Ask HN: How do you pick your next book? - <AUTHOR> I'm working on a new personal project which I'm super excited about. The landing page is here: www.booknshelf.com. I'd love to get some initial feedback from awesome HN community on how you generally find your next book to read, whether you care about what other people read, or you care only about reviews, etc. Thanks so much! <comment><USER2> Most books I read come from personal recommendations, a friend tells me they liked a book and think I will like it. If I read it and like it I might read others from the author.

Free books (and on sale <$1.00) are also an incentive and have more often than not resulted in me buying other books from the author.

Serendipity in book stores - not very frequent because bookstores are not close to me. I recently bought 3 books from various bookstores while looking at what was available. One I had been meaning to read for years the other two were by authors I knew of but had never read.

Random Internet reference, I read _Stanger in a Strange Land_ because of the SO answer "You don't grok vi" \- I wanted to grok grok.

Travel inspired, I read some Hemingway because I was going to Spain.

edit: Online reviews are like social media comments, bring some popcorn. If I want to read criticism about a book, it will be from a more reputable source. But, that is not to say I won't read a book with bad reviews from a more reputable source. Their negative spin might make me more curious.

<comment><USER3> I do this same thing, but have an interesting story as to how I picked up this habit.

In a diffrent age I lived in baltimore, and every day on my way to work would walk past the same homeless (or at least I thought) man sitting behind the church, who would be reading and have a pile of books next to him. One day I passed him and he was exchanging a book with a woman. My curiosity got the better of me and I watched the exchange and listened to the conversation. Apparently, he lived in the church, in trade for cleaning, with his basic needs provided for he had taken up to forming his own little book exchange for tips. After talking with him for a bit, about what I read and what I liked he promised me a book for the next day... Over the course of the next year, I read some rather interesting things that I NEVER would have picked out on my own, and was introduced to them in such a way as to make them much more palatable. As an example I had never been a fan of military history, after throwing a pair of military scifi books my way i got something more factual and loved it.

Because of him, I basically read anything any one gives me... fiction, non fiction, domain specific stuff.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> My fiancée and I give each other a book every month. She picks things she thinks I might like or that she thinks I ought to read (in a good way). It's a brilliant way of discovering new things to read that I'd never have even heard of otherwise.

Plus, over the four years we've been doing our little gift exchanges we've created a fantastic library that charts our relationship. If we make it to 50 years together it'll be something to behold. Assuming books are even a thing then.

<comment><USER5> I love that system! :-)

> Assuming books are even a thing then

Well, they have been "a thing" for close on 2000 years, so I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for them to disappear in the next 50 ;-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I mainly read books focused on certain topic. Every time it is different domain from varios fields like sociology, economics, leadership through programming, electronics, mechanics and architecture to weather and nanotechnology.

Books are selected per current area of interest. As source of recommendation i use current and past edition plan from scientific publishers.

I dont know anoyone around me who read these kind of books so i dont get recommendations from friends of mine.

From non-scientific literature i read books based on recommendation from HN or other forums like quora. It also depends on my mood.

Always i read something because i wanna learn something new, get fresh insight or different point of view. Side effect is that i can join almost every discussion on various topics. Sometime i also decide if i will read it or not based on future usage of obtained information.

</comment><comment><USER7> Well, right off the bat, having _only_ a sign-up button with no indication of what the site will do is kind of a turn-off. No tour, no "about," nothing. I get several hundred spam messages a week and so I'm not super-keen to put my e-mail address into another web site that I know so little about.

<comment><USER8> OP was asking for feedback about the process of choosing books, not about the website.

You might be interested in [https://mytemp.email](https://mytemp.email). It'll issue you a temporary email address without you filling any form. The email address is accessible by a URI and is perishable (dies if not accessed within 24 hours).

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> First of all: kudos for starting a project based on books! (I love books and anything to do with them, we need more of this...)

How I find my next book to read? Mostly chance. For example, I regularly visit local bookshops for a browse, and if anything especially catches my fancy, I'll buy it (usually after having read the first quarter of it in the shop). As a student my budget for "luxury goods" isn't phenomenally large, but I do make a point of buying one or two new books a month. Buying a book after a friend's recommendation is rare but not unheard-of. Sometimes reading a review (of the professional, printed in a published magazine type - NOT online user reviews) will also tempt me to buy.

Hope that helps :-)

</comment><comment><USER9> I write a lot of fiction, and co-host a writing/tech podcast, so a lot of recommendations come from other writers, as well as topics in the podcast. I really dig when someone is so passionate about a book they want to share with a stranger.

Goodreads as well.

I see a LOT of book spam on Twitter and Facebook, none of which I have ever bought. Free download maybe, but no purchase.

</comment><comment><USER8> I use a weighted citation system. Someone mentions a person or a book, I will take a look at it. I'll then learn about the person, connections, books, etc. Wash, rinse, repeat.</comment>


Chrome 78 Beta: a new Houdini API, native file system access and more - <AUTHOR> https://blog.chromium.org/2019/09/chrome-78-beta-new-houdini-api-native.html <comment><USER2> Browsers need a bright line between documents (HTML and CSS) and applications (electron-like, notifications, complex APIs, access to features that affect the user's security).

Plain HTML documents are SEO friendly, are a11y friendly almost by default, back/forward navigation works, and HTML doesn't chew battery and bandwidth on JavaScript.

For our web app the biggest pain points are: security (hard to integrate third party libraries), control over the viewport (an app header and footer that don't get lost when zoomed - like an App), control over data entry (the hacks we have to do for fast reliable time and date entry are rediculous, and other stuff is just too hard), and control over navigation (browser back/forward is broken for applications that POST data).

Unfortunately Google don't seem to want to encourage plain HTML documents (instead the insane AMP shit).

<comment><USER3> > _Unfortunately Google don 't seem to want to encourage plain HTML documents > (instead the insane AMP shit)._

AMP is just plain HTML documents [0]. The only difference between an amp page and a standard HTML page are the following:

1\. It includes the amp javascript library: `<script async src="[https://cdn.ampproject.org/v0.js"></script>`](https://cdn.ampproject.org/v0.js"></script>`)

2\. It contains amp within: `<html amp lang="en">`

3\. It must contain: `<!doctype html>`, has a `<body>`, a `<head>` and specify `<meta charset="utf-8">`.

4\. Contains a reactive viewport meta: `<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width,minimum-scale=1">`

I don't think any of these make an amp page "not html".

[0] - [https://amp.dev/documentation/guides-and- tutorials/start/cre...](https://amp.dev/documentation/guides-and- tutorials/start/create/basic_markup/?format=websites)

<comment><USER4> 1\. AMP is not HTML5-compatible beginning with their amp declaration.

2\. AMP is a set of web components that rely on JS to properly render.

3\. If JS is disabled, page content is hidden by a CSS declaration

4\. AMP pages are treated differently by the dominant search player

So yes. On the surface it's "just plain HTML page". _Technically_.

<comment><USER5> Also, on my iPhone I can never open articles on AMP in the "Reader view", destroying my accessibility needs. The articles that were completely readable in the original form become 100% unreadable as soon as they are AMP. It can still be verified on the publisher's site that there it works, but how long will that remain?

Long ago, it was seen that Microsoft had the policy "our OS isn't finished if the competior's program is still functioning." Google's "OS" is effectively all the web resources they control and then they "accidentally" miss to support Apple's browsers. Especially when they manage to bring all the news content producers to use their "technology."

AMP is evil. Behind seemingly "technical" solution is a huge additional monopolisation of the web by Google. Purely seen on that level it should be illegal. It's in the interest of the society to allow the competition and disable the strengthening of the monopolies.

