Litecoin and Ethereum buys and sells are temporarily disabled - <AUTHOR> https://status.coinbase.com/incidents/5fj9rx0py3bq <comment><USER3> I've made about $110k profit this year in crypto on a $21k investment earlier this year, and I think this is all a giant bubble. I was at my parents' house for Thanksgiving and a commercial with Ron Paul talking about Bitcoin came on, which coincided with around the time it went to $10k, and it hit me really hard that this isn't going to last forever (and probably will hurt sooner rather than later). I liquidated everything and just entertain myself doing some day trading on GDAX. I don't hodl anymore.

The entire thing is absolutely stupid, and isn't going to last forever. People are way too bullish on it. People who have no business investing in it are taking on debt to do so, with no clear exit strategy other than "the moon." A lot of people who don't have any money are going to get absolutely toasted when the pendulum swings the other way. They're in it to get rich. They have no idea what blockchains are. They just think they're buying magic internet money people get rich from.

To put a little perspective on how ridiculous this all is: Last night after Coinbase came back from maintenance, there was the (expected) sell-off, so I figured I'd make a quick buck and bought 300 LTC for about $241 each, then sold it a few minutes later for $251 after the instant rebound and went to bed with a nice $3k profit. I woke up this morning and was astonished to see that LTC was about $380. This was in the course of about 5 hours. Had I not sold it last night, I would have made almost $40k. I'm a little annoyed about that, but again: this is a stupid, irrational bubble that makes absolutely no sense. It's entirely speculative.

I think crypto and blockchain has a future, but it has to solve a few problems first (transaction fees/time and anonymity). None of the big three currencies do that well enough yet. This bubble is going to pop soon and I'm worried that a lot of people are going to get impacted badly.

<comment><USER4> Even if it is a bubble, that doesn't mean it can't go another 20x from here, depending which crypto you put your money in.

There's cheap liquidity (ho ho ho said the FED and the ECB), there are institutions (pension funds) that are starting to buy in, and in comparison, the dot-com bubble (which was mainly a US led bubble, not global) went to $5.7tn to $1.7tn. Gold is worth $8tn globally. Why couldn't Bitcoin get to part of that level, e.g. $2tn?

It sure looks like a bubble, and it probably is, but it could literally be the largest bubble in our lives -- unlike one stock in the market, this is a global phenomenon + you only have a few currencies that matter.

<comment><USER5> It's strayed so far from fundamentals that it's bound to crash. I really hope it's not that big when it does...

<comment><USER6> Bitcoin doesn't have fundamentals. Stocks are a claim on assets, buildings, inventories, and future profits. Real shit, like a parking lot full of trucks or something. Those are the fundamentals. Cryptocurrencies dont have anything like that.

To the extent that there is an analogous concept it's their utility as a means of exchange. Which outside of drugs and hard drive ransoms is minuscule at best.

<comment><USER7> You're forgetting currency control evasion. If a businessman from a country with tight controls wants to move money out of the country he would buy bitcoin and then sell it the other side of the border. This sort of activity is going on all the time, and it creates demand for crypto currencies.

<comment><USER8> I don't see how bitcoin can facilitate currency control evasion. The government can simply shut down all local exchanges, and some already did.

<comment><USER7> With amounts this large they could meet in person to trade.

<comment><USER9> If you have to do that, it doesn't seem particularly advantageous over existing methods. You're meeting in person, exchanging cash illicitly, etc. If someone is willing to do that, why not just buy USD in a foreign bank account directly? (That's my understanding of the current system; people with clean histories open accounts with varying amounts of money in USD / EUR / JPY jurisdictions, then transfer control of those accounts to someone else, for a small profit margin, who then transfers them again, in exchange for cash at a significant margin, in, say, China.)

Either way, someone ends up with cash CNY and the other person ends up with electronic USD or EUR or whatever.

The immediate limiting factor is the vulnerability of any in-person transaction to traditional law enforcement mechanisms, and the eventual limiting factor is that the exchange rate is going to be impacted by the demand for cash CNY. Eventually nobody is going to want to sell you USD (or whatever) for your cash-in-a-bag CNY, or will only do it at exorbitant rates.

<comment><USER10> I don't disagree with this, but if true, then it means that the value of cryptocurrency comes at the expense of other currencies. Every time someone in china sells their renminbi to buy bitcoin, bitcoin's value increases while the value of renminbi decreases. If that is the case, then bitcoin does indeed have value, and will reflect the differential of the cost of renminbi vis-a- vis its value on the world market.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This thread's audience is obviously a 'developed nations' one.

From our perspective yes, Crytpo's use case as currency make absolutely no sense (yet), we tap our Visa card to pay instantly with no fees and no fraud liability, hard to beat.

As a store of value however there is a very strong use case in the western world. Of the top my head, it is estimated that 10% of our GDP is in off shore havens, think about that infamous 1% moving just half of that 10% into Bitcoin ..

I digress..

If you venture your mind a little outside the borders of our empire and think about the 'unbanked' parts of our planet, entire populations whom live under poverty for the sole reason that they do not have access to the equity and efficient markets directly. If you look there, people are DYING for something like Bitcoin and other crypto's. There is absolutely no reason an African farmer to have to sell his Oranges to Europe in Euro then buy it back from there (Sell Euro to local currency) for local use.

Currency is an abstraction, an expression of a market, just like language is.

Here we tap to pay and need everyone to protect us from fraudsters, pornographers, money laundry , <insert your favorite horse man of the apolocyple here>, in other parts of the world , that far out number the western world in population, they don't care to be protected by the above because quite frankly the price they pay for that 'protection' is insanely oppressive governments that use the above to legitimize the oppression.

It is exactly in those markets where you start to see a VERY stong use case as both store of value and currency for crypto and it is exactly that market that will drive the world's demand for good UI for crypto that will eventually usher in mass adoption.

<comment><USER12> Africa is actually more sophisticated than the US in many ways regarding fintech

Anyway, this is a straw man. Who is saying cryptos are useless? People are saying that they are a bubble, that the valuations are irrational.

<comment><USER11> Totally Kenya's mobile payment system evolution from SMSing minute refill codes, to an actual legally recognized form of payment is the original Blockchain in my mind :) But that is exactly my point, in that market , there is demand and need for innovation that means crypto (while inflated right now) is here to stay. People who call Bitcoin a 'Ponzi scheme' , type of plant or apply whatever reduction on a very complex and innovative product are just mind boggling to me.

<comment><USER13> M-Pesa is a centralized service run by Vodafone, quite the opposite of blockchain. It only resembles blockchain in that it involves electronics and it's recent, but by that standard, we'd call credit cards or PayPal "the original Blockchain".

And as far as I know, it's denominated in Kenyan shillings, not in its own currency (i.e., hype about M-Pesa does not result in something with Bitcoin's to-the-moon valuation relative to the prevailing currency in the land).

I suspect that most Bitcoin detractors, whether those who call it a Ponzi scheme or simply those who oppose proof of work, will be absolutely thrilled with the growth of more _centralized_ electronic money transfer systems that are denominated in existing fiat currency. I know that I've been personally happy to use Square Cash, Apple Pay, EMV cards, etc. in the US. No mining, no or low fees, high security, quick, and suitable for small transfers.

And the fact that this is how M-Pesa works is an extremely strong existence proof that Bitcoin is not needed by the "African farmer".

<comment><USER14> I think you misunderstood him.

What he said is that others countries that doesn't have a solid electronic transaction system are actively trying new stuff. In that case, M-Pesa won that race but the fact that it was centralized isn't why it won, it won because it was needed.

Now does Bitcoin is needed for another country? No idea, but I would have said the same for M-Pesa.

<comment><USER13> But he specifically used the word "blockchain." I'm making two claims: first, that blockchain-based systems (for most people's definitions of "blockchain" other than a meaningless buzzword) are _worse_ for people in situations like that of the "African farmer" than centralized systems, and second, that the vast majority of Bitcoin detractors dislike it specifically because of things related (directly or indirectly) to it being a blockchain-based system.

For instance, "Bitcoin is a bubble" only makes sense if it's its own unit of currency. "M-Pesa is a bubble," "Square Cash is a bubble," etc. aren't meaningful statements to make; they just support transmission of the underlying currency. ("Kenyan shillings are a bubble" is a meaningful statement, but I've never heard anyone claim that you should use cryptocurrencies to insulate yourself from hyperdeflation of a fiat currency.)

"Bitcoin is environmentally dangerous" only matters if proof-of-work is relevant; in a centralized system, you don't have the problems that lead to you wanting to even consider proof-of-work.

"ICOs are a scam" doesn't make sense in a centralized system. "The transaction rate is too low" isn't a complaint anyone has about a centralized system (the usual complaint about the US markets is that the transaction rate is too _high_ , and HFT should be throttled). And so on and so forth.

<comment><USER15> "bubble": stocks have been said to be in "bubbles". If a person claims "M-Pesa is [in] a bubble" he would be talking about the market cap of the company, in the same way that "Bitcoin is [in] a bubble" speaks to the market cap of Bitcoin on some exchanges. Quite meaningful, actually.

"environment": Proof of work systems ensure that the ledger is secure and worthy of trust. Proof of Authority systems require trust, where the ledger is secure "because we say so." Isn't this the major reason why people are fleeing from legal tender? People can't trust the issuers, the processors, or the banks because they're colluding with politicians who provide bailouts using taxpayer dollars?

"ICO scam": absolutely makes sense in a centralized system. Are you actually claiming that people don't create scam companies with centralized currencies? Because why? Even legitimate companies can be slandered for the same reasons that people call ICOs "scams". The Franklin Mint, for example, produces coins which are sold on late-night infomercials that have little-to-no intrinsic value, but people buy for speculative reasons. Are they a scam? The reasoning is identical.

