Coinbase: The Heart of the Bitcoin Frenzy - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/06/technology/coinbase-bitcoin.html <comment><USER3> With the frenzy out there, Coinbase makes crypto currencies trading/investing/purchasing as robust and seemingly as safe as possible. This could be a signal, now that we have some reputable market players that crypto currencies are really just starting and there is a very high ceiling. Getting in before coinbase you had to mine your own (that party ended quickly - Butterfly Labs, cex.io for cloud mining etc) or be part of a sketchy exchange (mtgox, btc-e etc where funds were stolen or seized). Some of the rules such as 10k limits on buying/selling/transfers put a natural throttling on bitcoin that other markets don't have, since the buying is immense it should continue to go up for sometime due to this throttling and now reputable sources for buying into the market.

Side note: one of the absolute killer features of crypto currency markets is finally we have an always on market. Stock markets and exchanges still operate in the old days of the hours of the day in the country they are based in, crypto currency is an always on market which is nice because it eliminates the after hours/before open games that go on with stocks.

<comment><USER4> I've run into all sorts of bugs which made the site annoying to use.

1\. My bank account has a 5000$ limit and my credit card has a 750$ limit. After spending 1000$ from the bank (which takes a week), I wanted a quick 50$ from my CC, but it said I was already past the 750$ limit.

2\. When trying to recover an older account, the recovery keeps asking for my phone number but isn't sending me texts properly. If you say you lost your phone, you can submit id+selfie, but to get to that step, you need your phone??

3\. If you reset Authy, it removes your Coinbase token, and tells you to contact their support. They're very slow as responding, and after a week, I was just told to use my phone number (which again, goes back to #2)...

<comment><USER5> You can transfer money to a usd wallet so that should make it easier to purchase if you need to.

<comment><USER6> And for those worried, the USD wallet is FDIC insured in the US.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I have a ton of respect for Coinbase. It seems like their implied priorities are:

1) Security 1a) Compliance ... 57) Customer Service

While annoying, this was both sufficient and necessary for the business to date. Security is necessary for obvious reasons. Compliance is necessary because to be able to do business with US banks (card processing, ACH, wires...) they had to be aggressive about complying with US regulation. Which ultimately gives them an advantage on the customer service front relative to their competition for retail investors. And frankly, they aren't much worse than most online brokers.

These priorities were also sufficient. Amazon was competing against major incumbents and had to win on cost and service. By outcompeting an empty field on compliance, Coinbase has built a significant moat around US retail. They have relationships with Fidelity and USAA that signal legitimacy. They had cold storage while incumbents were/are still saying 'blockchain not Bitcoin'.

The critical question is how they manage customer service and communications going forward. Amazon, Facebook, and Google created monopolies based on a great user experience. Uber destroyed a thousand monopolies for the same reason. Coinbase is riding the coattails of Bitcoin's awesome UX, the warm fuzzies people get from making 10x on an investment. If and when there is a correction, their core business will hinge on how well they handle a large sell-off.

<comment><USER8> Agree with almost everything you've said, and unfortunately if past experience is anything to go by, they'll crash/go down during the next big price dip.

<comment><USER9> Maybe this is because of the immense increase in the number transactions during a dip? (really just guessing)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Coinbase seems to be the quintessential "sell shovels during a gold rush" company. Definitely provides a good case study about how to create a successful business during new industry booms.

<comment><USER11> The giant balance up top is an incredible FOMO machine. In the best findom/gamification, you can increase your "score" simply by giving them more money. The volatility makes the game more difficult to predict than most free- to-play games, but the daily graphs going up so fast make it hard to resist.

<comment><USER12> My brokerage account and bank accounts also display the balance. Sometimes at the top, sometimes in the middle. It's a UI decision, more than a FOMO game. With that mindset, capitalism itself is a FOMO and the balance at the top of your head (your net worth) the FOMO machine.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> It is pretty funny how the original value proposition of "being your own bank" given in the bitcoin whitepaper, which is necessitated by actually possessing the private keys, has gone out the window due to convenience and a lack of understanding of the fundamental blockchain technology by speculators. Coinbase is central in these facts.

<comment><USER14> It's not so much that they don't understand, but rather that they don't care. People can buy Bitcoin for fun or to try to make money without believing in the ideology that was originally used to justify it.

<comment><USER15> Which is why I got out of bitcoin.

There's literally nothing special about bitcoin, apart from its decentralised nature.

Other than that, it's just a big ledger. No different from virtually any other database. It's special because it's decentralised.

The way people use bitcoin however, completely reverses that and is extremely geared towards use of centralised parties. It's as if we built solar panels to generate electricity with which we heat up our oceans, causing ice caps to melt and global warming to occur. It's a bit of a joke.

We're now all valuing a system, above other systems, for its unique decentralised properties, while subsequently throwing that out the window, yet still expecting this system to be uniquely valuable. We're all introducing trust into a trustless system, and paying intermediaries and middlemen a cut in the process.

That's fine for other investments, e.g. productive assets that are valuable for other reasons. But it's not fine for an investment into something that's valuable because it's trustless, decentralised and disintermediating.

There's some nuance I'm leaving out of course, you can argue against this post, but by and large you can't ignore this massive disconnect between bitcoin's value proposition and bitcoin's reality. Nor can you argue anymore, like we used to, that it's just a phase. If anything, there's less and less regard for personally run wallets, personal nodes, personal mining, personal transactions, and an increase in use of centralised parties, with centralised wallet providers, cloud and company mining, transaction processors etc.

<comment><USER16> I think you captured this notion quite well and I think it's very interesting that for a decentralized system people have immediately given up on that so called benefit because it wasn't as easy to use as a trusted intermediary.

Then the whole angle of "trusted" is complex due to the parties that you are entrusting and the number of issues that they have suffered.

So then you look at banks and say ok, interesting, perhaps I haven't quite noticed the seamless ease of use layer that they provide, that I have undervalued simply because it's been a fact of life for so long it becomes invisible until you deal with the exact opposite.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Most interesting thing I learned from this article:

Brian Armstrong, Coinbase CEO, "said he now holds more of his wealth in a Bitcoin competitor, Ether"

<comment><USER18> Brian Armstrong has quite the history of being on the wrong side of every argument to do with safe and scalable crypto implementation. He has been a champion of centralization and attacks on bitcoin governance. He was a vocal proponent of four out of the five failed fork attempts of bitcoin over the past couple of years. He, and coinbase investors, are very lucky they had people like Charlie Lee managing the technical parts of coinbase.

<comment><USER19> I'm not sure if you're willfully misinterpreting what happened or just unware, but the debate over how to scale bitcoin (basically, on-chain vs off-chain) is know being played out with Bitcoin vs Bitcoin Cash. And it's looking like big blocks is actually a solution for scalability (lower fees, faster transactions), at least in the short term.

(For those not aware, Bitcoin Cash is a fork of Bitcoin that removes segwit, the initial groundwork for off-chain scaling solutions, and instead simply increased the blocksize; so far this has proven to greatly reduce network congestion.)

Maybe it was the right call for Coinbase to not support many of the forks, but they will be adding support for Bitcoin Cash in 2018 (at least withdrawals). So it's inaccurate to characterize Brian Armstrong on the "losing" side of these debates.

<comment> etr-strike Bitcoin Cash is the brute force solution to scaling. Increasing block size results in longer validation times as well as slower block propagation. Both of these things lead to centralization. The entire purpose of bitcoin is to be as decentralized as possible.

Anyways, here's a video released today of a lightning transaction happening on mainnet: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a73Gz3Tvx3k](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a73Gz3Tvx3k)

Here's a video of Greg Maxwell explaining how slight propagation delays can lead to drastic increases in centralization: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EHIuuKCm53o](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EHIuuKCm53o)

And here's rootstock, an ethereum compatible solution for smart contracts: [https://www.rsk.co/](https://www.rsk.co/)

Bitcoin Cash is like trying to solve traffic congestion by adding more lanes.

<comment><USER20> Why would anyone ever use rsk? They created a centralized clone of Ethereum and charge 20% fees, or something like that.

Here's a truly revolutionary scaling solution by the inventor of Bitcoin's Lightning network and Vitalik Buterin: [https://plasma.io/](https://plasma.io/)

Also here is an Ethereum's equivalent of the Lightning network, which was deployed on main net recently: [https://raiden.network/](https://raiden.network/)

<comment><USER18> I don't mind eth. I hope they can solve their problems. But they have problems, and they are running out of time to work them out. Their blockchain is out of control size. Nodes are dropping and they aren't coming back up. I've heard about sharding and pos, but i haven't seen anything approaching a solution yet. It's an issue.

Edit: > Why would anyone ever use rsk?

ICO. Share offer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I used to use coinbase but some godawful KYC/AML thing kicked in and asked me to send them a "selfie" of myself, which creeped me the hell out. I'm a US citizen, am not on any sort of list of prohibited people, and had already given them a photo of my driver's licence and my SSN -- and have had no issues with opening other bank/bitcoin-exchange accounts online previously.

I thus switched to Gemini because I do not want to support this invasive nonsense. It's literally an automated version of "put shoe on head" (the request that /b/tards would make of camgirls that they wanted to troll).

Between that, and the thing where you literally have to enter your _BANK_ 'S username/password to ANOTHER WEBSITE (coinbase, in this case) to prove you have that account (of course it chokes on 2FA); the USian banking system is such a scary bad mess -- and i'm pretty sure that that's a significant driver of bitcoin adoption (and there's also the ACH clusterfuck).

