The Day I Lost a Shit-ton of Money, Part I - <AUTHOR> http://ptotrading.blogspot.com/2014/11/the-day-i-lost-sht-ton-of-money-part-i.html <comment><USER2> Guys, you are missing the mark on technical analysis. It's not about forecasting where the prices are going to be, it's about forcing yourself to follow a set of rules instead of following your emotions.

There was an article on HN sometime ago about the practices of some old tribe to choose where to sow the crops for the next year. The practices were totally random, like watching the clouds, where a bird would fly, etc. Well, researchers eventually realized that those practices actually ensured a truly random selection and that was the _best_ strategy. A non random selection, that is any possible bias, could have exposed the tribe to the possibility of a _negative_ bias in selecting terrains and the risk of multiple years of bad crops which would have led to extinction. A random strategy would led to a bad year here and there and offer better chances of survival. But humans cannot make decisions truly randomly so they need a rationale system that helps them make random decisions. We are not that different from computers in this respect, but I am going astray now, so back to topic.

The markets are full of people trading based on their emotions. A stock is going up, greed and fear of missing out kick in and people buy high. A stock is going down, panic and fear of losing kick in and people sell low. People are psychologically wired to make bad decisions in the stock market, they have a negative bias. If you can find a rationale system to follow you will make better decisions than the crowd following their emotions and take their money.

Traders know very well that the first rule in the market is that everything can happen. They also know well that for any chart there are TA "rules" that say buy and other that say sells. They also know that a method will beat the guy with no method.

This at least is my theory, I have never practiced TA but I saw my father throw away tons of money with it and invariably the losses were caused by a few trades where he did not follow his rules but convinced himself to bend them a little. And he preached all the time that following the rules was the only way to win.

You are your worse enemy in the markets.

<comment><USER3> Trading with emotions is definitely bad (and all too human) --- but it's best not to trade at all. Technical trading in particular is highly irrational if you know what your up against.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I lost a shit ton of money at the firm where I work right now almost a year ago. I wrote software that began issuing trades outside of where it was expected to and did not stop. In a panic, I forced the server it was running on to terminate its process but trades were still open in the market. They had to be manually closed. I feel sick to my stomach even writing this right now, that hour I was trying to fix the problems sticks out as the worst moment in my life. I am glad whoever wrote this can be so nonchalant about it, if you have a strategy for forgetting I would love to hear it.

<comment><USER5> To me there seems to be a certain sort of karma in this.

HFT doesn't really add value to anything in my opinion (cue the arguments that HFT somehow adds real value to our society). Yet HFT creams a profit by shuffling money around very quickly. So if there are sometimes big losses like this from a bug, then it seems to even things out somewhat.

<comment><USER6> To me there seems to be a certain sort of karma in this.

Momentum prop trading doesn't really add value to anything in my opinion (cue the arguments that momentum prop trading somehow adds real value to our society). Yet some momentum prop trading creams a profit by shuffling money around very quickly. So if there are sometimes big losses like this from a bug, then it seems to even things out somewhat.

<comment><USER7> "Anything of value" is a subjective measurement - you could say that stock markets don't add anything of value, or you could say that they enable more investments, since you're able to liquidate your investment whenever you want.

Trend following, and mean-reversion following (what this article describes) are techniques that counteract the basic human irrational/emotional biases. Ideally, they should prevent bubbles and stop crashes. They make markets more rational.

<comment><USER5> "They make markets more rational."

Said during the greatest economic downturn since the great depression.

<comment><USER8> They don't help with long-term behavior, but they definitely can make markets more rational on a shorter time scale. You can think of HFT market-makers as adding friction to a system. They will generally take positions against the trend, reducing (or maybe just delaying) price impact of the trend traders.

EDIT: I should point out: _all_ market-makers provide this benefit to the market. The difference now is that HFT is automated, and like most forms of automation it has out-competed most manual market makers, for better or for worse. AFAIK, the last bastion of manual market-making is NYSE, where the humans have information and discretionary powers that are not granted to any of the robots.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Reading this sort of stuff from manual prop traders makes me laugh. It sounds so amateur hour. How in the world can manual traders ever compete against a short-term stat arb or HFT strategy? It just sounds like pure luck that any of them will make money.

Also, is 130k really a huge loss? I run HFT strategies, and while it would definitely be a big loss even for one of my strategies, it wouldn't be a phenomenal outlier. How small was this guy trading before?

<comment><USER10> Now you are just bullshitting. A 130k is a huge loss and a phenomental outlier. You've never had even a 100k loss on your strategies. And by current standards your strategies are not even HFT. I've seen you talking milliseconds. Nowadays people are talking sub-microseconds.

<comment><USER11> Sub-microsecond transactions seem impossible unless you're physically jacked in to the trading datacenter's network. If you try to transfer a message (like a string buffer) as quickly as possible from program A running on core 0 to program B running on core 5 on your server-grade computer, the best benchmarks I could achieve were "99% of measurements executed in fewer than 150 nanoseconds." And I worked hard on this problem. It seems like _maybe_ you could execute a trade in ~400 nanoseconds at best, if you have a server that's connected with 10GigE directly to a NASDAQ (or whoever) box and you're bypassing how Linux normally does packet handling, but I wouldn't be surprised if the overhead of the other party's server pushes that to at least 1 microsecond in all cases.

But... now that I've examined the facts, I admit what you say may be true. Are HFTs really operating in sub-microsecond time for trades nowadays?

<comment><USER10> Yes, you are correct. On an average Linux box to have a single cache line data transfer between the cores under 150ns 99% of the time is about the best that you can get. Especially if you are running stock kernel that eats this 1% and creates huge outliers ;). There is some talk though, about crazily-expensive switches with integrated FPGAs...

<comment><USER12> Light moves at 1 ft per nanosecond... I sure hope you're close to the NASDAQ data center :)

<comment><USER11> It's 1ft/ns in a vacuum, but my understanding is that it's closer to 0.5ft/ns in a wire, so what you say is doubly true. But I think HFTs are running on servers close to the NASDAQ datacenter, and that people pay buckets of money for such privileges.

<comment><USER13> Pretty sure NASDAQ rents servers directly on site for serious dough, so distance is not that much of an issue.

<comment><USER14> Yes and No. Nearly every electronic exchange now offers co-location services (including NASDAQ).

The "serious dough" part is a little harder to quantify. I've not looked into NASDAQ specifically but server colocation is usually on the order of a couple of thousand dollars a month. This is a drop in the bucket compared to the real costs of a professional trading outfit (namely employees and margin/risk costs).

Anecdotally, it's also almost exactly what I paid for a tier 1 co-located server at my first job in a startup during the first dotcom boom.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I can't help but think of confidence and the illusion of control:

[http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/23/magazine/dont-blink-the- ha...](http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/23/magazine/dont-blink-the-hazards-of- confidence.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0)

"Mutual funds are run by highly experienced and hard-working professionals who buy and sell stocks to achieve the best possible results for their clients. Nevertheless, the evidence from more than 50 years of research is conclusive: for a large majority of fund managers, the selection of stocks is more like rolling dice than like playing poker. At least two out of every three mutual funds underperform the overall market in any given year.

More important, the year-to-year correlation among the outcomes of mutual funds is very small, barely different from zero. The funds that were successful in any given year were mostly lucky; they had a good roll of the dice. There is general agreement among researchers that this is true for nearly all stock pickers, whether they know it or not — and most do not. The subjective experience of traders is that they are making sensible, educated guesses in a situation of great uncertainty. In highly efficient markets, however, educated guesses are not more accurate than blind guesses. "

<comment><USER16> To me this is depressing as my future pension is invested in funds. Given the rest of the comments: how best to invest it for long-term grown above the rate it'd have in a savings account?

<comment><USER17> Invest directly in stock and bonds. And if that is not available, than invest in low fee funds.

<comment><USER14> "Invest directly in stock and bonds."

That is pretty much the opposite advice you should take from those findings.

In general, investors now have the widest array of low cost, diversified instruments available at any point in history. Most advisors who know what they are talking about, will tell you to take one of these options (a non- managed index fund, a highly diversified etf) and invest in that. Rebalance once a year and don't worry about beating the market.

<comment><USER17> Well I do not advocate stock picking to beat the market. Just to construct the index tracker yourself instead of paying a fee for someone else to do it.

<comment><USER14> That is still phenomenally bad advice. You aren't paying index funds or etfs for their stock picking, heck most of that is in publicly available documents. What you are paying them for is their operational capabilities and economies of scale.

I would be amazed if a retail consumer could put together a balanced, diversified portfolio with the same cost as an actively managed fund. To try and compete with an etf or non-managed index fund is crazy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I work in a small prop-shop doing HFT. Most of the guys there are manual traders, and I've seen the same guys there for several years making steady money. I don't think this is bs or amateur hour, let me explain why. It is essentially the small (independent) traders that can make a win when the big guys (hedge funds, pension funds) are moving their positions around. Imagine a dude on a surfboard enjoying the wake of an oil tanker and you get the idea. Just don't get too close :-)

<comment> FLUX-YOU Any suggestions for HFT programming reading material and background knowledge for that kind of work?

<comment><USER18> I learned most of it on the job, from the masters. So I don't really know about the literature. The non-finance part of it involves alot of real-time stuff, which is found in game programming, and also audio software. Also, you could read up on networking, TCP/IP, etc.

As for risk control (by risk I mean bugs) I often wonder if there are lessons from eg. the nuclear industry, on how to keep complex, highly-strung systems on track. That's another thing I learned on the job, and not always the easy way :-)

<comment><USER14> The problem with using nuclear industry systems lessons is that the nuclear industry moves exceedingly slowly (for good reason) but trading needs to move fast. Opportunities exist for a very short time, so being able to find them, exploit them, and not blow yourself up in the process is the trick _.