<comment><USER4> > and then they "accidentally" miss to support Apple's browsers.

And Firefox. See this thread by Jonathan Nightingale about Google breaking FF on purpose: [https://mobile.twitter.com/johnath/status/111687123179245568...](https://mobile.twitter.com/johnath/status/1116871231792455686)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> My theory is that many Electron apps don't really need Electron - they just need secure, constrained local file system access.

Electron has _massive_ potential security issues. Chrome with native file system access could make it possible for many of those Electron apps to simply be browser apps, making them vastly more secure and bringing them back into the domain of the ordinary web app.

It's a hugely important new feature.

<comment><USER7> Your version only works as long as there is only one browser.

<comment><USER8> How many die-hard Firefoxers run at least one Electron app?

<comment><USER9> Not sure what's your point but I would prefer my Electron apps to run with Firefox's engine if possible since it's the browser I mainly use, it would use much less memory.

<comment><USER10> It would be slower and that's all that matter. Ram is dynamically allocated and chrome has arguably better caching. Ram usage has only one user facing drawback, it's when it affect negatively performance. Chrome then outweight Firefox on your own criterion, by one indirection. Anyway Firefox lack many features useful for "electron apps" and this new file system acesss will add to the list

<comment><USER9> > It would be slower and that's all that matter. Ram is dynamically allocated > and chrome has arguably better caching

I don't want to use chrome, so it's never going to be an option. The best option in a ideal world is the browser the user is using since there's not that much resource needed to open one more tab. Some APIs around that would be ideal.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'm not sure about how to think about the file system API. On one hand, is great to see that secure file system access is possible in-browser, which allows most electron apps be converted into PWAs. That's great, I no longer need to run 5 different chromium instances.

On the other hand, I'm really not sure if I like the future of editing Microsoft office documents in the browser. I heavily believe that apps should have an integrated UX (with appropriate OS-specific widgets), because it allows coherency and familiarity.

<comment><USER12> The "coherence and familiarity" argument for native apps is only half the story though. Cross-platform coherence and familiarity is also important. And as an app developer, when you have to make a decision regarding whether you should be familiar and coherent to the rest of the operating system or the other installs of your app, that's pretty much always going to land on the "my app" side.

Especially with Microsoft office, which was completely chock full of custom controls and didn't feel at all like part of the OS last time I used a natively installed version (on windows 7)

<comment><USER11> > The "coherence and familiarity" argument for native apps is only half the > story though.

The user only uses the application in the platforms that one uses; so cross- platform coherence is mostly meaningless.

> And as an app developer, when you have to make a decision regarding whether > you should be familiar and coherent to the rest of the operating system or > the other installs of your app, that's pretty much always going to land on > the "my app" side.

They might be beneficial to the developer; but it definitely isn't to the user, which ultimately uses the app.

One might argue that the user will use the app for multiple platforms; However the user will 'know' the average user experience for both platforms, hence having no problems adapting two different interfaces if the interface is well designed to match each platform.

> Especially with Microsoft office, which was completely chock full of custom > controls and didn't feel at all like part of the OS last time I used a > natively installed version (on windows 7)

I'm pretty sure Microsoft has opened the ribbon controls for this exact argument. At the very least, the Windows 7 file explorer's toolbar looks very similar to the Office 2007; so Microsoft is trying to make the operating system more coherent. The introduction of the Notification Center in Windows 10 has a similar purpose; to make lots of different notification system in Windows coherent.

If you want to look what an operating system looks like when the entire ecosystem considers coherence importantly: try using macOS. macOS users take this very seriously to the point that almost every app (that is not election) uses the default cocoa toolkit. Microsoft office isn't an exception; they implemented the custom ribbon menu, but other than that it's mostly plain Cocoa and it doesn't standout as much as in other platforms.

<comment><USER13> _The user only uses the application in the platforms that one uses_

Most people only use one desktop and one mobile OS, but it's extremely common to use the same app on both desktop and mobile.

If your Mac and Windows apps both have to be consistent with your iOS app, they end up having to be consistent with each other.

<comment><USER11> I can confidently say that people doesn't expect the same UI between mobile & desktop apps.

If the Mac version and Windows version of the app can be consistent with the mobile version(which will have different interfaces), why can't they be consistent with each other(between the two desktop apps) while having different interfaces?

<comment><USER13> No one has suggested that people "expect the same UI between mobile & desktop apps".

The point under discussion is that it's desirable for apps to have "coherence and familiarity" across platforms.

It's important that there be coherence and familiarity between Slack and Spotify's mobile, desktop, and web apps, for example, because most of their customers will use at least 2 of the 3 in any given week, which likely contributed to their choice to use Electron for their desktop apps.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> For those that are interested in the security around file system access please go here:

[https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2019/08/native- fil...](https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2019/08/native-file- system#security-considerations)

If you look at the various restrictions, you will see that the user is in control of most of the operations. It restricts access to system folders. I do think that many lay people may still fall prey to attack vector sites that may save an evil EXE or something, hoping they will later click it. However, I suspect once we see this feature in action, hopefully it will disallow creating executable files.

<comment><USER15> I read the link you referenced. Am not clear on how seeming it action will mitigate the vector. Saving msi inf sys com files tick, save in locations people have open in explorer/finder tick.

The mitigations appear around overriding Files in user and system directories and revoking access.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> The linked article about defining typed CSS properties using a mix of script and style tags seems perplexity complicated to me: [https://web.dev/css-props- and-vals/](https://web.dev/css-props-and-vals/)

Was this intended to be tied to some other feature or framework not mentioned?

</comment><comment><USER17> Is the filesystem API based on any web standards process? I'm curious if this is a Google-only feature.

<comment> iso-8859-1 Yes: [https://github.com/WICG/native-file- system](https://github.com/WICG/native-file-system)

<comment><USER18> [https://wicg.github.io/native-file-system/](https://wicg.github.io/native- file-system/)

        Editor:
            Marijn Kruisselbrink (Google)

As you may be painfully aware of by now, "web standards process" means next to nothing if Google gets to decide the standards anyway.

<comment><USER19> What are you complaining about exactly? That a standard was authored by someone who works on a browser? Would you prefer if standards were worked on by people with no browser development experience?

Here's the draft of the accessibility API [1]. The two editors are from Mozilla. Does this mean that the process of defining this API, gathering feedback, iterating and publishing it "means next to nothing" because folks from other organisations didn't chip in?

[1] - [https://wicg.github.io/historical-a11yapi/taxonomy.html](https://wicg.github.io/historical-a11yapi/taxonomy.html)

<comment><USER17> Google should not be releasing an implementation before the "very early" spec is finalized. They aren't acting in good faith with behavior like that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I find it interesting how the solution to the OTP SMS problem is to provide the SMS Receiver API. I think the iOS keyboard OTP suggestion is the right way to do that. An SMS Receiver API, even if secure, just seems like a backwards way to solve this problem.

</comment><comment><USER21> Serious question: is there a salvation for native desktop development??

<comment><USER10> Well electron already allow you to use arbitrary language and acesss almost any native OS api. So electron is the salvation for hybrid_native desktop development. Your question would better be: Is there a salvation for native and cross platform GUI frameworks other than chromium ? The answer is probably no as chromium beat everything both feature wise, library wise and (yes) performance wise.

Really why native development isn't totally dead yet is because of inertia to learn new technologies and because of shared misconceptions about chromium performance and GUIs framework performance.

