vocatus_gate

So why does GPM suck so much then?

Oh wow, I always assumed he just defaulted to HTTP version of the site, but HTTPS was an option. But nope, there isn't even a version of the site served over HTTPS. In the year 2018.

If that's the worst that happens I'll take it.

That's pretty insightful, actually. I mean, outside of Kraken (terrible), who are Coinbase's (legal/compliant) competitors? Basically no one.

Agree with almost everything you've said, and unfortunately if past experience is anything to go by, they'll crash/go down during the next big price dip.

Nope. Their revenue model isn't my problem. uBlock Origin enabled for 99.9% of sites I visit.

My bad, I think I grabbed the wrong URL and can't edit the post any more. vinw's comment referencing Void Tools is the correct url.

reddit.com/r/tronscript will remove all the OEM and Metro bloat, kill off Cortana, and disable the telemetry "features"

Reddit.com/r/TronScript also works well for killing off Cortana and the telemetry "features"

For what it's worth I'm another person who's been using "Everything" for years and love it.

https://reddit.com/r/TronScript will kill off Cortana and all the telemetry "features"

There IS a magic search tool, I've been using it for years.

https://everything.en.softonic.com/

"Everything" is a fantastic lightning-fast system-wide search that's tiny and can run standalone.

FWIW Palemoon (https://www.palemoon.org/releasenotes.shtml) is a fork of Firefox that attempts to maintain a power user environment and negate some of the ridiculous changes Mozilla rolls out. Updated pretty regularly and works more or less as well as vanilla Firefox. I've been using it on Linux Mint and Windows 7-10 for years now.

Premine/"founders reward"? Another scamcoin doomed to failure.

I mean, the value of bitcoin has gone from ~$7 in 2011 to almost $5,000 today. So a momentary dip due to bad news isn't that big a deal in the grand scheme of things.

Honest question, what do you do for event planning? Literally the only reason I still have FB is because my friend group uses it heavily for coordinating hikes, camping trips, etc. I'd love to delete it if it weren't for that.

By that rationale, why would anyone buy a flatscreen TV today, when they know they could wait a few months and it would be a lot cheaper?

The big mystery to me is whether Bitcoin is the Myspace or Facebook of digital currency. Only time will tell.

Maybe I'm cold-hearted but I believe in something called "personal responsibility." They chose to throw their money into something they don't understand, now they get the consequences of that decision. You can be sure they'd be all about accepting the consequences of their decision if it panned out the other way and they made a fortune. I feel zero sympathy.

Gwern actually replied elsewhere in this thread mentioning that paper. It's a great read.

Zcash has opt-in private transactions which are computationally very expensive. So, they do work, but being opt-in they might as well not exist. In my opinion full privacy must be mandatory for all participants for it to be truly effective. Monero is currently the only project that fits this criteria.

Just chiming in to say your username gave me a chuckle. Big Monero fan as well.

Hey gwern, it's you! I remember reading "Bitcoin is Worse is Better" and forwarding to quite a few friends. Great article, really like the pieces you've written over the years. Keep up the good work.

Wasn't anonymous OR untraceable, which is clearly evidenced by the fact that we all know about it and can see it on the public blockchain.

With the fees they charge, and the volume on the exchange, I don't see how they couldn't be making a profit? Of course I'm not a business guy, might be something I'm not thinking of.

Security is like Safety: if it is put on a holy pedestal then everything else suffers.

I always say "Safety Third."

The link goes "monero-project" on Github, that's why.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I get what you're saying but it doesn't really matter. If they don't want to lose a lot of customers (and revenue) they'll offer a withdrawal option.

This whole pipe dream of little Jimmy running his full Bitcoin node on a raspberry pi in order to protect against the big bad bankers/government/whatever was never based in reality. Bitcoin was always destined to end up centralized. Either in the form of powerful companies controlling it (development, Lightning Network, etc) or large concentrated groups of miners.

Whichever path it ends up going down, centralization is guaranteed.

No, what I'm saying is by refusing to allow withdrawal of the "new" coins, they put themselves in the position to be sued because clients lose potentially a lot of free money.

It's an opportunity cost: if I missed out on some big trades while the price was high due to their decision to withhold the keys, I'm rightfully annoyed by it.

Of course leaving legality out of it, it'd also just be a smart thing to do because it makes their customers happy and maintains goodwill. Coinbase is fairly respected in the crypto space and making their customers happy during a turbulent period can only be good for them in the long run.

They will capitulate eventually. Same thing happened with ETH/ETC.