Bitcoin Cash: Why It's Forking the Blockchain and What That Means - <AUTHOR> https://www.coindesk.com/coindesk-explainer-bitcoin-cash-forking-blockchain/ <comment><USER2> 8MB block means the block chain grows by 1,207,959,552 (~1GB) per day, or ~365GB per year. This means that now not everyone has the internet connection or the disk space to keep a copy of the block chain, and more control is in the hands of the miners.

I understand the reason for a larger block - it seems like it's pure profit for the miners (should we just refer to it as greed?), but I do not understand the objection to SegWit which is essential for lightning to work.

I am fairly convinced at this point that off-chain transactions as described in the lightning docs [1] is the future. The block chain cannot possibly support all the transactions, there could be millions per second if micropayments do take off, and that will most likely happen via the channels as described in the lightning docs.

[1] [https://github.com/lightningnetwork/lightning- rfc/blob/maste...](https://github.com/lightningnetwork/lightning- rfc/blob/master/00-introduction.md)

Edit: If you're not familiar with lightning, you should read up on it. The gist of it (my understanding, I am not exactly a bitcoin expert) is that if I trust someone, there is no need to announce to the whole world that I just gave my kids ice cream money, it's between me and them. And it's instant. The blockchain is used only as last resort, when one of the parties does not cooperate as as agreed.

<comment><USER3> I always thought that was a weak argument. There are currently 8403 nodes online if I believe [https://bitnodes.21.co/](https://bitnodes.21.co/), that's not exactly impressive. If a big miner wanted to take over the majority of the nodes they could probably afford to just spawn spawn 10 thousand nodes.

Not that it will do them a lot of good, what matters most is what the exchanges and other important economic entities handling bitcoins consider "the real bitcoin", having a majority of nodes won't do much.

There's simply not enough incentives for Bitcoin users to spawn a node so most people prefer to use a light wallet.

Furthermore ~400GB per year is not particularly insane, you can get a 6TB drive for less than $200 and that'll be enough to store more than 15 years worth of blockchain.

As for bandwidth it amounts to less than 14kB/s on average.

>there could be millions per second if micropayments do take off, and that will most likely happen via the channels as described in the lightning docs

Maybe, but I'm a bit surprised that so many people believe that LN will be successful when we have so little data on how it'll actually work. But I'm going to repeat myself, I already explained my concerns here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14759965](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14759965) (with some insightful replies).

In particular I can't really imagine how LN could reach a Visa-level number of transactions without having a few mega "nexus nodes" concentrating most of the open LN channels. That would give those nodes some power as they could decide who they pair with (which channels they open) which would be a big blow to the decentralized nature of Bitcoin.

The idea that every bitcoin user would each end up having a handful of channels open and we'd keep routing around the graph (with all the balancing issues it involves) to pay everything seems rather optimistic and aligns poorly with real-world incentives.

<comment><USER2> > In particular I can't really imagine how LN could reach a Visa-level number > of transactions without having a few mega "nexus nodes"

I think that's a valid point, but we won't know how it will play out until we actually get there. It seems to me that the "large block" crowd is of the "let's not go there" opinion, but I think they're resisting the inevitable.

<comment><USER4> > I think that's a valid point, but we won't know how it will play out

That sounds like a terrible plan. Let it play out on Litecoin or some other toy blockchain.

The large block crowd wants the easiest most straight forward way of scaling now. Which isn't to say other solutions aren't welcomed. But it's strange that the Core team has made it an either or.

It's weird how in certain forums there seems to be overwhelming support for blockstream - but everyone I meet in real life doesn't have that same enthusiasm.

<comment><USER5> Well some of the big blockers are against anything that'd prevent ASICBoost (which is a really fun/neat thing, look up the details if you haven't.) That does cast some suspicion on the purity of their motives. But I think the slightly-larger blocksize (8MB) for now is quite reasonable, and the lack of even 2MB size is really indefensible.

<comment><USER4> I don't know much about ASICBoost - but if the reason for changing the PoW algo is because of the US patent system.. then let the US patent system catch up, not the other way around. Bitcoin wasn't designed so that American miners have an equal opportunity.. Who comes up with these ideas

<comment><USER5> Parents aside, I understand AsicBoost encourages empty blocks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Do I have this right? Some miners want to increase blocksize, keeping Bitcoin in line with its original "peer to peer" nature, and thus are going to do Bitcoin Cash, with 8MB blocks to start.

Others want Bitcoin to become a settlement layer, and certain backers have said that $1000 tx fees would be great, since that means BTC won as a settlement layer. This kills the peer to peer aspect though, and end users would rely on offchain third parties to actually get transactions done. This group has fought to keep small blocks, despite recent congestion and increasing fees. The argument is that increasing blocksize can't solve all problems so why even start, and that increasing it even a bit would somehow prevent regular people from validating the chain.

Complicating matters a bit is that some miners have an optimised way of mining, exploiting Bitcoin block header layout to get an optimisation during hash calculations (AsicBoost). This is a 20% advantage but also encourages mining occasional empty blocks. AsicBoost is incompatible with many suggestions of changing the Bitcoin protocol, giving economic incentives to object to such things. This muddies the water.

On the other side, companies have invested a lot into becoming clearinghouses (Coinbase) or inventing ways to do offchain tx (Blockstream) casting doubt on their intentions of killing P2P and making BTC just for settlements.

It's not clear to me why an increase to 2 or 4MB wasn't done though. Perhaps to force the issue?

<comment><USER6> Everything you said is correct AFAIK.

> It's not clear to me why an increase to 2 or 4MB wasn't done though. Perhaps > to force the issue?

Yes, and it seems also out of spite. They could have increased to 2MB in order to avoid the horrible congestion on the network for a couple years. Once that was in place, they could have continued the SegWit work.

In fact, originally, everyone was in support of SegWit. Even the big-blocks camp (we can see that from the New York Agreement, where virtually the whole industry supported both big-blocks and SegWit). The only reason so many like Bitcoin Cash are against it today is because the debate has become emotionally-charged and us-versus-them. SegWit is an all-around good idea.

But the Core developers held out from a blocksize increase because, once they had declared that going from 1MB -> 2MB would be the end of the world, the network would become "centralized", etc, they didn't want to walk it back and simply compromise.

IMO, this is the main reason the ecosystem is migrating to Ethereum. It's not because of the Turing-complete scripting that is possible on Ehtereum, it's because development has been a lot more sane.

Despite the problems they've had (e.g. the DAO), the Ethereum ecosystem is more diverse and professional. They rationally discuss problems and make tradeoffs. They encourage alternate implementations, whereas the Core folks have engaged in baseless fear tactics to ensure theirs is the only implementation on the network[0] (and not talking about protocol changes-- simply alternate implementations of the same protocols and consensus rules).

I think unless these leadership problems are addressed somehow, Bitcoin is going to fade into obscurity as others, like Ethereum, lead the way.

[0] [https://web.archive.org/web/20160316061949/https://blog.conf...](https://web.archive.org/web/20160316061949/https://blog.conformal.com/the- bitcoin-consensus-red-herring/)

\---

EDIT: Corrected "Bitcoin ABC" to "Bitcoin Cash"

<comment><USER7> I'd like to comment about something I realized when reading your post. About the difference between the Bitcoin development/community and the Ethereum one. If you want to completely oversimplify it, the Bitcoin community appears to be full of fear, anger, attacks and competition among themselves. While Ethereum seems to be compromise, inclusion, discussion, working towards a greater goal. You see a change proposed, and one developer comments that they think it's a bad idea for certain reasons. Then after a month of discussion he will come back and say that, yeah, I was wrong, it's actually a good idea.

The recent multi-sig wallet hack was due to some bad refactoring by one of the developers on the Parity node/wallet team. Gavin Wood wrote a post about it, and instead of blaming his employee, he blamed himself, that he didn't put enough security into the Solidity language itself. And then he proposed some changes to make it safer.

There definitely was some ugliness with the ETH/ETC fork and controversies, but now we have pull requests from ETC developers that help improve ETH.

There seems to be a lot less ego in the Ethereum developer community. The fighting inside the Bitcoin community leads to attacking other communities too. Whenever there is a setback or hack or just the Ether price drops a bit, the threads are full of Bitcoiners coming in to laugh, attack, 'concern troll'. But you rarely see the reverse. Usually the attacks on Bitcoin come from the people who think all cryptocurrencies are a scam, they target everyone equally. Of course there are exceptions, there are amazing people in Bitcoin and horrible people in Ethereum. I'm just making a broad generalization on the feeling someone gets when reading and talking in their communities.

It's no wonder that Ethereum has the largest developer interest, it's just a really nice place to work.

<comment><USER6> Exactly. To make an analogy, consider what would happen if the president/congress appointed an incompetent fool as the chair of the Federal Reserve. The whole world would lose confidence in the dollar, and another currency would take over.

This is why I agree with Mike Hearn that the "Bitcoin experiment has failed"[0]. In fact it already did so in late 2015.

He makes technical arguments there which you could debate (some of his technical arguments have been shown to be misleading[1]).

But I think where he hits the nail on the head is that Bitcoin is now simply a circus. Unless the community can be united again, it won't last.

The Reddit censorship, DoS attacks, "scaling" conferences where solutions are not allowed to be proposed. It's childish, and almost shocking that people have stood behind their ridiculous behavior for so long, when they are on the verge of changing the world economy.

[0] [https://blog.plan99.net/the-resolution-of-the-bitcoin- experi...](https://blog.plan99.net/the-resolution-of-the-bitcoin-experiment- dabb30201f7)

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14833567](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14833567)

<comment><USER8> I rarely comment on Bitcoin these days, although I do still read things about it from time to time. I realise we're mostly in agreement, but on the technical arguments I'd like to briefly defend myself here - the arguments I made were not misleading or dishonest in any way. It's rather the post you link to which is.