_ A trick not many folks have proven they can do over the long haul.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> And here I was hoping the meat of the blog post would actually be in the post. Nope, just a teaser for part two.

Also, why is this submission marked "2011"? It was apparently written today.

<comment><USER20> They removed it now... must have been a typo

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I worked at an investment bank writing software for traders like the author. I never quite knew how it worked, but it somehow paid my salary. (It seemed a lot like crazy kids doing whatever they wanted. That might not be far from the truth.)

What I always thought was interesting was that when the traders blew up like this, they became the PMs or support for the software :)

</comment><comment><USER22> Technical analysis doesn't work. Big surprise you lost money. Those guys that you thought were good at it? They lost their shorts at some point too.

<comment><USER23> I'm wrong all the time and lose money all the time. The big difference here is I let one get away from me instead of keeping it small/manageable like I always do. It was a situation where I could have controlled it and I didn't. I'm still up more than 4x what the final realized loss was in my trading career.

I used to think TA was a joke. I was very skeptical before using it. I have never bothered to explain why it works intellectual to non-believers. But I do think someone who understood probability and saw the compiled statistics of practitioners would concede that there's 0 chance of non-randomness.

<comment><USER22> Yeah, no. That's called anecdotes, because when you do understand probability and backtest these strategies, they are known not to work in the large.

Stat arb is what happens when you actually do statistics, and these days it's got only a slim to nil advantage.

<comment><USER24> Trading is like the Israeli nuclear program: those who talk about it don't know about it, those who know about it don't talk about it.

If technical analysis actually worked, you'd be able to find the "Technical Analysis Toolkit" for on GitHub, and... technical analysis would no longer work. A little bit of grepping around yields: [http://ta-lib.org/](http://ta- lib.org/) (Technical Analysis Lib).

Ergo: if technical analysis ever worked (there is some evidence it did before about 1990 when personal computers became ubiquitous) it almost certainly does not today.

The only way market timing approaches can work is if they embody significant information that is not generally available. A successful market timer has to be smarter than everyone else in the market at the time of each trade.

Anyone claiming technical analysis works is claiming that there is an inefficiency in the market that has been well-documented in public for decades, to the extent that an open-source BSD-licensed tool for identifying the inefficiency exists, and yet the inefficiency still exists.

This is simply contradictory.

<comment><USER25> An economics professor is walking down the street with a student. The student sees a $100 bill on the ground and tells the professor. The professor says, "Nonsense! If there were a bill on the ground, someone would have picked it up already!"

I actually think that in this case you are probably right, though. But I wouldn't bet my life on it.

<comment><USER26> I love this joke, because on the surface it's making fun of economists whose theories blind them to an obvious reality. But how often does _anyone_ actually find a $100 bill on the ground?

<comment><USER27> My wife found one once on a very windy day in Denver.

<comment><USER28> Maybe Bill Gates dropped it ([http://www.netfunny.com/rhf/jokes/97/Jul/gateswealth.html](http://www.netfunny.com/rhf/jokes/97/Jul/gateswealth.html))

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> No surprise to me that these guys win some and lose some. All they are doing is trying to predict the future of a stock with absolutely no knowledge other than a graph of price movement. If it's going down, it will continue to go down. It it's going up, it will continue to go up. It's a fools game.

<comment><USER23> Hey Jbuzbee,

This is what I thought as well when I was initially introduced to the idea of technical analysis and day trading. I was very skeptical.

I don't want to call myself a probability expert but after studying poker theory and reading mainstream works like Fooled by Randomness, I bought into the idea that it was just a bunch of a guys throwing darts and the "winners" whom were trying to sell all their BS were simply benefiting from survivorship bias.

But after seeing the numbers themselves first hand, there's just no way it's random chance. Being net positive 80% of all days traded with all your winners and losers falling in a relatively tight distribution -- luck can't create highly specific, repeated outcomes like that. There is virtually zero tails risk since 99% trades are intraday only.

My loss was a failure of discipline. I froze like a deer in the headlights, failed to execute like I normally do and paid the price. Hope you keep reading to find out what happened!

<comment><USER30> > _Being net positive 80% of all days traded with all your winners and losers > falling in a relatively tight distribution -- luck can 't create highly > specific, repeated outcomes like that._

Yes, it can. E.g. you could sell deep out-of-the-money puts and collect a $1 premium day after day, say 99% of all days. Until one day a {terrorist attack in the US, humongous earthquake in Japan} happens and you lose more money than you ever made.

<comment><USER31> Which is why it's good to have net-short deltas (when beta weighted against the SPY), to protect against tail risk.

It's also why it's important to trade small, and have a large number of uncorrelated positions.

You can go on believing that nobody makes money doing this sort of thing over the long term. That's fine. But it's definitely not true.

Derivatives have no more risk than the underlying. What makes them more risky is the leverage. Selling 1 option w/ a 0.5 delta is no more risky than selling 50 shares of the underlying.

<comment><USER30> My comment is an example of why the reasoning below incorrect. My comment does not say "it is impossible to make money by trading stocks/derivatives".

> Being net positive 80% of all days traded with all your winners and losers > falling in a relatively tight distribution -- luck can't create highly > specific, repeated outcomes like that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> When's part 2 slated for? That was annoying to just get into the meat of the story and then...

<comment><USER33> He got me reading the whole thing and then it stopped abruptly.

The guy basically just posted the introduction.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Wow. I just saw my pageview count go up like a rocketship and saw that HN was the reason why. Kinda cool.

<comment><USER34> Get out now! It'll crash any second now.

<comment><USER35> Nah, just short the server!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Hey guys! Thanks again for all the interest. Since this site was responsible for more than 90% of my traffic, I thought I'd address some of the comments in this thread. Hope you all enjoy.

[http://ptotrading.blogspot.com/2014/11/a-message-to-all- non-...](http://ptotrading.blogspot.com/2014/11/a-message-to-all-non- daytraders-and.html)

</comment><comment><USER36> Long story short:

Guy makes living watching dead cats bounce, and correctly realising when it's bouncing and when it's peaking.

One day, he misses the peak, due to some SNAFU.

History.

I made a living doing exactly such for a little while, until I lost the whole damn lot due to having to reboot in the middle of a big position. Own damn fault, should have had another screen spare.

</comment><comment><USER37> Every time I try to read about trading, a little Baron Munchausen in my head starts going "Your reality, sir, is lies and balderdash, and I'm delighted to say that I have no grasp of it whatsoever." :-/ I dunno.

(This goes double for HFT.)

<comment><USER14> I feel the same way every time I read a story about a startup trying to put a web front end on some service industry.

This goes double for when I'm reading about their valuations.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Here's Part II!

[http://ptotrading.blogspot.com/2014/11/the-day-i-lost-sht- to...](http://ptotrading.blogspot.com/2014/11/the-day-i-lost-sht-ton-of-money- part-ii.html)

</comment><comment><USER38> Anybody have a glossary?

<comment><USER39> [http://www.investopedia.com/terms/h/hitthebid.asp](http://www.investopedia.com/terms/h/hitthebid.asp) \- there's one term from the article defined for you. The site has lots more.

If there are still terms you can't find, post them here and I'm sure someone can explain.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> What a tease! I want part 2

</comment><comment><USER41> Do you think technical analysis works? Look at the mountains, try drawing resistance lines, my god, you are able to predict when the mountain ridges are going to break through right past 9000! Are you Jesus?

<comment><USER42> Don't forget the magical term 'support'. Or 'Fibonacci levels'. Or 'resistance zones'. If I see another blog post by the brokerage firm I'm with about freaking 'supports' I'm going to hurl. Technical analysis puts everything from astrology through religion on to homeopathy to shame in its bullshittery.

The most entertaining part is when they go on about the support levels between the currencies. "NOK-NZD is about to break the 5.30 support level and this chart indicates that NOK-NZD is going to go up." It just leaves me thinking WTF, how do you go from here to there? I think, more honestly, the actual example I saw was CHF to JPY.

'Butterfly patterns'? You sure you're not reading tea leaves?

That said, I'm sure technical analysis works. Something like 0.5+ε of the time. And, if you find the right sort of TA, if it's just RSI or some MACD crossover with specific sets of parameters x or y for that stock you might beat buy and hold or whatever. 50% of the time, if you're lucky, before commissions.

But I'm not even convinced, nor should anyone with half a brain be, that 365 days is somehow a magical interval over which we should compare in the long term or anything.

Just buy and hold and index fund, people. Or something very managed with a very low level of turnover and low fees, keeping in mind an appropriate diversification period. When to buy? Today, or gradually over the next few months with dollar cost averaging. Holding period? Ideally forever. Simple.

<comment><USER22> When I saw the post I was worried that HN would eat this crap up. But this is the appropriate level of revulsion. Whew.

<comment><USER43> I'm glad you're here to back up the other revolted skeptics.

<comment><USER42> I've just had a revelation.

MACD has three days as parameters, 12, 26 and 9 being commonly used for completely arbitrary reasons.

Biorhythms use 23, 28 and 33 for similarly arbitrary reasons.

Maybe if we found the right magic numbers we can establish a link between these two highly reputable sciences.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> Not sure why the title has (2011) in it. This was posted today, November 11, 2014

<comment><USER45> I think this is the part of the story about his experiences in 2011.

<comment><USER20> Nah, the story starts in 2013

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> I guess this is only written for other traders? I couldn't make much sense of it and got bored pretty fast.