<comment><USER22> Wait what? Did they really ask for your bank login credentials? If so, approximately what date was that?

<comment><USER23> They use Plaid[1] to verify bank accounts using bank login credentials instead of micro deposits -- which reduces abandoned applications since you don't have to wait a couple days to complete verification.

This is a very common thing for fintech companies to do.

[1] [https://plaid.com/](https://plaid.com/)

<comment><USER24> It's so bizarre to me that there isn't proper auth delegation in online banking. You should _never_ have to put credentials for one domain into a form on another domain. Let alone banking credentials!

<comment><USER25> And that's a huge indicator of why blockchain finance is attractive. The banking system is AWFUL. Exchanges are bridges between banks and blockchains, and it's quite reasonable to want to keep your money in cryptocurrency just for technical usability reasons. I can send cryptocurrency from a shell script -- that's not going to work with bank money in a million years, or if it does it's going to be because of the competition from blockchains. Blockchains enable permissionless innovation in finance, and that's HUGE.

<comment><USER26> You're talking about the USA banking system, which is pretty much stone age compared to everyone else. (paper checks? really?) For example, in EU the requirement for banks to open up APIs to everyone is coming in force next year, a bit closer than a million years - and it's not happening because of competition from blockchains, it was put in force (before blockchains boomed) for reasons of consumer rights and restricting anti-competitive behavior by banks.

<comment><USER25> I'm not sure the EU directive will open up APIs to everyone. More likely it will be to a regulated class of businesses, right? If it really means I will be able to directly access and manipulate my own personal and business bank account with curl, then I'm really excited. If I have to go through a bureaucratic approval process, then it's still pretty cool, but not what I really want (permissionless innovation).

<comment><USER26> Yes, the main intent is not for end-users to access those APIs directly - <USER2> consumers don't want that, and the larger business who want it already have such access, pretty much every bank here offers a cash management solution that allows you to automatically access your account data and send transactions from your system to the bank. The big expectation is that it will open up the market to fintech service providers / tool makers who can then provide services using that API to every customer of every bank; but there certainly could be (or you could make) a service provider that offers exactly what you describe - a consumer friendly API for direct access, handling the authentication in some manner that's compatible with isolated curl requests. You wouldn't have to get permission from the involved banks to do that, but you would have to get the permission from the customers, of course.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> "too big to fail" doesn't yet apply to any entity directly engaged in this space, as its entire business model. J.P. Morgan got away with a central role in the GFC because it did not suit the regulatory environment to kick one of the legs of a wobbly table.

The same does not apply to this, or any other coin- centric company. Yes, in _our_ terms, these are huge dollar sums. But if you work in fintech, this is a small pimple on the side of trades in real goods, and existing financial instruments.

Look: the fintech people _get_ this space, and they are not dissing the model entirely. But please, don't pretend that the feds could not shut this agency down tomorrow, and it would have almost no effect on the US bottom line reports for financials.

<comment><USER28> That's a pretty good summary of a casual conversation I had with someone that works in investing about Bitcoin and Ethereum. He said blockchain is here to stay and that knowing what companies are going to try and do with it is useful but these currencies, or at the very least, their value, could go away very quickly.

<comment><USER29> This is what my uneducated hunch is, so I'm glad to hear you say it, but I'm enjoying reading all the countervailing opinions too, to educate myself further!

<comment><USER28> I'm glad to have finally pushed myself to read and learn more about all this sense it does seem to be hitting the mainstream.

Here's a shit ton of reading if you're interested:

[https://github.com/xel/blockchain-stuff](https://github.com/xel/blockchain- stuff)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Coinbase has a key difference from traditional brokers such as Charles Schwab, Scottrade, etc.

It doesn't charge a flat fee for buy/sell crypto currency, but a 2-3% fee based on the transaction value.

So even though I'm sure they've been making cash hand over fist this past 12 months, it makes any sort of future prediction extremely difficult. They not only have to predict customer growth (which leads to transaction volume), but also the price of those cryptocurrencies. It's akin to calculate position from nothing but a accelerometer, and that double integral would be quite a bit of margin of error.

But in the end it may not even matter, as far as revenue growth and even profit wise I'm sure they are doing absolutely amazingly.

Hell, I wouldn't even be surprised if Coinbase has higher daily revenue (definitely more profitable) than _Uber_ at this point.

<comment><USER31> I bet Coinbase makes more money from their exchange (GDAX) which does $1 billion each day in volume. While limit orders are free, market orders cost 0.25% of transaction value.

<comment><USER32> Why would anyone ever want to use a market order versus a limit? In any exchange, for any kind of trading? If you're really ok with e.g. selling for 0.01, set that as your limit.

<comment><USER33> Because the market could move against you.

If you're ok with buying for 100, but someone else is selling for 99, you've effectively done a market order and have to pay the fees. However if the lowest sell is 101 and then the price moves up to 105, you've just screwed yourself for 4 in order to save 0.25

<comment><USER32> Huh? Just set your limit to 105 or 200 or 10500. There's no reason to ever use a market order unless there's some other severe limitation on limit orders in a particular implementation.

<comment><USER33> You can't set your 'limit' to 105, when the current price is 101. That's a market order.

Even if you could, why would you want to buy at 105, when the current price is 101? Just to don't have to pay 0.25 in fees!? That sounds like "The Firm" from John Grisham where rich people would rather pay $2 to lawyers than $1 in taxes.

<comment><USER32> This is incorrect.

You do not know what the current price will be when you click the submit button. You may enter a limit of 105, and find that when you get around to submitting, the price is suddenly 205 or 1.05. This is why you use a limit order, so that your "market" order doesn't give you a sudden surprise.

On top of that, the current price is only valid for a certain depth. So if the asks are 10x101 and 20x106, I want to set my limit to 105 to make sure I only take that 10x101 order off, and not start chewing through and execute at a much different price than "current". All these orders are changing extremely rapidly for any popular item, so using limits makes sure you get the execution you want.

The limit does not set the price that your order will execute at, but the limit. It'll match at or better than the limit you set. So you never end up paying more than you're OK with, but you prevent getting burned by sudden movements. This is much more important on these cryptocurrency exchanges than traditional stocks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> If the bubble bursts, this will be a delightful pull quote in the postmortem:

"Correction: December 6, 2017 An earlier version of a photo caption with this article misidentified the place where Coinbase employees were gathered for lunch. It was the gaming room, not the cafeteria."

<comment><USER35> I work at Coinbase. If you want the inside scoop: "game room" is a bit of a misnomer for that room. It's a large room with a big theater screen. All day it's full of meetings and presentations. There are a bunch of games on shelves as well, and some people play them after hours.

<comment><USER36> Btw, do you have any engineers capable of working to upgrade the platform to use SegWit? I find it weird that Brian advertises open positions like there's nobody there capable of doing it.

<comment><USER35> I wouldn't take any job ad copy as disparaging to the current team.

<comment><USER36> Neither am I, just in this case I know some context that lead me to this question.

SegWit being pretty much the most important update to Bitcoin so far with a lot of advantages, I would expect that CB would give top priority on supporting it. But Brian when asked about it, he replied with a job ad about new positions, while I would expect they would put their most experienced engineers on it, instead of depend on new recruits for such crucial and maybe challenging project.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> > No company had made it simpler to sign up, link a bank account or debit > card, and begin buying Bitcoin.

Actually, I think it is still too difficult. I mean it is not that difficult, but if you had to send every e-commerce shop a photo of your driver license just to buy something there would be a lot fewer people buying stuff online.

<comment><USER38> There is a certain amount of financial regulation that they (and most other exchanges) have to comply with.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> Support is horrible, here is my story - not sure how common that problem is. Would be interested if others have the same valdation issue.

I have a case open for multiple weeks to get my address validated. I was able to buy initially, but now it pops up a "quiz" (that's how support calls it), where i have to enter my address and then it says that it's not a valid permanent address. Which is funny because that is the same address the accepted when I signed up and validated my ID. There support literally tells me, "sorry your problem, but you can try the quiz again- and maybe one day it will work". To me thats an unbelievable statement.

I think they have to stop onnoarding customers and solve some of their basic flows first. What if I wanted to sell? It is just not possible within Coinbase.

</comment><comment><USER40> I would love to hear more about what must be Coinbase's love/hate relationship with MongoDB.

From my very uninformed perspective, the tool mostly does what it says on the tin these days, but that hasn't always been the case. I would be interested in following along with Coinbase during this transition, and hearing more about what MongoDB is used for there today.

</comment><comment><USER41> Does anyone know the hot/cold wallet address for Coinbase, like the below one for Bitfinex?

[https://bitinfocharts.com/bitcoin/address/3D2oetdNuZUqQHPJmc...](https://bitinfocharts.com/bitcoin/address/3D2oetdNuZUqQHPJmcMDDHYoqkyNVsFk9r)

<comment><USER42> It seems likely that coinbase has _many_ cold and hot wallets which are geographically and technically distributed across many vaults and key generators.

<comment><USER43> Good for them that they can spend bitcoin cash without people noticing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> (Coinbase: YC S12)

</comment><comment><USER45> So can you actually withdraw money from coinbase, if you say had 100 coins (I don't). Everyone said back then that Mt. Gox was safe because it was the biggest. It being based in Japan was a huge red flag, but nobody cared until all of its money disappeared.