This growing gap could have been deduced so many years ago because of a simple fact: The number of full time employees working at improving chromium vs the number of full time employees working at improving QT, or GTK, etc. They are order of magnitudes more. And it has deeply increased since microsoft has joined chromium (they have moved a number of employee to chromium probably comparable as if all Gtk + QT devs moved to working on chromium. Btw, as they both know they can't keep up, they progressively webify (QTwebengine, both use CSS for styling, etc)

<comment><USER22> I can't take this answer seriously. Assuming half of what you claim were true, it would still be terrible for us to cede control of the future to Google. Of course the grim reality is that none of your claims are even remotely true.

This is a classic case of worse is better amplified by Google being in a position of unprecedented power and abusing it to full effect.

Those of us who were old before Google even existed, can see very clearly where this road is leading. On the other hand this is a battle that has to be fought mainly by the younger generation. Alas, it does not seem that we are winning.

<comment><USER10> Your only point seems to be: Chromium == Google Google == evil Therefore chromium == evil Firstly chromium implementations détails decisions are just good engeener decisions Features they intent to implement are just features devs want and or that solve a real limitation. I defy you to name a few chromium features that made the web worse. But more than anything, chromium is open source that you like it or not and Google is no longer the only major player I. Chromium since microsoft joined it. Nothing stop mozilla and Apple to join chromium too. If there's something you don't like about chromium (and indeed I can sociologicaly infer that it would be something privacy related and not something engeenering related (which is what we should mostly talk but that's not something hackernews understand much). For such thing nothing stop you from using one of the many privacy focused chromium forks.

<comment><USER22> I really don't understand this line of reasoning unless you're shilling for Google.

"Nothing stop you from using..."

"Chromium is open source..."

"Nothing stop Mozilla and Apple.."

There is a behemoth in the room that makes all these arguments NULL and VOID. It's called Google and it's ruling its domain with an iron fist. We saw what these sort of arguments lead to in practice, the recent ad-blocking debacle being the icing on the cake. Open source means nothing if you have a colossal gate keeper that is not only in full control but has the power to _dictate future evolution_. All Open Source provides in this case, is an easy excuse, a shield to deflect criticism and this is exactly what you're doing here.

Did we really learn nothing from Microsoft's past that we are willing to overlook an entity that's orders of magnitude more powerful?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Native file system access, That is what I wanted and waited the most for. Now It is possible to create an App alike webapp which needs just one prerequisite of selecting a folder on the start.

</comment><comment><USER24> The Native File System API sounds like an exploit waiting to be discovered.

<comment> iso-8859-1 I downvoted you because it is a superficial knee-jerk judgement.

<comment><USER25> I upvoted you because you explained your downvote

<comment><USER26> How does one downvote in HN? I've had an account since 2013 and I can still only upvote.

<comment><USER19> You need 500 karma, last I checked.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Rest in peace XSS Auditor</comment>


Is the iPhone a banana? (European court precendent) - <AUTHOR> http://theplanis.com/blog/iphonebanana/

<comment><USER2> In US law, I'd think the more relevant precedent would be US vs. Microsoft. Judge Jackson wrote a lengthy decision procedure for when a platform is a monopoly.

Microsoft's position was that Windows is not a monopoly, because customers had the option of buying a Macintosh instead of a PC. Jackson threw that argument out (and Posner let that opinion stand in appeal, IIRC).

I think this is the relevant bit. <http://www.justice.gov/atr/cases/f3800/msjudgex.htm#ii>

IANAL.

</comment><comment><USER3> You know what would be embarassing? If a company selling web-based project planning solutions had broken links in their website. Especially a link that was at the bottom of every page on their company blog, and was the link that was supposed to take you to the page about the product they sell.

<comment><AUTHOR> You are right, that is pretty embarrassing. It slipped through when I did a template update and I have now fixed it.

Thanks for the heads up.

<comment><USER3> I feel slightly bad about phrasing it in a snarky way now. Thanks for updating it, though :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I think there should be grounds for anticompetitive behaviour.

Whether I bought my iPhone outright, or whether I'm tied into a contract for 18-24 months, there isn't a sense of competition because I have no reasonable alternative to purchasing from Apple's App Store.

</comment><comment><USER5> The post about prospectus credibility is not bad: <http://theplanis.com/blog/latestage/>

<comment><USER6> I wonder how much of that is a result of European risk aversion and relative economic rigidity, focusing on credentials, legal barriers to competition (as opposed to building a better product), "connections and pedigree". It all sounds like big corporation CYA behaviour where the returns are low and predictable and you just need to scale, rather than an investment with big potential for upside and concomitant appetite for risk.

But like he says, it's only one data point.

<comment><USER7> > European risk aversion and relative economic rigidity, focusing on > credentials, legal barriers to competition

This is racism.

> It all sounds like big corporation CYA behaviour

And this is illogical. I mean, if Europe is the risk averse one, why is the acronym "cover your ass"? It should be "couvrir ton derriere", or at least "arse!"

<comment><USER8> >> European risk aversion and relative economic rigidity, focusing on credentials, legal barriers to competition

>This is racism.

This is an ad hominem argument. The original poster's comment sounds more like a statement about how he sees European law.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Is WebGL the future? - <AUTHOR> http://www.irrlicht3d.org/pivot/entry.php?id=1255

<comment><USER2> I agree with OP. The fact that a native app is 10X or more "better" is simply dwarfed by the low friction of full immersive 3D casual games right in the browser.

The question is not "how many polygons can you render?" but rather, "how many polygons do you _need_ to render to provide the desired experience?"

So it's a threshold question, not a contest where the winner is determined by benchmarks.

<comment><USER3> Why should there be less friction to go to a web page rather than install a game?

I think a more honest comparison (in _theory_ ) would be to compare a site used to serve music with spotify. For those that use spotify a link that opens up spotify is probably vastly superior to anything a site can do, that's not to say that the site itself doesn't have any value. But the act of playing music is something spotify better at - and that mainly is just because (if you use spotify) you have your music collection in one place. That's where you go to play music.

Playing a game locally doesn't have to be more than pressing an hyperlink. Steam is probably the, currently, best place for this but, I know, relying on something such as spotify, steam or flash sucks. But there is nothing to say that we can't have an _open_ android/iOS-market-like place for doing this. Apple and Microsoft will push their own markets and I'm surprised that the notion of a third party market hasn't come any longer than steam. I guess people are just too greedy.

There really shouldn't be _any_ reason for why running it in the browser should be any better than running it locally. Have sandboxing as an option (or requirement), similar to what apple does, and go nuts.

I miss the days when running low-level code in an all-purpose browser was something that was considered _moronic_.

<comment><USER4> _Why should there be less friction to go to a web page rather than install a game?_

Perhaps there _shouldn't_ be as much friction to install a game as going to a web page, but you can't deny that installing a game is currently not nearly as streamlined and easy as clicking a link. Even though it _could_ be, or even _should_ be. The main issue is that you have to wait to install the full game. A WebGL game would instead just download the minimum required to play the first level, and get you started playing the game ASAP.

The other thing though about a game being tied to a link is that it becomes a part of the web. Others will link directly to the actual game, rather than a page that lets you download/install the game natively. This ease of sharing is what makes it really powerful to have an in-browser game. The web is simply the ultimate form of distribution. It also seems less invasive compared to installing - you are not making any changes to your computer. Just close the web page, and it's gone (ignoring cookies/cached files). Whereas a native game will create all sorts of shortcuts and basically embed itself into your system. This is more of a perception problem with "installing" in the eyes of the average consumer.

<comment><USER3> I agree. But currently WebGL doesn't exist (in practice) either.

And nothing you said has anything to do with WebGL. See android market where you can install apps from a web page. See Origin, launch games from the browser. Installing, running an native game doesn't have to be more than answering "yes" to the question "do you want to play this game?". And I have a hard time seeing how it should be harder to uninstall than a game utilizing WebGL and local storage...

Keeping the game sandboxed and basically treating everything that is downloaded as a cache - no problem.