"slow/expensive transactions": One of Bitcoins main value propositions is aiding in international transfers. The centralized systems were too slow and expensive, so a better alternative was developed. Saying that speed and expense aren't complaints that people have made about existing centralized systems is simply wrong.

And so on and so forth.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> A lot of emotion with LTC. People are downloading Coinbase and buying LTC simply because it is the cheapest on Coinbase. This is definitely a bubble, really cant deny that anymore. All emotional, non-rational behavior.

<comment><USER17> Having purchased several cryptocurrencies recently, I can attest that I am certainly not acting rationally. But at least I'm having fun!

<comment><USER18> I should start a business selling thin air. Thin air from France, thin air from Japan, thin air from Mexico, and so on, you can collect them all, it is super fun. Then I could introduce cold captured thin air, warm captured thin air, etc. Wet thin air, dry thin air for year 3. More fun every year.

Even better, I should sell just a paper (well, an electronic one) stating you own some thin air. Hey, geeks, how cool can this get?

I am sure I could find buyers in the same market as cryptocurrencies.

PS: This is not directed at you, but you expressed the level of pointlessness and... void that reigns in this 'market', so I picked your message to place my joke/rant.

<comment><USER19> I'm not kidding when I say that you would be surprised at the size of the market for canned air. I made this same joke several years ago and then looked into it and was blown away.

<comment><USER20> Canned Air: It'll Blow You Away

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> 98% of their funds are stored offline in a cold wallet. I bet they exhausted their hot wallet supply.

[https://www.coinbase.com/security?locale=en- US](https://www.coinbase.com/security?locale=en-US)

<comment><USER22> Why would they need the actual coins to allow trading? Only transferring would require access to a wallet.

<comment><USER23> Seems like selling qualifies as a transfer, no? I think you can still receive and send LTC to other wallets, you can't convert to USD.

<comment><USER24> Selling doesn't do an on-chain transaction though. It's only on-chain when you withdraw (or deposit).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I understand that at the moment it may seem like all the cryptocurrencies are in a bubble but honestly, I don't mind because it is forcing the banks to stop their stupid cash grab and loosen up some of their rules.

What about the stupid fees that bank charge you to have the privilege to have you as a customer?

What about the fact that at the moment it takes 3-5 business days to make a simple bank transfer to another bank?

What about those insane fees when you try to buy another currency through the banks?

What about the fact that I have to call my bank and plead my case when I want to transfer an unusually large amount of money to somebody else because of them blocking the transfer and now I have to spend 1 hour on the phone to solve that issue and prove that I am the one who initiated the transfer?

What about the fact the bankers have brought the world on the edge of a great depression due to their greed and left millions of people underwater on their mortgages?

Bitcoin/LTC/ETH may not solve all the problems that we are facing now, it may not have much practical use at the moment either, but I 'll be damned if I give more money to the banksters.

<comment><USER26> >What about the stupid fees that bank charge you to have the privilege to have you as a customer?

Pardon my ignorance but don't banks provide a service? If they charge too much, can't I find a bank that charges less?

What makes their fees "stupid"?

<comment><USER27> If I give a bank my cash, it is I who am providing them the service of liquidity, so that they can have money to loan to others (as a service) for interest.

The only way I could find a "bank" with lower fees was to abandon banks altogether and switch to a credit union. I swear it's like all the banks collude to determine market rates for how many and how high of fees they can all charge their customers, to the point where—as a regular consumer—they're all indistinguishable.

Not only are the credit union's fees lower (or non-existent in some cases) the interest rates are higher and there are no shareholders to appease, except for other members of the credit union.

<comment><USER26> Don't banks provide the service of reducing the danger of holding cash or storing money in a risky investment?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Watching this whole thing really has me scratching my head. Honestly - <USER2> value of BTC in a decade is anyone's guess.

For me, I have a modest holding (in terms of its USD value today as compared to my other investments). After much wrestling, I've decided to just let it sit and be done with it. If it crashes back to pennies, oh well. If it goes to the moon, I'm glad I had a piece of the action.

As much fun as it seems, I've made the deliberate decision to not try to game / day trade it. It's been possible to try to make money like that in Vegas for many years and that's never been that interesting to me, either.

<comment><USER29> Define "the moon"?

<comment><USER28> The "moon" is the value required to have the jaw of your doctor / lawyer neighbor hit the ground when you tell them "I own one bitcoin".

<comment><USER29> What's absurd about that concept is that it supposes that there's a day coming when people who haven't already bought Bitcoin will want it so badly that they'll be willing to enrich people who are buying in now. I think people who bought in a year ago will be the ones who can claim that sort of reward, at best.

<comment><USER28> When Bitcoin was $1,000 you could have made the same argument in suggesting it would never go to $15,000.

Buyers today are not considering "should I or should I not enrich those who bought earlier". They are simply making a bet that the value might go up and want to own some if it does.

As an asset rapidly increases in value and the underlying driver of that increase is not well understood, all sorts of unexpected things can happen. The question is not how big will the bubble get, but who will be left standing when the music stops.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> This means that people are investing small amounts and going for the cheaper coins using coinbase. which means that cryptocurrencies may be having their facebook moment at this time , and their network effect is about to get a LOT bigger over the next months. While people may only invest small amounts (and coinbase can and should make sure they do), cryptocurrencies will come out of this extremely strengthened if a significant number of people end up owning even a small amount of any coin. Unlike tulips which wither, these people are not likely to sell their bitcoins even if there is a correction. A world scale network of people owning coins can be a giant leap for the world economy, as coins are much more resistant to censorship than the internet itself proved to be, and unless a new kind of gold is discovered , they may prove to be a much better, easier to transfer store of value. This bubble may never burst. All of this is speculation (of course) - I wish coinbase (which seems to carry the bulk of the wave of newcomers) would release statistics about their number of users.

<comment><USER31> > Unlike tulips which wither, these people are not likely to sell their > bitcoins even if there is a correction.

[citation needed]

Even long term investors in traditional securities often get panicky during bear markets. They sell their holdings, even if the underlying value hasn't really changed.

<comment><USER30> on the one hand bitcoins dont physically wither, on the other hand, it's about the personalities of people who own it. I don't know who pumps the bitcoin bubble, but much of the bitcoin is owned by people who can't quickly cash it out for USD or EUR because it's either illegal, not taxed or going to face big taxes. many of them are also ideologically driven. Sorry i dont have citations, i m (fittingly) speculating over these

<comment><USER31> > much of the bitcoin is owned by people who can't quickly cash it out for USD > or EUR because it's either illegal, not taxed or going to face big taxes.

That's certainly an interesting aspect, but I thought you were talking about all the new, smalltime buyers of cryptocoins, which I assume don't fall into this category.

<comment><USER30> yes sorry about that. i assume however that people investing a small amount will not panic, because they really don't care. It's like buying an expensive fad fashion item, that is then left to collect dust rather than being sold. fear of missing out is driving adoption atm

<comment><USER31> Huh... that seems like a separate category from the domestic speculators I was thinking about.

But then, how does an influx of a large number of fad buyers strengthen cryptocurrencies in the long term, if these buyers just completely forget that they own cryptocoins after the hype dies down?

<comment><USER30> when facebook was growing they went all-in for growth, because they knew if they got the network effect enough, they would have won, and they did. Coins have to grab the opportunity to reach everyone before governments start clamping down on their growth (which i m sure will happen not long from now).

getting people to own cryptocoins (and having a wallet) is really a trojan horse. just like smartphones turned nontechy people to app buyers, the ownership of a wallet creates a platform for many things which i don't know yet or i would be rich.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Can someone familiar explain why cryptocurrencies aren't a bubble? They both seem to exhibit similar characteristics.

Clearly, are shown by the site here, these aren't nearly as liquid as fiat currencies, nor are they really used to purchase anything.

So... What is it?

EDIT: upon thinking about it, MLM wasn't the term I meant.

<comment><USER33> Today I went to one bank to transfer 60k from one account to an account in a different bank. I paid 7.50$ to get a certified check from Bank A. Went to the Bank B near my house to deposit it there. Unfortunately the branch near my house isn't where my account is. They tried faxing a photocopy of my certified check to the other branch but the line was busy. They're going to continue trying until 3pm today when they close. After 2 hours I see the funds are in my account but I'm not allowed to access it because I'm limited to only 2000$ per day. They didn't call me as per instruction once the funds were in my account.

During that same time I transferred 15k$ from one crypto-wallet to another. It took 10 minutes all told.

Sure there are lots of people who are buying crypto because they think they'll make loads of money but a significant portion of us are in it because we dislike the infantilizing ways the current banks hold us hostage.

<comment><USER34> Let me guess, do you live in USA by a chance?

My first hand experience (2017) is that US banking oferring (from a european guy perspective) is a eyes opening experience.

* There is no instant bank wires (free ones) between major banks. Or at least the same days ones, working reliably through most of banks.

* You get paper checks from your bank :)))))

* Small business (sold a car, got a return from landlord) give you money on checks, also accept only paper checks if you need to pay them on the spot (in the office).

* your bank charges you a monthly fee, to protect you from overdraft (wtf is this on debit account??), he shall block from happening at the begining - we call it "protection racket" in Italy.

* boa/citi and others have websites with design from 2005, not to mention mobile apps..

* you can't send money from bank account to a different bank to your unsophisticated friend (plumber, maid, or mr sandwich) just knowing his phone.

* when you withdraw money from coinbase to your connected US bank account, you pay 1,5% of face value. WHAT? PERCENTAGE FEE? This is USA banking thing, as the very same coinbase, charges fixed 0.15 EUR fee per no matter how big wire if you're european.

* major us banks got two factor just two years ago in terms of security.