No particularly special Bitcoin knowledge is required to figure out why, just careful study of that post with a critical and analytical mind (and not the mind of a "fan"). I wasted far too much of my life dealing with people Peter Todd had deliberately confused back in those years - it's a Sisyphean task that simply never ends if you let it - so I don't wish to write out a long rebuttal now, especially as I don't know you. But see if you can figure it out. Like I said, you don't need me to explain if you study things carefully.

<comment><USER6> Thanks! I will certainly re-read it.

As I said to Peter Todd in that thread, I'm a neutral observer and a fan of both of yours. Having been a programmer for over a decade, it's a shame that even someone like me can get so lost in the rhetoric of this debate.

Thanks for all your blog posts, I point people to them all the time. My greatest wish (something I tried to communicate to Peter Todd) is that Core would write some thoughtful, clear, well-argued posts like yours.

But I suppose it doesn't matter, because as we both agree, the experiment has already failed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Javascript developer: "We like to constantly replace all our frameworks every 18 months"

Cryptocurrency developer: "Hold my beer"

<comment><USER10> Bitcoin actually rarely changes, which is why this is a big event. You're probably thinking of all of the shitcoins/ICOs that come out nearly every day - make no mistake, those are a cash grab.

<comment><USER11> This is only a big event if you choose to run the BitcoinCash software. If you stick with Bitcoin-core you aren't even going to notice that a thing happened.

<comment><USER12> It matters for the ability to convert BTC to other currencies (like USD), right? If I'm understanding this right, an existing bitcoin is now valid in _both_ the BTC chain _and_ the BCC chain, and presumably the world isn't going to let you sell the resulting BTC for its previous value _and_ the resulting BCC for its previous value (since the two sales would now be transactions on two different chains). So unless BCC fails completely, the market value of BTC will be reduced by the market value of BCC, which seems like a thing you'd notice.

<comment><USER13> Yes, this is right, but it appears that the value of the original coin and the forked coin don't correlate with one another too strongly after the fork. I mean here that it appears that the market value of BTC will not be reduced by the market value of GCC, in such a manner as you suggest. The less popular coin after the fork certainly is less valuable, but after the fork, the two values follow their own destinies, unrelated to one another.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Something I haven't seen in the comments yet: it's a realistic possibility that the Core team will make a change to Bitcon's proof-of-work, with the explicit goal of shutting down miners' efforts to implement the "2X" part of Segwit2X (a block size increase).

So while disaster has been avoided for now, and Bitcoin Cash is unlikely to garner much support, they could become the longest chain within a year or two if they keep at it. As the Bitcoin Cash developer said in the article:

> If the Segwit2x agreement fails to implement the 2x part, which is not > entirely unreasonable, and only ends up being being basically SegWit without > the 2x, many miners will likely defect to Bitcoin Cash.

He's right. The Core-versus-the-world battle is far from over.

<comment><USER14> > He's right. The Core-versus-the-world battle is far from over.

Proposals from the core development team have widespread support from businesses and exchanges [1].

Saying it's bitcoin core versus the world is a tad bit hyperbolic.

[1] [https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Segwit_support](https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Segwit_support)

<comment><USER6> Yes, SegWit has always had widespread support.

But what I would call "most of the industry" supports a block size increase, in addition to SegWit[0].

As I said in the parent comment, rather than making a compromise with this huge portion of the community, Core has discussed changing the proof of work algorithm in order to shut them out.

I don't think "Core versus the world" is hyperbolic at all.

EDIT: To add to that, remember that Core had to propose a soft-fork which risked a chain split in order to force SegWit into activation. Many were holding back support for the promise of a block size increase. That is why SegWit is now going to lock in: because the New York Agreement folks rallied together, compromised like adults, and agreed to implement both SegWit and a block size increase.

[0] [https://medium.com/@DCGco/bitcoin-scaling-agreement-at- conse...](https://medium.com/@DCGco/bitcoin-scaling-agreement-at- consensus-2017-133521fe9a77)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Still wrapping my head around the Bitcoin ecosystem, but listened to an interview of Nick Szabo by Tim Ferris where Nick pretty explicitly indicates that increasing the block size isn't a good idea and shouldn't even be a debate. He makes it sound like anyone in the "know" understands this.

What is the argument for the other side?

A Reddit post has the quote here, but I recommend the whole interview.

[https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/6fhmge/nick_szabo_...](https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/6fhmge/nick_szabo_theres_an_obsessive_group_of_people/)

[https://tim.blog/2017/06/04/nick-szabo/](https://tim.blog/2017/06/04/nick- szabo/)

<comment><USER5> Satoshi said blockchain size isn't an issue, and the solution is to not care about how big it gets. For this guy to pretend this is some super advanced thing mere mortals can't understand and shouldn't talk about is obscene.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Reminder:

You can monitor [https://www.btcforkmonitor.info](https://www.btcforkmonitor.info) to see when the forks take place.

(The site was discussed in [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14809259](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14809259))

</comment><comment><USER17> This is not surprising. The miners (or I guess I should say "some miners") want to retain their power by keeping all transactions on-chain in Bitcoin Cash, but I think at the end of the day a coin only has value if it has wide acceptance in the community, mainly including the people who actually use it for transactions. I think Bitcoin Cash will fail, but in the short term people will try to see how far "greater fool theory" will go by selling their Bitcoin Cash coins while still holding on to their bitcoins on the main blockchain.

<comment><USER4> > want to retain their power by keeping all transactions on-chain in Bitcoin > Cash

Exactly what power is that? The power to collect smaller mining fees?

Honest question - what's the status of Lightning? Core promotes it as the solution to scaling and it's essentially a page on github. Litecoin already has Segwit and no one is using Lightning. Am I missing something here?

<comment><USER18> Lightning implementations exist and are fairly usable (although I've found there is some disagreement on e.g. public key format for peers). Check out the following:

* Lit: [https://github.com/mit-dci/lit](https://github.com/mit-dci/lit) * Eclair: [https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=fr.acinq.eclai...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=fr.acinq.eclair.wallet) * lnd: [https://github.com/lightningnetwork/lnd](https://github.com/lightningnetwork/lnd) * lightning-c: [https://github.com/ElementsProject/lightning](https://github.com/ElementsProject/lightning)

Do these projects have the nicest UX? No. Is it fairly trivial to hook up a shiny UI to their RPC interfaces? Yes.

It's going to take a bit to roll out the infrastructure necessary, but a 1.7 MB block size is good enough until then. Especially if miners stop using ASICBOOST and mining near-empty blocks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> _Another difference is the project says it will support multiple implementations of its software, a move that 's not surprising given the criticism that Bitcoin Core's software is too dominant on the bitcoin network._

What does that mean exactly? Bitcoin being open source and anybody being able to connect to the network means that anybody can fork the client if they want to, doesn't it?

After all that's exactly what this Bitcoin ABC fork is doing.

<comment><USER19> Yep. You're right, it doesn't mean anything.

What they're trying to say is they'll support multiple implementations of the software on the same network (unlike Bitcoin ABC, which is a fork of the software _and_ a fork of the network).

But Bitcoin already supports that too. There is bitcoin core, bitcoin knots, bitcoinj, btc1, bitcore all running on the same network.

<comment> TD-Linux I think they also may be referring to some Bitcoin Core authors recommending against other implementations - the concern is if the implementations contain an error in the consensus code, they could accidentally fork off, and potentially lose funds for the user. For similar reasons, Bitcoin Core builds reproducible static builds and recommends those, the minimize the chance of behavior divergence.

But you're right - it's merely a suggestion from a portion of the developers, and it certainly doesn't stop anyone.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Related, I posted recently a step by step guide on moving bitcoin out of an exchange (like Coinbase) to your own wallet.

[https://hackernoon.com/how-to-move-money-from-coinbase-to- yo...](https://hackernoon.com/how-to-move-money-from-coinbase-to-your-own- wallet-2507aef1f717)

Here is why you need to move from Coinbase to your own wallet before Aug 1st: [https://keepingstock.net/move-your-coins-out-of-coinbase- to-...](https://keepingstock.net/move-your-coins-out-of-coinbase-to-a-wallet- that-you-can-control-before-aug-959ea4cd625a)

</comment><comment><USER21> >Indeed, the cryptocurrency is currently trading at $461, meaning it's worth about 18% of bitcoin's current price of $2,568, in an already-open futures market.

This statement needs a lot of asterisks added to it imho.

BCC has been trading at $600K USD volume in the past 24 hours [0] compared to Bitcoin's trading volume topping over $600M USD in the same time period.

BCC futures have only been trading on a single, unpopular exchange, that does not allow withdrawal of the coins being traded until only after the fork takes place.

If you can send them BCC to trade before the fork, I fail to see why you can only cash out after the fork.

I'm all for Bigger Blocks, but claiming that BCC has 18% support of the community based on that single price valuation is extremely misleading imho.

From a volume standpoint, I would argue that it has less than 1% support of the community at large.

[0] [https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/bitcoin- cash/](https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/bitcoin-cash/)

</comment><comment><USER22> Chains splitting off is a very interesting phenomenon. Just like with Ethereum Classic splitting off Ethereum, the value of the original chain can be divided into two, albeit unequal, parts. The process may even create new value - though I suppose it might just as well destroy value.

What I've also wondered about though is multiple chains combining into one. Does anyone know if this has happened before?

I believe there is a strong analogy here to how company stock can evolve, when companies are either split out as separate entities, or merged into one, respectively.

