NBA Highlights – Search for video of NBA plays - <AUTHOR> https://3ball.io <comment><USER2> I like the idea, but I'm having some trouble with it. Search results are only from this season, right? A search for Steve Nash showed a Steph Currey highlight as result one for me. More slang oriented searches like "dunked on" or "dunks on" don't really work either. Dunk/Dunks shows up in results, but nothing beyond that. Was looking for one of my all time favorite highlights, Baron Davis dunking on Kirilenko [1]. For me this type of thing would be pretty awesome with some sort of stats element. A 'visual box score' vs. 'highlights search engine.' ie show the box score for a game, and clicking in any particular field shows video of the plays that produced those stats.

1\. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tYpwjB0IzoU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tYpwjB0IzoU)

<comment><USER3> > A search for Steve Nash showed a Steph Currey highlight as result one for me

Presumably because Nash is on the warriors coaching staff.

<comment><USER2> I can't find any retired players, maybe you can. Larry Bird, Magic Johnson, etc. Pretty sure it's just this year for results.

<comment><USER3> I'm sure you're right, just meant to explain the connection between Nash & Curry.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Where is all the footage from? Is this allowed by the NBA? The quality of the footage is quite good.

This seems to be just searching the clip title. For example, if you search 'curry 3' ('curry three' returns nothing), it'll return things like "Curry 2' Finger Roll Layup (6 PTS) (Iguodala 3 AST)" or "Curry REBOUND (Off:0 Def:3)". If it could match the search query with play-by-play data, now THAT'd be cool.

<comment><USER5> My site ([http://eaganr.com/nba/](http://eaganr.com/nba/)) used to do this. But they changed up their video URLs, wondering how Matetricks gets the new URLs.

<comment><AUTHOR> I didn't build this, it's a site that's been trending on my news feed. Two people in my network built it over a weekend.

<comment><USER6> I would tell those 2 guys to build this out including parts that should be there but they need the data, etc, targeting it as a value-add service that Disney can sell to ESPN subscribers. Done properly with multiple sports over multiple years and consistent annotations, I would think sports fans would go nuts over this, wouldn't they? (Any sports fans here?) Like, think of the ability to jump immediately to the video of most any noteworthy event in a sports event in recent history - "hey, remember that time PlayerX did that funny fake tag out to PlayerY? Hey let's pull that up and watch it, grab this slider you can move it back and forth to see exactly how he pulled off that trick, hahaha awesome".

I think Disney has plenty enough in-house talent and they're usually pretty forward thinking, it's surprising they haven't done something along these lines.

<comment><USER7> I used to work at ESPN.com. My job application was a proof of concept of a similar idea, but because it was 2002 and wasn't possible to build technically it was designed to show that I could code and think creatively about consuming sports online.

When I took the job, the realities of licensing footage hot hard: the leagues were not keen on letting a third party like ESPN have historical, searchable footage like this available on demand. The leagues were still figuring not how to make money from digital and rights to their games are the biggest asset they have.

Things have changed since then but the tl; dr is that from 2002-2005 the reason this wasn't built by ESPN was not technical or due to a lack of imagination, but a business reason - it was prohibitively expensive / impossible to get licensing rights from the leagues.

<comment><USER8> I can see it working. Especially if it's community driven. Like use AI/machine learning to create the foundation for recognizing what event corresponds to which scene, and then have viewers be tagging or writing comments while the video is rolling

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> "All NBA Plays"?

For example, this well circulated failed dunk attempt by Curry from earlier this season is not there: [https://streamable.com/mntc](https://streamable.com/mntc)

<comment><USER10> Found it. The queries have to match the naming of the video so I searched "Miss Curry Lakers": [https://3ball.io/miss-curry- lakers/0021600238_233](https://3ball.io/miss-curry-lakers/0021600238_233)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'm a big basketball fan (mostly college). Where are you sourcing the videos? Also, are you manually tagging each video with player names, teams, and keywords or is there some magic happening on the backend?

<comment><USER12> Just from a cursory glance at the results, it seems like they're simply providing a naive search on the play-by-play descriptions that the NBA provides (e.g. [http://data.nba.net/data/10s/prod/v1/20161212/0021600366_pbp...](http://data.nba.net/data/10s/prod/v1/20161212/0021600366_pbp_1.json)). No computer vision behind-the-scenes magic, unfortunately.

<comment><USER6> > No computer vision behind-the-scenes magic, unfortunately.

Theoretically, it shouldn't be terribly technically difficult to attach a few sensors to each player to get a relatively hi-res 3D representation of each player's position throughout the game, should it?

Annotating the action accurately, not so easy, or might there be some trick?

<comment><USER13> This sort of happens already in NBA games. There's a system called SportVU that tracks XY positioning of players and XYZ positioning of the ball in real- time. Here's a decent article that describes it in more detail: [http://www.fastcodesign.com/1670059/moneyball-20-how- missile...](http://www.fastcodesign.com/1670059/moneyball-20-how-missile- tracking-cameras-are-remaking-the-nba) . Unfortunately, the data is proprietary.

<comment><USER14> my impression, from having talked with people who analyze the data from sportVU, is that the raw data is fairly useless and most of the useful data crunching happens overnight after each game.

with that said, bluetooth beacons, along with 3 bluetooth receivers for triangulation, could be used for inexpensive player tracking, but the data would be noisy and not as accurate (probably ~1 ft resolution or so). i've actually been wanting to put such a system together to determine how good it might be.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Would be great if it could learn which were most likely to be highlight plays based on the number of times they were clicked. And then give those priority in the results list. Also, maybe prioritise a player's involvement in the play.

e.g., if I search "westbrook dunk", I probably don't want the normal dunks first, or the time he passed to someone else who then had the dunk. Show me the great Westbrook dunks first, then the normal ones, then the assists to other dunkers.

</comment><comment><USER16> If you search for a player's name and the word pass you get all the videos with that player and that word in the title. That includes the ones where the pass was made by somebody else and the ones marked as bad pass, which are probably not what I'm interested in.

A suggestion: limit the search to the substring of the title between commas. It seems to always match a player with his play.

</comment><comment><USER11> I can't say for sure this is what 3ball is using, but here is an XML file from NBA.com listing videos with associated titles, descriptions, thmbnails, and video urls.

[http://www.nba.com/sitemap_videos_0001.xml](http://www.nba.com/sitemap_videos_0001.xml)

However it appears outdated since the dates only go up to 8/4/2016.

</comment><comment><USER17> For all the people asking where it's from, quick google brought up [http://www.nba.com/sitemap_videos_0001.xml](http://www.nba.com/sitemap_videos_0001.xml) and changing it to 0002 seemed to work. It's just an index of something from nba.com and nothing is hosted on the site.

<comment><USER18> You can get all the sitemaps here; [http://www.nba.com/video_sitemap_index.xml](http://www.nba.com/video_sitemap_index.xml)

<comment><USER19> How were you able to find that sitemap? Is there one for stats.nba.com?

<comment><USER18> Not sure mate, but you can find a bunch through G; [https://www.google.com.au/search?q=inurl%3Axml+site%3Anba.co...](https://www.google.com.au/search?q=inurl%3Axml+site%3Anba.com)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I tried like 8 queries and none of them yielded a single relevant result. Most of them didn't yield a video at all. Granted, they were difficult/obscure, but didn't make a great impression.

If this needs some special syntax or keywords, you should let the user know.

</comment><comment><USER21> Searched for "Kobe pass"

0 results lol

<comment><USER2> Would be pretty hilarious if the only result was the 81 point game.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Typed in "5x5", found nothing. However rare of a performance, Draymond pulled it off last season so it should be relatively recent.

<comment><USER23> This site appears to only have clips of individual plays, so neither a 5x5 nor a triple double would appear except as a long set of highlights. And not every play is a highlight; I checked a recent Russell Westbrook game and it had every assist but only about half of his scoring plays.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> This is a fascinating tool but I can't imagine this will exist much longer after the NBA's lawyers find it.

<comment><USER25> The NBA is usually pretty good about letting fan videos of their content exist.. compared to the NFL at least.

Also videos of every play are available as clips on the NBA site, this just seems like a more searchable version.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> How I can find who made this? Would love to work w/ him/her on a project.

<comment><USER27> [http://twitter.com/canzhiye](http://twitter.com/canzhiye)

<comment><USER28> And by Zhi P

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> cool stuff...

every letter search becomes a new route.. yikes that is awful for going back

also, I searched for ginobili assist but it found all plays with ginobili and any assist.

good start and the video quality is pretty strong on mobile</comment>


Ask HN: I'm a Theranos employee, am I screwed finding a new job now? - <AUTHOR> As most of you are aware the company is going through some serious problems with legal suites. The writing is on the wall and it's clear. I need to find a new job.
I'm a software dev for about 2 years since I graduated university (this is my only job besides internships) and since we're so popular in the news most people only have a negative connotation about us so I'm worried it's going to be hard to find something new. I feel like people are going to see the company name and associate me with being a liar or a fraud even though I had no knowledge of the problems the company is facing.
I'd like to get some honest opinions/ feedback on here from people about what they would do or think if they saw my resume. <comment><USER2> You'll be totally fine. Long term it will have zero negative impact on your career.