* tap to pay (we call it paypass) is also almost 10 years after europe.

* first chip card in citi was offered to me in 2015 or 2016? Still magnetic (easily copied) card is used in majority of points in the USA

etc..

Some of them are chaning in the last two years, but mostly for sophisticated customers, small banks, and people not being able to use those features between different banks. It will still take a lot of time to catch up with a Kenya from Africa...

<comment><USER35> > _you can 't send money from bank account to a different bank to your > unsophisticated friend (plumber, maid, or mr sandwich) just knowing his > phone._

Banks in the USA do not allow deposits into accounts without account holder permission. They won't let you stop by a branch and deposit into a friend's account (to pay them back) without a formal arrangement, so it's easier just to find your unsophisticated friend and give them cash directly. I'm not sure if this is due to a law, or our culture of security theater.

<comment><USER36> > Banks in the USA do not allow deposits into accounts without account holder > permission. They won't let you stop by a branch and deposit into a friend's > account (to pay them back) without a formal arrangement

This is not (universally) true. I've had many friends/family deposit checks for me at my local branch when I'm out of town/on vacation/whatever. I've done it myself for other people. I believe the banks in question were Wells Fargo and US Bank.

YMMV based on bank, but there is no regulation preventing this.

<comment><USER35> I was turned down by both Bank of America and Columbia Bank (local WA State bank), as it violated their security procedures at the time - this was about 10 years ago.

The reasoning presented was a little suspicious - they envisioned someone "forcing" you to unwillingly take a loan (of like $100) by depositing it into your account. Then they would demand their $100 back and use this as leverage to blackmail or otherwise disrupt your life.

But I don't totally disagree. To me, depositing money into another person's bank feels...improper - like performing an oil change on someone else's car, or taking someone else's books back to the library, or walking into your neighbor's unlocked house to lock all the doors. There are very good reasons someone would want these done for them, and also edge cases where these would cause an issue for the other person. It's a moral grey area to me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> So what ? It's not the first time it happened with Coinbase, and probably not the last

<comment><USER38> That's what happens when a business is trying to scale to meet crazy demand.

<comment><USER39> Can't they just click the auto scale button in AWS? Isn't that the entire point of cloud services?

<comment><USER40> That works, so long as you've refactored your infra to the point that the computational resources (whether server nodes or hard disks or or database shards) are modular enough that you _can_ just add more stuff and it will play nice with everything else. That objective -- not a cute UI that lets you change one of the numbers -- is the hard part.

And yes, it is to Coinbase's discredit that they haven't done so, but (assuming you're not joking), they could very well not be at that stage. It's typical for startups to have technical debt like that.

<comment><USER39> Can't they just get a bigger boat? Scaling via hardware is a good fix until systems can be made modular for scaling.

<comment><USER41> Most scalable systems have some 'singletons' somewhere in the stack. At a certain scaling point, the singletons must be made scalable to multiple instances, which often entails making a new singleton to manage these instances.

In this way, scaling often gives you an order of magnitude or two of available additional capacity, but periodically requires new dev work to support further increases.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> I wonder, what are these exchanges like GDAX, BitMex etc. doing with their dollar/euro/etc. reserves?

They obviously need to keep dollars on hand in order to cash everyone out. But what if Bitcoin goes up in price? If there is a run on the exchange later they may have to sell their bitcoins on the spot market to cash people out.

Banks reinvest money held into loans and other speculative investments. But what do you do when as an excuange / market maker you stand ready to buy and sell at any time?

Here is my concern: while it was just two guys meeting up to exchange $ for bitcoin, the $ kept circulating. But these exchanges may be locking up more and more USD just so they have enough to cash people out on demand. As a result, there is a real transfer of wealth to bitcoin and USD is getting frozen in exchanges.

If this continues for 5-10 years more, wouldn't bitcoin become millions of dollars and bitcoin holders would be able to buy up anything vs dollar holders? One bitcoin holder could buy half of NYC already, and who can stop them?

<comment><USER43> Huh - that is nonsense. They hold the exact amount of USD that their customers have deposited. They are custodians - not fractional reserve banks.

<comment><USER44> Well, they probably moved some of those funds into longer term bonds, so there could be some liquidity issues. But those would be unrelated to the price of BTC, and would be only temporary. There should never be solvency issues for a vanilla exchange.

Things look different with margin trading though. Margin trading implicitly implies a loan from the exchange to the trader. If the market moves too much against the trader, exchanges typically automatically force their positions to be closed. The problem is that if the price moves too quickly, the proceeds from this transaction may not be enough to cover the loan to the trader. So then the trader can end up owing money to the exchange, and it may be difficult for the exchange to get that money. That can lead to solvency issues.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> I just hope cryto speculators won't ask to be bailed out when everything will fail.

<comment><USER46> Already happened basically!

<comment><USER47> How? When?

<comment><USER46> Tezos wants a bail-out ;) [https://coinvedi.com/record-ico-tezos-founders- seek-bail-out...](https://coinvedi.com/record-ico-tezos-founders-seek-bail- out-from-foundation/)

<comment><USER47> Seek = "already happened"?

<comment><USER46> Seek = ask

<comment><USER47> Yes obviously. But you earlier stated that "Already happened basically!" in reference to a crypto bailout. So again, how is "seek" equivalent to "ask" here?

<comment><USER46> Parent comment i replied to - "... hope cryto speculators won't ask to be bailed out... "

To which I replied that someone has in fact already asked for a bail-out.

Title of Article - "Record ICO Tezos Founders Seek Bail-Out From Foundation"

It's only a matter of time before someone in the cryprocurrency sphere asks for a bail-out for reason or another.

<comment><USER47> Gotcha, I thought you were saying that a bailout already happened. It's obvious to me now that you were saying someone has already asked for a bailout.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> Man, Coinbase is having major scalability issues... They should hire Peter Lawrey: [https://www.todaysoftmag.ro/article/1618/low-latency-fix- eng...](https://www.todaysoftmag.ro/article/1618/low-latency-fix-engine-in- java)

Disclaimer: I am not Peter Lawrey.

</comment><comment><USER49> An economics professor told me once;

> Bubbles grow against walls of doubt. It is when the bubble must stand on > it's own that it bursts.

If these markets level out, and people stop investing because you can no longer get 20% returns every week, that is when things are going south.

</comment><comment><USER50> While cryptocurrencies are mostly used for trading, I think it is a technology with great potential.

There are still several unsolved problems with cryptocurrencies like having to keep a large database on disk and slow transactions (and illegal status in some countries). They are not protected from 50% attack by governments. When they are resolved, it can become really good alternative to card systems.

VISA has many disadvantages compared to Bitcoin:

\- it uses outdated technology and is absolutely insecure (card details are easily stolen and sold in large volumes, they still use unencrypted magnetic stripe)

\- it can require paperwork and a deposit to accept payments. It is difficult if you do something legally gray (for example, related to porn)

\- it is difficult to get a card without identification even if you are not going to do anything illegal

\- transaction cost is high for small payments

\- US government forbids to use VISA on some territories for political reasons

\- merchants often refuse to accept cards from some banks or some regions (for example: Digital Ocean doesn't accept some prepaid virtual cards)

\- companies can collect and exchange customer data when they pay with a card. Because it has your name.

\- the data on transactions from all countries go through systems controlled by US

It is only natural to replace those outdated magnetic card systems.

</comment><comment><USER51> With the price spike (Litecoin's up a hundred percent today alone), I wonder if the hot wallets ran out of coins to transact with?

<comment><USER52> You would think they would buy for themselves commensurately with client purchases so they wouldn't get into this situation.

Maybe they try to and couldn't keep up? Would be fascinating how this stuff is managed behind the scenes.

<comment><USER51> The recent speculation spikes have been pretty remarkable. I wouldn't be shocked if they occasionally exhaust hot wallets. I'd love to know what the process is - do they have coins in cold storage in the offices in safes? Bank vaults? Multi-person signatures?

<comment><USER53> They don't really talk about it, but I'd imagine it's multi-signature offline wallets that require a few people and an assload of physical security to spend.

<comment><USER52> Yeah I can't wait to read books about this stuff in a few years, probably soon! Hopefully Brian Armstrong will write one.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> What is causing the sudden rise in litecoin?

<comment><USER55> My guess is that the there are a lot of newbies now on Coinbase (#1 app in the Apple AppStore). They are buying the cheapest "bitcoin" without actually understanding what they are buying. This has increased demand for the cheaper of the only three options in Coinbase thus increasing price.

<comment><USER56> Yes, and I've cashed out handsomely as a result of being lucky enough to predict exactly this.

For clarification: I bought some $1000s worth of LTC when it was under $100 shortly after the Futures news hit. It was pure gamble on my part and I could have easily lost instead of the other way around.

I also bought a few ETH coins when it was around $400 but haven't cashed those out yet. I'm predicting my LTC gains will be wiped by ETH losses.

<comment><USER57> christ you must have made ridiculous money with this

<comment><USER56> Well, ridiculous in the sense that the whole phenomenon is absurd or relatively to what some people earn in a year, sure.

But I only made about 2.5x my wager, which wasn't much (less than $10000, more than $1000).

Also, as noted, much of a LTC gains could easily be eaten up by ETH losses. BTC is too expensive for my gambling taste.

<comment><USER58> To me, this kind of comment drives home the insanity of the crypto craze right now.

Complaints of "only" making a 2.5x return.

Or proposed strategies elsewhere in this thread of buying a coin, selling half "when" it doubles, not "if".

<comment><USER56> I wasn't complaining. The "only" was in response to suggesting I made "huge" amounts of profit. I didn't gamble that much, and so I didn't make that much even with the return. My profit was less than my paycheck. 2.5x is better than anything I've ever made in equities (in fairness 90% of my strategy there is selling covered calls on dividend paying stocks) and far and away my best gamble on a percentage return basis. I doubt I'll ever be as lucky as that again.