<comment><USER23> Multiple chains that have diverged in the past can never join together. Unless you want to double the amount of total coins in the network. Its technically possible if two different chains wanted to merge they could decide on which block they will merge at, but there is the huge issue of agreeing on an exchange rate between the both old coins to the new coins.

<comment><USER24> From a strict ledger of transactions metaphor of the blockchain they could be joined without double value but it'd require that all blocks from both chains were strictly disjoint sets of transactions and no account overspent when combining both chains. On a more real technical level though the protocol doesn't have a way to have two parent blocks even if the two chains satisfied the conditions to avoid double spending.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> One important detail that this article is missing is that the proposed fork forces a new sighash. This is important because it prevents a replay attack.

[https://steemit.com/bitcoincash/@bitbizke/bitcoin-cash- imple...](https://steemit.com/bitcoincash/@bitbizke/bitcoin-cash-implements- strong-replay-protection)

</comment><comment><USER26> I hold a small amount of Bitcoin today (in my own wallet, not in an exchange).

How do I access my Bitcoin Cash coins after the split? Is there another wallet I need to install?

Also, is there any news on what exchanges will trade Bitcoin Cash?

</comment><comment><USER27> This whole thing is actually really straightforward if you evaluate it from the perspective of governance. In bitcoin, miners run software and the software they run controls the performance of the network. Miners therefore control the future software state of the network.

Anything that moves transactions off of the network or decreases the number of miners queried per transaction is therefore antithetical.

If you are a miner, lightning and segwit just hurt you. The only way you'll allow them is if you believe that to do otherwise would slay the golden goose.

Edit: Source: I run a crypto hedge fund.

<comment><USER28> The counterpoint to this (not that I necessarily disagree) would be that 2nd layers solutions add new value to the network, and thus add value to a Bitcoin transaction. This is very likely to occur to some degree (e.g. micro- transactions and fast retail transactions that Bitcoin can't do), but will also cannibalize some on-chain activity.

Also, altcoins present a real competitive risk; failure to maintain an advantage over them will see network value approach zero.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> This should be very interesting.

It's quite possible that this fork is negligible for awhile. But because parties such as Core will likely refuse to let the segwit2x part of segwit happen [1, many others], if the miners follow through on their promises, then this could be real entertaining to watch if the larger miners start switching to BCC during this later period.

Just like when ETH split into ETH and ETC, it seemed as if almost everyone dumped their ETC coins as quickly as possible. But contrary to what most predicted, the chain ended up having real value. It seems like quite a few Bitcoin holders are planning on doing this as well, although many are being more cautious this time around and holding their BCC instead.

You don't want to sell your stash of the next Bitcoin, just in case you're wrong. These things are impossible to predict for normal investors.

[1] [https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Segwit_support](https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Segwit_support)

<comment><USER30> > You don't want to sell your stash of the next Bitcoin, just in case you're > wrong

If you think that the price will first crash and then bounce, you might want to sell your stash and then buy it back at a lower price. To keep the price up it wouldn't be enough to have many who wait and see; you also need lots of buyers for all the BCC that will be sold by those who have BTC and will want to get something out of their BCC as soon as possible.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> I've got some stored in a client called bitcoin-qt, which I haven't opened in years and I expect would take months to catch up with the block chain as it is. Should I be worried about trying to shift them before (or after) the fork? Am I likely to be tied into which ever fork the bitcoin-qt maintainers support? Should I be trying to transfer to a paper wallet before the fork?

<comment><USER32> If you haven't opened it in years, _do nothing_. Wait for the dust to settle. _Then_ you can decide what to do with it; whatever you have in that wallet will still be valid on both sides of the fork.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> So... were I a bitcoin holder at the present time (I'm not) then I'm potentially going to have those same bitcoin on two chains? So depending on what value is held in either chain this could be a huge financial boost?

Unless of course this tanks the system entirely, but that seems unlikely.

<comment><USER11> Most likely the sum value of each token is not going to be much different from the pre-split value of the original token. Or if it is, it means that people on both sides are relieved and optimistic about this technique for conflict resolution, and really do see it as value added.

If you care about one token over the other, the best thing to do is let the dust settle, then sell all of your non-preferred token for the preferred token. Financially, this should not set you back even if you prefer the minority token - you just end up with a bunch of them, and the total value of your wallet is still about the same.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> This is going to be a failed attempt of starting yet another altcoin. Just because this carries the "bitcoin" name doesn't make it any more special.

<comment><USER11> It has special meaning to people frustrated with the stubborn refusal from bitcoin-core to raise the block size. Bitcoin has two major factions, and this is more or less a peaceful way for them to split out.

I'm hoping it decreases the overall level of conflict, as both groups will be able to get what they want here.

<comment><USER35> The comments here (which overall are measured and reasonable relative to elsewhere) lead me to believe that this "us vs them" combative mentality will continue. It seems as long as there are two chains, supporters of one will still be trying to attack and hope for the demise of the other, even though I share your hope that the opposite will happen.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Question: according to Coin Dance[1], SegWit will lock in around 14 days from now. Will the max block size be what the SegWit code says, or the 2MB that SegWit2x has chosen? There is a majority of nodes running Bitcoin Core, but a majority of miners that run SegWit2x nodes. So what will happen?

[https://coin.dance/blocks#proposals](https://coin.dance/blocks#proposals)

</comment><comment><USER37> What do you think the exchanges will do here (aka Coinbase) [Yes I know you should pull all your BTC off...].

If there is a hard fork, are they just going to wait until the dust settles and then give people access to both coins? I.E. BCC would magically appear in your account. Or do they seriously intend to _not_ support one of the chains and just have all their users holding BTC worth X% less?

<comment><USER19> > What do you think the exchanges will do here (aka Coinbase)

Here's what they say: [https://support.coinbase.com/customer/portal/articles/284421...](https://support.coinbase.com/customer/portal/articles/2844217-uahf- uasf-faq)

Notably:

> Coinbase will not support the new blockchain or its associated coin.

<comment><USER38> Coinfloor however says that they'll support Cash if it gains traction.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> It's the culmination of a years-old debate. Looking at both arguments in a positive light, Bitcoin Cash wants to stick to the original idealistic vision of Bitcoin, and is offering a temporary solution for it. Bitcoin wants a better solution, and is ready to make some ideological compromises in exchange for growing the chain faster and making it easily usable.

Idealism vs pragmatism.

<comment><USER25> I don't think there was anything about the "original idealistic" vision of bitcoin that was explicitly against secure off-chain tx. Rolling back segwit is shooting yourself in the foot because your enemy told you that it was a bad idea.

Who would want tx malleability?

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> Keep in mind, that there's an big amount of propaganda going on in the comments and a lot of selective arguments floating, so don't take a single comment for an absolute truth. (including this comment)

One thing is for sure, that there are many dynamics at different levels in conflict around this situation.

</comment><comment><USER41> So if I have coin on, say, coinbase, what should I do? Should I withdraw it to a wallet before August 1, so I can access both Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash?

<comment><AUTHOR> I would not keep coins sitting in coinbase either way, so the decision is easy. Move it off. If you aren't planning on selling anytime soon then do it to a paper wallet or get a Trezor or the like if you want to actually use your coins.

But don't trust any third party with your coins, especially Coinbase which isn't sharing the private keys with you.

<comment><USER42> Absolutely not. Keeping coins on coinbase means on the split you have your normal balance, but coinbase keeps your bitcoin cash balance.

Take your money out of an exchange, it should not be kept there in the first place! If you don't own the private keys, you don't own your bitcoin. If it is on coinbase, you don't control it, you are just asking them for permission.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> Why don't they just go make their own coin? Nobody is going to have confidence in a currency if the threat of forking is constantly over it's head.

</comment><comment><USER44> Lets keep the blockchain protocol in the mind for a second. Now, given that bitcoin is born due to some problem with banks that the creator felt, what can the banks do at best?

They can create a bank that cannot control printing of money by cryptographically publically proving the held amount and all transactions, backed by proof-of-work as a proof that they are revoking the rights to change their own books. How would such a bank look like?

It would look like BitcoinCash(currency)+Viabtc(interface of the bank)+Bitmain(guards)+this particular dev group(sales) all of them owned by JihanWu. This is a prelimn form of the ultimate bank of the future. Epitome of centralised money.

Will it succeed? Well for most people when they are asking this ques they are asking "will it rise in price?". Well I know there are shit ton of shitcoins that trade in the market, and this here is something that is the best form of something historically considered useful vs a group of people who are saying history was wrong and wanting decentralization but this group feels lost in this group noise of speculators.</comment>


Ask HN: Best startup or business podcasts/interviews? - <AUTHOR>

I was working out at the gym today and I realized just how much dead time I am wasting when I could be learning something. Instead of listening to music I can learn more about business and marketing.
So I wanted to know: what are your favorite sources for audio business knowledge? A series of podcasts? Interviews? Audio books?
Maybe we can all find something new to listen to during out free time. <comment><USER2> I'll stick my head out and endorse Andrew Warner's stuff on <http://mixergy.com>

He has a mixed reputation on Hacker News (<http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=AndrewWarner>) because of his "dubious" past business, but his interviews are good. I only listen to about 20% of what he puts out, but what I do consume I find very compelling.

</comment><comment><USER3> Venture Voice is awesome, there some 50+ hour-long podcasts. <http://www.venturevoice.com/>

</comment><comment><USER4> Stanford's "Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders" podcast might interest you. The quality's uneven, my favorite is Steve Blank's (customer development) talk. Mitch Kapor and Shai Agassi were pretty interesting as well.