Short term: my advice is to be _very_ aggressive with your career management.

For better or worse, your career history is judge on how successful the companies you worked for.

Ask yourself, knowing nothing, which engineer would you hire:

Engineer 1-- did engineering on the Uber app

or

Engineer 2-- did engineering on Yadzoks, the leading shovel sharing app (shut down after 13 months, being unable to raise series A)

Could be that Engineer 1 was a bump on a log, and Engineer 2 was a total champion. But truth is Engineer 1 gets more love, probably out people's suppressed fear of the randomness of software market success and the irrational belief that maybe Engineer 1 "knows the answer" on how to be successful.

So you have the equivalent of a "dud" on your cv. Probably no worse then a random VC backed software flame out, maybe you'll get a few "har hars" at the beginning of the interviews, but most hiring managers will think they have you at an advantage-- was this guy just coding an internal wardrobe app for Elizabeth Holms? and not working on cutting edge, successful products?

1) Your best bet is to go quickly... you'd rather be the 1st engineer out, rather than the 500th.

2) Because hiring managers think they have you at an advantage, be humble, give them 1 (and only 1!!) piece of dirt where it seemed like something was amiss to acknowledge that you worked at a dud.

3) Don't "hold out" for the right position. If you get the dream job take it, but even if you don't if you think its a decent role and something you can build on it, take it. You're best to view this as a 2 year step back: take something more junior, with lower comp, then kick ass, prove yourself, get the step up in 1 year, and if they don't then look again for your ideal position. You'll gone a long way to "laundering your experience"

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the kind words. I'll try to apply this to my job hunt.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Focus on your technical skills and how they were applied. If anything is said about Theranos problems. Briefly clarify that you were unaware of what the management was up to. You were doing the technical work as directed. As far as you know, none of your work was part of the disputed technologies.

As a general rule, it is best to be brief and factual about any negative issues and move on. Avoiding them makes people suspicious. Staying on topic suggests that you are nervous and might have something to cover up. So be to the point and move on.

Good luck with your job hunt.

</comment><comment><USER4> > I'm a software dev for about 2 years since I graduated university...

Theranos problems rest solely on the shoulders of its leadership. Any reasonable hiring manager will understand that there will be some exceptional rank & file staff coming out of there. (Ex: Arthur Andersen/Enron) Your role was far too junior to be caught up in the shenanigans.

Incidentally, be sure to quietly line up individual supervisors and colleagues who can serve as professional references.

</comment><comment><USER5> _> people are going to [...] associate me with being a liar or a fraud even though I had no knowledge of the problems the company is facing._

So, be prepared to field questions like "Did you know about the unethical $STUFF going on?" and "How could you not have known about $STUFF?" etc. You might even get interviews that you otherwise wouldn't _just_ so they can satisfy their curiosity and ask you that sort of question. Milk it where possible.

Anyway, unless you were upper management, none of the stink should stick and create a problem for you (unlike other spectacular flameouts where the ethical problems were widespread throughout the organization).

</comment><comment><USER6> I think you'll experience the opposite. Most employers will realise you're in a real shitty situation and will be more than happy to help. Moreover, they will probably quite keen to interview you, if for nothing else than to get more information - use that opportunity to your advantage.

The morality and ethics of Theranos are in question, not the quality of their software, most organisations would be more than happy to have a former Theranos engineer in their ranks.

No one thinks the engineers are the liars or frauds, it would be really hard for a company to corrupt all the engineers on that scale without the whistle being blown much sooner that it was - employers will know that.

Stop worrying and go find a great place to work (preferably somewhere a little less controversial.... Uber perhaps!).

</comment><comment><USER7> I doubt it will make much of a difference as Theranos does not have a reputation for bad engineering. Perhaps the best thing you can take from this is that you will not have to explain to potential employers why you are leaving/have recently left your current position. I'm a bit curious though -- when and how did you come to the conclusion that the writing is on the wall? Why now and not months before?

<comment><AUTHOR> I'd say it's been there for a while but it's taken a long time to just accept this. Its kind of like a schrodinger's cat thing and hoping it got better. It's weird and difficult to accept that your company that you pour everything into is built on fraud.

<comment><USER7> Well, don't think about it like that -- not every part of it was a fraud. There were a lot of good people working there, including yourself, with the best of intentions. I even think the people at the top had good intentions until they were led astray by greed or fear or whatever it is that make good people do bad things. Anyway, you're gonna come out of this a little bit wisher and better able to avoid these sorts of situations like this in the future. Also, you've got a good to years of experience -- that's going to look great no matter what.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I have a feeling you'd be fine. I'm working on a biotech startup, and I'd be willing to hire a _biotech_ person out of Theranos. As a software dev, you can't have been expected to know what was going on.

</comment><comment><USER9> I doubt it. I spent over 10 years in the medical devices field and the only reaction we had to candidates coming from companies we knew were in trouble was "hey, this guy's from xxx corp. Must be one of the layoffs we heard about."

I have a hard time seeing it making any difference either way.

</comment><comment><USER10> For the more self-righteous startups (the kind that will grill you on engineering ethics when the job is to make a plugin to add a squiggly line filter to instagram), you are probably screwed as they will basically invoke Godwin's Law instantly. Similarly, for the companies that have to deal with real ethical concerns(government/charity work, etc) you are also probably screwed just because you are a liability (nobody wants to be the one who hired a Theranos employee if poop hits the fan).

But for the majority of firms, it is just a job. Just be very clear on what your job responsibilities were and that you did them.

But one thing to be very wary of that others haven't addressed (and have basically given horrible advice on): Be careful. What you say can be viewed in a very negative light if poop continues to hit the fan. Do not "dish" or air any dirty laundry. Depending upon how your branch is handled, consider actually talking with your manager/HR on the proper way to respond to any questions. Yes, it can screw you there. But they will know you are leaving the moment a reference is checked so it might be worthwhile to cover your butt.

I am not a lawyer and this may actually be a case where consulting one is not a bad idea, but my personal suggestion from similar (but not as high profile) situations is:

"I am not at liberty to discuss any ongoing investigations or court cases. And besides, even if I was, I wouldn't know anything anyway. I was just responsible for coding widgets 4-30 and improving our infrastructure for STUFF."

Covers your butt as you aren't disclosing anything and reasserts that you were a code monkey.

</comment><comment><USER11> I wonder if this is a problem at all. Most "normal" people that are not really into business or following the news all the time probably won't even know what's going on.

Don't get nervous at a problem that doesn't even exist yet.

</comment><comment><USER12> That's funny. I just applied to their new grad position? Is it really that bad?

<comment><USER13> Yes.Lawsuits from investors, customers, business partners due to lying about product: [http://www.businessinsider.com/theranos-faces-new- investor-l...](http://www.businessinsider.com/theranos-faces-new-investor- lawsuit-seeking-class-action-2016-11)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> In addition to all the other stuff, I'll add that one thing employers like to see, in fact, it's one of the Official and simple metrics about whether a man will be successful in life, is that you got this one job straight out of school and stuck to it for two years. That shows some very good character traits, and as long as you didn't personally know of the companies ... issues, they won't count against your character, as long as you do, of course, get out ASAP.</comment>


Bored YouTube viewers bail at 52 seconds - <AUTHOR> http://inyourface-atlantic.blogspot.com/2008/12/truth-tube.html

<comment><USER2> "Basically make sure that something 'good' happens in your video at 52 seconds and at 2 minutes 38 seconds."

What??

Either this post was written satirically, or the author lacks even a rudimentary understanding of the concepts of average and causality.

</comment><comment><USER3> It was very satirical, but written with the world weary experience of someone working professionally in the mind-numbingly 'head up your own ass' world of music promo production. The point he's making is that so many promos being produced are such rubbish, that you might as well just put the interesting bit in at 52 seconds in, the rest of the clip is pretty meaningless.

If you read his other posts, he makes some really interesting points about how the same old ideas are re-hashed, over and over and over. The director's treatment post is funny and very true. Here's an example of a verbal treatment we got once - "Err.. yeah, we're like looking for a vibe, y'know?" That was it.

Some people out there even believe the bands actually make their promos - "like wow, have you seen the new (insert band), they make such amazing videos". Go figure.</comment>


Ask HN: Co-founder set up a new company using our IP and enployees - ts-hn

A co-founder set up a new company using IP from our company and fired and rehired our employees. They've now gone through techstars and have raised several million. Unfortunately we cannot afford to go down the legal route, what are our options? Are there legal companies that will provide us with a service like no win no fee? If so which ones are recommended? Thanks! <comment><AUTHOR> I am not a lawyer, talk to one. As has been said previously, there are lawyers who will give you at least a basic consultation for almost nothing. If you have a case, there are a number of routes that take a "contingency based" payment structure. If you have no case, the lawyer won't take you.

