Are Bitcoins The Future? - <AUTHOR> http://blog.priceonomics.com/post/47135650437/are-bitcoins-the-future <comment><USER3> This article covers a lot of interesting ground, and isn't the usual same, old same-old article about Bitcoin. I especially liked the reminders of earlier examples of online currencies.

The conclusion is tentative, and reasonable. Along the way, the author brings up many interesting facts about Bitcoin, about its supporters, and about its critics.

I think it is especially reasonable to assume that Bitcoin exists with the tacit consent of the United States National Security Agency, even if the NSA didn't invent Bitcoin.

AFTER EDIT: Addition of my FAQ-in-progress about Bitcoin for Hacker New. A while ago I wrote that perhaps the greatest contribution the Bitcoin experiment will make to humankind is to teach you and me and our neighbors more about the realities of economics. And later I added that the Bitcoin experiment will also contribute to greater understanding of attack surfaces and online crime. Many of the ideas about how to mine Bitcoins, store Bitcoins, and trade with Bitcoins as a medium of exchange illustrate both the strengths and weaknesses of any other medium of exchange in a world full of human beings. Seeing the discussion of Bitcoins here on Hacker News reminds me of early online discussions in the 1990s of online payment systems such as PayPal, and the arguments beforehand that PayPal wouldn't have to invest a lot of time and effort (as it eventually did) building defenses against theft and fraud. If a weakness in a system is attached to a lot of money, the way to bet is to bet that someone will go looking for that weakness, even if you haven't thought of it.

This prompts a question for all the security-knowledgeable persons who participate here on Hacker News, a question once asked of the inventor of Pretty Good Privacy (PGP). How expensive do you think it would be for the United States National Security Agency (or a comparable organization from another national government) to crack a Bitcoin store, given that we know that some Bitcoin caches have already been cracked? And if the organization storing Bitcoin data held personal bank account data too, how attractive a target might it be to thieves?

<comment><USER4> >I think it is especially reasonable to assume that Bitcoin exists with the tacit consent of the United States National Security Agency, even if the NSA didn't invent Bitcoin.

How so? If the NSA really hated bitcoin, what would they do? Even if it were made illegal in the US, the United States are not the world, and it would be extremely hard to enforce.

<comment><USER5> NSA, China, Russia, most governments really, and possibly a lot of banks, could do a 51% attack and shut down transaction processing... or do double spends, but shutting down all transaction processing seems more damaging. This won't ever change, unless Bitcoin really causes governments to lose most of their power and money.

Edit: gavin has a plan ([http://gavintech.blogspot.com/2012/05/neutralizing-51-attack...](http://gavintech.blogspot.com/2012/05/neutralizing-51-attack.html)) but my guess is if they did the work to start an attack in the first place they'd have planned for gavin's plan and acquired enough older coins to foil it. It'd be nice if more thought went into other ways to thwart a possible attack but I'm not sure there really are any. Most people seem to discount and completely avoid the issue.

<comment><USER6> Folk might want to print out Bitcoin wallets or store devices in a Faraday cage... in the unlikely event Kim Jong-Un pulls a wild card! :-)

[http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2012/dec/19/north- korea-...](http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2012/dec/19/north-korea-emp- attack-could-destroy-us-now/?page=all)

<comment><USER7> They'd be useless without a hard-copy block chain to back them up.

<comment><USER8> Forgive me if this is a joke that I'm not getting, but they wouldn't be useless at all:

1) Bitcoin is a p2p distributed network with nodes all over the world. Even if a nuclear attack took out the entire US, the network would continue to work as long as segments of the Internet did (and recall that the Internet was originally designed to protect US data networks from nuclear attack).

2) It's quite simple to spend Bitcoins as long as you have access to a Bitcoin node (see above) and a copy of the 32-byte private key string corresponding to the public Bitcoin address the coins were sent to. This short string of characters can be written on paper, etched into stone, whatever.

<comment><USER9> The receiver can't be sure that the Bitcoin hasn't been double-spent without waiting on changes in the block chain to propogate; that's not easy in the middle of a nuclear wasteland.

<comment><USER7> Right, or even be sure that its a legal bitcoin at all, and not just a forgery.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Bitcoins are not the future. But they're a great start.

Bitcoins have two major problems stopping mainstream adoption; excessive volatility that isn't managed and the fact that is a deflationary monetary system, with the latter being a much bigger issue.

Fundamentally a currency needs to move around fungible value. That's it. If it doesn't do that - it's useless.

Bitcoin incentivises hoarding - the opposite of value transmission - <USER2> that's the main reason it'll remain as nothing more than a mere speculative currency, like modern day tulips, and why it won't ever become an actual alternative to actual cash.

Now - this isn't a knock against crypto-currencies - which are awesome - it's merely a knock at the fact that monetary supply in the bitcoin system isn't adaptive. Bitcoin needs a central decentralized bank that will help to stabilise the system and inflate (punish hoarders) as the economy grows in fits and starts.

I'm sure that one day in the not too distant future, another crypto-currency will come about that takes all the advantages provided by bitcoin, and combines them with stability/incentives of a nation-backed currency such as the US dollar. When that happens, we can finally end the monopoly held by large financial institutions that so clearly have literally no idea what they are actually doing (see Deutsche bank just recently).

Bitcoins are just the beginning of a whole new financial world, free from restriction, fees and abuse (hopefully :).

But they most certainly are not the end.

<comment><USER11> This is fundamentally the difference between the left and right economic worldviews. The left prizes inflation, spending, and centralized nation states. The right supports deflation, saving ("hoarding"), and powerful individuals or voluntary groups. And now we are finally going to have an empirical test where the left can't wave a gun at the right to force them into inflation.

<comment><USER12> Excessive hoarding is obviously dangerous to a currency though.

Imagine a fixed supply of 1.000.000 coins and suppose 99 people managed to nab 10.000 coins initially and are just sitting on them.

The bitcoin economy will then run as though the remaining 10.000 coins is the entire economy, _but_ 99 people will have spending power equal to the value of the _entire_ economy.

<comment><USER11> First, Moore's law is technological hyperdeflation. Your dollar buys more computer power in 18 months than it does today. Yet people still buy computers. And computers are the one bright spot in this otherwise Fed-bubble- governed economy.

Second, a deflationary currency is inherently viral. The more people in it, the more valuable it is.

Third, 99 median powers are better than one government having power over the whole world currency. Power over the economy is linked to the capacity to delay gratification, rather than the ability to maintain a monopoly on counterfeiting dollars through violence against alternate currency providers (see Executive Order 6102, Bernard von Nothaus, e-gold, et alia).

In your scenario, spending by those guys would drive down the value of the currency. But they couldn't do so to an infinite extent; at best one guy could devalue it by 50%. USG by contrast has devalued the dollar 96% since 1913. Moreover, their purchasing power will rapidly decline as they sell more and more off. Finally, the blockchain will show the global distribution of holdings, making "monetary policy" of this kind more predictable than the opacity of the Fed.

People have gotten into this mindset that inflation and infinite debt are good. But I'll go with something backed by computer science over macroeconomic pseudoscience anyday. At best, consider this a controlled experiment, Satoshi vs. Bernanke. I know what side my mine is on.

<comment><USER13> Computers are in no way deflationary.

They're manufactured. Better ones are made. There are so many computers in the world now compared to demand that their value has simply inflated away, making them accessible to everyone.

If the computer market were deflationary, then computers would really only be affordable by the 5 richest men in the world.

You seem to under the mistaken assumption that money itself is an investment. It's not. Investments produce value - which hoarding money does not. Neither does hoarding computers for that matter. The moment you buy a computer it decreases in value, so unless you use it productively it really is just inflated away - much faster then your money is.

<comment><USER11> Let's focus on a single parallel:

True or false: under Moore's law, your dollar can buy K transistors today and 2K transistors in 18 months (ignoring inflation for now). Nevertheless, people do buy and sell computers in immense volume.

True or false: under hyperdeflation, your bitcoin can buy K dollars today and (at least) 2K dollars in 18 months. Nevertheless, people are trading Bitcoin in large and exponentially increasing volume (see blockchain.info/charts).

Now, I agree that the mechanisms behind the deflation in each case are different. Technological improvements are behind Moore's law while Bitcoin's ramp is due to the controlled currency supply. But what I'm getting at is that we've already faced a situation in which people could "hoard" dollars indefinitely to buy an increasingly valuable asset, namely computer power. The empirical result: they don't hoard indefinitely despite this exponential rise. In fact, they buy by the billion.

<comment><USER13> Computers do not increase in value with time. The relative value of your money with respect to the computer market increases. But your money is subject to inflation, and interest, and other markets - computer purchases can be valued against the interest accrued in not buying a computer vs the expected returns of doing so. Which, if you don't have a computer, might be forgoing a massive amount of return profit (starting a startup, running a home office, being entertained).

Deflationary _currency_ is a very different matter entirely. Because the currency gains value relative to _every other thing you could spend it on_. Money you might spend on a computer, does not.

These situations are not analogous in the slightest.

If you want to treat computers as a currency (money-like object), then the reality is that computers are a currency experiencing hyper-inflation. They don't hold any value at all, to the point that people consume them as commodities instead.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Its a nice write up, but it gets many points wrong.

1) Bitcoin is not anonymous. Its pseudonymous since all transactions take place in public between pseudonyms (ECDSA keys). This is a big difference, one that hasn't been examined too well, and what has been written on it is not encouraging[0].

2) Bitcoin is not the first currency to prevent double spending without a third party. That minimally goes back to 2006 and a paper "Compact E-cash"[0] where double spending a coin reveled the user's identity and allowed for prosecution.

