Moving 12 years of email from GMail to FastMail - <AUTHOR> https://cpbotha.net/2016/08/06/moving-12-years-of-email-from-gmail-to-fastmail/ <comment><USER2> I'm a FastMail customer. Here's some things I like and why I switched from Gmail and Google Apps:

       - better shortcuts in the web interface
       - the mobile web interface is actually good
       - can import email by IMAP
       - POP links actually work, Gmail's POP links are broken
       - IMAP is better implemented
       - Gmail limits IMAP to 15 max connections and
         each folder ends up being a connection
       - CardDAV works and has good picture resolution,
         when I was on Google Apps they were limited to 80px
       - FastMail's Sieve filters are very flexible
       - on folders vs tags, I like folders more, because then
         I can import my huge work email as a backup without
         polluting my searches and my archive
       - Google Apps email aliases limited to 30 per user, which is
         pretty dumb and insufficient if you have a couple of domains
       - FastMail does sub-domain email aliasing, which is awesome,
         as now each user account I have has its own email; Gmail
         only does "plus" aliasing, but that's obvious and problematic

Part of this decision was also a switch from Google Drive to Dropbox: Dropbox supports Linux, Google Drive does not.

On the matter of privacy, Google is simply too big and has access to too much info. They have your searches, often representing your secret desires, your video/music preferences, your favorite locations and habits, your travel itinerary, your voice, your chats, your G+ likes, your email, your purchases, etc.

And don't get me wrong, personally I've never seen many big companies as competent and as non-evil as Google. I also worked with their AdX and I can tell you that from the advertiser's perspective, Google discloses much less information than others in the business. But they don't have to be evil right now, they simply have to store that info and analyze it later, sell it, etc. And consider that the info in question is enough to determine with accuracy if somebody is pregnant, male or female, black or gay, as in things that in the right context can get one injured or killed.

In other words you can use Google's stuff, but reducing their area of knowledge and not placing all your eggs in the same basket is always wise.

<comment><USER3> >Part of this decision was also a switch from Google Drive to Dropbox: Dropbox supports Linux, Google Drive does not.

Which to me has always been kind of weird because Google uses Linux internally for most of their workstations.

<comment><USER2> Well, for me that's not weird, it's just a big fuck you, totally consistent with what other companies are doing. Multi-platform these days means Windows + OS X + Android + iOS. And the market I'm in is too small for them to bother, so might as well sit on that pile of cash and not want my business.

The weird part is that Linux is mostly about the server, being a really good home server for many people. And setting up a home server that synchronizes your files, for cheap with a Raspberry Pi and an external hard-drive, is a no- brainer. It's almost like they _don 't want_ people to do that.

But anyway, I'm voting with my wallet as they say. Currently paying €13.98/month for Dropbox, because I included the 1-year versioning add-on.

I also just gave up on 1Password for the same reason, even though I was happy with it on my Mac, switched to KeeWeb + Keepass2Android + MiniKeePass. In some ways it's even better - I now have a full history of all my edits and it can never switch on me or die.

<comment><USER4> 1password keeps a history of edits, too. I don't know any way in which it's not a full history… hmm… maybe because they expose previous passwords, but if you change your username, they don't keep the old username unless it was a separate entry?

<comment><USER2> Yes, the username and all other fields besides the password are not kept in that history.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The most important step for folks that wish to break free for Google: start using a custom domain name as soon as possible. Because the hard part is not moving from one email service provider to another, but getting your new email address in everybody's address books and changing all your site logins.

And if you love your Gmail interface and all the goodies that come with it, thats fine. Get a 1 user Google Apps account ($5/month) and start using your own domain with it. That way you have the freedom to switch to a other provider at any time once you are ready.

<comment><USER6> Or if you can't pay the 5$/month, you can get a free Zoho mail account with custom domain and connect Gmail to it.

<comment><USER7> Holy crap...

So I read your comment and strolled on over to Zoho, who I'd never heard of before. They have a lot of products...just wow. That's a lot of stuff.

It's just such a jumble. I find myself wanting to know more about what they have to offer but yet completely overwhelmed by everything that's there. Can anybody speak to the quality of these products? How well do they interact? Is Creator any good? It looks like a BPM offering that could fit for small businesses?

<comment><USER8> Just a heads up. I hate badmouthing companies, but... I wanted to use them instead of Google but my standard .com domain kept error int out in there interface and multiple support emails and posts in their support forum went unanswered so I bailed back to Google.

I wanted to like them, but their signup and support experience was terrible. Their other products seemed to work well, but they've lost me as a customer.

<comment><USER9> (Zoho CEO here) I am sorry to hear this. If you can email me your issue I will have it taken care of. svembu at Zoho dot com.

<comment><USER10> Hi. On a tangent, but email related. To you sub-contract the system to Alibana in the form of Alimail. The UI looks completely identical.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> My business uses Fastmail, and I'm mostly happy with it. The one thing I notice every day though, is the spam detection. I start each day by marking 10-15 messages as spam. That's been the case for three years, and I don't seem to be making headway on training their spam filter.

It's a small thing, takes me all of 10 seconds, but I do notice it, every morning.

<comment><USER12> It's interesting that this is the top comment, I'm assuming it's because Gmail users like myself just don't see spam anymore - Google's spam filters are so good that I don't even think about it anymore.

<comment><USER13> GMail once ate (bypassed spam and instantly deleted it, silently) an email filled with travel itinerary for an interview, causing me to miss the flight booked for me and the company I was interviewing with to have to book a second one (~$1k). If you find this hard to believe, go check your spam folder and see how many emails you have. Do you think you're really only getting ~1 spam message a day? This is the dark side of Google's spam filtering.

<comment><USER14> > bypassed spam and instantly deleted it, silently

Do you have any proof for that - I don't want to see it in detail, but I cannot remember a single incidence where my mail was just silently eaten by google? But I agree with what you said implicitly: gmail should let users chose between "move to spam", "only flag as spam" and "simply delete"; I share your pain of having to go through the spam-folder to find the one mis- classified mail once a month.

EDIT: I have had many user reports about this but when checking mail server logs I always could pin-point the problem at either the local server config or being caught in some "you are evil" classification - the latter much more time intensive to fix....)

<comment><USER15> From the end user's perspective, silently putting email in 'you are evil' classification isn't much different from just deleting.

I'd rather get spam once in awhile than turn my spam folder into a de facto secondary inbox.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> > I had to deal with keeping my server out of over-enthusiastic spam > blacklists

My domain got blacklisted once. I contacted the service concerned (i.e. the people running the blacklist) and they said my web domain had appeared in the footer of a spam email.

"So, do you have any evidence I put it there, or paid someone to put it there?"

"No."

"So you'll blacklist random domains a spammer puts in their email? Because that's what happened here."

I was surprised (and still am) that this kind of service could be so naive. My domain was literally just a bare [http://domain.com/](http://domain.com/) in the footer, no link or advertising associated with it at all. Domain blacklist successfully polluted, as far as the spammer was concerned.

<comment><USER17> Perhaps it wasn't a spammer, it would seem like a really "good" (in an underhanded, evil manner) for for a competitor to try to hurt your business.

<comment><USER16> Non-commercial domain, in this case, on a .org address. But there's all sorts of evil can be done with this kind of thing, yours is another example.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> FastMail is great and their web interface is really light and fast, but the pricing[0] doesn't fit me. I want to use my custom domain as an email address, so I have to choose the `Enhanced` plan ($40 USD per 1 year). That also provides 100 domains and 500 domain aliases, it is a bit overwhelming for personal use. I hope they would make a new middle-class plan between `Full` and `Enhanced` with Cal/Card DAV features.

[0]: [https://www.fastmail.com/help/ourservice/pricing.html](https://www.fastmail.com/help/ourservice/pricing.html)

<comment><USER19> What about the family or business plans? They seem to have custom domain even at the lite option.

[https://www.fastmail.com/signup/family.html](https://www.fastmail.com/signup/family.html)

<comment><USER20> It says no custom domain support. I only see it at the enhanced option, just like personal.

<comment><USER21> Uh, it says "Use your own domain or one of ours" at the top. That sounds to me like you can use a custom domain with any family plan, Lite and Full included. Are you sure that isn't the case?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> +1 on almost everything you wrote. I also moved from Gmail to Fastmail in almost exactly the same way some months ago. I agree completely to the plusses and minuses you mention.

I would like to add one minus though. Any good old smiley like ":)" in emails gets replaced by a yellow smiley face icon. I hate to see yellow smiley faces where someone wrote colon end parenthesis. It's all done client-side though, so noone else has to see it. Have been in contact with FM tech support and they seem to be uninterested in adding a checkbox to turn this nuisance off. Otherwise an excellent, excellent service.

<comment><USER23> I had a problem with the smileys as well. They don't actually appear by default, but if you view your email in plain text and not HTML (as I do) there they are.

I made this for Stylish to fix the issue: [https://userstyles.org/styles/106482/fastmail-hide- smileys/](https://userstyles.org/styles/106482/fastmail-hide-smileys/)

<comment><USER22> Thanks! Stylish style installed and seems to work. But it's still bewildering why Fastmail does that. Anyway, I must say it's impressive that they make an email service where this is my biggest complaint :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Lately I've been looking at some paid email options as I'm not happy with the offering over at Yahoo, Google, Microsoft or AOL. I wonder why they're all quite expensive. Fastmail is $40 a year, and that's for 15 GB. I would need at least 20 GB (which means I'm looking at $120 a year).

15 GB is free over at Google. Does that mean my data is really worth $40 a year to them. I do realize this is oversimplifying things...

One option would be to "self host" at Digital Ocean. For the same $120 I would get 30 GB storage and I could use the VPS for some other things. But even DO themselves try to dissuade you from doing that (on reasonable grounds I believe)[1].