Coinbase being based in the US probably won't happen because there could be consequences for them if they disappear with the coins, but having been burned by Mt. Gox fiasco is making me sit out of crypto, but with some sour grapes because each day bitcoin just go up and up. Was $13000 yesterday and it's almost $16000 today. It took a week to go from $10000 to $15000. Insane.

<comment><USER46> It's an exchange so if there's no one to take the other side of the trade then you wouldn't be able to sell. They probably float a little bit of coin, but likely not enough to wipe them out. The question is what they'd do in a crisis. Would they freeze everyone's coin? Would other exchanges do the same?

Now, they could be hacked and lose a lot of customers' coin without realizing it as happened with Mt Gox. This is why it's advisable to hold your coin in an offline wallet, but doing so makes it harder to panic sell. But that shouldn't matter since we're all definitely here just to HODL crypto and see it actually be useful and we're definitely not just to try to speculate off of it. Right?? Right???

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> What I find most interesting about Coinbase is that they quote your selling exchange rate the moment you place a sell order. If I click "sell" right now, they lock in the $13,000 exchange rate or whatever it is. The amount that shows up in my bank days later is exactly what they quoted at the time I placed the sell order. When people start selling off, this policy is either going to drive them to bankruptcy or create a lot of unhappy customers.

<comment><USER48> You must have never had a transaction cancelled for being 'too risky'. Happened a lot for me in the past.

<comment><USER49> Can you explain more about what happened?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> Coinbase is getting away with murder charging outrageous fees, cashing in the bitcoin frenzy. Kinda like the shady brokerages in the 80s.

<comment><USER12> Maybe, but how are they supposed to hire employees to build and run the infrastructure and rent datacenter space / cloud VPSes / etc. if they do it for free?

I'm not being facetious, I'm genuinely curious - hey, the fees seemed high to me, too. Luckily the appreciation of the coins made those icky feelings disappear quickly.

<comment><USER50> AFAIK, running a full-on brokerage (e.g. Schwab, Robinhood) is probably more expensive as it's highly regulated, with non-trivial compliance costs, for example. Cryptocurrencies are supposed to be new, digital "securities", without the fat of the incumbents. I'm probably oversimplifying this here, but at the age of easy cloud scaling, where their main job is a secure digital wallet storage, their fees are mostly taking advantage of the BTC craze.

To clarify: their % fee isn't _that_ high - the fact that it's uncapped though is pretty outrageous. A $10K trade on Schwab costs a few dollars; on Coinbase, a couple hundred.

I guess once BTC futures are out and one can speculate on BTC in the open market, they'll have to feel the pressure and adjust their pricing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> Coinbase is down again. This seems to happen with every BTC price spike now, and since these spikes get more extreme, I guess Coinbase's infrastructure always lags behind.

</comment><comment><USER52> With the wild price swings, Bitcoin has practically no value as anything other than a speculative investment.

Are any of these people downloading Coinbase and buying coins really interested in transacting in Bitcoin or are they just buying Beanie Babies?

Although, as someone who thought the bubble would burst at $1,000, I'm quite impressed at how much interest it has garnered. I just don't seeing it end well for many people.

<comment><USER45> Why? Most people just put money they don't need into it, like spare cash. Depending on when you bought, chances of ever going down to that level now is incredibly small.

<comment><USER52> I'm not so sure in the middle of a buying rush that people are just putting spare cash into it.

But the larger point is that even if people are investing small amounts, they're doing so to ride the rush, not because they see value in Bitcoin as anything other than an investment.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> Unless you buy with credit cards, good luck making bank transfers work on Coinbase.

EDIT: Downvoting with no explanation will not change my experience. I believe that cryptocurrencies are the future but having to wait weeks for a simple bank transfer only to find out that your funds will be returned with no explanation why apart from a cryptic message that has something to do with your bank account name not matching your coinbase name is rather annoying. Match how? What do you compare? An extra dot at the end of your middle name will throw off the system without any reasonable explanation.

Honestly, if Coinbase improves their messages in this situation, it may actually reduce the overhead on their customer support but I gather that this might be intentional.

<comment><USER54> Never heard anyone have that problem. You're in minority so please don't speak like this is some major problem.

<comment><USER53> Do you work for Coinbase?

<comment><USER54> Yeah, because it's entirely impossible that you may have just been unlucky or messed it up on your side?

<comment><USER53> I can send customer support transcript if you want as attacking me does nothing constructive for this conversation. Also, if you do a quick web search you will find that this is not just unlucky, it is common although in the grand scheme of things it might be nothing for Coinbase or perhaps you are just not personally dealing with these types of problems. You know a minority can be a pretty large group of people.

Look, my comment is not meant to bash Coinbase but there are issues with the service and it can be ironed out to make it so much better.

<comment><USER55> It's worked for me just fine every week the last few months.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> I have heard so many bad things about coinbase...as the mtgox scandal shows, sometimes the most popular exchange is not the best I would rather spread my $ in several smaller ones

</comment><comment><USER57> I bought £100 of Bitcoin in September via Coinbase, pretty much just to have a play with Bitcoin itself, and try a couple of transactions.

To my horror, I discovered that transaction wasn't actually in the blockchain, and that Coinbase essentially has an internal system you just have to trust, which seemed to be contrary to the whole idea of a global ledger.

I setup my own wallet and transferred it to that (thus achieving my initial goal of seeing my own transaction in the block chain). There's no way I'd put any significant amounts into Bitcoin, let alone Coinbase.

<comment><USER58> Would it also horrify you to learn that when you transfer money from your savings to your checking account (at the same bank), those transactions are not cleared by the Federal Reserve?

<comment><USER29> I doubt it would, firstly because that hasn't been touted as the "point" of dollars, and secondly because FDIC insures deposits.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER59> im traveling and when inattempted to join.. due to my IP u couldnt get a US based account which would allow me to buy coins. i asked support and got some automated answer which didnt work. i responded and waited again. lost huge opportunities for weeks.

Their ID system keeps throwing me errors when using my US passport. i have no Us drivers license or Active Us Cel phone for auth.

</comment><comment><USER60> So, any guesses as to top line for coinbase?

</comment><comment><USER61> > 57) Customer Service

58) Recruiting process

</comment><comment><USER62> Slightly offtopic, but this is so funny: (From today's "money stuff" [https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-12-07/shale- sha...](https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-12-07/shale-shareholders- and-direct-listing))

Happy Bitcoin 13,000 Day.

I mean, that was yesterday. A few hours after I sent out Money Stuff saying Happy Bitcoin 12,000 Day, which was also yesterday. At this rate we'll have Bitcoin 25,000 before my "Bitcoin 25,000 Before Dow 25,000" hats get here.

Happy Bitcoin 14,000 Day.

That was also yesterday.

Happy Bitcoin 15,000 Day.

That was this morning. See what I mean?

Happy Bitcoin 16,000 Day.

That will be this afternoon, probably.

Happy Bitcoin 17,000 Day.

Just in case, why not.

Still more bitcoin.

Bitcoin futures are set to start trading next week at CBOE Global Markets Inc.'s futures exchange, with CME Group Inc. following the week after that, but some people object:

The Futures Industry Association, whose members include Goldman Sachs Group Inc., JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Citigroup Inc., detailed its concerns in a letter to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission on Wednesday. The association said there should have been more discussion about margin levels, trading limits, stress tests and clearing before the contracts were given a green light.

For clearing members of futures exchanges, the worry is that some bitcoin futures trader will blow up, and that bitcoin is so volatile that the trader's margin won't be sufficient to cover its losses. That will leave the members of the exchanges on the hook for losses. This seems like a ... totally reasonable worry? If you collected 25 percent margin from someone who was short bitcoin on Monday, they would have blown through it by this morning. Also the standard fate of bitcoin exchanges seems to be to get hacked and lose their customers' money, so if you are a customer of a futures exchange I can see why you'd be skeptical of your futures exchange turning into a bitcoin exchange.

Meanwhile, here is a nice profile of Coinbase, a bitcoin exchange that hasn't been hacked, much. (Though: "In May, the company was criticized by a customer who could not reach anyone at the company after his account was hacked.") It "runs an exchange, called GDAX, tailored to larger investors," overseen by Adam White. "A year ago, his Wall Street outreach was difficult, but 'it's all inbound now,' Mr. White said." Indeed.

Oh and another bitcoin thing was hacked:

NiceHash, the marketplace for cloud-based mining of cryptocurrencies, said hackers breached its systems and stole an unknown amount of bitcoin from its virtual wallet.

Some $60 million worth of bitcoins may have been affected. Elsewhere here's a guy who lost the password to his 40 bitcoins.

<comment><USER26> This aspect isn't anything new, stock markets (which are even more volatile in certain types of stock) and forex have been doing that for ages - stop loss orders are a thing; in your example someone who was short bitcoin on Monday would have been forced to sell e.g. yesterday and eat the loss even if bitcoin started to drop today.

</comment></comment><comment><USER63> I have recommended Coinbase to many people. But, a few days ago, I had a double charge on my bank account from them and have learned since that their customer support is essentially non-existent. It's been 8 days with no response by e-mail, their posted phone number results in a busy signal, and the alternate numbers I found posted on forums go straight to hold music before hanging up after a couple of minutes. I filed a fraud report with my bank.