The problem Bitcoin actually does solve is you don't have to trust the bank to not devalue your currency.

3) Bitcoin does not solve the Byzantine generals problem. Bitcoin is assumed to be correct if 51% of the computation power is honest. If everyone is equal, this means that bitcoin only requires that the majority of the generals are honest. The Bzyantine generals problem has no solution if even 1/3 of the generals are malicious[2]: this is a rather famous result.

How is this possible? Bitcoin isn't dealing with a fixed n Bzyantine generals, its dealing with a peer to peer system where anyone can join and you need to prevent sock puppet accounts. It's a completely different problem.

[0]F. Reid and M. Harrigan, "An analysis of anonymity in the Bitcoin system," in Privacy, security, risk and trust (PASSAT), 2011 IEEE Third Internatiojn Conference on Social Computing (SOCIALCOM). IEEE, 2011, pp. 1318–1326.

[1]<http://cs.brown.edu/~anna/papers/chl05-full.pdf>

[2][http://research.microsoft.com/enus/um/people/lamport/pubs/by...](http://research.microsoft.com/enus/um/people/lamport/pubs/byz.pdf)

<comment><USER15> I think the pseudonymous problem you are stating is a huge problem for wide adoption. If you are able to associate a key with a person, you know all the transactions done by some one (of course, with that wallet) You can take extra measures to have multiple wallets, etc, but it can be difficult to truly understand the risks and it could need an extra effort that, simply, is not going to be assumed by lots of people.

I'm pretty sure that wallets associated with service and product providers will be easy to figure out, so you can learn A LOT of sensible information about someone... I guess that the risk will be low, but the consequences could be huge.

<comment><USER16> Currently, using any accepted online transaction policy forcibly immediately associates a real identity with it every time. Bitcoin makes acting anonymously possible, it just requires work. Those that want the anonymity can put in the work to be anonymous, whereas everyone else gets the ease of use of associating keys with people.

<comment><USER14> By accepted online transaction systems I assume you mean visa, paypal, dwolla, etc.

In that case two points 1) If you are willing to accepted centralized systems , than my second citation gets you complete anonymity.

2) At least with those systems, your information isn't public to everyone.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I really like the idea of cryptographic currency, but bitcoin strikes me as a somewhat ill fated v1 of the idea.

Whatever replaces it will needs some sort of more sophisticated measure for keeping the value of a coin from fluctuating wildly; because with the way the currency is wildly deflating right now, I'd be super hesitant to "spend" a bitcoin for fear that it might be worth twice what it is now, while on the other hand, I'm also terribly afraid of buying a bitcoin, because what if they drop back down to earth? Currency only really seems spendable if its value is at least somewhat predictable.

<comment><USER18> Bitcoin is not even "v1," it is just an attempt by cryptoanarchists to create a currency without any central authority. Chaum, Okamoto, and many other researchers published a large volume of work on digital cash, creating systems that supported various notions of secure and anonymous electronic payments. Unlike Bitcoin, the security of many of these designs can be proved by reductions to hard problems, much like the security of public-key cryptosystems like ElGamal. In the typical "hack it out and pay no attention to previous work" style of the Bitcoin community, none of that research was cited or even hinted at in the original Bitcoin paper. The fact that the article presents this as a choice between something like Bitcoin and something like Paypal is telling.

The reason Chaum's digital cash startup failed is complicated, but it boils down to this: digital cash is poorly understood, banks have few compelling reasons to deploy it (their existing fraud mitigation measures keep them well within the realm of profitability), and the US government continues to work against the deployment of good cryptography.

<comment><USER19> Chaum's system was centralized. A chaum token bank may be blinded but is still a great big single central point of failure and control— they can still inflate the currency— they can still selectively deny access. The centralization created a huge operating risk and would make any such effort untrustworthy just from the perspective of political exposure.

The whole point of Bitcoin ([http://p2pfoundation.ning.com/forum/topics/bitcoin-open- sour...](http://p2pfoundation.ning.com/forum/topics/bitcoin-open-source) was to build a zero trust decentralized system.

Chaum's system provides some properties "perfectly" but they aren't the properties such a system needed to have in order to exist, much less be successful.

<comment><USER18> "A chaum token bank may be blinded but is still a great big single central point of failure and control...they can still selectively deny access."

That is not really true when there is an offline transaction protocol; the bank can only deny access initially (e.g. the bank can refuse to let you open an account), but once you are in the system you can spend money or be paid without the bank's permission. It is also possible to create threshold systems where there is no single bank, so that there is no single point of failure.

"Chaum's system provides some properties "perfectly" but they aren't the properties such a system needed to have in order to exist, much less be successful."

I think protection against double spending is a pretty fundamental property for a digital cash system to be successful. People would not use Bitcoin if they did not believe that it protects them from double spending. My only real point in all of this is that Bitcoin does not provide that protection according to the standard used by cryptographers; in practice, nobody has pulled off a double spending attack yet, but everyone knows how to do it and it is not impractical by any stretch of the imagination.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> _"If we sum up the amounts accumulated at the 609,270 addresses which only receive and never send any BTC's [bitcoins], we see that they contain 7,019,100 BTC's, which are almost 78% of all existing BTC's. This suggests that 78% of bitcoins are being hoarded, waiting for prices to rise."_

While I'm sure many bitcoins are being hoarded, the proof presented means nothing since by default all change is sent to a fresh address. So if I had a 100 bitcoins and bought an iten worth one bitcoin I would now own a new address with 99 bitcoins and no outgoing transactions giving the impression that I had never spent any of my bitcoins.

See: <https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Change>

<comment><USER21> From the paper: ('ff' letters missing due to PDF copy/paste weirdness)

</comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>=== Due to the way bitcoins can be repeatedly moved to fresh addresses, some of which can be very recent, we can not claim that all these bitcoins are out of circulation. However, 76.5% of these 78% (i.e., 59.7% of all the coins in the system) are \old coins", de ned as bitcoins received at some address more than three months before the cut o date (May 13th 2012), which were not followed by any outgoing transac- tions from that address after they were received.

To be even more cautious with our estima- tion of dormant bitcoins, we decided to ignore all the transactions which took place prior to July 18th 2010, when Mt.Gox started its exchange and price quot- ing services. The sum of the balances of all the addresses which have not been active since that date is 1,657,480 bitcoins. Clearly, by considering all these bit- coins as \lost" rather than \hoarded" we are underestimating the number of bitcoins which are kept dormant in \saving accounts".

By ignoring these very old bitcoins and repeating the same calculation, we found that 73% of all the remaining BTC's were accumulated at addresses which only receive and never send bitcoins, and that 70% of these 73% (i.e., 51%) are dormant bitcoins in the sense that they were received more than three months before our cuto date but after it became easy to exchange them. If instead of summing the transaction values we sum the nal balances of all the addresses that were active after July 18th 2010 but became inactive in the last three months, we get that 55% of all coins in the system are dormant in this sense.

This is strong evidence that the majority of bitcoins are not circulating in the system, and since it is based on the address rather than the entity graph, this conclusion is not a ected by possible inaccuracies in the way we associate addresses with users. Note that the total number of bitcoins participating in all the transactions since the establishment of the system (except for the actual minting operations) is 423,287,950 BTC's

<comment><USER22> Wow. So it genuinely does look like ~80% of the BTC in existence are just being sat on.

This is certainly consistent with the attitudes of miners and enthusiasts I've seen on the bitcoin forums.

<comment><USER23> A lot of bitcoins have also been lost forever by their owners.

<comment><USER22> How many is a lot I wonder? I guess that's even harder to figure out than how many are idle. If it's approaching a few % of the idle coins it could become significant to the BTC economy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I would have titled this much differently. More along the lines of: "A Comprehensive Guide to Bitcoin".

I just found it humorous that they titled the article "Are Bitcoins the future?" and then failed the ask or answer that question anywhere in mini novel they wrote following that title.

</comment><comment><USER18> No, Bitcoin is not the future. Most people need to deal with their nation's currency to pay taxes and settle debts, most businesses need a currency that is at least reasonably stable, and that is not getting into the extremely questionable security of the Bitcoin system itself.

<comment><USER25> The difficulty in settling debts directly does not prevent Bitcoin from being the future.

The Bitcoin as a currency is not a new concept. Right now, Bitcoin is almost exactly like gold. You don't pay your taxes with gold but it could be exchanged for your nation's currency to settle debts.

Some people exchange gold directly for goods and services but very few things are priced in gold. People price things in their local currency so you must exchange the gold for national currency to purchase.

Almost everything about gold is the same as Bitcoin and gold is a very trusted and traditional way to store value.

<comment><USER26> Gold has intrinsic value. Regardless of how our economic system functions, gold is useful. Bitcoin is useless unless it is intrinsic to our economic system. Bitcoin is absolutely nothing like gold, excepting that people assign value to it.

<comment><USER27> I used to think this too. The only difference between bitcoin and gold is gold has uses aside from being a currency. Gold is however largely only worth what it is because of its use as a currency.

Interesting collection of information here: <https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Myths>

<comment><USER28> > I used to think this too. The only difference between bitcoin and gold is > gold has uses aside from being a currency.

Well, the other big difference -- and one that drives a lot of the interest in physically holding gold against the threat of a general economic collapse -- is that physical gold plausibly could retain some value as a currency in the event of a general economic collapse that disrupts the viability of major social institutions.

<comment><USER21> why is gold more reliable than BTC?

If the USA collapses, bullets may become the new currency. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Fistful_of_Paintballs>

<comment><USER28> > why is gold more reliable than BTC?