[1] [https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/why-you- may...](https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/why-you-may-not-want- to-run-your-own-mail-server)

<comment><USER25> Try getting your mails from your self-hosted DO server into the inbox at Outlook, Gmail, Yahoo etc. The big mail providers have it all relatively sewn up - anything coming from the likes of a random VM provider like DO will end up in 'spam.'

<comment><USER26> Not necessarily true. A well configured mail server should be just fine. I personally use [https://mailinabox.email/](https://mailinabox.email/) to handle configuration for me and that works great.

<comment><USER27> If you're concerned about deliverability, you can also use a service like mail-tester.com [1], which receives a message you send and analyzes it for a wide variety of potential problems. I've found it to be a good guide.

[1] [https://www.mail-tester.com/](https://www.mail-tester.com/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I went the opposite direction -- FastMail to Google Apps -- several years ago when FM had ~3 solid days of downtime. Really long time ago, but still a bit of a sore spot for me as I missed at least a day and a half of incoming email that wasn't deliverable during that time. My sense is that they're a much more mature company now though.

That said, I'm not sure why more people don't consider upgrading to Google Apps from free GMail. $50 a year gets you an SLA, support, and no ads. It's been extremely reliable for me and I've not had any downtime (that I've noticed) for 5+ years. No performance problems either that I hear folks complain about with free GMail either.

<comment><USER29> Obviously it would be better if there was no downtime, but the sending MTA should really have queued that mail and delivered it when Fastmail was back up.

<comment><USER28> It was down long enough that it blew through the queue for several (most? some?) MTAs which were about ~36 hours if I remember correctly.

<comment><USER30> The default I have seen everywhere (qmail, postfix) is a week.

<comment><USER31> that's assuming no one changes defaults... if your a large enough provider you are tweaking these settings.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> "The Five Eyes, often abbreviated as FVEY, are an intelligence alliance comprising Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States. These countries are bound by the multilateral UKUSA Agreement, a treaty for joint cooperation in signals intelligence."

Austrlia is spying on your email on Fastmail the same way NSA is reading your gmail.

<comment><USER2> This is an often repeated fallacy, but Australia doesn't have the equivalent of the National Security Letter, by which they can coerce any company to do what they want without the right to disclose such breaches. The NSA is also the worst adversary you can get. I doubt Australia's agencies are as competent or as well financed.

Also, no security agency is above the law, but the problem with the NSA is that the US law does not apply to non-US citizens. Us foreigners, the ones that the NSA are supposedly targeting, have no way to fight this through the judicial system and we have no representatives to call or vote. But choose a service provider closer to home and things change dramatically.

<comment><USER33> > _the National Security Letter, by which they can coerce any company to do > what they want without the right to disclose such breaches._

National Security Letters can only be used to obtain metadata. Still bad, considering all that can be ascertained from metadata, buy not at all "coerce any company to do what they want"

<comment><USER34> What about lavabit? They were forced to shut up shop because of a secret order that was for much more than metadata.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> "I do have FastMail's Android app on my telephone. The app is a Cordova / PhoneGap / CrossWalk style unit with real-time email push and notification via Google Cloud Messaging (this is a relatively energy-efficient way for android phones to get push notification and is natively supported by FastMail)."

Migrating away from GMail for privacy reasons and he still ends up with Google for functionality...

<comment><USER21> Do you know what data is transmitted via GCM? It could be a simple "hey check your email" ping to trigger a sync. I doubt the message size allows for much more anyway. It might also be encrypted, whatever it contains.

<comment><USER35> You would still have some meta-data :-)

<comment><USER21> Well yeah but if all Google knows is when you're getting push notifications about email, then that's a lot better then them having all your email. I mean, there's a good chance that the person who just emailed you is using Gmail so they still have a lot of your email even if you don't use it at all. It's all a trade-off.

<comment><USER36> Civilians think Gmail IS email. I gave my landlord my email the other day, and she was like oh, isn't there supposed to be gmail at the end of it? I had a custom domain.

<comment><USER21> It always confuses the hell out of people when I give my email as "<companyname>@mydomain.foo". I've gotten responses from "oh do you work here?" to just confused looks. It's really just to help me with filters (and null-route things should the email get too much spam)

<comment><USER36> What was quite ironic for me is that I bought a ".mobi" domain name, because it was the only TLD that I was able to get so it can be $first_name + "." \+ $tld. - It seems that the .mobi TLD is more confusing than ever for people. I originally got it as a shorthand to my actual domain ( routing all emails to my primary domain )

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> _" So far, my conclusion is that this is a service that is technically more than capable of replacing GMail, even for power users. Furthermore, FastMail's primary (and in fact only) business model is to charge you money for making sure that you can keep on emailing like a boss. Together, this makes for an offer that I could not refuse"._

Totally agreed. I'm a Fastmail's happy user, glad to pay for such a great service.

<comment><USER38> About the last part: isn't the Google Apps model the same?

<comment><USER39> Google Apps isn't Google's primary business – they could neglect it and have unhappy customers, but their bottom line would hardly notice the difference.

<comment><USER40> Given that ~90% of Google's revenue is its search business (AdWords and AdSense) that's true for pretty much everything they do apart from that core business.

[http://www.investopedia.com/articles/markets/030416/googles-...](http://www.investopedia.com/articles/markets/030416/googles-6-most- profitable-lines-business-googl.asp)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Pretty hardcore fastmail fan here, love it, I did something similar about 3 years ago - I migrated my 10GB~ gmail account to Fastmail.

Haven't looked back since and it just keeps getting better.

These guys are the core contributors to so many fantastic open source products, they're transparent, respect your privacy and security above all else and it's resulted in an excellent all-round email service.

</comment><comment><USER42> Curious what y'all think of Protonmail? I've been using their service partially (just within family and a few friends).

They lack two big (features/caveats?) as of now.

(1) searching for a text within the body of the email is not available (They can't read my email kinda thing.) and

(2) Inline images don't work - pretty bad flaw.

I do like :

(1) Simple and Fast UI for web app, and iOS App.

(2) Knowing that I'm supporting folks that care about privacy and freedom. They do open source some of their stuff and are now the maintainers of openpgp.

[https://protonmail.com](https://protonmail.com)

<comment><USER43> I have an account but don't really use it. The lack of support for desktop clients, while understandable, kills it for me. Also, for the record, they're now the maintainers of OpenPGPjs not OpenPGP [0].

[0]:[https://protonmail.com/blog/openpgpjs-email- encryption/](https://protonmail.com/blog/openpgpjs-email-encryption/)

<comment><USER44> > The lack of support for desktop clients

Their servers do not decrypt your email, thus doing so requires support from the client. The browser currently does this on your machine. Do desktop clients support decrypting email? Can we trust these clients won't store your emails in plain-text on your machine? Or that they won't mistakenly leak your information via some other channels?

I agree desktop client support is a nice feature to have, but I am not sure it is trivial to make happen.

<comment><USER45> >Do desktop clients support decrypting email?

This is the traditional workflow for PGP-encrypted email, and has been for decades. Protonmail chose to be incompatible with this established standard.

<comment><USER44> > Protonmail chose to be incompatible with this established standard.

They've supported receiving PGP-encrypted emails[1] and are working on IMAP support currently[2]. Would be nice for you to cite sources before making strong claims like "chose to be incompatible". Everything is a feature and needs time to implement.

[1] [https://protonmail.com/support/knowledge-base/using- protonma...](https://protonmail.com/support/knowledge-base/using-protonmail- with-facebook-pgp/)

[2] [https://protonmail.uservoice.com/forums/284483-feedback/sugg...](https://protonmail.uservoice.com/forums/284483-feedback/suggestions/7180858-imap- smtp-tls-support)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> Why does FastMail charge a family account fee, thus making it more expensive to have two accounts under a family account than two individual accounts?

<comment><USER47> There's benefit that comes with the family account. I use one with wife and kids. You get shared address books and easy read/write access to others' folders you can configure as needed. So I have a folder in my IMAP tree that my wife can read (for bills etc.) and we both have read access to the kids' accounts. And we all share a family address book that I update once for everyone's benefit. In my experience, a family account is more than just a couple of individual accounts under one billing mechanism - it has technical advantages as well.

<comment><USER48> There is also the benefit of being able to use one custom domain, and have multiple accounts attached to it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> I moved from Google Apps to FastMail for six months or so. I'm back to Google Apps now. For me, I had a quite opposite experience...FastMail searching was much slower, and the return to folders instead of labels made organizing my mail more difficult. Additionally, GMail's Inbox organizing (slicing in Primary, Social, Promotions, etc) is invaluable when you receive many, many messages a day. Fastmail's interface, along with the increased spam messages which got through, simply didn't provide me with a good user experience and meant I was more likely to miss an email.

YMMV.

<comment><USER50> I had exactly the same experience.

The final straw for me was finding a solid android experience. Specifically, a client that didn't eat my phone battery whilst still providing the near instant notifications I've come to expect from Gmail. When using fastmail via imap in the 'gmail' app it didn't seem to get any push notifications and the polling was either too slow or too battery draining depending on the time interval configured. When I tried fastmail's webapp thing I found the searching and offline experience lacking. Maybe it's moved on. All the (free) 3rd party android imap clients I tried were horrible to use.

So I also came crawling back to Gmail. Which was a shame as fastmail's calendar is so much better, almost worth it alone.

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> I've come around to considering having 12 years of gmail online a liabilty. There's simply too much data there that can be used to steal someone's identity. At some point someone nasty is going to get into your email.

<comment><USER52> You feel that it's a liability compared to storing the 12 years of email elsewhere, or compared to just not storing 12 years of email? What about the utility of the archive compared to the liability?

<comment><USER51> I feel it's a liabilty to keep it online. Storing it offline is useful.

<comment><USER53> Why not just download your old mail and archive it then? Google provides an easy way to do this (Google Takeout).

As in, I don't see the problem with having more storage - you use only as much as you want.