<comment><USER64> Their customer service was great in the early days, but has most definitely gotten worse since its gotten so popular. I think they simply can't find enough people.

<comment><USER65> They should consider paying more to find a suitable equilibrium.

<comment><USER66> Well, people already complain about the fees they charge

<comment><USER65> Everyone is commenting how great their cash flow must be upthread-- regardless, it hardly matters.

If supporting your customer base makes the business unprofitable then you don't (yet) have a viable business model.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER67> I posted this earlier today, and earlier than that as an Ask HN. I promise after this I won't post it again, at least for awhile. This seems sufficiently important that it's worth a slight annoyance.

What should we do about the destabilizing potential of Bitcoin?

There are two facts about Bitcoin worth worrying about:

1\. There is no upper bound on the price

2\. Everyone who thought the price won't continue to exponentially increase was wrong

Greed is a powerful motivator.

It's easy to smile at this[1] but it will only take a couple more 10x increases before people stop laughing.

What happens when governments start putting money into Bitcoin because they don't want their economy to be left out? It'll only make the price go up even further.

It might be a good idea to take a step back for a moment and stop thinking "Can I get rich?" and start thinking "Before this reaches a point where we should worry, what should we do?"

I'm aware that this has roughly a 0.1% chance of happening. But if you'll suspend your disbelief for a few minutes and accept "What if it might be true?" then you'll find it's an interesting question worth thinking about.

It's starting to feel like no one really has a plan for this contingency. It will be a relief if the price crashes back to $1k, but Bitcoin defies belief. How many of you have parents that are seriously talking about getting in? Everyone wants to become rich. And if that infectious mindset spreads to the whole population, we might get an uncontrolled upward spiral.

Is there a way to prevent that?

Now, to add to the discussion: Several people have voiced that there is no reason to worry, both because it's impossible for BTC to hit $1M/coin and because this is all conjecture. But there is every indication that the BTC craze could in fact spread to the entire world -- literally nobody will be able to escape thinking about it, because that is what the world values. This has low probability, but just like climate change, it's worth planning for it now rather than later. Can we please try to think of something? Look at this[2] and let that graph sink in.

Fiction is also worth taking seriously. Satellites were predicted by fiction long before they were deployed. Many of the most influential ideas start as works of art. The dystopian future as envisioned in [1] is a far cry from how things would turn out, but the underlying idea is that we will become subservient to a tiny few. It's only a matter of time before that money starts turning into real power.

So, if we could set aside our selfishness and try to snap out of the getting- rich craze, and ask "Can we possibly stop this?" it would probably be one of the most impactful ways you could spend a few minutes.

Making BTC illegal won't work. It'll just go to countries where it's not, and take the people with them.

I don't think it would be possible to sneak a backdoor into BTC. People would notice by now. And even if it works, they'd just fork and preserve the wealth.

Even if one were to theoretically become batshit insane and try to hunt down everyone who holds BTC, that won't work either, because it's easy to conceal. The price of mixing services will just rise to the point of taking transaction fees into account, and that's how much people will start to pay.

I can't think of anything else. Ideas?

[1] [https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1lfobc/i_am_a_time...](https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1lfobc/i_am_a_timetraveler_from_the_future_here_to_beg/)

[2] [https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/7f3z8j/btc_price_a...](https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/7f3z8j/btc_price_as_predicted_by_luka_magnotta_aka_time/)

<comment><USER68> Yes, Bitcoin might very well eat all money on Earth. No joke, no freaking joke. I'm thinking along the lines of a financial black hole.

<comment><USER67> And it's very hard to get anyone to take this seriously. But as far as I can tell, it's a real possibility.

I had to talk some sense into a friend who was saying she was fed up with being poor and was going to put her $7k life savings into bitcoin. I told her to treat it like gold, hold it, and be very careful to keep it secure. And off Coinbase. And my advice made her hesitate, and now she missed the 100% growth over the last 30 days.

But almost everybody is starting to think that way. And if the entire world starts down that mindset, there isn't a top.

People have already noticed that wealthy Saudis' money is safer in BTC than in banks. Ditto for Zimbabwe. How long until the rest of the world follows?

We have to be thinking of ways to stop this, not merely to benefit from being prescient.

<comment><USER69> Could you explain why "this" needs to "stop"? Why would the success of Bitcoin be apocalyptic?

<comment><USER67> Although BTC has a finite maximum, it has been inflationary, since coins are being created. This will not hold.

BTC was the first crypto, and network effects means it stands a good chance of staying on top. Like eBay, it may be the go-to crypto.

If it's true that crypto is the future -- that the entire world will switch from fiat to crypto, kicking and screaming -- then that means the entire world will likely switch to whichever crypto is on top. There are many benefits to using the same crypto that everyone else is using, especially when it comes to long-term wealth storage.

Eventually, the coins will stop being generated, and those coins will be the only thing that the world values. We won't transact in BTC, but BTC wasn't designed to transact. It was designed to store wealth. And it does that very well.

The rise of Bitcoin will prompt people to pour even more money into it. Savings accounts will look like an anachronism. You won't want to keep your money in a bank: If the entire world is hopping onto the bitcoin boat, then you currently stand to benefit from (7 billion - total BTC holders) of people that have yet to switch.

That means you will find it quite inescapable.

Now, the final nail will be when your dollars start to lose value relative to BTC. One way of looking at the BTC price is to say that the dollar's value is going down, not that BTC is getting more valuable.

Do you really want to bet the future of all mankind on this grand experiment? For all their flaws, our traditional systems have gotten us this far. The amount of upheaval that it could cause to switch the entire world from inflationary to deflationary basis of wealth isn't something to underestimate.

[https://bitcoin.org/en/faq#wont-bitcoin-fall-in-a- deflationa...](https://bitcoin.org/en/faq#wont-bitcoin-fall-in-a-deflationary- spiral)

There are all kinds of theories about what might happen. But let it sink in that no one knows, and we have no plan to stop this if it turns out badly.

This isn't really meant to persuade you, as that would be impossible. No one knows what will happen, so this is guesswork. But we know that if BTC does ultimately win, we will lose all economic controls: there will be no way to inject more money when needed, such as the 2008 crisis, and no strategies to prevent deflation. We will be at the whims of an algorithm that no one has any incentive to change.

Contingency plans are good. Let's come up with one.

<comment><USER70> > We will be at the whims of an algorithm that no one has any incentive to > change.

Not only that. We will also be at the whims of a practically unchangeable algorithm that only works as long as (mostly) chinese mining operators keep their gigawatt-guzzling hashing machines running, and that has no suitable failure handling for the case of big parts of that hashing power suddenly going missing. Look up "chain death spiral" for a description of this specific doomsday scenario.

It really is intriguing to follow through on some of these scenarios in which Bitcoin sucks up enormous portions of worldwide economic power, only to catastrophically fail in one of the numerously envisioned ways in which it could fail. The higher the market cap rises, the more it seems possible that we are right now looking at the next worldwide financial crisis in its infancy.

Another thought: even assuming Bitcoin continues working normally and somehow being able to handle the transactions that come with a multi-trillion market cap, what about the fact that all this "value" is completely removed from the market where it would usually be mostly "at work" as operating capital of companies which in turn (not all of them, but in the grand scheme) generate actual value, as in improvements of the conditions for real humans? If this is not offset somehow, won't it cause a huge economic crisis of its own, possibly - in the worst case - leading to us (as humanity) not being able to keep up the stupid hashing game and thus making bitcoin entirely unusable and thus worthless?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER71> That "What is money" slide is pretty much brainwash</comment>


A new Django content management system - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/torchbox/wagtail/

<comment><USER3> I'm from Torchbox, the creators and maintainers of this project. It's nice to see Wagtail back on HN. For those who saw my original Show HN post a couple of months ago, here's as overview of progress since then:

\- Tests: stung by some of the (very reasonable) criticisms after launch, we worked hard to increase our test coverage - [https://coveralls.io/r/torchbox/wagtail](https://coveralls.io/r/torchbox/wagtail)

\- Docs: still a way to go, but our documentation is much better, and now includes an editor's manual: [http://docs.wagtail.io/en/latest/editor_manual/](http://docs.wagtail.io/en/latest/editor_manual/)

\- Translations: we were delighted by the immediate response of translators, whose work we're managing through the excellent Transifex: [https://www.transifex.com/projects/p/wagtail/](https://www.transifex.com/projects/p/wagtail/)

\- Installation: we reduced dependencies (including Sass instead of LESS, and plain JS instead of Coffeescript, so we could drop npm); we made Redis and Elasticsearch optional; we wrote one-liners for Debian and Ubuntu; we improved the installation docs; third parties contributed Docker images.

\- UI: we've continued to refine the interface, with feedback from our own clients as well as helpful strangers. In 0.3 we added the 'edit bird', a toolbar allowing logged-in users to add and edit pages from the site's front- end.

\- Modularisation: Wagtail now supports alternative backends for image processing (currently PIL and Wand), searching (currently Elasticsearch and SQL) and content embedding (currently OEmbed and Embedly).

\- Compatibility: we're working on Python 3 and Django 1.7 support. We've recently added tox to help us test multiple versions for thoroughly.

We're also adding features, but slowly and carefully. A form-builder and scheduled publishing should be released imminently.

We're very grateful for everyone's interest and contributions, even if it's just a harsh word on HN!