Because in a collapse in which major institutions fail, the gold you have physically on hand will still be on hand, verifiable as gold, and available for exchange, for whatever value it has.

BTC, not so much.

> If the USA collapses, bullets may become the new currency

Sure, bullets may be even better than gold as insurance against a general collapse, but that doesn't stop gold from being better than BTC in that regard.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> _> Bitcoin is the first digital currency to solve the double-spending problem without needing a trusted third party._

Really? Just a quick search, and I find: (2007)

[http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/articleDetails.jsp?arnumber=4...](http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/articleDetails.jsp?arnumber=4268195)

Is that the paper Bitcoin is based on? According to Wikipedia, Bitcoin was introduced in 2009.

Also, the price of a 51% attack is not that high:

[http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/17gqw0/the_price_of...](http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/17gqw0/the_price_of_a_51_attack/)

I've seen a more recent estimate that it would be $20 million to mount such an attack. That's chump change for a power like the US, or even another major industrialized nation. It's about the price of one older fighter jet and a faction of the price of a current one.

<comment><USER30> That paper you link to uses a trusted third party. I highly doubt you could run a 51% attack for any significant amount of time on $20MM. Consider the coins being mined everyday are worth ~500,000USD.

That is not to say it is impossible, but there is almost no way anyone in the world could pull it off for $20MM except the people who already have ASIC designs.

<comment><USER29> _> That paper you link to uses a trusted third party._

Not according to the abstract.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> artumi-richard If bit coins are used to avoid tax, as they could easily be, and that seriously threatens a government's tax take then the government would kill bitcoin. Even if it meant shutting down the internet. If it only mildy threatens the government you might find transactions being slowly split into two, one part in local currency for tax purposes and a second part which is anonymous and digital.

As far as I can tell bitcoin is a neo-conservative wet dream, if it gained mass traction anyway.

<comment><USER16> If governments tried to shut down the internet they would have significantly more enemies than just currency speculators to war with. Also, any first world economy that cut off the internet today would go back into the dark ages and would suffer a more severe recession than the great depression.

No government in the first world could realistically try to shut down the Internet. And if BTC gains transaction, it becomes harder and harder (eventually prohibitively so) for a gov't to disrupt the block chain or launch an attack on it.

<comment> artumi-richard If the government has the potential of _no_ revenue they would turn off the internet. Because they would believe, as I do, that government is good, as they do things like Schools, Roads, Defense (and in the UK HealthCare), policing, welfare, etc etc, and they collectively are more important than the internet.

If all currency is traded anonymously. There will be no tax take.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Every time I see an article about bitcoin I do a ctrl-f on the comments for the word "laundering" and come up empty. At some point, the men in black are going to make an example of someone.

As soon as bitcoin transactions tend to be over 10K, the FBI and Secret Service and IRS are going to be all over it. Do what you want with your banknotes. Just be warned: The dealer on the corner taking dollar bills is _much, much, much_ safer to deal with than any digital currency.

</comment><comment><USER32> Bitcoins are valuable only because people are hoarding it. It's a classic case of bubble. In the end, they're just bits, and that doesn't have much value.

<comment><USER33> Your (traditional currency) bank balance is "just bits". The only reason that a number stored on a bank's computer has value is that we have all agreed to trust the bank not to mess with that number. They are allowed to add and subtract from it in very limited circumstances, usually only when they modify another bank balance by the same amount (unless it's a bank in Cyprus!).

Bitcoin replaces that trust in banks with fancy cryptography. Assuming the cryptography is up to snuff, there is no reason why people won't come to accept it's value in time, just as we now accept that the "bits" that represent our bank balance denote value.

<comment><USER34> Thought experiment: I set up my own "bank", which is really just a little website that maintains accounts and a transaction ledger. I somehow manage to convince a large fraction of the population that I will follow certain rules and not mess with those numbers. Assuming that I do manage this, do you think those numbers on my website would become valuable?

If yes, why? If no, why do you believe that trust is the reason that fiat currency is valuable?

Consider the following alternative explanation: Fiat currency is valuable because there is demand for it. The prime source of demand for fiat currency is for taxes. The secondary source is from all sorts of contracts (in particular, mortgage and other debt service) that require lots of people to obtain it. Trust comes in only as a tertiary source, at best.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> >Bitcoin is the first digital currency to solve the double-spending problem without needing a trusted third party.

This is false. Karma was a p2p currency that did this in 2004, 5 years before Bitcoin: <http://www.cs.cornell.edu/People/egs/papers/karma.pdf>

</comment><comment><USER36> This article makes me ponder about the origins of Bitcoin.

This page claims that it could be a group of people who made it, which seems a bit more likely: <https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Satoshi_Nakamoto>

Does anyone else have any interesting insights into the origin of Bitcoin?

<comment><USER18> Judging by the original paper, the subsequent writings, and the kinds of things prominent members of the Bitcoin community say, it is likely that whoever created Bitcoin was an amateur. There are few references made to the work done by Chaum or Okamoto. The security proof in the Bitcoin paper considers only one specific attack strategy. ECDSA and SHA256 are referenced but little is said about whether or not they compose securely with the Bitcoin protocol, or even if the Bitcoin protocol itself is secure.

It is not that I mean to insult amateurs -- amateurs can theoretically make secure cryptosystems (though Bitcoin is not secure under the security notions used by cryptographers), but it is usually pretty clear when a system was designed by someone who is not well-versed in cryptography. It is unfortunate, however, that Bitcoin's developers cannot be bothered to search Google:

[https://www.google.com/search?q=digital+cash+site%3Aeprint.i...](https://www.google.com/search?q=digital+cash+site%3Aeprint.iacr.org)

<comment><USER37> If you don't mind, how is Bitcoin not secure under the security notions used by cryptographers?

This is interesting because if it wasn't secure I wonder why hundreds of millions of dollars have not been stolen yet? You could probably steal 100 million from some top addresses, move to MtGox and sell for a very decent rate before what you did became apparent (of course once what did became apparent Bitcoin would collapse forever)

Or if the addresses are secure and its something else that is not secure what is it? I am on the bitcointalk forum a lot and I have not read anything about the crypto being not secure.

Maybe I misunderstand what you mean by security?

<comment><USER38> I look at it this way: there are two kinds of rules in the Bitcoin system: crypto rules and social rules.

Some are self-executing, by which I mean that they can be enforced "by construction" - if you create an object that doesn't follow the rule, other people will know. Said another way, breaking the rule would also require breaking some crypto.

Some rules, though, are social. For example, why does everyone try to extend the longest branch in the block chain? Sure, the protocol _says_ it's the rule, but why should that mean anything? People don't follow rules because they want to. They follow rules because it's in their enlightened self interest to do so. If you could make money by choosing a different rule, somebody would do that instead. So it must be that these rules get followed because it's in the interest of Bitcoin players to follow them. The natural follow-up question is whether these social/economic rules are stable. That is, why not some other solution? Why not only extend blocks whose (nonce % 0x0d) == 0?

Cryptographers use a very particular notion of security in which they like the security of their schemes to "reduce" to a well-understood assumption. That is, we prefer it you can prove something like "if you can break my system, then you can also solve problem X" where problem X is well-known and widely thought to be very hard. Then either I am forced to believe that your system is secure or that you have found an efficient way to solve problem X. And since solving problem X is unlikely, I should consider your system secure.

As I said, some parts of Bitcoin _do_ reduce in this way to known cryptographic primitives (which in turn reduce to problems we believe are hard). But not all the parts.

<comment><USER37> Thanks, this is exactly what I wanted to know. You make a good point about the social rules. The biggest hole in the entire system is the network is still dictated entirely by these rules and the main client is the vessel in which all these rules are set.

But its not set in stone and the lead developers do have a huge amount of control.

Also many disagreements in the forum about the max block size and blocking Satoshi Dice do worry me.

<comment><USER39> The max block size, and consequently the transaction fees, are the most urgent problems to solve IMO.

There's still time, but it really is something you don't want to mess up. <https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=157141.0>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> "Bitcoin is unknown territory. It draws praise from Silicon Valley fixture Paul Graham and simultaneous dismissal from Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman. "

No, No, nO!! There is no Nobel Price in economics, period.

There is a "Nobel MEMORIAL price" made by a central bank to propagate their propaganda as scientific, huge difference.

</comment><comment><USER41> This is a great write up.

</comment><comment><USER42> No one knows the future. They could be, and that's a pretty amazing prospect.

</comment><comment><USER43> I would have to say: "nopes...", on this one ;)</comment>


"grep -R doesn't automatically search amazon" - <AUTHOR> https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gnome-terminal/+bug/1055766

<comment><USER2> My favorite bit appears in the comment chain:

 _> akeane, please stop with the snark.

Why is my bug report a "snark", I have in good faith reported what I consider a bug with Ubuntu, namely the functionality that is being added to the GUI is not also being consistently added to the CLI tools that some many of us rely on.

You have chosen to mark my bug report "invalid", which is your total prerogative and I have total respect for you doing that.

I am saddened, however, you have chosen to resort to personal insults (being labeled a snark nearly made my monocle drop out!), rather than focusing on the technical issues presented._

<comment><USER3> And this, from further down:

 _grep --universe would be a good shortcut, except that i think we all agree this important functionality should be present by default. showing these results from places other than my local computer should be opt-out! how about grep --no-universe ?_

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> While this is amusing, it's also rather disrespectful.

You may not agree with the decision by the Ubuntu team to incorporate a feature...and that's fine. There are plenty of ways to voice that opinion (blogs, email, forum).