But I agree it does highlight how insane the crypto craze is.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER59> Many here insist it's a speculative bubble. And while I might agree that perhaps BTC is in such a state (this may extend toward LTC, ETH, etc), I'm curious to know your thoughts on the less popular and lower market cap "alt- coins" such as the Y-Combinator backed Request Network and Quantstamp. It's hard to say anything in crypto is truly undervalued at the moment, but I believe if anything is, it's projects with real utility that extends beyond speculation.

For those that believe in the technology that blockchain, DAG and smart contracts offer there is a lot up and coming projects that might contribute a lot to the space (and beyond into the real industry world, potentially).

<comment><USER60> My .02 BTC (now worth $351.44) is that cryptocurrency is here to stay. The runup might be a bubble, might not, doesn't really interest me that much. The long run for this technology feels very strong to me so I'm buying to hold.

I think BTC and ETH are the lowest-risk coins right now. 99% of the coins are going to fade away, so that's where the real bubble is. Some random ICO pops up and within months their token market cap is hundreds of millions based on nothing other than a vague buzzword-laden plan?

<comment><USER59> While I agree that BTC and ETH are likely lowest risk long term, I'm not exactly throwing money at crypto for the low risk portion of my portfolio and don't mind doubling down on a more dangerous gamble since I've researched my holds pretty well, imo.

Further, I'd argue that BTC and ETH are both extremely overbought at the moment, and reflect more of what a bubble is than many of the lowly alt coins that have real use cases (not that BTC and ETH don't). I feel you're underestimating the potential of some of these smaller projects, the problems they aim to solve and the progress they've made towards solving them.

<comment><USER60> _" some of these smaller projects"_

Which ones? There are hundreds of these things, and my personal view is that they're mostly worthless. I really don't think the hard part at this point is coming up with a cool use case for cryptocurrency, or even building the technology that works (though many of these alts have yet to even do that). The hard part is adoption, and my estimation is that almost all of them will fail at adoption. Time will tell, I guess.

 _I 'd argue that BTC and ETH are both extremely overbought at the moment_

You might be right, you might be wrong. It'll only be clear in hindsight. Which is why I don't time the market or trade. I just buy and hold for the long run. It's a small portion of my networth, weighted towards BTC and ETH, but I'm buying some other alts with 1-2% of my net worth (total).

In the long run, the cryptocurrency market will be worth $0 or trillions, so I'm not particularly worried about whether I got in when it was $10 billion or $500 billion or how it goes up and down in the meantime.

<comment><USER59> >Which ones?

ChainLink, as this project is aiming to incorporate outside data into the blockchain and smart contracts. This has plenty of real world use cases. This could be what the internet is to a computer, but for blockchain. Zen Protocol is also working on a similar idea, but they incorporate smart contracts into their project and have improved upon ETH's model a bit (not charging gas for failed contracts to name one example). I see no reason why this wouldn't be adopted if they can deliver.

Request Network, a project backed by this very website, is working to create a currency agnostic payment platform that may compete directly with PayPal and demands far less fees. There is a pretty incentive to adopt this over vendors listing individual currencies for payment methods, and everyone saves money due to lower fees.

RaiBlocks and ByteBall diverge from the blockchain and instead rely on DAG tech, and have extremely fast confirmation times because of this, and scale upward excellently. There is incentive to use these in the crypto space because transfer times and tx fees are too high, but we'll see how the outside world reacts.

Ripio Credit Network is working on making a decentralized lending platform to allow (currently) South Americans access to reasonable lending solutions, but I see this extending to a much larger global scope if successful. There is pretty clear incentive for adoption here, you can read about their potential customer base.

Just to name a few, I invite you to research a little more as a lot of these products are pretty amazing, and I'd be curious as to why you think the above are "worthless". But yes, adoption is the biggest concern. Personally, I don't see cryptocurrency ever going back to $0, the technology is better than existing models of centralized banking and middle men. Unless something comes along that disrupts the disruptor, I think it's here to stay for the forseeable future.

<comment><USER60> I appreciate you sharing all this (genuinely), but you missed my point, which is that most of these will fade away. Having cool tech isn't enough.

 _Personally, I don 't see cryptocurrency ever going back to $0, the technology is better than existing models of centralized banking and middle men. Unless something comes along that disrupts the disruptor, I think it's here to stay for the forseeable future._

I agree, but not enough to put more than a small slice of my net worth in at this point. Fortunately, if it doesn't go to zero, it'll probably 100x or 1000x again, so I'll be fine with just a small slice of my net worth :)

<comment><USER59> I understand your point of the likelihood of it fading away, but the tech's always being taken more and more serious on an industry level and becomes more robust after every crash. Many of these solve unique problems, even if the majority of the market leaves and cashes out, blockchain still needs oracles (ChainLink), and there is still demand for the others I listed (currency agnostic low fee payment platforms, decentralized lending for 3rd worlders, faster transaction times, etc etc).

Maybe I'm biased because I place more of my portfolio on these, but I have witnessed lot of these alts becoming more and more established everyday and predict this trend continue if industry adoption continues at it's current rate (and there is economic incentive for it to do so).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER61> Is there really so little else to invest in that plugging money into magic scarcity is the best bet?

<comment><USER41> If you are a value investor, everything on the S&P500 has been overpriced and overbought for the past several years. Best bet is all relative.

I think allocating a small percentage of wealth to an asset with 10% chance of going up 20x, and 90% change of going to 0 (net expected value 2x) is a rational diversification. Crypto seems to be fairly uncorrelated to broad market. (This is actually a more bearish perspective than I hold, but wanted to point out that it can be rational to hold an asset which is likely to fail as long as there exists a significant chance of order-of-magnitude returns)

</comment></comment><comment><USER62> Bitcoin looks like a bubble to me.

The way I think about investment is that you should only invest if you have a clear and rational reason to do so.

There is a rational reason to use fiat: you need to pay taxes in it. The government also provides all sorts of guarantees about your cash when deposited in a bank. These are solid, irrefutable arguments.

Investment in bitcoin seems to be based on an argument along the lines of "we need to change currency because centralised is bad" or "it's just another form of gold", or worse: "because it will keep going up". None of these arguments make sense. Yes, maybe bitcoin will become a big currency. But why? Can you give a watertight answer as for the value of fiat? Some people answer "it's decentralised", but that is clearly untrue. Miners and exchanges are the centralised concentrations of power in bitcoin, but they are unregulated.

The idea of cryptocurrency is interesting and exciting, but investing in something purely because it's interesting or exciting is only a good idea if you're happy to lose that money. No doubt bitcoin is important as a technological milestone, but that does not make it a good investment.

When bitcoin crashes, it could undermine various startups, which will have a knock-on effect to the startup bubble we're in. Presumably that won't be enough to crash a stock market, unless bitcoin reaches astronomical levels.

Hmm. Maybe I should buy some gold.

</comment><comment><USER63> For those on this thread who still think Bitcoin as currency, try flipping this on its head and think of Bitcoin as a store of value and ask why it would not make sense. Like most things in this world, value is perceived- we attribute vakue to Gold, Diamonds, etc. Why wouldn't Bitcoin be in the same bucket as a store of value?

</comment><comment><USER64> I've just went by the link (never visited that site before) and it says "THIS REQUEST HAS BEEN RATE LIMITED You're making too many requests to our servers from this computer..." immediately.

<comment><USER65> Are you checking from your office? Big company?

<comment><USER64> No. From home. And every time I try - I see this error message only.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER66> Tulip Mania comes to mind...

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

<comment><USER67> Tulip mania lasted 9 months. Bitcoin is 9 years old.

<comment><USER51> Tulips were sold before the mania, just like Bitcoins were.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER68> issue resolved. :D

<comment><USER37> Wow those guys are fast

They're pretty good at scaling to meet that crazy demand

</comment></comment><comment><USER69> Coinbase is a joke of a service. They're telling me it will take 8 days to buy a Litecoin.

Is this for real?

<comment><USER70> Use your credit card. Transferring funds between your bank account and Coinbase takes forever.

<comment><USER69> I just used my credit card about 9 hours ago. I've had the money taken out of my credit card, but I've yet to see the coins appear in my wallet for sending or selling. It shows in coinbase that the transaction was "Completed", but I have nothing so far.

How long does the credit card process take?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Looks like it's back up again!

</comment><comment><USER71> I made $10,000.

Wow.

<comment><USER72> I made $3 million :)

<comment><USER73> holy shit. just on litecoin?

<comment><USER72> No, I bought in 2013 for $10k at about $7 per BTC. I had about a $300k net worth at the time, so it seemed like a good play. Periodically sold and distributed into several alt coins over the years (eth, dash, monero, bitshares, etc.).

I could have made a lot more if I didn't sell so much, but at the time a 10x increase seemed like a one in a lifetime event. When it increased to $80 per btc, I sold 80% of my investment.

When it hit $1000, I felt bad about selling so much during the last run up, that I didn't sell at all. I took the crash back to $200 in stride. I was convinced that crypto was following a pattern of boom and crash, and then boom again and that in the coming years there would a final "big wave" as the last market (finance and retail) opened up to it. It appears that that is what happened. I've already sold a lot, avoided taxes by making a CRUT (a tax shelter) but still have about 50%. I plan to sell some more in January, because I think this wave is going to peak rather slowly (because, let's face it, finance and retail are _dumb_. It will take finance a long time to shift direction, and public perception is going to change slowly, IMO. For example, the housing bubble went on for a year after it seemed obviously to have reached its peak.). Also it works to my advantage considering taxes to wait.