<comment><USER4> When you say "translations" I assume you mean just the admin. But does Wagtail support multilingual websites (nothing seems to be in the docs)?

<comment><USER3> Yes - we're currently building a multilingual site for an international NGO - but it doesn't currently do anything clever to link different language versions of the same content; in this implementation we're simply allowing editors to reference translated pages with a page chooser UI.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Quite an interesting project, and was already posted by the dev team (with a bunch more resources & info): [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7231164](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7231164)

</comment><comment><USER6> Paraphrasing Bruce McKinney on Visual Basic (who was probably paraphrasing someone else): "Django-based CMS systems make the easy easier and the hard impossible".

I worked with Django for about 4 years of my life, maybe more if we consider some proof-of-concept projects. Every single 'framework on top of the framework' (with the exception of Django REST Framework) I've tried has been 'almost perfect', but that little delta between what you have and perfection is impossible to bridge. Just the dependency hell introduced by some of the projects is reason enough to give up.

If all you want is a simple CMS with support for some markup and adding images/videos, you can throw that together using Django, the Markdown module and one of the myriad upload plugins in a couple of days. You want to provide RSS? Use the built-in feed system. You'll spend more time reading the documentation and tweaking the settings file than putting the whole thing together yourself.

<comment><USER3> For a site with a handful of pages and a single author who's happy to use django.contrib.admin I agree with you that plain DIY Django will probably get you there more quickly. But Wagtail (and other Django CMSs) gives you a lot more than that:

\- a fast, intuitive content authoring experience

\- preview / submit / moderate / publish workflow

\- a UI which scales to very large numbers of authors, pages, images

\- powerful full-text search in the front- and back-ends

\- strong support for image handling (e.g. animated gifs via Wand) and media embedding (OEmbed or Embedly)

As an agency, these points are all pretty much requirements for the sites we build. We couldn't find anything else which gave us these as well as allowing us to build models and templates in plain Django, and we had a client - <USER2> Royal College of Art - who agreed to let us open source Wagtail on the back of what we developed for them.

<comment><USER6> Hi!

Sorry, I didn't mean my comment to come through as criticism to this particular project. I meant it as a more of a warning to people who might be tempted to use such a complex system for something like running a small few entries in their website. Chances are the effort to integrate it would be bigger than just writing a minimalistic thing in the existing codebase.

I agree that systems like these have a place if what you want is something akin to Drupal (but with a nicer codebase.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> At work a client wants to use Django CMS, so I considered this as an alternative, but I'm not sure how the modularity of Wagtail compares to Django CMS.

Can someone help me understand why I should prefer one over the other?

<comment><USER8> It's not like django-cms or various PHP-based CMS (Conrete5 comes to mind) where a template defines "slots" into which an administrator can drop different type of content widgets. In spirit, it's much more like Mezzanine, where each Page has a particular type and an associated template. Your page is just a Django model, so if you want three areas for text, an image, and a caption, you'll have a model which has three TextFields, a CharField, and an ImageField.

(Having said that, the rich text editor is in Wagtail really is rich and can support inserting images from the image library and links to documents in the document library, as well as oEmbed stuff, so it has some wriggle room).

The two schools of thought ("each page is designed ahead of time with structured content in mind" vs "each page is a collection of content objects") have their adherents. Personally I prefer the Wagtail and Mezzanine approach, but the right answer depends on what the client needs and the nature of your relationship with them.

<comment><USER9> If you are part of the Wagtail team: Can you elaborate a bit on the differences between Mezzanine and Wagtail? On the website it says:

> But having built content-managed websites for 14 years we have strong > opinions about the editor experience and how a CMS should work and be > structured, and we need to manage a more rapid pace of development than we > can achieve by contributing to existing projects.

.. and your editor does in fact look really nice, but what are the structural differences to mezzanine, why is it not just another backend for Mezzanine? That would be a question your landing page or README.md should answer in my opinion. Maybe you could also add Wagtail to the grid on [https://www.djangopackages.com/grids/g/cms/](https://www.djangopackages.com/grids/g/cms/) ?

<comment><USER8> I'm not on the team, but I've used both. I would be interested in seeing both maintainer's answer to this, too.

At a high level, I can see how there might have been a bit of friction in trying to implement Wagtail on top of Mezzanine. Mezzanine's features, admin interface, and content model are fairly tightly integrated (I hope I'm not misrepresenting Mezzanine here, I think that this is an affirmative goal of the project). It provides a lot for the developer and the site admin out of the box—usable templates, basic page types, a blog, an image library. On the other hand, Wagtail core offers surprisingly little—the wagtaildemo project is a nice starting point for some basic content types, but it's just another user of the Wagtail API.

For me, the killer features of Wagtail are: deep integration with ElasticSearch, a moderation based workflow, content revision tracking, document library. It's feature list is like a love letter to institutional clients. However, that's a lot of code that is not integral to Mezzanine, and I don't think it fits with the maintainer's philosophy of "it's integrated, but not a kitchen sink." [Note: I made up this quote.]

To both maintainers, nice work, and thanks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I have a couple of sites for friends, which I setup ages ago, for which I used Drupal - only because a) My design skills weren't that great, and I could use a package called Artisteer to create the theme b) It was a CMS - so my mates could just add content themselves

Now - turns out that the Drupal interface is still a bit confusing for people that don't care for tech. Plus, I'm having to host it on my own server. Can anyone recommend a really simple CMS I could replace it with, preferably for something I could host for free?

<comment><USER11> I'd recommend Processwire[1]. It's really easy to use any HTML template with it and I personally find it much easier to work with than Drupal. The catch is, by using this or Drupal, you are storing your models on the database and you can't version control a model in a database without getting really creative.

[1]: [http://processwire.com/](http://processwire.com/)

<comment><USER12> ProcessWire is really great. Some people complain that it doesn't have quite the off-the-shelf setup of pre-made modules for e.g. powerful e-commerce or super easy theming, but I think regardless it's an example of the way a CMS/CMF should be written in the 2010s. In fact I approached a developer of one of the early CMSes that is still hanging around, and he was quite interested in migrating to PW as a content management framework backend rather than using an application framework. The CMS part of ProcessWire is built upon the ProcessWire content management API and it's easy to build your own custom back end if you don't like it.

With a content management framework (such as PW), so much has already been done for you that you start to wonder why you will ever need an application framework. Of course, application frameworks are very useful but CMFs are not to be missed out on. I just finished writing a project management system using ProcessWire and it's been a lot of fun. Like building-with-Legos fun. I hope to see clones or variants appear in other languages as I'd happily give them a try as I expand my CS education.

<comment><USER13> Any chance you are going to release your project management system in the PW modules directory?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I made a demo here : [http://runnable.com/U14o8gNBvRl84F7n/wagtaildemo-git- for-pyt...](http://runnable.com/U14o8gNBvRl84F7n/wagtaildemo-git-for-python)

Run it, expand the URL written in the top box (not sure why it's not working properly).

Add /admin to the URL and log in with hnews/hnews for the admin area.

</comment><comment><USER15> I've browsed the site, the documentation, repo and tutorial. I still don't know what the content model or publishing flow is.

I realise that the concept of a generic CMS implies DB backed with bespoke content types. However, it would be nice to know whether there are any 'first- class-citizen' types (user, profile, blog post, etc.), how pages are built or constructed (static html export? dynamic templates?), how edited content is stored and how / whether I might intermingle CMS edited content with UGC content.

This kind of information would be much more interesting to me than learning that the thing is "Beautiful", "Light" and "Agile".

<comment><USER3> Thanks for the feedback, @thruflo.

The project site is really focused on potential clients, but you're right that the documentation should be clearer about these basics. The README lists a 'feature' as 'Configure content types through standard Django models', which hopefully makes sense to Django developers; essentially you configure your own content types as Django models and register them as pages, where they inherit tags, slugs, publication dates etc. Users are standard Django users and can be augmented with profiles if you want. The wagtaildemo project [1] includes blog posts as a fully worked-up content type, but you don't have to include these in your project. Pages are constructed on the fly, and Wagtail is Varnish- / Squid-friendly if you have lots of traffic. FWIW we're working on a static HTML export feature which could be used for archiving or publishing to S3 etc. Edited content is stored in the database. You can intermingle CMS and UGC content - students at the Royal College of Art are uploading their own work alongside the content managed by the site's administrators, for example.

Plus it's really beautiful, light and agile :)

[1] [https://github.com/torchbox/wagtaildemo](https://github.com/torchbox/wagtaildemo)

<comment><USER15> Thanks for the info. And for the record, I very much welcome the beauty, lightness and agility :)

Just as a ref, here's a CMS intro that focuses on the content model and workflow: [https://github.com/SpontaneousCMS/spontaneous#features- curre...](https://github.com/SpontaneousCMS/spontaneous#features-currently- supported)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Played with Wagtail and the first thing I wanted to find out is how to customize the wysiwyg editor. Is there any API to add / remove buttons, markup, etc? Is it possible or we're stuck with what's offered?

<comment><USER17> It's not quite possible yet, but that's a frequently requested feature, and we're most of the way there. The wysiwyg component we're using, [http://hallojs.org/](http://hallojs.org/), supports defining extra buttons via plugins, and Wagtail provides a hook mechanism for passing in custom JS/CSS to the editor - we're just missing a bit of glue to connect the two.