Now with that said, some non-official legal opinion. So you had a company previous to this incident which had IP and employees? And a co-founder left, built the same exact company, with the same exact IP, and same exact employees? And then that co-founder got into techstars? And then that co- founder secured several million dollars in funding for said new company? And now you would like to sue this co-founder?

Maybe you see where I am going here. This is not exactly an open and shut case. Usually if a co-founder (or anyone else from within an organization for that matter) suddenly leaves with a substantial amount of IP and employees this raises the legal red flag right away. Yet you have come AFTER the company moved forward, received seed funding, received a series A round, and is now running at least presumably more successfully than it was before. That is not a good legal position to be in for you.

Second, although I have no idea what techstars seed round due diligence looks like, I am absolutely sure that the Series A round had a rather large legal due diligence process which included checking on the IP and making sure it was more or less clean. The start up world may be the wild west of funding but investors don't just handle over millions of dollars and hope for the best. This is not to say that a company can't lie, they can, some might, and often they do get caught during due diligence.

Sorry, the whole story sounds a bit fishy. If you are in fact in a small group of people who were "left behind" this could be entirely legal and even a viable business strategy. I have seen companies where a reverse merger acquisition has been made to move profitable employees and IP while leaving behind substantial debt and less profitable employees. I wouldn't call it ethical, but it is viable and certainly legal in some cases. Every situation is different though. Consult an attorney (or 3, because legal opinions are just that, opinion, until a ruling or a settlement is made), see what your options are, and move on.

</comment><comment><USER2> Are you also a co-founder or just an employee that didn't get taken along. Only matters in terms of standing nothing else, e.g. an employee wouldn't have standing to go after a co-founder for doing this AFAIK, but a fellow co- founder or investor could likely. If you are an employee with vested shares, then technically you might have grounds to go after him for causing a devaluation of your stock. But that only counts if it actually has/had real value at the time he left.

In the end, all this depends, and IANAL but if the IP was developed before the company was legally formed and never properly assigned to the company then it might be a little tougher to go after him if he originally created it. At the same time, if the company paid to develop features etc and was formed legally, then there could be a claim, again it is likely messy.

You can absolutely find some good attorneys to at least sit with you in consultation and figure out where you stand. Honestly, even if it costs you 2-4 hours of their time that would be worth it.

</comment><comment><USER3> Even if the co-founder did not sign a non-compete you should still be protected by the trade secret act. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniform_Trade_Secrets_Act](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniform_Trade_Secrets_Act)

<comment><USER4> It is unlikely that a noncompete would matter much in a situation like this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> You need to talk to a lawyer about this. There are plenty of good lawyers out there who will give you a short consultation without costing you much. There's unfortunately not enough detail here for good advice to come from HN and you're likely to prejudice any proceedings if you reveal too much here.

In short: get to a lawyer. Search for grellas's posts about who to talk to cheap.

</comment><comment><USER6> I apologize for being a bit confused. Please help me understand.

What is/was your role in the original company?

What was the cofounder's role in the original company?

How was IP assigned in the original company?

Why is the "legal route" not an option?

</comment><comment><USER7> You can't afford not to go the legal route.

Did this co-founder sign non-compete and confidentiality and IP assignment agreements?</comment>


Ask YC: What Are Your Biggest Marketing/PR Problems As A Startup? - <AUTHOR> I am curious: what are your biggest PR/Marketing problems as a startup? Is it getting noticed? Getting coverage? Differentiation? What problems are startups having when it comes to marketing? <comment><USER2> Good question. I sent emails on <http://uploadthingy.com> to about 20 blogs that I thought would be interested a while back - what happened? Nothing. Nada. The service is now profitable and growing every day. Going to try again this week. Not expecting too much. Adwords rules - at least for now.

<comment><USER3> I wrote a chapter in a book on blogging on how to approach this subject (getting bloggers to link to your project). Here's the short version.

* You'll have a better luck pitching things to people who you have a pre-existing relationship for. Your business has a blog. That blog's purpose in life is to generate pre-existing relationships with people similarly situated to your customers (and, relatedly, to talk about what your customers care about). Talk about what they are talking about and link to their posts. Comment on their blogs. Then, when you email them about your project, you don't get sent straight to the spam box.

* Pitch your product as something their readers will be interested in, with a specifically tuned pitch that reminds them that you are a) already trusted by them and b) know what they want. People almost always end up getting links out of me when they send me an email that demonstrates they really have been reading for as long as they say they have.

* Free licenses are the best money you've never had to spend. Give them out liberally.

* Focus on blogs one step up the social pecking order from you. TechCrunch gets probably a thousand emails a day. Bob's File Format Blog probably gets one every three weeks. Guess which one of these is absolutely dying for anyone to pay attention to them? That's right. This gets you a bit of exposure. Gradually work your way up the exposure chain -- after you get X level of renown, start mailing bloggers at X+1 rather than 10 * X. Get mentioned on the blogs that are read by the bloggers you want to influence and you might not even need to mail them at all.

<comment><USER2> hey - thanks for all the tips - although it's always easier said than done. Weird how writing code always seems to be the real work - and all this other stuff just - well... you know. Gotta turn it on its head. And: especially like #4 - never thought of that, great idea.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> At NewsCred, we got covered on ALL the big technology blogs (Techrunch etc) as well as a lot of mainstream press (NYT, Boston Globe, Reuters, BW etc). That was not the difficult part, although I still owe this community a blog post about how we did it (soon, I promise!).

The hardest part is getting your community engaged, and loving the site so much they will tell their friends. Its getting AdWords users converting into real, long-term members. It's about getting your users to love your site so much that they couldn't live without it.

My takeaway: the media coverage/PR feels great and seems important, but it has nothing to do with the long term success or sustainability of your site. Build something people want and love - that's more important. Get a small, but rabid user base. Get them to spread the love.

</comment><comment><USER5> Here's an idea: think of a related useful free product or web utility that can draw target users to your site?

</comment><comment><USER6> Getting web page visitors past the 1st page, and to return - conversions.

Until you solve this, there is little point in trying to get featured on high profile media.

The key might lie in providing social proof (that people actually use your services). If there is none, visitors following links from features won't be very useful. They might be interested enough to check out your landing page (content skimming), but getting the user to slow down and really get familiar with you requires more. It's like channel hopping with tv. You skim through a number of options and see if anything interesting comes up. But the scale of options is different. You might be able to skim through hundreds of websites in one sitting with tabbed browsing. That's not a lot of time per site.

</comment><comment><USER7> Distribution is and always will be the #1 problem for new web startups.

<comment><USER8> What exactly are you selling? Our company sells software the SaaS way and distribution has never been as easy!

<comment><USER9> Distribution in the marketing sense doesn't mean strictly physical distribution of a product. It's the place where you sell it. For most SaaS products the product can only be bought from the company website.

If you sold your SaaS as a white label product or OEM through partners or affiliates, that would be another way of distributing it.

But the traditional marketing concepts, like the four Ps (distribution being the Place), fit better with physical products IMHO.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I just wrote a blog post about attacking the chicken and egg problem: when users won't sign up because no one is there. Hopefully there will be some usable advice:

[http://marketingstartups.com/2008/12/15/10-tips-on- attacking...](http://marketingstartups.com/2008/12/15/10-tips-on-attacking- the-chicken-and-egg-problem-new-users-wont-sign-up-because-no-one-is-there/)

If you find it useful, pls let me know and I'll submit it to HN. I don't want to be the guy that submits everything he writes.

</comment><comment><USER10> time. Resources. Lack of artistic/design skill

(actually, I'm selling about as fast as I can get servers up, so marketing is not high on the priority list right now)

check out <http://prgmr.com/xen/>

Horrible, no?

I'm moving to a design based on <http://prgmr.com/~lsc/css/> \- very minimalist (when I'm done, most words on that page will be links to more information)

The idea is that I have no taste. I can come up with something that conveys the idea, but I'm pretty much operating on blind trust when choosing a designer.

I can give you a long list of links to designs that I've got from people which were either clearly bad, or that other people told me were horrible.

In my business, credibility is very important. Well, that, and price, but I'm the cheapest of my competitors by quite a lot, so it's really only credibility I need to worry about. A web presence is part of that.

I was also approached about writing a book on the subject, so I imagine that will help: <http://nostarch.com/xen.htm> though I clearly have missed the hype sweet-spot.

</comment><comment><USER8> I think that largely depends on what product is being sold and what market you're in.

Cloud9 sells software to tour operators and other travel suppliers and, unfortunately, our potential customers are not very internet savvy, making it rather difficult for us to reach potential customers.

</comment><comment><USER11> I think Squeezed Books is a cool idea. I'm less certain that it will ever be a business that generates a lot of money, but I still put some effort into it, and would like to see it grow. Getting critical mass, though, is a bitch!

</comment><comment><USER12> Figuring out a way to market an online product to a somewhat technophobic niche.