</comment><comment><USER5> I just finished listening to 'how to get rich' by dennis felix, which is a good light, humorous book. Take everything with a pinch of salt, but mixergy.com has some good stuff. Ecorner.stanford podcasts are all pretty damn good, harvardideacast and knowledge@wharton are interesting but not to the same level. Can also recommend venturehacks and venturevoice podcasts for customerdev/marketing entrepreneurial stories.

I listen primarily when running or at gym, killing two birds...

</comment><comment><USER6> I just listened to "Secrets of Self-Made Millionaires" ebook by Brian Tracy. You can find it on iTunes. Short and a fun listen.

</comment><comment><USER7> iinovate: <http://iinnovate.blogspot.com/></comment>


Golf in China Is Younger Than Tiger Woods, but Growing Up Fast - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/14/magazine/golf-in-china-is-younger-than-tiger-woods-but-growing-up-fast.html?hp&_r=0&pagewanted=all <comment><AUTHOR> All in all, the child athlete training regimens here don't sound all that more narrow or rigorous than what other nations have done for their Olympic aspirations in other sports...but the OP is particularly interesting, I guess, because it seems to be fueled by the upper-middle class acting out of their own initiative, rather than just a top-down mandate. It's as if golf is the new race for those who would otherwise want their children to be famous surgeons and engineers.

The abandoning of school just to practice golf is...off-putting...at least there's the consolation that there's huge money in professional golf, unlike all the other niche Olympic sports (weightlifting, field events) that nations invest in just to rack up a raw medal count.

Also: obligatory section that directly relates to HN-type discussions:

> _A few years ago, American golf academies seemed poised to flood the China > market. But several famous ones that opened branches in China — run by golf > luminaries like David Leadbetter and Cindy Reid — have closed, often after > disagreements with local partners. It's a pattern any foreigner doing > business in China would recognize: Chinese firms tend to nudge out their > foreign partners once the technology has been transferred and the local > company has built up its own strength and know-how._

</comment><comment><USER2> My only observation of golf is how it is neat trick to create apparently more valuable real estate out of otherwise nearly valueless and featureless land by building a golf course. Can't build a beach, can't build a mountain, can't build a real lake without a real river, but a golf course, yes, we can build one of those.

China seems overdue to fall into permanent Japanese-style economic stagnation. Maybe we can flog their economy to death with overpriced golf course housing developments.

</comment><comment><USER3> Golf in China is crazy expensive. In the US, there are generally places to play for ~$40 a round, in fact there are two courses in NYC accessible by subway for that price. In China, the cheapest I could find was ~$150/round.

I wonder if the Chinese public will be interested in the PGA once this generation is playing on the tour. The sport is just so inaccessible to the public, that it is possible none in China will care about their success.

</comment><comment><USER4> Growing fast by cutting trees

</comment><comment><USER5> golf is an arrogant sport to begin with. it will be even more arrogant in a culture where a billion people compete for space.

<comment><USER6> What's arrogant about it?

<comment><USER7> probably referencing the fact that it consumes alot of resources

takes alot of green spaces that could be turned into parks, only lets a few people use them

depending on where the course is you consume alot of resources watering the course

have to be fairly well of to get any use out of a golf course

not saying I agree, but I'm guessing thats the argument,

(had a gf that laid out roughly that argument)

<comment><USER8> [http://hyperboleandahalf.blogspot.pt/2010/04/alot-is- better-...](http://hyperboleandahalf.blogspot.pt/2010/04/alot-is-better-than- you-at-everything.html)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How do you monitor API fraffic/performance? - <AUTHOR>

Hey HN,
At our startup we've just released a new version of our API (REST, web-based), and folks are finally signing up to use it. Unfortunately, we've neglected to set up any kind of traffic or performance monitoring of our API specifically. Here are some of the problems I'd like to solve:
* An new API client emails me, saying that a particular API call isn't working. I'd like to be able to go into this magical traffic logger and see precisely what calls this client has made, to what endpoints, at what times, and what we responded with. * We release a new endpoint. We've tested the endpoint and feel confident in it, but still, we'd like to ensure that it's working the way we thought it was going to work in production. We should be able to go into this traffic logger, filter by the endpoint that we want, and look through the logs manually, and ensure that everything looks reasonable. * I'd like to be able to track the performance of endpoints over time. I'd like to see statistics about error rates and response times, broken down by endpoint.
Here are the services that I've considered:
- 3scale/Mashery: Though it seems to satisfy my requirements, these services offer a whole suite of things that we don't need and wouldn't want to pay for, like monetization and authentication. Also, I'm slightly sketched out by the API proxy part of Mashery -- I don't want our API to be dependent on Mashery being online. - Loggly/Splunk: Maybe this is the time to jump to a big boy logging solution? Right now all our logs just live on our app servers. Perhaps I could just log some information about requests, and set up fancy filters and such inside the app itself. - New Relic: I believe that New Relic can satisfy these requirements if configured properly. One downside is it seems to be crazy expensive.
Anyways, I'd love some feedback. Have any of you tackled this particular solution, and what have you done to solve it? <comment><USER2> With 3scale, there's a free version + the traffic doesn't pass through us. The paid version start at very low cost for your own domain for the developer portal and active documentation ([http://wwww.3scale.net](http://wwww.3scale.net)).

<comment><AUTHOR> Cool, thank you!</comment></comment>


How not to handle mass SSL certificate revocation requests - <AUTHOR> https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/mozilla.dev.security.policy/wxX4Yv0E3Mk/jx6r9jlPAwAJ <comment><USER2> Wow, Trustico majorly fucked up. I had to go back and read from the top to understand the whole situation, but damn, they had SSL private keys being generated and output in plaintext into the user's browser on their site... on pages with 3rd party javascript files (some from advertising companies) being loaded in. The keys were "compromised" the moment they output into the browser in other words.</comment>


Show HN: Flattehn: A Chrome extension to hide points / users until you've voted - <AUTHOR> https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/hahhhdmfdgfiehpgljfiichmokfpkbpg

<comment><USER3> Two ideas:

1\. put it on github, so people can continue developing it easily, under a free license, during your finals :)

2\. Especially in back-and-forth comment threads, it would be useful to know who is replying to whom, or to be more exact: whether the same people are in a conversion or whether someone new joins in. I would suggest running a hash over the username + story_id and putting a colored box or shapes in place of the username. That way, a username is reasonably recognizable within a story, but not across stories, and you can identify participants in a discussion at a glance.

<comment><AUTHOR> I wish there were a way for submitters to pin info to links... my repo comment will be buried soon.

Anyway: <https://github.com/Groxx/Flattehn>

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Why do we each have a name? On a website, it is so readers can associate what a commenter is saying to what that person has said before. Any community where people are going to encounter each other more than once has a use for names.

Here, look, patio11 just said the following: "Trust me on this: no. I used to have ABingo [yadda yadda]" [1]. Because it's patio11, I _do_ trust him more, at least on this topic. And when he mentions ABingo, yeah, that's right, he has an A/B testing package he made for himself, that he opened sourced to people.

When someone I know is a maker talks about the domain in which they make things, they have more credibility to me. This is not celebrity worship (I have my own gig, thanks), it's just paying more attention to the people I find interesting.

Hiding names and points with a Chrome extension is a cool hack, but there's no way I'd ever want to use it myself.

[1] <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1996587>

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Reason for its existence: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1991973>

I hope you like it! Let me know here / on its page if you have any requests. Work on it is likely to stall for a week or two while finals roll through, but I fully intend to make it more flexible in the future.

Want a FF / Safari extension? Let me know, I'll consider it, though it'll have to wait for a bit. I haven't made extensions for either.

</comment><comment><USER5> In my opinion the only interesting advice comes from people that "been there, done that". I don't need to read any self-help crap from people that tell you how something is done without actually having done it. Sometimes they are right and their tips are valuable, but more often than not they are just writing about trivial things or nonsense.

I don't like people that worship say "pg" and take his words as holy truths. But when pg says something I'm more likely to listen to him than to an unknown person, because he has a track record.

A nick-name (and the authentication behind it) is the only credibility indicator for me. Therefore I'm certainly not installing this extension.

Sometimes something will sound like good information, but that doesn't mean it is good information. At least a high-karma nickname means the person posting it is putting his hn-reputation on the table. Now that may not be much, but it's as good as it gets.

</comment><comment><USER6> Hmm, I don't know, I think I see people tend to vote if they think a comment's score should be higher or lower than it is. For example, unoffensive but unhelpful or off-topic comments never seem to make it to -10 — most people seem to make sure the comment ends up at 0 or -1. This isn't because slightly less than 50% of those who read it disagree, it's because everyone thought it needed to be at 0 or -1.

Right?

<comment><USER7> They never end up at -10 because HN is implemented that way. If the score is lower than -4 it _displays_ -4, but the real score could be lower.

<comment><USER8> I believe the point is that people tend to leave those comments at zero/-1 rather than downvoting them further. That has nothing to do with the -4 limit.

<comment><USER7> I see a lot more comments at -4 than at 0/-1. YMMV.

<comment><USER8> Certainly. I was just trying to clear up a possible misreading.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Good idea, but I suspect the sort of person who'd install this is the conscientious type who wouldn't vote prejudicially anyway. I hope I'm wrong but it feels like selling handcuffs to criminals.

<comment><AUTHOR> heh, interesting analogy.

My top-level comment here has the line of discussion which led me to make this, which does make some sense. If pg were to comment here, regardless of what he said, would you be more likely to vote him up over someone else who said the same thing? Names / numbers have pretty strong subconscious effects on our behavior - the purpose here is to eliminate that effect, so non- prejudicial voting by those details isn't just _attempted_ , it's _achieved_.

