Japanese Can Soon Pay Their Utility Bills with Bitcoin - <AUTHOR> https://news.bitcoin.com/japanese-pay-utility-bills-bitcoin/ <comment><USER2> I keep hearing about Bitcoin being used to pay for commodities, but will this actually ever scale? With a maximum transaction rate of ~3.5 transactions per second, won't any practical application of Bitcoin for the masses eventually have to be implemented by a bunch of trusted third parties operating off the blockchain and bundling transactions? At that point, we seem to be back to using credit card companies who just happen to use the blockchain for clearing transactions with each other.

<comment><USER3> There are scaling solutions like lightning network being built and the blocks are not full. Also for a cup of coffee you don't need so much security so go use litecoin or something, why not.

<comment><USER4> Why wouldn't I just use some trustful centralized solution for a cup of coffee? In fact, I myself prefer to use credit card for these, where I don't actually have to trust the payment method provider, but the payment method provider trusts me to pay the bill one month later. I don't see how bitcoin can compete on this sector, except for privacy issues.

<comment><USER5> You really do have to trust your payment method provider to protect you against fraud. You have to trust it not to committing fraud. Your payment method provider does not 'trust' you to pay the bill. They trust that they have the bigger stick and better lawyers.

<comment><USER6> >You really do have to trust your payment method provider to protect you against fraud. You have to trust it not to committing fraud.

Any major credit card provider in the US provides this with no hassle. I've had people steal my number with 4 different credit card providers and the only thing I've had to do is call them and identify the bad charges. The only inconvenience is the 3 minute phone call and waiting a week for a new card.

<comment><USER7> Which results in a high administrative overhead

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> A side note is I find it a little odd that bitcoin often gets "hate" from inside some tech circles. From a technology standpoint I was amazed because I was able to set up a wallet, set up a twitter account and get people to send me bitcoin in legal and ethical ways in a very short amount of time. People can actually tweet you "money" very easily with no hassle of setting up bank account or waiting etc. I was able to spend it on things as well. Sure its not the most convenient thing to buy most things with yet but its still very new. I am not some bitcoin advocate or anything but just the ability to do something like that I thought was very useful.

<comment><USER9> Hate? No, not from me. But I am wary of bitcoin advocates' desire for it to become widespread because it is an anti-democratic currency. Like all currencies, it's got assumptions baked into it (fixed supply leads to deflation, etc) that influence its spenders' lives, but unlike government- sponsored currencies, there's no way for its users to have a meaningful say in those decisions.

With dollars, I get to vote regularly for people, and those people appoint someone to call the shots on "how dollars work". So does everyone else (well, registered voters, but you get my drift). They don't need to be versed in printing or ACH or whatever to have their voice heard.

With bitcoin, if I'm not happy, where do I go to have my voice heard? Saying "code up your changes and get 51% of the network on board" isn't the same, not even same ballpark, or neighborhood, as "here's your ballot, citizen".

So that's my beef with bitcoin.

<comment><USER10> Isn't the only difference from "here's your ballot, citizen" that it's _actually_ fair this time, instead of cross-your-fingers hopefully fair? Shouldn't a majority vote reflect the will of the majority?

<comment><USER11> How is "the people who can buy the most hashing power have the most votes" fair?

That's the bitcoin majority...

<comment><USER7> The hashing power follows the economic majority, not the other way around.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> > The service is the first of its kind in Japan, where Bitcoin is still a > novelty in daily consumer life.

Where is Bitcoin _not_ a novelty in daily consumer life?

<comment><USER13> Wasn't there an article a few weeks ago that said bitcoin was on its last legs? Did I imagine that or did that happen?

<comment><USER14> It's died at least a hundred times by now [https://99bitcoins.com/bitcoinobituaries/](https://99bitcoins.com/bitcoinobituaries/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> What is the advantage of this? Here in Japan every creditcard is giving you some kind of bonus program and encourages you to use that card for your bills so you automatically aggregate amazon / rakuten (japanese amazon competitor) / ANA / etc points.

I mean, I guess I could exchange every month my yen into bitcoins and then pay with it, but why?

<comment><USER16> It would be convenient if you have an income or savings in Bitcoin.

Some people are attracted to using Bitcoin as a day to day currency and payments system, to reduce their dependence on mainstream banking. The "be your own bank" philosophy.

Admittedly right now Bitcoin seems like a novelty, but it will never reach wider use without small "pointless" steps like this.

<comment><USER17> _It would be convenient if you have an income [...] in Bitcoin._

Miners, drug dealers, and who else exactly?

<comment><USER6> Ransomware authors, hitmen, online gambling sites, politicians, etc. All of your favorite people are in!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Already implemented in the canton of Zug, Switzerland.

(Incidentally, this is where Vitalik Buterin, author of Ethereum, resides).

<comment><USER19> I can add Hanover, Germany to the list.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Now you can pay for electricity consumed for mining bitcoins with bitcoins.

</comment><comment><USER21> Finally a way to get the dark web marketplaces incomes flowing back into the economy!

</comment><comment><USER22> Looks like the last season of Mr Robot was predictive.

</comment><comment><USER23> * Some Japanese * Electricity Bill

<comment><USER24> The rollout map includes Kanto (Tokyo), Kansai (Osaka, Kyoto), Chubu (Nagoya), that is the majority of population in Japan: 42,607,376 + 22,755,030 + 21,714,995 = 87,077,401 out of a total of 127,110,047, 68.5%

Bigger map on homepage: [https://coincheck.com/en/blog/2353](https://coincheck.com/en/blog/2353)

<comment><USER25> You forgot Kobe in Kansai.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> > most japanese prefer it as a speculative investment.

Lol, you mean the 0.0001 percent of Most Japanese actually.

</comment><comment><USER26> I'm not sure if this is news or not.

You can pay for anything you can buy online (PayPal, Skrill and most payment processors) and with Credit Card using Bitcoin.

In fact, you can create virtual credit cards with bitcoin without any verification for amounts smaller than $2,500.

However, here is the catch: It comes with around 5-10% premium to the Bitcoin spot prices on major exchanges (Coinbase, circle, etc..)

So unless you are buying with something like Gemini (where bank transfers are free) and you are not getting any premium on the bitcoin price, this is not a novelty.

I don't know how accessible Bitcoin is for Japanese consumers; and how much it'd cost (premium over spot) to buy it. But if it is, indeed, easy; this can be huge.

If you are a heavy consumer (say $5,000 per month), 5% will make around $250/month in savings, or $3,000/year. That's something worth the hassle.

</comment><comment><USER27> can != will

</comment><comment><USER28> But why?

</comment><comment><USER29> In Japan right now and hardly anywhere seems to take card. It's a very cash focused society in my opinion, but really it's impossible to tell what would make sense to Japanese people, everything here can feel almost deliberately contrary at times; they eat KFC on Christmas day, all the locks turn anti- clockwise to open and people aren't fat despite massive amounts of refined carbs.

<comment><USER30> Really? I use my credit card for maybe 70% of my spendings. It's true you absolutely need to have cash on you for the occasions when you can't use it but I can buy a 30 yen chocolate bar in every convenience store here. Compare that to Germany where I think no supermarket takes credit cards and even to use electronic cash you have to spend a minimum amount.

<comment><USER31> Almost every German supermarket takes credit cards usually without a minimum amount. I use mine to pay for almost everything.