And streaming content to a native-game isn't exactly rocket science either, there just haven't been a need for it when you still have this cumbersome install process that you have today.

Do this and you would get an awesome separation of performance critical low level code and the web resulting in a vastly reduced attack vector (basically going from push to pull). As a bonus you would get much better performance.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Definitely not. The performance is pathetic, the feature set is pretty basic.

WebGL is where compiled 3d apps/games were, like, 20 years ago. Yes, I know it will improve, but so will compiled products. The sheer fact that WebGL is interpreted and is a poor-man's subset of OpenGL, puts it at permanent disadvantage.

Of course, you could have some trick allowing for compiled graphics code to be run within the browser, analogous to the Chrome Native Client, and with all the DirectX/OpenGL features. But that's no longer WebGL, that's just a smart trick to run old-school code within the confines of a browser environment. You might just as well write a stand-alone app.

<comment><USER6> WebGL is not a poor-man's subset of OpenGL, its the same subset that is supported by most mobile devices (OpenGL ES2.0). What are you missing? Quads? 3D textures? NURBS?

And yes, we know that JS is interpreted and that it's no use for building anything more than a clock on your webpage, right?

<comment><USER5> Could you write (graphically) Battlefield 3 in WebGL, assuming you'd be able to compile it to run efficiently?

As for your second question, JS is very useful, I love JS, I write 90% of my code in JS. But we're talking sophisticated 3d apps here, not whether it's useful at all.

<comment><USER7> Yes you can. Have you seen Team Fortress 2 in WebGL?

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DQrC5YLKFUY>

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lmvj6-CFbbA>

JS is not very pleasant to code with, so writing an actual game logic could be a bit painful, but so is development for PS3 and it's done somehow. It's not a question of performance, rather about workflow and structures provided by language.

<comment><USER4> JS has gotchas and some really bad parts, but if you know the language well and know what you're doing, I think it's quite pleasant actually for many problems. Have you done much programming with JS, and if so, what was so unpleasant about it?

Though, I think I've heard pretty much all the complaints against JavaScript, many of which are addressed by using something like CoffeeScript.

<comment><USER7> I'm using Google Closure to get rid of the bad parts, but still it's not very good. I did some testing with game AI, graphics and so on - JS is far from perfect for such things. Maybe it's a lack of tools, maybe of some features I was used to in C++ or maybe it's that all the books and tutorials are targeted for C++.

It doesn't really matter, browser games are the future and no matter how complicated it's going to be, somebody will be good enough to write them. We already passed "demo era" and some games are really good, like [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/bhoaojooagiaaiidln...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/bhoaojooagiaaiidlnfhkkafjpbbnnno)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Future of what? I don't know any use case where I would want 3D graphics on my web pages.

Running games in a browser? That's a stupid idea to begin with. Browser should be just a document reader, and games are not documents.

Why are we reinventing wheel again? Games used to be crappy, and now we want crappy games again? Why is it so amazing if something runs in a browser? Why don't we think about other solutions like making native apps more web-like?

<comment><USER9> _Why is it so amazing if something runs in a browser? Why don't we think about other solutions like making native apps more web-like?_

What's amazing is that something that runs in the browser will run on every platform where there is a browser (with some proper care of the inevitable small standard deviations). No such luck with native apps.

<comment><USER3> Yeah, with native apps you have to run a script that compiles it for all platforms.

<comment><USER10> What magic script lets you natively compile OpenGL code for Mac, Linux, Windows & portable platforms without having to write any platform specific code?

<comment><USER3> Who said anything about not having to write any platform specific code?

"with some proper care of the inevitable small standard deviations" Is exactly what I would say is required to make a game run on different platforms. It of course depends on what you want to do, but if you limit yourself to the subset that is the browser there shouldn't be any real problems at all.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Entrepreneurial Activity Reaches Highest Point in 14 Years - <AUTHOR> http://www.readwriteweb.com/start/2010/05/entrepreneurial-activity-reaches-highest-point-in-14-years-says-kauffman-report.php

<comment><USER2> Not despite, because.

<comment><USER3> Absolutely. It's so weird how the article completely misses the obvious, people that are out of work are, quite often as a last ditch attempt at making some money, very likely to start a small business trying to weather the crisis as good as they can.

The interesting thing is that a small fraction of them will succeed beyond their wildest dreams.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> For a good book on interpreting some of the Kaufman data, check out: The Illusions of Entrepreneurship: The Costly Myths That Entrepreneurs, Investors, and Policy Makers Live By Scott A. Shane

Cheers, Tristan</comment>


Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index - <AUTHOR> https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption <comment><USER2> You can't compare Bitcoin to Visa. Visa is merely a payment sytem -- a means of transfer of money that already exists. Visa is not money.

Bitcoin however _is_ money. As well as being a payment system.

The correct comparison would be to compare the cost of Bitcoin to U.S. dollars or gold. Gold requires hundreds of dollars per ounce and untold energy to extract. U.S. dollars require the existence of a powerful economy and trillion dollar military to keep the currency secure and desirable.

<comment><USER3> >The correct comparison would be to compare the cost of Bitcoin to U.S. dollars or gold. Gold requires hundreds of dollars per ounce and untold energy to extract. U.S. dollars require the existence of a powerful economy and trillion dollar military to keep the currency secure and desirable.

No it isn't- the energy cost of bitcoin is ongoing and depends on the volume of transactions. Each time money changes hands, it costs energy to verify it. Comparing it to VISA or ACH makes the most sense, because those also incur ongoing costs per transaction.

<comment><USER2> If read the article correctly, he's including the cost of mining Bitcoin, not merely energy cost to verify a coin (which is absolutely trivial). Once all Bitcoin is mined (yes, there's a built-in maximum), or it becomes prohibitively expensive to mine, there won't be any mining costs.

You can look at the current Bitcoin energy costs as the startup cost to establish a new gold mine or a new country with its own currency.

<comment><USER4> > Once all Bitcoin is mined (yes, there's a built-in maximum), or it becomes > prohibitively expensive to mine, there won't be any mining costs.

In that future you will still mine blocks, but there won't be any new bitcoin generated in that block. Sure, you might want to use a different word for that than "mining", but it will still have very real and significant energy.

<comment><USER5> "Validators" is the more generic for term what are also called miners or stakers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> That is an absurd amount of energy. This really changes my opinion on this being a feasible currency.

<comment><USER7> I agree. I've been racking my brain on ways to connect proof of work to something useful (like folding proteins, general purpose distributed computing, etc.)

<comment><USER8> Do that and it would no longer be useful as proof of work. Proof of work-i- was-going-to-do-anyway is not useful for securing the ledger.

<comment><USER9> That's incorrect. All that matters is you can't game the system by taking shortcuts or deciding what the problem will be beforehand; the work cannot be even partially computable without knowing the previous block.

<comment><USER10> No, you are incorrect. The important aspect of proof of work is that it is very expensive to create an alternate history (maybe one where you didn't send $15,000,000 to the exchange, for example). If you are doing useful work, someone can pay for it, and you can use that payment to make an alternate history for free, defeating the security assumption of blockchains.

Blockchains only work by probably wasting in order to build a history. If you aren't wasting, then it wasn't expensive to build the history (it was subsidised), and it wouldn't be expensive to build a different history (that one could also be subsidized)

<comment><USER11> But "socially useful" does not imply saleable (to the bane of venture capitalists everywhere).

It's possible for something to provide a social benefit but not make sense for anyone to pay for as a for-profit business because others would get the same benefit and free ride off them. (Hence the problem of public goods in economics.)

So if the proof of work is only solving some general research problem, then it might not be feasible to double dip like you've described. That's why primecoin was able to avoid the problem.

