Bitcoin Is Dead, Long Live Bitcoin - <AUTHOR> http://avc.com/2016/01/bitcoin-is-dead-long-live-bitcoin/ <comment><USER2> Back in 2009 when I was getting into bitcoin, it was widely described as a "stateless currency" and not just an alternative to Visa or credit cards. Having a background in economics, bitcoin looked to me like a truly revolutionary technology and if it was adopted en masse would change politics forever.

The problem however is that a nation's currency is arguably the primary source of it's sovereignty. Whomever controls the currency primarily used in a nation, controls the nation. So it's safe to say that no nation is going to let bitcoin or any other currency take hold for widespread commercial use in lieu of it's sovereign currency - that's a hallmark of a failed state.

In fact that's why when regulators declared bitcoin as a commodity it was such a big deal. The US doesn't really care because we haven't had commodity money since the 1970s, but the idea that if enough people decided that they wanted commodity money, they would arguably have a medium with which to do it with that wasn't tied to any state.

So as with every product, unless a massive number of people decide to stop using their home currency and start using bitcoin, then bitcoin will "fail."

Whether it pivots to some kind of credit system or not is largely immaterial because of the potential it had.

It's like if we created Artificial General Intelligence and it decided to just write movie reviews forever.

<comment><USER3> > The problem however is that a nation's currency is arguably the primary > source of it's sovereignty.

The reverse is also true--any significant currency creates sovereignty by elevating the power of those with the greatest influence over that currency.

In the case of Bitcoin, the "core" developers, in addition to the highest- volume miners, have been elevated to the sovereign position. Rather than a distributed stateless currency (which I would argue is impossible), what Bitcoin has become is a currency whose sovereigns are accidentally selected, poorly organized, and not responsible to its currency users in any direct way.

There is a famous concept called the "tyranny of structurelessness," which says that there are always political structures when groups of humans interact, the question is just whether they are defined or hidden. A "structureless" organization, rather than egalitarian, is governed by a small secret clique that assembles for unknown or possibly trivial reasons. There are no clearly defined procedures for removing or adding sovereigns, or for adjudicating disagreements.

Does this sound like Bitcoin? Based on the articles I've read this week, it does to me.

Edit:

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

<comment><USER4> Well, right.

One may frame this whole "failed versus not failed" as a power struggle between two camps:

a. Those who own a large stake in the original BitCoin - such as the developers, miners, venture capitalists, the Winklevoss Twins, etc.

and

b. Those who don't own a large stake in BitCoin currently, but wish to own a large stake in the dominant cryptocurrency. Wall Street...

When you attack BitCoin on any grounds, technological or otherwise, you are attacking those stakeholders.

<comment><USER3> Another way to look at it is, what was the goal of the Bitcoin experiment?

a. To create a new network for digital financial transactions? This seems to be what Fred Wilson is writing about, and I agree with him that the jury is still out.

b. To create a distributed currency free from government bureaucracy? Bitcoin seems well-separated from the U.S. federal government, but lately it also seems like Bitcoin has organically sprouted its own messy government bureaucracy.

<comment><USER5> > Bitcoin seems well-separated from the U.S. federal government, but lately it > also seems like Bitcoin has organically sprouted its own messy government > bureaucracy.

Bitcoin, nor its tokenholders, cheerleaders, etc. do not have the violence- backed power to tax. So while it may have the nasty trappings of a bureaucracy, I don't think it sinks to the level of a _government_ bureaucracy.

<comment><USER6> That's damning with faint praise, if the best thing you can say about the Bitcoin community is that at least it hasn't monopolized its capacity for violence.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The problem with bitcoin, as I see it, is that discussion of problems that may exist can lower the value of bitcoin- whether the problem is real or not. If you're heavily invested emotionally with bitcoins, you need to discuss these problems so that they can be solved. If you're heavily invested _financially_ , you need to make sure no one talks about these problems, at least until you have a plan for how you're not going to lose your fortune.

Those invested financially have very good reasons to believe in solutions that will retain their investment, and dismiss solutions that put them at risk.

<comment><USER8> Well the problem is THAT DISCUSSION OF SOLUTIONS to bitcoin issues are being censored, with key people being banned from the usual discussion forums

A decentralized currency where the development, mining and discussion is controlled by less than a dozen people which is a joke

<comment><USER9> It is irrational to complain about censorship in a private location.

<comment><USER10> No it's not.

<comment><USER9> Contribute to the discussion please as to why private property rights should not apply?

<comment><USER11> Nobody's saying it should be illegal for them to censor. They're saying that they shouldn't censor.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The article asks "is Bitcoin gold" or "is Bitcoin Visa".

Bitcoin's first killer app was drugs. Then Silk Road I and Silk Road II were taken down. That put a dent in the price.

Currently, Bitcoin is a way to get yuan out of China and convert it to dollars or euros, despite China's exchange controls. Most of the mining and the exchange volume are in China. Buying Bitcoin with yuan and selling it outside China is technically prohibited by the People's Bank of China, but they haven't cracked down hard on it. Yet. Mining is also a way to convert yuan to dollars. Miners in China can also qualify for the loans and subsidies the government of China gives businesses.

Bitcoin as a general currency for transactions just isn't happening. The real transaction costs are too high. There's volatility risk. There are exchange costs getting in, and exchange costs getting out. (At the retail level, those are high; Robocoin ATMs have a buy/sell spread of about 15%) There's also the substantial risk that the exchange will fail or steal your money. (This got better in 2015, but until then, more than half of Bitcoin exchanges went bust. It wasn't just Mt. Gox.) Paying 1% - 3% to Visa looks good compared to that, especially since buyers get protection against merchant fraud.

Bitcoin as a speculation looks good some years, and bad in others. It's like a penny stock, except that Bitcoin is zero-sum. There's no intrinsic value, and no fundamentals. It's all greater-fool speculation.

The impressive thing about Bitcoin is that the system is well behaved in the presence of a very high level of criminality. Few, if any, other distributed computer based systems can make that claim. It would be nice if DNS or BGP or SS7 worked that well.

</comment><comment><USER13> Block size isn't a free parameter. The team behind btcd, a Bitcoin full node written in Go, made the following observations about block size [1]:

1\. a 32 MB block, when filled with simple P2PKH transactions, can hold approximately 167,000 transactions, which, assuming a block is mined every 10 minutes, translates to approximately 270 tps

2\. a single machine acting as a full node takes approximately 10 minutes to verify and process a 32 MB block, meaning that a 32 MB block size is near the maximum one could expect to handle with 1 machine acting as a full node

3\. a CPU profile of the time spent processing a 32 MB block by a full node is dominated by ECDSA signature verification, meaning that with the current infrastructure and computer hardware, scaling above 300 tps would require a clustered full node where ECDSA signature checking is load balanced across multiple machines.

For context, a meager 300 tps is less than 10% of what VISA does - hence this solves no long standing problems in Bitcoin, yet it condemns all the nodes to run in compute clusters in datacenters. Naturally, "small blockists" as we're called, point out that this isn't how Bitcoin works today at all. Forcing nodes into compute clusters in remote datacenters is a major, sweeping departure from nodes running on home networks with consequences both forseeable and unforseeable.

[1]: [https://blog.conformal.com/btcsim-simulating-the-rise-of- bit...](https://blog.conformal.com/btcsim-simulating-the-rise-of-bitcoin/)

<comment><USER14> Hasn't signature verification speed been improved significantly since 2014? And what year would 32MB blocks be needed in and what processors would be available in that year?