Personally, I find having all my mail searchable from any computer useful. And Google does provide lots of security features (2FA, suspicious login detection, new login alerts, login audit logs etc)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> Why would you use FastMail when hosting your own mail server has a much higher privacy level? It seems no better than gmail in this respect.

<comment><USER55> because if you run your own mail server apparently you have a 50/50 shot of having literally none of your mail ever delivered.

<comment><USER54> I bought a house and run all my bills from my own mail server, so that certainly hasn't been my experience. You just need to configure it correctly and make sure your IP doesn't have a bad rep.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> I was a Fastmail customer for 3 years (2012-2015), but have since migrated to Gmail.

I outlined the factors in this decision in [https://gist.github.com/tomfitzhenry/d73fef19752cbf6ccdda3eb...](https://gist.github.com/tomfitzhenry/d73fef19752cbf6ccdda3eba5316f874) .

</comment><comment><USER36> I'm a FastMail user for about a year now. The one thing about the android app is that you get real push notifications. This is a great feature, that you don't get with ANY OTHER mail app for android. The interface of the android app seems to be a web-view, and I don't like it at all. The resolution is low, and it takes a long time to load. Overall, the push notifications is huge for me. I tried using the Gmail app connected to FastMail's backend, but emails would be delayed up to 15 minutes sometimes.

If you're a big Google Drive user, you'll most likely miss Gmail's built in integration with Drive, but FastMail has a simple file storage feature, where you can save attachments to your allocated space, and attach files from your files.

Another advantage for using FastMail, is that they do Email as their primary business, so it seems.

<comment><USER57> Outlook for android gives you real push. So does the blackberry hub.

<comment><USER36> Must you be connected to an Exchange service to get real push?

<comment><USER57> No, they both support at least some imap servers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> Any news on JMAP since [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10781894](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10781894) ?

</comment><comment><USER32> If you are concerned about privacy and gov tracking and getting their hands on your email then whats the point of migrating from one "unsecure" email provider (gmail) to another one (fastmail)? With some of the fastmail servers in US jurisdiction your email is just as safe as with gmail.

<comment><AUTHOR> In this case it was less about gov tracking, and more about the depth of the machine learning profile GOOG builds of its users.

That being said, decentralising a bit to providers that don't specialise in user profiling but more in email handling, is a step in the right direction.

<comment><USER32> gotcha! noone can guarantee fastmail wont be doing the same thing.

We get what we pay for. Free email is not free. The price is the security that we give up. Gmail and Fastmail are equivalent to me. Both own your privacy that you consciously give up for free...

<comment><USER59> Fastmail is paid service.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER60> Honest question: How is it that GMail is perceived faster than a locally running MUA like mu4e which is quoted in the article?

I'm actually using mu4e for exactly this reason: It's so much faster than any web client could ever be. And I'm saying this as a professional web dev^^ And yeah, I know GMail - I was an early adopter and have seen two companies migrate to it in the last five years.

Of course, running mail within Emacs has its additional awesome benefits, but that's a different kind of argument I'll leave out for now. I'm honestly curious why people think/believe/know that GMail is faster than a well engineered locally indexed app. It just doesn't seem to be the case for me, but I hear this time and time again.

<comment><USER52> If your mu4e is backed by a maildir on disk then it's pretty much assured to be slower than gmail or fastmail. One disk seek is very very expensive, and for many people a round trip to gmail's frontends is going to be faster. Gmail's speed will remain constant no matter how busy your local disk is. If you're compiling firefox on the same single disk that stores your mail, mu4e is going to take multiple seconds just to go to the next thread.

On the other hand if you have a good SSD then a local MUA running from local storage can look competitive.

<comment><USER61> > If you're compiling firefox on the same single disk that stores your mail, > mu4e is going to take multiple seconds just to go to the next thread.

I don't know what kind of machine you're using, but that's not true for any CPU/disk from the last 8 years or so.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER62> But in the end won't most of the sent emails still go through Google's servers, thanks to the ubiquity of Gmail?

<comment><USER63> Yes, even if you blacklist mail explicitly outbound to Gmail a huge number of companies still use it under the covers through Google Apps. I suppose you could blackhole their MX through local DNS.

Other than that the only real protection is encryption but aside from my pension provider and a former ISP I have not encountered companies that advertise a PGP key.

<comment><USER64> Dreamhost and Facebook both let you receive PGP-encrypted emails. (And it seems "all" major news sites now have PGP-keys listed somewhere …)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER65> Very happy recent convert to KolabNow!

      Pros:

      - 100% green energy
      - 100% Free Software
      - Servers run on fully open POWER8 architecture!
      - Server for your contacts (CalDAV), calendar (CalDav), and
      notes (IMAP)
      - Swiss privacy laws
      - They run what seem like very fancy business-class LUG
      events in Europe. Of no utility to me what-so-ever, but I'm
      glad to be indirectly funding this sort of thing.

      Cons:

      - No 2FA :(
      - Not the cheapest (but I'm happy to pay a little extra for
      the above)
      - Slow webmail (moved back to native clients)

<comment><USER66> I've been using Kolab Now for a year or two as well, primarily for the peace of mind of them being Swiss — who knows how far the famed "Swiss privacy" goes in reality though, especially these days. In any case, they are a Swiss entity and their servers are in Switzerland, so it's outside of the Five Eyes at least.

I'm happy with the service, though it's nothing fancy. No major downtime, other than two or three times over the years where sending a message over IMAP from Mac OS X Mail.app was rejected for an hour or so (webmail worked fine). The fact that they support open-source software development is an added benefit (and gives me a warm, fuzzy feeling inside).

</comment></comment><comment><USER67> I also did this trick 2 years ago [https://www.outcoldman.com/en/archive/2014/05/08/fastmail/](https://www.outcoldman.com/en/archive/2014/05/08/fastmail/), happy FastMail customer. Mainly because of a lot of geeky features.

</comment><comment><USER68> Has anybody used HushMail [0] or ProtonMail [1]? How does it stand against both free services like GMail/Yahoo or paid ones like FastMail?

[0] [https://www.hushmail.com/](https://www.hushmail.com/)

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

<comment><USER45> Hushmail should be considered compromised. They have turned over plaintext emails to US law enforcement in the past.[0]

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hushmail#Compromises_to_email_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hushmail#Compromises_to_email_privacy)

<comment><USER68> Thanks, this is interesting.

So, ProtonMail [0] and Tutanota [1] appear to be better choices.

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

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

<comment><USER69> On the data-privacy front, you may also be interested in Unseen[0], which has servers in Iceland, and Lelantos[1], which routes over Tor. I haven't used either service but they've come recommended. ProtonMail looks interesting.

[0] [https://unseen.is/](https://unseen.is/)

[1] [http://lelantoss7bcnwbv.onion/](http://lelantoss7bcnwbv.onion/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER70> I've tried a number of times to make the jump but the cost is so much higher for me $0 -> $120. I am grandfathered into google apps but even if I wasn't I'd rather pay $50/yr. Google is far from perfect but it does _just work_ and I don't have to ever think about it. That might be the same with fastmail but switching is a non-zero cost (in time, and money and I mentioned above). I have 25GB of email in gmail and another 10GB archived off (from other accounts that I'd love to have all in the same place but worry I'd screw up all my email). I won't self host my email due to all the issues with that but I'm also not going to switch to another provider when the costs are 2X google and I'm not sure what happens if/when I hit 60GB as that is their biggest plan.

</comment><comment><USER71> How does this work with Google Docs? I have a Google Apps account and I don't want to lose all my documents.

Is it possible to have my email usage through FastMail but keep my email address to log in to google so I can still access all my docs?

Or do I need to create a gmail address and move my docs over, then move my email over?

<comment><USER72> Yes, all you need to do when moving to Fastmail is update the DNS MX records for your domain so that email is routed to your Fastmail Inbox.

Then all you need to do is, visit to docs.google.com and login using your Google accounts credentials.

</comment></comment><comment><USER73> I'm also a big fan of Fastmail, and I've been using it for a while with great pleasure. However, I've come to realize that Gmail is really two things: an e-mail service, and and e-mail platform. Fastmail is more than enough to replace the service aspect. But there are so many plugins and startups that use Gmail, that at some point one feels like one's missing out. I'm thinking of things like Streak, Mixmax, Boomerang..

At some point I asked them whether they could "emulate" Gmail's UI, so that these apps and Chrome extensions could run on Fastmail. But understandably this is quite a big task. If they could pull it off, it would be quite phenomenal though..

<comment><USER74> This exactly. I moved from Fastmail back to Google Apps (I have an account grandfathered into the free version) because of all the integrations from third party services such as Polymail, Evernote, etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER75> As founder of Soverin I'm definitely biased, but it's great to see that awareness is growing and this discussion seems to strike a nerve. Some great insights here, thanks for that. Moving from Gmail was actually one of the reasons for my new startup. Wanting to build an honest alternative and decreasing my data footprint. A Gmail importer was one of our first things we build to make switching as effortless as possible ([https://soverin.net/features](https://soverin.net/features)).

</comment><comment><USER76> It's great that we can do this, and I might have a use case sometime, but:

Am I alone in finding web-based email too slow for day to day use? The responsiveness of a local MUA w/ or w/o a fast index (notmuch, etc.), once you're used to it, is hard to live without, at least for me. I find it messes with my workflow if I click on an email or folder and have to wait for the browser to return and render the XHR result. Or did Gmail just become slower and slower with time? I haven't tried FastMail yet.

<comment><USER4> Fastmail's web app is blisteringly fast. Admittedly their search is not quite instant, but I don't use that feature super frequently

</comment></comment><comment><USER77> I've recently came across the same problem, and decided to go with runbox.com. Servers are located in Norway, and I think they have reasonable pricing.

</comment><comment><USER78> Guh. I have about the same amount of years with gmail and thats why I havent felt like switching yet. Because I'm lazy. Which is a terrible reason.