</comment><comment><USER13> The chicken and the egg is probably the biggest problem. The new users don't want to join/buy because you lack content/users/reputation etc

<comment><AUTHOR> Vaksel- Awesome point. You inspired me to write a post on exactly what you're talking about: [http://marketingstartups.com/2008/12/15/10-tips-on- attacking...](http://marketingstartups.com/2008/12/15/10-tips-on-attacking- the-chicken-and-egg-problem-new-users-wont-sign-up-because-no-one-is-there/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> With my current project I've been having trouble being noticed. I've been featured on Mashable but that's about it.

Differentiation is pretty tough too (but integration has been easy!).

<comment><USER15> _"... I've been having trouble being noticed ..."_

Is the trouble getting users or just being picked up in the press? (both non- trivial problems)</comment></comment>


Did Bitcoin just prove it can't scale? - <AUTHOR> The past few days have shown what happens when many people attempt many transactions using Bitcoin. The network slowed to a crawl. Transaction prices went through the roof. And we still are at a point where only a tiny fraction of people are using Bitcoin, and only a tiny fraction of all financial transactions are using Bitcoin.
How is this expected to work with 7 billion people using it for every tiny financial transaction? I don't think it can.
I have owned BTC for 5 years and I am enjoying the rally, but with the high transaction fees, back log, and long transaction times, I wonder how well it can really work as a replacement for banks.
Am I wrong? <comment><USER2> Others here are touching on Bitcoin being like the "1.0" of cryptocurrency, but it's actually a lot more than that. In the public eye, it's a symbol of what cryptocurrencies can be.

You're suggesting Bitcoin just proved it can't scale, but it actually just proved it did--just not with transaction volume. The network continued to process transactions averaging one block every ten minutes exactly as it was built to do, despite the heavy load.

To put it differently: A different online payment system could have stopped accepting transactions, or run out of resources, allow transactions it shouldn't have, disallow ones it should, or something else terrible. But Bitcoin didn't. If you wanted into the next block, you'd need to pay more, but that's (from a technical perspective) entirely by design.

What Bitcoin is proving is that it has clear and well-understood limits and continues to work well within them, and that's incredibly important for public perception. IMO, if Bitcoin's transaction capacity never scales, it'll still be a huge technological success. Other cryptocurrencies can try their hand at scaling, but Bitcoin needs to be rock solid to the extent possible for all cryptocurrencies' sake.

<comment><USER3> Bitcoin is a lot of things, and many of them interesting, but suggesting that ~4 t/s is impressive or "scaling" is an insult to kids in high school writing rails apps that can do 100x the volume.

We already know at least 2 obvious ways to improve the transaction flow rate of bitcoin in trustless ways, and many others are being proposed that do not also create energy arms races.

Please don't redefine success.

<comment> etr-strike If proof of stake proves itself to actually work, Bitcoin will adopt it. Migrating a 200 billion dollar network to an untested PoW proposal would be irresponsible.

Arbitrarily increasing blocksize without addressing propagation delay and centralization impacts is also irresponsible.

Bitcoin has been tirelessly working on the scaling problem in a responsible way. SegWit will allow up to 12t/s. Mimble Wimble and Schnorr Signatures will further compress transaction size and increase t/s to roughly 20t/s. All this without increasing propagation delay (increasing blocksize).

Lightning network further reduces the number of onchain transactions necessary.

Rootstock adds ethereum compatible smart contracts to bitcoin as a side chain.

All these technologies responsibly scale Bitcoin. Your comment implies Bitcoin is stagnant which to me implies you don't know what you're talking about.

<comment><USER4> The lighting network completely undermines the entire purpose of bitcoin, and blockstreams seeming desire to sabotage bitcoin for daily use coincides suspiciously with their outside "investment".

If you read the original bitcoin white paper it is clearly evident that the purpose of bitcoin was as a currency. These insane fees, wait times, and rediculous technical decisions by core have made it such that bitcoin is becoming "bank coin" aka only used for settling between large groups and useless for individuals (unless you're a speculator).

This has to change

<comment><USER5> If you believe lightning undermines the whole purpose and is the product of sabotage (or whatever core is being accused of these days), there are multiple forks to choose from that don't use it.

No need to attack Bitcoin, just go all in on Bitcoin Cash , put your money where your mouth is, and move on.

<comment><USER6> Yea! And I wish all these American liberals would stop complaining about Trump policies. Put your money where your mouth is and move to Mexico already! /s

<comment><USER7> Terrible analogy. To be more accurate, you would copy america and change the policies you want. Then the market decides on what they believe in and want.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> IMHO (because to claim to "know" anything about how this is all going to turn out is to be a fraud), Bitcoin is the proof of concept for this whole crypto thing.

It was the first. It was the genesis idea. But good lord, do we think it's the actual solution? What would be the odds?

I imagine that Bitcoin will play its part as the public face of the blockchain revolution, but something else - or many other somethings - will be the successors that we actually _use_ in the future. (Pick your own alt-coin as the successor; good luck.)

If I had a large holding in Bitcoin now I would be cashing out or I'd be nervous. I'm not saying it won't go higher, I'm saying that at some point its demise is inevitable. Might be quick, might be slow, but it'll happen because Bitcoin is not the technically best solution in this incredibly exciting field. It's not even close.

<comment><USER9> > Bitcoin is not the technically best solution in this incredibly exciting > field. It's not even close.

Just curious here: What would you say are technically better solutions than bitcoin?

<comment><USER10> that is a tough question as many other alt-coins have yet to be challenge by the huge volume that btc/eth experience. Some might say litecoin for one.

<comment><USER11> I also like litecoin for the purely selfish reasons of it still being (relatively) cheap. BTC prices are out of my ability to play, and most ICO's are derivatives of 'ScamCoin'. LiteCoin is one of the few options it feels I can still get in on the action with a purpose driven coin with a strong/transparent dev team.

<comment><USER12> You know you can buy fractions of a BTC, right?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> As engineers and technologists we must always be mindful of our impact on the planet. Bitcoin has been a disaster when it comes to environmental concerns. It is a shadow on techs efforts to lead the way toward a sustainable future.

We need to figure out a way to solve this issue, especially if cryptocurrency utilization is to increase, in particular through Bitcoin:

Bitcoin uses about 32 terawatts of energy every year, enough to power about three million U.S. households, according to the Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index published by Digiconomist, a website focused on digital currencies.

By comparison, processing the billions of Visa (V) transactions that take place each year consumes the same amount of power as just 50,000 American homes, according to Digiconomist.

<comment><USER14> You're wasting energy for posting comments too. If we think a way like this, we can't no anything.

<comment><USER3> What on earth is this logic. Bitcoin is _by design_ inefficient. Its scaling inefficiency _is the principle method by which it ensures fairness_. That's what PoW chain commits are. That's how they work.

Bitcoin was ALWAYS going to be inefficient. It was assumed that hardware would scale to keep up with demand, but that hasn't proven true in the advent of ad hoc mining pools.

<comment><USER15> > It was assumed that hardware would scale to keep up with demand,

No, it was designed to stay at "one block every ten minutes" _regardless_ of the hardware added or overall hashrate of the system. Which is why you hear a lot of people arguing over block size and block compression: you always have one block every ten minutes, how many transactions can we squeeze into that block?

The only thing that adding more hashrate does is waste more power, since the network will adjust.

<comment><USER3> The power consumption is what I was alluding to. I guess I was too vague.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> You are both right and wrong.

There have been multiple attempts at scaling Bitcoin on-chain by raising the blocksize. They have all been unsuccessful because they have been blocked by the Core developers and their supporters using censorship, troll campaigns, ddos and abuse. It's not due to technical reasons but because they want to redirect scaling off-chain, using technology they coveniently develop. The very same developers actually supported bigger blocks a couple of years ago but changed their tone to support the scaling approach their company favors. After the last attempt (Segwit2x) it's clear Bitcoin won't scale on-chain.

However the technical limits of the technology ha never been reached, tested or even been fully researched. Bitcoin Cash is for example a fork which aims to scale on-chain by increasing the block size. If all transactions from Bitcoin would be done on Bitcoin Cash the network would work fine today.

Where the actual limit is we don't know. It's probably not possible to support every financial transaction for everyone. For that we do need off-chain scaling in addition to many other improvements.

<comment><USER17> Maybe you are right and it would be technically feasible to bump the block size limit 2x, then 2x again and maybe later 2x again... Basically every time people demand extra cheap block space for their transactions someone would have to lead the charge and coordinate a hard-fork (probably with a lot of drama). But then we (as a community) would set a dangerous moral hazard there and be like the U.S. Senate increasing the debt ceiling limit every year or so.

For reference this is a year-old article from Gregory Maxwell, a prominent Bitcoin Core developer, explaining his view: [https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/438hx0/a_trip_to_t...](https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/438hx0/a_trip_to_the_moon_requires_a_rocket_with/)

I think Greg is right. And at least this scaling situation puts a lot of pressure on Bitcoin blockchain and accelerates whole ecosystem to quickly develop and deploy layer-2 solutions like Lighting Networks or parallel 2-way- pegged solutions like sidechains. Which is in my opinion a good thing even for the price of hampering Bitcoin growth in short-term.