My general advice now is if you see an investment you are unsure of but could pay off big time, you should invest a little at least. A basket of risky investments can be a huge windfall even if not all pay out.

Also, when you think a risky investment has run its course and is going to crash, it's usually a good idea to not sell all of it and leave maybe 10% just in case.

<comment><USER73> i agree.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER74> my coworkers and their families, who don't really know anything about bitcoin, are buying in like btc is water! when shit like that happens, you know the bubble is about to pop!!

</comment><comment><USER75> The question is which is the worse bubble Bitcoin or Litecoin?

<comment><USER76> Bitcoin has integration into a lot more payment options. But, that doesn't mean the price will come crashing down any time now. I think a drastic correction is due.

</comment></comment><comment><USER77> I never felt that. I'm on actively trading Litecoin now.

</comment><comment><USER78> Coinbase is not prepped for the influx of traffic... it's enraging, especially when there is money on the line. Their reputation is tarnishing more and more every day.

</comment><comment><USER79> would love to be a bubble, to drop in price so I can get in, but I don't think so, if you compare bitcoin with gold, bitcoin is better, the "gold" brand is stronger still with its history, but not so much among the new generation, unless bitcoin gets to 7 trillions, the gold market cap, I would not wory about being a bubble.

<comment><USER80> > if you compare bitcoin with gold, bitcoin is better

If you have access to a computer that has many many gold plated connections.

Gold is still superior for restarting civilization after an apocalyptic event.

</comment></comment><comment><USER81> Coinbase is rolling in the dosh right now

</comment><comment><USER82> So much for a "decentralized" currency system. Actually coinbase and the other players are and will be worst actors than banks if this presque monopoly isn't solved

<comment><USER83> coinbase is just an exchange, or a way to buy/sell crypto. once you own crypto, you no longer need to use coinbase. coinbase never advertised itself of being decentralized

<comment><USER82> I am well aware of that, the emphasis here is the prevalence of coinbase in an ecosystem that is supposed to be decentralized

<comment><USER83> and my point is you need something to onboard people from fiat to crypto. it doesn't happen in a vacuum

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER84> As i thought, money is backup by a government. It is represented for a country's power. But for Crypto currency, there is no country backup it. It's kind of scary though.

<comment><USER85> Bitcoin has succeeded in creating a scarce resource backed by computing power. That's about all.</comment></comment>


An Open Letter to Phil Schiller and Apple Developer Relations - <AUTHOR> http://www.simplymadeapps.com/blog/2017/01/an-open-letter-to-phil-schiller-and-apple-developer-relations/ <comment><USER2> Why not just actually audit each app? Surely there's a way to diff the changes and only have reviewers consider those. For issues like the one cited (free trial CC requirement), that seems very easy to check, especially if the payments are integrated with Apple. So v1 didn't have any CC entry stuff, gets approved + catalogued by Apple as having the free trial w/no CC attribute. V2 comes along, reviewer sees visual diffs, ooh hey there's a CC entry form now, re-check trial flow, reject v2, record this.

I'm definitely oversimplifying, but is that not at least close to how it works?

<comment><AUTHOR> The trouble is that these things don't always get caught. In the example, the statements were there before and after In-App Purchase was implemented. It wasn't until some reviewer for another completely-unrelated change saw that text and decided it was a problem. The time between the newly-decided "violation" and the last review is measured in years.

As a developer, you add notes telling the reviewer what has changed but this doesn't stop the reviewer from scanning through everything looking for either overlooked issues or newly-emphasized rule interpretations.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Brilliant!</comment>


Arduino Partnering with MSFT to Give Away 1000 Boards - <AUTHOR> https://www.hackster.io/challenges/arduino-microsoft-maker <comment><USER2> Trying to compete with that $5 Raspberry Pi</comment>


What's the fastest way to chill your beer? - <AUTHOR> https://www.which.co.uk/news/2020/06/whats-the-fastest-way-to-chill-your-beer/ <comment><USER2> I expected fire extinguishers (adiabatic expansion), dry ice, liquid nitrogen and the like to turn up, but this is limited to things one can do with stuff most people have available at home.

For practical methods, for beer bottles that one isn't allowed to open, I would experiment with placing the bottles upside down, as that would increase the area of beer in contact with the inside of a bottle, and that, I think, should increase cooling (I guess by just a tiny amount)

If so, spinning the bottles would probably speed up cooling even more (it further increases that area, but also will generate some heat)

</comment><comment><USER3> Best [but most dangerous]: Put it in a bucket of petrol [or other highly volatile liquid]</comment>


Analysis of Large-Scale Bitcoin Mining Operations [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://www.allied-control.com/publications/Analysis_of_Large-Scale_Bitcoin_Mining_Operations.pdf <comment><USER2> Interesting but outdated, block reward is now 12.5 bitcoins and price is ~$3400 per coin. I imagine both of these figures have a significant impact on the economies of mining, this is without even looking at the hashtags and more efficient miners ( <28nm ASIC devices are now available). Probably worth updating the figures to keep the analysis current.</comment>


Consumer Crypto Product Ideas - <AUTHOR> https://blog.dani.town/dani/consumer-crypto-product-ideas <comment><AUTHOR> > I think someone is going to build an amazing, fun, wacky consumer avatar > platform and that is going to be of course built on crypto

When reading this sentence, I immediately lost any faith in the author's ability to understand or predict the future (the "of course" before crypto sealed the deal).

Maybe I'm the one who doesn't know better. Time will tell.</comment>


Dropmyemail's security - <AUTHOR> http://blog.geeksphere.net/2012/09/27/response-to-dropmyemails-response/

<comment><USER2> Wow, either the author has a serious grudge against them, or isn't willing to at least fact-check their response.

\- The app checks your email on your behalf.

\- You need the actual password to log into an IMAP server (android also stores your email passwords in clear text if you aren't using gmail <http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=10809>).

\- They clearly state this in their response, which the article completely ignores. They try to use OAuth where possible.

\- They store the passwords encrypted via S3. Personally, I'd prefer that to MySQL on a VPS somewhere.

\- See also: <https://developer.pidgin.im/wiki/PlainTextPasswords>

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm the author.

1) The app downloads your emails into their server.

2) Yes, they store that actual password. Which is ridiculous.

3) Yes, good for them for that, but still there are others where they store passwords. And that is not acceptable.

4) But that also means that they outsource the security part of things. Which doesn't lend faith to the idea that they know about security. And if someone realises how to control their application, all the passwords will be hacked.

5) Pidgin is stored locally. There's a difference. Not that I support it, but it's still better than someone storing my passwords.

<comment><USER3> How do you recommend that they regularly backup a user's email messages without storing that user's login credentials for that email service?

<comment><AUTHOR> they can't, unless the email service gives them oauth.

and even then allowing a 3rd party to backup your emails is a very dangerous thing to do. they say that credit card is more dangerous, i say no. for credit cards you can claim fraud.

when your email gets hacked, potentially your whole digital life is gone

<comment><AUTHOR> what they could have done is to allow users to autoforward their emails over to their servers or something. not impossible, but i'm not their employee and i'm not responsible for thinking up business strategies for them.

so yea. not necessary

<comment><AUTHOR> and by storing the passwords, they are putting their users at risk. and we are in an era where email security means more than anything. it means access to all your services.

they should go think about how they can design a service securely before offering it.

<comment><USER4> your argument is similar to: "it is impossible to design a bank that can be kept 100% secure from bank robbers, therefore we shouldn't use banks"

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> This article is nonsense. The author isn't saying anything substantive about the "security" of this particular company. It should go without saying that email backup services will currently, in most cases, need to store your email login information in a retrievable way.

A slightly better post might have been,

"Beware unproven email backup services. Don't forget that if they make a mistake, potentially all of your email messages can be exposed to someone else. Since you probably have account credentials for other services stored in your email box, that situation can get ugly really fast."

<comment><AUTHOR> so you do concede that it can get ugly really fast.

<comment><USER3> I "concede" that they are doing nothing wrong and you are way out of your depth here.

I strongly suggest that you drop this before digging yourself an even deeper hole in front of the people following this from Twitter.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I do believe that all this kurfuffle originates from a 'false package deal' composed by: factual data (we store passwords), your assumptions about our incompetence (we're bound to lose them), and your subjective valuation of risk vs. convenience. You should not feel bad about other people breaking down the argument in the different topics. I am a Dropmyemail employee who works hands on with the security of the site, although I'm replying on my personal capacity. We don't practice security through obscurity so we can discuss the technicalities of our security measures here. I would appreciate not being treated as an incompetent goon though, to keep things friendlier. I see on this thread you accuse someone of being sent by the company I work for to discredit you personally: They did not, furthermore, I personally see your article as a valuable service, you will see in our site that we try to be as transparent as possible, and there's nothing that I could want more than for people to actually know and understand what Dropmyemail is about. Thanks for your article.

<comment><AUTHOR> i'm not assuming you are incompetent. what i'm saying is that no system is fully secure, and by saving the users' passwords, you are risking them.

one of the first rules i learnt in web development is this, you do not store passwords. ([http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2010/12/the-dirty-truth- abo...](http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2010/12/the-dirty-truth-about-web- passwords.html)) you never assume that your system will be so secure that no one can hack it.

<comment><USER5> Indeed, no system is fully secure, and we don't try to hide that fact, that's one of the reasons Dropmyemail exists in the first place. We offer people an off-site backup at the cost of trusting a third party with their password. This is a risk assessment discussion, and I believe although good for raising awareness about what dropmyemail offers, the original articles fails to make a distinction between the objective information it provides and what are your personal valuations on the risk involved (for example, it assumes one of the worst possible scenarios regarding our competence). Things get a bit confusing when non security related topics like storage capacity are mixed in though. I believe you are trying to help people to be safe and choose the better tool to solve their problem, I do think you are underestimating them a bit, but in case I'm wrong I repeat how valuable your article is in raising this issues.