With the amount of upvotes for this article, is it safe to assume people like (and trust!) FastMail? I didnt used to care about privacy, but I have been much more interested in it lately so I would like to switch.

</comment><comment><USER79> Just switched an account to fastmail and found customer service sucks and the service is misleading. First, if you want a custom domain don't bother with the pro account go business when you sign up. Second, tech support didn't have a clue on how to migrate a pro account into a business account.

That said, once I figured it out the service seems solid.

<comment><USER80> > If you want a custom domain don't bother with the pro account go business > when you sign up.

I have the Enhanced plan (not business) and a custom domain. Works great.

</comment></comment><comment><USER81> From the article > "use my data to customise adverts around the web"

Why is this always a bad thing? Is it just an innate feeling against having your information "used"? Personalization is an ever more important and much wanted feature in everything else in life so why should ads just be generic and irrelevant?

<comment><USER82> For many people, personalization is not a wanted feature because it implies that information about you is being gathered and stored. This storage may not be problematic right now, but it can potentially be used to cause you problems in the future. Some people simply do not care or believe that the advantages outweigh the disadvantages, while others do not mind the small inconvenience of non-personalized offerings if it means they might avoid a large inconvenience in the future.

</comment></comment><comment><USER83> "If you use any Apple iOS devices to read your mail, you'll be pleased to know that FastMail, with help from the big A, fully supports iOS push." This is huge! I thought it was just Apple being idiots. I didn't realize that third- party non-Exchange servers could push to iOS!!!

<comment><USER84> I wonder how that works? I found an "open source" project that apparently requires OSX server to generate "com.apple.servermgrd.apns.mail" push gateway certificates: [https://github.com/st3fan/dovecot-xaps- daemon](https://github.com/st3fan/dovecot-xaps-daemon)

</comment></comment><comment><USER85> In regards to the discussion around migrating from Google, does anyone have suggestions for an analytics alternative? I've looked at Piwik, gauges, and clicky but curious if there is anything else out there I've missed that is as simple and affordable as GA (but not Google).

</comment><comment><USER86> E-mail is a solved problem. I run my own e-mail servers and I love it. It's a beautiful decentralized and distributed system. Every time self-hosting e-mail is brought up many ppl say they have problems with the big players, but that is not my experience at all.

<comment><USER87> I had this opinion, until I changed IP addresses.

It doesn't matter to Google that I have DMARC, DKIM, and SPF records that practically guarantee the mail server is legitimate. The domain isn't blacklisted and I don't send bulk mail. But ever since the IP address changed, for the past six months all my messages have been marked as spam in Gmail (so for almost everybody).

There's zero recourse. You simply don't matter when it comes to the big players, and it sucks when it happens to you.

<comment><USER86> Are you on a dynamic IP? I used to run a mail server on a dynamic IP, and many people will be butt-hurt about it and block you on sight.

<comment><USER87> The IP address change was from spinning up a new server on DigitalOcean.

From what I could gather, changing the IP on a mail server is seen as suspicious and resets your reputation level. Google handles this by "safely" marking all of your mail as spam, I guess until your reputation is restored, which is nearly impossible since nobody will see your mail.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER88> I checked out FastMail but it's too bad that while they promote privacy, they require a mobile number to sign up. I understand it's probably used to prevent abuse, but if I'm truly in it for privacy I would imagine this is a non- starter

<comment><USER89> Privacy and anonymity are different things. It's also primarily a paid service and doesn't take cryptocurrency - credit cards are more traceable than phone numbers.

<comment> extropic-engine They actually do accept bitcoin.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER90> I once went fastmail -> gmail. It's been a while, thinking about going back tbh.

</comment><comment><USER91> Probably a dumb question, but if I have a @gmail.com email, there's anyway of redirecting that to another email provider without it touching google's servers? (i.e. Without just using automatic e-mail forwarding).

<comment><USER92> No. That's not possible. The MX records for gmail.com will always point to Google servers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER93> Would love to leave Google Mail but eventually, the ecosystem around Google Apps got so strong, in particular all the extensions for Google Sheets and Google Mail, it makes switching quite hard.

And you get the Google Apps at a good price.

</comment><comment><USER94> Have been using tutanota (free). Servers are in Germany and have been quite happy but would like them to add a few features. Am going to upgrade anyway I think.

Did you delete the Gmail account?

</comment><comment><USER95> My private and my business emails run with FastMail and I am very happy with it! I also use the DNS for some smaller projects and it works like a charm. Thanks for that.

</comment><comment><USER96> It took me an hour to read all of the comments and replies on this post. But I just noticed that "iCloud" Mail wasn't mentioned in a single word.

Interesting.

</comment><comment><USER97> Unfortunately I can migrate my email to FastMail, but years worth of paid Android apps will be lost if I migrate away from my Google Apps for Work account.

<comment><USER98> No need to. You can have a different email account than Google account on your Android devices.

Android allows you to have almost unlimited accounts fort unlimited things, and you can yourself control what gets synched for each individual account.

Just keep using the old Google Account for play services and the like and your new email account for fastmail email.

Android is nice that way.

<comment><USER97> Unfortunately that requires me to keep paying $6AUD/month for Google Apps. That may be the way to go, ultimately.

<comment><USER98> Fair enough. I have a grandfathered Google Apps account which costs me zilch and nada, so it's easy to forget that for other people it costs money.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER99> Can anyone suggest a service similar to gmail but based in Western Europe (not UK)? I would like to have my data there.

<comment><USER100> they are hosted in the Netherlands:

[https://soverin.net/](https://soverin.net/)

<comment><USER99> Thank you so much, exactly what I was looking for!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER101> Your mails are as private as the mail servers of the other people you are communicating with.

</comment><comment><USER102> Nothing can substitue inbox.google.com for me so far.

</comment><comment><USER103> I get far more spam at fastmail than I do at gmail.

<comment><USER104> I get far less spam at fastmail than I did at gmail.

</comment></comment><comment><USER105> How do you handle changing your email address?

<comment> k-mcgrady Can't speak for the OP but I recently changed address. My solution was to forward mail from my old Gmail account to my new account. Any newsletters I got I either unsubscribed or hit the link to update my details with them. Anytime I logged into a website that required my old email I took a minute to update it to my new one. And after I replied to a contact from my new email they naturally just hit the reply button so started replying to my new account. I've changed emails a few times now and I just keep the forwarding going for a year or two. Then I check in and once then only stuff coming into that account is spam for a few months I feel it's safe to delete the account. The one thing you lose out on is old email (what if I want to search emails for 5 years ago for example). AFAIK FastMail has an import system that will import all your email for you. I'm not using FastMail but I found over time I'm just not going back to old emails often enough for it to matter.

</comment></comment><comment><USER106> How good is the search in fastmail?

<comment><USER21> Very good. See [https://www.fastmail.com/help/receive/search.html](https://www.fastmail.com/help/receive/search.html) for an overview of what it can do. It's also quite fast, I have a decade of email in my account (tens of thousands of messages) and a search through all of these messages takes only a second.

</comment></comment><comment><USER107> Just a small correction: Google has no datacenters in Africa.

[https://www.google.com/about/datacenters/inside/locations/in...](https://www.google.com/about/datacenters/inside/locations/index.html)

<comment><USER108> Google don't have their own datacenter in Africa, but they do have nodes in existing datacenters in South Africa as part of the Google Global Cache infrastructure. Whether GMail forms part of the Global Cache infrastructure though, I'm not sure.

</comment></comment><comment><USER109> Joke's on him about moving out of the US: fastmail has servers in New York.

</comment><comment><USER110> Why fastmail if your primary concern is snooping? End to end encrypted email like protonmail is the right option against snooping

</comment><comment><USER111> Who cares? Why go through all that effort just to move your data out of the US, if they really wanted to read that they would, but they most likely would not care.

Silly over reaction. Your going to use a service that is not as good, waste a bunch of on importing/exporting for reasons that would have made no difference to your life.

So your actively choosing to downgrade your life to spite someone else. Smart move.

<comment><USER21> FastMail's servers are in the US. The company is based in Australia.

I recently moved my email to FastMail and I really like it. I even prefer its web interface over Gmail's. Please explain why you feel that FastMail's service is inferior. My experience has been to the opposite.

</comment></comment><comment><USER112> > [...] I moved all of my data out of the US and of course [...]

I don't think you can move your data out of Google right? They will keep it even if it looks like deleted to you.

Google (Alphabet now right?) has changed their TOS so many times can someone actually educate me on how long they keep my deleted emails and then if they truly ever delete those, or there is some 160TB compressed tape archived in their basements so that if they truly want to, they can open it and read my emails from today in year 2056 ??</comment>


ClearContext's Stab At Making Email More Manageable - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/05/19/clearcontexts-stab-at-making-email-more-manageable/

<comment><USER2> Cool. I tried their plugin once before but couldn't justify the price. I'll try the new version though since I thought the last one I tried was nice.</comment>


Someone just made a $147,239,214 Bitcoin transfer - <AUTHOR> https://blockchain.info/tx/1c12443203a48f42cdf7b1acee5b4b1c1fedc144cb909a3bf5edbffafb0cd204 <comment><USER3> Consider this: They paid $0.00 for the transfer of $150 million dollars.

A direct (i.e. not based on third party credit, regulations, etc.) transfer of wealth of this magnitude between two entities usually consists of a heavily guarded, insured, physical shipment of cash or gold. Depending how safely you want to make the transfer, and how far the entities are on the globe, it can cost hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars.

Bitcoin has _real_ value. It solves problems on an incredible scale. I wish I realized this months ago.

<comment><USER4> >between two entities usually consists of a heavily guarded, insured, physical shipment of cash or gold.

Err, life isn't a james bond movie. For money transfer like this we use bank wires. We dont buy gold and ship it on gunships anymore.