<comment><USER30> Oh interesting, I didn't know. A lot must have changed in the last couple years. I was just there this month and didn't notice any credit card logos at the checkouts and just assumed they still weren't accepted.

<comment><USER12> IIRC in an earlier thread about this someone said that things changed quickly in Germany once the EU started enforcing lower interchange fees.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> A friend of mine who lives in Tokyo told me that in Japan it's near impossible to transfer money from one bank to another. He told me the way Japanese people transfer money between banks was to draw the cash out in one and pay it in to another. I'm prepared to be corrected if this tale isn't true.

However, with this in mind, it seems like quite a leap from a non-electronic intra-bank system to Bitcoin. On the other hand, it may be the poor banking system that's created this.

<comment><USER33> _A friend of mine who lives in Tokyo told me that in Japan it 's near impossible to transfer money from one bank to another_

Go to any of your bank's ATMs with your ATM card and/or passbook. Select 振込. Input amount. You will be asked the bank, bank branch, and 7 digit account number of the person you are sending it to. You will then be (typically) shown a screen which shows you the fee (100 to about 500 yen depending on bank and size of transaction) and lets you adjust your telephone number or name if required for the convenience of the firm receiving your payment. Hit OK. If done within banking hours, the payment is effectively instantaneous. If you cannot follow these instructions, you can ask a teller to assist.

If you're doing the transfers between your own accounts _and_ they're at different institutions then one will occasionally see people withdraw to cash and then immediately redeposit in a second account, to save the ~300 yen or whatever.

In related news, Japan is a major Western country and banks do not communicate via couriers and smoke signals, contrary to impressions your friend may have.

<comment><USER34> > Japan is a major Western country

Um...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Here we go again, I'm learning yet another "Japan is weird/oddly advanced" thing from a non-Japanese source...

I believe all Westerners want Japan to be weird and perverted. ALL of them.

<comment><USER36> This is a Bitcoin article written for a Bitcoin news site, I don't detect any "weird Japan" vibe in it anywhere.</comment></comment>


Toxic 'forever chemical' found in drinking water for 7.5mm California residents - <AUTHOR> https://abcnews.go.com/US/toxic-forever-chemical-pfas-found-drinking-water-75/story?id=65877630 <comment><USER2> Those sure are some small California residents.</comment>


Worries Grow That the Price of Bitcoin Is Being Propped Up - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/31/technology/bitfinex-bitcoin-price.html?dlbk <comment><USER2> The somewhat ironic part is that one of the core concepts of Bitcoin is that you can't counterfeit it. You can mathematically prove how many coins you own, if somebody sends you 3 BTC then once it's been validated on the blockchain you _know_ that the money is now yours, they can't have lied, it can't bounce like a cheque

Except this Bitfinex thing shows that while an amount of bitcoin can't be manipulated or counterfeited, their actual value is relatively easy to influence _because_ it's mostly unregulated. I mean think about it, _if_ Bitfinex is lying about their dollar reserves this might be one of the simplest and most efficient scams of all time. They're literally making up money as they see fit. Hundreds of millions at a time. Just like that.

Now of course maybe they're not actually crooks and they do have the money, it's kind of a schrodinger's cat scenario at the moment. Still, the fact that nobody manages to know for sure the truth of the matter shows that they _could_ be doing it and we'd be none the wiser. People are buying and selling for million of dollars of these things, not knowing if they're trading digital dollar bills or monopoly money.

<comment><USER3> The most interesting thought to me right now is how the situation will develop if or bitfinex/tether crashes the market hard.

I am not a fan of the SEC getting involved. Taking crypto as an experiment, I think it is better for the market to take a hit and then find organic solutions. If the SEC gets involved and busts bitfinex/tether, the community loses the opportunity to become 'unbailable'. Yes , people will lose the money, but if you create the expectation that the sec will protect you as a consumer from the scams, then we will not be sophisticated to actually organically ignore scams.

What will happen next, FDIC and too big to fail institutions?

<comment><USER4> You could say that humanity has repeatedly and organically come to a solution broadly known as government and regulation.

<comment><USER5> Worked great in 2008.

<comment><USER6> It actually did. The market was on it's way to crashing harder than the great depression, but it didn't, probably thanks in some part to government being able to intervene and control monetary policy

<comment><USER7> Have you ever heard of the phrase "kicking the can down the road"?

<comment><USER8> You can play this argument ad infinitum without actually adding anything of value to this conversation.

Central banking is not perfect, but it has a better track record of stability and growth than any other system that's been tried at a large scale. Try and remember that the alternatives aren't optimal economic systems that are immune to bubbles, recessions, depressions, hyperinflation, corruption and manipulation.

If anything the Bitcoin experiment is reinforcing why we have existing regulations in place.

<comment><USER9> How do you know that it has a better track record of "stability" and "growth" than any other system at a large scale? Much of America's growth in the late 19th happened without any central banks in 1913. Most of "depressions" happened prior to that -- and there were 4 such major ones in the 19th century and many of them were directly caused by the govt policy changes -- were nowhere as severe as the Great Depression occurred after the creation of the central banking in the US.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10>
      "It's a signal to the market of what those who have
      scrutinized the situation already believe: There is a
      problem here," said Jill Carlson, a former trader at Goldman
      Sachs who now consults with a variety of virtual currency
      companies. "The dissolution of a relationship between an
      auditor and a company is very rarely a good sign that the
      company is behaving in accordance with market best practices."

When you're getting dunked on by Goldman Sachs for being unethical, you know you have a problem.

<comment><USER11> And yet they were able to print like 800 million USDT a month _after_ being subpoenaed by the US government.

Strange, no?

<comment><USER12> This is what I thought about too. So either they just thought screw it, let's make hay while the sun shines, the feds will never get us - or they are legit

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Bitcoin is a system where you can have reasonably strong trust in the ledger and absolutely no trust in any other part of the market at all. It's a demonstration in practise that pure unregulated trade in the digital equivalent of used unmarked bills leads to a broken market where literally everything is a scam, crime pays, and meaningful business cannot be transacted.

Its value is being propped up beyond this technical tinkering, by poorly informed optimism, ideological dreamers and a lot of people hoping to make hay while the sun shines, sometimes by knifing you first. It is going to bust all the way down to $0 and probably get internationally banned as an attractive nuisance.

<comment><USER14> In what way is a transparent blockchain where every transaction is recorded and fully public analogous to unmarked bills?

<comment><USER13> Way to pick out a non-central point. But the answer is that cash and bitcoins are intrinsically self-authenticating but not owner-identified and do not rely upon a credit card / bank-account facility which can be shut down by authorities if it is being misused.

<comment><USER15> Here's a thought: if you bought Bitcoin with Fiat it is 100% identifiable to you. Please learn about blockchains before you talk.

<comment><USER16> Your real identity isn't in the blockchain. You can only be identified if the identity of whoever you bought from is known, they know your identity, and they can be induced to share it, or if the transaction can be identified and you can be tracked from the transaction.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> My question is: what is the value of a Bitcoin? It looks to me like a great way to transfer currency and facilitate exchange of goods, but not much more than that.

So 'investing' in this digital currency itself does not make much sense to me, because intrinsically it has no 'real' value. I might be misinformed about the subject, in which case I would gladly like to be shown my error.