And from technical point it is beneficial that Bitcoin Cash folks forked the chain and will experiment with their own scaling solutions. It will be interesting to watch future technical developments on both sides.

<comment><USER16> Which is why a dynamic block size should be implemented. (This is on the roadmap for Bitcoin Cash).

For reference here's a paper by Peter R, a prominent Bitcoin Unlimited developer, arguing that a blocksize limit is unnecessary: [https://www.bitcoinunlimited.info/resources/feemarket.pdf](https://www.bitcoinunlimited.info/resources/feemarket.pdf)

Who's right I do not know. But even if Greg is right he's worrying about a potential problem decades from now. We have very real problems _right now_ we should solve first.

I would also be wary of any claims Greg makes as he has clear conflict of interests against raising the blocksize. He's one of the founders of Blockstream whose goal is to earn money developing 2nd layer solutions. With working on-chain transactions what use would their 2nd layer solutions have?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> People now envision bitcoin as 'store of value', and less like an actual currency. I imagine there are many technical and financial reasons why it will never be suitable as a currency. (Deflationary by design, technical limitations on size of blocks leading to slowness of transactions)

Does being unsuitable as a currency mean it's also unsuitable as a 'store of value'? The answer to that isn't obvious to me.

The value of the US dollar comes in part from our ability to pay taxes with it (and perhaps ultimately from the US military). Cryptocurrency has no central authority to enforce its value via taxes or military, and isn't particularly suitable for day-to-day transactions. Without either of those properties, I have a hard to imagining it being a particularly good store of value. But we'll see. I think we're all watching an interesting experiment unfold in real time.

I don't think the current price of btc has anything to do with whatever utility it may or may not have as a currency or store of value. The price is entirely informed by speculators hoping to sell it the following day for 100% ROI. I think a collapse is inevitable.

<comment><USER19> > The value of the US dollar comes in part from our ability to pay taxes with > it (and perhaps ultimately from the US military).

It doesn't come from either of those things. It only has value because people believe it does, otherwise they would all try to get rid of it as quickly as possible.

<comment><USER20> > It doesn't come from either of those things.

Yes it does. You have to pay your taxes in U.S. dollars, so people have to use it. That's one of the purposes of taxes: so that the government-issued currency is used.

<comment><USER19> It's quite obvious that the value of USD comes from much more than the taxes people have to pay. If the only demand for USD was from people paying taxes, it would be worth only a small fraction of what it is actually worth.

<comment><USER20> The "demand for USD" is really demand for goods and services that are priced in USD. Because everyone living in the U.S. uses USD because that's what we pay taxes in in the U.S., most people in the U.S. offer their goods and services in exchange for it.

<comment><USER21> The demand for USD comes from the legal structures that exist in the United States for things like debts, torts, taxes, etc. Basically, if you take out a loan to buy a house, you have a legal obligation to repay it regardless of how it is denominated by your bank; but if you fail to meet that obligation, you will need to deal with a bankruptcy court, which will only deal in USD. So if you take out a 40BTC mortgage and fail to pay, the judge will first convert the value of the house into USD and work out a way to repay (all or part) of the debt in USD. By forcing you to convert what assets you have to USD, the court is creating demand for USD.

Of course, banks know this (it is the core of their business) and will therefore denominate loans in USD to avoid the risk of an unfavorable conversion during such a proceeding. Such an unfavorable conversion is exactly what the creditors in the MtGox bankruptcy are facing, because the proceeding involved converting their BTC accounts into JPY according to the exchange rate in 2014. Due to the change in BTC prices recently, that means that under the law the creditors will be fully repaid using what BTC assets MtGox still has, despite the fact that the creditors would receive a far greater payout if they received the amount of BTC that had been in their accounts at the time of the hack.

Beyond debts, there are also torts. Suppose I crash my car into your house and you sue me for the damage I caused. The courts will order me to pay in USD; so again, the courts are creating USD demand by creating an obligation to pay with USD.

So the demand for USD is only indirectly due to demand for goods and services; after all, there must be some reason why merchants are pricing their wares in USD. The direct driver of demand is the law itself, hence "fiat" currency.

<comment><USER20> > So the demand for USD is only indirectly due to demand for goods and > services; after all, there must be some reason why merchants are pricing > their wares in USD. The direct driver of demand is the law itself, hence > "fiat" currency.

That's exactly what I was saying: the goods and services are priced in USD because the legal structures require USD. I just used taxes as the most simple example.

But the whole point of the legal structures requiring USD is to get people to offer goods and services for sale in exchange for it. That way the government can purchase goods and services from the private sector to use as public goods, without having to first "get the money" from somewhere else.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Two popular refrains on scaling:

a. Block size - This was increased in bitcoin cash. What many people are not aware of is the paper 'Information propagation in the bitcoin network' by Decker and Wattenhofer in 2013. The average time for a block to be seen by a node is ~13 secs. As per the paper:

 _" For blocks, whose size is larger than 20kB, each kilobyte costs an additional 80ms delay until a majority knows about the block." -'Information propagation in the bitcoin network._

So, increasing the block without increasing the block time actually increases chances of double spending. But, increasing block time is well simply delaying the payments.

b. Lightning network - Off-chain transactions. Fascinating idea. The problem is it goes to a form of centralization. And if things hold the companies running these channels will invariably meddle in some transactions. But the stated goal of bitcoin was -

 _Commerce on the Internet has come to rely almost exclusively on financial institutions serving as trusted third parties to process electronic payments. While the system works well enough for most transactions, it still suffers from the inherent weaknesses of the trust based model. Completely non- reversible transactions are not really possible, since financial institutions cannot avoid mediating disputes. The cost of mediation increases transaction costs, limiting the minimum practical transaction size and cutting off the possibility for small casual transactions, and there is a broader cost in the loss of ability to make non-reversible payments for nonreversible services. With the possibility of reversal, the need for trust spreads. Merchants must be wary of their customers, hassling them for more information than they would otherwise need. A certain percentage of fraud is accepted as unavoidable. These costs and payment uncertainties can be avoided in person by using physical currency, but no mechanism exists to make payments over a communications channel without a trusted party_

<comment><USER19> Anybody can run a lightning node. I intend to do so.

It's not like PayPal where if you want to pay using PayPal you have to use PayPal-the-company. With Lightning, if you want to pay using Lightning you can use any route you like over the Lightning Network to reach the recipient of the payment.

<comment><USER23> If you run your own LN node, your channel is associated with your IP, and your transactions are associated with your channel. It is the same as reusing a single bitcoin address for all your transactions, with all the consequences [1], except this time you can tracked down to your physical location. In vanilla bitcoin you can at least generate addresses at will, while opening and closing payment channels every now and then undermines the whole idea of the off-chain transaction layer.

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

<comment><USER24> if you don't want your IP associated you can host anything on a cloud provider, run it through a tunnel, VPN, or TOR.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> > How is this expected to work with 7 billion people using it for every tiny > financial transaction?

[https://lightning.network/](https://lightning.network/)

tl;dr: a network of off-chain, transitive payment channels. two on-chain transactions (to fund and settle channel) allow for ~unlimited, ~free, ~instant transactions across a p2p network of nodes off-chain

<comment><USER26> Payment channels (which Lightning Network uses) allows for unlimited transactions, but not an unlimited number of users, because — as you say — two on-chain transactions (deposit+withdrawal) are required to initiate and finalize a transfer. Given that the Bitcoin blockchain can only handle ~20M transaction per month, this means only 20M people can deposit to/withdraw from the Lightning Network (LN) per month.

To this critique, some reply that merchants will just start trading unsettled (off-chain) LN transactions to pay their suppliers, but no one has presented any model of how this would work in a real economy, with merchants needing to pay suppliers, who need to pay their suppliers, who need to pay their employees.

<comment><USER27> ~20M transaction per month are an arbitrary limit. The economic majority recently decided against increasing that limit, but this doesn't mean it's not going to get increased at some later point.

<comment><USER3> There are very good technical reasons for that limit. It is not as simple a problem as "voting".

<comment><USER27> Of course there are technical reasons for that limit. But whatever the correct size of the limit is - the current limit is almost certainly too low. The Ethereum blockchain is able to handle a significantly higher amount of transactions without implementing all of the performance optimizations that Bitcoin has (such as compact blocks).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> "A Fast and Scalable Payment Network with Bitcoin Duplex Micropayment Channels"

[https://www.tik.ee.ethz.ch/file/716b955c130e6c703fac336ea17b...](https://www.tik.ee.ethz.ch/file/716b955c130e6c703fac336ea17b1670/duplex- micropayment-channels.pdf)

<comment><USER3> Why do you think this fixes the transaction speed problem?

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Obviously no, the current version of Bitcoin does not scale.