<comment><USER5> Not true:

[http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-01-31/venezuela- receives-...](http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-01-31/venezuela-receives- last-shipment-of-repatriated-gold-bars-1-.html)

[http://www.forbes.com/sites/afontevecchia/2013/01/16/germany...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/afontevecchia/2013/01/16/germany- repatriating-gold-from-ny-paris-in-case-of-a-currency-crisis/)

<comment><USER3> Not only is gold shipped frequently, it's also stolen frequently:

[http://rt.com/news/gold-shipment-stolen-france-304/](http://rt.com/news/gold- shipment-stolen-france-304/)

[http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/05/16/us-usa-miami- gold-...](http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/05/16/us-usa-miami-gold- idUSBRE94F0RM20130516)

<comment><USER6> Not only is Bitcoin sent frequently, it's also stolen frequently:

[http://rt.com/news/bitcoin-hacking-stolen- million-417/](http://rt.com/news/bitcoin-hacking-stolen-million-417/)

[http://www.nbcnews.com/technology/250-000-worth-bitcoins- sto...](http://www.nbcnews.com/technology/250-000-worth-bitcoins-stolen-net- heist-980871)

[http://www.esecurityplanet.com/network-security/czech- bitcoi...](http://www.esecurityplanet.com/network-security/czech-bitcoin- exchange-bitcash.cz-hacked.html)

edit: unrelated, someone should make an index of how many Bitcoin threads hit the front page of HN per day.

<comment><USER7> Your point stands, but most thefts occur on third party sites/applications where the address of the coins and their private key are stored in a central location. Owners of the bitcoin should transfer their coins to a private wallet.

I don't understand how so many sites can't use password hash generation to secure the private keys, or something to keep it more secure. The first link you posted was a site run by an 18 year old.

<comment><USER8> Sorry to digress a little, but I'm sensitive on age issues :)

Pinkie Pie won his first $50k award by creating a 0-day sandbox escape on Chrome, by chaining 10 different vulnerabilities. He was 19 (now almost 21). Two years before, at 17, he released jailbreakme.com, all by himself, which was a 0-day able to jailbreak all iOS models shipped to date by just visiting a website.

Age means nothing by itself, but the point is correct. The problem is that we don't know how much we can trust bitcoin site owners, as most of them are relatively new with no history to inspect, closed source, and sometimes even run by anonymous users whose experience we can't inspect.

<comment><USER9> Sure, there are 18 year olds with impressive technical chops.

But do you know _anybody_ who would deposit money in a bank run exclusively by an 18 year old?

Coding skills can be created and honed by highschoolers - business, legal, and commercial experience - very much less so.

<comment><USER10> I think any skills can be created and honed by highschoolers.

But I think it's extremely rare in the cases you mentioned.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> If this was an actual transfer of ownership of Bitcoin at all near that value, this would trigger money-transfer reporting requirements under the laws of most countries,[1] especially if this was an international transfer of ownership. I see that all the other comments here are speculating about what exactly happened here, and one astute comment before this one pointed out that the actual owner of the Bitcoin may still be the same individual person both before and after this blockchain transfer. It will be interesting to see how the regulatory environment keeps up with the implementation of Bitcoin, which so far is a very tiny percentage of the world economy.

There were also statements in some previous comments that this transfer was made for free. It is true enough that a Bitcoin transfer doesn't inherently incur a processing charge from a merchant payment processor, but as merchants learned back in the Middle Ages when charging interest was formally illegal, the price of a transaction can hide financing and processing costs. We don't know what was agreed with whom by whom to make this transfer happen. The transfer may have occurred at a higher than list price for something that was bought, to make up for the ongoing inconvenience of receiving a payment using the new Bitcoin payment mechanism.

[1] One example, among many: [http://www.consumerfinance.gov/remittances- transfer-rule-ame...](http://www.consumerfinance.gov/remittances-transfer- rule-amendment-to-regulation-e/)

<comment><USER12> I'm not sure I see where you're going by mentioning reporting requirements. Isn't the point of Bitcoin that those kind of laws are unenforceable?

<comment><USER13> It might be harder for authorities to monitor bitcoin transactions. But, as the very fact that this HN article exists illustrates, the blockchain is a public record that's available for anyone to monitor, analyze, cross-reference with other sources of data, etc. Particularly for large movements like this, I'm inclined to say that it would be downright foolhardy to assume that BTC transactions are anonymous.

<comment><USER14> It might be foolhardy to assume that BTC transactions are anonymous, but that doesn't mean that it wouldn't be EXTREMELY EXTREMELY EXTREMELY difficult to figure out who was involved.

<comment><USER15> When it is such a large amount of money, it is not all that difficult. Just look for the guy who is $147M richer.

In other words, the only way you get to have the money is if you never spend it, except in minuscule amounts.

<comment><USER13> Case in point: Supposedly the money from a lot of cases of major Bitcoin theft is still sitting in the same wallets. Implication: The thieves are having a hard time figuring out how to spend the money without outing themselves.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> As pointed out on Reddit, this wallet has made several large transactions since September: [https://blockchain.info/address/1HBa5ABXb5Yx1YcQsppqwKtaAGFP...](https://blockchain.info/address/1HBa5ABXb5Yx1YcQsppqwKtaAGFPYe5xzY)

<comment><USER17> I wonder if it is an early miner, or a certain black pirate...

<comment><USER18> I'm surprised no one has identified what I think is the most likely situation: bitcoin theft.

<comment><USER3> Are you suggesting that any given transaction is most likely to be a theft?

<comment><USER19> I think the point is that the only reason to transfer such a large sum of money is either buying/selling something or stealing. And considering there probably aren't many (if any) things one can buy with that many bitcoins, theft seems to be most likely scenario.

<comment><USER20> >I think the point is that the only reason to transfer such a large sum of money is either buying/selling something or stealing.

Perhaps you could be a little less specific?

>And considering there probably aren't many (if any) things one can buy with that many bitcoins, theft seems to be most likely scenario.

You could buy a lot of something from a private entity who really values Bitcoin.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Whoever owns this wallet used it to gamble on [https://letsdice.com/](https://letsdice.com/)

[https://blockchain.info/tx/a80f91549f863ccb58603e45a37980e30...](https://blockchain.info/tx/a80f91549f863ccb58603e45a37980e3010a17ba70622c11d024e6cc84fd42d3)

<comment><USER22> So much for anonymity of Bitcoin.

<comment><USER21> Bitcoin is pseudonymous by default, not anonymous.

Anonymity is a choice. CoinJoin [1] and other trustless mixing software projects are aiming to make anonymity a push of a button. This is being implemented into DarkWallet [2] where mixing happens automatically in the background.

[1] [http://bitcoinmagazine.com/6630/](http://bitcoinmagazine.com/6630/)

[2] [http://www.indiegogo.com/at/darkwallet](http://www.indiegogo.com/at/darkwallet)

<comment><USER23> Though I have every expectation of mixing falling afoul of AML laws, if not presently then soon.

<comment><USER24> The legislators can make whatever they want illegal, but that doesn't make it necessarily enforceable.

Thing about mixing is, since any person (or autonomous process) can generate wallets and send BTC to those on the fly, how do you prove that you used a tumbling service and not that you gave coins to a guy who gave coins to a guy who split them up into separate wallets who each gave coins to a guy, etc etc etc.

As Bitcoin picks up steam, this problem only gets harder. Remember that the block chain only consists of hashes and signatures. Proving who owns those is a much more difficult process.

<comment><USER25> It's trivial to make it enforcable. Whenever BTC leave the mixed wallet into a regulated area, bust the person doing so for violating money laundering laws if they used mixing. If they didn't use mixing, but received mixed funds you can probably impound some fraction of their funds to.

Either way you now have enough evidence to raid their PC to check for further laundered funds and generally make their lives miserable. When people complain just find a fraction of a BTC that was used at some point in the past to fund the social demon of the day (child porn, terrorism, drugs, sex trafficking, etc.) to justify it.

<comment><USER24> How do you prove that circulated coins are the product of a mixing operation and not just normal transactional flow?

Someone mines coins and gives coins to a guy who gives coins to a guy who gives coins to a guy (repeat n times) who gives coins to you, and every link in the chain is following best practices by generating new wallets for each transaction, how would the adversary prove that you're doing something untoward (and since we're discussing law at this point, beyond a reasonable doubt?)

<comment><USER23> This is no different than laundering cash, except that there is more information about the actual transaction flow.

<comment><USER24> You didn't really answer my question. Assume you're in some position of authority. With the knowledge that bitcoin wallets can be generated out of thin air, how do you _prove_ that a given transaction chain was the product of a mixing operation and not the product of normal transactional flow?

<comment><USER23> Physical wallets can also be created out of thin air. I'm not a forensic accountant, so detailing precisely how is not in my area of expertise, but we successfully prosecute people for laundering cash, and bitcoin only has _more_ information, _more_ accessible than cash. I am not saying it can be done with just the block chain, but the block chain is a piece of evidence that is far more easily accessible than a criminal enterprises' individual ledgers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Hardly. If you tried to sell 195,000 coins you'd wipe out all the exchanges and cause a crash.

Talking numbers, you could sell them all on BTC-E right now, bagging you just $7M, and take the price down to ~$36. You can spread that around the exchanges of course, if you're quick, but you're still nowhere near $147M at current market depth.

<comment><USER27> Why do you seem to think that selling them all at once is the only way to sell them?

<comment><USER28> Exactly this! What the heck would you do with $150 million in cash... stick it in a $250,000 FDIC insured bank?

Most people with this level of wealth diversify their holdings, which makes the total amount less liquid, but much more secure, as well as providing protection from inflation or returns on investments. Real wealth often does not have perfect liquidity, and I would argue in these amounts, almost never does.