Putting patently invalid(joke) bug reports in a system that's designed for actionable bug fixes just makes life a bit more troublesome for people actually trying to fix things. Harassing them about it through this channel seems like a waste of their time.

Seems like Shuttleworth responded to this gracefully, though. :)

<comment><USER5> It's akin to a sit in protest. I think it's adequately placed.

<comment><USER6> And adequately impotent. When you insult someone, they stop listening to you.

<comment><USER7> Ignoring something in a public forum like this won't simply make it "go away", though.

There are 100's if not 1000's of eyes on this already (and likely 1000's more now that it's being shared on news aggregators).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This lacks ambition.

        $> cd ~/Movies/Avengers
           ... people who changed into this directory were also interested in
           Marvel Avengers Assemble [DVD]        £10.00

        $> ls ~
           Desktop   Downloads   Movies   Music   Pictures
           ... related items
           Intelliplug - Desktop Version    £12.95

<comment><USER9>
       $> gcc -o test test.c

          test.c:1:22: iostream.h: No such file or directory
          ... people who encountered this error often purchase
          GCC For Professionals [Hardcover]  £12.95

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> It amazes me how easily this whole thing could have been prevented if they had just made the Amazon results show up in a separate shopping lens instead of the default lens.

Then even if it's pre-installed there'd be some reasonable expectation that a program designed to show you shopping selections would have to connect to a 3rd party server and send your query.

<comment><USER11> What amazes _me_ is that people make it sound as if they did not consider this. Of course what they considered doing that but also realized that it will raise very little revenue since 99.99% of folks will not click on the Shopping lens.

With this way, people are forced to see Amazon results and a few of them clicking on irrelevant results and buying will result in a lot more revenue comparatively given that it's certainly an affiliate deal.

<comment><USER12> It's just a total misfire to take Linux users, many of whom are in the Venn diagram intersection of "computer savvy" and "libre software advocate", and then try to force them to watch advertisements on their own desktop.

Even people that don't know computers would probably prefer to use Windows or OS X, since that's going to be a nicer experience.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Great to see Shuttleworth taking it easy...

> grep --universe might be a better shortcut ;)

[https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gnome- terminal/+bu...](https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gnome- terminal/+bug/1055766/comments/13)

<comment><USER14> I find "grep --universe" confusing because that should be a shortcut for searching Amazon for Carl Sagan cooking books.

       http://www.neatorama.com/2009/12/31/carl-sagans-apple-pie-recipe/

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Can someone explain the context of this? I'm not getting the references. I mean, I know what grep is, and I know the -R option, but ...

Is the joke that grep obviously has nothing to do with searching a server you're not on, and the submitter is pretending to be someone who expected that it would search Amazon for results? If so, that's stupid, and not even a clever joke.

However, from some of the comments, it sounds like real users (ones actually competent enough to be using grep) are expecting this functionality -- perhaps it doesn't work on some Amazon storage site?

<comment><USER16> This is a reaction to the fact that, as of 12.10, the Ubuntu Unity "search lens" now includes Amazon results.

[http://www.pcworld.com/article/2010538/now-in-ubuntu- linux-1...](http://www.pcworld.com/article/2010538/now-in-ubuntu- linux-12-10-integrated-amazon-search-results.html)

<comment><USER15> Okay, then he gets a solid "thumbs up" from me!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> The decision to include Amazon results (by default!) is not in itself a terrible move, but it is an incorrect one.

The fact that it is so patently incorrect to so many outside observers forces me to consider whether the internal vision of the project is completely distorted. No, it's not a big deal, it's just a silly & inappropriate use of your time, and potentially a symptom of a distressing detachment from the real.

</comment><comment><USER18> Snark aside, it's a valid point. Shouldn't CLI tools mimic GUI tools?

<comment><USER19>
        quake3cli --map anarki -e '(walk-forward) (rotate 0.2) (fire)'

<comment><USER20> Hmm, would I use -e - or will it read from stdin if I don't supply -e?

How do I pipe to it?

<comment><USER21> I imagine you'd read from /dev/random, if you wanted to play as well as I do. All joking aside, I imagine that one could easily write a bot that allowed one to give it heuristics via STDIN or a command line parameter.

I doubt many would do it this way, but it would be consistent with the unix design ethos. One program would manage the Playing the Game and perhaps providing an API for interacting with the game, or even a pluggable section of games, and another would handle generating heuristics (or retrieving them).

Then you could, e.g.:

multibot -g quake3 --name "Rocket Llama" -h rockets.lua multibot -g quake3 --name "Ash" -h shotgun-only.lua cat /dev/urandom | multibot -g quake3 --name "Confused"

multibot -g civ3 --name "Dr. No" -h well-defended-island.lua multibot -g civ3 --name "Dr. Evil" -h meeeeelion.lua

That'd be a nightmare to implement, of course. :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> It would have been a more effective snark if it came with a pull request.

<comment><USER23> Then it wouldn't have had this bit:

>Please can you change the grep warez to have this feature, and just install it on my machine while I'm down the pub, after all you do "erm, have root", so it should be easy for you to do :-)

which made the post for me

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Awesome that Shuttleworth replied, and in good humor.

I still totally buy that ads are step one to Ubuntu integrating more closely with Amazon, and the latter making a pretty bold device play.

</comment><comment><USER25> Are people this bored that they start trolling open source bug database?

<comment><USER26> You read it, then commented on it. So I think you answered your own question.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> The saddest part is this probably offended some people.

For the troubled Ubuntu user who still has a sense of humor and an ounce of common sense, I recommend Linux From Scratch. Time to start over.

<comment><USER28> For the "lazy" power user that doesn't want to build everything from scratch I recommend Archlinux.

<comment><USER27> The thing with LFS is that it would cause Linux users to learn. Not necessarily a bad thing. And I would predict it could lower their tolerance for the lots of the garbage that many ditributions force on them. (Like this brilliant move by Ubuntu!) Who knows, it could lead to a more DIY capable userbase.

They would not have to ask anyone how to remove things or plead with decision- makers to implement their desired changes, they'd just do it themselves.

But yeah, from what I know the Arch Linux distribution imposes a very minimal amount of "pre-configuration".

I've always found it easier to add stuff to a bare bones OS configuration than to remove it from a pre-configured one (you have to thoroughly understand what you're removing first; it's easy to break someone else's delicate Rube Goldberg contraption). But maybe that's just me.

<comment><USER29> >The thing with LFS is that it would cause Linux users to learn. Not necessarily a bad thing.

This is exactly why I stopped using RHEL and other distros back in the late 90's. I am very interested in learning - to some extent. Writing my own goddamned drivers for my ADSL modem was not what I had in mind. Canonical and Ubuntu have made huge strides forward for Linux in the marketplace.

<comment><USER27> Yeah, but who said anything about writing drivers? Very few people can do that. How about just really basic stuff, like how to not have ads for Amazon popping up when there is no need?

The driver issue is, in my opinion, the single biggest problem with not using Windows or Mac. If you just jump right into that issue i.e. that the latest driver for your peripehral is not going to be available for some time and ignore all the other benefits of Linux and other UNIX-like systems, then you could pretty easily conclude these systems are worthless. Hardware manufacturers don't care about them. They only care about Windows and Mac.

But we all know these other systems like Linux are far from worthless.

Clearly, there is some middle ground.

You can still do a heck of a lot without the source code for the 2012 driver for Whiz Bang Hardware Component.

If Canonical and Ubuntu decided not to accept any binary blobs I wonder if the "strides" would seem as huge.

<comment><USER29> These days Ubuntu has made some seriously poor decisions; I won't deny that (Unity is a joke, this Amazon thing is a huge lol). But Canonical was vital in the push to get Linux on the desktop and to be accepted as more than a "hacker's playground" that is too hard to use for the average person.

Chromebooks and other low-cost appliances like it are successful in large part because of how easy Ubuntu/Canonical made it to transfer into the Linux world from Windows.

I personally use an Ubuntu 11.x build for everything these days (minus some plain Debian builds on my ARM7 devices), and I really like what they've done for Linux - even if the present stuff they've done has been a little stupid.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> New kind of trolls detected in the wild: bugtracker trolls.

<comment><USER31> Bugtracker trolls have been around a while.

When we started using bugzilla for GCC (many years ago now), within the first 100 bug reports, i think there were 5 trolls.

This also isn't very advanced trolling. Advanced trolling is indistinguishable from the thing they were trying to parody.

<comment><USER32> Ubuntu bug #1 did sort of set a precedent...

<https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu//+bug/1>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Shouldn't this be a bug in locate?</comment>


Ask HN: How do you decide where to direct your charitable giving? - <AUTHOR>

Or, what makes a charitable project or organization attractive to you? As the holiday season approaches in the US, many individuals and companies step up their giving. For both individuals and companies, what determines how much you'll give and where it will go? How did you discover the organizations to which you currently give? Are you satisfied with how your donations have been used?<p>For background, I run a tech-focused community organization, and I'm trying to figure out ways to improve our donation revenue this season as we work towards financial self-sustainability. The name's not important here, but you can email me for more info. <comment><USER2> I believe there are sites that reiew overhead. That's a first big one...

I donate to things are non-denomniational, but of my religious background. That's a personal choice. They tend to be a top on my list.

Assoicated with children is anohter big one. However it really had to make an impact.

Also I tend to want to give where there is impact where I live. And I can go check in. It is nice to not only make a monetary impact, and also a physical impact.

Also, I was brought up that charity should long term get the person off charity. Teach a man to fish. The charity might end up self-destructing, but that's ok. People get up and fall down, and the point of charity is the helping of the getting up.