I don't see why you think that means Bitcoin _can't_ scale though. In order to convincingly make that claim, you'd need to be able to prove that all existing proposed solutions for scaling the network (lightning, block size increases, etc) cannot possibly work.

</comment><comment><USER30> Off Topic: Is anyone else creeped out by having an open ledger? As soon as I transact with someone or an entity, they now have access to view my wallet's holding/transactions via pub key. I don't know how I feel about Overstock having that information.

<comment><USER31> You never use the same address twice. scatter received coins over other addresses.

<comment><USER30> The fees to move the coins to another wallet just to pay for coffee would be 4x the coffee.

<comment><USER31> you don't have to pay fees to transfer to yourself, assuming there is no rush.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> The piece you are missing is that this problem is a direct result of the Core dev teams deliberate choice not to scale. They have a strangle hold on development and vehemently opposed any proposal to scale through block size increases as was the original intent.

Bitcoin Cash isn't having these problems and won't have these problems in the future. Many people aren't aware of the underlying issues driving the transaction backlog in part because the historically important forums where Bitcoin is discussed have suppressed any discussion of this issue for a couple years now.

[https://www.yours.org/content/a-roadmap-for-scaling- bitcoin-...](https://www.yours.org/content/a-roadmap-for-scaling-bitcoin- cash-b11efae5ef9d/)

<comment><USER33> So if we say it "won't" scale - would that be more accurate? It can, but chooses not to? Seems like a distinction without a difference.

<comment><USER32> The point is it is a team issue not a tech issue. The team behind Bitcoin Cash which is rooted in the original Bitcoin block chain is scaling Bitcoin w/o issues. The Bitcoin Core team who has control over development of the legacy chain is the problem not the technology itself.

It would be like if there were two auto makers one claimed that you can't make a car that holds more than two people and refused to do so. Along comes another auto maker and builds a bus off the same concept. Doesn't mean that automobile tech is bad it means the team insisting it can't / won't scale is incompetent.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> That's why I tell you guys to just use bitcoin cash instead. Bitcoin cash uses bigger blocks that can accommodate more transactions per second. We are going to increase it as more people use it. Right now the transactions are nearly free.

<comment><USER35> Ok.

We'll just ignore the issues associated with increasing full-node storage requirements even faster than they're already increasing. And lower transaction fees lead to lower block rewards which lowers mining profitability. Both of these things result in more centralization.

While we're at it we'll forget the post-fork difficulty adjustment faisco brought to us by the Bitcoin cash devs. We'll just trust their competancy and good will.

Also we won't think about the legitimate off-chain solutions for transaction rate scaling, or how the side-chain concept dates back to early Satoshi emails.

There are better alt coins for cheap and fast transactions. Besides, recommending something based entirely on those two factors is a massive oversimplification.

<comment><USER36> Lower transaction fees leads to more volume of transactions. They're going for the amazon approach of razor thin margins which should lead to more transactions overall. They plan to keep transaction fees around 1 penny by increasing the block size as it fills up. Next fork for Bitcoin Cash will give it 32mb blocks.

<comment><USER35> Yeah I realise that. Even if it does work (noting currently most BCH blocks are tiny) then the chain will grow by ~135Gb per month (the entire Bitcoin chain is ~145Gb). Running a full node means you now have to buy a hard-drive (or two) and hope your internet connection isn't capped. You also have to be OK with really slow block propagation (which you _really_ shouldn't be).

There are some very good reasons for small blocks and higher on-chain transaction fees.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> The idea is that bitcoin is decentralized. But common sense tells you that by having an append only system, eventually you will need a supercomputer to deal with the blockchain.

Naturally, the blockchain will have to be hierarchical, or find ways to compact it.

<comment><USER38> Dosen't the blockchain already compact? Correct me if i'm wrong but once a block is hashed and confirmed as the most recent block, why would you need to store the previous blocks?

<comment><USER39> Full nodes must store the hashes that are generated from previous blocks. If they didn't, how would you know that the most recent hash really is the generated as a result of hashing the previous block recursively? A malicious attacker could forge a previous block, act as the next one is the current block based on the hash of the forged block, and there would be no way to verify that the hash of this block is valid or invalid.

<comment><USER38> I was under the impression that attack would not work because as long as the majority of nodes are "honest" there would be no way for an attacking node to outpace the chain. Each node votes with their cpu so the combined compute/speed of honest nodes would always outpace the introduction of a corrupt block. Since the the most recent "confirmed block" is a hash of the previous successful block it just continues.

However I admit much of my assumptions are just from reading the original paper so i'm probably over-simplifying. I guess it would make sense they need some history but not sure why they would need all of it since the previous blocks are confirmed?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Have you seen any announcements from merchants, businesses, exchanges regarding downtime due to congestion? Probably not, because the spam- prevention mechanism built into Bitcoin by Satoshi themselves is working as intended.

On the flipside, you have Ethereum with more or less unbounded block sizes having issues with Cryptokitties congesting the entire network. Numerous entities using Ethereum are unable to do business due to the equivalent of Beanie Babies clogging the network [0][1].

[0] [https://www.coindesk.com/ethereums-cryptokitties- blockchain-...](https://www.coindesk.com/ethereums-cryptokitties-blockchain- deluge-sparks-ico-delay/)

[1] [https://twitter.com/myetherwallet/status/874285733707526145](https://twitter.com/myetherwallet/status/874285733707526145)

<comment><USER41> It's the same case for Ethereum. Blocks are bound by total gas, and you can ensure your transaction is included into a block quicker by paying a higher gas fee, if you are willing.

For about $0.40 you can get an ETH transfer into a block in a couple of minutes. [https://ethgasstation.info/](https://ethgasstation.info/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> Growing pains. Think about it, it's been less than ten years since bitcoin was created. Give it time. The code will change and it will be able to scale. We now have multi-millionaires that have a very strong incentive to make sure it never fails. 20 years from now the bitcoin code and network will be very different and many of the bugs will be worked out.

I was a disbeliever but now I am a true believer. Bitcoin is here to stay. The only danger is that countries will make it illegal. It really is a danger to the way countries manages their economies. But only time will tell. Keep the coins and enjoy the ride. You won't be sorry. Lucky you.

</comment><comment><USER43> Bitcoin can be used for transactions? And here I thought it was just used as free money!

</comment><comment><USER44> What would concern me is, for example, if the cost of a transaction grows faster than the price of a given bitcoin in dollars. If that trend would continue for too long, then I suppose my bitcoin could get trapped in the system for an indefinite period of time, that is, from the time I no longer can justify moving the bitcoin because of high transaction fees to the time I can. It seems that this situation suggests a lower bound on the amount that makes sense to store in a bitcoin wallet. I wonder what that lower bound is today.

<comment><USER45> That has already happened as transaction fees have increased from less than 1 cent to $5.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> I'm not sure why so many people ignore that Bitcoin and all other serious cryptocurrencies are focused on their next generation scalability improvements. Several of the most viable blockchains like EOS are built to be scalable and the legacy coins like Bitcoin are working to adopt similar ideas. When the entire 2018 roadmap is about scalability, it gets boring reading these same posts about how it's too slow and doesn't scale without any reference to their work in progress.

<comment><USER15> Because the whole 2016 roadmap and the whole 2017 roadmap was also about scalability. All they've done so far is throw their hands up and say "it's a really hard problem trust us guys". And nobody has shown any sort of traction on a solution: the developers admitted Lightning Network won't solve scalability concerns.

Some people are getting a little tired of the pony show.

<comment><USER46> Then people will move to Ethereum and EOS (or whatever competing blockchains get scalability first). With interoperability of blockchains, transactions can be done on alt blockchains that are cheap and fast instead of on the Bitcoin chain.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Bitcoin involves broadcasting all transactions; that is obviously not scalable, regardless of block size, regardless of PoW, regardless of other design details.

<comment><USER47> You don't have to broadcast all transactions to all parties. Merkle trees can summarize past transactions, so not everyone needs a copy of the entire blockchain.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> This video: [https://youtu.be/GtKhYx2Vlb4](https://youtu.be/GtKhYx2Vlb4) helps explain and address the thought process you're going through now. Bitcoin scaling issues are analogous to many internet technologies such as Ethernet. With Ethernet people initially thought there was no way it could scale to support the whole world because the tech just couldnt support anything more than 1mbps, yet people found a way. They built new technology on top of it, they changed packet routing algorithms and they even changed the underlying physical hardware used. The only thing that remains is the name and the brand, Bitcoin will probably go through a similar development process.

In upcoming Bitcoin technology, the lightning network is really exciting. It's a layer that runs on top of Bitcoin which allows thousands or possibly millions of transactions per second, performed instantly, with almost zero fees. It may have bottlenecks of its own, but I'm sure we can overcome them.

</comment><comment><USER49> My view of BTC is as digital gold, in that, it is the standard to which other easier-to-trade (digital or fiat or not) currencies are anchored in (so like gold standard). Ever since I started reading about it, this was how it was sold. The new gold standard. In this regard, high transaction fees/times was expected. POW is a feature, not a bug.