<comment><AUTHOR> And again, I am not doubting your competence. What I am saying is that we are all humans. Google might have hired the best computer scientists around the world but they still got hacked. It might even be a problem with the programming language you are using (rmb mass assignment on ROR?)

"We offer people an off-site backup at the cost of trusting a third party with their password."

Yes, this is my main point. People have to learn that they shouldn't be giving out passwords to just about anybody.

I think this guy in the comments here ([http://blog.geeksphere.net/2012/09/27/response-to- dropmyemai...](http://blog.geeksphere.net/2012/09/27/response-to-dropmyemails- response/#comments)) made a pretty good point. Maybe you might want to answer his doubts there?

<comment><USER5> I fail to see the point made by that commenter that has not been made yet in this thread, other than the funny accusation of malice. We don't store plaintext passwords, and we are very aware of mass assignment bugs. (being suspected of such naive practices is why I mentioned the incompetence thing earlier). If security is a chain, then we strive not to be the weakest link. People have to learn what's the risk involved in giving out their password, how to evaluate who they give it to, and then make their own choice regarding whether they want to give it away or not. I get my hopes high when I read that you wouldn't mind people giving their password to a company that is better than 'just about anybody'. Convincing people that we are trustworthy was a big initial challenge for us, and still is as we reach out to more and more users.

<comment><AUTHOR> yea, you are now aware of the mass assignment bugs, but what about previously? even github got affected by it. are you saying that they are incompetent? what about bugs that have yet to be revealed?

what i am saying is that there may be some things that you forget about, because we are all humans. and in order to mitigate the risk from us being humans, we should not store passwords in a way that is easily recovered.

<comment><USER6> Have you stopped beating your wife? Are you now aware of the mass assignment bugs?

Aside from the fallacy, it is a false argument to pose all risk as bad. Given what is presumed to be your idea of acceptable risk, I would expect you to surf the net _behind_ _7_ _proxies_ : <http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/good- luck-im-behind-7-proxies>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Why does this still happen? Aren't security best practices still not wide spread enough to dissuade people form doing this?

<comment><USER4> because there's no way their service could ever work without storing passwords, a fact that this article completely ignores.</comment></comment>


Okay SOPA is done but now ACTA comes to the US - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=citzRjwk-sQ

<comment><USER2> What do you mean "now"? ACTA was signed by the US in September.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> At least they name them similarly :)</comment>


Amazon appears to be tracking every tap on Kindle - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/adrjeffries/status/1222277544730337280 <comment><USER2> One of the selling points for Kindle is that if you switch devices partway through (e.g. switch from reading on your tablet to reading on your phone, or switch from reading the ebook to listening to the audiobook in your car), it remembers what page you're on, so you can resume exactly where you left off.

Amazon actively touts this "Whispersync" feature in their marketing. (From the Kindle product page: " _With Whispersync, switch from Kindle to the Kindle app without losing your place (requires Wi-Fi)._ ") One would presume that Amazon achieves this by tracking whenever readers tap the screen to advance to the next page. (And having a timestamp for that tap matters for resolving merge conflicts.)

Also worth noting that in the case of Kindle Unlimited (Amazon's "Netflix for ebooks" program), authors get paid per page read. (If a person reads the first 5 pages of your book and drops it, the author gets paid less than if they read the whole thing.) One of the things that Amazon has to deal with is fraud prevention, to detect when authors are finding ways to game metrics: [https://techcrunch.com/2018/06/11/notorious-kindle- unlimited...](https://techcrunch.com/2018/06/11/notorious-kindle-unlimited- abuser-has-been-booted-from-the-bookstore/)

<comment><USER3> There's a less invasive way to do that though by storing the latest location for each device. You don't need to store each and every page turn for the page sync feature.

<comment><USER4> How is "tapped on page 11" different from "is on page 12"?

<comment><USER5> 90k rows of "tapped on page X" is definitely different from "is on page 12 in book Y" with exactly one entry per book.

<comment><USER4> "Is on page 12 in book Y" at what time? If you send an update every time position changes, then there is no difference.

<comment><USER3> There's a difference between storing every single tap and just storing the latest position for each book and device pair. And the Kindle doesn't update whispersync every page tap anyways it syncs periodically so the Kindle is storing that tap info and sending it all so it's not like this is just a factor of logging the data it gets sent for updating page position. [0]

[0] I think Kindle on Android is the worst for this. Sometimes I don't get the position synced to my Kindle even 30min+ after leaving the Kindle app. Seems like the way to guarantee the server gets updated is to either exit the app or to return to the library.

<comment><USER6> There's a "sync" button. It's in the top nav on physical Kindles and the hamburger menu everywhere(?) else.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> ...Just wait until they hear about services like Google Analytics, and MixPanel.

Jokes aside, i often find the excitement around "tracking" to be frustrating. Like fears of global conspiracies and mind control, the idea that somewhere a companies engineers are using this data to track your inner most thoughts is crazy in practice. Instead they're using it as a way to diagnose a bug when your ebook crashes or as a way to figure out how to make sure you're not getting stuck in a poorly design UI.

<comment><USER8> It's not a dichotomy.

It can, for example, be that out of 1,000 companies tracking your every click, your every character typed, and your every web site visited, 999 are doing it for better bug tracking or feature development.

But the 1,000th company is Facebook.

So it feels reasonable for people to ask, "What are you tracking, how is it used, and how can I be confident it won't be abused?"

<comment><USER9> >What are you tracking, how is it used, and how can I be confident it won't be abused?

Because of the nature of computer security, you cannot be certain that any data that you give to a 3rd party will be secure. Once it leaves your machine, it's out of your control, forever. Maybe an initially privacy friendly policy vanishes once the company is bought out, or a data breach occurs and the data is suddenly indefinitely in the public domain.

This doesn't just apply to Facebook, it applies to every single company storing data. The only way to prevent is to have a data retention policy and invest heavily in security, which pretty much nobody does except for the really big players.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> When I read my Kindle, I turn off the wifi/cell. I only turn that on when I want to look at the Amazon store.

I do this mostly to save battery life, but also so it doesn't track (but of course it may save up these logs to transmit when I do turn the wifi/cell back on).

The Kindle at least keeps track of my last read position in all my books. Foxit only tracks for the last two pdfs. Ditto for every other reader I've tried. I've had to resort to keeping a separate note of my place in the book.

<comment><USER11> > I do this mostly to save battery life, but also so it doesn't track (but of > course it may save up these logs to transmit when I do turn the wifi/cell > back on).

It absolutely does save up those logs. I worked on some of the code which saves up the advertisement view metrics. Admittedly that was more than 2 years ago, but knowing the team we handed that off to, I would be astonished if that's changed.

<comment><USER10> Thanks for the confirmation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> While I'm surprised at the granularity, this seems like it would be needed at some point to generate read times and such. Kindle tells you how much time is left in a book and this is either a WAG or something based on data.

<comment><USER13> Yes, this information would be needed at some point to generate read times.

But why does it need to be calculated on Amazon's servers? AFAIK Kindles are running a linux kernel with a lot of busybox, and calculating a running average doesn't appear (to me) to be a particularly difficult calculation.

Perhaps it can be argued that this calculation uses battery, but so does sending all of this telemetry to el Amazon.

What I'm saying here is that I think that we shouldn't concede privacy in return for convenient little UI widgets, especially when the computing power is available, cheaply, locally.

<comment><USER14> I think your Kindle use case is single device but mine is across 4 devices so doing anything fully locally doesn't really work. Unless each device would need to be trained.

<comment><USER13> I hadn't considered multiple devices, but don't we also have to factor in possible different text sizes on these devices, too?

Also, slightly OT: has Amazon ever said whether that reading time is calculated locally or on their servers?

<comment><USER5> > don't we also have to factor in possible different text sizes on these > devices, too?

The kindle tracks progress via the actual amount of text read instead of pages, so the screen and text size should be irrelevant. It can still be switched to display the page number, but that is also independent of the amount of text on the screen(meaning it doesn't necessarily increase with every swipe to the next "page").

<comment><USER13> >The kindle tracks progress via the actual amount of text read instead of pages

This doesn't seem to me like what the tweet is describing, wherein the kindle is registering every tap instead of distinct "x words/chars progress made".

If they were capturing and storing "X words in fiction read in n seconds", I could understand it, but they're not: they're registering every tap. I'd be interested to see how this matches up with "userChangedTextSizeToBlah" data if this is how they're calculating reading speed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I've never met a PM who didn't want this stuff if it was feasible.

</comment><comment><USER16> This is very common, everyone is doing it, and it just for measure UX and understand pain points from users, that's all, nobody is fixated with your taps.

<comment><USER17> I really can't wait until "everyone is doing it" ceases to be an excuse.

<comment><USER18> We need a word (like "Godwin's Law" or "whataboutism") to shove in people's faces when they spam the response threads with "everyone is doing it" and "are you surprised?" when a tweet or news item like "BigCo or BigGov is doing Bad Thing X." No we're not surprised but we didn't know, I want them to stop, and fuck you, your comment is not adding to the conversation.

<comment><USER19> It's a valid argument, though. I'll put it in different words to show.

"This is useful for legitimate reasons and is an industry standard practice --- even though it has rife potential for abuse, too."

<comment><USER17> It being a "standard industry practice" doesn't really affect the utility of the trade-off. "Kindle tracks every page turn in order to determine how long you have left in the book" would be a statement of the trade-off, and how much abuse there is and the worthwhileness would be a potential topic of discussion, but "industry standard practice" doesn't really have much bearing. If it's wrong for one person to do it, it's wrong for everyone, even if all people are doing it.