Personal views, of course.

</comment><comment><USER3> I am actually working on a startup to help people decide where to direct their charitable givings to. In the US alone there are over 1 million registered charities. It is very tough for someone to figure out which charity is in line with their beliefs/hopes/aspirations. And on the other side, charities want to get more exposure to the kinds of people that would be interested in donating to them. We want to be in the middle to act as a matchmaker.

</comment><comment><USER4> Just an opinion, but my wife and I both like Heifer Project, and I also like afsc.org/</comment>


Returns over Last 20 Years Berkshire Hathaway: +387% Gold: +488% - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/charliebilello/status/1159463389506297856 <comment><USER2> It's 2,806% for AMZN. Survivorship bias combined with arbitrary time windows can yield very impressive numbers.</comment>


Ask HN: How do you build an audience? - <AUTHOR>

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5903868
Was looking at the passive income thread that got so highly upvoted. How do you build an audience HN? I'm a complete noob and don't know anything marketing.
Any good starting points, communities, references, de facto standards, etc? <comment><USER2> Ah, you need to understand SEO (to optimize your site), metrics/analytics (to understand your visitors and measure improvement), and most importantly, interesting content that is connected to people who would be interested in it.

There are hundreds of Great American Novels lying around in drawers as unpublished manuscripts. Many of them are truly great. Don't be one of them! You need to find your audience, get product/market fit. That's about marketing.

<comment><USER3> I hope you didn't list that in order of importance.

First you have to find a niche. If your product/book/website/blog/whatever is the only one out there, it's a red flag because it might mean that there's no need for whatever you offer.

A product will never create a need, you create a product out of people's need.

Try to look for something that already exists, and you know you can make it better, and pitch whatever you built to the your competitors dissatisfied users, and there you go, you have an audience.

Then you can start looking into metrics/analytics and finally into SEO.

<comment><USER2> Well, I did say that interesting content was the most important thing (really, interesting content that those who are interested in it would know about).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> There's a farm who started posting pictures of their animals on websites like Pinterest and Reddit. They have a pretty big following now, for a small farm. I also noticed that they are outranking pretty big sites(like Petsmart) since they started.

You just have to have something worth sharing.

</comment><comment><USER5> It really depends what is your market? What kind of products do you make or services do you offer? You would use very different approach if you're making a game, car or bug-tracking software.

</comment><comment><USER6> It is all about OC -- original content.

<comment><USER7> That is a necessary but insufficient criteria. I have original content. I still have no audience. I have more traffic than I used to, but I am still trying to work out just what am I missing? Because an awful lot of pat answers over the years have failed to solve my traffic problems.

<comment><USER6> OK, good. I think these are excellent books on SEM:

"Search Engine Optimization: An Hour a Day" by Jennifer Grappone

"Getting Noticed on Google" by Ben Norman

And if it isn't measured, it isn't managed:

"Scientific Advertising" Claude C. Hopkins

<comment><USER7> Thanks! I will see what I can do, though e-books and websites are better for me (for medical reasons -- I don't do so well with paper books).</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Testing Google Stadia [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o6pf988yFSc <comment><USER2> I seriously did not understand how there could be no input lag, and even though I was asking people who both tried and watched it they all said that it was not noticeable. I had a hard time believing it, and still can't...

Stadia should, theoretically, be like playing an online multiplayer game with no lag compensation. Your inputs are received and processed, and the output is sent back at the network delay; this is going to be _at best_ three to four frames late (60 ms on a good day, with 16 ms per frame at 60 FPS). Unless you run multiple instances of the game at the background and do input prediction at different modes (much like CPU branch prediction, I suppose), you will encounter this significant lag. Even with prediction, the experience just cannot be smooth.

<comment><USER3> The best they could do is enforce a constant latency equal to your worst-case actual latency, so at least it was consistent and you'd be able to compensate for it. (This was a thing that RTS games used to do, consistent mid-level latency feels way better than variable latency.)

<comment><USER4> Yes this is a key, consistency of lag for some is crucial for experience.

I can see a lot of games to be playable with Stadia.

However anything competitive PvP is a no-no. Playing TF2 I could tell whats is server ping with accuracy of around 30ms by using projectile weapons. Adding best case scenario 60ms is a big deal.

Stadia simply can't ever compete with local setups. Currently multiplayer game will play with your local input and then resolve any inconsistencies on server side (this is the reason you were 'killed' when clearly behind a wall). While the resolution of the local input might differ to server the responsiveness feeling of local input is part of good play experience.

There are corner cases for some games (RDR2 - all actions have long unskippable animation) or game play style racing games (input lag is hidden by the 'responsiveness of a car').

All that said, its still very impressive how low they got. I was expecting no less then 100ms.

<comment><USER5> But what if the TF2 server runs on the same Google machine?

<comment><USER2> Then there's two ways to work with that:

1) It's only Stadia users against each other;

2) People who are directly connected to the Google machine _still_ have an advantage over the Stadia players.

The first is... OK. You'll be fine, the playerbase will be tiny and you won't be able to play with your non-Stadia friends.

The drawback for the second one is a little less obvious, but the result is that the Stadia users will not benefit from the client-side lag compensation measures that Source (TF2's engine) implements. Most people in this thread miss the fact that in multiplayer games you're always ahead of where the server thinks you are, because you're playing on your timeline, and the server perceives you at RTT/2 behind. When you think you perform an action, the server travels back in time to determine whether how it played out (as opposed to actually executing your actions in what is relatively RTT/2 later).

<comment><USER5> @2.) I disagree that this would necessarily lead to a disadvantage for Stadia users. When the prediction turns out to be wrong, your client has to correct which can be disconcerting. This is not the case for Stadia users. Prediction is certainly more comfortable, but i am not sure it is an advantage. What you are describing is just moving the prediction from the client to the server. If the server receives input from t-10 and recalculates the state(t) and sends it to the client then obviously (t-9) - (t-1) inputs are missing for the final state calculation at t.

<comment><USER4> That's what I described in my comment. And while it is ture that you might feel cheated because something else happened on the screen (your character was hit while already in cover). This is 'rare' event in terms of perception. Client makes a lot of predictions but most of those misses are invisible to user.

What is visible and perceivable is the lag effect and it is constant and unavoidable.

The client - server differences are handled differently depending on the game. AFAIK there is a trend of 'attacker' advantage ie client input is more favored when resolving delta, incentivizing active play vs camping. In that case Stadia fares worse then local.

<comment><USER6> Rare? Depends on what you play. Overwatch, cod, and destiny are terrible for this. Happens to me several times, per 10 minute game. Csgo is the best in my experience.

Trading kills can theoretically happen, but it's like lightning. If it's happening a lot there's something wrong. My guess is the fuzzy calculations in the earlier mentioned games err on the side of killing everyone.

<comment><USER4> Overwatch is just badly made game, half of those are engine issues rather then buggy netcode.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Eurogamer also did a tech review, and actually did find it laggy: [https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2019-stadi...](https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2019-stadia- tech-review)

Also, they found that to get the best performance from it, it sucked down in the region of 20gb per hour of data. Which is a lot for countries with capped internet allowances.

<comment><USER8> It's streaming video, so depending on your settings, about the same as Netflix I would think?

<comment><USER9> Pre-prepared streaming video will compress much better: amongst other things, modern codecs will send frames out-of-sequence in order to better compress, have motion prediction, stuff like that. Even if this system is willing to spend the compute to do high-level compression, they don't have the data from future frames yet that will allow them to get down as low as you can go.

Equally, because you know so much about the scene, there are many more opportunities to do smart video compression - however, those would be extremely difficult to take advantage of.

<comment><USER3> > Equally, because you know so much about the scene, there are many more > opportunities to do smart video compression

Ultimately they could cache textures, models etc. on the client system and only transmit data about the players' locations and inputs. Then the codec would render the game on the client... hey wait.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The problem I have with Stadia is that you need a monthly subscription and also need to pay full price for all games. Games that can't be sold on the second hand market, unlike the current console games. And at $129 it's not far off from the €200 I paid for my PS4 during Black Friday 2017. The TCO of the Stadia seems much higher than traditional consoles.

The upside is using it on a mobile device but to me this doesn't add value, as the network connection outside my house is either a high-latency 3G connection or someone else's unreliable WiFi. And with Remote Play on the PS4 I have similar capabilities.

<comment><USER11> >The problem I have with Stadia is that you need a monthly subscription and also need to pay full price for all games.

Yes. The problem with Stadia is Google. Google hates hardware and they pretty much half-ass everything that is even an inch outside of their core competency.

There is something exciting about cloud-gaming, even in the present state ... but to make it a success it would have required Google to make better deals with content providers (maybe turn it into a true Netflix-for-games), and potentially pour some significant resources to subsidize it. For example, they could make the controller/hardware really cheap, subsidize content-provider licenses (so games are available via an Xbox-pass type service, or are half the price of their PS4/Xbox counterparts), or, god-forbid, invest in first- party studios to create original games. But that's not the Google way.

<comment><USER12> > The problem with Stadia is Google. Google hates hardware and they pretty > much half-ass everything that is even an inch outside of their core > competency.

You make it sound like their core products are good.

Search is worse than in 2009.

Ads has been useless for me for years, even when I tried to help..!

Anyone here who buys Google ads, expect to be fleeced for nothing:

There exist ads I want (events, local) , but I never see them.

On the contrary: for years I've seen irrelevant but probably very expensive ads that aren't even remotely interesting but rather insulting.

<comment><USER13> > Search is worse than in 2009

To be fair, the internet is worse as a whole. Google is at war with SEO and bad actors.