<comment><USER8> There are very few things that are actually useful (socially or otherwise) but don't provide economic incentive. As pointed out by others primecoin isn't really a very good example. A good application to shoot for, if there are any budding cryptographers in the audience, is a ticking timelock encryption. A set of keys known in advance, and each block solves the next key. This would let you encrypt messages into the future, where the cost to decrypt is equal to the cost of minting that many blocks.

I've seen partial schemes for this, but no complete ones that would justify implementation. If a full and workable scheme could be devised, I would bet on it replacing sha256 based proof of work, eventually.

<comment><USER11> Every public goods problem is mathematical research is a case where the solutions are socially useful but not saleable. The problem (pointed out by the sibling) with primecoin was that it worked too well, such that further solutions were uninteresting and past the point of diminishing returns.

Edit: See my here for a model of how NP complete problems could fill the role of you could predict difficulty in advance. There wouldn't be double dipping because the person wanting the answer wouldn't pay both bounties.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15107653](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15107653)

<comment><USER8> No the problem with primecoin is the mathematical "problem" it is solving isn't scientifically interesting.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> > Electricity consumed per transaction: 165 kWh

Thats about $20 in the US.

If a transaction is _that_ expensive, how can this system even work for transactions with a value of that order? Are large transactions "sponsoring" small transactions?

What happens if more people use the system for small transactions? Will BTC become unusable?

<comment><USER12> So, if you look just at transaction cost the system clearly cannot sustain itself. But as more people buy into BTC, the system keeps from collapsing. If you ask me, that's starting to look like a Ponzi scheme in disguise ...

<comment><USER13> Check your premises-- your transaction cost is inaccurate.

<comment><USER12> Check jaekwon's comment above.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> The statistic that stands out to me from this article is that 1 bitcoin transaction uses enough energy to power 5.58 us households for a day.

I'm hoping someone more knowledgeable about bitcoin can comment - is it likely that this will continue as the mining reward decreases? How expensive will transactions be after that happens? And if smaller rewards reduce total mining and power consumption, how vulnerable does the blockchain become to attack?

What i'm wondering is if transaction costs in the 'end state' of bitcoin can be competitive with centralized competitors like credit cards, paypal, etc. given this level of power consumption?

<comment><USER14>
        I'm hoping someone more knowledgeable
        about bitcoin can comment

I did and was quickly voted to the bottom.

        bitcoin can be competitive with
        centralized competitors like credit cards

In it's current form it can't. It's already running at max capacity. No further increase in transactions per day is possible.

If there will be a cryptocurrency that can handle as many transactions as Visa, it will be something else then what we currently call Bitcoin.

<comment><USER15> Iota?

<comment><USER16> Correct. Glad someone has heard of it at least on hacker news.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Long term outlook for mining isn't good. Ethereum, for example, is moving toward Proof of Stake ([https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/Proof-of-Stake- FAQ](https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/Proof-of-Stake-FAQ)), and Bitcoin will become less profitable for miners soon, beginning with the activation of Segwit.

The reason for the recent Bitcoin Cash fork, was that miners are terrified of losing control given the substantial investment required to maintain profitability. I don't think Satoshi ever thought mining would become so profitable, centralized, and political. If Satoshi had, he or she may have rethought the mining aspect of Bitcoin.

It's the end of days for mining as we know it.

<comment><USER18> Miners can choose to include more profitable transactions, skiping segwit ones.

POS will not work. you need to back Bitcoins value with something, and its electricity. Gov backing with gold.

<comment><USER19> Incorrect. Bitcoin isn't "backed by electricity". You can't turn Bitcoin back into energy. The energy is used to secure a distributed ledger to prevent double spend attacks on ongoing transactions, in a really inefficient way, but don't call it "backing".

PoS will succeed. It already has, we've set all the pieces. The thing is, you don't want to live in a world where Bitcoin and PoW dominate our financial transactions. That world is not livable.

Bitcoin transactions are secured by spent electricity. PoS transactions are secured by cryptographic signature schemes and reputation of operational security. It's how the world already functions, just more replicated.

<comment><USER10> It takes a cryptographically provable amount of energy to reverse a Bitcoin transaction, and that amount is equal to the money spent on electricity mining blocks that confirm a transaction.

Proof of Stake systems have no equivalent. They operate by trusting the staking parties are not colluding to create an alternate history. But if they do decide to collude, there is little thermodynamic cost to rewriting history.

It's a fundamentally weaker system, and one that depends on trust. The whole value of proof of work is that it allows you to escape trust.

<comment><USER20> PoS as well as PoW depend on the assumption that a majority (either in terms of value invested in hashing power or invested in tokens) of the network is following the rules. If you try to double spend in a PoW system you are betting your current electricity usage on a new block becoming the longest chain and in a PoS system you are betting the tokens themselves - from an economic point of view those two systems are indifferent (if your attempt doesn't succeed you have wasted either electricity or tokens). Collusion can happen in both cases. PoS systems introduce new (probably yet unsolved) problems but they aren't inferior from an economical point of view imho.

<comment><USER10> No, in a proof of stake system collusion to rewrite history is essentially free.

In a proof of work system, even if you collude you still have to spend a non- trivial sum of electricity to create that alternate history. Electricity that would be making you money via the block reward if you were using it honestly.

It is provably more expensive to reconstruct history in a PoW setting, even when everyone is happily colluding.

<comment><USER20> Whether it is more expensive or not is irrelevant. If a majority of the network (either in hashing power or number of tokens) decides to collude and start modifying network states for their own benefit then they will ultimately succeed. You argue that in a PoW system rewriting older blocks is more difficult than in a PoS system but that doesn't matter, because when a majority of the network becomes hostile and starts blocking all of your transaction attempts then the value of your coins immediately goes to zero. In a PoW system the records of your older transactions might be around forever but that's little more than damage control.

In such an adversarial environment proof of stake even has advantages over proof of work. If in a proof of work system a majority of the network starts to double spend or censor transactions, what can you do? You are essentially powerless because any fork (that tries to fix their malicious blocks) can be quickly taken over by the colluding miners. However in a proof of stake system you could simply fork once and destroy/invalidate all the tokens of the malicious miners.

<comment><USER10> If you are resorting to a hardfork to manage malicious actors, you can always change the proof of work algorithm, which would damage the malicious miners to a tune of billions of dollars in bitcoin.

Rewriting a year of history in a proof of stake system takes a couple days on consumer hardware. Rewriting a year of history in Bitcoin is going to require burning a literal hundred million dollars of electricity, if not an order of magnitude more.

In a proof of stake system, typically less than 30% of participants by coin amount actually do the proof of stake. And that's for systems that don't require you to bond coins for months. Exchanges frequently control that many coins. And if an exchange abuses their power, are you going to burn the coins of every single person using the exchange?

It gets worse than that though. You don't need current coins to attack the system. You only need old keys of coins that you sold. After you sell your coins, why wouldn't you sell your keys to an attacker too? If the attacker is paying for the keys, and you sold the coins anyway, there's nothing to lose for you.

Or an exchange can rotate their coins to new addresses and use the old coins to attack the system.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Just another thing people went wild for without thinking about externalities. You don't need to be a genius computer scientist to realize a thing that requires a constantly rising amount of processing power just to keep pace will eventually need an unreasonable amount of power.

<comment><USER22> Bitcoin does NOT need constantly increasing computing power. The hashrate and difficulty level adjust up _or down_ as needed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> The energy expended is a guarantee of security and immutability.

The fact that real world energy is expended is the thermodynamic guarantee of the irreversibility of a transaction.

If you have access to the VISA database, and change something, you cannot have the cryptographic proof that it has not been tampered with. At the very best, you trust a VISA root key.