<comment><USER47> That's how most of us feel when we see articles about SF real estate or politics :-)

<comment><USER46> Why are you telling me? I don't post articles about SF real estate or politics, I just like to comment on them. In fact, I haven't posted anything so far :-)

<comment><USER47> Relevant to your comment:

"I guess this is only written for other San Franciscans? I couldn't make much sense of it and got bored pretty fast."</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Want Hacker News Comment Scores Back? Check out HNPoints.com - <AUTHOR> http://hnpoints.com <comment><USER2> If we're going to open a new dialog on this:

Has anybody noticed the drastic decline in quality of links and comments in the last month or so? I think one of the problems is that, without comment scores, new users don't have feedback from the community on how they're supposed to act. There's no way for them to learn the culture.

So it's September, but with no way to tell the new students to mind their manners.

<comment><USER3> Bad comments are still grey.

People can see their own comment scores.

HN is still in decline, but I don't think it's worse than when it had public scores.

Meanwhile, not having up-to-the-minute scores makes the site more pleasant to participate in; one isn't prodded to make statements in reaction to ludicrous (and likely ephemeral) voting swings.

<comment><USER2> Yeah, but there's no context for the new users. I know that a +20 comment score is really good, but I only know this because I've been around for longer than the removal of the scores.

New users wouldn't have this feedback. They might think they're making good contributions at +2-3.

People talk about "group think", but when you've got an intelligent group (like HN), a bit of group think can be a good thing.

<comment><USER3> I can see why you'd want feedback that worked this way, but HN comment scores never did. Also, +20 isn't a "really good" comment score. Depending on the thread, it's:

* A comment made by someone with name recognition whose comments are read in RSS by 20 people.

* A comment on a political thread that states a clear polarizing opinion for people to glom onto.

* A mystical winged unicorn "good comment".

* A mediocre comment on a buzzy thread ("TechCrunch Says Apple App Store Approval Process Makes iOS Better Than Android!").

My best comments on the site are not, as a rule, my top-scored comments.

Meanwhile, public scores clearly do create problems: they promote groupthink, they prod reactionary voting or, worse, reactionary commenting, and they act as nerd pheromones driving tangential discussions to the tops of threads.

The harm of public scores outweighs the good, in my opinion. Reasonable people can disagree about that point. But I'm not sure they can disagree that there's _nothing_ bad about public scores (which is not an argument you made).

<comment><USER4> _My best comments on the site are not, as a rule, my top-scored comments._

My best comments usually get about 5 points. That's because the _best_ things that I write are usually on very specific topics that I know a lot about. However, the way that breaks down is that there's a tiny number of people who also know enough about those things to know if I'm just talking out of my ass or actually saying something useful. And even if they could tell, there's often not enough backstory for someone who doesn't at least have a passing interest in those areas to make sense of them.

On the other hand, my 50+ point comments tend to be some combination of well- timed, snarky and generic. Basically, they're the sort of thing that HN wants to _discourage_. As such I'm generally a fan of the scores being hidden.

<comment><USER3> Strong agree.

One of my highest-rated comments (inexplicable; I'm embarrassed by it):

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2184067>

Meanwhile, here's a comment I actually had to do research to write. Skim it and take a guess how its karma relates to the previous comment:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1994085>

Hint book: _ZBER GUNA RVTUG GVZRF YRFF XNEZN._

<comment><USER5> Why are you embarassed by the first one? Targeted specific criticism is _fantastic_ and hard to come by. The world needs more "this is bad -and heres why-" and less "yo Dawg I'm just not feeling it Dawg"

<comment><USER3> Can we just suffice it to say that I think the scores on these two comments should be --- at least --- reversed?

<comment><USER6> Of course the scores should be reversed on a place called "Hacker News" but you know the reason why the scores are the way they are; As the popularity of this site increases, the average skill set of the users deceases. Your "embarrassing" post is comprehensible to unskilled people, but your beautiful post is well beyond the skills of most users to understand.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Yeah, having got past the initial "ooh, this is cool" phase, I do actually think HN was better off with the comment scores.

For example, I was looking at a popular submission the other day and someone had said "Hey is there a PHP port of this?". Back in the day, I'd be able to see how many points it had as a rough indicator of how many other people would have found a PHP port useful. Now I can't tell if that was just one guy, or if 50 people thought the same.

Please, PG, bring the points back? (and while you're at it, stop new users being shown in green?)

<comment><USER8> Speaking of coloring, what if, instead of points, highly voted items showed orange-red or something to that effect.

I lost information when comments went away. When someone suggested a payment processor and got 150 upvotes, I would know they sound respectable.

Maybe bringing comment scores back isn't needed, just a rough sense of how the comment was received via coloration.

<comment><USER7> Yeah that would solve it. (even better, make the shade of colour relative to the number of votes deployed on that page. So it's indicative of the percentage of votes on the page, rather than some absolute value)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> On the issue of scores vs no-scores, it'd be possible to A/B test this, so half of HN users see scores, and half don't.

Metrics to track might include the number of comments made, number of hits on the site, number of upvotes / downvotes, and probably many more.

Some people obviously feel strongly about this issue, and it might be necessary to take steps to prevent gaming of the outcome. Keeping the metrics secret until after the test would help with this. So would publicly announcing that only a small (say 10%) but undisclosed subset of users will be used to determine the outcomes of the testing. So any individual user wouldn't know if their behaviour would affect the results, and so would have little incentive to waste their time trying to affect the outcome.

It'd be nice to take a data-driven approach to resolving this question.

<comment><USER10> An interesting idea. But what would stop someone from continuously creating new accounts until they got an account which could see the scores?

<comment><USER9> You could exclude recently created or low-karma accounts, or at least track them separately. Indeed, there are many subgroups of HN users it might be interesting to track. E.g., new users, or users who've had accounts for a long time, or users with particularly high average comment scores, etc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I much prefer the new HN, without visible comment scores.

When comment scores were visible, it was obvious that many people would just vote with the herd, downvoting comments with lots of downvotes, and upvoting comments with lots of upvotes.

This is still a problem, since HN still tends to put highly rated comments near the top, and low rated comments near the bottom. But it's not nearly as much of a problem as it was when comment scores were visible.

I think the quality of comments has increased with the new system, and I find myself reading more of the comments now that the scores aren't visible.

I also find myself voting less, and voting only on comments I personally feel are exceptionally good or exceptionally bad.

One change I would like to see HN experiment with is making the score of a given comment visible only after you've voted on that comment.

This will both encourage voting and also satisfy people's curiosity, while still discouraging voting with the herd.

<comment><USER7> > When comment scores were visible, it was obvious that many people would just > vote with the herd, downvoting comments with lots of downvotes, and upvoting > comments with lots of upvotes.

Hmm. First of all you had no way of knowing that people were voting because of the high (or low) scores. Your theory seems to be "Hmm, the score on this comment is un-naturally high, therefore people must have just been voting on it because it was high". Secondly, now that we can't see the scores, you've no way of knowing whether the points awarded are just as 'un-naturally' high as they were before scores were shown. For example, one of my comments in this thread has got 11 points in the last ten minutes or so - that's without scores being shown.

In the past, you may have attributed that score to herd-voting. But clearly that can't be the case, as no-one can see the score _. (_ except the few who've installed the points plugin!)

<comment><USER10> Well, it's true that I can't read people's minds and find out the real reason that they voted for something.

However, it's not true that there weren't signs that herd voting was going on.

I've spent quite a bit of time on HN, and have monitored many popular threads and have seen how comments fared when they've gotten lots of up or down votes.

It was my feeling (though just a feeling, without hard data to support it) that comments would tend to get upvoted substatially more when they already had a relatively high rating, and downvoted when they had a relatively low rating.

Also, I noticed many comments that I considered to be of high quality get passed over for low quality comments with higher scores, and what I considered to be kneejerk downvoting on valuable comments with lower scores.

Now that comment scores are no longer visible, it's harder to gauge these trends, but not impossible.

HN still tends to place higher rated comments near the top, and lower rated comments near the bottom, so you can get a feel for how people are voting on a given comment by making note of how the comment moves up and down the page.

The scores of your own comments are also visible. So you can draw some conclusions from monitoring voting on them.

I would certainly love to see public release of anonymized HN voting data, and some good analysis of these sorts of trends (also on voting patterns in relation to how long a given user has been on HN, and how active that user is, etc..).

Until then, all we have are our own subjective interpretation of what we've seen happen on the site.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> It really bothers me that so many people here seem to be saying " _I_ am capable of scoring articles fairly, but the rest of the community seems not to be able to think for themselves, falling victim to group think and a herd mentality."

This seems like a lot of fundamental attribution error [1] going on here.

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_attribution_error>

<comment><USER12> I don't think that's accurate - I want points back because it allows me to see what _other_ people have voted. Because I trust this community I'll be fairly certain these ar ethe comments that will hold the most value for me.

<comment><USER11> I agree with you. It seems to me that those _opposed_ to visible points are saying that "other people don't vote properly".

<comment><USER3> I don't think I voted well either. I think you may have set up a false dilemma here.

<comment><USER13> Agreed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> In my view, the comment scores made the site more fun and more social.

One thought is that maybe the score gets hidden if it is 1 or less. I think that scores are especially interesting when it highlights a great comment or provides feedback to the person making the comment.

The ordering of comments without a score is a good example of why a visible score is needed. You assume that the best comments are on top but it is not clear how good are the comments below the top one.

Since the scores were removed, I have been commenting less often and often ignoring many of the comments below the top ones.

</comment><comment><USER15> The submitted site is interesting. I will not go to the trouble of contributing any scores I am aware of to the database, however. Here in this thread, we are once again in metadiscussion about whether or not it was a good idea for HN to experiment with not showing users the comment karma scores of other users, a change that happened not long ago. When pg wrote his post "Ask HN: How to stave off decline of HN?" just 47 days ago,

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2403696>

he wrote, "The problem has several components: comments that are (a) mean and/or (b) dumb that (c) get massively upvoted."