I'm cautious about overloading the rich text editor with too many features - things like tables, say, would be better handled as an explicit part of the page model / template rather than kept in an opaque blob of HTML - but I can appreciate the need for more formatting options.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I like the design of wagtail admin very much. Can I extract it & use it in other django app? (I'm asking for permission)

</comment><comment><USER19> Can it be used with Django 1.7? What versions of Django are required? I didn't see it listed anywhere...Maybe I'm blind.

<comment><USER20> The setup.py makes clear that Django 1.7 is not supported. 1.6.2 or higher should be used.

<comment><USER19> Of course it does. I'm trying to make the point that one shouldn't even have to dig that minuscule amount to find out. It's as simple as adding a line to their landing page: Wagtail supports Python 2.7 and Django 1.6.2.

<comment><USER21> Thanks for the comment ryannevius. Sometimes it's the obvious things that go overlooked when writing a stack of documentation! There's now a note about supported versions on the Github README and the Readthedocs landing page.

Thanks for the feedback!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Why there is not the demo; I don't evaluate web products which do not provide a demo in their site

<comment><USER9> There is a demo, you can run it locally using vagrant and it's linked in the README: [https://github.com/torchbox/wagtaildemo/](https://github.com/torchbox/wagtaildemo/) . If you are asking for a _hosted_ demo, then I don't know if there is one but you could always set up your own one on services like OpenShift.

<comment><USER23> The Show HN link from the original creators has a link to a site built out of wagtail.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7231164](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7231164)</comment></comment></comment>


The Mathematician (1947) - <AUTHOR> http://www-history.mcs.st-and.ac.uk/Extras/Von_Neumann_Part_1.html <comment><USER2> John Von Neumann was a terrifyingly intelligent person. I've never read anything by him that wasn't intellectually stimulating and rewarding. Thanks for this.

<comment><USER3> Indeed. There is an interesting discussion on Quora about whether he was smarter than Einstein.

[https://www.quora.com/What-was-John-von-Neumanns-IQ-Was- he-s...](https://www.quora.com/What-was-John-von-Neumanns-IQ-Was-he-smarter- than-Einstein)

The conclusion seems to be that he had a higher raw IQ but Einstein was a 'deeper' thinker and better aesthetician. General relativity (which took Einstein 10 years of 'thought experiments') is often considered the greatest achievement of any single human mind. In Einstein's words:

"After a certain high level of technical skill is achieved, science and art tend to coalesce in aesthetics, plasticity, and form. The greatest scientists are artists as well." \- Albert Einstein, 1923

<comment><USER2> From that page:

According to George Pólya:

"The only student of mine I was ever intimidated by. He was so quick. There was a seminar for advanced students in Zürich that I was teaching and von Neumann was in the class. I came to a certain theorem, and I said it is not proved and it may be difficult. Von Neumann didn't say anything but after five minutes he raised his hand. When I called on him he went to the blackboard and proceeded to write down the proof. After that I was afraid of von Neumann".

<comment><USER4> Worth noting for those who may not know, Pólya was himself an extremely prolific mathematician with many major contributions to mathematics.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Does anyone happen to know more about the relationship of mathematics with philosophy and epistemology? This to me is more interesting than its relationship with the natural sciences and empiricism; although analysis of the latter relationship seems to have potential insight that is interesting as well.

<comment><USER6> The SEP is always a good place to start: [https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/philosophy- mathematics/](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/philosophy-mathematics/)

<comment><USER7> Philosophy of mathematics is just one part of the connection between philosophy and mathematics. Many historical philosophers have been heavily influenced by mathematical thinking.

To give just a few examples from European history of philosophy: Spinoza took the geometric method (basically the axiomatic method) from Euclid. Kant is heavily drawing on geometry and the discovery of non-Euclidean geometry has been suggested as disproving him. If you look into Hegel's Encyclopedia of the Sciences, you will find a lengthy discussion of calculus.

In current analytic philosophy there are many other areas of overlap and cross-polination, for example in decision theory and metaphysics.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Some kind of kerning or OCR error lead to the appearance of "modem mathmatics" several times in the article.

Von Neumann predicted the Internet and arxiv and the polymath project ;-)

</comment><comment><USER9> Beautiful.</comment>


In Venezuela, life has gone from bad to worse. And the world has quit noticing - <AUTHOR> https://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-ocanto-venezuela-guaido-maduro-trujillo-radio-20190421-story.html <comment><USER2> The world still notices. I've recently seen a number of articles about the protests and the opposition leader Juan Guaido. In fact the New York Times published an op-ed piece by him fairly recently.

<comment><USER3> citing the new york times :/ didnt they push for WMD in iraq? edit: ah yes, unquestioned reporting pushing the administration's policy of war. [https://www.theguardian.com/media/2004/may/26/pressandpublis...](https://www.theguardian.com/media/2004/may/26/pressandpublishing.usnews)

isnt this what happened with collusion as well? oh yeah [https://taibbi.substack.com/](https://taibbi.substack.com/)

<comment><USER4> The actual content of the Mueller report makes Taibbi's post about it appear both premature and immature.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > If there is power, and I can do my job, I've been told by my bosses to be > more measured in how I cover what's happening in Venezuela. They're > terrified of being shut down by the government and having their equipment > confiscated. That would spell the end of our station.

Maybe writing a (non-anonymous) article about the situation for the LA Times isn't the best idea?

</comment><comment><USER6> The baffling thing about this is the vast oil wealth the country controls. Its oil reserves are the largest in the word, yet its economy lies in shambles.

That takes some serious mismanagement.

<comment><USER7> The economy of Venezuela lies in shambles due to US intervention and sanctions. Venezuela has very limited access to the world market.

<comment><USER8> Easily untrue. The US has been 40% of Venezuela's oil export[0]. If they wanted to, they could have obliterated Venezuela's economy in a second.

[0] [https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d0/EEPPHOTO...](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d0/EEPPHOTO1.png)

P.S. I'm Russian and do not have the regional bias.

<comment><USER7> [https://www.reuters.com/article/us-venezuela-politics- rosnef...](https://www.reuters.com/article/us-venezuela-politics-rosneft- exclusive-idUSKCN1RU2A4)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'm from Colombia and my family lives in one of the biggest cities that is relatively close to the border. I visit frequently and every time I visit, there are more and more venezuelan immigrants. This started happening years ago.

I'm shocked by the people who pretend that this is all propaganda and that the venezuelan people are ok with their government. I'm sure that the people living on the streets here aren't.

</comment><comment><USER10> How do their "leaders" still have their heads?

<comment><USER11> It's not always that easy. Look at what's going on in the US right now for example...

<comment><USER12> The US political situation is not even remotely comparable, ignoring the plundering of the economy by the government and military, in 2020 or by 2024 at the latest, the US WILL have a different president. Absolutely and without a shadow of a doubt.

<comment><USER13> Presidents are inaugurated the year after the election, so '21 or '25.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Unfortunately, the population accepted a gun ban back in 2012.

<comment><USER2> As long as the military continues to support the government, an armed population cannot not successfully force Maduro out.

There are also many Venezuelan civilians who still support the regime. These people would presumably also have guns.

<comment><USER15> this goes against every revolution in the history books.

<comment><USER16> Untrue. Read (for example) Erica Chenoweth's detailed empirical work on civil resistance. Nonviolent resistance has a considerably higher real-world chance of success than armed uprising. It also has the huge advantage of leaving behind less collective trauma, giving post-revolutionary society a better chance of sustaining peace.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> It's not just Venezuela, look at what is happening in Haiti.

</comment><comment><USER18> Regardless of whether this is the "fault" of socialism, socialism demands a lot of centralized government power, which seems like the perfect cover for this kind of horrible government.

(Aside: I think a lot of social programs could be run quite well at a local level, but when a politician asks for immense power at the scale of a nation or large state, I get very worried.)

<comment><USER18> Getting a lot of downvotes for this comment, but could someone please explain where I'm going wrong? A lot of people think the way I do, so it would be helpful to explain.

A country with a bright future just a couple decades ago experienced a truly remarkable decline after a socialist was elected. I'm sure there are other factors, but surely this is going to be seen as yet another failure of socialism.

Whether this is because the socialism was not "implemented correctly" or not, clearly the socialist label has been used by a number of very bad people as a way to accumulate more power.

<comment><USER19> I think you pushed enough buttons and simplified the issues enough that people who disagreed with you downvoted you. No big deal...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> venezuela is under economic attack, see [http://www.socialistviewpoint.org/marapr_19/marapr_19_05.htm...](http://www.socialistviewpoint.org/marapr_19/marapr_19_05.html)

that centralized planning doesnt work is just wrong :) look to walmart and amazon as examples of efficient central planning. [https://www.versobooks.com/books/2822-the-people-s- republic-...](https://www.versobooks.com/books/2822-the-people-s-republic-of- walmart)

<comment><USER2> > that centralized planning doesnt work is just wrong :) look to walmart and > amazon as examples of efficient central planning.

Walmart is one of many players in the economy and it reacts to consumer demand when it decides what to produce and sell. That is not a form of central planning.

An example of central planning would be the government ordering Walmart to produce ten million bicycles per year and to sell them for $80 each -- regardless of how many people actually want to buy bicycles and how much they are willing to pay.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> When they have power, Bitcoin has been a solution for wealth preservation and capital movement given their pariah status with western banks and the never ending destruction of their currency. When the dust clears and capitalism is restored, there will be a fascinating case study on this development.