However minor of a gain that may be. To each their own :)

<comment><USER9> pg is a bad example for me as I don't know and have never spoken to him so he doesn't get undue upvotes from me ;-) But I get your point, as I'm more likely to vote up someone I perceive as a friend because I actively want to read what they say - but I'm also "cool" with that. I'm more bothered about people _down_ voting people they don't like, but I don't do that and the people who do, I'm not sure they're mature enough to use your extension.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I didn't see an obvious way of looking at the source code for those not using chrome, so maybe you have this already, but you should not hide points for negative comments.

I hate seeing negative non-spam comments that simply don't match common opinions, and I always mod those back up. That's one time where you do want to know how many points before deciding if to vote.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'll add that to my todo-options list. I watch out for comments like that too.

Currently, you can click the icon in the address bar to reveal everything (v0.9. If you've got an earlier one, force an extension update: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1996581>). And for negative-voted comments in particular, there's always the grey-ness of the text - <USER2> matches how far below 1 they are.

edit: can't figure out how to get source from .crx either... if you want, I could email you the raw zip, or gist it, or something. Only jquery is minified, and the rest is small & simple.

<comment><USER10> Don't email it to me - post a link in the description of the extension.

<comment><USER11> When you download .crx rename it to .zip and open it.

<comment><USER10> If you're not on chrome it doesn't give you any sort of download link, so you can't even look at it.

<comment><AUTHOR> save-as the install link. (edit: whups, you're right. annoying...)

I'll also be putting it up on GitHub soon.

edit: it's up: <https://github.com/Groxx/Flattehn>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I really like this. I'm already reading the content of posts more (as that's all there is) as opposed to involuntarily being swayed by extreme points and high profile user names. I'm not sure I'll use it all the time but it has already had a beneficial affect on how I interact with HN.

</comment><comment><USER13> I think it would useful to have this implemented as a actual feature on the site.

If we can't make a decision without knowing how other people feel, I think that's a disadvantage.

At its worst, the karma system helps fuel a popularity contest. At best, it helps interesting comments rise to the top. This system stands to discourage the first, and encourage the second.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> For anyone interested, the github repo: <https://github.com/Groxx/Flattehn>

</comment><comment><USER14> Cool!

It would be good if there were a way to reveal the author without upvoting. Maybe in doing so, the arrows would hide?

<comment><USER15> Agreed - I think the biggest problem I see with the user name being hidden unless you click on the link is that it makes the comments a bit harder to follow in big threads (especially where people end up being referenced by name).

<comment><AUTHOR> I've got to add a page-specific button, to turn it on and off. Poking at it now, as I hadn't thought of that purpose :) I _think_ that requires "tabs" permissions though, which warns everyone it has access to "your entire browsing history".

edit: yep, it will. I'll get on it, though.

edit2: think I should have the switch _just_ show names? Or the points as well?

edit3: Another idea: double-click on text, and if it matches a name, it'll reveal and highlight. How's that sound?

<comment><USER14> You could embed a link into the page and/or add a keyboard shortcut.

Another idea: don't censor the author & the user's own posts.

<comment><AUTHOR> Your own should be left alone (are they hidden?). Author I think I'll leave for a future version, where I'll have loads of options (what to hide, when, etc), and I'll add that to the list.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Good work for making this. I see a few hypotheses here on how behaviour will be changed...I'd like to see another post in a about a week or so on peoples' experiences using this extension.

One request: I'd like to hide my own karma.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'll add it when I get options running, which unfortunately needs a pretty big change to make this more flexible. The source is up, you can see it's pretty simple.

Did you want your _comments_ ' points to be hidden, or your points at the top of the page (or both)? I sort of liked when it showed your ratio instead of points, I could get that going as well.

<https://github.com/Groxx/Flattehn>

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> What good are points if people can't see them?

<comment><USER18> They affect where the comment shows/ranks on the page.</comment></comment>


Docker 0.11 is the Release Candidate for 1.0 - <AUTHOR> http://blog.docker.io/2014/05/docker-0-11-release-candidate-for-1-0/

<comment><USER2> So I just started playing with docker today at lunch and have to say I am super impressed with it. I'm excited to play around with it and learn more. I am planning on using it help manage many versions and configurations of a certain daemon to test my application against. Do Dockerfiles has any sense of inheritance? I am trying to think of the easiest and most maintainable way to set this up. Should I create a base image of a working install for each version I want to test with and then have a Dockerfile to make the configurations changes for each test case? It seems like I would get into the place where I would have a Dockerfile for a test case and then I'd have to make copies of it for each version and change the "from" line.

</comment><comment><USER3> Looks good, particularly the support for host networking; this will be a boon (I think) for those of us using Docker to run lightweight VM style containers which we wish to have directly accessible on the network by other machines/devices, and resolved via an existing router's DHCP/DNS.

</comment><comment><USER4> There's additional discussion here:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7712070](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7712070)

</comment><comment><USER5> Sadly, no more mentions of earlier promised BSD Jails support for Docker 1.0.

<comment><USER6> The focus for 1.0 is to offer the APIs necessary to customize Docker in every way you need - including custom sandboxing backends (like for example BSD Jails).

There is now an execution driver API (which was indeed planned for 1.0), and now it's a matter of the community contributing and maintaining a BSD jails driver that works :) There are several efforts underway, but we (the core developers) can't contribute and maintain every driver possible, it would be too much work.

If you're interested in participating come say hi on #docker-dev on Freenode, we can help you get started :)</comment></comment>


MIT's Newest Invention Fits All the Furniture You Need in One Closet-Sized Box - <AUTHOR> http://www.citylab.com/tech/2014/05/mits-newest-invention-fits-all-the-furniture-you-need-in-one-closet-sized-box/371778/

<comment><USER2> I wish I had saved a link or a reference to a story I once read about some very interesting small houses being used for temporary housing at some European university (I think it was in Europe). Something had happened that made it so they could not use one of their big housing units for a couple years, so they brought in these small houses.

They were ridiculously small, somewhere around 100-200 sq ft I think, but looked quite livable. They were split into two rooms. The smaller was the bathroom. It had a toilet and shower. There was no separate shower stall--the whole bathroom was the shower.

The other room was the kitchen/bed room/living room/dining room. The bed, dinning room table, stove, and couch all folded out.

You could reasonably comfortably have 3 guests over for a study session or to watch a movie with you on your flat screen TV.

These things looked comfortable enough that I wondered how they were going to get the students to move back into the housing unit when it reopened.

There's a lot you can do in a small space if you are clever.

</comment><comment><USER3> This looks like a joke/puzzle from Douglas Adam's game, Starship Titanic. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pZabKeSHmW0#t=900](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pZabKeSHmW0#t=900) <\- starts at 15 minutes</comment>


Slack IRC and XMPP Gateways Are Closing - <AUTHOR> https://get.slack.help/hc/en-us/articles/201727913-Connect-to-Slack-over-IRC-and-XMPP <comment><USER2> This is really unfortunate. I've used the IRC gateway feature over the years to lurk in multiple Slack groups and looks like this will be the end of using (social) Slack groups for me.

Their web interface has just.. not cut it for me. Too resource intensive and not enough control over how/when I am interrupted. This was why I gravitated to the IRC gateway in the first place. Oh well.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> This is the MOTD when connecting: [https://i.imgur.com/A8XP0eK.png](https://i.imgur.com/A8XP0eK.png)</comment>


It-ebooks.info - Is this legit? - house9-2 http://it-ebooks.info/

<comment> house9-2 A friend just sent me this link - wondering if this is a legit site?

At the bottom it states "Reproduction of site books is authorised only for informative purposes and strictly for personal, private use." - not sure what that actually means

maybe these books are published under creative commons license? anybody familiar with this site?

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm going to go out on a limb and say no, that it is not a legit site. Sorry if that's a let down.</comment></comment>


Snowshoe hares found to routinely feast on their own dead - <AUTHOR> https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/adorable-snowshoe-hares-found-to-routinely-feast-on-their-own-dead-study <comment><USER2> I had a traumatic experience as a child. My family went to visit some friends. They thought my brother and I would like to see their new baby rabbits. We were sent out to the backyard on our own. When we got to the cage all the babies were dead. The adult rabbits had chewed off their heads. I'm now 42 and I can still see the bloody baby rabbit carcasses.

</comment><comment><USER3> My understanding is that damn near anything (at least among mammals) will eat meat if they can get it in bite-sized bits. Ruminants may not have the teeth to tear chunks off a carcass, but they'll crunch up baby birds given the opportunity.

Someone else has already done all the hard work of converting plant matter into the stuff that meat is made of, so it's high-density protein with very little metabolic cost. Even an herbivore would be foolish to pass that up.

<comment><USER4> I find it astonishing that the disease risk doesn't lead to a strong aversion to having contact with other animals for any purpose other than reproduction. This is especially true for cannibalism.

In the wild, antibiotics are not provided. Worms can get in the heart, lungs, and brain. Even external parasites are risky. Disease means death.

The situation is slightly more understandable with some of the dedicated meat eaters. Vultures for example, have unusually strong stomach acid to deal with the infectious agents. Snowshoe hares and ruminants don't have that.

<comment><USER5> Clearly the evolutionary (survival and procreation) benefit of getting the easy protein is greater than the risk of acquiring a disease.

Your point is probably valid for cannibalism, which is why it's rare, and even rarer outside of young. The latter not yet having had an opportunity to acquire disease.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> And mother rabbits will eat any babies of theirs that die during birth. Is this news?

