vijayboyapati

The thing I find interesting is how thin the order book is: https://www.bitstamp.net/market/order_book/

It shows that you don't need to sell a particularly large block of btc to substantially move the price in either direction. If one big buyer jumped into the market it could easily move the price $50+. This shows that bitcoin is still immature and in its infancy. The more the liquidity of bitcoin grows, the less this kind of volatility will plague the market.

There has been a long and storied tradition of smuggling in the Americas going back to before the founding of the republic (John Hancock, president of the first Congress, was a notorious smuggler in his day). Here are some examples that always make me smile:

A letter from British Customs official writing a complaint home on the nature of his work:

"In this country an officer of the customs ought to see his way very clear before he ventures to make a seizure. Because he sure of having every possible difficulty thrown in his way. He is looked upon as an enemy to the community and treated accordingly. And whether he succeeds or not, he is sure never to be forgiven, and thinks himself fortunate if his punishment is deferred to a future day." [1]

Joseph Harrison, collector for the port of Boston:

"Large quantities of dutiable goods have been smuggled in a most audacious manner. But publicly known and talked of, such is the temper of the times that no legal information could be obtained so as to prosecute or make any seizure of them. "

And finally a letter from the owner of a small smuggling vessel to the Captain of the Speed Well, a government ship that had confiscated his ship, taken his goods and seized his men.

"Sir: Damn thee and God damn thy two purblind eyes thou bugger, thou death-looking son of a bitch. O, that I had been there (with my company) for thy sake when thou tookest them men of mine on board the Speedwell cutter on Monday, the 14th of December. I would drove thee and thy gang to Hell where thou belongest, thou Devil incarnet. Go down, thou Hell Hound, unto they kennel below and bathe thyself in that sulphurous lake that has been so long prepared for such as thee, for it is time the world was rid of such a monster. Thou art no man but a devil, thou fiend. O Lucifer, I hope thou will soon fall into Hell like a star from the sky, there to lie unpitied and unrelented of any for ever and ever, which God grant of his infinite mercy. Amen."[2]

[1]http://www.cambridgehistory.org/content/boston-tea-party-and...

[2]http://www.libertarianism.org/publications/essays/excursions...

My claim was not that it was the only factor, but that it was a major factor - I list three other major factors, the first being the most important. Comparison to the EU misses the point; both the EU and the US have intellectual property laws creating monopolies over drug production. The comparison should be to the state of the world if intellectual property law was not in force. There is little evidence that this would lead to a major reduction in production, although drug companies would really like you to believe this.

I gave a lecture on this at the University of Washington in 2010 and it covers intellectual property as one of the four major causes for the cost of health care in the US: http://mises.org/daily/4434

Not to mention it sort of defeats one of the main value propositions of cryptocurrencies - their decentralized nature. If reddit created such a currency you would need to trust reddit to trust its value. And if it's backed by reddit shares, then it seems like a proxy for allowing public trading of the shares of a private company. I wonder what the SEC would think of that.

>He said he could not understand why companies would “market something expressly to allow people to place themselves beyond the law.”

Perhaps he's entirely unaware of any history where "the law" was used to oppress. Perhaps he's also unaware that something being "the law" does not make it just. For instance, in Washington, where I live, just two years ago it was illegal to own marijuana. Now it's legal. Does this now mean that the moral status of owning and smoking marijuana has changed, or does it merely show that the law is inconstant and often at odds with justice? Much is taken for granted in his rhetorical question.

"Let us be quite clear: if Bitcoin was a cheaper or more efficient transaction method, for-profit organizations such as large payment processors would have forked it long ago and would likely already be using it internally in order to shore up their margins."

This is quite a presumptuous lede. Bitcoin itself has only really been around for 5 years, and of that only entered the public consciousness for about 2. Large payments companies are like all large companies; they tend to be slow, bureaucratic and have to deal with internal politics to get anything done. On top of this, Bitcoin solved a long standing problem in computer science that many people believed was not solvable (Satoshi's original post on the cypherpunk list received a lot of skepticism when it was first posted). No large company would have precipitously risked their entire technology stack on something so unproven. Even Gavin Andresen is careful to say Bitcoin is still "in beta". And only now are some large companies starting to accept bitcoin in payment, which is a much weaker step than replacing their internal payment infrastructure. This stuff takes time, and this cycle of optimism and pessimism seems to repeat itself with every revolutionary technology:

T1. New technology X is going to change everything and the world will be amazing!

T2 (only short while after T1). Nothing has changed, the world is still the same, X is a failure.

...

TN: Whoa, we use X a lot now.

A pardon for an American hero. C'mon Obama, you can do this.

I really love the testimonials :) http://autowale.in/

I've been developing with Perl for almost 20 years and am a great fan of it. I think it's not difficult to write easy to read and understand Perl code (although it's also not difficult to write awful Perl code). I'm very interested to learn more about Mojolicious. I've been using and really enjoying Perl Dancer, which from the example on the landing page of Mojolicious looks very similar. Could someone familiar with the two give me a summery of the differences and pros and cons between them?