<comment><USER21> Hopefully when Bitcoin-Core transaction fees reach $30 again like they did in December 2017, the common Venezuelan people will be able to afford the $60 overhead ($30 opening fee and $30 reserve needed to close the channel in case of counterparty fraud) to open a Lightning Network channel, or simply switch to a more scalable cryptocurrency.

<comment><USER22> i've read accounts that say litecoin is nearly as popular as btc there

<comment><USER21> I'm not surprised. I'm betting on Bitcoin Cash, which has recently overtaken Litecoin in tx volume, and has most of the big early adopters in the Bitcoin space (e.g. Bitpay, Coinbase) backing it, and of course, Ethereum. It doesn't really matter what it is, as long as it can gain a sufficient amount of liquidity and number of users.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> The world could always halt sanctions: the source of the problems.

<comment><USER2> The Venezuelan government destroyed the economy. On top of that, the government is using military force to prevent foreign aid from entering the country.

Sanctions make things a little bit worse, and they make Maduro's claims that outside forces are to blame for Venezuela's problems seem more convincing. (Sanctions have the same propaganda effect in North Korea).

But in any case, it is pretty clear that the Venezuelan government's mismanagement of the economy has been the primary factor for almost 20 years: Chavez was first elected in 1999 and the problems began under his leadership.

<comment><USER23> The economy is predominantly private: it is the sanctions hurting the economy. I refuse to defend Maduro, but he is the peoples' choice. Yes there are anti- Maduro rallies, but there are also pro-Maduro rallies the media conveniently ignores.

Meanwhile, the idea that the US could help without putting someone right wing in place that happens to benefit the supply of fuel against the interests of the people of Venezuela like Guaidó is absurd.

If you want to help the people of Venezuela, end sanctions. This is an economic siege and we are seeing the consequences.

<comment><USER24> Here's a different view: [https://economics21.org/how-socialism-destroyed- venezuela](https://economics21.org/how-socialism-destroyed-venezuela)

<comment><USER23> That is blatantly from a capitalist think tank.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> 1\. What does this have to do with Hacker News

2\. Everything but the US point of view seems to have been flagged here. What is the goal of having comments if there is no discussion.</comment>


Advocacy groups are pushing the FTC to break up Facebook - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2019/1/24/18195959/facebook-advocacy-groups-ftc-break-up-cambridge-analytica-scandal-data-breach <comment><USER2> "Advocacy groups" hired and funded by whom? There are lots of "advocacy groups" demanding a lot of things. It would be interesting to find out why theverge and other news companies selectively choose which "advocacy groups" to promote.

Also, what about microsoft, netflix, amazon, twitter and most importantly google? Also, what about humongous international banks? Or the chemicals/agribusiness where 2 or 3 companies dominate the world's market. What about the media? Where a handle of megacorporations own so much of the market?

<comment><USER3> _Also, what about microsoft, netflix, amazon, twitter and most importantly google_

Only have to break up one and the rest will fall into line.

 _what about_ ism

<comment><USER4> Fall in line how?

Other than Google, which clearly abuses (at times) their market power from the dominance of Google Ads, Android, and Chrome, I have no idea what draws the ire of all those other companies; not individually and certainly not as a group.

I guess it's supposed to be something... something... social media... something... privacy... something. But I strongly suspect it's just vague anti-corporate sentiment, anxiety around our bitter political divisiveness, and resentment over the excesses in the technology sector (e.g. brogrammers).

I'm no anti-trust scholar but I don't think the purpose and design of anti- trust law is to resolve national cultural crises.

<comment><USER5> Microsoft is the poster-child of abusing market power, and Amazon isn't exactly innocent on that front, either.

<comment><USER4> I do think Amazon is the new Microsoft. With AWS, Amazon figured out how to embrace, extend, and extinguish the entire open source ecosystem. But AFAIK AWS isn't yet acting anti-competitively. (And neither is Microsoft any longer, for that matter.) I suppose maybe in the book publishing industry there are strong anti-trust concerns.

But I don't think this is what people have on their minds. Few in the industry question the consequences of moving to AWS. And most people--techies and non- techies--use and enjoy Google Search, Chrome, and Android without qualms. Nobody is shedding a tear for Bing, Firefox, or Yahoo, and in any event nobody is arguing that Google unfairly muscled them out.

It's only when a service or technology implicates social media do people really get fired up, and to a lesser degree the selling of mined personal data. But the fact that people think of Facebook, Google, _and_ Twitter, plus a litany of other tech companies with household recognition, should all be punished betrays their logic. None of this behavior is anti-competitive; it's not destroying markets; it's not transferring wealth. It's one thing to argue personal data aggregation, mining, and selling should be more heavily regulated (a la GDPR). But anti-trust has nothing to do with it, and I don't see how splitting any of these companies up would substantially change anything, let alone result in a net benefit. At least not under the pretense of "fixing" social media, privacy, or fake news.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Break it up into what? All the problems of Facebook are inherent to Facebook as a product, "breaking up" Facebook doesn't really fix anything.

<comment><USER7> Two facebooks that need to talk with each other (and new implementations) via open and documented protocol.

<comment><USER8> This is the worst case scenario for consumers.

An "open and documented protocol" is what led to the Cambridge Analytica scandal; most people are not informed enough to properly manage permissions and even if they were, the personal data of friends would necessarily be available via this protocol. Posting something on this new platform-ized Facebook would be akin to sharing with every app each of your friends has authorized.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Are there any historical examples of this where the company in question was not in charge or national resources or infrastructure that was paid by a government?. All the bell, oil, railroad examples have this in common.

Short of the government making these companies the only government approved ones in their respective fields I do not see how breaking them up would be something that can be done. Even then the monopoly would only exist because yet again the government created it.

<comment><USER3> _Are there any historical examples of this where the company in question was not in charge or [sic] national resources or infrastructure that was paid by a government?._

American Tobacco Company, for one. There are a number of others.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._American_Toba...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._American_Tobacco_Co).

<comment><USER4> American Tobacco was aggressively and successfully _conspiring_ with other companies to maintain high prices. It's precisely such conspiracies to restrain trade that are _specifically_ prohibited by the Sherman Act.

How is Facebook conspiring to restrain trade? With whom? Would breaking Facebook up result in lower prices for using social media services? The services are already free. Should people expect to get paid for posting selfies?

Breaking up Facebook for its behavior would be like breaking up IBM for age discrimination. It doesn't matter whether it's wrong nor even whether it's illegal. It's neither the function nor intent of anti-trust law to break up companies under such pretenses.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Are there any analogous corporate breakups in history? Any tech companies that have been broken up as these people are suggesting?

<comment><USER11> AT&T and Bell were broken up, but that was because it was a monopoly.[1] I don't think Facebook is a monopoly though.

[1][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakup_of_the_Bell_System](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakup_of_the_Bell_System)

<comment><USER12> It does effectively have a monopoly on online identity. Organizations like Uber and Airbnb depend on FB accounts for trust.

But I think the most effective way to take down the monopoly isn't by regulating, because it may hurt consumers. Instead the government could help make FB obsolete.

If people could "login with us.gov" instead of "login with Facebook", I think most people would.

<comment><USER13> If there's any dependency it's a soft dependency. I don't have FB and I use uber and airbnb.

<comment><USER12> It may be harder as a host/driver, but you're right that they may have fixed that dependency. Back in 2008, it was one of the main ways you could trust the car or house that you're about to step into.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> It seems to me that US trust busting in the past was:

1\. Seen as radical at the time, and odious to all private industry. 2\. Able to leave shareholder value somewhat intact because they were simply splitting physical assets.

While I think 2 might be addressed by eg forcing Instagram/YouTube/etc to spin off, 1 would require the election of radicals to high office. Our political system has built in so many safeguards over the years to keep true radicals out of office that I just can't see it happening. Trump promised many things, but disruption of business was not one of them.

edit: What I see as more likely is regulations that preserve shareholder value and enshrine these companies as utilities, erecting barriers to entry so high that they become permanent monopolies, while (hopefully) slowly reigning in the wild profits.

edit 2: Facebook's current share price basically values it as a utility already, and given their slowing growth they might even lobby for such regulation themselves to staunch the bleeding.

<comment><USER15> _1 would require the election of radicals to high office_

How does Theodore Roosevelt fit into this model? How does JFK/Johnson fit into this model?

 _edit: What I see as more likely is regulations that preserve shareholder value and enshrine these companies as utilities, erecting barriers to entry so high that they become permanent monopolies, while (hopefully) slowly reigning in the wild profits._

That's 180 degrees away from where I'd go. Change regulations to favor new competitors arising. Right now, big tech companies seem to comprise a faction which sometimes colludes to crush potential competitors.

<comment><USER14> TR was punted to the vice presidency to get him out of New York because he was too radical. Johnson and JFK pushed through some of the most progressive civil rights and anti poverty measures this country has ever seen. By today's standards all three would 100% be considered radicals, and were considered so by their contemporaries.

Edit: I didn't say what I want to happen, just what I thought was most likely. Strange reason to downvote

Edit 2: I think Vietnam weighs heavily on LBJ and JFK. I personally lay that on the feet of the military industrial complex coopting an inexperienced JFK, and LBJ doing everything he could to see through his predecessors policies.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> What's the best one for a New Yorker to get involved with?