That's still the key issue. In the view of the site founder, who has had a registered account here for 1684 days, many of the high-scoring comments carried a false signal of quality, likely to mislead users about which comments are factually accurate or helpful to the community. If some change of voting rules or comment karma visibility brings about higher scores for good comments, and lower scores for mean, dumb, or other bad comments, that is helpful to all readers of HN.

Feel free to review the site guidelines

<http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html>

and the site welcome message

<http://ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html>

for guidance on what is desired here and thus guidance on how to vote. I defer to the site founder on all issues of site governance. I have found HN largely to be a worthwhile website for my 914 days as a registered user, and my interest is mostly to make sure that the site founder and the members of his volunteer editor ("curator") team

<http://ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html>

continue to enjoy the site and find it useful for themselves. They are doing a good job, and I want them to have incentive to keep up the good work. On my part, I have been able to find good comments more readily since the comment karma scores were hidden than I was before.

<comment><USER16> I wonder if a system that weighed upvotes based on the commenter's karma would make things better. The top 10% (or 50%) of users could get full upvoting capability, while the rest can give a fraction of an upvote based on their location on the karma order.

</comment></comment><comment><USER2> I love this. A hacker approach to getting the points back :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your support! Yep, just trying to make something people want. :)

<comment><USER2> This is _definitely_ something people want. Thanks for building it :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> There is a huge asymmetry in the power of HN users between those that can down-vote and the rest. The problem is that many of the "powerfuls" use their privilege to punish other users based on disagreements, whims, or simply to silence opposite opinions. It is OK to indicate the popularity of a comment by moving it to the top but it's wrong to silence an unpopular comment by fading it away. That should be reserved only to comments that violate the rules: spams, trolls, shameless ads, etc.

Put the unpopulars at the bottom or indicate the degree of popularity with a number, but don't disappear it. Fading away honest unpopular comments is a big turn off that ultimately harms the debate.

</comment><comment><USER7> How about throwing the code[1] up on github?

[1] The XPI is a slim greasmonkey-compiled script which just loads <http://hnpoints.com/hnpoints.js> into the page

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm planning on doing that, but wanted to fix up any bugs that crop up first. In the meantime, as you noted, the un-obfuscated JS file is up on the server for all to see. It's used in the bookmarklet and Firefox plugin directly, and the Chrome, Opera, and Safari extensions use the same file bundled up with minor or no changes.

<comment><USER7> By the way, I don't think you'll get past the mozilla review process with this extension structure. When I wrote one for my job, I seem to remember them being nervous about loading and executing JS from 3rd parties (the thinking being: if you're hacked, suddenly everyone who installed your extension is also hacked, especially as the JS is executed with raised privs.) Not that you're at that stage yet, but I just thought I'd give you a heads-up :)

Nice idea, well executed.

PS: You aren't using the extension yourself? edit: ah you are now :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the tip! Given how technically savvy most of HN is, I was thinking the XPI download would be sufficient at least for now, but when I do go to submit it to the addons repository, I will be sure to put the actual JS in there.

I am indeed using the Chrome extension, but it only updates comment scores every 10 minutes while on HN as not to slow down the HN reading experience. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I'm onboard, but I think it's funny that this is the only thread I've seen numbers in so far.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, in its infancy, it's natural for all of the participants to be congregated on the inaugural thread. :) Comment scores for people who have the extension should show up for any comment they've made in the past two weeks, though, and it should start filling in around HN as more people start using it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Dear PG, please bring back the vote counts and vote-based sorting. If you want to give the option, make it a per-user setting to disable.

My recent approach to having to weed through ALL comments to find the interesting ones has been to completely avoid reading them and switch to different channels of obtaining information (blogs, apps, reddit, etc.)

</comment><comment><USER20> Apparently Websense filters the site as "Potentially Damaging Content Sites."

I am not saying this thinking that the site is potentially damaging. Websense is pretty dumb about most of the things it chooses. I just wanted to let HNPoints know that because it blocks people from seeing it from behind a Websense filter.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the heads up; I will see what I can do. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> How do you infer comment scores. The order of comments appears to be determined by both score and elapsed time. You'd have to have pretty exact knowledge of how it worked. Is that information available?

<comment><AUTHOR> The source code for Hacker News is available with the Arc download. pg has said that the actual ranking algorithm differs slightly from the code listed in order to thwart abuse, but for the purposes of ranges I thought it'd be close enough. Knowing the time, relative ranking, and the known scores of participants, the ranges are basically "how many points would this comment need to be one rank higher/lower".

<comment><USER22> Thanks for this extension.

A suggestion- I understand what you're trying to convey with the point range, but for usability I'd prefer always seeing one number there. I don't mind a best guess and marking the score as an approximate number. Having to mentally parse ranges and less than symbols adds a slight speed bump.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Goodness and badness is subjective. Up/down voting should exist only for the purpose of recommending articles to each individual _user_. This is far different from the typical use of up/down which is to recommend articles to the _collective_ , which is not robust against influxes from other communities, e.g. reddit, digg etc.

In other words, when I log in, I should see my own _personal_ HN list of stories, that have been submitted by people I respect (i.e. people I've previously upvoted), or people that they respect etc.

I call this idea PeopleRank.

</comment><comment><USER24> I would love to see information from PG on the following in relation to the recent changes in HN:

        - increase/decrease in activity of users with highest karma
        - increase/decrease average in comment score, normalized
            by time after post of OP
        - amount of time the highest rated posts stayed on the front page
        - trends for # of flags

Also, it would be great if he __put the guidelines on the submission page __.

I've posted this before, but haven't heard anything.

</comment><comment><USER25> Seriously, just bring the friggin' scores back. I feel this experiment has run its course and at this point it's really just more irritating than anything.

</comment><comment><USER26> I was relieved when the scores disappeared. The less unnecessary information the better, I find. Besides, I think score visibility just promotes groupthink.

I don't use score sheets with my friends. Moderation becomes necessary in a pseudonymous environment, but there's no reason for it to become visible where it's not necessary. Reply-order shuffling and grey-out seem to be a pretty good fit there.

</comment><comment><USER27> Thanks for this; I've installed it. I don't really think that disabling the public points has lead to better discussions.

<comment><USER28> +1

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Are you filtering on the server side for cheating?

(I am testing it with this very comment)

Edit: No

Double Edit: well it was 99999 for a moment, back to 1, so you are doing something. gg.

</comment><comment><USER30> Take away points from people too.

Only submissions themselves should have points.

That way there is no "ego" - it's only about the articles.

</comment><comment><USER31> Thank you so much for doing this.

</comment><comment><USER32> I guess I don't really get the point of this. The whole idea of ditching points was to see if it could generate better discussion. By using this extension you are re-enabling points (even if only for a few select users). That re-enabling is going to encourage those users to go back to their bad posting habits... or so we would assume if the original theory that points cause bad posts is correct.

I know a lot of you love your points, but maybe we should see if no points really does generate better discussion rather than trying to find a way to create a point system.

PS: I think points is really tricky, it rewards people for great comments, but it also rewards those stupid-one-line-no-thinking comments. Maybe only show points for comments with more text... whatever, thats a whole other subject.

<comment><USER33> The point of this is that users' wants & desires are really hard to dictate. The _desired outcome_ of ditching points was to see if it could generate better discussion. The thing is, there are a certain sub-set of users (personally, I'm ambivalent) who really, really want the point system back, and don't necessarily agree with the assertion that HN was on the decline to begin with.

I have a tendency to use HN in a few ways:

* As a tech industry firehose: I review headlines in RSS (Reeder) and only 'v' through to headlines that really pique my interests.

* As a means to directly interact with smart people whom I would not otherwise meet (I'm in a small town in Florida).

* As a means to understand how people feel about the ideas I'm reading.

That last use case has been more or less squashed by the removal of visible points. I can only know how much the community agrees or disagrees with what _I_ say, not those in disagreement with me. What's ironic is that agreement/disagreement wasn't the purpose of the karma system at HN to begin with. That's just how it was frequently used.

You can blame this on the fact that the attribution of karma points on HN was supposed to be driven by causes that many people simply don't think about. Put another way, voting the way we're intended to isn't intuitive to most people. This situation is made worse by the fact that virtually every other site with a similar voting system uses it to express agreement/disagreement, rather than conversational contribution/detraction.

The benefit of transparency is offset by the many well argued counter-points. The perception of this issue has a lot to do with one's personal use case. I'm happy to keep two out of three, but for someone who plays more of a spectator role, I'm sure the loss of the point system is a big hit to the utility of the site.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> For goodness' sake people. You don't need to be told which comments are 'good'. In any case, the score system is indicating popularity, not quality.

Use your own judgement, you don't need to behave as part of a herd.

</comment><comment><USER35> Quick question that is off topic, but did you do the design for that page yourself or did you purchase it off some sort of theme site? Just wondering cause I love it.

<comment><AUTHOR> The design is from themeforest.net, with some minor adjustments. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> For some reason it just doesn't feel the same ;) :

<http://i.imgur.com/3u1Rb.png>

I wish we didn't have to rely on a 3rd party.

</comment><comment><USER6> Typing is kinda difficult for me on most days, so I don't comment much. I vote a little bit on comments, when I bother to read them, but I tend to vote-up more on submissions. I've also have been known to do a lot of flagging on the /newest queue (and even triggering the "excessive flagger" threshold).

I do try to remember to make new submissions for all to enjoy, but the irony is, this means I'm off somewhere else looking for interesting stuff rather than finding it here. The stuff that _I_ find interesting is new tech, engineering, security and science developments (i.e. hacking up new solutions and analysis) along with a small splattering of business.