<comment><USER7> It is to me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> OT - two weeks ago I was snowshoeing in the Assiniboine park (border of Alberta and BC) for photography and saw their fresh tracks. At first I thought it might be a wolf. Their front paws were as big a my hand - Photo:

[https://twitter.com/salimmadjd/status/1084260050615455744](https://twitter.com/salimmadjd/status/1084260050615455744)

<comment><USER9> Down here (more toward Texas), we have "jack rabbits" that are the size of some kids if you hold them across your chest. Huge. Look them up in DuckDuckGo images.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> It's just protein, if the alternative is to die there's no question

<comment><USER11> Mad rabbit disease!

<comment><USER12> Rabbititis!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Reminds me of Killer Rabbit of Caerbannog.

<comment><USER14> _I warned you_

[https://youtu.be/XcxKIJTb3Hg](https://youtu.be/XcxKIJTb3Hg)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> By pure coincidence I had a similar discussion with my friends yesterday. One claimed that even the most carnivorous animals (sharks, he claimed) eat some vegetables (up to 20%, though that sounds like a lot to me). Wolves apparently like to eat the stomach of their prey first, which in the case of usually herbivorous prey, is likely to contain a herbivorous diet. I read before that deer like to eat the occasional bird.

If true, it seems like there are no true carnivores and herbivores: everybody is omnivorous to some extent. It's just what you get the majority of your diet from.

</comment><comment><USER16> The broader point is that animals thought to be purely herbivores are in actual fact 'opportunistic omnivores': they'll supplement their diets with animal biomass (including bones) if given an opportunity. This is especially common animals that are unable to get complete nutrition or caloric intake from their existing diet.

Another interesting concept is 'placentophagy' (mammals being observed eating their own placentas post pregnancy).

</comment><comment><USER17> On the one hand, this doesn't mean that it would be beneficial for a herbivore to eat meat all the time - clearly, they evolved a mostly herbivorous diet that meat provides a protean supplement to.

On the other hand, it does show that a voluntarily purely vegetarian diet is an artificial human creation. Yet, humans impose all sorts of artificial strictures on themselves and live to tell the tale.

<comment><USER18> > On the other hand, it does show that a voluntarily purely vegetarian diet is > an artificial human creation.

That's an odd comparison. For the hare, if the choice is "starve in the middle of winter" or "eat meat", it's not surprising they eat meat. I think to say that a "voluntarily purely vegetarian diet is a purely human creation" is true not because of the vegetarian part, but because of the "voluntary" part. Most humans have the luxury of being able to choose a large part of their diets, while many wild animals are usually in a constant state of semi-starvation.

<comment><USER19> Food security for humans was first achieved by the US around 1800.

<comment><USER20> It's unfortunate you're being downvoted, because you are broadly correct. The US was the first country to achieve a sustained, structural food surplus nationally. By 1920 it was saving millions of Russians from starvation via its immense food surplus. Millions of Europeans fled their homes over decades to come to the US because of food scarcity and starvation back home. During most of the 19th century starvation was still a common problem across nearly all of continental Europe. All the way back to the late 18th century, the British soldiers and Hessian mercenaries that were raping and pillaging their way across the colonies couldn't believe the general prosperity that New Englanders were enjoying (such that they had any cause to be rebelling; see the book 1776 by McCullough). Until the last 40 years, the US had typically been far wealthier and with a far greater national food surplus than most of Europe. Even now, the US GDP per capita is typically 50-60% higher than the EU GDP per capita. The Irish, Germans and Italians that fled Europe to the US did so because of extraordinary poverty and famine. The standard of poor in the US today is greater than 10x higher than the floor on poverty in Europe, which you see in countries like Moldova, Ukraine, Bulgaria, etc.

"Irish, German, and Scandinavian immigrants arriving during the 1840s and 1850s made up the second wave of European immigration, fleeing famine, religious persecution, and political conflicts."

[https://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/european- immigrants-...](https://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/european-immigrants- united-states)

<comment><USER19> You can also see this in height statistics - US heights increased steadily from 1800-1900.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Jared Diamond (without explicitly naming sources) claims that cannibalism in humans (with the specific example of Polynesian peoples) arose from the lack of plant-based protein (they had no native cereals with non-negligible protein components) such as wheat, barley, or quinoa; and that this element was shared between most societies with cannibalistic histories.

<comment><USER22> Cant provide sources because I lost my written notes but Diamond's claims are often based off of cherry picking and iirc there are a lot of canibalistic societies which don't back this claim up. This is a hammer and nail issue. He wanted to push his environmental determinism everywhere and a bit tol far.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Reminds me of one of my favorite urban animal experiences. There was a squirrel atop a nearby wall, and I had a little bit of trouble resolving its outline. It was holding onto the rear half of another squirrel, so the body outline was all confused. Processing further, I see that my little friend had a very bloody face. After we make momentary eye contact, it nonchalantly goes back to eating its lunch.

Squirrels are so cute! Who _doesn 't_ love eating cute animals? Even cute animals agree!

</comment><comment><USER24> Anthropomorphization is bad. Reminds me group selection studies, where scientists expected animals to self regulate and reduce amount of breeding in bad conditions, while in fact it just caused cannibalism.

</comment><comment><USER25> Might as well get protein where they can.

</comment><comment><USER14> Mandatory killer rabbit:

[https://youtu.be/XcxKIJTb3Hg](https://youtu.be/XcxKIJTb3Hg)

</comment><comment><USER26> If it's alive kill it!

If it's dead, cook it!

If it's cooked, eat it!

(unless you are a rabbit: several steps become optional)

<comment><USER26> Downvote if you want, but I find that what my grandparents taught me is in a funny way still appropriate here :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Humans generally do the same when they're starving.

<comment><USER20> Fortunately humans always have a choice and don't function by strict instinct:

[https://www.amusingplanet.com/2018/08/the-scientists-who- sta...](https://www.amusingplanet.com/2018/08/the-scientists-who-starved-to- death.html)

<comment><USER28> Always ... except for those who are lost at sea, or are victims of wilderness plane crashes, of course. And then there's vengeance, but I digress...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Only the Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch can stop them!

<comment><USER30> Only if they can count to three.

<comment><USER31> Five is right out.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> so Monty Python was right after all ...

</comment><comment><USER33> Oh, it's just a harmless little bunny, I told you....</comment>


Programming Servo: My own private runtime - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/programming-servo/programming-servo-my-own-private-runtime-8a5ba74c63c8 <comment><USER2> Building and using Servo as a library has been a huge pain. I've been waiting for improvements since [https://github.com/paulrouget/servoshell](https://github.com/paulrouget/servoshell) was abandoned

<comment><USER3> Same here, I thought it would have been ready for that long ago as they touted embeddability as a prominent goal, but every few months I try again, and have to give up again.

So far I'm using WebKit while I wait for libservo to be ready.

The article however is a very good explanation (as far as I can tell) of how the SpiderMonkey Javascript interpreter is linked to Servo. What I need in the first place is the layout and rendering engine, but hopefully this article will be useful for me in the future.

<comment><AUTHOR> I personally haven't much work on embedding Servo, however I do think there has been some progress the last few years, Servo is being embedded in a Hololens applications(see [https://github.com/servo/servo/tree/master/support/hololens](https://github.com/servo/servo/tree/master/support/hololens)), as well as a Magicleap application(see [https://github.com/servo/servo/tree/master/support/magicleap](https://github.com/servo/servo/tree/master/support/magicleap)).

The embedding API used can be found at [https://github.com/servo/servo/tree/master/ports/libsimplese...](https://github.com/servo/servo/tree/master/ports/libsimpleservo)

I think it's a pretty low-level embedding API, so perhaps not comparable with embedding Webkit(I have no experience with that either), it does seem to do the trick.

<comment><USER2> The problem with libsimpleservo is that it only supports one view.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I think this article should contain some references and comparison to the deno rutime, [https://deno.land/](https://deno.land/)

<comment><USER5> ...why? Servo and Deno are doing very different things.

<comment><USER6> The article doesn't try to use any feature of the web platform, but tries to piggy back on it to provide their own runtime functions. WebIDL could be a overkill in such a scenario. Usage of WebIDL means there is a bindings generation process using a Python script during compilation of servo.

I could imagine one can define all the functions available in the JS runtime using the same facilities that are used to define the intrinsic objects like Array, Number and so on. Their implementation could use an event loop provided by Tokio.

Comparison with Deno is interesting and could provide interesting insight into how SpiderMoney can be used to build such a runtime. I tried to build one at [https://github.com/ngsankha/rustynode](https://github.com/ngsankha/rustynode) couple of years ago, but abandoned due to other commitments. The implementation is far from optimal.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah I agree Deno is an interesting comparison, thanks for pointing it out I wasn't aware of it.

On the other points, I would still stick to my suggestion of using WebIDL, at least for Spidermonkey, since you'd have to otherwise write all the glue code yourself. The bindings generation is worth it I think.

Re using Tokio to run the event-loop of the VM, I would probably just use a native thread, like I suggested in the article.

Tokio is really like a runtime for Rust, meaning that if you use it to implement a runtime for say Wasm, then you're trying to run your own runtime within someone else's runtime. Not saying it can't be done, just not how I would do it.

I think Tokio on the other hand could really shine if used in a separate "networking component" that, in a Deno-like server-side runtime, would handle all incoming requests/connections, and then have the "runtime" run in a separate component(and process, if you want some isolation). Let's say you wanted to run different VM's, isolated from each other, you could run each in it's own process, and the networking would also be done in its own, or the "main", process of the overall engine.

Incoming networking requets could then be translated into events or other kind of calls into the user-code running on an isolated VM, which itself is probably best run using a simple event-loop running on a single-thread.