</comment><comment><USER50> Many say that Bitcoin's primary use is a store of value and a horrible medium of exchange. In that light, being unable to make small transactions makes sense, you store your wealth in Bitcoin and leave it there, kind of like a savings account, the high fees and slow transactions don't matter because you are not moving funds. High fees also reduce the amount of transactions in kind of an equilibrium,the higher fees go, the less people are willing to transact, thus lowering fees to the point of usability.

The other camp that wants to use Bitcoin for small transactions is either in the illusory lightning network camp, or more realisticly investing in bitcoin cash. In my opinion, bitcoin has proven itself to be a great store of value but a poor medium of exchange, so just treat it as such.

<comment><USER51> Anything that fluctuates in value by 20% of more in a day can't be called a store of value.

</comment></comment><comment> TD-Linux I don't know what you mean by "prove". People have known about the block size limit for years. It's been increased, but most haven't updated their software to make use of it yet. Lightning now works on mainnet, but no one is using that either.

Maybe it's more proof that no one cares?

<comment><USER52> I think I'm living in a different world than yours. Where I live, it's all different that what you said.

The block size hasn't increased. Instead, a new chain forked out with an 8MB block size, it's called Bitcoin cash.

Lightning network hasn't launched yet. A few people are testing alpha on the main net and that's it. (Btw I'm a skeptic of lightning network so i'm not advocating lightning network here).

<comment><USER53> I think he referred to SegWit, which increases the block size a bit under special conditions. That's the thing about bitcoin scaling: instead of improving scaling by increasing the block size (which will be required anyway even with Lightning), a solution that requires only changing the thousands of full nodes, they go for SegWit, which requires changing millions of wallets. Then everybody wonders why adoption isn't instant.

And Lightning, yup. I tried to use two Lightning implementations on the test net and neither worked, but they have been declared "ready!" by fans.

And Lightning deserves skepticism. Releasing software 1.0 means nothing: it requires a totally new infrastructure, with new wallets (again) which have to be online to receive money, hubs which don't exist at all today, liquidity providers willing to leave money locked in channels, (but hey, at least we didn't have to upgrade full nodes) and has completely different failure modes than the blockchain on top of the failure modes that are already there. As far as I understand it isn't even possible to receive more money than you already have with Lightning, and any part you open a channel with can block your funds for as long as the channel timeout has been set (and you don't want short/underfunded channels or you may end up paying more in transactions than you would have with a pure blockchain).

Also the opening and closing of channels means that if Lightning is actually successful the current block sizes won't be sufficient. It's at least one transaction to open the channel and another to close it, and because you want to keep a warm channel so you can buy coffee, you will want to do that whether you end up using the channel or not, but you also don't want it very long otherwise your money will be stuck if the channel goes down. So essentially you need to pay subscription fees to the blockchain for using the channels as well as well as commission to the channels for providing liquidity to you.

Maybe some super-centralized thing will come out of it and we'll all connect to the Coinbase Channel or something to do trustless centralized off-chain transactions (as opposed to trusted centralized off-chain transactions that they provide now) but even that has a host of problems when you think about it.

It's... a complicated system. It's cool and very interesting but it won't happen overnight and it's not guaranteed to actually work.

<comment><USER54> I think lighting is more to trading webs, if you want to transfer from bittrex to blockchain.info it would be trough light so all this kind of transactions would free the blockchain

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> Bitcoin, like gold, is useless as a currency.

humans trade on credit not by exchange. Always have done.

<comment><USER56> Seems pretty popular in places like India.

</comment></comment><comment><USER57> You are correct. One interesting point to note is the high disparity between prices on different exchanges.

COinbase shot through the roof, but other notable exchanges were sometimes $5k out for a number of hours. This proves that either people couldn't cross trade (i.e. buy cheap on one market and sell high on the other) or didn't know how to (which is suspect)

this could be because the transaction speed stalled trades, meaning that effectively each exchange became its own global market, either way, having large disparities between exchanges is problematic.

</comment><comment><USER58> One of the questions I have is why is that a requirement? Why does one network need to support the entire global populations? I mean if it's to be used as fiat currency then I only need it to pay for things roughly in my extended community. Why aren't there seperate networks developing in distinct geographic areas?

</comment><comment><USER59> Yes, BTC has weaknesses. No, it cannot scale up to "7 billion people using it for every tiny financial transaction" likely even with Lightning. It doesn't need to and you should please ignore the people who say it will.

I love BTC, I think it's great. I think other cryptocoins innovate where BTC can't. But the BTC zealots who act like BTC will displace general purpose banking (or zanier still, the entire financial industry) make this conversation so frustrating.

BTC can be a success without this all-or-nothing campaign. In fact, it is a success because it will continue to exist/store value, and operate as a medium of exchange. It will have hiccups and scaling challenges and we will entertain proposals like segwit and LN which don't radically alter the coin's design.

Unfortunately they alter enough of the design to disturb the economics/incentives for the different roles. Those different roles have had well-aligned incentives for a long time and hopefully they don't continue to drift apart. This is the greatest risk facing Bitcoin IMO. For a long time I was worried about a weakness in the signature hash. But the bounty for that has been so enormous for so long that I'm doubtful one will ever be discovered. So Bitcoin is truly a robust coin, and it can continue to serve us well. If the 15000USD value is based on "7 billion people using it for every tiny financial transaction" then people should probably start shorting BTC (maybe tomorrow evening w/CBOE/Gemini).

</comment><comment><USER60> Bitcoin is a quasi-legal worldwide distributed mechanism for financial gambling that everyday people can now participate in from their smartphone.

Clearly it has scaled well, it is now one of the more successful means of gambling extant. The fact that it is becoming unusable for any other purpose could have implications, but it's self evident that this use case has scaled considerably.

</comment><comment><USER61> Bitcoin is Myspace.

</comment><comment><USER62> You are not wrong. The same math that created BitCoin necessarily ignores the basis for the value is a sociopathic waste of time.

</comment><comment><USER63> Of course it can't scale. Blocks can't grow larger than 1 MB, which means no more than three transactions per second.

If you want scale, you have to look to Bitcoin Cash (which carries on Bitcoin's original vision of being a massively scalable peer-to-peer electronic cash) or Ethereum.

</comment><comment><USER64> I use electrum wallet and never had a problem with the default settings - transactions appears after 20 mins.

<comment><USER65> That's about 19 minutes and 59 seconds longer than what would be acceptable for a digital cash system.

<comment><USER66> You just need to wait for a few seconds for the transaction to be "pending" though, which is enough for small-medium payments. Unless you're worried the guy buying a 5$ burrito from you will mine a block with his double-spent transaction.

<comment><USER67> A service could pop up that offers to double spend your $5 transaction and refund you a percentage of the amount. If they mine the block you scam a few bucks, if they don't you paid full price. It would be profitable for the miner and for the burrito buyer at the expense of the burrito seller. If such a service becomes common, that seller is going to start making you pre-order your burrito 20 minutes in advance – at which point people will just switch to cash, credit, or a blockchain without these problems.

<comment><USER24> you can also walk out of the store with the burrito without paying but that is also stealing. this small transaction issue will be solved technologically but the changes are incremental because of the risks involved.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER68> I think you're right. Bitcoin sucks. It cost around $5 to make a single transaction back in August, and that was when Bitcoin was at 1/3 of its current price in US Dollars. Does anyone know what the cost to make a single transaction is today (in US Dollars)?

</comment><comment><USER69> I sent $30k for less than $5 and the transaction was confirmed within 15 minutes (second block), the network is fine. Yes it isn't free transfers but they are still possible if you don't mind waiting and your transaction is reasonably sized you are fine.

</comment><comment><USER14> Watch this prediction.

[https://us.teamblind.com/article/update-from-block---btc- fut...](https://us.teamblind.com/article/update-from-block---btc-futures-hodl- and-moving-funds-into-fiat-4c0jpDZV)

</comment><comment><USER70> Bitcoin is like gold, has always been. It's pretty bad for routine payments.

</comment><comment><USER71> Bitcoin has always been slow compared to other alt-coins such as Litecoin.

</comment><comment><USER72> My understanding is... There is a scaling problem. It could be help by increasing the block size (like segwit2x) But the miners don't want to fix it because they like the high transaction fees.

<comment><USER73> A global currency controlled by a few warehouses in china sure does sound optimal.

</comment></comment><comment><USER74> _How is this expected to work with 7 billion people using it for every tiny financial transaction? I don 't think it can._

It's not meant to. It stores wealth. Nothing more.

</comment><comment><USER75> I believe ripple has solved the problem with scaling. It can handle more than 1500 tps and the throughput can be increased upto 50k tps

</comment><comment><USER76> The idea seems to be that BTC is a store of value (eg: gold) and payments is something to be implemented on a different layer.

</comment><comment><USER77> Quantum computation will prove much more about the limitations of these cryptocurrencies that we expect.