<comment><USER13> > Hasn't signature verification speed been improved significantly since 2014

Pieter Wuille's work in libsecp256k1 promises to improve verification speeds on 64-bit CPUs by as much as 700%, and it's set to be deployed on the network as early as February.

This will hopefully be enough of a boost to reasonably process 2MB blocks on a desktop PC. This desktop processing goes very underappreciated by most onlookers. Imagine if you couldn't run a BitTorrent client on a home PC? To put it mildly, I would have an issue calling BitTorrent "peer-to-peer" in that case. For example, it would be absurd to out-and-out need a remote compute cluster to seed or leech torrents.

> And what year would 32MB blocks be needed in and what processors would be > available in that year?

The "big blockist" proponents actually contended Bitcoin dies without 20MB blocks starting this month, January 2016, and doubling every two years. Going by their original propositions, we would have >32MB block capacity by around this time in 2018. How much do you think desktop PC performance will have improved by then? And this is to say nothing of the bandwidth costs [1].

[1]: [http://statoshi.info/dashboard/db/bandwidth- usage](http://statoshi.info/dashboard/db/bandwidth-usage)

<comment><USER14> Something seems off here. If a 7x performance increase is only enough for 2MB blocks, does that mean a PC today can only handle <300KB blocks? How have we not heard about this? How are people running full nodes on RPis?

And I don't remember seeing anyone call for 20MB blocks. The debate looks more like 1MB vs. 2MB vs. 8MB etc.

<comment><USER13> First, it would behoove you to run a full node on your desktop PC.

What you will surely find is that maxing out your CPU at 100% for hours on end isn't very fun and isn't necessarily conducive to getting other work done at the same time. This is again to say nothing of the bandwidth requirements, streaming videos or playing games for example may become out of the question depending on the quality of your network connection.

This is to say, at 1MB blocks, full nodes on the desktop are already becoming problematic for some users. The warning signs are as clear as day. What's more, to even get the performance of full nodes on desktop to this level has been a monumental feat and one largely spearheaded by the so called "small blockists" \- th efforts of Dr. Adam Back, Gregory Maxwell and Dr. Pieter Wuille have been absolutely essential to making Bitcoin full nodes at least runnable on consumer hardware. For example, Greg Maxwell claims testing an original version 0.1 full node would take upwards of _20 weeks_ to sync fully.

Second, Gavin Andresen originally proposed 20MB blocks starting January 2016, and doubling every two years [1]:

> CPU and storage are cheap these days; one moderately fast CPU can easily > keep up with 20 megabytes worth of transactions every ten minutes. > > > Twenty megabytes downloaded plus twenty megabytes uploaded every ten minutes > is about 170 gigabytes bandwidth usage per month – well within the 4 > terabytes/month limit of even the least expensive ChunkHost plan. > > Disk > space shouldn't be an issue very soon– now that blockchain pruning has been > implemented, you don't have to dedicate 30+ gigabytes to store the entire > blockchain. > > So it looks to me like the actual out-of-pocket cost of > running a full node in a datacenter won't change with a 20 megabyte maximum > block size; it will be on the order of $5 or $10 per month. > > I chose 20MB > as a reasonable block size to target because 170 gigabytes per month > comfortably fits into the typical 250-300 gigabytes per month data cap– so > you can run a full node from home on a "pretty good" broadband plan.

That we now see Gavin entertaining a much lesser fork - to 2MB instead of his previously claimed "safe" 20MB - speaks volumes about the severity of this issue.

Now, the Bitcoin core team has proposed a similar increase to 1.6MB effective through SegWit. Hence, the divisiveness of this issue isn't just about the numbers, but it is regretably devolved into a political power struggle with one side apparently wanting to demote the other side. "Big blockists" have long seen no harm in putting full nodes datacenters, backing their logic up with such gems as "Satoshi said this was fine 8 years ago therefore it's fine now". Meanwhile the "small blockists" \- who are comprised of the very people who optimized Bitcoin full nodes to the point where we can now have this very debate - believe you need desktop PC users of full nodes to have a truly P2P network.

[1]: [http://gavinandresen.ninja/does-more-transactions- necessaril...](http://gavinandresen.ninja/does-more-transactions-necessarily- mean-more-centralized)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> 1\. I have no idea how to get Bitcoin. A quick search takes me to several exchanges that look like torrent sites for pirating shit.

2\. Nor has anyone presented me a compelling reason to get bitcoin (other than the future). Off the top of my head, if a company offered me an account that would take care of my online transactions in a secure way using Bitcoin, I might be interested. Maybe I'd put a few hundred in it each month and use it for random expenditures, and hopefully get access to some cool micro-services.

But I have zero awareness anything like that exists.

3\. If it's to succeed as capital, it will be a daring bank that creates their own bitcoin equivalent... followed by one of the norwedish countries making their own national bitcoin. Then the floodgates will open.

<comment><USER7> The only real compelling reason anyone has these days to buy a bitcoin seems to be for use on darknet markets, mostly to buy drugs. The merits of those markets are wonderful to discuss, but as I don't really have a use for drugs in my life right now, I have no need for bitcoins.

<comment><USER16> I don't know, have you tried to buy plane tickets with a credit card? It takes me a solid half hour every time, between the "verified by Visa" crap, the merchant not accepting the card and some failure on their system. With Bitcoin, you tap the link and press "confirm".

It's miles ahead of any other payment system I know, including cash (because you don't have to be in proximity of the recipient).

<comment><USER17> >have you tried to buy plane tickets with a credit card? It takes me a solid half hour every time

Who exactly are you buying plane tickets from?

The last time I bought tickets, it took less than a minute to pay with a credit card. I spent more time searching for a flight with wifi.

<comment><USER18> Maybe his country has different rules about this sort of thing? Or maybe airlines/credit card companies have different rules for his country?

<comment><USER17> Or _maybe_ it's pure hyperbole to support a narrative that Bitcoins are easier than credit cards.

Bitcoin transactions can take up to 10-15 minutes just to complete.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> It is a traditional view that in order to increase throughput we need to increase the bandwidth. This is true but we also know that throughput can be increased by abstracting the existing bandwidth to hold more information.

Increasing the blocksize will increase throughput, but is it the only way? Definitely not. The very recently improvement by Dr.Peter Wuille to segregate the witness (cryptography used to validate transactions) from the data (transactions) increases the capacity by around 66%, even if block's max size is unchanged. This is already in the testing phase. There is a whole bitcoin scaling roadmap & a lot of work going on.[0]

Practically, the death scenario being painted by XT hasn't realised and transactions are still going through normally.[1]

The bitcoin developer community comprises of very capable hackers many of whom are not only PHDs but have also invented new cryptographic techniques and also are robust security coders.[2][3]

[0][https://bitcoin.org/en/bitcoin-core/capacity-increases- faq](https://bitcoin.org/en/bitcoin-core/capacity-increases-faq) [1][http://statoshi.info/dashboard/db/transactions?panelId=4&ful...](http://statoshi.info/dashboard/db/transactions?panelId=4&fullscreen&from=1435768112971&to=1452875394268) [2][https://people.xiph.org/~greg/confidential_values.txt](https://people.xiph.org/~greg/confidential_values.txt) [3][https://blockstream.com/2015/08/24/treesignatures/](https://blockstream.com/2015/08/24/treesignatures/)

</comment><comment><USER19> This is interesting to me because it presents the blockchain size dispute in a way that seems much more sympathetic to the "no, we shouldn't increase the blockchain size" crowd than Mike Hearn's essay.

Is it really true that the people who are objecting to increasing the blockchain size see Bitcoin turning into a reserve "currency" to _hold_ wealth instead of a liquid currency used to make real time transactions?

Is that _really_ the debate? Because I didn't get that from Mike Hearn's essay at all...