For example, why don't I invest in Yuan or the Pound instead of Bitcoins? From my perspective the only thing driving up the price of Bitcoin is the demand for it by 'crypto-investors', which is completely artificial and they are not chasing any tangible value.

Can anyone enlighten me?

<comment><USER3> I like to compare Bitcoin to Land. When people migrated over to america, land was basically worthless: there was too much of it and too few people.

As the more fertile and better located land was taken, prices started to rise. As land supply is inelastic, the price can only tend to go up as long as the demographics expand.

Bitcoin has a limited amount and even more has a diminishing supply (as coins get lost, stolen, broken). Its use case is less valuable than land but its supply way more limited.

The only thing bitcoin needs to increase price is inelastic demand. IF there is just a single use case that uses bitcoin everyday, its price will tend to infinity.

<comment><USER18> I'm sorry but your point of view could not be further from the truth.

First and foremost, land has intrinsic value. You can grow food, build shelter and have access to water. If you're very lucky there might even be oil below it. On the other hand, Bitcoin won't help you survive very long.

Second, Bitcoins can be divided infinitely. Today I pay 1 BTC for a car. Tomorrow I pay 0.5 BTC. It really does not matter how many BTCs is the maximum.

Land, on the contrary, loses value proportionnaly as you divide it. 50% of the land means 50% of food, water, shelter, etc.

Finally, Bitcoin price will never reach infinity because there is a physical limit to the real value Earth and humans can produce.

<comment><USER3> > First and foremost, land has intrinsic value. You can grow food, build > shelter and have access to water. If you're very lucky there might even be > oil below it. On the other hand, Bitcoin won't help you survive very long.

Thats the inelastic demand I'm talking about: if bitcion finds a use case where it shines above all else, even if it is something like sending money overseas, the demand will be inelastic and with diminishing supply its price will tend to be infinite.

> Second, Bitcoins can be divided infinitely. Today I pay 1 BTC for a car. > Tomorrow I pay 0.5 BTC. It really does not matter how many BTCs is the > maximum.

So can money and so can land...this is a Zeno's paradox reasoning.

> Land, on the contrary, loses value proportionnaly as you divide it. 50% of > the land means 50% of food, water, shelter, etc.

That's not true for land because the value of land is determined by the difference in fertility between lands which is something bitcoin doesnt have as each is the same as any other. But lets assume that is true for the purpose of argument: BTC does not have immediate transactional capacity, that is the limit of use. So if you want to have your operation happen you need to pay for it to happen. And moving more btc is cheaper than moving less btc. So yes, smaller amounts of btc are less useful than bigger BTC.

> Finally, Bitcoin price will never reach infinity because there is a physical > limit to the real value Earth and humans can produce.

Its a theoretical concept, much like saying that if there wer eonly 1 cup of water its value would be infinite.

<comment><USER19> Sending money overseas with bitcoin doesn't exhaust the supply of bitcoin. The bitcoin isn't consumed - it's converted from useful money to bitcoin at one end, and bitcoin to useful money at the other. While a limited supply of bitcoin would limit the throughput, the ledger calculation already does that, and at a much lower rate. So it's not as if _any_ utility immediately lends bitcoin value.

<comment><USER3> It does because transfering that money takes blocks of operations to happen, which means you cant transfer infinite amounts of bitcoin in a finite amount of time. You have a limit of how much btc you can move between addresses.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Crypto is learning all the hard lessons that banking has learned over the past 100 years. Ironic that a currency founded on the idea of transparency (the blockchain) is so fundamentally opaque at almost every other level.

</comment><comment><USER21> I'm curious how big the ramifications for Bitcoin will be if the majority of Tether tokens are proven to be fraudulent and Binfinex collapses (which doesn't seem that unlikely at this point).

<comment><USER22> You just have to look at what happened after the MtGox collapse in 2014: Bitcoin goes back to sleep for 2 or 3 years, afterwards everyone forgets it ever happened and another rally takes place where cryptocurrencies "go mainstream". Lather, rinse and repeat until the amount of people willing to speculate on it is completely exhausted.

<comment><USER23> I don't personally think it will be that cyclic. There is so much more invested this time around, so many more people standing to lose so much more money, such a brighter light on the cryptocurrency world now. A devastating loss (e.g. Bitfinex shuts down and freezes all transfers, Tether worthless, that type of thing) to the BTC economy would be critical to the entire future of cryptocurrency as we know it, IMO. I don't think Bitcoin has 9 lives.

<comment><USER24> I don't know. Most finance people now have access to bitcoin exposure through trusted institutions via futures. Many of these people felt a lot of FOMO at missing the boat on Bitcoin's last big jump. I think if it drops to $5k, there will be some big players taking a long position in hopes of another order of magnitude movement. Certainly could get much uglier, but I think Tethers vanishing would not be fatal.

Also, with Bitcoin becoming 'established' I bet everyone who owns more than $1M in cash is considering Bitcoin as a method of alternate banking and transferring funds internationally.

Bitcoin certainly isn't the safest place to store your money, but there is a decent argument to be made that it can be safer to keep 90% cash and 10% btc instead of just 100% cash for some risk profiles. Criminality is one obvious use case, but people who want a plan for how they could flee their country in the case of disaster, financial meltdown, or social unrest would also see advantages: much easier to get a $100k private key through an airport and customs than the equivalent in physical cash.

<comment><USER25> Most, if not all, financial institutions aren't exposed to cryptocurrencies directly either through futures or the underlying currencies. Institutions are defined as endowments, sovereign wealth funds, pensions and asset management firms such as Goldman Sachs. Capital inflow into the cryptocurrency space in aggregate is still less than $10B. If the Norwegian sovereign wealth fund bought Bitcoin, their minimum purchase would probably be $50MM which represents .5% capital inflow and a nice uptick in "market cap" of the industry.

Bitcoin is by no means established because these institutions aren't investing. If and when the day comes that this happens then Bitcoin will be established and increase one or two magnitudes. Many of the above institutions legally can't invest because they are restricted by their mandates. Bitcoin is a terrible use case for criminals because it's transparent. Monero would be better because it's anonymous.

<comment><USER24> You are correct. No major institutions have publicly disclosed an investment in Bitcoin, and many are legally restricted from doing so.

However, I think that market speculators, particularly hedge funds, would strongly consider opening positions in Bitcoin below $5k in hopes of a many- fold return on investment. It is high risk, but in a diversified portfolio Bitcoin may be attractive in our current market climate where the market is so overbought.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Bitfinex/Tether follow the classic investment fraud story arc. The big frauds don't start with bad intentions. A self-proclaimed genius seeds an operation, gets traction, attracts money, hits a snag, fudges the numbers and keeps doubling down, intending to pay it back, and then (a) collapses, (b) gets caught or (c) rolls the scheme over until (a) or (b). The terminal phase is inevitable given the non-linear difficulty of scaling a fraud and their need to scale to maintain credibility.

The set-up: Tether was, to a layman, a decent idea. The build-up: As creation and redemption was demonstrated, Tether attracted buyers. The snag: Tether got hacked [1] and released an IOU to affected customers [2]. Wells Fargo got spooked and froze Tether/Bitfinex [3].

The fudge: Tether has a hole to plug. They also have nowhere to put incoming U.S. dollars. Someone suggests they buy Bitcoin with the incoming dollars. The stupid figure it's a temporary measure until they find a new correspondent bank, the evil smell a scam and the lazy don't think about it. Bitcoin ascends. This move becomes very profitable. (It also increases the size of their balance sheet, which makes finding a new correspondent bank more difficult.)