The speed of churn on the /newest queue means some of my submissions are not even seen. On average, there's maybe two or three other people here with similar interests to mine, or better said, they appreciated the submission enough to up-vote. But that is on average, so plenty of my submissions vanish into obscurity with no notice. --This is not a complaint. Other people have other interests, and the fast queue progression should be expected when there is no barrier to entry.

The trouble is, the fast queue means submitters get very little _USEFUL_ feedback. If you post some link-baited controversy, getting 1000+ points on the submission is not too unusual, but it probably isn't noteworthy new hacking. The _good hacking stuff_ on HN seldom hits the main /news page, instead it's buried deeply in the /newest queue. --It has always been like this. Blame human nature. If you look at /classic or do some HN spelunking by item?id= or hit archive.org for old snapshots, you'll find the main /news page has neither improved nor declined.

I think gaining points for submissions is unfair. In my opinion, I think a submission just says, "Hey, I thought this was interesting, and you might too." When a submission is sincere, it's just a friendly gesture with good intentions. But we all know how good intentions work. Whether or not the submissions is ever seen by others here, or more importantly, is interesting hacking _to them_ is generally unknown, even to the submitter. The displayed up-votes on submissions are really just a popularity contest feeding on link- baited controversy.

Another reason why gaining points for submissions is unfair is a submission has vastly superior visibility compared to a comment. I believe PG has some secret sauce running to address the visibility discrepancy. As far as I've been able to divine through observation, points from submissions don't count towards the "average" listed in your profile. Well, it seems that way on my account, but I think even older and more active commenting members (grellas) may have their average calculated with both submissions and comments. (Don't get me wrong, when grellas posts, I read it, and usually up-vote. I doubt I'm alone on that so his exceedingly high average might be warranted from comments alone).

So the display of points on submissions fails to be particularly valuable metric. Similar could be said for the display of points on comments. I refuse to care what other people think of you or your statements, and I would prefer avoid being biased by displayed points so I make up my own mind on whether or not I find your comment interesting.

For notes, it was tptacek that made the suggestion to remove the display of comment points in the "Stave Off The Decline of HN" thread from PG. I thought his idea was brilliant, possibly because I had the same idea, but as usual, tptacek thought of and posted it first. If you want a discussion to be useful, turning it into a game is entirely counter-productive. Worse yet, the display of points creates an unfair game due to manipulations of visibility, cognitive bias and other factors.

Since the removal of comment points being displayed, there has been far less one-up-manship in the discussions, and people are more polite because they are not competing for points in a game. You are now more free to just state your opinion without worrying about whether or not others will agree or disagree with you. As long as you're not being an ass about it, you can generally post uncommon or even controversial opinions without repercussions.

Some have (repeatedly) argued that the lack of displayed comment points results in a loss of context or loss of a valuable metric for deciding what is worth reading. I'd argue the opposite (and slightly less popular view) that displayed comment points fail to offer any real usefulness and are mostly harmful. --Just like whether or not my submissions are interesting, the usefulness of displayed comment points is a very subjective matter of opinion. Some find it helpful, but others consider it harmful.

To you, my opinion about comment points does not matter. You already have your own opinion. _And there is the very reason why displaying comment points doesn't really matter_.

</comment><comment><USER37> OT: What do names highlighted green mean?

<comment><USER38> It represents a new user. (I think it is for accounts having age < 1 day.)

<comment><USER37> Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> I hope everyone on HN installs this.

</comment><comment><USER40> I knew someone will do this.

</comment><comment><USER41> I liked it for 2 weeks, but, as a data driven person, i would like to be able to see the scores . What was the incentive to hide them again?

</comment><comment><USER41> Science says that blind crowdsourcing is generally better: [http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2011-05/17/wisdom-of- cro...](http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2011-05/17/wisdom-of-crowds- decline)

One could find arguments for both sides, though:

\- HN is not a crowd, it's a niche community

\- Voting is not blind even now.

\- The number actually encourages voting, since it serves to remind that your vote will change than number

\- It's good to know whether your vote will have little impact or will move the comment upwards

\- The site should encourage more people to vote, the more people vote the better.

</comment><comment><USER42> Thanks for this! I was hoping pg would fix his own site, but since he won't i guess the community will have to.

<comment><USER21> You can't "fix" it. It's deliberate.

<comment><USER18> Broken is broken, deliberate or not.

<comment><USER21> Honestly, I think you're being less than objective. If PG wants comment scores off and comment scores are off then I'd say its correct...

Calling it broken is like calling piracy "theft". It's flamebait and it obscures the issue.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Getting Hacker News'd Twice – Lessons Learned for Entrepreneurs - <AUTHOR> https://getpolarized.io/2019/04/02/getting-hacker-news-lessons-for-entrepreneurs.html <comment><USER2> > This post is actually a meta experiment. > > My hope is that this is > actually the 3rd time we're going to make it on HN. :)

It certainly seems like you'll succeed :)

Does the Web app/Chrome extension support Anki? That's what I hoped I'd be able to use it for.

<comment><AUTHOR> The Electron version does but I actually didn't realize that I could actually make sync work if I used a web extension / chrome extension and just requested access to [http://localhost:anki_port](http://localhost:anki_port) ... so I might try that and update the web extension that way.

This would mean you don't need to use the full desktop app.

It's been interesting getting the zen of the desktop + chrome + mobile thing all working and humming along.

We're getting close to having MacOS + Windows + Linux + Web + Mobile...

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> HackerNews front page is good for thousands of views. As much as 10,000 if you can get near the top.

r/programming is good for a couple of tens of thousands of views. Reddit is hard and random. Getting the first ~20 votes is soooo random. Subreddits like r/rust are smaller, but passionate, and good for a few thousand views.

r/dataisbeautiful is good for hundreds of thousands of views. It's a very slow subreddit so if you can hit #1 you'll be on it's frontpage for 24 hours plus. I cracked half a million views from there once.

I've never gotten shit for traffic from Twitter or Facebook.

</comment><comment><USER4> I actually made it once or twice to HNs front page, and what I've seen is that HN is one of the heaviest users of adblockers in the general population. I did a request counter vs an analytics counter, and I'd say you easily get 2x or 3x the traffic google analytics shows.

<comment><USER5> Which honestly makes a ton of sense. while the HN crowd might be the biggest beneficiary of ad tech, they also are the most knowledgeable about blocking it and of course know how intrusive and annoying it is.

<comment><USER6> We call those types of people hypocrites where I come from.

<comment><USER7> It's just "You don't get high on your supply".

<comment><USER6> When the comparison to a heroin dealer is considered more charitable...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> You stopped me at " Just login and enter their credentials and they're in" Providing credentials is at a cost. As you aptly point out in the rest of the post you will use those credentials in the future, and that's to the cost of us, the potential clients.

<comment><AUTHOR> > you will use those credentials in the future, and that's to the cost of us, > the potential clients.

How is that? I don't follow.

<comment><USER8> It's a cost to receive and manage any future email, and there is a risk that could get out of hand if a site passes on the email address to others.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Polar – an offline web browser with annotations and tagging

(in case anybody else is wondering)

</comment><comment><USER10> It's interesting. From my Show HNs only one got a real spike.

The most recent two went by as if nobody ever saw them. That includes the one I consider the most important (basically, TensorFlow for C#). I feel if it does not start with "Google announces", nobody cares to look.

Maybe I need more clickbait in the titles :/

<comment><USER11> This guy is spamming his product on here day in and day out.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> We are "insanely smart" guys.

<comment><USER13> And gals.

But seriously, that is why I come to HN...so I can talk to people smarter than me, or at least, expert in an area I am not.

<comment><USER14> Careful, HN is also full of blowhards. "Blockchain" and "NoSQL" are dead giveaways.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Is this high HN traffic? Sites can't routinely be going down with 2k users and 20k page views right?

<comment><USER16> Years ago, when one of my posts made it to #1 on Hacker News, the traffic was so much for my cheap WordPress blog hosted on DreamHost that they "moved" the blog to a more high-demand system and somehow _corrupted the database_ in the process.

In less than 24 hours I learned how static blog sites work and somehow I was able to migrate everything using Google caches.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> NICE BUT ALL MY PDFS HAVE A HEAVY TEAL TINT ON THEM AND I CANT TURN IT OFF AHHHHHHHH IT SEEMS TO BE A FEATURE I CANT TURN OFF BECAUSE IT CORRELATES WITH THE READ-PROGRESS BAR

<comment><USER18> Yeah--I thought/think it's a feature, so you know how far you've read, but when I saw it I thought, "_Wow_ that's a strong design statement that I doubt I'll ever get used to."

<comment><AUTHOR> oh. Sorry. Yes. The pagemarks are overlays showing which portions of documents you've read.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Just a heads up on iOS with Safari your two GA images are wider than the rest of the page.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! Fixed it!

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Hey. This is interesting. The title of the post I submitted changed.

Who changed it? Does HN automatically change the titles of posts?

<comment><USER20> I believe it's done by the mods.

You are to submit URLs with their original titles.

What title did you use in your submission?

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Think this is great information for people like me. I am a serial entrepreneur.</comment>


Save Kickstarter from scam - report this fake sexist project - <AUTHOR> http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/susanwilson/9-year-old-building-an-rpg-to-prove-her-brothers-w/report/new

<comment><AUTHOR> because: [http://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/1awnzx/so_you_know_th...](http://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/1awnzx/so_you_know_that_kickstarter_for_the_girl_who/c91g8yn)</comment>


Show HN: Monads for Deno - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/hqoss/monads#deno <comment> aaron-santos Are Option, Result, and Either what monads mean to folks these days? Where are identity, reader, writer, state, list, continuation, and task?</comment>


Teamwork: Tasks for hackers - <AUTHOR> http://teamwork.mdomans.com/
Startup idea. Simple tool for _groups_ of hackers hacking away at hackathons. Or similar groups, such as equal people doing something voluntarily. <comment><USER2> You may want to throw in a video, a blog post, a cople of screenshots or at least a better explanation of what :teamwork: is, and why people should give you their email.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thx :)</comment></comment>


'Eat More Kale' Company Is Losing Against Chick-Fil-A in Trademark Battle - <AUTHOR> http://finance.yahoo.com/blogs/the-exchange/eat-more-kale-company-losing-against-chick-fil-212157027.html <comment><USER2> > Chick-fil-A tried to stop him after first finding out about the sales in > 2006 but then gave up the fight.