<comment> TD-Linux The opinion, of course, widely varies. Mike's piece was Mike's opinion, so of course it's not going to be very sympathetic to Core developers.

The limits on transaction size have been known since the beginning of Bitcoin. VISA level transaction rates require insanely high block sizes, much larger than those proposed so far. People have come up with many, many different solutions to this problem.

One thrown around a lot is the lightning network [1], but it's not really a "reserve currency" in this case - it's a way to prevent a bunch of intermediate transactions from entering the blockchain forever, but it's based around advanced Bitcoin scripting usage, so it's using Bitcoin for much more than just a backing value.

Keep in mind that Bitcoin currently has a $6 billion USD market cap. Breaking Bitcoin would reduce that to $0. Many people have strong motivations to be conservative with changes...

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

<comment><USER20> The Lightning network is not based on advanced Bitcoin scripting, in the sense that Bitcoin script makes it possible or something. Bitcoin script is, rather, an impediment which has added a huge amount of complexity to Lightning. The same principle expressed without Bitcoin script can be explained in a few minutes[1]

1\. [http://altheamesh.com/blog/universal-payment- channels/](http://altheamesh.com/blog/universal-payment-channels/)

<comment><USER21> You are wrong. Lightning works by using smart contract logic. For Bitcoin in particular, that involves using Bitcoin scripting using real Bitcoin transactions.

That blogpost is basically describing lightning. Lightning Network has explicitly described instant cross-chain swaps privately, and publicly for many months.

<comment><USER20> Yes, and on a platform that allows for arbitrary logic, like a Turing-complete blockchain, or just a regular server, Lightning-like transactions are trivial. They can be described in minutes, and implemented in weeks. Due to the limitations of Bitcoin script, Lightning takes 60 pages to describe and is still not implemented. It's a revolutionary concept, hobbled by an antiquated platform.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Bitcoin is simply going through a discontinuity brought on by a fixed blocksize. Personally, I feel uncertainty is the real issue. The "community" should either accept this, or opt for a potentially unlimited ceiling (limited by physics and network size and topology).

If you choose to remain with the fixed blocksize, then you're betting the system will reach another equilibrium (which may be total collapse). This equilibrium will revolve a natural evolution in the pricing of transactions.

Either way, at some other point in the future another source of discontinuity will be the circulation limit. Again, which may or may not kill the system.

Bitcoin is simply evolving, as it necessarily needs to.

It's definitely interesting to watch as an outsider.

</comment><comment><USER23> Even when Bitcoin was riding high, Wilson was investing in something he believed was likely to fail. It's what he does: invest in startups, I mean.

I don't see any reason to believe that his position on Bitcoin should be read in any other terms than his investment in Bitcoin _companies_ is not appreciably worse or more risky than other companies in his fund. That his personal asset portfolio holds less Bitcoin than wine illustrates the distinction he's making.

His message is for people invested in Bitcoin _companies_. It is don't panic, these companies were always risky.

</comment><comment><USER24> Bitcoin will one day be known as 'the grandaddy of them all' just like the Rose Bowl. Bitcoin suffers from centralization, the very thing it was designed to circumvent The Bitcoin cultist are emotionally wrapped up with the idea that it has to be everything for everyone. Money has a way of making us emotional. Bitcoin has to be a payment machine for payment processors, It has to be a store of wealth for investors, It has to be a currency for libertarians. It is so caught up in trying to be everything that it does none well. Bitcoin developers dont be afraid to go your own way. They should branch out into new areas and create new coins, applications and opportunities. Why does it have to be Bitcoin or bust. Proponents attack new ideas. They wake up at night in terror that something new might emerge that meet needs in better ways. What would the Stockmarket be like if there was but one issue to trade. It is no wonder that Bitcoin companies struggle to make money. The market is being restrained from growing by those that seek to control the golden goose and make certain that there is no other options. Yes, new things are coming and new financial markets will come into being whether Bitcoin changes its protocol or not. Centralization leads to waste fraud and abuse even with the best of intentions Bitcoin

</comment><comment><USER25> Love the Bitcoin/VISA analogy. Wrote about it here: [https://medium.com/shekel-magazine/odd-bedfellows-the- strang...](https://medium.com/shekel-magazine/odd-bedfellows-the-strange- history-of-visa-and-how-it-relates-bitcoin-101a93507c17)

Can 100% understand why some people may hate that future for Bitcoin, but I think the parallels are serious and it's probably what will happen.

</comment><comment><USER26> > At the core of the debate is whether the Bitcoin blockchain should be a > settlement layer that supports a number of new blockchains that can be > scaled to achieve various goals or whether the Bitcoin blockchain itself > should evolve in a way that it can scale to achieve those various goals.

No, among the developers actually working on Bitcoin that is not what the debate is about at all.

Bitcoin is a decentralized ledger, and indeed it can be argued that this is the only property about Bitcoin which is interesting/useful. Why? Because all properties we care about (availability, uncensorability, unseizability, etc.) derive from decentralization[0]. And at the end of the day we can do everything Bitcoin does faster, better, and cheaper on some alternative consensus system (see: Stellar, Open-Transactions, Liquid) that does not have this decentralization property. Decentralization is _expensive_. It requires a dynamic membership, multi-party block signing algorithm, which at the moment means proof of work. And proof of work costs hundreds of millions of dollars per year to maintain, and throttles the available bandwidth due to the adversarial assumption and the existence of selfish mining[1].

The question is not whether Bitcoin _should be_ a store of value or a medium of exchange. That implies we have some choice in the matter. The question is what level of on-chain utility does Bitcoin actually support under untrusted, adversarial conditions, without losing all properties derived from decentralization. This is an empirical question. The available bandwidth is something that can be determined from the performance of the code in the real world extrapolated to various adversarial simulations.

We had two Scaling Bitcoin workshops last year that gave us a data-driven answer: 3-4MB per block, tops. There are potentially ways that this number can be improved (see: weak blocks), and those are being worked on but are still some time from showing results. There are also some assumptions underlying this number, e.g. that we change the validation cost metric, which none of the existing proposals do in a smart way. But the scientific process is telling us right now that with the tools available to us we can increase the worst-case block size to 3-4MB with a better metric without the decentralization story becoming unacceptably worse off.

That is the plan of Bitcoin Core. The deployment of segregated witness will allow up to 2MB blocks under typical conditions, and 3-4MB under worst-case adversarial conditions. It will exhaust the available capacity for growth in the Bitcoin network at this time. Meanwhile, work progresses on IBLT, weak blocks, Bitcoin-NG, fraud proofs and probabilistic validation, and other related technologies that might provide an answer for the next increase a year or two later. I'm hopeful we may even be able to get an order of magnitude improvement from that one, but we'll see.

No one I'm aware of is pushing for smaller blocks because Bitcoin _should be_ a store of value and a settlement layer. If I had magic pixie dust I'd want 1GB blocks and everything on-chain too. But we live in the real world and are stuck in a situation where Bitcoin loses all of its unique properties if we scale much further than where we are at now. And so we must ask the question: what will Bitcoin become, since it can't scale on-chain? How can we live with that outcome? The idea of a settlement layer and off-chain but trustless payment networks like Lightning naturally arise from that thinking. The Lightning Network[2] is a way that we can have our cake and eat it too: Bitcoin remains small and decentralized, but everyone still has access to bitcoin payments. Lightning can potentially scale to global usage with a small-block chain as the settlement layer.