Selling 100s of thousands of dollars worth of bitcoins a year for USD would hardly put a dent in the markets, and is probably the most anyone would want to do. The purchase of an asset would instead be made directly with bitcoins in a transaction such as this.

<comment><USER29> A redundant array of insured deposits of course.

I'm actually serious, there's a service called CDARS [0] that balances a large number of individual CD accounts of varying expiration times and maintains the 250k per individual per institution invariant. It acts like as single (albeit illiquid) bank account.

[0] [http://www.cdars.com/](http://www.cdars.com/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Should this be regarded as capital gains from currency speculation, when it comes to taxation, or how does something like this look to a tax attorney or accountant?

<comment><USER31> The government would have to consider Bitcoins as a currency for it to be taxed like a currency. Right now it has no status identified for legal purposes so no way to tax it. I am sure that several governments are looking in to it as we speak. Death and taxes

<comment><USER32> The government can tax anything it wants. For example, barter exchanges are taxable by the government, even if no actual money changed hands. They would just put a dollar figure on the barter, and then tax it accordingly. Bitcoin doesn't have to be a currency in order for the government to tax any gains made on its sale or transfer.

<comment><USER33> The IRS purposely keeps the definition of income loosely defined so that they can broadly apply it as new schemes and technologies arise. I am sure the IRS could bust you for income tax evasion if you didn't declare your bitcoin appreciation as income.

<comment><USER34> Oddly enough, the pioneers on this subject are actually game currencies. Look up Julian Dibbell's _Play Money_.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Were any of these previously-thought-lost "dark" bitcoins, or was it all live bitcoin currency?

</comment><comment><USER36> Is that right someone transferred millions with 0 fees? cheapskates :D

<comment><USER37> High priority transactions can be made without fees

<comment><USER38> Transaction priority are based solely on fee amount..no?

<comment><USER39>
        priority = sum(input_value_in_base_units * input_age) / size_in_bytes

A recently received single bitcoin can have a transaction fee, while one that has aged may not.

<comment><USER40> Damn, how do you do quotes?

<comment><USER39> 4 spaces in front of the content - the problem with it is that on larger text, it puts it in a scrolling div, which is not easy to read.

<comment><USER41> Yeah, it is really meant for code snippets. Asterisks for italic is generally preferred for quotes.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc](https://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> If you look at the tree view, the lump sum has already been broken down into smaller bits.

[https://blockchain.info/tree/98324324](https://blockchain.info/tree/98324324)

Click the yellow circles to expand the tree nodes.

<comment><USER43> The original transaction was likely made at a discount to someone willing to peddle the smaller bundles.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> Are those editorialized links added by Blockchain.info admins, or are they part of the block chain itself? ("gotcha" and "shit load of money!")

<comment><USER45> They're added by users of blockchain.info. The actual blockchain does not store any metadata.

[http://blockchain.info/tags](http://blockchain.info/tags)

<comment><USER46> Interesting! Any idea how the verified tags work? Who verifies what and how there?

<comment><USER45> Nothing by the looks of things. I tried a few and it looks like the target URL you put in must contain the address somewhere, otherwise it's not verified. I guess it's to stop people flooding spammy names.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> Must be someone buying a seat on Virgin Galactic

<comment><USER40> Isn't a seat 400 Bitcoin? That is a lot of seats, maybe they are buying the rocket and plane?

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> > Someone

This is a little misleading. This could be a business etc.

A mining pool or exchange transferring from one wallet to another (ie. to cold storage)?

You wouldn't want a typo in your address for that amount of cash! I'd probably break it up into a bunch of smaller transactions just to be safe.

<comment><USER49> Luckily Bitcoin addresses use Base58 encoding [1] and have built-in checksums, so any typo you make likely won't be a valid address.

[1] [https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Base58Check_encoding](https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Base58Check_encoding)

<comment><USER50> And a transfer to an invalid address just fails?

<comment><USER49> Yep - the default client won't let you send to an invalid address. And even if you used client software that was broken and performed the check incorrectly, the transaction would still be rejected by the other nodes in the network.

<comment><USER51> Not necessarily. The protocol itself doesn't use base58 or the typo checksum, AFAIK. If your client sends out a hash it derived from a typoed base58 string, nobody on the network will know it was a typo, they just see a 20-byte hash that could be anything.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> I still dont get how that kind of amount is cashed out. I mean, yeah, there is some brokers, but I dont think they have this kind of cash available...

<comment><USER53> It's not hugely different to if you had $150m in Albanian lek or Abkhazian apsar. You would find it ridiculously hard to convert into an alternative currency in one go and even if you did you'd probably be getting a bad deal (and could even devalue the currency in those two examples).

Ultimately, there's always a price that you can convert ("cash out") anything at. For example, I'd be willing to pay $100 for 100 bitcoins right now. Eventually a seller and buyer will find a meeting ground, a transaction is made, and value is defined.

<comment><USER52> I never saw it like this, but you are right. It's just another currency exchange.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> If the map is correct, the first node that saw the transaction is located roughly in Frankfurt, Germany which is a major financial centre. The transaction was made at 5:38 local time which is right around the time the Frankfurt exchange closes. Might be this transaction was done by a larger financial institution closing up shop for the week.

<comment><USER40> Remember this is the first node that the Blockchain.info website saw. This relay information is extremely misleading. So that German node could have relayed the transaction from another node before Blockchain.info became aware of it. (Blockchain.info is connected to about 1% of all the active Bitcoin nodes)

<comment><USER54> Well, how does the propagation of transactions in the BTC network work? I honestly don't know, but I would assume that it is more likely for the originating node to be near to the relaying node than not.

<comment><USER45> Every peer makes an announcement that they've seen a new transaction to every one of it's 8+ peers, if a peer doesn't know about the transaction that's announced, they send back an inventory request to get it for themselves.

There's never really many degrees of separation between nodes, but you're probably incorrect in that blockchain.info knows anything about the originator of the transaction. They connect to a large number (abusively) of nodes, but not enough to do this sort of discovery. There's a reasonable portion that never expose themselves to the public network at all.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> FBI clearing out DPR's accounts?

...or DPR associate moving around his money? ;)

</comment><comment><USER56> Well, this is just another reason why bitcoin will not work - you can track money changing hands.. Certain three letter agencies would have not trouble tracking most of the transfers, all over the world.

<comment><USER57> i love this

         this is just another reason why bitcoin will not work

5 years later; several orders of magnitude later, so many arbitrary "milestones" met (parity with dollar, can i buy airplane tickets with it?, well we'll see when the government recognizes it)

when do you decide that bitcoin 'works'? i mean; it is absolutely undeniable 100% certainly no-matter-what-you-say currently working RIGHT NOW; the mental dissonance around bitcoin naysayers is becoming hilarious

<comment><USER56> Size of the current bitcoin economy is "just" $8bln. While it sound like a lot of money, comparing to the rest of the economy it does not even qualify as a pocket change.

<comment><USER58> So it's definitely worked well enough to create an 8 billion dollar economy?

<comment><USER59> I was a naysayer until recently. After the senate hearing, I ate crow. Too late to profit at this point though :(

<comment><USER60> I'm not sure that's true.

<comment><USER59> What is your price target, if I may ask?

<comment><USER61> 7,000 USD within five years.

<comment><USER62> More likely to be within 2014 at this velocity and no reason to think it won't be S curve adopted.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER63> Someone wanted to be on the bitcoin 100 richest list.

</comment><comment><USER64> About 0.000028 times as big as daily forex trading.

</comment><comment><USER65> Someone trying to get #1 on [http://bitcoinrichlist.com/top100](http://bitcoinrichlist.com/top100) ?

Seems very reckless. All your eggs in one basket.

</comment><comment><USER66> Karl Gray claims the transfer

[https://twitter.com/paradimeshift/status/404043972646932480](https://twitter.com/paradimeshift/status/404043972646932480)

[https://twitter.com/paradimeshift/status/404042739127308289](https://twitter.com/paradimeshift/status/404042739127308289)

</comment><comment><USER67> I had some one steal my laptop, which had all of information on it and also had a wallet with well over $300,000 worth in bitcoins. My laptop was stolen back in April, right when it was beginning to soar. I had written everything down on paper and had it in the laptop case which they took too. I looked for a verification email and it was no where to be found. I am so depressed about this. Right now I am in a struggle losing my home to foreclosure, never did I think I would miss out on an opportunity like this. Its like winning the lottery, but losing your ticket. Sighhhhh......... Now... all Ive got is an empty wallet. 16syUE7aoGTM6BTvn1N9zf6UUCcUcRaHfL I dont even want to mention how much time I spent online searching for my wallet. Sucks!

</comment><comment><USER68> That's nothing, someone owns (owned) six million litecoins:

[http://ltc.block- explorer.com/address/LTpYZG19YmfvY2bBDYtCKp...](http://ltc.block- explorer.com/address/LTpYZG19YmfvY2bBDYtCKpunVRw7nVgRHW)

<comment><USER69> that's like $60million isn't it? how is $147million nothing?

<comment><USER68> Imagine if litecoin goes to $100 next year, now calculate.

<comment><USER70> $147m is nothing! Imagine what the value of this Nerf dart sitting on my desk could be next year!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER71> Everything you need to know about bitcoin is contained in this articlear [http://seattletimes.com/html/businesstechnology/2002020751_b...](http://seattletimes.com/html/businesstechnology/2002020751_beaniebabybubble31.html)

If you don't understand why, then thank God you are not working in a bank. Banking is one of the most innovative, talent hungry industries in the world, with the anomaly of (and exception in) the US retail market due to legal idiosyncratic US regulation..

Mand

</comment><comment><USER72> wow, 7kb data value 150 million dollars, what a crazy world.

</comment><comment><USER73> This stage of BTC growth is lovely. If you have a lot of it, you can issue transactions that might increase the total value. Not claiming this was the aim here, but certainly an effect :)

If this same owner splits the holdings up slowly, transfer wallets, and then recombine it again, it might spike up once more. People will definitely catch on, but it might bring up the value a couple hundred dollars in the hype.