>That is, until Muller-Moore filed for trademark protection in early 2011.

well that's pretty different than it sounded like based on reading the other HN comments.

they aren't going after him for using the phrase (they did try that in the past, but gave up), but for trying to trademark it!

<comment><USER3> They aren't going after him, just probably opposing the registration in front of the PTO.

If you are a party who may be damaged by issuance, you can challenge the registration before it issues.

EDIT: Actually, looking closer they aren't even opposing, the PTO issued the rejection directly, without any involvment from chick-fil-a at all. It never even made it to the opposition stage.

[http://tsdr.uspto.gov/#caseNumber=85412053&caseType=SERI...](http://tsdr.uspto.gov/#caseNumber=85412053&caseType=SERIAL_NO&searchType=statusSearch)

There are no filings or documents from chick-fil-a in here at all. The examiner apparently came up with the rejection reason on their own (any communications chick-fil-a had by phone with the examiner would have been on record and here as well)

It's even been through two examiners now.

That said, the current examiner's arguments seem like complete and total BS.

Double edit: I take it back, it looks like one of these actually _is_ a notice of a letter of protest (december 22nd, 2011), which functions much like an opposition. However, only the outgoing notice that a letter of protest is filed is there, the _actual_ letter of protest (received, december 2011), presumably from chick-fil-a, is for some reason, not in the documents.

Sorry, i'm much more used to reading patent dockets than trademark ones :)

<comment><USER4> The article says that they re-contacted him directly to try to get him to stop using it after he filed for protection: "In October 2011 Chick-fil-A sent a letter to Muller-Moore stating that he had to stop using the phrase because it may be confused with the company's. They also told him to stop using his website, eatmorekale.com."

Which, given that they'd stopped after 2006, does make it look rather like a don't-poke-the-bear thing regarding his own filing for trademark protection after Chick-Fil-A had initially dropped it.

<comment><USER3> Fair, but they almost had to, if they wanted to be able to oppose it sanely, since they knew about him using it, etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The only reason that he filed for a trademark was to keep other people from printing "Eat More Kale" on t-shirts. He's the IP bully at this point. Chick- Fil-A gave up on trying to bully him in 2006.

<comment><USER6> According to the article (though I haven't verified this), there are sellers on eBay using "the exact same logo." That does sound like it might be unethical. Assuming the copying is as audacious as the article suggests, I wouldn't characterize the original creator as a bully.

Regardless of the status of the trademark application, I'd also be curious as to whether a copyright claim could have legs. If a t-shirt design is copied verbatim, you might not need trademark protection; copyright could be sufficient.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Is it really possible to trademark a sentence where the plain meaning of the sentence is something that people would ordinarily say?

<comment><USER8> Yes, but such trademarks are necessarily harder to defend because you have to show that consumers associate the term with a specific brand, not just the meaning of the words. This case is pretty easy, though, because nobody would use "Eat More Kale" as a marketing slogan unless it was an intentional play on Chick-fil-A's popular and widespread "Eat Mor Chikin" campaign.

<comment><USER9> But isn't satire considered a non-infringing use?

<comment><USER8> Parody is a non-infringing use, but this seems more like playing on the popularity of Chick Fil-A's slogan than parodying it. Successful parody cases (where the use was found non-infringing) have been things like "South Butt" (versus North Face) and "Chewy Vuiton" (for dog toys).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Since living in Holland I've started eating a lot more Kale. The boil it and mix it with mashed potatoes, served with smoked sausage and bacon bits.

With good quality hand made smoked sausage it's one of my favourite meals.

For anyone interested: [http://recipes.sparkpeople.com/recipe- detail.asp?recipe=2023...](http://recipes.sparkpeople.com/recipe- detail.asp?recipe=202341)

<comment><USER11> Totally recommended. My favourite potato-hash style dish. I usually skip the sausage though, I don't like the cheap processed ones (though they are most "traditional"), which is what you usually get (except when I'm the cook), so I just add more bacon :)

And next you're having boerenkool with some IT types, tell them how UNOX is the _worst_ operating system.

<comment><USER10> Hahaha, nice one. I live in Gelderland, close to a butcher who smokes the proper sausages.

For Americans - the difference is the same as between the processed cheese you get on a burger and real cheese..

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Here's an "eat more corn, oats, ..." poster from WWI: <http://www.archives.gov/education/lessons/sow-seeds/> I wonder if that's good for anything.

<comment><USER13> IANAL, but trademark are different than patents. If this were a patent issue that poster could be prior art. However, Chick-fil-A does have a trademark on "Eat mor chickin", and that's what matters.

In fact if there had been a trademark on "eat more corn, oats, and rye" which I highly doubt there was, it has likely fallen out of use. You can trademark old marks that have not been in use for a while. I met a local trademark attorney that did just this with an old beer brand, that he is now selling a craft beer under.

<comment><USER12> But perhaps the prior use could help to demonstrate that "eat more ..." is just a generic statement, and so the "eat mor chikin" trademark shouldn't be applied so broadly?

<comment><USER14> You can trademark generic statements as well, as long as it remains notable within the business field.

<comment><USER12> But the trademark is on "eat mor chikin", not "eat more". IANAL, but the article gave me the impression that the USPTO has some discretion in determining how much similarity makes a violation.

<comment><USER14> Yes, that's just it, it's practically all subjective. You don't have to copy every word for it to be a trademark infringement either.

Personally I think he was lucky to have gotten Chik-Fil-A off of his back in 2006 because the slogan similarities are stunning, but then again I've actually seen Chik-Fil-A advertising for years before this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I had no idea that Chick-Fil-A had a slogan, let alone that it was that retarded. "Eet Moar Chikin" or something like that? What the hell. How is "Eat More Kale" even similar? One is clearly serious (Kale) and the other is clearly trying to sound like ICanHazCheezeburger (Chick-fil-A).

<comment><USER8> Eat Mor Chikin is a popular (and quite original) series of advertisements, and "Eat More Kale" is clearly an attempt to play off that slogan.

<comment><USER16> How is it clearly an attempt to play off that slogan?

I hadn't heard of the slogan, and 'Eat More Kale' just sounded like it was playing off the pro-Kale zeitgeist of our times.

Both vegetarian and paleo diet eaters love Kale (to use two opposite diets as examples), and it's all the rage in trendy urban areas.

<comment><USER8> If you've heard of "Eat Mor Chickin" you clearly perceive "Eat More Kale" as a vegetarian retort to that. If you haven't heard that slogan... well I don't know what to tell you, what rock have you been living under?

EDIT: I think this may be explained by my being from the south and your being from Canada...

<comment><USER17> Chick-fil-a is much, much more prominent in the South than they are in the rest of the US, let alone the world, and the Eat Mor Chickin campaign seems to be much more prevalent down there as well. I honestly don't think I've seen the phrase outside the South; I'm sure it exists, but chick-fil-a doesn't advertise nearly as much in NYC and Chicago as they do in the parts of the South I've lived in.

It's not surprising to me in the slightest that somebody from Vermont, like the Eat More Kale guy, had simply never heard the slogan. Most people in New England have never heard of Waffle House either.

<comment><USER18> The Eat More Kale guy was born in Memphis, TN.

<http://eatmorekale.com/about.html>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> What's so preposterous to me is that Chick-Fil-A's entire "cows doing things poorly" advertising campaign is basically a rip-off of Gary Larson. Not in any legal sense, of course, but in an intellectual honesty sense.

</comment><comment> jack-r-abbit I seem to recall the milk industry getting their panties in a wad over the up tic in "Got <thing>?" usage. I don't see that going away so perhaps the milk industry lost that battle? This seems the same to me.

</comment><comment><USER20> This would be equivalent to "Where's the chicken?" (Wendy's "Where's the beef?"), right?

Couldn't it just be classified as a parody? It seems silly to not allow them to use something because it's similar.

<comment><USER8> See: <http://www.lfiplaw.com/articles/trademark_parody.htm>

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Looks like Chick-fil-A love getting into controversies. Remember that whole anti-gay thing?</comment>


Umbra Privacy Platform - <AUTHOR> http://umbra.shadowproject.io/ <comment><USER2> If this is their chat scheme:

[https://github.com/shadowproject/whitepapers/releases/downlo...](https://github.com/shadowproject/whitepapers/releases/download/1.0/ShadowChat.pdf)

... that's really scary (ECDH + ECDSA + CBC mode, using OpenSSL's primitives, in an ad-hoc configuration, with plaintext compression), and also inferior to modern secure messaging schemes. People should use Signal Protocol for this stuff.

 _Slightly later_ :

The only source code I can find for this is a giant collection of C++. There's CSS referring to "ShadowChat", and a file "smessage.cpp" which roughly corresponds to the protocol sketched in that PDF. It's C++, lots of it, with a lot of memcpy.

<comment><USER3> Hi,

If you want users to take your comments seriously then you should be a bit more specific about what's scare. CBC and ECDH are the basis of most modern end-to-end encrypted messaging schemes.

I agree with the key exchange, it doesn't have a proper ratchet, it's on our to-do list.

<comment><USER2> I'm really, really comfortable with who does and doesn't take my comments on this particular subject seriously. If you rephrase your comment in the form of a question, I'll respond.

