yaa_minu

Happy New Year! Just as many people here have said already, HN is really one of the few places online where one can find thoughtful discourse devoid of flame baits. Many a times, I read the comments before even following the links if at all. I've learned so much through HN. I would say that not only technical knowledge but also my English has improved massively all thanks to this forum.

This sounds good and funny at first but how is this different from this scenario: A software engineer pays a dentist for servicing his teeth and he turns around to pay the software engineer to build an appointment system for him? Clearly lots of value was created so unless this is to illustrate that GDP calculations can't filter out bogus transactions (bogus according to whom), I can't really make sense of it...

This problem seems completely unrealistic because then you simply buy through the countries they haven't banned? What you're suggesting will only work if said country is a global superpower that can bully every country to tow the line. At the end of the day, no country can produce all the "critical" things it needs so this national security defence of restrictions on trade seems like a very unwise insurance to buy in almost all cases except maybe your millitary supply chain.

Understood but in the case of crypto, you don't hand over your private keys to third-parties unlike cc where you have to hand over every information about your card in order to make payments. Thi is the main vector of stolen credit cards so I fail to see this as a serious problem.

In what ways would a consumer be screwed if crypto payments become dominant? I'm genuinely curious

I know hn is not crypto friendly but crypto payments don't have this problem at all. Many of the heurestics used to defend against these problems too end up hurting we those in emerging markets including even cards issued by local banks. I hope merchants adopt crypto based payments more and more as an alternative.

Heard about this way too late, but I'll consider attending!

Happy new year from Ghana. I hope we find the wisdom, courage and strength to deal with the challenges of this year better than we did last year ♥♥

This is a bit of a tangent but I think reports like these strengthen the argument against electronic voting. There's basically no way of building a secure electronic voting system that can beat the security and auditability properties of old school pen and paper voting.

Most people don't know that you can bookmark a tweet. Besides the like button is more convenient

>>Can it ever recover if people lose trust in it? Since that's a major part of what's keeping such a system going.

This is the most important thing MMT supporters seem to ignore. Fiat money is a confidence game and all the theories will be pointless if people lose trust in the money.

Location: GMT-0

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: Not immediately but maybe in the future

Technologies: Python, Django, Rest Framework, FastApi, Tornado, Node.js, Typscript, Javascript, Postgres, Redis, Mongodb, Celery, Elastic Search, Docker

Email: afolanyaaminu {at] {g-mail} [dot] [com]

resume: https://tinyurl.com/lci9JBJB

github: https://github.com/yaaminu/

I'm an all-round generalist backend engineer with over 4 years of experience and have spent the majority of my career working in fast-paced startup environments. At my current company, I've played a critical role in the design of among many things, the architecture of our inventory, payment processing and billing system. Before joining them, I helped build data aggregation tools and a monitoring dashboard for a UK based Non-Profit that focuses on early childhood development. More in my resume.

Can you please expound on this a little bit more?

Yes, in the short term, neither gold nor even gold is a good hedge. Cash will always be superior in the short term unless we're in a hyperinflationary situation. However, on a long enough time scale, gold and bitcoin can function as great inflation hedges. I say this with a little bit of caution especially for bitcoin because it's only a few years old but we know for this short 12 year period that no one has lost money by holding bitcoin for more than 4 years.

Location: GMT-0

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: Not immediately but maybe in the future

Technologies: Python, Django, Rest Framework, FastApi, Tornado, Node.js, Typscript, Javascript, Postgres, Redis, Mongodb, Celery, Elastic Search, Docker

Email: afolanyaaminu {at] {g-mail} [dot] [com]

resume: https://tinyurl.com/lci9JBJB

github: https://github.com/yaaminu/

I'm an all-round generalist backend engineer with over 4 years of experience and have spent the majority of my career working in fast-paced startup environments. At my current company, I've played a critical role in the design of among many things, the architecture of our inventory, payment processing and billing system. Before joining them, I helped build data aggregation tools and a monitoring dashboard for a UK based Non-Profit that focuses on early childhood development. More in my resume.

How are they going to regulate defi?

Except this is neither a state prohibition nor about explosives.

Exchange transactions and on-chain transactions are not the same, no?

Location: Accra, Ghana

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: Not immediately but maybe in the future

Technologies: Python, Django, Rest Framework, FastApi, Tornado, Node.js, Typscript, Javascript, Postgres, Redis, Mongodb, Celery, Elastic Search, Docker,

Email: afolanyaaminu {at] {g-mail} [dot] [com]

resume: https://tinyurl.com/lci9JBJB

github: https://github.com/yaaminu/

I'm an all-round generalist backend engineer with over 4 years of experience and have spent the majority of my career working in fast-paced startup environments. At my current company, I've played a critical role in the design of among many things, the architecture of our inventory, payment processing and billing system. Before joining them, I helped build data aggregation tools and a monitoring dashboard for a UK based Non-Profit that focuses on early childhood development. More in my resume.