#shorsalgorithm

</comment><comment><USER78> Bitcoin is competing with gold, not visa.

</comment><comment><USER79> Not just BTC. iota, which is supposedly scalable, has come to a screeching halt over the last few days as well

<comment><USER16> IOTA is however fundamentally flawed. It can never be decentralized if it ever even becomes useable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER80> Bitcoin Cash can easily scale.

There never was a "scaling problem." The only problem is "people that don't want Bitcoin to scale."

[https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoincash/comments/7gmn8t/there_n...](https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoincash/comments/7gmn8t/there_never_was_a_scaling_problem_the_only/)

</comment><comment><USER81> Couldn't bitcoin blocks be 100 times larger? What's the drawback of huge blocks?

</comment><comment><USER82> What are the best resources for staying up to date with Bitcoin and Ethereum development?

</comment><comment><USER36> Check out Bitcoin Cash if you want a scalable on chain crypto currency. Bitcoin Cash has the same history as Bitcoin up until August 1st, 2017 when they forked off the majority chain. Bitcoin Cash allows you to send any amount of money to anyone in the world for about 1 penny per transaction.

<comment><USER83> And if its transaction volume were equal to bitcoin what would happen?

<comment><USER36> Well right now Bitcoin Cash has 8x the capacity for on chain scaling 1mb blocks on BTC vs 8mb on BCH. Next Bitcoin Cash fork gives us 32mb blocks or 32x transaction capacity.

Simplified a little bit I know you can pack segwit transactions into 1.7mb blocks on BTC.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER68> Crypto-neckbeards be like "Bitcoin is going to $500,000!"

</comment><comment><USER84> There are altcoin solving all these problems

</comment><comment><USER85> Not sure if it will ever scale. Look into Iota.

</comment><comment><USER86> Litecoin is the solution. It was not designed to be a Bitcoin replacement, but rather to handle this exactly.

<comment><USER87> No it wasn't. It's 99% a copy of Bitcoin with small configuration file differences. It is configured for one order of magnitude more transactions, but it provides no architectural scaling innovations. It's just like Bitcoin -- can only be used at scale as a settlement layer.

<comment><USER88> Litecoin is similar to Bitcoin, but it was the first to make some of the changes that were made to both, like Segwit ...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER89> and what happens if Governments decide by law that bitcoin is illegal?

</comment><comment><USER90> Buy Ethereum

</comment><comment><USER91> Etherium

</comment><comment><USER92> Betteridge's law of headlines.

</comment><comment><USER93> > have owned BTC for 5 years and I am enjoying the rally, but with the high > transaction fees, back ...

That sir is a first world problem!

</comment><comment><USER86> Litecoin is the solution.

</comment><comment><USER94> Same question back in 1994 about the internet. "build things that don't scale. PG".

<comment><USER3> "Then sell them to sucker companies who will throw out all your work and redo it better." was the rest of the quote, right?

</comment></comment><comment><USER95> Maybe we learned that _coinbase_ can't scale its website, but that has nothing to do with the ability of BTC to scale.

<comment><USER96> Did you try to make a BTC transaction lately?

</comment></comment><comment><USER97> I don't think you're wrong and there are other problems too. Widespread Bitcoin adoption would require more energy for mining coins than the entire world can currently produce.

<comment><USER26> Bitcoin has no particular requirement for energy, it's an arbitrage involving the prices of three components: 1) a bitcoin 2) a KWh of power 3) mining hardware.

As long as the value of newly minted bitcoins makes it profitable to buy mining hardware and burn off power to earn them, the amount of power used by bitcoin miners will increase.

So, way before Bitcoin miners consume all of the world's energy, either energy prices or mining hardware prices will increase, or the bitcoin price will fall, to make mining unprofitable.

<comment><USER98> And a kWh of power is of course done with coal. How pathetic.

<comment><USER26> I believe most mining operations make use of hydro-electric power, simply because it's much cheaper than burning off coal.

<comment><USER16> Also practically free hydro-electric power which would otherwise be wasted.

<comment><USER99> That's not true at all. If the power were not used by Bitcoin miners, it would be used by other industries, and less more-expensive (coal etc) power produced by other power plants.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER100> The rally is partly because it can't scale and people are unable to get their bitcoin to an exchange to sell it. Instead it is stuck in the mempool... and there is an increasing amount of bitcoin that can't be moved because fees surpass its value.

For a bitcoin that has scaled see Bitcoin Cash.

<comment><USER101> >The rally is partly because it can't scale and people are unable to get their bitcoin to an exchange to sell it.

that's demonstrably false. there's plenty room of you're willing to pay enough in transaction fees. if you don't want to pay $5 in transaction fees to cash out $5000, that's your problem. either that or you don't want to pay $5 to cash out $10, but in that case that has no appreciable impact on trading volume.

>For a bitcoin that has scaled see Bitcoin Cash.

if you mean bitcoin with block size limit lifted, then yes. but right now it's handling less transactions than bitcoin so it's not fair to say it has scaled.

<comment><USER100> The median fee is currently $15 and there have been around 200k unconfirmed transactions for days. Is it false in addition to this that around half of all bitcoin addresses hold less bitcoin than the current fee? That's a massive constriction of supply. Very few people are transacting at amounts of $5000 where the fee might make sense.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER102> It's not really designed to handle every little transaction. I would expect it to be used by exchanges and banks as a settlement layer, with most transactions happening off-chain.

It's a mistake to look at recent news, because this has been known since the very beginning.

<comment><USER103> There is a thread on the site with the original Bitcoin paper right now. The first sentence of the abstract:

> A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments > to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a > financial institution.

A peer-to-peer network without going through a financial institution. The design was certainly intended to scale up to large numbers of small transactions.

<comment><USER104> it would and it will imo. I just don't think bitcoin is it.

It has however bootstrapped a few potentials. Until its decided which that might be, bitcoin kinda serves its purpose.

<comment><USER105> root DNS services do not service _every_ lookup _but_ they back delegated authorities, which does scale. Same for blockchain tech.

<comment><USER106> So you're saying Bitcoin needs banks like every other currency then?

So what's the point of it again?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER107> Not only is BTC epicly badly designed (energy consumption=Denmark) but it doesn't solve a problem that anyone actually has (and neither do any of the other cryptos). Nobody uses them to pay for things, and nobody has any incentive to start doing so, because paying for things is not currently a problem. Compare with the Internet boom: along with the stock bubble, millions of people began using this new tool which changed their lives forever. Compare with the housing boom: tons of people got something, at least temporarily, that changed their lives, namely a house. Now look at cryptocurrencies. They having zero effect on ordinary life because they don't solve a problem that anyone has.

<comment><USER31> You must not have any experience with international transfers or currencies other than euro and USD.

<comment><USER107> Indeed I don't. Nor do most other people. That's one of the reasons why, to first approximation, zero people are using them. And even if lots more people suddenly begin needing to transfer non-reserve currencies internationally, these transfers are going to run into legal issues which, despite fantasies of bitcoin enthusiasts, are not going to be evaded just by putting "crypto" in a prefix.

<comment><USER31> Your claims are fallacious. Most people, i.e. 51%+ don't use USD or EUR. Many people also make international transfers. There is a use-case and your observations that zero people use btc are anecdotal at best.

Pray tell what kind of legal issues would suddenly arise if it became mainstream.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> > How is this expected to work with 7 billion people using it for every tiny > financial transaction? I don't think it can.

Give it ~30 years, for the cost of CPU time/storage space/internet speed to cost 0.1% of what it does today, and — in combination with off-chain clearing — this becomes feasible.

For Bitcoin to even work as money in the first place, people need to store their savings in bitcoins. This transition will take at least ~30 years anyway, which leaves ample time for computing costs to fall to a level where 1GB blocks are realistic. Combined with an off-chain clearing protocol (like Stroem[1]) for consumer-to-merchant payments, this should allow Bitcoin to scale to ~10bn people.

[1] [https://www.strawpay.com/docs/stroem-payment- system.pdf](https://www.strawpay.com/docs/stroem-payment-system.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER108> You may place too much value in the transactions of fiat currency. You can still do an in-person trade.

Credit payments may seem instantaneous but they are not. Research the gold standard and who actually stores the gold not the paper receipts for it.

The endgame for bitcoin...Transaction fees? Popup currencies ala private currency?

I hope we are solving some fun math problems with all this distributed hash power.</comment>


PiPhone – A Raspberry Pi based Smartphone - <AUTHOR> http://www.davidhunt.ie/piphone-a-raspberry-pi-based-smartphone/

<comment><USER2> Fantastic project - thanks for the link.

My challenge is that this submission points to the web site of the person who actually did it, but there is considerable and useful discussion on a submission to the Raspberry Pi site. So should I link to that discussion?

Or not?</comment>


EA lied about SimCity's online requirement - <AUTHOR> https://pay.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/1a9t0e/simcity_modder_removes_always_online_forced/

<comment><USER2> Interesting that a lot of the game's code is written in javascript.</comment>