With Bitcoin you trust math and physics, telling that if the whole network has expended 1TWh after my transaction, at least twice that energy will be necessary to reverse it, and the only data i need to prove that, is the blockchain.

<comment><USER24> I get that the energy is being used for something useful and cool, but when the energy cost to secure a single transaction could power 5 households for a day, then something is wrong and needs to be fixed.

Surely even fans can agree there's a level at which it just doesn't make sense any more.

<comment><USER10> That energy is not just confirming the transactions in the existing block, it is protecting all transactions in the blockchain history, adding security to each of them. That represents a history of more than $70 billion in value. Suddenly it doesn't seem so expensive anymore.

<comment><USER25> That's actually revealing.

First people try to argue that all this gigantic energy expenditure "buys" security.

And then – in the fine print – you are learning that you don't actually "buy" security, you have been sold a subscription. This gigantic waste of energy doesn't do anything unless you follow up with even more energy.

So the calculations that x amount of energy "secures" y amount of economic value is flat out wrong. Because x should be x + x' \+ x'' ad infinitum.

Oh, and the longer you stay in, the more difficult is getting out, because "sunk cost" isn't a fallacy in this scheme, it's actually real.

<comment><USER10> Yeah, the inflation is a tax more or less. It's a tax on your holdings to pay for the security and integrity of the network, and to make sure things keep moving forward.

Bitcoin is nearing the point where most security will be paid by fees instead of inflation, but imo inflation is the more fair model to pay for security.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Spending 800M$ a year in electricity alone to run a digital currency is massive and at 8$ per transaction seems incredibly inneficient. The comparison to the VISA network is incredible. Independently of your opinion of the value of Bitcoin in the long term the current network is definitely not more useful to society than the VISA network.

<comment><USER18> 800M is not to run the network, its hard money. If 1 mb limit was removed today, this network can handle loads of VISA and more. Electricity is spent to create new blocks... Hard work is done to create new Bitcoin and verify transactions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> BECI is flawed, I wrote a critic of it some months ago: [http://blog.zorinaq.com/serious-faults-in- beci](http://blog.zorinaq.com/serious-faults-in-beci)

This motivated me to research and publish a more precise energy comsumption estimate, and I have been published in Bitcoin Magazine: [http://blog.zorinaq.com/bitcoin-electricity- consumption](http://blog.zorinaq.com/bitcoin-electricity-consumption) [https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/op-ed-bitcoin-miners- co...](https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/op-ed-bitcoin-miners-consume- reasonable-amount-energy-and-its-all-worth-it/)

I always like to remind people that Bitcoin miners consume about the same amount of energy as Christmas decorative lights in the US. Kinda puts things in perspective...

<comment><USER27> > I always like to remind people that Bitcoin miners consume about the same > amount of energy as Christmas decorative lights in the US. Kinda puts things > in perspective...

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

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Apparently "terawatt-hours per year" is a unit that people use in public policy, but it strikes me as strange. Converting 16.22 TWh/year to a "more metric" unit, that's a sustained power usage of 1.85 gigawatts.

So Bitcoin is constantly using more than enough power to make Doc Brown's eyes bug out.

<comment><USER29> I too hate seeing __ watt-hours per year. What's the point of the double time conversion? It's like saying "The movie starts in 3 kilometers per mile-per- hour"

<comment><USER28> I mean, I understand why, it's because often you want to relate it to cost, and electricity is _priced_ in $/KWh, not in ($/sec)/watt.

<comment><USER30> I do wish energy were priced per megajoule. But I suppose this is probably a symptom, like miles-per-hour vs meters-per-second, of the non-metrication of time units at the relevant scales. (It takes order of an hour to drive somewhere, and order of an hour to run a laundry machine.) If we had a metric hour of a thousand seconds, a kWh would just be a MJ, no problem. And if we had a "metric year" of a million seconds, a "TWh/yr" would just be a GW. Unfortunately, it's pretty important to humans to track time in a way that lines up with earth's rotation and revolution, and there's no way to make that metric. (If French Revolutionary Time caught on, a second would be 1e-5 days instead of 1/86400 and an hour would be 1/10 of a day, and that would be a start, but the year/day ratio is pretty intractable.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> This is one of the reasons I prefer proof-of-stake schemes, despite the complexity, low power consensus is preferable given roughly equivalent tamper resistance. State collusion with mining pools is a credible threat to proof- of-work schemes.

<comment><USER32> Proof of Stake is just Proof of Work with hidden work.

Miners will crank whatever handle they can crank to increase their payout, up to the point where they spend more marginal effort cranking the handle than the corresponding marginal payout is worth. In PoW (in bitcoin) that handle is SHA256. In Proof of Stake, it's more obscure, but they will find it, and they will crank it, and you'll just be back where you started.

I'm not convinced PoS is a practical improvement on PoW.

<comment><USER20> This is a misleading argument. Yes, miners will always spend more until marginal revenue == marginal cost. The problem with the proof of work system of bitcoin (and many others) is its inefficiency that only allows for a low transactions throughput. Proof of work has no inherent value for the system, it's simply a way to cap the network throughput to about 1MB per 10 minutes because anything lower than 10 minutes will make the network increasingly vulnerable to adversarial attacks [1]. There's got to be a way to increase network throughput beyond this while maintaining censorship resistance and decentralization.

[1] C. Decker, Information Propagation in the Bitcoin Network: [http://www.tik.ee.ethz.ch/file/49318d3f56c1d525aabf7fda78b23...](http://www.tik.ee.ethz.ch/file/49318d3f56c1d525aabf7fda78b23fc0/P2P2013_041.pdf)

<comment><USER5> The point is expend work to create signatures, creating a crytoeconomic cost to state changes.

<comment><USER20> The purpose of PoW is to reduce the number of forks and also making double spending attacks very expensive. Why can't the computing power of the entire network be used to just verify the integrity of all transactions and skip the nonce finding part? This would immensely increase network throughput. The reason is because Bitcoin's PoW implementation can't provide the same level of consensus and security with a higher number of transactions. Newer PoS systems might.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> PoW needs to die.

PoS can be superior to PoW in every way except the problem of initial wealth distribution. PoW solves this problem elegantly. PoS currently has no meaningful alternative to this distribution method.

What Ethereum is doing with using PoW to bootstrap wealth and then transition to PoS looks like a winning combination.

</comment><comment><USER34> So the calculation is incredibly sensitive to the assumptions, that miners spend 60% of revenues on electricity and that they have an average cost of $0.05 per kw-h.

Anyone have any sense of how accurate either of those is?

<comment><USER35> Just want to note that 60% is the expected future (ultimately), but the current % is more like 22 (found by taking the total cost # divided by the total annualized mining revenue #).

<comment><USER32> So in that case it's only ~2 houses rather than 5.58? Is this your website? Do you think the figure should be made more accurate?

<comment><USER35> Ah no, it's 5.58 for the current 22%. If it actually gets to 60% it would be much worse.

<comment><USER34> If you aren't going to disclose your actual assumptions and methodology you should probably delete all the text that purports to do that.

Will save people time.

<comment><USER35> Huh? It's all in the infographic. 60% is the target, but "production takes time" (see content here) hence the "ultimately". I'm not hiding the current number, it's in the key statistics.

If you're interested in where the 60% comes from in the first place > it's based on the lifetime costs of a number of machines. It was on the page a while ago, but the index page itself isn't a research paper so I removed it. I'll give it a new spot soon, probably on this page (already containing the foundation of the method):

[https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-electricity- consumption](https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-electricity-consumption)

If you just want to see some real-world numbers, check out my break-down a farm recently:

[https://twitter.com/digieconomist/status/898582265080446976](https://twitter.com/digieconomist/status/898582265080446976)

(Note: subtle difference between part spent on elec & part spent on ongoing costs. I take costs and then 1 kWh for every 5 cents spent, so including overhead.)