The US dollar for a long period of time was backed by gold and was therefore pretty stable for that period so calculating inflation over 400 years is disingenuous at best. It would be interesting to see how much value it's lost since the gold standard started to be compromised and eventually discontinued in 1971.

This is not true. Lightening network is trustless just like the bitcoin base layer unless for very very small transactions (like few cents). Channels are constructed in such a way that any counterparty that attempts to cheat can be punished by the honest partner. Of course the honest partner has to be actively monitoring the base bitcoin network but this can also be outsourced to a third-party (tehcnically called a watchtower).

That's not entirely true. Bitcoin is neither anonymous nor untraceable. governments however can't control it. They can only observe what's happening on the chain. Hope that helps.

How so? do remember that they can only do things supported by the general climate of opinion so them being in government isn't the point of contention here. It's what we as people tolerate (passively or actively) that matters. Besides, this greatly undermines the justification for anti-trust laws as they're clearly communicating to everyone that "it's OK to collude"

It's interesting that you're being downvoted but you make a solid point. People in government are no different than those not in government, we're the same human beings. To suggest that they should be able to do anything they want seems pretty backwards and quite contrary to the enlightenment ideas.

Location: Accra, Ghana

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: Not immediately but maybe in the future

Technologies: Python, Django, Rest Framework, FastApi, Tornado, Node.js, Typscript, Javascript, Postgres, Redis, Mongodb, Celery, Elastic Search

Email: afolanyaaminu {at] {g-mail} [dot] [com]

resume: https://tinyurl.com/lci9JBJB

github: https://github.com/yaaminu/

I'm an all-round generalist backend engineer with over 4 years of experience and have spent the majority of my career working in fast-paced startup environments. At my current company, I've played a critical role in the design of among many things, the architecture of our inventory, payment processing and billing system. Before joining them, I helped build data aggregation tools and a monitoring dashboard for a UK based Non-Profit that focuses on early childhood development. More in my resume.

How's bitcoin stupidly wasteful?

Bitcoin is also a protocol and there are several implementations. The same applies to the lightening protocol which has about 7 different client implementations and growing.

As usual, there are a lot of negative comments here on what seems like a good news given how bitcoin is criticized for using chinese coal-based energy for mining. Let me respond to the most popular ones I've read in this thread and hopefully, I'm able to at least get some rational skeptics to at least re-assess their priors

Too Volatile To Be a Store of Value: Volatility alone doesn't make something not a good store of value. Gold, a popular store of value is much more volatile than the US dollars but if you held gold from 50 years ago, you'd be up 37X against the dollar [0]. What makes something a good store of value is how scarce and easy to transfer both across space and time it is. Bitcoin can't be blamed for the casino mentality, it's up to market actors to use bitcoin as a store of value and from what I've observed, that's going to be the long term outcome.

Bitcoin is slow: The argument that bitcoin is slow and expensive is a fallacy. Bitcoin is a settlement layer and when evaluating the speed of a settlement layer, the emphasis should be on speed of settlement assurances and transaction finality[1]. Bitcoin being an open decentralized settlement layer makes this even more important. Comparing bitcoin to visa or sepa which don't settle instantly is disingenuous at best and ignorant at worst. If you want faster transactions, use a layer 2 solution like the lightening network which is orders of magnitude faster and cheaper than visa [2].

Bitcoin is ponzi scheme: This is a complete fallacy both in theory and in practice and it's pretty offensive to suggest that well-meaning people working hard to make finance open and globally accessible are a cabal of scammers looking to steal money from unsuspecting investors. Surely there are bad actors but that's the case in any industry.

Don't believe me? Bitcoin chainanalysis shows emphatically that the vast majority of coins that moved in this crash were new spends in the past months which shows that it's the new buyers that are selling[3], where then is the pyramid scheme? In fact, The early adopters of bitcoin are the least likely to sell. I hold bitcoin not to sell and many in my network are like me(although I can't speak for them). MSTR as an example hasn't sold a single coin, in fact they bought more.

I could go on but it's very exhausting that a technical forum is so negative towards an emerging technology with a lot of promise, it's even more disturbing that a lot of the criticisms are uninformed. We can do better.

0. https://goldprice.org/gold-price-history.html 1. https://medium.com/@nic__carter/its-the-settlement-assurance... 2. https://medium.datadriveninvestor.com/lightning-is-3-7-milli... 3. https://twitter.com/100trillionUSD/status/139660908211150438...

I think the refusal of service is less problematic than the attack where they keep mining empty blocks without including any transactions. The refusal of service will only extend the block time which will be resolved in the next difficulty re-adjustment. It also requires significant percentage of the miners to agree to co-operate.

With the empty blocks attack, they prevent difficulty re-adjustment and also get rewarded with new btc unlike the refusal of service where they'll just be wasting their electricity without any rewards and the small miners will be able to produce blocks albeit in a much longer time than ~10 minutes.

He donated a billion dollar worth of an illiquid shitcoin[0] sent to him by the scammers who created.

0. https://shibatoken.com/