<comment><USER19> > It being a "standard industry practice" doesn't really affect the utility of > the trade-off.

It doesn't affect the utility of the trade-off, but all else being equal we usually accept what exists now. Fighting what already defacto exists is hard-- either as lone consumers, where we're tilting at windmills to little effects... or as regulators, where we risk unintended consequences.

> "Kindle tracks every page turn in order to determine how long you have left > in the book" would be a statement of the trade-off

Nah, Kindle tracks all these actions so that developers can improve ux and understand how the device is being used. Wonder how often people turn pages by mistake? Look for quick pairs of page forward with page backward. Then maybe you can think about touch sensitivity. How much will be people be annoyed if you remove the buttons? See what proportion of users exclusively, mostly, or don't use buttons.

> If it's wrong for one person to do it, it's wrong for everyone, even if all > people are doing it.

It's wrong for anyone to abuse the information. If we have an industry of people using the information ethically, and then one bad actor misuses the information, we need to consider that background. Do we take measures solely against misuse, or do we attempt to stop the collection to have more certainty in stopping the misuse?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Ex-Amazon employee from a while back (to which I only speak on behalf of my own feelings and imply no other intent...). IIRC this was driven from a analytics standpoint, wasn't actually really used outside of bug deep dives, and was horrible to implement.

That's not to say it hasn't started to be abused but at the time it was completely from a "customer/UX first" stance.

</comment><comment><USER21> I'm certain this type of data is tracked on most devices. In an optimistic outlook it drives a better customer experience because AMZN can capture trends in data to discover things like "oh people change the page forward too frequently accidentally" and track down root causes. In a pessimistic sense it can help target you based on how long you spend reading specific content and which content you highlight as a reader.

Generally every product I am aware of tracks interaction based data such as where someone clicks or taps and what context they are in. Consider things like `utm` parameters which suffix most links people click to determine the context they clicked on something and what they clicked on.

I do not see this as sinister. I imagine somewhere in settings one can turn this feature off but I don't know for sure.

* Disclaimer: I am currently employed at a subsidiary of Amazon. These views are my own.

<comment><USER22> > "oh people change the page forward too frequently accidentally"

Would you need to log every page turn with every book and time and date for something like that though? Wouldn't that be a more specific event like "turns page forward, turns page back within x seconds"? This sounds more like "we don't know what we might use this data for, but it's better to have it and not need it than to need it and not have it ... who knows, maybe we can deduct some profile from knowing how quick the user read through that chapter in that book" than legitimate use cases.

<comment><USER21> This assumes the client can keep state in a more reasonable way than a server can piece it together. Definitely a stateful event is more powerful but is likely more lossy.

From what I've seen tracking simple events and then piecing them together en masse tends to show up significantly more frequently.

<comment><USER22> Sure, I mean, it's also easier because you don't have to know the questions you might want answered.

Given the very private nature of the data ("he read Marx and Mao, and read some sections carefully!"), vacuuming up as much as possible doesn't sound like a good idea. Add to that the almost chronic inability of large corporations to protect data, they really should start treating data collection as a liability rather than an opportunity.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Does this really matter? Maybe I'm missing something?

<comment><USER24> It matters to some people. Or, at least, it matters to me. The less data that is being phoned home, the more comfortable and happier I am.

<comment><USER25> Why does this matter to you?

<comment><USER24> For a number of reasons, but the main one is what I said in my comment -- it's important to me to minimize data leakage, even for relatively trivial data.

In this age of Big Data, when it's relatively inexpensive to weave together a large number of small data points to come up with an overall profile that is truly invasive, I have to consider every byte that is sent to be a risk, and to be avoided when at all possible.

<comment><USER25> Thanks for answering. If you don't mind me asking, why is it important to you to minimize data leakage? (Not trying to say it's wrong, I'd like to understand your POV).

<comment><USER24> I think I answered that in my comment... my biggest concern is that I want as little data about me as possible in databases.

There's also the question of autonomy. I actively resent data collection without my informed consent. Companies that do this are, in my opinion, being abusive and infringing on my right to autonomy and, to a degree, to have control over aspects of my existence that matter to me.

<comment><USER25> Thank you, I understand.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> There should be an open e-ink device and ecosystem. Even if you go through the trouble of flashing your kindle with a custom image, you're still stuck signing into your Amazon account to borrow a book from the library.

Librarians will never give out your checkout history to anybody without a national security letter or a warrant. Meanwhile, Amazon is probably passing your reading records around to 50 different analysts and storing them in databases where dozens or hundreds of engineers have access. When I go to amazon.com, I see recommendations for other books similar to those that I've read, including those that I didn't buy through their store.

<comment><USER26> > Even if you go through the trouble of flashing your kindle with a custom > image, you're still stuck signing into your Amazon account to borrow a book > from the library.

You could always just get all your reading material from Library Genesis instead. I have owned several Kindle models over the years, but I have never had to interact with Amazon. I put the device in airplane mode the moment I took it out of the box and kept it that way, and I have downloaded all my reading material from LibGen (or a publisher who provides DRM-free ebook files) and moved it to the device via USB.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Presumptively, they can't do this with an unregistered Kindle, right?

Which wouldn't be as convenient, but you could buy books from Amazon, and then use Calibre to strip DRM and send to kindle over USB.

<comment><USER28> We should not be required to strip invasive DRM as a privacy-protecting measure, that's ridiculous. Buy a physical, paper book, that's not going to track you.

<comment><USER29> E-books do have some benefits. To list a few: they require much less weight and space, they are searchable, they offer dictionary and they can be delivered to you in seconds regardless of your location.

<comment><USER28> And I do take advantage of these benefits when I can do that easily, such as with a plain, DRM-free format. I'm just not going to use invasive DRM-based platforms that come with these blatant privacy concerns.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> This isn't necessarily sinister. I know UI/UX designers and a lot of them talk about wanting a heatmap of clicks on a given webpage for experience reasons. They want to know where and what you're clicking and how often so they can optimize processes and flow.

It gives insight into how things are used and what's used most often etc. Granted this isn't necessarily directly applicable to this case with the kindle, but similar in concept.

<comment><USER31> Facebook receiving purchase events from Dominos with the toppings you ordered isn't necessarily sinister. They just want to know what you are eating!

Users are not your experimental group. This attitude should have died years ago, latest with the GDPR.

<comment><USER30> Very different concepts actually.

One is optimizing/improving experience based on anonymous data, the other is building user profiles for targeted ads.

Mapbox is a fantastic example of mass data aggregation of users that has been anonymized.

EDIT: Why should we do clinical studies on medicines when that could be invasive to a persons privacy collecting such personal information? Is it necessarily wrong? Tools can be used for good and evil, that's the problem here, not the tool itself.

<comment><USER32> The Kindle data is tied to the account. And who says Amazon isn't using it to target ads?

Clinical trials require informed consent and institutional review. Regulating software telemetry like other human subject research would make privacy advocates very happy.

<comment><USER30> We actually agree with each other so I'm struggling to see what your point is that contradicts mine.

I explicitly said what I'm talking about isn't necessarily directly applicable to amazon kindle. I also agreed with you regarding software telemetry being used responsibly and irresponsibly.

So I'll repeat I don't see where we disagree.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> What I want is an ereader with symmetrical page turn buttons. I can't be the only person who switches which hand they are holding their book in and doesn't want to have to rotate the book 180 degrees and wait for the page to flip when doing so. Surely changing hands is a common use case

I'd not worry about tracking if the experience is good enough. Please someone make sane controls for these devices again

</comment><comment><USER34> Why is this a surprise? They do show advertisements so how do you think they gather target data ?

</comment><comment><USER35> This is a great example, one could almost say the epitome, of what is wrong with modern product design.

Gigawatts of electricity are used to run sophisticated neural nets, advanced data pipelines built to funnel all that data to the mother ship and thousands of dev hours went into this elaborate tracking mechanism. You need that of course, "to improve UX". I do not have a problem with that for such a device, per se. Fair enough, go real overkill on your "user research" then.

And yet, so many UX aspect of a Kindle are just plain bad. Problems which have varying degrees of complexity, to be fair. But some of them are so trivial yet impactful that it is hard to imagine they would escape the attention of _a single_ UX engineer worth his salt looking at a Kindle for two days. Some examples:

* I have a cheap Kindle, which means the lockscreen shows ads. They are so hilariously anti-personalized I can't even. Like, you have all this Big Data and you think I will ever buy a run-of-the-mill cliche romance?

* The recommendation system itself. When you "start out" on your Kindle, your recommendations are literally just every single other book the few authors you read have ever written.

* Having airplane mode off seems to drain the battery massively even if I am not connected to WiFi/Bluetooth nor actively attempting to

* One can view interesting usage statistics, but only if you declare yourself as your own child and activate a password based content lock

* I have to manually flip through sometimes dozens of pages of imprint, one-line-per-page copyright notices and so on until the Kindle realizes I have indeed "read" the book so it stops displaying it at the top at "99% progress"

What I want to say: Do all the Edge AI and IOT and Orwellian Surveillance for all I care. But maybe fix the boring old low hanging fruits first?

</comment><comment><USER36> Wouldn't they need to, in order to provide this functionality? I use several devices to read Kindle books and it synchronizes my state across devices (latest page turned across each device). The info in this screenshot looks to pertain to that.

<comment><USER22> Given that kindle devices have different sizes (and usually different font sizes), can be in portrait and landscape mode etc, is "page" even meaningful for cross-device synchronization? Sounds like syncing the text position would be closer to it, not "has advanced a page (whatever page might be)".

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> I'd be somewhat surprised if they weren't. Deep, invasive telemetry is widely practiced

</comment><comment><USER38> What I'd love is a small, bug free e-reader, ideally waterproof, that I can load my own books onto and doesn't track me. Unfortunately such a product doesn't seem to exist.