<comment><USER34> Okay, I'll rephrase: An explanation of where each number in the table comes from would be more interesting than the current text.

It would also be useful to separate the table so that one contained the information meant to be conveyed by the index and another contained the impressive comparisons to countries and households and stuff.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> ... Speaking of environmental externalities,

In the US, "Class C" fire extinguishers work on electrical fires:

From Fire_class#Electrical:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fire_class#Electrical](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fire_class#Electrical)

> Carbon dioxide CO2, NOVEC 1230, FM-200 and dry chemical powder extinguishers > such as PKP and even baking soda are especially suited to extinguishing this > sort of fire. PKP should be a last resort solution to extinguishing the fire > due to its corrosive tendencies. Once electricity is shut off to the > equipment involved, it will generally become an ordinary combustible fire.

> In Europe, "electrical fires" are no longer recognized as a separate class > of fire as electricity itself cannot burn. The items around the electrical > sources may burn. By turning the electrical source off, the fire can be > fought by one of the other class of fire extinguishers [citation needed].

</comment><comment><USER14> The reward for mining a block will go down over time. In the end, all mining will be financed via the transaction fees. Then the market will figure out how much energy should be used per transaction.

<comment><USER37> Does that justify wasting enough electricity to power Dallas, Texas in the mean time?

<comment><USER32> It's not "wasted". The miners wouldn't spend the energy if they weren't getting a good return on their investment.

Just because you don't like bitcoin doesn't make it a "waste" of energy, any more than mining gold is a "waste" of energy if you don't like gold.

<comment><USER21> You're thinking of waste too narrowly. That power wasn't available for other things, so more had to be produced to cover Bitcoin and the other things, which meant more of all the negatives that come with energy production. Does Bitcoin provide something valuable enough to human civilization to account for that? Could that value have come from a more efficient source?

Failing to account for externalities is how we get rapid ecosystem destruction (before even bringing in climate change). Those Bitcoins aren't innocent little bits on drives. They have a cost to the planet they're produced on and the life that inhabits it.

<comment><USER32> If you think you can replace bitcoin with something more efficient, please do so. The millions of people who use bitcoin every day would gladly switch to a cheaper version if it was truly just as good.

<comment><USER21> I don't take it as a given that Bitcoin is a good solution to the problem those people solve with it. The best of the bad solutions is still bad, and Bitcoin isn't looking too good by its power consumption. It's okay to stop, really think about a problem, and find a good solution instead of charging ahead with a bad one oblivious to the brick wall ahead.

<comment><USER32> What do you think is the best way to store+exchange value across borders in a way that can't be censored or reversed by any third party and doesn't require trusting or asking permission from any third party?

Personally, I think the answer is bitcoin.

<comment><USER38> Made an account just to upvote your comment. This is an incredibly powerful point that appears to be completely missed by the majority of threads I'm seeing. Maybe PoS will turn out to be effective and reduce energy costs for cryptocurrencies, but there is absolutely nothing like them. The anonymity of money is valuable for any free and open society, and Bitcoin is currently providing that to anyone willing to create a wallet.

<comment><USER39> Who told you bitcoin was anonymous?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> What the article fails to take into account is the huge volatility of BTC relative to the USD. So if you are going to make this calculation over a whole year then you have to split it up into many small calculations (for instance, per block with the going rate of BTC:USD at the time) and then accumulate in USD.

On another note: a very large fraction of all bitcoin mining is happening in China and electricity cost there is quite different compared to the USA.

So I seriously question the prime assumption leading to the quoted energy consumption.

</comment><comment><USER41> It's such a waste of energy in a planet already burdened with climate change we worsen annually. Greed is crazy. What this is wasting is painful to see.

</comment><comment><USER42> This is a stupid comparison. The number of transactions can be increased by a factor of a 1000 easily while holding the amount of energy expended constant.

<comment><USER28> If it's so easy, please describe how.

<comment><USER43> The how is easy to explain with just the name of an implementation/fork: Bitcoin Cash.

The reason it has not happened for original Bitcoin is internal politics. If the number of transactions are limited then they are more profitable.

<comment><USER28> I do not believe that Bitcoin Cash is 1000x more efficient than Bitcoin. It is an extraordinary claim and requires extraordinary evidence.

<comment><USER43> It is not, each block in Bitcoin Cash can only hold 8x more transactions.

Also, and more important: it is not necessary to for it to be 1000x more efficient, because no cryptocurrency currently has such a big amount of transactions per hour. It would be more wasteful to support 1GB blocks when they would go empty.

But, and this is actually my claim, if volume transaction increases enough to saturate a Bitcoin Cash block, then they will increase block size, as many times as it is needed, as that is the proposed Bitcoin Cash strategy. In stark contrast with the Bitcoin 1MB blocks forever strategy.

(I am assuming you don't think efficiency is measured in watts per transaction, because if you do, /facepalm)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> >Number of U.S. households powered for 1 day by the electricity consumed for a single transaction: 5.58

The one that surprised me the most

<comment><USER10> It's a bad stat. The electricity that goes into a block doesn't just confirm the transactions in the block, it also confirms all the transactions in all blocks prior to that block, and those transactions have a cumulative value of about $70 billion.

The bleak picture painted on the article is an incomplete one by far.

<comment><USER45> Why is it a bad stat? Is having to confirm all transactions in all prior blocks not a direct result of a transaction? Why is the cumulative value relevant? I can see how there is a perceived value there but if the transaction didn't happen it wouldn't have been needed?

<comment><USER10> If the block had zero transactions in it, it still would have cost just as much energy to create.

Similarly, if the price of the coin were 1/1000th but the block were full, it would have cost 1/1000th the price to confirm those transactions.

What determines the cost/mining reward of a block is not the transactions in it, but the value of the chain as a whole.

<comment><USER45> Ah got it. Thanks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> Why don't we compare Bitcoin's energy footprint with that of all the banks, remittance shops and associated infrastructure instead?

The PoW is quite expensive, but remember that mining is a subsidised activity amounting to billions of dollars worth of rewards for the miners, many of whom make extensive use of hydro-electric and solar power.

There's the question of wether we need all this hashing power to protect the billions of dollars worth of bitcoin market cap. The truth is that ASICs mining was not anticipated and neither was the "arms race" that made mining into a profession. With Proof of Stake consensus algorithms taking front stage in Ethereum, EOS and other blockchain projects, PoW is bound to be abandoned or significantly changed.

<comment><USER47> Both ASIC mining and the arms race were anticipated as early as 2008:

"[As] the network grows beyond a certain point, it would be left more and more to specialists with server farms of specialized hardware." [https://www.mail- firstname.lastname@example.com/msg09...](https://www.mail- email@example.com/msg09964.html)

"We should have a gentleman's agreement to postpone the GPU arms race as long as we can for the good of the network. It's much easer to get new users up to speed if they don't have to worry about GPU drivers and compatibility. It's nice how anyone with just a CPU can compete fairly equally right now." [https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=12.msg54#msg54](https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=12.msg54#msg54)

<comment><USER46> You're right.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> GuB-42 What kind of unit is a TWh/year? Why not just use watts?

By the way, 10 TWh/year is about 1.21 GW.

</comment><comment><USER48> While it's a lot of power being used, it's pretty much all automated, versus any other currency that takes a lot of manual labor. Bitcoints biggest flaw in my mind is that there is no trust built in. After each transaction it should be possible to give a rating, so that each wallet/account has a reputation, it could work like "Pagerank". Trust is essential to Bitcoin and Bitcoin markets usually has either public trust, or rating and escrow added on.

