to you that AT LEAST some of these big addresses are bound to represent other exchanges/online wallets.

> So while large wallets exist to see a number like 2.8m coins and assume it means there are at least 2m users is simplistic at best.

It is simplistic for you too to assume that these 2.8 million BTC are all owned by a few individuals.

If you want my estimate, since we don't have much data to rely on, I think that roughly 30-70% of this 2.8 million BTC is owned by individuals and the other 70-30% represents exchange/online wallet customer funds. It's realistic to think that even the smaller portion (30%) of 2.8 million BTC could still represent at least 1 million users. And the ~2 million addresses with smaller funds could represent another ~1 million users (as you yourself estimated, well you said 0.75 million which is close enough). So that's ~2 million users total.

So if Twitter took 4 years to release MAU, would you have accused them for 4 years that they have "something to hide"? Now you get my point. It's sensitive. Sometimes you wait years before feeling comfortable releasing this number.

It is very common for companies to not release MAU numbers especially in their initial years, even if they are being very successful. I challenge you to find Gmail's MAU numbers released in the first 3 years of its existence.

If you can't understand why MAU is a sensitive metric, then yeah I understand why you make up theories in your head why they must be "covering up" something.

> There really is no arguing against that.

You are sarcastic, but it really is the case. Some of these addresses were proven to belong to exchanges, for example these 240,000 BTC belonged to Bitstamp: https://blockchain.info/address/12sENwECeRSmTeDwyLNqwh47Jist...

So of course this single address at the time represented hundreds of thousands of Bitstamp users. Ditto for the other 10,000+ BTC addresses that belong to other exchanges.

They don't release their MAU numbers not because they want to hide things, but because it really is a sensitive business metric.

Your logic is flawed. It doesn't matter if even 99% of the addresses all belonged to the wallets of a few hundreds early adopters.

As of today (as of block 350,000) there are 102 addresses with 10,000 BTC up to a few 100,000 BTC in each of them. They represent 2.8 million BTC! Most of these addresses belong to exchanges or online wallets and contain their customer's funds, because no one owns that many bitcoins. So these 102 addresses most certainly represent the 2 or 3 million bitcoin users worldwide that exchanges and online wallets claim they have: http://www.quora.com/What-are-the-future-consequences-of-the...

It has been explained many times users tend to leave their coins on exchanges. So 1 exchange address containing 100 BTC could represent 100 bitcoin users each owning 1 BTC. Therefore your upper limit estimate is invalid.

It's obvious "0.05% of the US population" is a valid ballpark estimate that is very conservative: assuming there are 2.5 million global Bitcoin users (your lower estimate) and assuming they all belong to the top half of the richest people of the planet (3.5 billion, which covers all of North America, all of Europe, all of Japan, all of Oceania, most of China & India, and more) then: 2.5 million / 3.5 billion = 0.07% of them would be bitcoin users.

However ForHackernews's idea that Coinbase barely has 4-digit active users is dubious and likely false.

This incident had nothing to do with zero-conf txs. In fact okpay did wait for multiple confirmations, and was still hit by this $10k double spend!

This whole thing was possible because of an accidental fork of the chain which lasted a few hours. This is the only accidental fork that occurred in the last 3 years.

Details: https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0050.mediawi...

> they still pose an element of risk that isn't necessarily present with cash and credit.

The element of risk is ALWAYS present with cash and credit. You could be handed counterfeit bills. You could be hit with chargeback fees (even when the CC processor will let you keep the money because it was a card-present transaction). But somehow merchants accept these risks... so why not Bitcoin?

Sounds like your employer isn't as confident/competent as other point-of-sale manufacturers who have been able to support Bitcoin, like point-of-sale giant NCR http://www.ncr.com/news/news-releases/small-business/ncr-sil...

No, these 4 peoples have no power to "force" (your words) the change of some rule, against the will of the users. Because the moment they would try to force something the users disagree with, the users would simply change the pool they mine on, thereby removing any power the pools had.

Pools are in fact very democratic systems for this reason. Users can change pool at any moment's notice.

> it doesn't track that it had money in it or its location within the receivers infrastructure

If the customer mails an empty envelope, the merchant won't ship, so where is the problem?

If postal workers steal the cash but reseal the envelope... well these incidents do happen but are very rare. It can't be the major reason why "people don't mail cash". People mail valuable items all the time.

If a trustworthy merchant genuinely lose the envelope after delivery... well these incidents are also very rare. It can't be the major reason why "people don't mail cash".