Doubling down: Bitcoin descends. The firm becomes, or comes close to becoming, insolvent. Tethers are issued to bring the balance sheet back into line. The stupid figure they can unwind when Bitcoin recovers; the evil and lazy agree to not think about it. The frequency and magnitude of this "support" keeps growing.

The collapse: At each development, the smart and ethical decamp. That leaves everyone on board too incompetent, distracted or lazy to properly address a journalist's investigation [4]. That, in turn, attracts regulatory attention [5].

[1] [https://www.theverge.com/2017/11/21/16684296/tether- cryptocu...](https://www.theverge.com/2017/11/21/16684296/tether- cryptocurrency-stolen-30-million-hack)

[2] [https://www.coindesk.com/bitfinex-disperses-unique-token- to-...](https://www.coindesk.com/bitfinex-disperses-unique-token-to- compensate-for-60m-theft/)

[3] [https://www.coindesk.com/bitcoin-exchange-bitfinex-sues- well...](https://www.coindesk.com/bitcoin-exchange-bitfinex-sues-wells-fargo- over-bank-transfer-freeze/)

[4] [https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-12-05/mystery-s...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-12-05/mystery- shrouds-tether-and-its-links-to-biggest-bitcoin-exchange)

[5] [https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-01-30/crypto- ex...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-01-30/crypto-exchange- bitfinex-tether-said-to-get-subpoenaed-by-cftc)

<comment><USER27> Hmmm.. I think your first link is to the wrong hack. If everything were as you claim, the hack would need to precede the bank freeze in order for it to be in any way causal. I was originally writing this reply to refute your claim on that basis, but while investigating it I found that there was indeed another hack where bitcoin was stolen from bitfinex rather than Tether being stolen by Tether. Your article 2 cites the bitfinex hack as well. Furthermore, the IOU issued wasn't Tether, but rather some other token "worth" $1 called BFX. The rest of the story seems plausible, but it seems you have a mixup in your buildup and snag phases of the hypothesis (I'm not saying that it is outright wrong because of this though)

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> It looks, on the surface, to be a sort of massive fraud on the issuance of tether, which also propped up the price of Bitcoin and a lot of other coins, as a couple of billion in fake liquidity was pumped into the market.

It's too early to tell what the exact story is, but it's certainly the case that the tether company's promises that they get frequent, professional audits are an out-and-out lie. I, personally, don't believe they have billions of dollars in the bank to back up their tokens, either.

Various authorities are starting to take interest, as are more mainstream media sources (like the NY Times).

I think if Tether and Bitfinex are above board, now is the time to release a statement and some pretty compelling evidence.

</comment><comment><USER29> "Hundreds of millions of dollars worth of new Tether were created; almost always when the prices of other virtual currencies were heading down."

Doesn't this simply mean that when people were selling their virtual currencies, they chose to stall their money in Tether?

<comment><USER30> Perhaps I don't understand it correctly but I assumed that wouldn't result in Tether being created. A holder of Tether would exchange his Tether for BTC. Only a transaction of Tether for cash would result in Tether being created.

<comment><USER31> One of the claims here is that Bitfinex was somehow creating new Tether without a USD deposit. In other words, out of thin air. This Tether would then be exchanged for Bitcoin or other crypto, causing an artificial increase in demand for those coins, and causing their price to rise.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> I'm wondering how many people are shorting USDT on Kraken? The potential downside is having to pay interest. The upside is 100% win. With enough short position, Tether will run out of funds and the price will have to crash. Disclosure: I'm short USDT.

<comment><USER33> I have a theory that some of the market crash in December was because of selling Bitcoin (originally gotten from USDT) for USD in order to fill their reserves of backing USD. I think that USDT could be moderately sophisticated in that they could have fulfilled their coffers via market manipulation.

If they were smart and brazen, I think they could have possibly pulled it off. One would have to study the market inflows and outflows.

This type of pump and dump would show up in their books, so a thorough audit would find it. But it may mean that they have a lot of USD now. Thus I am unsure if USDT will technically crash.

<comment><USER32> Interesting theory. If they indeed hold the USD, they could still run away with it. The 2.3B$ worth of Tether represents more than 75 years worth of gross profit of Bitfinex (see [https://www.reddit.com/r/BitcoinMarkets/comments/68wlre/some...](https://www.reddit.com/r/BitcoinMarkets/comments/68wlre/some_numbers_about_bitfinex/) ).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> If it becomes unprofitable to continue mining, and miners physically stop (selling gear etc...), will the change in Target just re-inflate the bubble again further down? Or have I misunderstood in difficulty/incentive structure?

From here it looks like the flood of market actors with an unsustainable price have created a crash, the flakes will get out of the game (pushing the price south), and then it might begin to get more profitable again?

Not sure what the outcome will be, but looks like a grass-burning point for those with skin in the game.

<comment><USER35> If nobody wants to buy Bitcoin, it doesn't really matter what the difficulty is to the price.

<comment><USER34> But don't the same market forces come back into play? Shortened transaction times, "brand name" for speculative buyers, more attractive price. It'll burn a lot of people, but another one born every minute...

<comment><USER36> Yes. A price drop will result in hardware going offline, meaning the difficulty should drop.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Genuine question: whether or not Tether is fraudulent, how much can a currency with a market cap of ~$2B affect the greater ecosystem, or even just Bitcoin with a purported market cap of ~$150B? Obviously a scandal of this magnitude in a major cryptocurrency is bad for the whole environment for a host of reasons...but if Tether is really just a ~$2B fabricated cash injection, how much could it really prop up BTC?

<comment><USER38> It's hard to say because so much depends on investor psychology. But if they act to prop things up on the dips it looks like it just goes up and then other dumb speculators like me pile in.

Some academics studied manipulation at MtGox and "the paper demonstrates that the suspicious trading activity likely caused the unprecedented spike in the USD-BTC exchange rate in late 2013, when the rate jumped from around $150 to more than $1,000 in two months." Not sure how much actual cash was involved there but "bitcoins (BTC) valued at $188 million were fraudulently acquired."

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> Watch for a premium on the BTCUSD rate on Bitfinex. That'll be the market believing there's a significant risk of insolvency.

I'm surprised there's no premium yet.

<comment><USER40> If Bitfinex or its sister company is engaging in outright fraud, I see no reason to believe its market data.

<comment><USER39> How would they fake the price while allowing trades and BTC withdrawals?

<comment><USER41> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mt._Gox](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mt._Gox)

<comment><USER39> I remember mt. gox very well. They started having withdrawal delays, and then halted withdrawals of BTC as well as USD altogether, precisely because keeping withdrawals open would have been so expensive as to be impossible. I'm saying Bitfinex has no magic way around that, either.

<comment><USER41> That was the end-game. They didn't have enough reserves to cover liabilities long before there were outward signs.

<comment><USER39> That's true, but I don't recall any indication of them faking ticker data.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> I find it weird that people assume this is intentional market manipulation. If they are in fact fraudulent (I think they are), being able to print money is a business model in itself; you don't need to intentionally manipulate the market (but could end up doing so accidentally)

<comment><USER43> Not true. In order to make sure there isn't a run on their fake currency, they need to ensure that the balance tips towards buying bitcoin rather than cashing out holdings. If the price goes too low, people will start trying to convert tethers to real money, triggering a crash.