</comment><comment><USER17> Break up Google while you're at it.

<comment><USER18> More like Amazon

<comment><USER19> How about all three? Instead of everyone just picking their favorite platform for dubious reasons and blindly adhering to that corp maybe we should just bust them all up at once in one swoop, whether they are on your "team" or not.

Google is probably the most dangerous and abusive of the three today, but I think Amazon is trying to steal that throne and will probably be much scarier in a few years.</comment></comment></comment>


Chinese scientists have reported editing the genomes of human embryos - <AUTHOR> http://www.nature.com/news/chinese-scientists-genetically-modify-human-embryos-1.17378?

<comment><USER2> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9423401](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9423401)

Posted 30 minutes ago.</comment>


Facebook jumps into the short URL space with fb.me - <AUTHOR> http://www.insidefacebook.com/2009/12/14/facebook-testing-new-url-shortener-fb-me/

<comment><USER2> "short URL space"? There's a 'space' for these now? Next it'll be called a business sector or something.

<comment><AUTHOR> There a good dozen or so companies all doing the same thing; how many more do you need before you call it a "space"?

<comment><USER2> There's a good number of beginner programmers that write HelloWorld applications. But it doesn't really make it a 'space'.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I would use a URL shortener that included _some_ description of the destination site. Perhaps just the domain name minus the top level. So something like:

xx.yy/nytimes- _unique identifier_

The shortness of the URL doesn't really matter all that much does it? From what I can tell they are used mostly for stat tracking. People are still mostly clicking or copy/pasting them. 5-8 more characters isn't going to hurt.

</comment><comment><USER4> Yet another one? Quoting mcav "Just when I thought the URL shortener fad was on the way out..." <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=995050>

<comment><USER5> Augh. Yet another! When will the madness end?

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Does anyone understand why?

<comment><USER7> Today's URL shorteners are yesterday's redirect links. Used to be that we hated redirects and avoided them if we could; now Twitter has suddenly made them cool. If you get people to use your redirects/shortener you gain access to all those delicious traffic analytics on where the eyeballs are going today. Hence the land grab by google and fb in what used to be bitly's private domain.

<comment><USER8> > land grab by google

If anyone else was confused by this, I believe it is in reference to <http://goo.gl>

I had not heard of that project until just now. It's nice to see they're giving it some thought rather than just slapping something together, but I'd love to see "longevity" added to the project goals.

<comment><AUTHOR> They might join something like <http://301works.org>, which aims to archive short URLs even after the company goes away.

Although I'm not sure why people are so terrified of short links breaking; _long_ URLs are constantly disappearing.

<comment><USER9> Long URLs constantly disappear, but only one root at a time. If Wikipedia disappeared tomorrow, all the Wikipedia links would break, but URL shorteners consolidate roots. If bit.ly disappeared tomorrow, it's not just one site that is affected. Furthermore, the use of a redirect breaks traditional mirroring systems. You can't just prepend somemirror.com to the path and expect it to work.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Faking it: seven-segment displays - <AUTHOR> http://www.evilmadscientist.com/article.php/fakeseven <comment><USER2> OK, but now I want a real 7-segment display with RGB LEDs driving it. Google seems to suggest that this does not exist :(

<comment><USER3> Then you need to build your own: <http://www.jave.de/blog2/?p=7>. :)

<comment><USER2> Tempting. It would certainly make for a beautiful (and unique) desk clock.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> L?

<comment><USER5> L for low, H for high.</comment></comment>


Google Search Appliance: Free Download - <AUTHOR> http://code.google.com/enterprise/gsave/download_main.html

<comment><USER2> "Google Search Appliance virtual edition is a developer platform designed for the enterprise development community to build and test applications that use the Google Search Appliance."

This is just a free download for developers who want to write applications for the Search Appliance. It's one-step up from a free SDK.

</comment><comment><USER3> There's also some good info on what you can do with it at [http://google-code- updates.blogspot.com/2008/11/announcing-g...](http://google-code- updates.blogspot.com/2008/11/announcing-google-search-appliance.html)</comment>


Teach Everything You Know with Nathan Barry – Chasing Product - <AUTHOR> http://www.chasingproduct.com/episodes/episode-28-teach-everything-you-know-wnathan-barry <comment><USER2> Hey! That's my podcast! Thanks for the link. :)

Nathan is a smart dude, I really enjoyed interviewing him.

If anyone has any questions about this episode, or about what Nathan & I talked about, post 'em up! I'll answer pretty much anything...

<comment><USER3> How did you approach Nathan Barry to ask him to be on your show?

<comment><USER2> I cold-emailed him and just asked, and he said yes. Turns out he had already heard good things about the show, so he was inclined to accept my invitation.

Get ready to hate me - getting guests for my show has been pretty easy, in general. Nobody has ever refused to be on the show, although a number of people have had problematic schedules.

Actually, wait - one person declined my invitation, but that was due to being uncomfortable doing an interview in English (it was their second language).

I hear some podcast hosts express difficulty in getting guests, but I'm going to keep riding the "just e-mail and ask" bus until the wheels fall off! Nathan was a great get and a cool guy and I'm really glad I was able to share his story with my listeners. :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I really liked what he said about the venn diagram of your products. You have to make sure they're all related in some way, driving your customers toward the next. This is a good lesson for a product creator at any stage.

<comment><USER2> Yeah, that was interesting. I'm a sucker for anything that can be explained via Venn diagram, but I immediately understood what he was getting at.

I have a similar problem (admittedly on a much smaller scale), having content in the wild that appeals to a podcasting audience on one hand, and a freelancing audience on the other.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I love the Chasing Product podcast. Great interviews from the dev/freelancer perspective for anyone looking to branch out into making their own thing.

<comment><USER2> Nice of you to say. Thanks!</comment></comment>


MS SQL Server Resolution Service enables reflected DDoS with 440x amplification - <AUTHOR> http://kurtaubuchon.blogspot.com/2015/01/mc-sqlr-amplification-ms-sql-server.html

<comment><USER2> I'm genuinely curious -

What are the reasons for exposing an SQL server directly to the internet? Obviously there's a bunch of people who have mis-configured and have accidently exposed their systems, but are there real-world reasons to expose a SQL server directly to the net?

I would think most people who are sharing datasets would do so with some sort of API - and there'd need to be room for rate limiting / blacklisting IPs and so on. I would never expose a SQL server directly to the net, and I'm really curious if there are reasons to do so?

<comment><USER3> In a word "laziness."

It is just easier to log in and manage an SQL server if it is available on the internet. I know I'm certainly guilty of doing so for short periods when I'm off-site with no VPN and need to manage a server.

Some sysadmins just get lazy and leave it available on the internet with strong passwords 24/7, just so once in a blue moon they can log in and manage it. Or are doing some kind of site to site data migration and are tired of the VPN connection dropping.

I've done a site to site SQL migration across two Azure zones because doing it the "right" way was too complicated/time consuming/expensive. However once the data was copied across I changed the End Point config to protect the SQL server again.

I won't make excuses, it is just laziness/expedient. But that is human nature for you...

<comment><USER4> It really is simple to use ssh to tunnel a port; that is always how I access SQL Server remotely. Laziness indeed.

<comment><USER3> You use SSH port tunnelling on a Windows Server to access MS SQL? I'd be surprised if that was "simple." But go ahead and explain it.

<comment><USER5> We do here where I work. We're running Bitvise SSH server on Server R2/2012 and you can use bitvise tunnelier or putty as the client(maybe others, just have used those two myself) and then connect via management studio once the SSH tunnel is connected. We also require both key and password auth. We also do RDP over the SSH connection as you can't remote to those machines directly.

<comment><USER3> I'm not sure if $200 in third party software counts as easy. In particular when you could be using RRAS instead, which is built in.

<comment><USER5> Bitvise server is $100, but now you want both simple and free? It's well worth the $100 IMO as it's pretty easy to setup and manage accounts and keys. You only said "simple" before, and I consider it pretty simple to get up and running. I didn't pay for it, but $100 one time is pretty negligible for what we use it for.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Isn't the 440 figure disingenuous? Surely you must count UDP/TCP header size, which would bring the value closer to 21/461 ~= 22.

Still an interesting discovery. DDoS amplification is a security risk few people consider when developing applications.

<comment><USER7> Agreed. As I see it there are two main design methods for overcoming this issue.

The first is better for 'anonymous' services; require the client to send a packet of the same size as the buffer they want to receive. It's network in- efficient but for small requests better than the delay in setting up an actual session. It eliminates the chance of amplification attacks.

The second is to establish /some/ kind of session. This might be as 'simple' as logging in, or it could just involve a few round trip communications that indicate the client /is/ listening to server replies. That eliminates every DDoS style except for a man in the middle capable amplification vectors; yet if MitM is possible then why bother with DDoS.

<comment><USER8> I guess we are throwing UDP out the windows all together now? ;)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Isn't this service disabled by default? I've never needed to enable it and I install new SQL Server instances just about every week. It's my understanding that nobody really _needs_ a live list of all SQL Server instances on a server to be made available on the network, nevermind the Internet at large.

This is one of those legacy services that Microsoft keeps around just in case somebody wants it but it's been a long time since it had any changes or updates. What they really need to do is have it not even included with the product. It should be a download-only utility, for those that really, really want this on their systems.</comment>