If a fraudulent merchant "lose" the cash after delivery... as I said this is why we warn to not mail cash to untrustworthy merchants.

Again, "lack of tracking" is not why people don't mail cash even to trustworthy merchants. People don't do it because faster and more convenient ways of sending money exist.

> your instance to dismiss the possibility that companies can make mistakes

I DON'T DISMISS MISTAKES. I acknowledge they do happen. But they are rare and therefore don't matter as much as you insist they do. You gave me 3 examples of Tiger Direct refund problems, and yet that's only 3 out of thousands(?) of error-free orders. And these 3 all were eventually solved in the customer's favor, so none of them required a chargeback (had it been possible).

> Not all problems that require a chargeback are fraud.

That's not my point. My point is all of these problems (whatever they are: mistakes, frauds, etc) are rare to begin with. How many times to I have to explain it? You even confirmed it with your own life experience: you personnally issued only 2 chargebacks, ever.

Chargebacks are RARELY needed, period.

> lack of tracking

Are you joking? The entire shipping industry offers tracking services, delivery confirmations, etc.

We warn about mailing cash to dubious/untrustworthy recipients.

But paying a very trustworthy merchant by mailing cash would probably be fine in terms of risk of theft: mailing a $100 bill is no different than mailing a $100 item, yet people ship millions of $100+ items every day through the postal system and few get stolen.

It's just stupid to mail cash because faster ways of sending money exist.

BitPay alone has 50k merchants: http://blog.bitpay.com/2015/03/10/heartland-payment-systems-...

Coinbase has 38k: https://www.coinbase.com/about

Gocoin has 5.5k: https://ihb.io/2015-01-29/news/gocoin-announces-5500-merchan...

That's already 93.5k from merely 3 american bitcoin gateways. Add the rest of the world (China, etc) and it is clear there are 100k or more.

All systems that require adoption are, initially, impractical.

Bitcoin is becoming more and more practical as more and more merchants adopt it. Again: 100,000 merchants accept Bitcoin today, and this number is (so far) increasing rapidly.

Credit cards enable theft at, or fraud by the merchant because you give the merchant your CC info; Bitcoin fixes this flaw by design as it cryptographically authorizes only transactions of specific amounts to specific addresses.

CCs and Bitcoin solve different issues with fraud and theft. I argue that the protection offered by CCs is overrated. For example plenty of people everyday are happy to use a system that does not offer these protections: cash. I don't see you running around warning people to not use cash because it offers no protection.

Not always true. The reality is less rosy than you depict it.

Most credit card issuers don't let you charge back transactions older than 60 days. It is always fun to discover this fact after a merchant invents believable excuses to stall your order for 60+ days... ("Warehouse stock depleted, wait 4-6 weeks. We shipped it! Sorry we shipped the wrong item!")

Merchants can dispute chargebacks, and in fact do win 40% of them. See page 12 of http://bit.ly/10iW5wJ A lot of this is friendly fraud but still...

CC issuers will typically hold you liable and refuse chargebacks if the PIN code was used (the hacker guessed it, stole it, or cloned it). Check your CC fine print, for example: "If your Password or PIN is used in such a transaction, you will be liable for the full debt" from http://www.scotiabank.com/ca/common/pdf/borrowing/revolving_...

1. Use an iOS or Android Nexus device. Apple and Google do a good job of keeping iOS and Nexus devices very up-to-date security wise. (Specifically avoid non-Nexus Android devices as companies other than Google do a bad job at deploying timely OTA updates.)

2. Use a deterministic wallet app so there is no need to back up anything whatsoever (all your addresses and keys are generated from a password): Greenaddress, Breadwallet, Mycelium.

Then all you need is one strong unique password, and you have a decently solid Bitcoin wallet. If someone specifically hacks you with a 0day to compromise your mobile device, you have a lot more things to worry about than losing your bitcoins.

> needs a bank account anyway if they want to convert their bitcoin into something that they can actually spend outside of the dark web

That's not true. Americans (Facebook's intended audience for this Messenger money-sending feature) can spend bitcoins directly at Microsoft, Dell, Expedia, Overstock, Newegg, Tiger Direct, DISH Network, etc. They can use and spend bitcoins theoretically received from FB friends without having a credit card, without even having a bank account.

100,000 (legitimate!) merchants worldwide accept Bitcoin - http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/bitcoin-now-accepted-by-100000-merc... It is time to kill the myth of "only the dark web accepts Bitcoin".