It's similar to what Servo does actually, where there is a "net" component to do the networking(although it's client-side networking off-course), then there is the "constellation" component that is like "one ring to rule them all" main component, and you have the "script" component actually running Spidermonkey VMs each on their own event-loop(let's say roughly one per "tab", plus one per worker).

So the JS/Wasm running on Spidermonkey is "async", like you can await a promise and so on, however it's actually driven by a single-thread, with other components, like "net", running "in-parallel" of "script", in their own process, and using whatever threading or async runtime they need.

So for example, if you do a fetch in JS, then the script component can keep running other stuff in it's task-queues in the meantime(in a single-threaded, one task at a time, fashion), while the net component will do the fetch over the network, and as "stuff happens" related to this fetch, net will enqueue tasks back on the event-loop where the fetch originated, resulting in events/promise resolving on the VM, and executing of handlers in JS.

So not only do "net" and "script" have to run in separate processes for security(spectre) and robustness, they also have to run in parallel of each other, and according to a very specific specification(see for the event-loop of script for example: [https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/#event-loop- processin...](https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/#event-loop-processing- model))

So I guess you could run a tokio runtime in both processes, but it would actually be kinda overkill(Servo does uses Tokio in the "net" component, and that's obviously a good fit since it's doing the networking).

So I'd say the trick would be clearly separating the networking, from the VM(s), probably use something like Tokio in the networking component, and to implement the event-loop driving the VM, I'd just use a native thread, one per VM.

This article is part of a collection of articles going into the architecture of Servo, if you're interested: [https://medium.com/programming- servo](https://medium.com/programming-servo)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Social Networks Without the Networking - <AUTHOR> http://measuringmeasures.blogspot.com/2010/01/social-networks-without-networking.html <comment><USER2> I think social networks should be solving 3 of my searches: 1) who should I start a company with? 2) who should I hang out with? 3) who should I make babies with?

Right now, they pretty much are failing at all of the above.

<comment><USER3> I agree that they are failing at all of the above.

I disagree that they are attempting to solve any of those problems.

There are websites aimed at helping you with #3-- but that's a pretty narrow type of "social network".

For questions like #1, there are sites such as this one, and relevant blogs, where you can discuss business ideas and find like-minded folks.

For questions like #2, you're probably better off walking away from the screen, and mingling in the flesh.

It seems to me that "social networks" are aiming at a different kettle of fish altogether, which is to reduce the friction in maintaining certain types of casual relationships.

<comment><USER2> Right, and the question remains, are they after the right goal? I think the three I outlined above should be the real goals of a social network -- getting me in touch with the people that I don't know but should know.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I think there's some confusion about what "networking" (as a verb) might mean. In the "old school" sense, networking meant "expanding one's network of contacts"-- the object being to collect contacts that might prove fruitful down the road.

"Social networking", on the other hand, may not share this objective. Personally speaking, I use Facebook to stay in touch with my (existing) network of friends, and have absolutely no interest in "friending" people I am not actually, in real life, friends with. The value to me comes not from expanding the network, but in nurturing the existing relationships.

<comment><USER4> No. I get it. I just don't care.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I use facebook for social networking. Social as in socializing.

That is, I meet people in a social setting, such as a house party, a the choir I sing in, people that visit my roommate, or even potentially just random encounters in a public place. Then, I establish contact via facebook for future social activity.

In many cases, these people are already friends with someone in my friend list. This means that tracking them down is very easy. (It is also easy for them to track me down, if they so desire). I look them up on facebook, friend them, and the next time I am interested in inviting them to something they are easy to reach.

That's what networking is, by your own definition: interacting with people in your fields of interest. And that's what facebook is good at. The list of dormant collections that is a typical friend list is still an excellent tool for establishing new contact, even if you don't technically 'meet' for the first time online.

The purpose of social activity is not research, or content sharing. The purpose of social activity is to connect with other human beings and share life, because this makes us happy.

<comment><USER6> However, that's not a universal approach to socialization. For example, I don't view my online socializing as a direct extension of my offline socializing. They have different roles.

I don't need to follow my sister on facebook, I just meet up with her to talk. I really don't need to see what statuses by strangers my long-time friends "liked", I'd much rather just meet up with them in some interesting place for a vacation. And if I am connected to them online, I have no use for a notice that a friend is DJing at such and such club on the other side of the earth in 5 days, but I'd like to share music we are working on or books we are reading, so I connect with them on platforms designed to share those things.

Online socializing also provides the opportunity to be exposed the ideas, work and output of people who I couldn't meet any other way. As a result, when I'm online I seek out strangers who are working in domains that interest me, read what they say, check out their work, discuss things with them and collaborate on creating things.

So, in my situation, I relate to the author's approach: I seek out content. I strongly prefer discussion-centric platforms like forums and the only social networks I use heavily are either domain-specific, like goodreads or linkedin, or content-centric, like github, soundcloud, vimeo and even, to some degree at least, twitter. Friendster, Myspace and Facebook have never been interesting to me.

It's just a different perspective. Different people simply have different interests and differing socialization patterns. Personally, I find these differences fascinating.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> There are two kinds of networking I do:

 _Business_

This is mainly done old-school with cell-phone numbers. And has always a strict reason like supporting an application.

 _Private_

Nowadays it's just twitter, jabber and facebook. The first one is used for the internet-savvy communities but not too technical. The second one is for the most technical community, mostly they don't have a twitter-account here in Germany. The last one is mainly for real friends I stay connected with.

</comment><comment><USER8> It seems like, at this point, Facebook (at least revenue/usage wise) is more and more about social gaming than networking.</comment>


Computer compromise leads to theft of bitcoins valued at $500,000 USD - <AUTHOR> https://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=16457.0 <comment><USER3> I now understand that BitCoin is actually an experiment to teach people basic economics and why many of today's rules and institutions (e.g., banks) exist. Sorry for criticizing it. BitCoin is an awesome educational tool.

<comment><USER4> What prevents you from setting up a BitCoin bank?

More interestingly: are the features that let you set up a dollar-denominated bank features or bugs?

<comment><USER5> Banks are regulated by law and have the funds insured by FDIC. i.e even if the bank goes belly up, the FDIC will make sure the depositors get the money. With BitCoin, how do you trust a bank? Even if it's just by word-of-mouth trust, eventually the bank will be taken over or run by non-trustworthy people. The threat of federal prison keeps most real banks honest. Nothing like that exists in the BTC world.

<comment><USER6> Banks also inflate the money supply using fractional reserve banking, effectively diminishing the value of every other dollar in active currency.

If you think that is honest behavior, then bury all your money for 10 years and then try to spend it. Suprise! You've been robbed.

If I'm not mistaken, there is an eventual limit on the amount of bitcoins that can ever be created.

<comment><USER7> That's not entirely a negative... We're better off that people are incentivized to not bury all their money. Deflationary spirals are no fun.

<comment><USER6> I agree that circulation of currency/commodities is necessary for a healthy economy. I don't agree that we're better off having value stolen from our currency by inflating it for the sake of "incentive".

How many joe sixpacks actually spend their money as quickly as possible because they're afraid of inflation? Hopefully it never comes to that.

> Deflationary spirals are no fun. $5/gallon of gas and $7/gallon of orange > juice are no fun either.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'm a BitCoin skeptic with the best of them. But this is breathtaking.

That's one thing about bitcoins. There's no FDIC or SIPC watching your back. It's the wild west with train robberies and stage coach heists in all.

<comment><USER4> It's interesting to consider why that is. I could start a BitCoin deposit insurance company, for example: you'd pay me X% of your balance each month, and I'd make you whole in the event of fraud.

Of course, I'd want all sorts of regulations on how you set this up; I might sell you some kind of extra-secure system for managing your balance, for example. At that point, the market would basically be putting a price on BitCoin security.

Obviously, my deposit insurance scheme could go broke, if I price it wrong. That's theoretically a risk with SIPC. It's not a risk with the FDIC, since that is ultimately backed by the government's ability to print an unlimited amount of money.

So it might make more sense to say that deposit insurance is a feature of unstable currencies: if anyone's dollar-denominated debt can be 100% guaranteed by the government, then the value of _everyone's_ dollar- denominated assets will face an inflation tax to pay for this guarantee.

<comment><USER9> Maybe I'm missing some detail of the scheme you're proposing, or have some fundamental misunderstanding of bitcoin, but if bitcoin is anonymous and untraceable, how do you prevent insurance fraud?

<comment><USER10> You could only insure bitcoin that is stored in a wallet that you control (i.e. act as a bank).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Seems fairly inevitable: if I sat by the window of my house, talking to anyone who walked by about having a large cache of money, which it was clear was also in my house... well, I would probably want to do one or all of: (a) invest in some quality locks; (b) stop talking about it; (c) keep my money somewhere else

</comment><comment><USER12> Correct me if I'm wrong, but given the P2P nature of bitcoin, wouldn't it effectively give someone interested in malicious activity a list of target IP addresses? In theory he could set up his own P2P, watch for large transactions, and then he has an ip running a bitcoin client who (potentially) has a large wallet.

Then it's just a matter of running common exploits (or new ones, if you have them) in order to access the machine and the bitcoin wallet.

<comment><USER13> There's no way to know which IP address corresponds to which bitcoin address.

<comment><USER14> The point is that all of the IP addresses recorded in the network transactions _are_ Bitcoin users.

<comment><USER15> No, you can make a receiving address without _ever_ connecting to the network. Current clients won't do so (that I'm aware of), but it's entirely possible.