[0]: [http://bluematt.bitcoin.ninja/2015/01/14/decentralization/](http://bluematt.bitcoin.ninja/2015/01/14/decentralization/)

[1]: [http://hackingdistributed.com/2013/11/04/bitcoin-is- broken/](http://hackingdistributed.com/2013/11/04/bitcoin-is-broken/)

[2]: [http://lightning.network/](http://lightning.network/)

<comment><USER19> This is very interesting and another rephrasing of "what the debate is actually about!" At this point, as a complete outsider to Bitcoin I must say I am a bit confused. Here are the camps I am seeing:

Hearn seems to be saying that Bitcoin right now is _not_ really decentralized - aka the Chinese firewall problem and so much power already centralized in a few peoples hands. He also seems to be saying that the motivations for Bitcoin Core developers are not based on good faith technical disagreements, but more about bad faith political disagreements.

Fred Wilson seems to be saying that he concurs with Hearn's concerns about Bitcoin already being centralized, but would characterize Bitcoin Core developers as having _good_ faith political disagreements and advocates for "hard fork(s)" as a way to resolve these _good_ faith political disagreements.

You seem to be saying that, in fact, BitCoin Core developers have good faith technical reasons - nay - _empirically validated reasons_ to believe BitCoin has no real choice and that it can not ever become a visa-like transactional currency without destroying the decentralization qualities that make it so interesting. I assume you also believe that Hearn's qualms about the current centralization are wrong in some way.

So that makes for very conflicting stories about what is going on for this outsider to have any hope of judging. Very interesting though.

Can you tell me why the decentralized ledger can't just be made more granular so that increasing the block size might make kick out current under-powered nodes, but those nodes could be turned into virtual nodes where under-powered machines could pool resources to establish a virtual node and thus maintain decentralization?

<comment><USER26> > Hearn seems to be saying that Bitcoin right now is not really decentralized > - aka the Chinese firewall problem and so much power already centralized in > a few peoples hands.

This is true, and people are working to fix it on many levels. For example, separating the transaction selection from coinbase reward (what p2pool does, but with better scaling properties). Also, large chip manufacturers like BitFury selling all-in-one mining setups rather than running the miners themselves--they are presently doing mostly in-house mining, but are moving in the right direction. Also, smart property miners so that it doesn't matter if the hardware centralizes to where power is cheapest. There are also protocol- level changes along the lines of Bitcoin-NG, or non-outsourceable puzzles which remove a good deal of the mining centralization pressures.

So what you might not have gotten from the Hearn article is that this is a known problem and while scarily bad, work _is_ progressing on this front.

> He also seems to be saying that the motivations for Bitcoin Core developers > are not based on good faith technical disagreements, but more about bad > faith political disagreements.

I don't know what to say to that. We had two open workshops last year for discussing the scaling problem, which Hearn did not participate in. We have a plan for increasing the capacity of the system which also references what we do genuinely believe to be the technical hurdles to scaling. I charitably hope that Hearn is simply ignorant on this matter.

> I assume you also believe that Hearn's qualms about the current > centralization are wrong in some way.

No, the present state of mining centralization is concerning. But I'm not willing to throw in the towel on that just yet.

> Can you tell me why the decentralized ledger can't just be made more > granular so that increasing the block size might make kick out current > under-powered nodes, but those nodes could be turned into virtual nodes > where under-powered machines could pool resources to establish a virtual > node and thus maintain decentralization?

Decentralization in Bitcoin is about _mining_ decentralization. Everything else barely matters. A cabal of miners can censor transactions costlessly. A cabal of miners can require extra-protocol information to de-anonymize bitcoin holders. A cabal of miners can keep anyone else from mining bitcoin, thereby closing off competitors. The threat to Bitcoin's decentralization is centralization of control over the mining hashpower -- whether from the form of pools, or external coercion on pools, or companies having exclusive or back-door access to mining hardware (e.g. 21co).

Outside of the back-doors, what causes mining centralization is a combination of validation cost, latency, and external factors like electrical power subsidies.

But, having said that, what you propose is known in the community as 'probabilistic validation' \-- only checking part of the contents of a block and being able to relay small fraud proofs when such validation fails. This requires the ability to create such fraud proofs, which we will get with segregated witness (being worked on by Bitcoin Core right now), and with a lot work will eventually get us to the point where validation cost is not concern so long as there is a large, healthy network of probabilistically validating full nodes.

But we'd still have latency and real world power economies to worry about.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> It seems like the potential fork in bitcoin is already happening to some degree with Elements and the sidechain ([https://github.com/ElementsProject/elements](https://github.com/ElementsProject/elements)) -- a super interesting project that I just found out about yesterday! I can't help but feel, to a certain degree, like forking bitcoin is re-arranging deck chairs on the titanic though. There already seem to be more viable alternative cryptocurrencies.

<comment><USER28> The problem is for almost everyone technical features are trumped by market cap when it comes to cryptocurrencies. Viability for almost everyone comes down to which economy commands the most investment into it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Correct me if I'm wrong, but if this was a stock or some other security, and I somehow had influence over how it is managed thus what I said could affect its value, declaring it "dead" (or soon to be worthless) AND holding interest in it (long or short) - would be criminal in most countries.

<comment><USER30> Then this would be illegal (the website owners have a short in Herbalife).

[http://www.factsaboutherbalife.com/](http://www.factsaboutherbalife.com/)

I think as long as you disclose your position in the stock/security, you can say whatever you want.

<comment> shawn-furyan Indeed. People who specialize in shorting stocks, bonds, etc. live on the cycle of finding dirt through thorough private research, shorting the stock, and then publicizing the dirt.

This is actually one of the mechanisms that Efficient Market Theory relies upon for disseminating market information. If you could only benefit from assets increasing in value, then there would mostly be negative incentive for anyone to try to expose companies that are weaker than the market assumes them to be.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> The big drawback to the consumer is the speculative price. Of course, this attracts the scum of the Earth, but that's another r story. Bitcoin can be saved by applying the concept of a Currency Board [0]. All speculator will leave and only the serious players will stay and then regular folk can jump in. Of course, you can't make a million dollars from a single bitcoin you bought at $400, but you won't make it anyway if things go the way they've been going! Well, I know you can't apply the concept to Bitcoin, but just wanted to give some food for thought.

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

</comment><comment><USER32> I have never understood the bitcoin protocol very well, and I did not have time to read the entire posted article and its linked supporting pieces. That said, I did pick up that one of the major issues is that a few miners in China control a huge portion of the hash power and have an incentive not to allow growth. Given that computing power is so affordable, is it really not possible for some competing group to decide to save the protocol by creating some large resource pools? In other words, can miners not be evicted once in control?

<comment><USER33> The problem is one of scale. Bitcoin is heavy resource-intensive. So much so, that your Core i7 can't really do anything. These days, not even the latest GPUs can compete. You really need specialized hardware, and a ton of it. And so, money.

It's not enough to spin a thousand VMs in AWS and call it a day.

<comment><USER32> Yes, certainly. I wasn't assuming that a couple of programmers could pull it off. But if a group of people with the funding wanted to take control of the network away from these problematic miners could they?

<comment><USER14> Sure, but they'd lose $10M+ to do it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> The actual story here is that the attempt to fork Bitcoin (Bitcoin XT) is dead. Hearn tried to do so, failed, and left. Anyone who doesn't run XT should be celebrating their victory.

<comment><USER35> But there's Bitcoin Classic now, right? Which is emphatically an attempt to fork Bitcoin (just an attempt to fork it _even more aggressively_ than XT to the point where Core is the actual fork).

Would Classic have happened without XT? It seems to share some developers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> I'm worried (about myself) that I easily shift between these 2 camps: this thing is outrageously ingenious and this thing is outrageously preposterous.