It is not a requirement, but companies within batches, and within Ycombinator in general have a unique insight into the demands and pain-points of their fellow companies. This is why each batch usually has a handful of companies working on products specifically designed for other companies (e.g., MailGun, SendHub, Heroku, Mixpanel etc). Some of the companies pivot toward building tools if/when they discover their original idea isn't getting traction.

Peter Klein has some very interesting research showing there are limits imposed on organizations by the problem of economic calculation: http://mises.org/document/350/Economic-Calculation-and-the-L...

This is an application of Mises' work on economic calculation in socialist economies and why it is so problematic for such economies to allocate capital without squandering it.

At scale I think this affects companies like Microsoft which, as they grow, find it harder and harder to allocate resources without an internal price function. E.g., how many engineers do you put on infrastructure versus Xbox? The answer isn't obvious because you can't directly measure the profitability of the infrastructure team. When teams are small (such as in startups) the leader can kind of guess this stuff, and successful leaders do it well, while bad ones go out of business. Some companies try create internal markets to allocate capital but that has problems too, because it causes some level of friction in the process of how capital is internally allocated.

This is why I think Ycombinator's model is potentially very useful. Instead of a monolithic structure where capital is essentially moved between divisions based on the judgment of a single person (the CEO), there is a syndicate of companies which tend to produce goods that the others need, while still maintaining a market so that prices can be established and used as a guide for which projects should receive more (or less) capital.

I've already had this debate with Tim in private (we're friends). Some of his analysis of transactional use is quite misleading. For instance: http://letstalkbitcoin.com/blog/post/a-marginal-economy-vers...

Here he compares bitcoin to m-pesa which is a deeply misleading comparison. The former has a floating price, the latter is a money substitute and its price is fixed against the currency which is substitutes for. This is why I've suggested to Tim that it is total purchasing power transferred that should be measured, and I think I have convinced him of that.

Also the number of transactions per se is not the best measure of bitcoin's importance; it is the total purchasing power being transferred that should be considered. Bitcoin is a medium of savings that allows people to transfer value easily, from any point on the globe to any other point with minimal fees. The total purchasing power being transferred has growth tremendously because BOTH the number of transactions has grown AND the purchasing power of bitcoin has increased manyfold in the last few years.

This, of course, does not even factor in all the transactions that happen off blockchain.

This is one of the technological/mathematical developments, along with multi-sig, that has great promise for improving the security and flexibility of Bitcoin. One of the worries for people with large bitcoin holdings is the being-hit-by-a-bus problem. With normal property the legal system provides the flexibility and rules by which valuable goods can be passed on to heirs. With Bitcoin, the loss of keys can mean huge amounts of value are irrecoverably lost. I hope that Shamir Secret Sharing is used as the basis for a bitcoin startup that allows bitcoin users to easily specify a set of trusted people who can come together to reconstruct keys on the event that the original holder of the keys is incapacitated or deceased.

Multi-sig is a very powerful innovation for corporate use of bitcoin. Not because you can have arbitrarily many M of N signing a transaction, but that you can outsource complex policy in a trusted way. E.g., create policy that lower level employees can control a small percentage of a company's holdings, while higher level employees can control a higher percent. It allows you to implement flexibility that exists in the credit system, without giving up the trust/control that comes from the blockchain system.

There are a number of technological solutions to the security issues related to storage. BIP38 and multisig are both very promising innovations, and there will be more. We're really at the very early stages of Bitcoin's development. Think 1994 for the Internet.

thanks :)

Anyone have evidence of Satoshi's use of Tor? This seems like a crucial claim made by the blog post author, yet I cannot find any evidence of it.

The author of the blog post makes the claim that Satoshi used Tor. I'm interested in what evidence there is for that. I googled and found a few people mentioning it, but no direct quote from Satoshi himself. I also searched the archives of his posts: https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&e...

Suppose that claim is not true, or that he was not fastidious in his use of Tor, it seems to me the email service provider would have logs on where his emails were originating from. From his original paper his email is satoshin@gmx.com

I'm not sure who owns gmx.com, but I think it likely that if a sovereign state went after them, they would probably divulge the information. Not that I want this to happen, of course. I hope he's never uncovered and his legend grows with the success of Bitcoin. I hope he did use Tor. I'm just not certain there is evidence for it.

Edit: I am not Satoshi Nakamoto, although I wish I was

Great article. Another type of analysis I found really helpful was done by Marshall Rosenberg called "non-violent communication", which dissects the "turning toward" and "turning away" phenomena in marital (and other) communication. I cannot recommend his course highly enough, and it's free online (the workshop he did in San Francisco): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YwXH4hNfgPg

At first I was a little skeptical because it seemed goofy, but I had never heard so incisive an analysis of how and why communication breaks down (or succeeds).