Might make millions in the confusion.

</comment><comment><USER74> Is it only me, but such things make Bitcoin seem somwhat... less private... than real money?

</comment><comment><USER75> can it be related to this at all?

[https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=54673.1120](https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=54673.1120)

can someone do any further checks on the information below as a lot of people have lost out on a lot of bitcoins, including myself. Please check the magento company and if possible further info on 50BTC.

[http://myip.ms/info/whois/184.108.40.206/k/1171871757/website/5...](http://myip.ms/info/whois/18.104.22.168/k/1171871757/website/50btc.com)

I don't need any sarky should haves or comments, just advice or routes to take. We're all on this earth together no??

</comment><comment><USER76> It was Richard Branson..most likely someone paying for their ride to space in BTC.

</comment><comment><USER77> ... and I go right back to building something to help Bitcoin mitigate risks

</comment><comment><USER78> Is it possible to know the actual amount of money that exchanged hands?

<comment><USER79> It is possible to know 194,993.50000004 BTC changed between two addresses - these could be owned by the same individual, could be different accounts for the same individual. Anything else, USD, goats, Yuan, securities, etc that may have been traded would not be reported/recorded in the BTC transfer.

edit: corrected by josephagoss, ty

<comment><USER80> Goats aren't tracked by the blockchain?

<comment><USER77> people are building (and/or have already built) systems that allow parties to transfer both pure-digital-only assets (images, videos, music, ebooks, etc), and, the rights to RL assets (eg. a goat, a painting, a vehicle), both "on top of" the Bitcoin network/architecture as well as via completely separate but Bitcoin-like systems. Systems which are also distributed, anonymity/privacy- optimized, resilient, globalized, bureaucracy-routing-around, efficient, automation-friendly, fee-less, built/run by engineers & entrepreneurs rather than by politicians/lawyers/bankers/aristocracies, etc.

<comment><USER81> Well, I give that a few years before the government takes those dreams down to size, just like the NSA did of the entire internet. Keep dreaming.

/ super jaded

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER82> Everybody is suddenly a currency expert. Remember the days when everybody was a real estate investor? Yup. I'm gonna enjoy the show from the sidelines.

</comment><comment><USER81> My ignorant BTC question is this - does knowing that this 'address' has this much money make it a target for people to crack its key?

<comment><USER83> If the key was randomly generated (not derived form a passphrase), it is impossible to crack the key. Usually when people talk about cracking a "key", they refer to brute forcing a passphrase that either protects the real key (encrypted wallet), or is used to derive the key (brainwallet).

</comment></comment><comment><USER84> With a significant number of casual PCs storing bitcoin the virus industry is about to become WAY more lucrative for the bad guys.

</comment><comment><USER85> Might be the german govt. They've been advocating open source and linux for a while now. Maybe trying out buttcoins.

</comment><comment><USER86> Anyone know of any genius graphics programmers who have had access to lots of high-end GPUs, who might be retiring soon?

</comment><comment><USER87> After recent fluctuations it's very hard to predict what, if any impact this will have on it's value.

</comment><comment><USER88> and already on its way back to one of its original wallets [https://blockchain.info/address/1HBa5ABXb5Yx1YcQsppqwKtaAGFP...](https://blockchain.info/address/1HBa5ABXb5Yx1YcQsppqwKtaAGFPYe5xzY)

</comment><comment><USER89> Is there not a limit to the amount of money that can be transferred via Bitcoin?

<comment><USER90> In theory a single transaction cannot involve more BTC than exists, but that's not a practical limit since you couldn't buy all the BTC that exists anyway.

</comment></comment><comment><USER91> What does the "shit load of money!" mean on the transaction page?

<comment><USER92> It's a link to a reddit thread discussing the transaction.

</comment></comment><comment><USER93> i am worried about sha256

and finally mathematicans could get rid of poor now

</comment><comment><USER94> This was obviously made by someone with very large botnet.

</comment><comment><USER95> Wild-ass guesses:

1) Someone at the NSA 2) Barack Hussein Obama 3) Me

I hope the national-security apparati have a handle on this -- wouldn't want the evidence of a smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud...

</comment><comment><USER96> They couldn't spare even 0.5 for fees?

</comment><comment><USER97> OMG... is someone buying a nuke? !!!

</comment><comment><USER98> My guess: Bail money for DPR.

</comment><comment><USER99> Doesn't anyone find it odd that the price is quoted in USD and not BTC?

<comment><USER100> Nope. Click on the amount.

<comment><USER99> Just sayin -- quoting everything related to Bitcoin constantly as if it's USD in your pocket is so misleading. For a group that loves BTC so much and eschews the US Dollar, they sure love to quote it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER101> Here is my analysis:

Time: 17:30 - <USER2>

roughly 5pm europe time, past the 9-5 general business hours . If all the parties or just the reciepients are based in europe, between legal and illegal.. I would tap this as illegal. It just doesn't make sense.. for someone doing a legal transfer of this size, after business hours, unless.. senders were based in US.

Going through the direct senders (1 step back), the time with least 1k BTC+ transactions was 0200, 0400, 0500.. while with most big transactions were made around 1300, 1500, 2100 .. suggesting that these transaction were roughly either made from US to Europe, if of legal nature.. or within europe.. suggesting something shady. Very very crudely speaking.

Yeah, everything is possible, and the above is not necessarily true, but it appears so, at least to me.

Amount: 194k bitcoins

Multiple connected accounts who sent to the above address seems to have had 220k+ in total recieved and looking at denomination, it didn't seem like lot of normal people were involved. Besides, with this kind of money involved it is wise to have 10 or less people involved who are highly trusted. This appear so also, with how countable no of bitcoin addresses were used to say "bounce" the trace of that money. Skill wise, these are not normal people.. but given __HOW __this ended up in public domain, they could have done slightly better.

I get the feeling you get from govt hired people doing such things, no offense.. but somewhere below the elite, but above the average joe. It is also possible that a bigger or equal (more likely) sum was also transferred elsewhere.

Movement seem to have stopped.. due to attention it has already garnered or is it the actual resting place? If it would be illegal, one would have had no problem keeping it in multiple bitcoin wallets in smaller amounts. But if it is someone, with legal force on side.. say govt agency, it would not have problem leaving the bitcoins in such limelight, for a long time, as long as they believe that bitcoin is actually 100% and not 99.9999999% impregnable.

Motive, as discussed slightly above, can be mainly either "convenience of centrality" > or > "hiding a bigger sum" .. well I at least won't be putting my money in BTC for my own reasons. I got that feeling today to use it.. but I resisted.

BTC is genuine, but the currently it seems like a pyramid fraud system which is perfectly legal strictly speaking. More people putting in money in BTC system.. already rich getting richer.. tickle down effect :? Well 150 million.. has really left a lot of questions .. or its nature, motive, ownership, moral, etc. Who would answer? No one.. ironically.. thats a big problem as well a big benefit of BTC. I'm sorry.. lot of things I said above are based on feelings, but to tell you the truth, before today, BTC was in a nutshell somewhat easy to understand.. but 150 million.. is a figure that can give any guy a lot of different vibes, speculative as well as wild goose chase type.

</comment><comment><USER102> Russian mobs.

<comment><USER103> Or Heisenberg.

</comment></comment><comment><USER104> OMFG, Bitcoin is so anonymous!

<comment><USER105> Do we know who these two people are? No? Then it's anonymous.

<comment><USER92> It's pseudonymous, because if they make a transfer later we'll still know it's the same people.

<comment><USER106> You can't know that for sure. I could pay you 2 BTC by giving the private key to a wallet holding 2 BTC. You could even return change in the same way.

The physical Bitcoins (like those by Casascius) work exactly like this: physical coins containing a private key hidden behind a seal.

<comment><USER104> You're so open to scammers that it isn't even funny.

Lets say I give you a "physical" BTC worth 1 million BTC. Is there any way for me to prove to you that I have erased the private key to this BTC address?

No, there isn't. Anyone who is caught using physical BTC coins is a sucker who doesn't understand the system. They can be very easily scammed by the very man who created the "physical BTC coin". After all, all I need to do is keep a copy of the private address, and transfer the money sometime after I've "sold" you the BTC.

<comment><USER65> Read the FAQ.

[https://www.casascius.com/faq.aspx](https://www.casascius.com/faq.aspx)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Yauba: a search engine that logs nothing - <AUTHOR> http://www.yauba.co.in/

<comment><USER2> Nice one ... in light of recent privacy issues at Facebook and other online sites, I think something like this is sorely needed.

The Yauba alpha blows away Cuil's and Powerset's beta!

</comment><comment><USER3> They have some hot babes working for them: <http://www.janeenabasra.com></comment>


Why there is something rather than nothing – The finite, infinite and eternal [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://arxiv.org/pdf/1205.2720.pdf <comment><USER2> First: it's nice to give arXiv links to the abstract/metadata page rather than straight to the PDF: [http://arxiv.org/abs/1205.2720](http://arxiv.org/abs/1205.2720)

Second, this paper is from 2012.

And third, who is this guy? A quick Google search suggests that he's a college dropout who somehow made a big media splash in 2003 after announcing that he had a radical new theory of time, but has had zero impact on the actual physics community. Why is this paper worth our time?

<comment><USER3> >Why is this paper worth our time?

It's not, it's obvious crankery.

<comment><USER4> The paper must have been endorsed by an arXiv endorser:

[http://arxiv.org/help/endorsement](http://arxiv.org/help/endorsement)

Who the endorser is doesn't seem to be public though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> To summarize his arguments:

The universe is eternal, which means it has always and will always exist. If there is something that always exists, then it is impossible for there to be nothing. It is impossible for there to be nothing.