</comment><comment><USER37> if chinese miners are indeed trying to limit blocksize in order to increase transaction costs, then the necessary chain of events which needs to occur is: 1) faith in bitcoin as a currency/payment system drops causing price crash 2) miners realise that the marginal increase in money made via transaction costs is massively outweighed by what they have lost in block rewards by limiting growth of the system 3) the miners get their act together and everyone upgrades to a new whizzy high capacity bitcoin.

This should continue to work until block reward becomes negligible in 2035.

</comment><comment><USER31> Bitcoin is long dead; the blockchain - not so much, but it won't survive in its present form as it's highly inefficient.

<comment><USER38> How do you have one without the other?

<comment><USER39> "Blockchain" is just a brand name given to a particular form of using Merkle trees, and Merkle trees have no correlation or dependency whatsoever on Bitcoin.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Yeah, well,that's just like... your oppinion, man.

</comment><comment><USER41> > I read his entire post a couple times.

because some blockchain investments might be in danger</comment>


The future of work looks like staying out of the office - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/02/employers-should-expand-not-cut-telework-into-the-future/ <comment><USER2> Well looks like I'm already living in the future. It's a comfy future with much time spent in my undies.

In all seriousness I have been apprehensive about the current pandemic and have been working from home mostly the last month. There are lots of co- workers coming and going to HK, Taiwan, Macau, and other Asiatic locales.</comment>


Nobody cares what you have to say: self doubt and me - <AUTHOR> https://www.staticcatgames.com/2020/08/nobody-cares-what-you-have-to-say.html <comment><USER2> Hello there! Nice blog. One small suggestion: I didn't quite like the picture of the screaming man you used it the post - it was, um, a bit jarring and distracted from the content.

A few days ago there was an interesting perspective on blogging, which I found useful. Maybe you will also find it useful -- [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24163658](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24163658).

All the best!</comment>


Ask HN: Cons of open sourcing MH370 investigation data? - ben-gy

I'm curious to discover your opinions on why the Malaysian authorities haven't open sourced the investigation data for missing flight MH370.
I'm certain that many benefits from OS development would carry through to equivalent investigations, especially through harnessing the collective problem solving abilities of communities like HN.
What do you think the opposing factors are? <comment><AUTHOR> > I'm certain that many benefits from OS development would carry through to > equivalent investigations, especially through harnessing the collective > problem solving abilities of communities like HN.

Given the recent high-profile incident where internet crowdsourcing converged on identifying two innocent people as responsible for the Boston Marathon bombing, and then attempted to spread their personal information as widely as possible, I don't think this approach currently has a good reputation.

I think it's an interesting question what crowdsourcing works well and poorly for. But I'd put criminal investigations way down the list of good candidates, due to the danger of devolving into mob justice, and even raising the risk of innocent people being lynched.

</comment><comment><USER2> There are a couple of potential concerns of national security which explain Malaysian officials being cagey about the radar "blip" which (presumably) turned out to be MH370:

1\. The exact locations and ranges of military radar capabilities is considered secret, if other countries knew their exact locations/abilities it would make an attack easier. This would make them reluctant to say where they picked it up/lost it on radar as it could reveal the range of the radar.

2\. If the radar blip wasn't MH370, what was it? It could have been a drone from any number of countries, or a spy plane flying over, or any number of potentially embarrassing possibilities that a military commander would have trouble admitting had gone mostly unnoticed for 72 hours.

</comment><comment><USER3> Do you believe there is some necessary domain-specific expertise which the Malaysian authorities don't already have access to?

They have "open sourced" it to the degree that they allow other governments and their resources to be involved. But I don't understand what it would even mean beyond that context.

<comment><USER4> Certainly, not only do large open datasets about tragedies that need to be solved attract many curious minds, they tend to attract:

1) people with domain experience but in different specialties in that domain that may prove to have a different viewpoint or hypothesis to explore or may have access to technologies or useful knowledge that the current domain experts the Mayalasian government has employed do not. 2) people without domain expertise, but have a strong expertise in another field that could offer novel strategies. These people are probably already autodidacts and would just spending enough effort to learn about specific parts of the domain that allow them to apply their knowledge.

Both have a lot to offer in addition too (not instead of) what Mayalasia's own expert already are doing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> (I do not think open source means what you think it means.)

Some of the data may be products of military signal gathering, capabilities of which those agencies would be loathe to disclose.</comment>


Learn GraphQL by querying JSON - spell-slinger https://www.graphql.college/practice-graphql <comment><AUTHOR> i thought Graphql was confusing at first, merely because of their distinction of "Query" and "Mutation". It turns out (which I should've known), "Query" is just like GET requests where you are retrieving information and "Mutation" is like a POST/PUT/PATCH/DELETE requests that can modify the data.

After grasping this, Graphql was pretty similar to working with REST and a bit more flexible in how we want the data to be returned.

Graphql really does fix the whole "query multiple endpoints to construct a single data" dilemma.

Only thing I didn't like about it was the way Graphql schema is to be written in server side, thought it could be a bit more intuitive and simplified . Currently, it can get pretty verbose and breaks the DRY mantra. Would be nice if the Type system can be hooked up with the whatever ORM you are on (Mongoose, AR, Sequel) because you'll be re-mapping the fields to Graphql which can be an overhead for no reason.

Also schema is like working with SOAP's WSDL all over again. I used to hate it but it's back with Graphql so I'm trying hard to like it!

<comment><USER2> > _Also schema is like working with SOAP 's WSDL all over again._

Glad to hear that I'm not the only one who feels that way. I still like using simple tools like curl to try out APIs. It's so much easier to demonstrate an issue to a coworker when you can copy/paste a curl command in email/chat/PR. My (admittedly limited) experience with GraphQL so far has been that it makes this more awkward.

<comment><USER3> This is the static vs dynamic type argument at its heart. When making small apps, dynamic wins out from not having to declare or think too much about types. After some threshold in complexity having static types is much better.

<comment><USER2> > _This is the static vs dynamic type argument at its heart._

I think you're commenting on GraphQL vs REST itself, and I don't disagree with what you're saying. Your comment, however, seems disconnected from what I attempted to express in the comment that you replied to. My comment was probably not clear, so I'll try to explain:

My comment is about the tooling and its effects on my workflow, which is mostly orthogonal to static vs dynamic typing. Specifically, I'm expressing a preference for simple tools over special-purpose tools. It was very common for me to test REST APIs with curl and share curl commands on team chat that others could copy/paste to reproduce something. SOAP and GraphQL tend to encourage the use of specialized tools, which adds friction to this kind of workflow (which happens on a daily basis). In fact, what I've seen since adopting GraphQL is people sharing screenshots from their IDE. It's in that respect that working with GraphQL reminds me a lot of working with SOAP.

That said, I don't think GraphQL is as bad as SOAP in this respect. I can still use curl to test out GraphQL APIs. It's just a bit awkward and takes longer to construct the command. I don't remember ever doing that with SOAP, but it's also been a _long_ time since I've used a SOAP API.

Returning to your analogy to static vs dynamic typing, I completely agree about static typing helping manage complexity [1], but it doesn't dictate which tool I use. I can write C programs in vim or I can write them in XCode, Visual Studio, or some other IDE. I prefer vim. GraphQL and SOAP feel like using a language that almost forces me to use an IDE.

[1] Static vs dynamic typing isn't the whole story, though. There's also strong vs weak typing. Haskell and C are both statically typed, but Haskell is strongly typed whereas C is usually considered weakly typed. Strong typing helps manage complexity compared to weak typing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> For me GraphQL adds a lot of complexity when setting up the API for only an incremental benefit when querying. Do others feel the same? Or am I missing something?