The main reason though is that new addresses aren't broadcast. The only time you know their location is when they send, and _only_ if you were watching their traffic / the traffic of all nodes they sent to.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> [http://blockexplorer.com/address/176LRX4WRWD5LWDMbhr94ptb2MW...](http://blockexplorer.com/address/176LRX4WRWD5LWDMbhr94ptb2MW9varCZP)

That's the account record of the address that supposedly stole the huge amount of bitcoin. The maximum balance I see it have is 400 blocks. Is it missing from the record or is a bitcoin block larger than 1 BTC?

<comment><USER17> A BTC "block" is currently 50 BTC, I think.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> This reminds me of the "come from" statement. COMEFROM is a long-running joke, it's a flow control statement which is intentionally confusing. It works like a GOTO but backwards. There is no indication in the area being jumped from that flow control is about to go somewhere else in the program. <https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/COMEFROM>

I think, when parts of your currency start to resemble any part of INTERCAL, you have a big problem :-)

<comment><USER18> People joke about the COMEFROM statement all the time, but isn't this was observers do?

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> This guy's experience reads like something out of a William Gibson novel. If BTC takes off, I wouldn't be surprised if the world got several orders of magnitude nastier, malware-wise. If the value of breaking into someone's machine is not merely the computer's connectivity or, worse, information to enable identity theft but _actual, untraceable value-holding currency_ , you know the incentive to compromise computers is going to skyrocket.

Are we prepared to live in that world?

<comment><USER20> What's the cyber-analog of those "driver carries no cash" signs?

<comment><USER19> Funny. More seriously, this reminds me of the difference in deterrence value between Lojack and The Club:

Lojack makes it little less likely that any particular car will get stolen but increases the likelihood that a car thief will be caught.

The Club basically says, "Go steal someone else's car."

"Driver carries no cash" is well intentioned but says, "Go rob someone who _does_ have cash." It has a local deterrent value perhaps, but is of limited value as a deterrent from robbing people who drive delivery trucks.

All of this gets me wondering? Does UPS still do COD? And if so, do they accept _cash_?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> The worst part of this is how irreversible it is. With a bank you might be able to get it back, with cash nobody can just siphon the actual paper money remotely, but with bitcoin you're out of luck.

<comment><USER22> Traceability in the real world banking institutions has its advantages. As a business owner I've once had a mistaken transactions that resulted in erroneous withdrawal of +10,000 from business bank account. A phone call to the bank and a bit of investigation fixed things and I don't think the bank was out any money either, it was just a wrong account number issue.

With bitcoin, things are not at all reversible.

Also I expect bitcoin to be shutdown because it could be a great way to fund terrorist activities. (There are major federal investments in anti-money laundering systems that monitor bank transactions, bitcoin transactions operate outside of this system and thus will be suspect.)

<comment><USER23> _Also I expect bitcoin to be shutdown because it could be a great way to fund terrorist activities._

So is cash :)

<comment><USER24> It's pretty hard to move large quantities of cash around... it's pretty easy to move a flash drive with a bitcoin wallet around.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> BitCoin has an analog in cash. Yes, it's anonymous but there are things you simply dont do with it.

<comment><USER26> The design of BitCoin only includes very weak anonymity. A medium-to-large scale network analysis could most likely break any anonymity people thought they had.

<comment><USER27> Adding Tor to the equation makes the system fully anonymous, assuming you don't leak other information.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> For a bunch of DIY hackers, I'm sort of surprised you guys are so willing to hand your money and control over its security over to the government and financial institutions. Then again, I was a computer security guy for the government and online financial institutions, so I guess I'm comfortable with my ability to protect my (very very small amount of) money, or I'm just more cynical about them.

Western Union is irreversible, and would probably have been shut down if it wasn't so well-established. Most other US payment systems are reversible, which is why you have holds on getting the money out of those systems - <USER2> want time to detect fraud and reverse the fraudulent transaction. This requirement for reversibility seeps through the system, which makes anonymity very difficult, and causes a lot of friction on anything that changes a reversible payment into a non-reversible payment, since that's where you eat the fraud. Now you know why it's hard to get cash equivalents out of the system, especially to a remote party.

The point here is that once the money is in a non-reversible network, you can accept a payment and know that it's good very very quickly. If you make bitcoin reversible, you might as well just use one of the old payment systems, where the money might disappear later (and you'll be out your privacy, goods, cash and services), or you'll be paying transaction fees based on your charge- back rates, and unable to charge more for the reversible payments than the non-reversible ones due to contracts you have to sign to be part of the payment network - and thus the non-reversible payers subsidize the reversible payers. What a racket.

As we used to say, "there's no good guys in payment processing, only bad guys and less-bad guys".

</comment><comment><USER29> Sounds to me like a BTC bank should be set up, with corresponding accounts. Instead of 'you' holds all your BTC, your BANK holds most of your BTC in a secured location, and you can make withdrawals to your account on demand.

Of course, this would effectively require an insurance corp also set up in such a fashion that integrity of the bank could be configured.

/hmm... maybe I should do this!

</comment><comment><USER30> Third sentence:

> If only the wallet file was encrypted on the HD.

Yep. Anyone who doesn't do this is stupid.

<comment><USER31> I haven't used Bitcoin, so this is an honest question - Why doesn't the software encrypt the wallet automatically?

<comment><USER32> Bitcoin is a Thesis of one Guy. Its great in many ways but in terms of Softwaredesing and Engeniering at least the Client sucks. I've the Auther had knew it would be blowing up like this he would probebly have build something better.

Its Open Source and you can interact via JSON so it would be that hard to build a good client that does this kind of stuff.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> It seems to me that Bitcoin requires an actual wallet. A physical device that will store your "money" ie. verifiable account info, the way a general purpose computer is storing it now.

</comment><comment><USER34> Anybody have the text of the post available? The site's not working for me.

<comment><USER35> I just got hacked - any help is welcome! allinvain June 13, 2011, 08:47:05 pm

Hi everyone. I am totally devastated today. I just woke up to see a very large chunk of my bitcoin balance gone to the following address:

1KPTdMb6p7H3YCwsyFqrEmKGmsHqe1Q3jg

Transaction date: 6/13/2011 12:52 (EST)

I feel like killing myself now. This get me so f'ing pissed off. If only the wallet file was encrypted on the HD. I do feel like this is my fault somehow for now moving that money to a separate non windows computer. I backed up my wallet.dat file religiously and encrypted it but that does not do me much good when someone or some trojan or something has direct access to my computer somehow.

The transaction sent belongs rightfully to this address: 1J18yk7D353z3gRVcdbS7PV5Q8h5w6oWWG

Block explorer is down so I cannot even see where the funds went.

I tried restoring an earler backup of my wallet but naturally that does not work because the transaction has already been validated.

Needles to say I feel like I have lost faith in bitcoin.

Anyone have any ideas what I can do besides just jump off a bridge?!

\</comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>--- [snipping out posts that don't contribute much] \</comment><comment></comment><comment>--- Re: I just got hacked - any help is welcome! June 13, 2011, 09:05:04 pm allinvain

First thing that I noticed is that my slush's pool account got hacked into and someone changed the payout address to this:

15iUDqk6nLmav3B1xUHPQivDpfMruVsu9f

I then changed the password and proceeded to run some antivirus and anti malware scans. Some stuff was found, but they were all cleaned up and they were all in my windows user profile temp dir which I deleted all the temp files. God I can't even type properly. Sorry folks I'm a bit emotional now.

I then left another virus scanner running and went to sleep. When I woke up I check my bitcoin wallet. I leave the client running to help the network, and I notice -25,000 (and a transaction fee) gone.

Fuck, I really should've moved the coins to a vmware linux session I have running. But the question is was it already too late? Could someone had my access to my wallet.dat for a long time and now just decided to "cash out"

</comment><comment><USER36> Valued by who? Hasn't this been fluctuating like crazy lately?

<comment><USER37> No. One exchange one day.

<comment><USER38> No? I'd say a high of $24 and a low of $16.10 over the last 48 hours most assuredly qualifies as 'fluctuating like crazy.'

<comment><USER37> Man, JCP is fluctuating like crazy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> someone should make a physical bitcoin wallet device.

</comment><comment><USER40> It's not really $500,000 though is it? As soon as you exchange a small amount of that into dollars you crash the exchange and the value drops significantly. I'd estimate it at about $30,000 worth.

<comment><USER41> Can you elaborate on how to came to the discount factor you used?

<comment><USER42> He means that there isn't enough people to cash with the current rate. That is $500K.

<comment><USER41> Yes, I realize that, I'm just wondering how he came to 30k.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> ahem, read up on European history..

The Merchant trade in Europe came up with three valued things:

1\. Corporations 2\. Insurance 3\. Banks

Those three items are related to one another. While its true that due to the anonymous nature BitCoin is biased towards illegal mafia-like formation of banks and such for illegal activities as soon as legal activities start using them as trade banks, insurance, etc will form as a nature evolution.

</comment><comment><USER5> Maybe there's value in creating a BitCoin bank that will hold money for people, just like real banks?

<comment><USER44> Mt. Gox and Bitcoin Market already do that.

<comment><USER45> They're just exchanges though -- they don't offer incentives (e.g. interest) for depositing.

<comment><USER46> Since you can't manufacture bitcoins, I think guaranteeing interest would be difficult at best

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> This is why we can't have nice things.

</comment><comment><USER48> IMHO the shadiest side of the bitcoin daemon is that it discovers peers by connecting to an irc channel. Just like a typical virus botnet handles command and control. Connecting these two uses of IRC is pretty obvious, and then you get a virus that attacks windows machines running bitcoin and steals wallets.

<comment><USER30> What... That's like saying the shadiest part of the BTC daemon is that it uses computers because botnets use computers.</comment></comment>