This is not to reduce how bad/evil their ad model has become.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Dan Luu recently measured latency of computers of the past, keyboards, terminals. See posts listed on [https://danluu.com/](https://danluu.com/)

[https://danluu.com/input-lag/](https://danluu.com/input-lag/)

[https://danluu.com/keyboard-latency/](https://danluu.com/keyboard-latency/)

[https://danluu.com/term-latency/](https://danluu.com/term-latency/)

[https://danluu.com/latency-mitigation/](https://danluu.com/latency- mitigation/)

</comment><comment><USER15> The stream I saw said there was barely any noticeable lag. Not discounting this experience, but I suspect the specific corporate network might play a significant role here.

<comment><USER16> Corporate networks don't magically add latency. You would need a corporate network that idiotically sent things over the wire to a corporate office on another continent.

<comment><USER17> They are also not magically low latency. Maybe there are some QoS rules in place that deprioritize Stadia's video stream. According to the video the mobile connection was fine and the router just treats traffic over wifi differently.

<comment><USER18> Or it might be that mobile connection is better because the bandwidth needs are much lower for the mobile-size video feed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I can't see how this lag couldn't exist with the network, processing and encoding overhead. How did they get that far through product development and still assume it was viable?

<comment><USER16> They have a whole thing on using machine learning to predict your inputs to reduce input lag....essentially making it pointless for a human to play at all but that's another philosophical topic.

<comment><USER19> Oh wow that just sounds horrible. So it is entirely the illusion that it's doing what you want. It'd be as pointful as riding in one of those cheap amusement rides outside a shop. It's all shiny. I want to sit in it. But the novelty wears of immediately when you realise you're not totally in control of things.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Been using Nvidia's GeForce Now for a couple of months, playing games like Apex Legends on a macbook air 2013. Works like a charm! The only issue have been the waiting time between game updates (I guess they have to update all their servers, which takes time).

</comment><comment><USER21> Stadia and other streaming services will be a next unique selling point for internet providers. It could cost consumers more money to have a 'stadia'-ready connection, where the ISP invests in more stable infrastructure. Routers and wifi access points could be 'stadia'-ready. Do not forget Stadia will be a free service next year and consumers are going try out free-to-play games and blame ISPs for lag.

</comment><comment><USER22> I have been using Shadow for a couple of months from my fast and stable gigabit FTTH connection. My ping to their servers is about 20 ms, and I have to make a conscious effort to notice any input lag. Some of you may argue my brain is slow. I can assure you it is not.

On the other hand, I got Stadia a couple of days ago, and although graphics work very well, input lag is unbearable. Some streaming users will experience input lag because their Internet connections cannot handle it, but that is not my case.

It's sad because I live in Dublin. Google has servers here. Shadow's servers are in the Netherlands. I'm very disappointed at the level of incompetence that Google displayed on this release. They have enough data centres, money and quality network connections to pull this off properly, yet they didn't. Shadow, a small French company streaming remote Windows PCs, did a much better job running standard Windows games that are not purposefully made to be streamed.

</comment><comment> Const-me What might have worked for them, develop a new game engine from the ground up, designed for their unique environment.

Games do non-trivial amount of processing with relaxed latency requirements: physics, cloth, many particle systems, fluid dynamics, some other VFX like weather / time of day, many parts of gameplay logic. Even some parts of rendering pipeline don't require low latency, e.g. camera frustum culling doesn't. Many of these things even run on CPUs as opposed to GPUs, and cloud providers have a lot of idle CPU and RAM resources.

Such a hybrid engine might be OK offloading half of the code to the cloud, while still using local GPU for rendering and dynamic lighting, using assets streamed from server and cached locally. This still requires a reasonably fast local machine, but hopefully less so compared to current game engines.

Very expensive to develop and run, though. Also it may consume even more download bandwidth compared to the streaming video they have now.

</comment><comment><USER23> Here's a positive demo from CNET without lag issues:

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

<comment><USER24> He doesn't seem to test for lag though. You can also see there is a delay between him pressing the button and the character moving.

<comment><USER23> Compared to the one in the post it looks negligible he even says that it's fine. I don't claim it's zero lag, lol.

<comment><USER25> CNET video has 8 frames (260ms) of input lag on TV ~6 (200ms) on phone, and it looks about 720p after compression [https://mobile.twitter.com/Nitomatta/status/1196485009315520...](https://mobile.twitter.com/Nitomatta/status/1196485009315520512)

<comment><USER23> Where do you have the data from? Did you analyze the video frame-by-frame? Actually that's not bad considering what are we talking about here. Wish I could try it.

<comment><USER25> You can pause YT clip and skip one frame at a time using ,.(<>) keys.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I remember trying out Gaikai in some 2009, and I was completely blown away both by the quality and by the latency. It felt like magic, I couldn't understand why they didn't succeed commercially, and I still can't understand why there is still no better service out there.

<comment><USER27> THer's also GeForceNow, from nvidia - it's been around for a few years now.

I've used it for Prey 2 (finished) and The Witcher 3 (in progress) and I'm really happy with it. It's still in closed beta (although I think it's available commercially somewhere in Asia(?)), but it's a no frills product that does exactly what it says.

There's no platform play, though (like the Stadia integration with youtube and special Stadia dev framework etc), but that's an advantage to some.

<comment><USER26> I also have a GeForce Now account, but somehow, it doesn't feel as smooth as Gaikai back then. An FPS like CS GO is unplayable for me - because of input lag.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> The solution is to build mini data-centers frequently placed around neighbourhoods in an ecological way.

<comment><USER29> Micro data-center in each home. Then we can just attach the input and output devices to said data-centers, and skip the whole video encode/decode step as well.

<comment><USER28> I mean we use Uber and book rooms on AirBnb. Why not to share gpu cycles ?

<comment><USER30> I cannot tell of this is sarcasm.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> From what I gathered, it should be laggy. I mean, you have to have a killer Internet speed to pull this off and even then - the inconsistency and fluctuation of speed are just natural. Waiting a bit to see how this will be solved

</comment><comment><USER32> There will always be a lag. The best they can do is hide the lag by doing some stuff on the client (e.g. mouse cursor or shifting viewport pixel-wise). That ways I suppose they could get this on a level where most people don't notice.

</comment><comment><USER33> Promised 60fps 4k and no lag. Delivered 720p/1080p, compression artifacts and 200ms lag in best cases. That's like onLive 10 years ago.</comment>


Scientists are searching for a mirror universe - <AUTHOR> https://www.nbcnews.com/mach/science/scientists-are-searching-mirror-universe-it-could-be-sitting-right-ncna1023206 <comment><USER2> Barring the terrible style of the article, I think the concept of a mirror universe is not difficult to understand.

If we take our three spacial dimensions, and add another time dimension, then we can do a reflection at t=0 and this will produce a mirror object of everything from t>0 at t<0\. (Note that in three dimensions, if we perform a reflection it is the same as a rotation when we add a fourth dimension, meaning we can do this "mechanically" if that is worth anything to you.)

This universe at t<0 looks exactly the same as our universe at t>0, except that you switch chirality (or left and right if you will). Now my toy example does not have exotic matter (abundance) differences and also cannot comment at things at the speed of light. In that sense it is Euclidean or perhaps Newtonian.

But what is interesting is that this toy example gives us a concrete way to understand right and left. You can choose anything to call left and anything to call right. But the side at which your heart is of your body will be switched at t<0\. Additionally, and this is the only part that I find important or useful, we have actually partitioned things now according to whether they internally define left and right in the usual way or in the opposite way. And finally, we can even now say that subatomic particles that decide to decay as matter or antimatter now self-identify themselves for us and their choice of chirality determines their position at either x > 0 or -x < 0.

EDIT: Disclaimer: I am a mathematician, not a physicist.

<comment><USER3> Physicists have considered two time dimensions, but it seems that 3+1 spacetime is 'priviledged'. Here is a chart showing properties of n+m-dimensional spacetimes [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Spacetime_dimensionality....](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Spacetime_dimensionality.svg)

This article speaks about mirror universe that exists in the same 3+1 dimensional space-time as ours. It's just that the two are transparent to each other. Only gravity ties them together.

<comment><USER4> If this concept is interesting to you, Greg Egan has written an entire scifi novel (Dichronauts) set in a 2+2 universe. Weirdness abounds, but quite rigorous.

<comment><USER5> Was going to highlight that book too. It's also helpful / fun to explore the articles and visualizations outside the book either before/during/after reading it. [https://www.gregegan.net/DICHRONAUTS/DICHRONAUTS.html](https://www.gregegan.net/DICHRONAUTS/DICHRONAUTS.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > _"It's pretty wacky," Broussard says of her mind-bending exploration._

The quality level here smacks of 1999 vintage Onion:

[https://www.theonion.com/worlds-top-scientists-ponder- what-i...](https://www.theonion.com/worlds-top-scientists-ponder-what-if-the- whole-univers-1819565229)

<comment><USER7> Thanks for the link

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I was under the impression baryonic matter has been strongly excluded as a candidate for dark matter, because dark matter does not seem to clump together; it seems to interact with itself only through gravity as well. So it can't be any kind of baryonic matter, in a mirror universe or a nearby brane or anything like that, which is also why the idea of "dark matter life" does not seem likely; you can't build life out of a material that interacts with itself only gravitationally.

Although, do free neutrons clump?

Then again, if the neutrons oscillate to "mirror" and then have a high probability of coming back, presumably an independent probability over time, that can't be dark matter either since it tunnels back on timeframes even humans consider short.