<comment><USER44> Or (assuming they're legitimate) they just buy back tether with their holdings, raising the price back to roughly $1. Which is the whole point of it supposedly being backed 1-1 in the first place.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> Discussed earlier:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16279300](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16279300)

</comment><comment><USER46> My hope is that there isn't a complete crash before some of the most unique and important ideas being built on blockchain technology have a chance to come to light.

It might _need_ a 2014 reset before it happens, but there are plenty of ideas not yet able to be executed because the crypto community at large are waiting for the technology to catch up.

I have a business plan in the works on a nonprofit that would benefit the world as a whole. I don't want investors or an ICO or whatever. I just want crypto to still be exciting by the time I build it, otherwise it'll be that much harder to onboard anyone who would benefit from such a system.

</comment><comment><USER47> Is Tether highly exposed only to bitcoin and not ethereum? Bitcoin price seems to be taking a heavier hit than Ether [https://www.coingecko.com/en](https://www.coingecko.com/en)

<comment><USER48> I was noticing that the other day. I wonder if that's because Ethereum has contract functionality and thus as some intrinsic value to it.

<comment><USER49> On the other hand, the main application for those contracts is ICOs -- which are themselves primarily a speculative instrument. It's turtles all the way down.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> Here a possible explanation on what Tether is doing and the economics behind why there is such an incentive behind pump and dump BTC. I think they are running a currency board pegging USDT to USD, and then using the BTC gained to push up BTC even further.

Part of the idea of a currency is a stable value, that means supply and demand need to be matched. With a fixed quantity such as all the common cryptos, when demand rises (either organic or from manipulation) there is no way to keep the value stable so the value of the currency will be constantly whipped around as demand is constantly changing.

This is the general problem with floating currencies. They are difficult to keep stable. Fiat tries to solve that by putting someone in change of money creation (in the Feds case until recently this was mostly in the form of manipulating the overnight rate banks charge each other).

Another way to do it is through pegging the price to something believed to have a stable value itself. Various precious metals have been used in the past, but commodity baskets are also thoght of (look at the chart of the CRB index vs gold and they are almost the same). Baskets of floating currencies have also been used but they arent nearly as stable and still rely on central bank decisions.

A currency peggged to an underlying doesnt mean you need to hold all the underlying. You just need to intervene in the market when your target price rises or falls too much. This could be what Bitfixex/Tether is doing. They aren't holding dollar reserves, but they are keeping the exchange rate constant with other traders by stepping in when necessary. That's why they don't have a conversion window.

If you had a crypto that was stable, pumping might not be nearly as effective since the currency you are pumping isn't going to increase in value, just more will be created to cover the demand.

So now we have a situation where BTC is easily manipulated up on artificial demand pressure, but that will also cause a rise in BTC/USDT sales as there are now just more trades. This pulls the value and price of USDT up, but to keep it at 1 USD, more USDT need to be printed and sold. And this is exactly what we see.

So they can sell either USDT for USD directly, or they can sell USDT/BTC. But now they have a bunch of BTC, so they can go sell that too pushing BTC even higher. The party stops when demand for USDT starts falling and the price needs to be defended.

I think if we ever get a good crypto currency it will be pegged to a commodity basket or gold or something. I'm working on the idea of how to control supply algorithmically and fairly though a combination of systems and bonds.

<comment><USER35> > A currency peggged to an underlying doesnt mean you need to hold all the > underlying. You just need to intervene in the market when your target price > rises or falls to much

Which works great until it doesn't, and then it gets costly: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Wednesday](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Wednesday)

Tether claims to avoid the problem by literally holding a dollar in cash for every tether it has minted, so it can't be attacked- no matter how many people try to sell Tether, it can always buy up all the outstanding Tether with dollars and maintain it at parity.

It's hard to tell the difference until the company runs out of money, and then the currency collapses all at once.

<comment><USER50> Exactly. I was updating my comment as you posted this. The party stops when usdt needs to be defended. And they need to use either their usd reserves or any btc they have from selling usdt/btc to hold the peg.

Or they can defend it by selling bonds. We mat see bitfixes tying to write loans in cryptos. Or literally just steal from people. They have a lot of customer accounts they can raid "temporarily".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> What's the difference between legitimate technical trading and propping up a market? Is it just volume?

<comment><USER52> This article talks about suspicions that Bitfinex has "printed" large amounts of Tether (a so-called stable token which is supposed to be backed 1-1 to a supply of real USD) to buy up Bitcoin and artificially inflate the price.

<comment><USER53> You'd think that if they really did link 1:1 to the dollar, they'd encode some kind of proof in the tokens themselves - like idk, the registration number of banknotes, or a transaction number in a publicly viewable bank account (supported by a real, trusted bank). You need some way to verify the claim that "1 tether == 1 real USD" instead of just trust.

<comment><USER54> Money in a bank account doesn't have serial numbers. In fact, less than 10% of money in circulation is cash.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> I don't think the price dynamics looks great for Bitcoin, even if one wishes to think of it as a long-term investment. Since a lot of, perhaps most, people buy it for speculation but the price has gone sideways for a number of reasons. If it stays sideways for a while and then it drops, some speculators will start to panic which might cause further drops.

Also, some people who made handsome profits from early speculation have got out, and new money who might have less faith came in. These people are likely more sensitive to bad news.

Maintaining the prices or increasing it a bit might be possible but to get it to rise stratospherically like last year is unlikely because of the amount of money required to balance with those who cash out for other coins and other investments.

This is unless there is a huge change in regulatory landscape and popular mindset—-that is, Bitcoin becomes widely thought of as a good long-term store of value—which are unlikely.

The analysis above is mostly about Bitcoin, although it will likely have side effects on most other cryptocurrencies as well.

That is, the upside for a well diversified crypto portfolio is limited now (Feb 2018), almost certainly much less upside in percentage terms than in 2017. Although one could beat the market by picking the right horses, as in other markets.

... and the downside could be quite an abyss.

</comment><comment><USER56> Could be the best buying opportunity of the year.

As someone involved in bitcoin since 2012, these cycles are pretty standard. It went from $1000 to around $250 iirc at one point and recovered. No reason it cant go from $20000 to $5000 and recover. It may take many years, but its not as if all crypto will die overnight.

I see crypto being big in the more distant future, 15-20 years away when many of the problems are sorted out. Everyone is focused on the extreme short term.

<comment><USER57> > No reason it cant go from $20000 to $5000 and recover.

There are plenty of reasons why it could never recover. The previous cycles happened with a very different environment and context for bitcoin. This time Bitcoin has just hit mainstream. This cycle will very likely crush the mainstream's faith in Bitcoin to where it will never recover.

<comment><USER58> That's true, but however, what if Bitcoin goes on like the Video Game Crash of 1983, the Second AI Winter, etc.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_winter](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_winter) [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_game_crash_of_1983](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_game_crash_of_1983)

<comment><USER57> Apples to oranges, Bitcoin isn't cryptos as a whole. Future cryptos will absolutely succeed Bitcoin.

<comment> lloyd-christmas Their comment is based on historical facts, making it apples and oranges. Your speculation has no substance, but is 'absolutely' true? I'm not sure I follow that logic.