Not a very satisfactory answer. The interesting question just becomes: Why is the universe eternal? or Why does there exist an eternal universe at all?

<comment><USER6> > The universe is eternal

Is this proven?

<comment><USER5> No, he just asserts it. And it's probably impossible to prove.

<comment><USER7> Numbers can go forever but the universe can't?

I think the universe would be quite annoyed at the idea of being out-ranked by a bunch of numbers.

<comment><AUTHOR> >I think the universe would be quite annoyed at the idea of being out-ranked by a bunch of numbers.

very amused by this analogy

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Replace "universe" with "God" and this starts to feel like a philosophical argument for theism.

<comment><USER9> It is a rehash of Thomas Aquina's argument and every other cosmological argument.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> This debate has being going on for a very long time (our first record of it is with the Greeks). I see no reason why why [0,inf) universes cannot have being (an interesting question is whether [0,fin] universes exist, if they do they probably don't have conservation of energy). The mathematics that defines a universe is certainly eternal, but that doesn't mean that only systems that work for time (-inf,inf) need have being. The logic in the article would also seem to imply that the universe cannot have initial conditions in the way we usually think about them, it can only have constants which hold everywhen which, while certainly in line with scientific dogma, we have not sufficiently show (consider searches for variation in the fine structure constant).

I think the author conflates the eternal nature of the mathematics that defines a universe with the temporal nature of that universe, as if time was not itself something that was defined by the mathematics. Our own universe happens to be one of the mathematical entities that is reasonably stable and doesn't wink back out of existence a microsecond after coming into existence or remain a sea of hot quark-gluon plasma for all eternity. Hell, there are probably universes out there without time.

</comment><comment><USER11> Reminds me of this article published in in Nature in 2005: "The Mental Universe", from Richard Conn Henry.. similar idea (The PDF is first result in Google)

[http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v436/n7047/full/436029a...](http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v436/n7047/full/436029a.html)

</comment><comment><USER9> Terrible paper, it's doesn't use any process of proof (proof by contradiction etc.) It also leads to a logical inconsistencies e.g if the Universe is eternal it must take an infinite amount of time for any being to exist (since the time between the "beginning" and "now" is infinite).

<comment><USER7> What "beginning"?

Your assumption is that beings exist now, but not ages ago. Perhaps they've always existed in this cyclic universe he talks about.

<comment><USER9> No this is a common argument against anything involving infinite universe/ universe being infinite. If the universe has always been here how many events does it take for us to exist? Infinte. Saying beings always exist therefore beings exists is not a proof.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Trying to deny the possibility that the universe could not exist is a fool's errand.

Clearly, existence is contingent. There is no logical requirement that matter exist, and there's a clear logical possibility that nothing physical would have ever come into being.

(It's hard to wrap one's mind around this because we do exist.)

<comment><USER13> I think the better response is that our minds aren't capable of answering the question of whether the universe is eternal or had a beginning, is necessary or contingent. We lack the conceptual apparatus for understanding and/or answering the question. This position goes back at least to Kant's antinomies (specifically the first and fourth): [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kant's_antinomies](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kant's_antinomies)

<comment><USER6> > It's hard to wrap one's mind around this because we do exist.

I confess that I get slightly dizzy when I contemplate the existence of absolutely nothing. I have all kinds of inexpressible contradictions over the observation of nothing, but skipping all that to the acceptance of "nothing" ... What doe that _mean_?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I am one of those people who finds this question fascinating. I am neither a philosopher nor a physicist, but it seems to me that one of two cases must be true: Either the universe has existed for an infinite time in the past or the universe came into existence from nothing. Either of those cases seems extraordinary to me. But am I missing a third option? I realize that some (like Lawrence Krauss) have shown that you can get a universe from nothing plus the laws of physics, however, that seems like a rather unsatisfactory answer. For one thing, it leaves me with the question of where the laws of physics came from? And do the laws of physics exist independently the universe or are they merely convenient models that humans use to describe the universe?

<comment><USER15> A third option: existence is not a concept that can be used with the spatio- temporal totality that is the universe. Just as there are syntactically correct but meaningless sentences such as "colourless green ideas sleep furiously", there are ideas such as "the universe came into existence" and "the universe always existed" that are "syntactically correct" (according to some unspecified syntax that governs concept formation) but don't pick out meaningful concepts.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> If anyone is interested in some thoughts on this question that have been in vogue in recent years in academic philosophy circles you might want to look into speculative realism (and also look into the immediate disavowel of the term the moment those involved felt pigeon-holed).</comment>


Supdate – A Clojure library for transforming nested data structures - <AUTHOR> https://vvvvalvalval.github.io/supdate/ <comment><USER2> This is neat! When I first started reading and it described itself as "transforming nested data structures" I immediately thought of specter, which we use quite a bit at Latacora. We've published a library, eidolon[0], with common specter navigators.

To get a feel for the difference I translated a few of the examples to what they would look like in specter.

A few things I learned:

\- supdate is very useful if the data you have is already regular and not too convoluted. By comparison, most of the time the data I pass to specter is a giant (>100MB serialized and compressed) rat's nest (data from every AWS service under the sun).

\- supdate is very good at this "implicit projection/selection" (in the relational algebra sense). It feels a lot more like Datomic pull syntax that way than specter. By comparison, the equivalent specter thing made me write a pretty complex multi-path with submap to get the same behavior. By comparison, specter feels better at the logic programming equivalent of this: in specter, I express the data I want to address and specter figures out where it lives; in supdate, I tell you exactly where it lives, structurally.

\- Implicit selection (per previous point) feels like something that's maybe most valuable for data representation, so, UIs? To quote Perlis, "It is better to have 100 functions operate on one data structure than 10 functions on 10 data structures.", so something I have done a few times with specter is write a navigator for commonly accessed things (like the actions in an AWS IAM statement) and then reuse that all over the place. It's harder for me to see how to do that in supdate, but I guess it's all data so it can't be that hard :)

In conclusion: I think it does what it says on the tin. There are things that it can't express (or at least I can't figure out how), but it's very clear at expressing the things it can. I probably won't end up using it, but that's not an indictment of the tool as much as it tells you what we use specter for :-)

[0]: [https://github.com/latacora/eidolon](https://github.com/latacora/eidolon)

</comment><comment><USER3> Libraries like this are an argument for dynamic types. In Clojure, all libraries work with associative or sequential collections, which is why you can compose supdate with literally anything.

We do lose the embedded proofs that statically typed APIs give. We regain some of the confidence with clojure.spec'ing them.

I wonder if there's a way to make a compile time spec - enforce contracts at API boundaries, but let stuff like supdate work in a highly generic way in between. C++ templates and Rust traits could work, but everyone would need to agree on a core set to use.

<comment><USER4> Regarding compile-time spec checking — Spectrum is working toward just that. [https://github.com/arohner/spectrum](https://github.com/arohner/spectrum)

<comment><USER5> Spectrum would be great, but I think it's still way off from being usable. Taking a line from Specter's page, static analysis that catches idiotic bugs (es mis-typed keys) would really be "Clojure's missing piece". I have been trying it on and off for a bit of time now, but it still breaks on anything but the simplest cases.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This looks like a fantastic library for updating nested data structures -- something that's definitely been a pain point in writing Clojure.

I wrote a library that complements this nicely -- it's for transforming one deeply nested data structure into one that has a different shape, for example:

(f/transform {:a [1 2 3] :b [2 3 4] :c [5 6]} {k [vs]} {vs #{k}}) => {1 #{:a}, 2 #{:a, :b}, 3 #{:a, :b}, 4 #{:b}, 5 #{:c}, 6 #{:c}}

[https://github.com/disalvjn/faconne](https://github.com/disalvjn/faconne)

</comment><comment><USER7> Love it! This looks like it solves a problem I have for an community project (parsing a 2mb convoluted json with status data for 100+ devices) in an elegant way!

What skills does one need to have to be able to write such libraries for yourself? I'm just feeling like a mediocre copy&understand&adapt&paste programmer but rarely I'm able to create unique concepts/software.

<comment><USER3> Exposure to several different ways of solving similar problem sets could help you think outside of the box (or in many boxes at once, at least). Clojure is a great choice for one box. Maybe look into what Haskell or ML do with type systems, or what Smalltalk does with message passing. I picked these to complement Clojure's strenghts.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> What a coincidence. I've been working on a macro to do exactly this yesterday and think I might have a working version tonight or tomorrow. In Clojure too.

The only difference is in the way I decided to treat arrays

        (xxx {:a [1 2 3]}
             {:a [_ _ inc]})
        ;; {:a [1 2 4]}

This is because I intend to use it on arg vectors rather than proper data. So I'm fine with having to access everything step by step from the left and having a one to one relation between leafs in the data tree and leafs in the transformer tree. Actually I wrote a cowalk function (as well as coprewalk, copostwalk, etc), to allow for traversal and editing of multiple data structures at the same time provided they have the same shape.

<comment><USER9> Interesting! In supdate the transform would be:

{:a {2 inc}}

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> This looks like it enables functionality very similar to specter. [https://github.com/nathanmarz/specter](https://github.com/nathanmarz/specter)

Except

1\. Much easier to grok syntax/easier learning curve

2\. Not as powerful/generic

<comment><USER9> As the author, I fully agree with this description!

The cost of abstraction should not be ignored, and that's why a lib like supdate sometimes makes sense before reaching out to Specter, lenses etc. (although I love those too!)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Some related work to look at, if you're interested in approaches like this, are the pattern-based syntax transformers from Scheme (e.g., early `syntax- rules`) and Racket, and the XML transformation languages.

</comment><comment><USER12>
        (require '[clojure.string :as str])

Infix, really? I love both Lisp and Haskell. Code like this makes me wonder why I ever strayed from Haskell.

<comment><USER13> It's not infix, but keyword args which have been part of lisps since at least the cltl2</comment></comment>