Anyhow, on the article's own terms, the connection to dark matter seems tenuous.

</comment><comment><USER9> This reminds me of 'The Gods Themselves', by Asimov. Doesn't talk about a mirror universe per se, but a parallel one. It's one of my favourite Asimov stories outside the Foundation/Robots series.

<comment><USER10> Personally I think it is Asimov's best work, with I Robot not far behind and Foundation in a distant third. Honestly not sure why people are so enamored of Foundation.

<comment><USER11> I disliked The Gods Themselves when I read it the first time because of all the freaky alien sex that was described in so much detail. Of course I was a child at the time.

I liked Foundation because of the series aspect - it was a cool premise and it was good to have so many books cover it thoroughly. I did find the last bits that were just to tie it together with the Elijah Bailey stories to be boring.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> So the mirror universe is where the dark matter we can't find is, and for some reason it just happens to form halos around where our galaxies are, just to make their rotations weird. This is a strangely specific mirror universe.

</comment><comment><USER13> I just don't get how there can be more than one universe. Multiple dimensions still would be in the universe.

The definition of THE universe is: "all existing matter and space considered as a whole; the cosmos".

<comment><USER14> This is a semantic problem, not a physical. Generally, there is no single definition of the word 'universe' that all physicists ascribe to. When you have causally disjoint set of spacetimes that may or may not be governed by the same set of physical laws, some people choose call these multiple universes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Don't know enough physics to talk about the specifics of this particular experiment/research. But, it seems to me, that we live in the midst of the intersection of the "real" world and the mirror one. Similar to Newton's third law (action/reaction), for anything to exist (or make sense to us), the complement of that thing needs to exist too. For example, if there was only one color, there would be no colors, we need for two colors to exist so we can tell them apart. Things only make sense to us in contrast to what they are not.

Following the above concept, you could "split up" (conceptually) the world/universe into explicit complements and you'd have the universe and its mirror. And this is in fact a very old concept, very well illustrated by the yin and yang.

<comment><USER16> According to modern physics, the total energy of our universe is in fact zero, with matter and radiation contributing to "positive" energy, and gravity and other quantum effects contributing to "negative" energy. This is actually the reason we're able to say that our universe could have arisen from nothing, since only a universe with zero total energy can do that.

Therefore, by Occam's razor, we don't need another "mirror" universe to balance out this one.

<comment><USER17> I had never considered it like that, but it feels true. Do you have some reference material for the statement that gravity and quantum effects are "negative energy"?

<comment><USER16> It's not difficult to derive why the gravitational potential energy must be negative.[0]

For the cosmological implications of this fact, there's Lawrence Krauss's book "A Universe from Nothing", also "The Inflationary Universe" by Alan Guth, and Stephen Hawking touches on it in "A Brief History of Time."

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravitational_energy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravitational_energy)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Is the time difference between the neutron experiment results due to time dilation? One of them had the neutrons moving at high speed, I.e. In a particle beam.

<comment><USER19> No. Well, sort of. The time difference has to do with how you store free neutrons. Different conditions suppress, to varying extents, the possible energy states of the vacuum field.

Just as in the Casimir experiment it was demonstrated that opposed conductive plates are attracted with a force that results from the suppression of vacuum energy states between them, so must the decay of the neutron be modulated by the vacuum field.

If you contrive the storage system to suppress the vacuum energy to a greater extent, the field will interact less with free neutrons and they will live a little longer. Likewise, the more possible energy states, the shorter they live.

This effect is apparent because the free neutron is quite unstable and short- lived. It is readily affected by the particle-antiparticle pairs that are always popping into and out of existence in the vacuum.

Protons, which are very stable and last a long time, show the same effect, but you would be long dead by the time you observed it. So not a practical experiment.

Why does a radioactive element decay at a particular time? Why is it random? Why is Schroedinger's cat a superposition of alive/dead with no way of predicting which one until you observe it and collapse the wave equation?

The answer to all of these is the same. The background state of the universe is chaotic. It visibly affects things that are unstable, while not having much effect on things that are stable.

The faster something is moving, the more mass it has. The more mass, the less it is affected by the vacuum field. This is the mechanism of time dilation. Increased mass, decreased size, increased density, surrounded by mass, all of these contrive to suppress the interaction of the vacuum field with an object by limiting the possible states it can occupy.

The outcome looks to us like order, but it's not. Everything is randomness and chaos.

Newton's laws are approximations because they apply simple math to chaos. Likewise, general relativity is a geometric theory applied to a chaotic universe. It's a good approximation of what we see, but it's only an approximation. No geometric theory can explain something that is fundamentally chaotic.

There. Is. No. Meaning.

Sleep well!

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I liked the original form of this idea better, when it was hypothesized that universes are packed into a stack-like structure of membranes, although the mirror hypothesis has the benefit of being theoretically accessible to experimentation.

There are a couple of neat effects that fall out of the (mem)brane hypothesis. For example, it offers a model for why gravity is seemingly so weak compared to the other forces: because a large part of it leaks out into neighboring universes. In that case, we'd have a handy explanation for dark matter as well: it's gravity that leaks _in_ from neighboring universes. This would mean that stuff clumps together across universes. It could also be an auxiliary model for black hole formation in certain cases where we have yet to find out how some black holes could grow very quickly.

If we ever become a K3 civilization we could attempt to send a message across universes with gravity, or possibly even paint a symbol into the sky using large masses. Not we know how likely the other universes are to support life (probably not very).

<comment><USER21> I know Kardashev never proposed a level 4 on his scale, but would a K4 civilization be one that can span parallel universes?

<comment><USER20> I don't know since merely controlling the area is not enough, you'd have to capture (and use) all the stellar energy that comes out of that region. So K4 could be something like "uses the energy of the entire visible universe", but that's a shrinking concept over the time scales in question.

It's not a well-defined scale anyway, since you could probably build a K3-equivalent civilization with only a few star systems using miniature black holes as reactors; conversely, you could easily be a galaxy-spanning civilization but only use a fraction of the total stellar output.

The concept of translating into another universe does seem like an appropriate achievement and next step after K3. Since another universe might have wildly different basic parameters, classical sci-fi portals and such are probably out of the question. You'd have to translate the information stored in the brain into something appropriate that could continue to perform roughly the same functions on the other side.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> If there is/are mirror universe(s), wouldn't we detect particles coming from unexplained sources experimentally?

Or is the 'portal' mechanism triggered so rarely that we would probably never observe it happening naturally?

<comment><USER23> Isn't this reflected in the 10-second discrepency of decay they mention in the article?

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Despite its timecube-like-energy, I'm reminded of this: [http://www.januscosmologicalmodel.com](http://www.januscosmologicalmodel.com)

</comment><comment><USER25> Hmmm how does one store neutrons? Because I highly doubt the bottle...

It seems that in the crucial part the article makes gross oversimplification. I would imagine storage impacts observed half-life.

<comment><USER26> With very cold temperatures and magnets. The article had a link to a much better article in Science Mag [1] with more information about how neutrons are trapped.

[1] [https://science.sciencemag.org/content/360/6389/627](https://science.sciencemag.org/content/360/6389/627)

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> so could we communicate with this mirror universe using the particles that cross over?

<comment><USER28> If our scientists are trying to inject neutrons into a mirror universe, are mirror-world scientists trying to inject neutrons into ours? Could we detect that if they did?

<comment><USER29> Reminds me of the "Fringe" TV series.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> They can stop searching, we're it.

</comment><comment><USER31> This means the mirrored universe is looking for us too

<comment><USER21> They might have already found us, and realized that we were the "evil twin" universe where humans are malevolent, and have decided to avoid all contact with us.

<comment><USER32> Does that universe have JavaScript?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> The most intriguing about stories such as this is that our own ignorance on topics such as e.g. dark matter will, at some point in the future, be something a fresh grad will look back on with bemusement - how could we not possibly have managed to discover [x] as it gradually comes to be seen as self evident? This is long since the case for Newtonian mechanics which are now the domain of secondary education, and is already starting to become the case for relativity for those of sufficient education.

It's kind of an interesting thought experiment to try to put yourself in the mindset of a people before the discovery of something and trying to imagine how you would have perceived the world and if you yourself might have conceived of such notions. For instance the idea that all objects fall at the same rate of speed is something that's oddly enough an extremely recent discovery. The tale of the apple falling on Newton's head dates to but 350 years ago. We, of today, are separated by then by little more than about 4 lifetimes.

It feels at times that science progresses through 1% genius and 99% creativity. Newton's gravity is, relative to the times, no more simple or complex than Einstein's gravity and undoubtedly whatever we may eventually find to be the source of dark matter. The tricky part is that the universe has this habit of requiring us to cast aside what we think we know and look towards paths that seem insane. A feather falls at the same rate of speed as a bowling ball? Time itself can move differently for people in the same location based upon their relative velocities? Physical distances can literally contract or expand again for people in the same location and again based on their relative velocities? Objects themselves can bend what seems to be emptiness and, in turn, bend light itself (to say nothing of also having an impact on time)? These ideas are mostly so difficult to develop not because of mathematical or technical problems, but because they sound insane. It's really quite a blessing for the inquisitive and creative that we seem to live in a universe that prides itself in as being as defiant of intuition as it possibly can.

<comment><USER25> I doubt that anything like that will become standard curriculum. Some conclusions and effects might become common knowglede, but the mechanisms and theory not.

It would have to be taught in high scholl, and even then not everyone have a complete high school knowledge. People don't generally know Newtonian mechanics unless they are physics undergrads or graduates. You need calculus to get it.