<comment><USER5> It's a pretty great format for rapid prototyping, but very complex and wouldn't deploy it as a public API that needs to be supported for a long time.

<comment><USER6> Thats what I thought at first as well. But as I started working deeper and using more frameworks (had to write some as well) that made the complexity go away. Adding data sources can be very easy and the frameworks, like Apollo, take care of all the things you had to think about previously. I know that there are of course frameworks that handle cacheing and query routing for REST apis, but the flexibility of GraphQL is unparalleled. I find them to be best suited to backing UI's that may get rethought and reworked every 6mo to a year. As well as for data analytics ad hoc queries.

My point is the can be very complex, but they don't have to be. I have a number of them deployed right now that are far more hands off for me than our other APIs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Errors from parsing the JSON should show up somewhere visible, as of now it looks like nothing happens unless you check the console.

<comment> spell-slinger Good catch. I actually showed them in a previous version, but now I let Codemirror show JSON errors inline.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Looks like a low friction way to bring on new team members to GraphQL.

However, the tools is either broken or not finished yet. I tried to change posts to books in the JSON tab and I get an error below: "Cannot extend type "Post" because it does not exist in the existing schema."

<comment> spell-slinger Glad you found it useful!

Sorry for the cryptic error. That happens because the two objects in the comments array reference post_id. If you change those keys to book_id everything should work.

The algorithm for generating a GraphQL schema from a JSON object could be improved, along with its error handling. I use the algorithm from this repo: [https://github.com/marmelab/graphql-schema-from- json](https://github.com/marmelab/graphql-schema-from-json). Error messages come from there.

I'll work on improving this tool and make it more user friendly. But I think that it is worth sharing it, even at this stage.

Cheers!

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> CSS is broken in Firefox.

<comment><USER10> HN is a tough crowd.

<comment><USER11> Free cross platform testing.

Pretty good deal.</comment></comment></comment>


Canada's CSE cyberwarfare toolbox revealed - <AUTHOR> http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/communication-security-establishment-s-cyberwarfare-toolbox-revealed-1.3002978 <comment><USER2> The Intercept write-up:

[https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/03/23/canada-cse- hac...](https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/03/23/canada-cse-hacking- cyberwar-secret-arsenal)

One of the documents (PDF, 46 pages):

[https://s3.amazonaws.com/s3.documentcloud.org/documents/1690...](https://s3.amazonaws.com/s3.documentcloud.org/documents/1690224/doc-6-cyber- threat-capabilities.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER3> The job of a spy agency is to spy, that will never change. The problem I have is when it starts infringing the rights and freedoms of it's own citizens (ie C-51).

<comment><USER4> They don't even have to. The NSA will spy on Canadians and then ship CSE the data.

<comment><USER5> There needs to be a ban on this practice.

I don't know about Canadian law, but most likely the spirit of:

 _The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures_

Was certainly not: Ask the Canadians to seize it for you and then they can give it back to you without due process.

(This is exactly the kind of Hostile Act the NSA should be protecting American's against, not cooperating with).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> [https://s3.amazonaws.com/s3.documentcloud.org/documents/1690...](https://s3.amazonaws.com/s3.documentcloud.org/documents/1690224/doc-6-cyber- threat-capabilities.pdf)

This is not a "cyberware toolbox." This is an IDS. For real, I bet they are using Snort inside one of their codeworded intrusion detection/response systems. Companies try to defend themselves from hackers by analogous systems. Is this any different?

</comment><comment><USER7> I see two strategies: (1) fight to restrict how much spy agencies spy. (2) fight to bolster ordinary citizens' use of technologies like encryption so that they cannot be spied upon.

I would bet that strategy (2) is the more likely one to gain traction and make a difference against the infringement of our rights as citizens.

<comment><USER8> The problem with strategy (2) is that the government can take action to stop it. For example, in the UK it's a criminal offence to withhold encryption keys in the face of a warrant.

David Cameron also relatively recently argued that encryption should be banned or controlled to prevent anyone hiding things from the intelligence services.

Widespread deployment of encryption would probably just result in more offensive tactics from intelligence agencies.

<comment><USER9> Key disclosure laws fall into this same category. It doesn't matter if you use full-disk encryption - you have to turn over the keys when asked else you face imprisonment. TrueCrypt's plausible deniability feature was really helpful; I wish dm-crypt has something like this.

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

And this is what happened in Canada recently:

[http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/nova-scotia/quebec-resident- al...](http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/nova-scotia/quebec-resident-alain- philippon-to-fight-charge-for-not-giving-up-phone-password-at- airport-1.2982236)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'm Canadian, and my initial thought was "Yay! We don't suck at something! Hooray! We're not irrelevant!" followed quickly by "Oh, $hit..." :-(

The worst part is that if this was part of _evidence-based_ policy, strategy, or tactics, it would at least be _arguably_ not stupid.

Sigh.

<comment><USER11> Fellow Canadian, definitely cool we have some bleeding edge stuff, just scares the hell out of me. Trying to convince fellow non-technical friends of what this means with C-51.

<comment><USER12> Have you thought about what "we" means there?

</comment></comment></comment><comment> at-fates-hands Are we seeing an arms race now in terms of cyberwarfare? It seems like this is the next "must have" for any nation state arsenal.

Makes you wonder what will be more powerful in five years. These kinds of weapons that can attack and bring down parts of a countries infrastructure or a nuclear bomb?

</comment><comment><USER13> Not mobile link

[http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/communication-security- establi...](http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/communication-security- establishment-s-cyberwarfare-toolbox-revealed-1.3002978)

<comment><USER14> thx. dismayed that the urls don't match up (by removing the 'm' or whatever). Boo.</comment></comment>


Startup Lessons I Learned the Hard Way - <AUTHOR> http://davidcancel.com/3-startup-lessons-i-learned-the-hard-way/

<comment><USER2> Fred Wilson was the first one to clue me in to the "Valley of Death" phase. He expands on it here: [http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2010/05/from-hopes-and-dreams-to- the...](http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2010/05/from-hopes-and-dreams-to-the-real- thing.html)

 _I also like to advise entrepreneurs to take advantage of the financing environment that is available to them during the hopes and dreams phase. It is a strange situation. Your company will be worth more to investors during the hopes and dreams phase than it will be worth while you are crossing the chasm. So you should raise enough capital at hopes and dreams valuations to get across. If you don't, a down round is waiting for you as yet another challenge while you are crossing the chasm.

Companies with no revenues but big potential are worth whatever the market will bear. But once you have revenues and are heading towards earnings, the market will be able to better assess what you are worth. Revenues and earnings multiples will enter the valuation discussions. And most of the time, revenues and earnings multiples will result in a lower number than hopes and dreams, at least for a while._

</comment><comment><USER3> _They are so paralyzed by the fear of failing that they spend every waking moment reading Techcrunch (don't do it, please) and other blogs, reading countless books and attending startup events all in the quest to learn some "secret" they think is going to help them succeed._

Haha, true. Although I read publications because they have interesting ideas, sometimes its hard to recognize advice in perspective; ie. a VC will say something completely different from an entrepreneur. Frankly, even entrepreneurs in different industries will say things that contradict one another. The problem is when everything is rational AND the entrepreneur has credibility. And then theres the case of people blogging advice when they shouldn't, ie. startup guys giving advice about hiring and building culture before they've even left their own garage.

Sometimes you just gotta put your head down, forget all the "lessons learned" blogs and and go with your gut.

</comment><comment><USER4> "Believe me failing sucks really bad but there are no repeatable patterns that lead to startup success."