<comment><USER57> The apples to oranges is in reference to comparing Bitcoin to the AI's as a whole. AI as a whole survived the winter but a random implementation from 1985 did not. My comment was comparing Bitcoin as an implementation of a cryptocurrency to previous implementations of AI that have generated hype and then became either irrelevant or obsolete.

<comment> lloyd-christmas Correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't back-propagation one of the major techniques in the AI of the 80s? It's 90% of mainstream AI today. Activision was one of the major publishers prior to the video game crash. Today it has the largest share of the market. Just because some things fall out of favor doesn't mean all of them do, especially the most popular ones.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER59> I asked this before and I still don't understand it: Who is holding the Tethers? I can see that "someone" wants to artificially increase the BTC price by buying BTC using USDT. But for this scheme to work, someone needs to sell BTC for USDT (and hold the USDT!).

Who would do that and why? We are talking of about 2 billion USDT that have to be somewhere.

</comment><comment><USER60> In other news, water determined to be wet.

</comment><comment><USER61> The regulators were extremely slow in this case. Bitfinex is/was a major exchange and not performing a proof-of-reserves is not a red flag but a motive for immediate action.

</comment><comment><USER62> > In recent months, however, many investors have been raising alarm bells > about Tether. Hundreds of millions of dollars worth of new Tether were > created; almost always when the prices of other virtual currencies were > heading down. The Tether were used on the Bitfinex exchange to make big > purchases of Bitcoin and other tokens, helping push their prices back up, > according to multiple analyses of data from Bitfinex.

Surely this is illegal? (if confirmed true, of course)

<comment><USER63> That is an interesting question.

Digital "currency" is unregulated so the question is which law is violated.

If, in purchasing a tether, there is some underlying contract that says the tether is backed by a dollar, then you might claim a violation of the contract. You may have to look at the fine print. Who was the counter party? What were the terms? Who is on the hook for it? Is it an entity that is outside the US?

However, if there isn't such a contract and someone makes the claim, you might claim there was an implied contract. This is harder. Not being a lawyer, I won't even venture to guess how this would play out.

In the absence of those two, I don't know if you can claim there was a violation of the law.

Edit: There is one more law you can violate, and this is the obvious one: Fraud!

In the US it is fraud if:

\- somebody misrepresents a material fact in order to obtain action or forbearance by another person,

\- the other person relies upon the misrepresentation, and

\- the other person suffers injury as a result of the act or forbearance taken in reliance upon the misrepresentation.

So now the question is where is the injury? Especially if they are able to sell of Bitcoin and actually back up the Tether?

Now it might be a question of: the buyer took a risk they had not intended on taking.

<comment><USER31> If they say Tether is backed 1:1 by USD, and it's not (allegedly by a wide margin), then it's clearly fraud.

<comment><USER63> Yes, I forgot about fraud. That's the obvious one.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER64> why don't the other exchanges just drop their USDT pairs ?

<comment><USER65> A lot of exchanges are using Tether to avoid coming in contact with USD. Most, if not all, of them have no banking access, so Tether is the only way they can pretend to trade in USD and still be safe from US banking regulations.

</comment></comment><comment><USER66> The story of Bitcoin in a fun video:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KTf5j9LDObk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KTf5j9LDObk)

</comment><comment><USER67> How hard is it to audit tether? Can't they just point to a bank account or US treasuries that add up to the total they owe?

</comment><comment><USER68> Bitcoin: Revenge of the Beanie Babies

</comment><comment><USER69> Better get in on GRLC now!

<comment><USER70> Is GRLC a joke/meme that just got out of hand?

<comment><USER65> Just like Dogecoin. First it was a joke, then it got serious.

But wrt Garlicoin, I think the creators know exactly what they are doing and use the gullible masses to make money by exploiting "memes".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER71> I think 90% is true, otherwise why won't they won't agree to get audited, also investors, can you call yourself an "investors" if you give $100 and they give you 100 of something promising you they will keep your $100, while not showing any proof of it.

</comment><comment><USER72> If you haven't already, I recommend getting out of Bitcoin and into Ethereum immediately. There is a transfer of dominance rapidly happening.

Market Cap

Bitcoin $158,149,902,894

Ethereum $106,632,442,880

<comment><USER73> Market cap is a terrible measure. If i make a my on crypto coin mine 100 of them and convince one person to buy one for 1000 euro, my coins market cap is suddenly 100,000 euros.

<comment><USER74> For example: [https://signalvnoise.com/posts/1941-press- release-37signals-...](https://signalvnoise.com/posts/1941-press- release-37signals-valuation-tops-100-billion-after-bold-vc-investment)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER75> First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.

<comment><USER76> As Carl Sagan put it, "The fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown."

<comment><USER77> Columbus really belongs with Bozo and not Fulton and Wright. His plan was ridiculed because it was ridiculous for reasons which were had been clear since before the _rise_ , much less fall, of Rome, could not reasonably have worked, and did not work.

He happened to stumble into something unrelated in the course of his crazy plan (which is the only reason anyone on the expedition survived), which lots of people who weren't him recognized as something new and valuable independently of the goal Columbus had both insanely set out and, even more insanely, insisted after the fact and to his death that he had succeeded in.

<comment><USER78> Ok but it's possible he had a Chinese map from an earlier expedition, and while he misinterpreted _where_ he was going, he was pretty sure that he was going somewhere.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Less than meets the eye at Facebook - <AUTHOR> http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2012/02/less-than-meets-the-eye-at-facebook/

<comment><USER2> I think this author fails to understand the business model of selling the user data to marketing companies.

That 'like' is a data-point about that user which which adds to the mass of data that FB sells. Also, the 'like' promotes that product within the system providing content for FB visitors to feed on. It isn't even a loss leader, it's a part of building their content.

The off-site 'like' has as much value to FB as the YouTube player adds to YouTube, and is a small percentage of the value that AdWords (or have I got the wrong product) provides to Google.

</comment><comment><USER3> Interesting article. The MAU number which Barry comes up with (161 million) seems to be more line with what Quantcast says Facebook MAU is (142 million).</comment>


Ask HN: Why is self-post text grey? - <AUTHOR>

It looks like a downvoted comment, it is harder to read because the contrast is too low and the "downvoted comment" look primes me to expect that I'll read something stupid. Can it be changed to just black? <comment><USER2> It's to encourage you to either keep it short, or to post it to your blog instead (and then post the link to your blog post to HN).</comment>