<comment><USER3> Hi,

I didn't mean to come off as rude, it's a bit late and I'm quick to the trigger sometimes.

What are your concerns with our scheme? Do you have any suggestions on improving it?

We really need to implement a key ratchet, that's a sure thing.

<comment><USER2> It's 2002-grade crypto primitives, hand-rolled, written in C++, apparently on top of OpenSSL's primitives.

Nobody is going to be able to sanity check this code "in real time" in response to message board comments. But I skimmed it, and I see concerns right away. For instance, it looks like the CBC IV isn't included in the MAC calculation.

In terms of primitive selections:

* CBC+HMAC is fine if you're very careful. I'd certainly do that before I tried to hand-code a real AEAD. But then, see above! A modern protocol would use either a hermetically sealed AEAD construction like GCM, or, even easier, use ChaPoly, as provided in TweetNacl.

* I can't tell what curve this is based on, but I'm guessing because this is all bitcoin related it's secp256k1. New protocols shouldn't use secp256k1, if only because it's not misuse-resistant. I'm assuming this project inherits its secp256k1 code from wherever bitcoin gets it, but anyone else who tried to interoperate with ShadowChat has to carefully avoid invalid curve attacks as well.

* ECDH is fine. Whatever. The problem is secp256k1, not ECDH.

* But ECDSA is not fine. It relies on a random nonce and explodes like a pipe bomb if so much as a single bit of the nonce is biased, which is surprisingly hard to get right. It's also difficult to make ECDSA constant time with arbitrary curves.

That's just the really basic stuff, though. Secure messaging systems are surprisingly difficult to get right. You need to understand the underlying crypto primitives very well, but then also a whole mess of almost- domain- specific stuff about messaging protocols with particular threat models.

This is not a good thing to DIY.

 _Later_

And, I mean, I have structural concerns with this C++, too. For instance: there's a place that passes an integer computation to std::vector's resize, then memcpy's into it on the assumption that the computation didn't shrink the vector. Is this a real problem? Fuck if I know. You know what it costs per day to really audit C++ code like this?

 _Later Later_

Sorry, I forgot: compressing plaintext creates traffic-analytic side channels. Back in 2002, people thought it was a good idea to compress plaintext, because it destroyed structure and made some attacks harder. But then CRIME was published and now we all worry about compression --- also, it turns out, the code for the exploits compression was supposed to stop gets trickier, but not impossible: see "Dancing On The Lip Of A Volcano" for more.

Also: how much of this code is your project's, and how much is inherited?

<comment><USER3> Hi tptacek,

We know that thorough review does not happen instantly. I want to let you know that we have bounties and funds available for doing code review. [https://shadowproject.io/en/bounties](https://shadowproject.io/en/bounties)

* That's indeed true, we will be including the IV in the HMAC. Will be patched in our next version. Thank you!

* ChaPoly by TweetNaCl - dearly noted. The thing is, libs need compatibility with our curve. TweetNaCl only supports Ed25519 :/

* secp256k1 is correct.

* Do you have any references to the "exploding like a pipe bomb" problem? We're using the ECDSA from the bitcoins secp256k1 library - which is constant time and should be secure enough. Function: RecoverCompact()

We initially paid for a cryptographic review but the guy, whom we know by real name, disappeared from the planet. We're scouting for cryptographers willing to do code reviews, for a payment ofcourse.

If you're capable and interested then you should reach out to us on GitHub or Slack!

We do appreciate you doing this in your free time, so we're sending Bitcoin tips to whoever makes good suggestions. Please post your Bitcoin address if you'd like to receive some.

\---

Most code is inherited from Bitcoin, custom code with cryptography: smessage.cpp, ringsig.cpp and stealth.cpp

<comment><USER2> People. Come on.

It is OK that you don't know the best curve to use, or that an IV needs to be included in your MAC.

What is not OK is _shipping privacy code to users_ without understanding this stuff. You don't get to learn this stuff on the job. Sorry. I know it's not fair. But to do otherwise would be even less fair to your users.

 _First_ be sure of your crypto. _Then_ set up the bug bounty.

You can donate mine, for the MAC bug (which is severe), to Partners In Health.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Hard to take seriously with all those ambitious goals and talk about privacy but without https configured on their subdomain.

<comment><USER5> On the other hand, setting up https is a different skill set from the types of distributed systems that Umbra is trying to be, and I still find it to be confusing even though things like Let's Encrypt have made the process a lot easier.

Still, I've been around the space for a long time and I don't remember hearing too much about the Umbra project before today. That's usually a bad sign, especially given that they don't have a whitepaper.

There are a few major problems that slaughter projects like this:

1\. They don't respect scalability constraints.

2\. They don't actually understand what it takes to achieve privacy.

3\. They don't realize that they've set up a centralized system.

4\. They don't understand a lot of things about decentralization. This stuff is hard.

The only whitepaper I could find for the whole system was for ShadowChat, which says they use AES-256-CBC to encrypt the chat. AES is a symmetric encryption algorithm, and a strange choice for a chat protocol. Furthermore, CBC is not great at hiding patterns, and chat will often have a lot of patterns. Not necessarily going to cause problems, but it's another decision that I think is pretty weak, especially when there are better standards already out there.

[https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&c...](https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=13&ved=0ahUKEwjYjouplvvOAhWCkh4KHaNID5UQFghHMAw&url=https%3A%2F%2Fgithub.com%2Fshadowproject%2Fwhitepapers%2Freleases%2Fdownload%2F1.0%2FShadowChat.pdf&usg=AFQjCNHONU9jeIqA6_UD7QKKxFSNOg14kg&sig2=vomczSrOjmUdP_1Mlx- ebw)

[http://crypto.stackexchange.com/questions/25089/plaintext- bl...](http://crypto.stackexchange.com/questions/25089/plaintext-block- chaining-bad-idea-why)

As for anonymous cryptocurrency, there have been a lot of attempts at creating anonymous cryptocurrency and they are generally garbage. Either the mixing leaks information, or there is a reliance on central services, or other major problems.

Shadowcash claims to be a Proof-of-Stake cryptocurrency, which is a consensus system that has been pretty highly discredited among the more well respected researchers. The threat model is definitely different, and in general is a lot weaker both in terms of attack-resistance and in terms of decentralization that traditional Proof-of-Work. Even Ethereum has yet to come up with a Proof- of-Stake algorithm that they feel comfortable committing to, and they were so certain they'd get there that they added a feature which will break the currency unless they hardfork to PoS (at least that was the idea - given that PoS is not ready, they will probably just hardfork to a not-intentionally- broken PoW).

[https://download.wpsoftware.net/bitcoin/pos.pdf](https://download.wpsoftware.net/bitcoin/pos.pdf) [https://download.wpsoftware.net/bitcoin/old- pos.pdf](https://download.wpsoftware.net/bitcoin/old-pos.pdf)

A few worth taking seriously are Monero, Zcash (though Zcash depends on new/fancy/less-trusted crypto - zkSnarks), and JoinMarket. Everything else that's got academic strength behind it is too early to have a user-ready implementation.

That's just my two cents. Maybe in a few weeks there will be a whitepaper that covers the full strategies of Umbra and it ends up being pretty good. But I don't think so, given that the few decisions that I could find already suggest that this is a platform built by amateurs.

<comment><USER6> > The only whitepaper I could find for the whole system was for ShadowChat, > which says they use AES-256-CBC to encrypt the chat.

Okay.

> AES is a symmetric encryption algorithm, and a strange choice for a chat > protocol.

No, it's the standard choice.

Signal uses AES-256-CBC + HMAC-SHA-256, for example.

> Furthermore, CBC is not great at hiding patterns, and chat will often have a > lot of patterns.

That's not true. CBC mode isn't great at hiding patterns _with IV reuse_. Solution: Don't reuse IVs.

The problem with CBC mode is that it's unauthenticated, and as a result is often susceptible to padding oracle attacks that allow messages to be decrypted byte-at-a-time.

[https://paragonie.com/blog/2015/05/using-encryption-and- auth...](https://paragonie.com/blog/2015/05/using-encryption-and- authentication-correctly)

A better mode would be GCM, or maybe GCM-SIV, or scrap AES entirely in favor of ChaCha20-Poly1305.

<comment><USER3> It's not voiding the cryptographic doom principle, that's one thing. The HMAC is dealt by OpenSSL it seems and is the hash of the timestamp, destination and encrypted payload. It's appended outside of the encrypted payload. [https://moxie.org/blog/the-cryptographic-doom- principle/](https://moxie.org/blog/the-cryptographic-doom-principle/) [https://github.com/shadowproject/shadow/blob/master/src/smes...](https://github.com/shadowproject/shadow/blob/master/src/smessage.cpp#L3510)

On the other hand I agree to switching over to a different mode to eliminate padding oracle attacks.

The IV are 16 random bytes generated by OpenSSL's RAND_bytes. [https://github.com/shadowproject/shadow/blob/master/src/smes...](https://github.com/shadowproject/shadow/blob/master/src/smessage.cpp#L3364)

<comment><USER6> If one of the project devs is reading this thread:

[https://github.com/shadowproject/shadow/blob/f3fa333f8377688...](https://github.com/shadowproject/shadow/blob/f3fa333f837768823afe16c0347272b5cb8d6c2a/src/util.cpp#L579-L592)

That's really hard to read.

Also, don't use OpenSSL: [https://paragonie.com/blog/2016/05/how-generate- secure-rando...](https://paragonie.com/blog/2016/05/how-generate-secure- random-numbers-in-various-programming-languages#c-csprng)

<comment><USER3> Hi,

Yes we're always where the critics are, they are or best source of information.

I'm very happy to see our work being reviewed. I'm not an expert cryptographer but I am capable of understanding it. (fyi I didn't code it).