Maybe not, but there are definitely repeatable patterns that lead to startup failure. Time familiarizing yourself with them can be time well-spent.

</comment><comment><USER5> Sorry to disagree, but saying, "Business plans are always wrong so stop obsessing about them!" is a foolish and cocksure attitude and a good way to suddenly get hit with a dreaded, "oh, I didn't think about that" moment when the fecal matter impacts the turbine as Mr. Murphy pays you a surprise visit.

Sure you may not need detailed 3 year financial projections or spreadsheets coming out your ears, but if you don't have at least a basic plan then you run the risk of having to handle issues you should have seen coming if only you had a basic plan. Writing a plan is as much for the Founder as it is for any investors and only fairly experienced businessfolk can really get away with skipping it.

<comment><USER6> _The plan is useless; it's the planning that's important_ \-- Dwight D. Eisenhower

I interpret this to mean that the planning process forces you to understand the problems you face, and that _understanding_ is what lets you adapt to changes in circumstances.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is the one I always have to learn the hard way: "Focus all your energy on solving a critical problem. Forget your idea."

It's so true, yet such a bitch to put into practice. Cognitive biases conspire against you--especially the sunk cost fallacy, because forgetting your idea often involves throwing away finished work.

My hope is that by getting burned by this enough times, I'll sharpen my spider sense about when I'm not focusing on solving a real problem.

<comment><USER8> _Nobody cares about my idea, and they don't care about your idea, either. Nobody._

I'm not sure why there is a difference, in Mr. Cancel's mind anyway, between "your idea" and a problem that needs to be solved. Your idea should = a problem to be solved. If it doesn't -- what the hell's your idea, then?

<comment><USER7> Dream versus reality. Your idea always starts out as solving some supposedly critical problem, but sometimes you're the only person with that problem. Or, the idea evolves over time and takes on bloat. I interpret dcancel's comment as: find a demonstrably critical problem that people have, then focus like a laser on solving that one thing. It's damn good advice.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> David Cancel also had some great points during his talk at Startup Bootcamp at MIT this fall.

You can watch the video here: [http://www.youtube.com/startupbootcamp#p/c/A978F0F30D190EF9/...](http://www.youtube.com/startupbootcamp#p/c/A978F0F30D190EF9/10/5lQ1NBUU_Us)

</comment><comment><USER10> Business plans may be mostly fluff, but execution plans are pretty essential.

</comment><comment><USER11> dcancel, thanks for great post... not really optimistic, but practical and realistic thoughts.

</comment><comment><USER12> WHERE did you get this

"what you think would be cool to build"?

What the heck does "cool" have to do with anything important?

This "cool" stuff is from what, some view that hacker entrepreneurs are prone to ignoring reality in favor of some oblivious intellectual self-abuse and a desire to insult and denigrate them?

Let's f'get about "cool".

You wrote:

"Your idea doesn't matter."

and

"Focus all your energy on solving a critical problem. Forget your idea."

You have some undefined but clearly confused, obscure, and highly negative conception or definition of an "idea". Such an "idea" is irrelevant, so let's set it aside.

The definition of a relevant 'idea' is one that enables, permits, or says how to solve "a critical problem". Or curing some deadly variety of cancer is "a critical problem", and an important "idea" would be how to do that.

Or, much of the REASON a "critical problem" still needs to be solved is that finding an idea good enough to solve the problem is too hard.

So, if we are attacking what is clearly "a critical problem", then the "idea" DOES "matter" and is crucial -- the idea needs to be GOOD, and finding it will likely be hard.

In denigrating an "idea", you appear to have bought into some common nonsense, especially spread by Guy Kawasaki, that "ideas are easy; execution is hard". Wrong, wrong, way WRONG, Guy.

Here Guy likes to insult, denigrate, and run down entrepreneurs, and that is common on his side of the table. Or, that side of the table likes to claim that much of what the other side of the table has is worthless.

Actually, GOOD ideas are HARD, and, then, execution is routine. BELIEVE ME, if you have a GOOD idea for curing some deadly variety of cancer, then the idea was hard, hard enough that so far some thousands of well funded, very serious biomedical researchers have missed it for some decades, and execution is routine, or many patients and their families and physicians will be knocking your door down as the last chance not to die yet.

Yes, with an easy idea, execution will likely be hard.

A charitable explanation for saying

"Your idea doesn't matter."

or

"ideas are easy; execution is hard"

is that someone really just has not even a weak little hollow hint of a tiny clue about what constitutes a GOOD idea or how to find one and to know that it is good; but there are ways to do these things: The work is essentially 'research', and the education for it is called the Ph.D. The all-time, unique world-class, grand champion for such ideas is the US DoD, and the NIH is not far behind. So, thankfully for US national security, the US DoD, and thankfully for US health care, the NIH, have for decades identified GOOD ideas and pursued them with high effectiveness.

A good DoD example is GPS. Yes it started as 'just an idea', but it was backed by some quite solid mathematical physics that permitted evaluating the idea. The 'idea', and actually nearly every good idea pursued by the DoD, is presented and evaluated first just on paper. So, in such work, the concepts of 'traction', prototypes, 'product-market fit', pivoting, etc. are all just silly; instead, the project gets evaluated just on paper long before 'traction', etc.

We CAN present and evaluate good ideas just on paper; learning how is much of why we go to school; that's part of what Ph.D. people do.

Uh, here's the little secret: It is human nature for people to run out of money.

Or, 'the story of America is rags to rags in three generations'.

Or, suppose tough, hard working, determined Joe from the wrong side of the tracks builds a company worth $800 million and then falls over dead from a heart attack and/or overwork. So, after the lawyers get their pieces, Joe's son Tom takes over the company. Too soon, via ignorance, simplistic thinking, lack of hard work and determination, high maintenance, fast women, slow horses, fast cars, nasty divorces, liquid pleasure, funny, smoky stuff, weekends in Vegas, Tom has the company losing money.

So, the other family members, seeing that they might have to go to work instead of just suck at the teat left by Joe, contact a private equity (PE) firm that agrees to buy 80% of the company for $40 million. Tom gets to 'pursue other interests'.

The PE firm brings just basic responsible business management, nothing more, cuts out the nonsense, gets the company worth $600 million, and sells it.

Why? Human nature. There are only a few people like Joe and a lot of people like Tom.

So, what about 'venture capital' (VC)? PE with a twist: Again much of the key is that commonly people run out of money. So, a VC firm can say that they are looking for passionate, visionary, etc. entrepreneurs. Why? Because the startup CEO is eager enough to see himself as passionate, visionary, etc. and because the VC firm wants the CEO to believe that VC firm is investing in the 'visionary', etc. CEO, his 'disruptive idea', 'secret sauce', etc.

The VC firm is just doing a routine manipulation; they are emphasizing the sizzle and not the steak. The VC firm is just looking at a way they can buy low and sell high, and their main way is that the CEO, as is human nature, ran short on money. It also helps if the CEO and his team are a bit naive, gullible, and easily manipulated.

Keeping money is hard. Building a valuable business, including finding the good idea, is hard, and keeping the business is also hard. There are lots of ways to throw money away that are not seen by poor people but make themselves known to rich people! Anyone who both made a lot of money and kept it avoided many opportunities to lose the money.

In particular the VC firm (I'm assuming information technology not biomedical technology) cares not at all about 'the idea', the 'secret sauce', etc. and will refuse (and, really, is nearly totally unable -- they are commonly just history majors, and only a tiny fraction of VC partners have any serious technical qualifications) even to evaluate it and, instead, just looks for some simple numbers: The main numbers are ComScore numbers and their rate of growth. That is, they look for 'traction'. Or, good traction and a good 'idea' are nearly as good as just good traction alone. Or the future value of the business and the idea are conditionally independent given the traction.