I would argue that Newton's theory was more complex because it required new math. Einstein didn't. The math was already there, and he managed to incept his idea without it. Riemannian geometry just simplified description. It's similar to Maxwell. He had electromagnetism in over 20 equations, then some lad whose name I forgot, made work and closed it down to four, that again 99 percent or more people don't know, though they govern nearly everything at our scale. Touch, vision and chemistry is described by them. I can come with only two things that are part of everyday life, that lie outside. Gravity, in the part that makes us stick to the planet, and atomic energy, though that's fast trasformed back to EM domain. Everything else seems to be far away, except for the fact they make things stable, but we don't harness it.

To me ingenuity and creativity are essentially the same. It's the abilty to have those insane ideas, perhaps genius is to pick important ones to ponder upon. I think we agree, that scientific breakthroughs seem to be based on making up grander picture, where what you physically see is some kind of special case of generally opposite rules. One of the greatest example is the idea that movement is generally self sustained, seems crazy here in the atmosphere, where the 1st theories said, that it requires force and work to keep going. Something we all experience.

Well, that's a long tought-chain. Hope someone's find it interesting.

<comment><USER34> When pondering progress in physics, do not underestimate the role of technological progress and the impact that has on experimental evidence, which are at the heart of all grest theories. These would not have been dreamt up without certain experimental data as the starring point for a new explanation.

Quantum mechanics required the weirdness of the blackbody radiation spectrum to spring to life. The special theory of relativity is based on the observation that the Maxwell equations are not Galileo invariant and the results of their strange Lorentz invariance can be observed. The general theory of relativity is baed on the realization that despite efforts to measure a difference, inertial mass and gravitational mass always have the same value.

It took time for these things to become measurable and to make people go "hmmm..." and think about nature in new ways. The answers are creative and genial, but they required starting points. And creating those takes time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> The article may sound like promotion for some TV-series but this is not related to experiments done in the Hawkins National Laboratory in the 80s.

As I understand it, this mirror world would be colder than our own and this would affect nucleosynthesis in the early universe. There would be significantly more helium and less heavier particles. Because the mirror universe is connected to our universe trough gravity, we would definitely notice is dark matter stars and planets would go buy. Our universe would have more dense points of matter and the mirror universe would have more light gas clouds circling roughly at the same area as galaxies in our world.

<comment><USER35> Why do you think any of that? A hotter early universe would produce more helium, not less, and at the cost of hydrogen, not heavy elements. Not only were heavy elements effectively not produced by the big bang but even now make up an utterly insignificant portion of the universe.

<comment><USER3> Maybe I'm wrong. I'm just referring to what others have said written about this mirror universe theory. I'm not a particle physicist nor do I have original ideas about this subject.

Here is a paper from 2000 "The Early Mirror Universe: Inflation, Baryogenesis, Nucleosynthesis and Dark Matter" [https://arxiv.org/abs/hep- ph/0008105](https://arxiv.org/abs/hep-ph/0008105)</comment></comment></comment>


Jazz in the 21st century: Playing outside the box - <AUTHOR> http://www.economist.com/news/books-and-arts/21702735-new-sound-summer-playing-outside-box <comment><USER2> "If you don't want jazz to change, you are putting a pillow over its face, and it's going to die."

Truer words have never been said. Jazz wasn't meant to live in the shadows of Coltrane, Ellington, Monk, Bird, or even Miles Davis forever. Sure the history is important, and technique and the theoretical rigor will always be a necessary ingredient, but the moment Jazz stops innovating and expanding is the moment it dies.

</comment><comment><USER3> Teaching Jazz is the way to go for most people who want to make a living from Jazz. I know several successful musicians who started as Jazz musicians but make a good living in rock and pop music. Getting to be known as the best of the best on your instrument via your Jazz chops can open doors in other genres to be invited to work with very successful, established artists. To make a living directly from Jazz you really want to go into education. If you have some hustle and you live in a medium to large sized city, no matter where you are there are likely enough kids interested in learning to play Jazz that you could develop a viable income as a private Jazz instructor on your instrument. From there you're taking part in building the scene of the future.

<comment><USER4> Indeed, likewise for classical music too. I'm pretty involved in my local music scene. Everybody I know who makes a decent middle class income from music, teaches. For one thing, there's reasonable demand. For another, it's a way for a performer fill your schedule with work during the hours when they pretty much can't be performing.

<comment><USER5> While, I'm incredibly grateful for the music education I've received [and still play at the age where many fellow amateurs increasingly don't [though time well tell whether I keep this up as I intend to]], the idea that the vast majority of artists _primarily_ teach the next generation _does_ carry the whiff of a Ponzi scheme.

<comment><USER6> This depends on what you consider to be the purpose of music education. A good portion of musical training could be for personal enjoyment, expanding horizons, resume padding, etc. so it wouldn't be necessary or even desirable hat everyone get employment.

Think of martial arts. The best way to make a living in it is to teach, but the vast majority of students aren't there to make a living of it in the future.

<comment><USER5> Sure I'm fine with learning art not to be a full time professional, that's me after all. And if you going in wanting to teach, that's great too. I don't have a fully formed thought here, but more a gut reaction against a world where education and educators is always celebrated without any......sympathy that maybe these people rather be doing something else.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I clearly know nothing about music, but why does it even have to be called 'Jazz'? Given those market numbers cited, it seems like it would be a very bad brand to be associated with your music.

Having a son who's 12, and having recently had a bunch of pre-teens running around my house all going through the timeless ritual of identity crafting, I have gotten to listen to their music, watch their media, and hear their thoughts. When I talk with them about music, it doesn't surprise me that they view the music of my day (80s / 90s) with as much boredom as I had viewed big band music in my day. To them, rock and jazz are Baroque. Guitars and Drums? I might as well play them a harpsichord.

On the other hand, I know several highly skilled, expert musical technicians in their 20s and 30s. They have spent the majority of their lives training to master the practice and theory of music. They know so much about their instruments and their technique, it frankly astounds me. In comparison to dedicated musicians of my day, they seem like masters. Yet, for some reason, they spend their time playing Jazz derivatives and covers or as studio musicians. Interestingly, they're all playing Jazz - which to me is so puzzling. It's akin to being a master visual artist and being absorbed in re- creating Pollack or Rothko or Kadinsky.

Jazz had a moment, and it was a beautiful moment. It can be admired and relished as such, and the music can help transport one to that moment in time. But, does Jazz even make any sense in the modern world? I love listening to some of it - Coltrane and Davis, of course. But, if I went to a music venue today, and the band was playing Jazz, I'd be bored out of my mind.

<comment><USER8> > why does it even have to be called 'Jazz'?

* [http://www.apassion4jazz.net/etymology.html](http://www.apassion4jazz.net/etymology.html)

* [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jazz_(word)#Etymology](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jazz_\(word\)#Etymology)

> But, if I went to a music venue today, and the band was playing Jazz, I'd be > bored out of my mind.

Jazz has many flavours that have long walked hand-in-hand with social dancing. Maybe spend a bit more time exploring its depth? Here's a modern rendition of a timeless classic:

* [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GhxSrF0HYnY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GhxSrF0HYnY)

Here's a jazzed-up version of "All About That Bass," also easily danced to:

* [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aLnZ1NQm2uk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aLnZ1NQm2uk)

Another classic, "Blue Skies," with some social dancing:

* [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2xziwtk1i3A](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2xziwtk1i3A)

And one more, showcasing some rather skilled Lindy Hop dancers, a fancy aerial at 1:20, and a modern take on Ellington's "Diga Diga Doo":

* [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v9xxeWRxSbA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v9xxeWRxSbA)

* [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e3aJ_9IAIjQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e3aJ_9IAIjQ) (Ellington)

Here's a remake of "When I Get Low, I Get High":

* [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=acb-js00c40](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=acb-js00c40)

> But, does Jazz even make any sense in the modern world?

Yes. Try some different jazz venues and find a style that speaks to you.

<comment><USER7> [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CF6SGWRMIYw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CF6SGWRMIYw)

<comment><USER7> Come on, you know that was funny.

But, my point is that when I watch those videos, I see people trying to avoid modern reality - trying to portal back to a different time. It looks like escapism, avoidance, or maybe looking for acceptance from their elders. Or, maybe that's just me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Many developments in jazz of the 60s and 70s are just starting to become normalized and institutionalized in the 21st century. Check out the history of the AACM and Art Ensemble of Chicago for one important example:

[http://www.npr.org/books/titles/138018824/a-power- stronger-t...](http://www.npr.org/books/titles/138018824/a-power-stronger- than-itself-the-aacm-and-american-experimental-music)

</comment><comment><USER10> Playing outside the box office, too...

<comment><USER2> This makes sense because only music that makes money matters.

<comment><USER10> What I wrote is a factual observation, not a value judgement.

So it makes sense whether one believes that "only music that makes money matters" or not.

(And I don't believe that at all)

<comment><USER7> I think you guys are missing my point, which is my fault. Making art for the money should never be a primary goal, unless one's goal is the emphasis and irony of that relationship (see: Koons). Otherwise, how can it really be art? It's been constrained and affected by the expected effect.

However, there's a huge difference between self-labeling one's art in a way that obscures it from wide access (like labeling a music created today as 'Jazz') and actually re-producing previously successful art forms (e.g. 'Jazz') because of a fear of judgment or chasing of praise.

<comment><USER11> Jazz has always been a progressive, innovative musical form. If you understand jazz to be static and backwards-facing, then you have been sadly misled. Jazz has a tradition, but that tradition is a starting point rather than a destination. Jazz musicians stand on the shoulders of giants, not in their shadows.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>