Our memcmp in constant time is not the prettiest, but it's short so we roll with it :P

This project started around 2014, LibSodium was still very small back then and OpenSSL, in ours view, remains the defacto standard. Is there any particular reason on why we should move away from RAND_bytes() ?

<comment><USER6> Yes: Aside from being a userspace CSPRNG (which is an additional risk of failure over the kernel's CSPRNG and doesn't provide defense-in-depth), it isn't thread-safe.

[https://github.com/ramsey/uuid/issues/80](https://github.com/ramsey/uuid/issues/80)

[https://github.com/nodejs/node/issues/5798](https://github.com/nodejs/node/issues/5798)

There are also some recent IACR papers (linked in the Node thread), but those are the two biggest concerns.

<comment><USER3> Thank you CiPHPerCoder!

That link to NodeJS was a good read, I'm fairly convinced that we should ditch RAND_bytes from OpenSSL for something more secure, we'll look into LibSodium.

I've caught rumours of a possible RAND_sys_bytes which operates over the systems CSPRNG? We like to be conservative on the libs.

We'd like to tip you for your efforts, do you have a Bitcoin (or ShadowCash) address?

<comment><USER6> I do, actually, but I haven't accessed it in almost two years. EDIT: And I forgot my password. Here's a new one:

      1D6RMsgnTAf2GLWpD91EaQvQ5ppuaZKkGT

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Do we need a payment system and chat client connected as a "platform"? Seems like an odd collection of things, and can't imagine that a startup would have reasonable expertise in chat AND payments.

</comment><comment><USER8> It's probably just me, but this all seems hilariously similar to the "shadow" metaphor that Comey (FBI Director) mentioned in his speech the other day. I half-jokingly think this is just an FBI front.

<comment><USER9> Fully not jokingly, I think governments love BTC and other pseudo-anonymous blockchain tech in particular. It's a permanent, irrefutable record linking transactions. Even if your name's not on it, without extreme heroics, you name will be traceable to the cash end or the service end at some point. This is way better than cash.

Fully anonymous blockchain tech probably scares them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> > currency

OK, it's an altcoin scam.

Sounds like they don't even have any interesting cryptographic primitives for privacy, but they just have a mixer built into the app or something. Why would I use this over using Bitcoin with a mixer? Plus, if/when Bitcoin starts integrating ZKP/privacy cryptography like Ring signatures, it's going to be a very hard sell to use any of the miscellaneous altcoins that have some privacy-related cryptographic advancement as their only feature.

</comment><comment><USER6> [https://github.com/shadowproject/shadow/blob/4e6affe1457116a...](https://github.com/shadowproject/shadow/blob/4e6affe1457116a70d1e53bfd4cc4d1d2deceea5/src/crypter.cpp#L92-L117)

Ever heard of IND-CCA3?

</comment><comment><USER11> The site doesn't even work with JS disabled. Which is especially important here, given that a lot of privacy-conscious people _disable JavaScript_ to prevent fingerprinting.

</comment><comment><USER12> Any distributed storage option? Asynchronous chat-style messaging is rarely enough for social networking.

</comment><comment><USER13> Man another alt coin

</comment><comment><USER14> The URL made me think it had something to do with this instead : [http://umbra3d.com/](http://umbra3d.com/)

<comment><USER15> Me too. The tech was used in a gamedev company I worked. But I guess this is a bit of expected, like QT the QuickTime and Qt the UI, and many other cases.</comment></comment>


Why You Should Care About Bitcoin - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/what-i-learned-today/1a812f8fa7cd <comment><USER3> Good quote:

"Hackers are the animals that can detect a storm coming or an earthquake. They just know, even though they don't know why, and there are two big things hackers are excited about now and can't articulate why – Bitcoin and 3D printing" \- Paul Graham

<comment><USER4> And drones.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> This article really reflects the reasons why we are building Coinkite (coinkite.com) on our own dime.

</comment><comment><USER5> Yes, care. However, this article is a strong but partial articulation of the overwhelming issues with present-era financial systems, the roots of which go far beyond merely Bitcoin. I addressed more of these in my talk at _Observe, Hack, Make 2013_ (OHM2013) two months ago on _Finance & The Future Beyond Bitcoin_.

This article addresses Bitcoin as a protocol, a commodity, and an ecosystem. These perspectives might be understood in terms of their mapping to William Stanley's classical theory on the functions of money[1], namely: _a medium of exchange, a common measure of value (or unit of account), a standard of value (or standard of deferred payment), and a store of value_ ; also summarized in 1919 by Jevons: _Money 's a matter of functions four: a Medium, a Measure, a Standard, a Store_.

The first perspective ( _Bitcoin as a protocol_ ) and second perspective ( _Bitcoin as a commodity_ ) could be mapped to the first function ( _medium of exchange_ ) and second/third functions ( _unit of account /standard of payment_). Bitcoin may not be ideal as a store of value for a variety of reasons (relative difficulty of exchange for conventional currency, small relative market size leading to overall volatility and fundamental price manipulability), which is probably why this perspective is missing. Other currencies or assets types exist that can or have _already_ been designed specifically to maximize their value from this, and each of the classical perspective: a classic case is the "basket of commodities" approach proposed for use as a more stable _standard of measure_ (also providing more stable _store of value_ features if it can be commodified as an investment).

So we can see there are more options here than just Bitcoin and its distributed single-asset blockchain siblings (a fact which the Bitcoin community often seems to overlook), and theories and tools that do answer some of the obvious challenges. But there are also other issues, issues which drive to the heart of our societies, that desperately need to be better understood by innovators and participants in our economies.

Since there are recent books[3] eloquently evidence the fact, take it for now that money conventionally is all about control, and typically occurs only in warmaking/expansionist societies that systemify inequality and tend to have lost any sense of cohesive social concern. This control is of the state - widely defined as a "monopoly of force" \- for organizing the logistical support required to field larger armies and for taxation of the overall population. It's rather worrisome to realise, particularly if you have been lucky enough to experience some of the few but still extant cultures in which money is not yet dominant in the social order and how greatly its absence seems to enhance people's mutual trust, assistance and cohesion. Changing the nature of money, then, actually fundamentally threatens the notion of state. The truths of world financial surveillance and control presently include the fact that all international transfers, even within

Over the last three years at Payward, I've also been lucky enough to meet Bitcoin enthusiasts and business people, high frequency trading (HFT) experts from some of the world's largest investment banks, international political/law specialists, monetary theorists and community currency associations. All are fascinated by the era and bring different perspectives, yet perhaps none of us fully understand the breadth of concerns at play. We can, however, elucidate what Bitcoin and brethren represent: the first major crack in long held, effectively state-linked and inter-state coordinated, near-global, back- scratching monopoly of usury and control, a crack in which is already impossible to close through regulatory action. A crack which potentially offers the beginnings of far-reaching, positive changes in our challenged world.

We see the future as one of opt-in choice and interoperability (since - <USER2> pigs might jump some distance on occasion - forcing a state-run, centralized monetary system on people may actually one day be challenged successfully as a breach of human rights), and thus looking beyond any immediate and concrete benefit for our own company, Payward have graciously been supporting me in proposing various standards as IETF Internet Standards Drafts through an open membership entity, the IFEX Project[4]. Namely X-ISO4217-A3[5] (open identification of currency-like commodities to bypass ISO registration issues), IIBAN[6] (open identification of financial endpoints), IMIC[7] (open identification of financial markets).

We are also (slowly!) brainstorming on a transaction-level protocol, IFEX[8], both asset/currency/commodity neutral and settlement system neutral, to tie together disparate systems while addressing concrete issues of settlement path limitations, latency, normalized transaction status and adequate hooks out to potentially produce full-featured risk/trust/compliance systems. This protocol aims to equally describe commodities such as energy (in a full scale grid, or an embedded system) or physical assets within a modern or emerging 'distributed manufacturing' (3D-printing-style) supply chain. In short we aim to provide a coherent, logical, transparent platform upon which emerging settlement paths can compete with conventional settlement paths on a fair basis. A free market for financial services, if you will, but one which removes the distinction between goods and money. Simple in conception, rather more difficult to execute than it sounds, and fantastically threatening to some established interests. Right now we really need other groups getting in to participate.

TL/DR: This article is really about some issues with the current financial system. Bitcoin is only one proposed system, and it is not suitable for all occasions. Broader financial reform is going on, and we will see more than one solution. This change is a challenge not only to nations themselves (who will ultimately have to accept it by broadening their own fiscal systems to include alternative asset classes), but more immediately to the rather sickly back- scratching coordination that goes on between them and functions to prevent innovation, surveil and control even across borders. Decades of haughty 'free market' and 'human rights' rhetoric are reaching their logical conclusion: technologies and legal structures that function to remove the old, clunky system of control and usury through local fiscal monopoly. To let the imagination flow: we potentially stand on the threshold of global society's yet greatest rennaissance.

[1] Jevons, William Stanley. (1875) _Money and the Mechanism of Exchange_ [2] Milnes, Alfred (1919). _The economic foundations of reconstruction_. Macdonald and Evans. p. 55. [3] Graeber, David _Debt: The First 5000 Years_ (2011) [4] [http://ifex-project.org/](http://ifex-project.org/) [5] [http://www.ifex- project.org/our-proposals/x-iso4217-a3](http://www.ifex-project.org/our- proposals/x-iso4217-a3) [6] [http://www.ifex-project.org/our- proposals/iiban](http://www.ifex-project.org/our-proposals/iiban) [7] [http://www.ifex-project.org/our-proposals/imic](http://www.ifex- project.org/our-proposals/imic) [8] [http://www.ifex-project.org/our- proposals/ifex](http://www.ifex-project.org/our-proposals/ifex)</comment>