<comment><USER39> A Kindle is one of those (barring the waterproof) if you keep the wifi off and transfer your books via USB to your PC with Calibre.

<comment><USER38> Kindles are usually pretty limited in terms on the formats they work with since they really only want you to buy books through their store in their formats.

<comment><USER28> Calibre takes care of that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Is this surprising? Sounds like a very natural step approach logging.

</comment><comment><USER41> Why is this even surprising? What kind of product team doesn't track user behavior for improving the product or supporting other features?

</comment><comment><USER42> Kind of unrelated, but I did discover some, say, strange behaviur of Alexa ately. See, I don't use Amazon music on my phone but Google Music. My wife and kinds listen to Amazon Music on Alexa. We also have _very_ different music tastes. I was kind of surprised that when my wife asked Alexa to play music she likes Alexa started to play stuff like Five Finger Death Punch.

I do have the Alexa app installed on my phone so.

</comment><comment><USER43> Putting aside whether this is ok for a second: This should not be a surprise to anyone. Of course they are doing this. I would almost argue that it would be foolish of them not to collect this data. The lifetime expected value of the data is so much higher than the marginal cost of transferring and storing it.

I can't think how many times on the product side of services I've run that we've been grateful to have this kind of data. Sometimes it's for obvious reasons that we always knew, but often it's for suddenly crucial reasons that we never could have anticipated when we first started collecting the data.

Again, that doesn't mean it's OK and I strongly support GDPR-style data privacy legislation in the US. But in the meantime I guarantee you that just about every service you use is gathering data like this and a whole bunch more.</comment>


Are there benefits to paying students for good performance in school? - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/03/health/03rewa.html?ref=health <comment><USER2> In my junior high, there was a reading program where you could get some fairly dinky prizes for passing a test to prove you had read a book.

I cheated that system pretty savagely - I would skim a book, look up cliff notes on the internet, and then pass the test. I can't say I really enjoyed many of the books I "read", nor remember much about them.

In my opinion, any sort of extrinsic "performance"-based reward system is just going to lead to optimizing to the system (rather than learning) and to the system being gamed.

</comment><comment><USER3> _"There are suggestions of students making in the thousands of dollars," he said. "The stress of that, for kids from homes with no money, I frankly think it's unconscionable."_

There are a couple of options for students from homes with no money to make thousands of dollars at the price of significant stress. Would you prefer they try one of the other ones?

"Our children are too stressed" is a high-class problem in every sense of the word.

</comment><comment><USER4> At the University of Queensland you are rewarded with extra postgraduate scholarship money from the university depending on your undergraduate GPA.

This entices the best and brightest to stick around and do some research for the university. Seemed to work pretty well too. I can think of one example off-hand who stuck around and did some amazing research for CSIRO and the CS department. After finishing he was hired by Google Australia as the lead for the first release of Google Maps.

</comment><comment><USER5> It really depends on how you give out rewards. Give your employee $1 every time they finish 100 lines of code and they will be insulted. Give everyone a surprise $1000 to celebrate a product launch and they will be excited.

It seems like scientific studies often ignore this factor because it's hard to measure. So it's no surprise there is conflicted data.

</comment><comment><USER6> Here in Russia students get money for having good marks at university. And education is free if you pass entrance exams.

</comment><comment><USER7> A better idea would be to give them marks based on how much money they made from their own startups.</comment>


German electronic identity card project – lessons learned 2019 - <AUTHOR> https://www.gemalto.com/govt/inspired/eid-in-germany <comment><USER2> "Papiere, Bitte" from Thales, delightful.</comment>


Tactics to Hack an Enterprise Network - <AUTHOR> http://blog.strategiccyber.com/2013/01/14/tactics-to-hack-an-enterprise-network/

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi guys, there's been a lot of news on HN lately about the Java 0-day, the Ruby on Rails exploit, etc.

There's a lot of misconceptions about hacking and what it looks like now. This blog post attempts to raise awareness about what a targeted attack looks like today. It's a lot more than scanning systems for open services and launching a remote exploit.

\-- Raphael</comment>


Show HN: Keypad Layout Window Manager for Mac - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/janten/keypad-layout <comment><USER2> I can highly recommend kvm[1] for those of you who are interested in tiling window managers for macOS. Another pearl is Amethyst[2]. I've used both of them (and others such as xnomad) extensively for the past 5 years or so and must say that I'm very pleased.

[1] [https://koekeishiya.github.io/kwm/](https://koekeishiya.github.io/kwm/)

[2] [https://github.com/ianyh/Amethyst](https://github.com/ianyh/Amethyst)

<comment><USER3> Been using kwm for the past 6 months or so. Amethyst never really clicked for me, and it didn't work very well with multiple spaces, which I am a big user of.

Kwm and khd (kwm does layouting, khd sets up keyboard shortcuts) are not the easiest to configure, and kwm can be extremely complex, but for me it's been the best window manager for Mac OS I've been able to find. I just wish that performance was better, and that it handled corner cases like small dialogs better.

Doesn't hold a candle to the ones available for Linux, but I blame Apple for that more than I blame the developers.

<comment><USER4> mind sharing your config?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> There's also spectacle ([https://www.spectacleapp.com/](https://www.spectacleapp.com/)), however this seems worth trying out, especially due to the ease of remembering the layout config shortcuts

<comment><USER6> Came here to recommend spectacle too. I basically only use the keyboard shortcuts to send windows to the left half, or right half of the screen. If you hit them again it does 2/3rds or 1/3rds of that side of the screen which is helpful on lower resolutions. That pretty much covers me for window management.

<comment><USER7> Yeah - the simplicity of it, over something like this one posted, makes it much nicer. I also use for move windows to the other display.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'll drop in the customary link to hammerspoon: [http://www.hammerspoon.org](http://www.hammerspoon.org)

It has a couple libraries for window management. One is plug and play, the other is lower level. Here is my config for setting up a 2x2 grid: [https://github.com/andrewhampton/dotfiles/blob/master/hammer...](https://github.com/andrewhampton/dotfiles/blob/master/hammerspoon/.hammerspoon/grid.lua)

<comment><USER9> Another one is called slate: [https://github.com/jigish/slate](https://github.com/jigish/slate)

Very flexible, my favorite feature is that configs can be written in JS, here's mine: [https://gist.github.com/tnajdek/48ea2a2ccac365b91f29](https://gist.github.com/tnajdek/48ea2a2ccac365b91f29)

<comment><USER10> Slate is my favorite as well - there's a fork that accumulated a bunch of patches over the years as the original author appears to have abandoned it:

[https://github.com/mattr-/slate](https://github.com/mattr-/slate)

Unfortunately, it was declared unmaintained as of a few days ago...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I can't recommend enough the first app I install on any new Mac, ShiftIt: [https://github.com/fikovnik/ShiftIt](https://github.com/fikovnik/ShiftIt)

\- It's open source + free \- Once you install it and learn the keyboard shortcuts you basically can forget it's there because it stays out of your way

</comment><comment><USER12> I always used Divvy for this, but IIRC it's paid only. Looks like a nice start.

<comment><AUTHOR> Author here. I actually started this project after buying Divvy. Divvy has many more features but I could never set it up _just right_. In particular I found no way to use the grid feature without the mouse (other than assigning shortcuts to pre-defined layouts). So I scratched my own itch and created Keypad Layout as a simple no-frills replacement that works exactly the way I want it to.

<comment><USER13> I'm loving this model. Thanks for sharing.

I own Magnet, Moom, Cinch and a few others. I always end up abandoning because the powerful keyboard features get in the way when you're in an actual workflow, and the basic ones make me reach for the mouse.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I use Moom for this, it has a killer feature (for me) that I haven't seen anywhere else, the ability to leave n pixels between windows, and between windows and the edge of the screen.

<comment><USER15> This looks great, definitely going to give it a whirl.

I have to use a Windows 7 PC for work (proprietary software for a laser cutter) and have AutoHotKey running about 30 customer keyboard shortcuts, so when I get home to my Linux and Mac laptops I that I use for casual computer use I struggle to remember key combos for window management. Moom looks like it solves that problem by novel use of existing window manipulation buttons.

Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Magnet is great if all you're looking for is hotkeys to arrange/maximize your windows and move them between monitors.

</comment><comment><USER17> I use option+shift+a/d for left/right snapping and option+shift+e for full screen, all mapped in BetterTouchTool. But I do feel I need more flexibility for corner and horizontal snaps. Anyone got ideas how to do it better (I do not have numpad)?

</comment><comment><USER18> Don't most Mac users have a Macbook with effectively no Numeric Keypad? I use an external KB but it's tenkeyless.

Some other default bindings would be useful.

</comment><comment><USER19> i just need a window manager that performs the following for free:

\- hotkey for full screeen window

\- hotkey for center screen window

\- hotkey for left/right half window

\- hotkey for move window to prev/next monitor

\- hotkey for resize window by mouse (a la bettertouchtool)

\- hotkey for move window by mouse (a la bettertouchtool)

currently i'm using a combination of these to do the following, but i feel its a bit overkill when all i need are what i described above:

\- bettertouchtool

\- sizeUp

<comment><USER20> > for free

If you want it so badly, why not pay for the ones that exist?

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Looks neat and I'll have to try it out. Just curious what makes this different from Spectacle or Shiftit?

</comment><comment><USER22> Hammerspoon</comment>


Transfer Image Style -Combining Markov Random Fields and CNN for Image Synthesis - <AUTHOR> http://arxiv.org/abs/1601.04589 <comment><AUTHOR> open source [https://github.com/chuanli11/CNNMRF](https://github.com/chuanli11/CNNMRF)</comment>