The Complete Guide to Figure Out the Heterogeneity of Tumor Cell - <AUTHOR> https://www.creative-bioarray.com/products/tumor-cell-types-13.htm <comment><AUTHOR> What is tumor heterogeneity? Tumor heterogeneity refers to the difference between genotype and phenotype of tumor cells in different parts of the same malignancy or in different parts of the same patient. Tumor heterogeneity refers to the difference between genotype and phenotype of tumor cells in different parts of the same malignancy or in different parts of the same patient. This difference can occur in different individuals, which can show different genetic backgrounds such as chromosome mass and quality differences, different cell types. There are also significant differences homogeneous tumors at the molecular level, such as gene expression profile, network regulation, mutation spectrum and other aspects of the difference. The inconsistencies happen between the mutant gene spectrum and biological characteristics in the same tumor paitient, reflecting a high degree of complexity and diversity for the evolution process of malignant tumors.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> The breast cancer cells were divided into three subgroups: stem cell-like subsets, basal cell subsets and bursal epithelial subgroups by flow cytometry. Keep culturing three subpopulations of cells, then each subpoperation will produce another three subgroups, and there was a random conversion mechanism in the cells to maintain the balance of stem cell-like cells. Cell fusion may be a source of metastatic tumor cell heterogeneity. Using the breast cancer lines MDA-MB-231 and MA11 co-cultured with human normal bone-derived stromal pluripotent cells, spontaneous fusion of heterozygous cells was observed and the DNA content was aneuploidy. The hybrid cells were inoculated into immunization Defective mice, breast tumors can be observed in metastatic capacity.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> The origin of tumor heterogeneity Most common view for the origin of tumor heterogeneity is from cancer stem cells. Cancer stem cells refer to a small group of stem cell-like cells with infinite self-renewal ability in the tumor, which can evolve into different phenotypic cell populations with strong tumorigenicity. Affected by cell differentiation, clonal evolution and microenvironment and other factors, leading to phenotypic and functional heterogeneity. The maintenance of heterogeneity is related to randomness.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> The mechanism of tumor heterogeneity This heterogeneity can be traced back to normal human cells. With the development of single-cell whole genome sequencing technology, each cell in normal cells prove to be different, genome, phenotype, developmental stage and gene expression will cause the same tissue origin between a group of cells Heterogeneity.</comment>


Ask HN: Is it weird to read articles written in English by non-native speakers? - <AUTHOR> I'm wondering whether to primarily write articles in German (my mother tongue) or English. For me, the advantage of writing in English is that I'll potentially reach many more people with my writing. The disadvantage (in my opinion) is that the quality of my writing will probably not be as good as when writing in German, and the occasional "weirdness" of the text might put off native English readers.
My question to native English speakers: Do you mind reading articles written by non-native speakers (given it is clearly noticeable in the text)? Do you have any recommendations for us to make our writing better or less "weird" for your native-speaking brain?
My question to non-native authors writing in English: How do you handle this? Do you think it impacts the way your writing is received by native English readers? <comment><USER2> So long as you can get your point across clearly, that's the key thing of value to the audience and what they should be grateful for.

Being a German speaker, you're in the fortunate position that the kind of occasional give-aways that you may have in your writing tend not to sound bad to native English speakers.

That's not necessarily true of people with much less closely related languages, where the mistakes can be really distracting and confusing. It tends to cause the worst impact when the writer's confidence far exceeds their actual ability and they do things like utterly misuse clichés.

The fact you've asked this is very thoughtful. Your question text above is clear and well written, so I don't think you've anything to worry about and would encourage you to give it a go (provided you feel comfortable and it isn't a burden).

Purely out of curiousity, I would be interested to hear how it goes - is it something that might be posted here in due course?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for that feedback, I'll keep you updated on my progress and will make another post once I got the first articles out! I'll write about privacy & data security engineering for startups, among other things.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> [Hi from Argentina!]

I usually write the articles in Spanish and English. The English version usually has 10x move visits than the Spanish version. So I strongly recommend to write the English version too.

Also, I can read in Spanish and English, some Portuguese and Italian, and a little of French and German. I had some formal education of German in primary school, but I don't remember too much. Each one has a different set of languages, but most people understand English and something else.

In many cases, it's clear that the author is not a native English speaker. I try to pass some spelling and grammar checks to minimize errors, but they are not perfect. For technical blog posts it's not so important, and you may get a few friendly emails with corrections.

[Anyway, while reading articles written by native English speaker, I sometime find errors like using "then" instead of "than" that are annoying because it absolutely doesn't make any sense in the Spanish version. So, being an English native speaker is not always 100% safe.]

</comment><comment><USER4> I think that what you have wrong in your question is that the question is not to write for a native speakers audience but for an audience.

To that regard most perhaps non native will not be able to tell the difference in English.

As for your second question, my more fictional / creative writings in English often get corrected for sense or grammar. I never heard the slightest criticism in a more technical / teaching. I know that my weakness is too use to complex sentences, and so I try to avoid them.

</comment><comment><USER5> Native English speaker here. For me the weirdness of the English used is entirely dependent on context.

For technical writing (scientific papers, technical blog posts, documentation) what matters is the clarity of the ideas and the science/design behind them. My brain is aware that I'm not reading literature. As long as the English is competent enough, I will readily forgive any weirdness. I will judge you more on your actual API or your actual science than your English unless I truly cannot understand what you've written, which is rare.

If you are writing a novel or doing standup comedy[1] or some other form in which the presentation is important, the weirdness of ESL English will be more apparent. My own status as a monolingual, in my mind, still leaves me little room to judge other's language skills, but I will notice more.

FWIW, English is absurdly complex and I cannot imagine the difficulty of learning it as a second language. For example, I just learned about adjective ordering[2] recently. It's true that, as the example says, I need "three good reasons" rather than "good three reasons," but I knew that purely through intuition rather than being taught. That kind of fine tuning must be maddening to master as non-native speaker, and I have nothing but admiration for those who even come close.

[1] [https://www.thisamericanlife.org/blog/2016/09/french-vs- amer...](https://www.thisamericanlife.org/blog/2016/09/french-vs-american- comedy-gad-elmaleh-on-stage)

[2] [http://www.gingersoftware.com/content/grammar- rules/adjectiv...](http://www.gingersoftware.com/content/grammar- rules/adjectives/order-of-adjectives/)

<comment><USER6> English is complex, but it's not unique in that regard.

Polish is "hard" due to genders and cases. English is hard because it is irregular, and it has a lot of loan-words which compound the problem.

(Not that regular verbs make life easier, even languages like Finnish which are genderless and very regular have complications to make life "fun".)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I certainly don't mind, generally it's the information that I'm interested in. In your case, I could not tell that your English was non-native :-)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, happy to hear that :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Nah, it's not weird. I mean, tons of blogs and websites I read are by people who learnt English as a second language, and many of the people I subscribe to on YouTube aren't native speakers either.

Heck, most of the time I don't even notice they're not native English speakers until I come across the location field on their profile or an article where they talk about their personal background.

But yeah, if you can get your points across clearly (without the kind of stilted wording found in machine translations or works by people with only the most rudimentary knowledge of English), then you'll be fine. Most people won't even notice you're not a native speaker.

</comment><comment><USER9> As a native English speaker I often don't notice the subtile differences that could be pointed out as weird.

Everyone has a different writing style, I'm not sure anyone could pick your writing out as being from a non-native speaker but it does stand out slightly.

IMO people who write English as a second language tend to write longer drawn on sentences than someone who writes it from birth. We take pride in shorter, informal, more concise ways to speak, even if it's lazy.

I don't mind reading articles that are noticably from a non-native speaker, it can be very beneficial reading an author with a different background and in technical writing, longer formal sentences is a godsend.

<comment><USER10> > IMO people who write English as a second language tend to write longer drawn > on sentences than someone who writes it from birth. We take pride in > shorter, informal, more concise ways to speak, even if it's lazy.

I (non-native) have noticed that too. Native speakers taking pride in shorter sentences is one thing. But for me those shorter sentences are not intuitive. I can't really tell why. I suppose I try being extra careful to be comprehensible.