The trouble, I feel, with the overlap between science and philosophy is that most modern practitioners of what we know as "science" only have exposure to one epistomological world view: positivism. Granted, this world view has created a great abundance of valuable and life improving knowledge for humanity - as Bacon would have described it, it is good for more than disputation (no offense, to Ol' Aristotle) - but it does not encompass the entire sphere of knowledge. There is authentic knowledge to be gained from disciplines which are entirely a priori - such as mathematics, or as some argue, economics.

I was in the same YC batch as Nikki. The thing I remember most about her was her enthusiasm. I also remember that her presentation on Demo Day got the loudest applause and most interest. Sad to hear 99dresses didn't make it, but I'm sure Nikki will have a bright future. Few young women her age will have gained the experience and insight that comes from founding a company and seeing it fail. As Michael Jordan said "I've missed more than 9000 shots in my career. I've lost almost 300 games. 26 times, I've been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I've failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed."

This is good in a way. It's yet another tacit admission of the legal legitimacy of bitcoin by USG. It's not like USG would seize 20kg of cocaine then sell it into the market in an auction!

Anyone know where they're getting their market data for price history and volume? Perhaps not as important after the collapse of Gox, but the market is still illiquid enough that there can be substantial spreads between exchanges.

It's interesting to think what announcement like this have in aggregate on the price of bitcoin. Counter-intuitively the price of bitcoin should face downward pressure as merchant adoption of this sort increases. Expedia doesn't hold any of the bitcoin they receive. The bitcoins are instantly converted to dollars on a market exchange. This means that holders of bitcoin, especially those who are sitting on large capital gains, now have a new outlet to realize their gains.

On the other hand merchants who choose to accept bitcoin using Coinbase (or Bitpay) and who also choose to keep some fraction of their profit in bitcoin (thereby exposing their profits to currency volatility, which may even be a good thing for growth of their profits) will tend to increase the market price of bitcoin.

Overall it seems like most merchants accepting bitcoin are not holding any of the bitcoins they accept. It would be great to see more merchants choosing to keep some fraction, however small, in bitcoin itself.

It's incredible to hear stories where businesses will self immolate just to protect a cherished cash cow. Microsoft's reluctance to make many of their products free online can be seen as a special case of this. And game theory wise Google was quite sharp to start offering under-featured products such as Google docs for free online. Despite the fact that these products had only a fraction of the features of e.g. Word, they were a direct attack on Microsoft's cherished cash cow (Office), and put Microsoft in the incredibly uncomfortable position of either having to begin innovating and offering their products online at deeply discounted prices (and hurting themselves further), or just sitting still while Google's initially awful offerings became more feature rich and a more threatening competitor.

In business inertia is often death.

She writes: "I am also yet to have a single male employee come to my office to give me dirt on a co-worker or share an awkward gossip-like story. My female employees though? Every. single. one."

The Economist had an article which tangentially comports with her comment above:

http://www.economist.com/node/21551535

Gold's use value is much, much lower than the current price reflects. Most of the price of gold is explained by its reservation demand - i.e., monetary demand, both by individuals and central banks.

And you're incorrect that bitcoin has no "intrisic value". As this author explains: http://blog.oleganza.com/post/42262765318/direct-use-value-o... ------ Bitcoin network has very interesting properties that allow you to use it not only as a currency. For example, the block chain (decentralized transaction history) is designed to be extremely hard to forge and very easy to verify. This, with some crypto features, allows it to be used for secure time-stamping, proving ownership of tangible property, decentralized DNS and new ways to sign contracts without having to fully trust any one party. Some of these things are already possible using existing software, some require already planned and compatible modifications. --------

There are a great many things that are now possible with the creation of bitcoin and the solving of the Byzantine Generals' problem that were previously impossible. If that's not "intrinsic value" then nothing is.

Sam writes: "It just means that for it to succeed, we’ll need significant external buy pressure. As I wrote awhile ago, I think the key thing we need for this is people actually using bitcoin for transactions instead of speculation (and merchants willing to hold bitcoin balances). "

I think this is a very common meme about what success means for bitcoin and it's tied up with a misunderstanding of what money is; most people think money is valuable because it's used transactionally. Rather, money is valuable because it has reservation demand. An increasing level of transactional usage might increase reservation demand but it doesn't need to. On the other hand increasing reservation demand can occur even without any new transactional demand. Moldbug explained this best in his discussions on bitcoin and how money is a bubble phenomenon:

http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2013/04/bitcoin...

http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2011/04/on-mone...

Bitcoin can be "successful" even if it's not the preferred medium of exchange for most, or even many transactions. It can act as a store of value just as gold does. Except it is superior to gold is almost every way - more fungible, more verifiable, more divisible, easier to transport (especially across borders) and easier to transmit. A success case for bitcoin is that it becomes Gold 2.0. Gold's market cap is approximately 7 trillion. Bitcoin's market cap is approximately 6 billion. If Bitcoin were to replace gold as an alternatively medium of savings (say, in 50 years), its price could be hundreds or thousands of times higher than it is now without needed much, if any, increase in transactional use. Gold has almost no transactional use but it has a great deal of reservation demand.