</comment><comment><USER49> I always thought it was purely ridiculous that bitcoin requires mining which eats energy. So freaking ugly. The genius that created bitcoin could not see that the cheapest form of energy is coal and that his idea will just spew more CO2 into the atmosphere. Or somehow this genius could not see that? OK, yes... Iceland's geothermal energy.

</comment><comment><USER50> Has anyone read up on the proof-of-stakes algorithms mentioned in this article? I didn't hear of those before.

<comment><USER51> There's some Wikipedia coverage.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof-of- stake](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof-of-stake)

Maybe there's a better or more up-to-date introduction elsewhere.

<comment><USER10> [https://download.wpsoftware.net/bitcoin/pos.pdf](https://download.wpsoftware.net/bitcoin/pos.pdf)

Most bitcoin heavyweights who have researched proof of stake have concluded that it's not viable, and not worth further research in the context to trustless and decentralized systems.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> How does this compare to carbon-intensive resource extraction operations like gold mining?

(Gold is industrially and medically useful, IIUC)

See also:

"So, clean energy incentives" [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15070430](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15070430)

</comment><comment><USER52> Funny way to say this. Why not 1 us household for 5.58? Any reason for this?

Edit: title seems to be fixed.

</comment><comment><USER53> Bitcoin is the very essence of the free rider problem, it derives its value from illicit goods and money laundering and uses real resources at an incredibly inefficient rate to do so.

</comment><comment><USER54> Well...yeah. It's kind of by design, right?

I mean, it's either "work" or centralization, so that's the trade off bitcoin makes. The work is the disincentive against cornering, right?

<comment><USER19> No. There are sustainable alternatives to PoW. See Tendermint and the Cosmos Network, for example.

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> Taking lots of energy is literally the point of proof-of-work. Criticizing Bitcoin mining for using lots of energy is like criticizing DNA evidence for being hard to fake.

</comment><comment><USER56> The article says that Bitcoin could switch to proof-of-stake. Can it really do that and stay Bitcoin? I'm sure it would require at least blockchain split...

</comment><comment><USER57> I'm really confused by this article. Sometimes it seems like they're talking about bitcoin mining, then they start talking about transactions.

<comment><USER37> The act of mining confirms transactions in bitcoin.

</comment></comment><comment><USER58> Such a waste of energy for this experiment.

</comment><comment><USER59> I wonder what happens if/when the cost of mining becomes prohibitive

This is a crash waiting to happen

<comment><USER60> It can't: regularly (every 2 weeks IIRC) the hash difficulty is ajusted, so that with the average hashing power available during the last period, a new block would be found every 10 minutes on average.

So if it becomes less profitable, some miners give up, the mining rate falls, and the difficulty is adjusted so that it becomes cheaper, hence more profitable, to mine.

<comment><USER59> Ah I see, I was not aware the difficulty could go down as well

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER61> Byteball is not PoW or PoS, but has no energy waste for consensus.

</comment><comment><USER62> Note: Ethereum adds another 30% and is rapidly rising.[1]

[1] [https://digiconomist.net/ethereum-energy- consumption](https://digiconomist.net/ethereum-energy-consumption)

</comment><comment><USER63> Next week in the headlines:

"Bitcoin causes global warming"

</comment><comment><USER46> I'm saddened with how many technologists here think of money. As if our current system of fiat currency is in any way reliable, let alone at the ultimate stage of its evolution as a technology of wealth transfer.

If I look at the US currency as a technology that enables trade and cooperation, I notice:

\- falsifiable; see the North Korean super dollar;

\- pieces of metal alloy; coins are a souvenir from the past we shouldn't be bringing them into the future.

\- porous fibre carry bacteria; See here: [http://www.newsmax.com/health/Health-News/paper-money- germs-...](http://www.newsmax.com/health/Health-News/paper-money-germs- bacteria/2014/04/21/id/566829/)

This makes me doubt if I can trust it and unlikely that I'll carry it on me.

On the other hand Bitcoin and other cryptos are currencies from the future that we all can buy and use today.

These are currencies designed to assure trust between unknown parties, so they are most definitely a means of exchange with no significant counter-party risk.

As a store of value, they suffer from the same speculative price fluctuations all too common in the FX markets, as we can see with the GBP over the last year or so. In crypto, this natural movements are amplified because there are no jurisdictions and very low barriers of entry, so when the coin supply doesn't increase to meet the demand prices go up, as they should. And lets not forget that several countries have already moved to recognise crypto- currencies as legal tender, so demand is increasing by reaching wider portions of consumer market.

As for crashes, to the best of my recollection, all major ones were caused by panic selling following news of major hacks ([https://storeofvalue.github.io/posts/cryptocurrency-hacks- so...](https://storeofvalue.github.io/posts/cryptocurrency-hacks-so-far- august-24th/)) or rumours of impending legislative crackdown in China and now in the US.

The intrinsic value of crypto-currencies is in the platforms that support them, so not only the market cap but also what the project stands for and what it can deliver in terms of market proposition, for instance:

\- Ether is used to pay for resource utilisation on the Ethereum platform which I use to develop smart contracts, but the Foundation is re-inventing the internet so that's how I value the currency.

\- Monero, ZCash are in the forefront of cryptographic research and are some of the most accessible and privacy protecting financial instruments available so that's how I value them.

\- Bitcoin is all about economic resilience and self-sovereignty, unfortunately the in-fighting is bound to decrease its usefulness.

(edit: formatting)

</comment><comment><USER64> demand & offer, if the energy were more expensive, fewer would mine and the difficulty would drop, I wish I could mine on my low powered laptop, but if you want to raise the pitch forks against bitcoin, on the same logic, we could stop playing computer games, watch movies/shows/tv etc, even using modern phones, the old nokias that lasted a week one one charge would do fine.

<comment><USER21> People have been raising the issue of our civilization's wastefulness for years. Where have you been?

<comment><USER64> Don't remember seeing any article about how many houses we could power by not playing computer games.

<comment><USER21> A bit old, but it's one of the first results on Google.

[https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/video-gamers- use-...](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/video-gamers-use-as-much- energy-as-san-diego/)

>> _U.S. homes have about 63 million video game consoles, and together they use about as much energy as San Diego does in a year, according to a 2008 study by the Natural Resources Defense Council_</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Startup help...YoungMillionaires.com - <AUTHOR>

Wanna see what people think about this concept and if I should go route of members only club like millionaire matchmaker or make it more like a sugardaddie.com ? help! <comment><USER2> You could cut out the middle-man, and just try to get us the phone numbers of the ladies in your stock art.

There's already a category for businesses which offer rich men the chance to specify things like 'chest size' in the women they'd like to 'date', and 'dating site' isn't it.

</comment><comment><USER3> 100K/yr?!? More like YoungMiddleClassAndProbably UnderwaterOnTheirHome.com

<comment><AUTHOR> well 100 k because its a concept that can work nationally not just in california or new york or miami

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Open Minded Discuss about all thing what peoples LIKE to KNOW</comment>


Protecting a directory from being accidentally erased by rm -rf * - <AUTHOR> http://www.commandlinefu.com/commands/view/8448/protect-directory-from-an-overzealous-rm-rf-

<comment><USER2> I guess the inverse of this is

cd <dir>; touch ./-rf

<comment><USER3> > cd <dir>; touch ./-rf

Ha! That is _evil_!

But I can counter it. Assuming we're using Bash:

$ alias rm="rm --"

Your move. ;-)

P.S. OTOH, the alias above also defeats the "touch ./-i" idea.</comment></comment>