When I watch something like 'The Simpsons' I am amazed by how simple every day sentences can be. For instance, something like "Can you stick it in the refrigerator?". That's pretty close to what I'd literally say in German. But if I had to ask that question spontaneously in English then I'd use way more words.

<comment><USER6> I'm slowly trying to get better at this, now I'm regularly using a foreign language. The difference between "I'm Steve" and "My name is Steve" seems to be a little jarring for some people.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Not all native English speakers write well. When reading articles written by non-native speakers I can often work out their primary language from the idioms that they translate into English.

You don't mention what level of articles you are asking about. If you are writing articles for top level academic journals, then engaging the services of an editor or having an competent English writer as collaborator is a very good idea.

In a more informal setting you could always enlist the help of people interested in your topics to review your writings before publishing them more widely.

</comment><comment><USER12> It is distracting to me if there are many errors, and I feel it may bias me to trust the author less. Usually what throws me off the most is the misuse of prepositions, where switching 'of' and 'to', for example, in a way that changes the meaning. I remember from learning German that different prepositions are used in different circumstances than they are in English, even though they seem to be the same word. In any case, having a native English speaker edit your article can mitigate this.

</comment><comment><USER13> I agree with most of the other comments that you'll get a wider audience with English. It isn't just for native English speakers, but everyone who uses English as their second / interchange language. (When I was last in Europe, I saw Swedes, Dutch, Icelandic & German people all speaking to each other fluently in English. It's a de-facto Weltsprache.)

But why not write in both? Write your articles first in German, and translate the articles that become popular into English.

</comment><comment><USER14> Without knowing the gap between your german and english writing it is difficult to give an answer. Personally (I am bilingual), there is for me a threshold of grammar and syntax accuracy below which an article looses credibility. What I would do if I were you is write in German and publish and then translate in english the articles with best reception (visits, number of comments...). Translation can be done by you directly with some support from google translate (if your syntax and grammar in english is decent, you will be able to spot and correct the worst bits of the Google output). Or it can be even done by a professional if this is sustainable economically (I hear that cost per word is quite low these days). This approach has the bonus that you will structure your storyline and syntax in your mother-tongue: this will generally be much better than a first version written in a language you don't master. Also, while english will give you a larger audience, it also gives you a larger competition.

</comment><comment><USER15> Honestly if you write as well as you are in your OP, you'll be fine.

Design your website so that there's a small profile of your in the top right or top left where you can prime readers that you're a German.

It's often frustrating for me to write in Japanese (since I feel that my English is much less stilted), but most readers have had nothing but positive things to say about my style. I imagine you'll feel that your English writing will be stiffer and less fluid than your German, but if the objective of your articles is for you to reach the largest audience with your writing, then English is the way to go. If you want it to be an avenue of expression for you, then German may be more suitable.

</comment><comment><USER16> How many native English speakers would read your writing if it was not in English. I'd guess close to 0.

So the question becomes do you want any readership from native English speakers or not.

Side note, my wife was formerly a PHD student in French literature. She was kinda annoyed that she was encouraged to write papers in English. The reasoning was to gain a larger readership.

</comment><comment><USER17> > and the occasional "weirdness" of the text might put off native English > readers.

If it is occasional it won't put anyone off. If is barely legible throughout the whole text, it will.

I'm not a native English speaker (or writer) but I would not consider any other language than English to write in. Or read in for that matter, it has some kind of "off" feeling to it for some reason.</comment>


Ask HN: Why the IDE Religiosity? - <AUTHOR> Why do developers exhibit such religious reactions to any perceived criticism let alone threat to IDEs? Both as a concept and then also in defense of their IDE of choice.
I can't relate. I'm pretty tool agnostic and just find IDEs cumbersome. I move machines a lot, so I'm not known for getting attached to a specific configuration. IDEs are that on steroids, so I avoid them. But that's on me.
However, coworkers, interwebbers, whoever, on learning that I don't use an IDE seems to assume my toolchains are archaic and slow and simple and stupid and {insert whatever here}. "Clearly your IDE-less projects couldn't get to the same complexity as mine!" they mightily exclaim. I mean, maybe, I guess. But I'm just drinking my coffee?
Write with whatever makes you happy
/As long as it works. <comment><USER2> couldn't agree more. the Intellij fanatics have the strongest religion at least in my experience</comment>


Frogs Radio Tracked for First Time in Madagascar (2013) - <AUTHOR> http://news.mongabay.com/2013/0301-radio-tracking-frogs.html#ixzz3T98Slfn6

<comment><USER2> Does anyone know what kind of technology could be used for these tiny radio systems?</comment>


Growing a Business Website: Fix the Basics First - <AUTHOR> http://www.useit.com/alertbox/design_priorities.html <comment><USER2> A lot of people, especially from Silicon Valley should read this quote repeatedly until it sinks in:

"the Web's chattering classes tend to be overly engaged in the "Internet elite experience." They actually care about the 'Net for its own sake, and go gaga over new ways of showing maps. In contrast, average users just want to complete tasks online. They don't particularly like the Web, and they'd like to get back to their jobs or families as quickly as possible."

<comment><USER3> _They don't particularly like the Web, and they'd like to get back to their jobs or families as quickly as possible._

That's a description of the average 40 year old user. The average 18 year old is much more interested in talking to their friends on networks than they are in their job or family.

<comment><USER4> The examples in the article are a corporate intranet and how to find a local store.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> God damn that website hurts my eyes.</comment>


Restaurant bans tipping, service got better and they made more money - <AUTHOR> http://qz.com/113597/after-i-banned-tipping-at-my-restaurant-the-service-got-better-and-we-made-more-money/ <comment><USER2> The Freakanomics podcast covered some of this as well[1]. It was interesting when they covered the racism and sexism aspects.

1: [http://freakonomics.com/2013/06/03/should-tipping-be- banned-...](http://freakonomics.com/2013/06/03/should-tipping-be-banned-a-new- freakonomics-radio-podcast/)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> As a restaurateur I love the idea, but shouldn't the service be the same? A good manager isn't waiting for a server to report being undertipped, but actively looking to fill holes that service may have missed.</comment>


Saudi Arabia bestows humanoid robot with citizenship - <AUTHOR> http://www.nydailynews.com/news/world/saudi-arabia-bestows-humanoid-robot-citizenship-article-1.3591719 <comment><USER2> I may have seen to many sci-fi movies, but this sounds rather threatening:

>>It [Sophia] accused him of "reading too much Elon Musk," and said, "don't worry, if you're nice to me, I'll be nice to you. Treat me as a smart input- output system."

Still, the actual intelligence is probably nowhere near threatening or useful, but who am I to judge?</comment>


Open Terraria Rewrite - <AUTHOR> Hello!
I'm a creator of open-source Terraria rewrite in Java. Our project grows and  already supports modding. Here is a simple example, that allows player switch to Ghost mode using 'g' key:

    public void onLoad() {
        ModAPI.addKeyBinding(Input.KEY_G, new Callable() {
            public void call() {
                enabled = !enabled;
                ModAPI.getPlayer().setGhostMode(enabled);
            }
        });
    }
 Full code: https://github.com/egordorichev/LastTryMods/blob/master/GhostMod/src/org/egordorichev/ghostmod/GhostMod.java Here is the repository: https://github.com/egordorichev/LastTry
If any one is interested, please, join me! Thanks, George. <comment><AUTHOR> Also, we are looking for developers.</comment>