Why do the VCs do this? Because they, and their limited partners, understand and trust in human nature MUCH more than in technology or secret sauce.

It remains: For a successful business, the idea is just CRUCIAL. Yes, it is essentially true that the idea matters only to the founders and not to the VCs, but still the idea is crucial. That VCs ignore ideas is just that they have (or at least have had until the losses of the last 10 years, and still hope to have) a way to make money easier for them and that they and their limited partners do understand -- exploit human nature and take advantage of gullible CEOs.

Or, rule out everything else and what remains, however improbable, must be the truth!

For reading Tech Crunch, HN, blogs, Fred Wilson, etc., that is very thin and watery material, much of it very wrong, but a little of it is worth knowing.

For

"There is no secret to startup success."

of COURSE there is: Else success is all just blind luck (which we can't believe) or many more people would be rich.

For

"there are no repeatable patterns that lead to startup success. None."

yes there are, but, of course, they are difficult to see. The US DoD sees them, and so does nearly all of the applied research community, but nearly no one in information technology entrepreneurship does.

Yes, even though there are repeatable patterns, not all successes will fit any such patterns.

Actually, when looking for exceptional events, which, of course, successes are, empirical distributions and averages are not very important.

So, as is common, the more important 'intelligence' about such things is beyond empirical distributions. Or, that Langley fell into the Potomac and that many others had failed for many decades didn't mean that the Wright Brothers had to fail.

How did the Wright Brothers know? They designed and built a good wind tunnel, did good lift, drag, and thrust calculations, and made good progress on the crucial issues of three axis control. So their 'pattern' was to take advantage of some basic physics. Sadly they did not understand Reynolds number so had two thin wings instead of one thick one.

The pattern remains: There are ways to know.

For your

"just f __*ing do it (#JFDI)."

no: You are proposing just blind, passionate irrationality. Instead, plan well enough to see your way fairly clear to success; then measure twice and saw once. Or have a carefully worked out flight plan WITH reserve fuel and alternate destinations. Charles Lindberg did. Of course, if you have no way to see your way clear to success, then you will have to proceed with just blind passion.

Even Fred Wilson will advise, quoting roughly, "If you don't need venture capital, then you shouldn't take it."</comment>


Ask HN: The most interesting work you could imagine doing? - <AUTHOR>

Obvious question derived from PG's "The Pooled-Risk Company Management Company" essay. <comment><USER2> either starting/running or being a part of a small company looking to solve bigger problems, like the one laptop per child project.

problem with that is that the work is so interesting that it doesn't pay well, which is a problem OLPC fell into, too. jobs like these tend to require that you not need to have the job to make a living.

</comment><comment><USER3> Building and running my own company. I guess I fall into that rare class of founder who doesn't need to ever flip.</comment>


Astronomers Discover Potentially Earthlike Planet Orbiting Binary Star - <AUTHOR> http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/arxiv/27005/

<comment><USER2> Sensationalist headline. Actually just a candidate for supporting liquid water (and then only for some of it's fairly elliptic orbit).

And it's pretty damn big, so not likely to be a rock, more like a gas giant (If it _doesn't _ have a large gaseous atmosphere it would I think be the biggest rock planet ever discovered.)

So "habitable exo-planet" is stretching things............... a lot.

<comment><USER3> This has become a common pattern with exo-planet reporting.

Often they are reported to be "earth like" or "habitable" when they only have potential for liquid water.

Also, some of these planets that are reported may not actually exits. See <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gliese_581_g>.

<comment><USER2> Yeah well it's an unfortunate by-product of a) research institutions feeling the pressure to spin their output in a way which is consumer-friendly and b) the publishing industry turning that spin into an absurd attention-grabbing headline.

<comment><USER4> It's more a by-product of the fact that the Kepler mission has produced so many planet candidates (with an estimated ~50% false positive rate) that it would require about 30 years of telescope time on the world's largest telescopes to actually confirm that the stars have planets.

<comment><USER5> Can you cite a source for your 50% false positive rate? I found a source[1] that argues for a ten percent false positive rate.

What do you mean to "confirm" that the stars have planets? I could imagine, directly imaging them is confirmation, but, as I understand it, that's nearly impossible for the average exoplanet we've found. What types of data are Kepler and COROT lacking which you desire for confirmation?

[1] <http://arxiv.org/abs/1101.5630>

<comment><USER4> The false positive rate seems to have been revised to 40% since I last checked, but my reference is here (though they cite the Morton & Johnson paper, too):

<http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2011ApJ...736...19B>

The 10% false positive rate is for rank 2 targets, but the majority of targets are rank 4, which have a 40% false positive rate. (See section 2.2.2)

To confirm that the stars have planets, one would do spectroscopic follow up. You would see the slight wobbling of the host star due to the gravitational influence of the planet, and this would manifest itself in a slight Doppler shifting of the spectral lines of the host star. The problem is that most of the stars that Kepler is observing are so faint that ground-based spectroscopic follow-up is impossible except on the largest telescopes, and even then you can only do it for a handful of the thousands of candidates that Kepler is discovering.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> A red dwarf from 1000 au would only look like a moderately bright star, won't it?

On the other hand, it would be close enough that if aliens inhabited, they could send a probe with present-day human level of technology. That is, the nearby star would serve as a stepping stone and an excuse to bridge the gap to interstellar space. Compare it to our Alpha Centauri, which lies just shy of 300K au, a relatively costly cosmic barrier to entry.

But for our neighbourhood, there is still the possibility of a brown dwarf or Jupiter-sized world lurking in the depths of our Oort cloud. Alternative destinations are 500-750au which would be good spots to place a telescope (exploiting the Sun as a gravitational lens) <http://www.centauri- dreams.org/?p=10123> . You need intermediary objectives to make interstellar exploration a more realizable goal.

<comment><USER7> I probably did the calculations[1] wrong but the value I'm getting for the apparent magnitude of 55 Cancri B at 1000 AU with an absolute magnitude of 12.66[2] is about -3.9121 which, if located in our Solar system, would be bright enough to see in daylight, despite being almost 35 times as distant as Pluto is to the Sun.

[1] [http://ceres.hsc.edu/homepages/classes/astronomy/spring99/Ma...](http://ceres.hsc.edu/homepages/classes/astronomy/spring99/Mathematics/sec19.html) [2] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/55_Cancri>

<comment><USER6> Still, it won't look like 'two suns in the sky', but more like Venus.

<comment><USER7> Definitely. It would look like a pretty damn bright star, but not like a second Sun.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Maybe in 50 years we can get probes up to 10% light speed.

200-250 years to reach the planet and then another 20 years for the signal to get back (if we can somehow make a signal strong enough).

So 300 years from now our great-great-grandchildren might know (that's 70 years longer than US history).

But we'd actually have to spend some of that war and terrorism industry money on NASA and private investment to accomplish that. Not sure the politicians would ever bother.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> "We're left, like the starving donkey equidistant between two bails of hay, unable to decide on what to celebrate" <\-- the closest of these things is 20 light years :[

<comment><USER9> The scale of space is shocking. The fastest man made object, Helios 2 (<http://goo.gl/xCow>), at 250000kph, would take 17000 years to get to the next nearest star, Alpha Centauri.

This post by Charles Stross is worth a read: [http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog- static/2007/06/the_high...](http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog- static/2007/06/the_high_frontier_redux.html)

To quote: "interstellar travel for human beings is near-as-dammit a non- starter"

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is one of those stories that makes my internal 12 year-old want to post the following comment and my 42 year-old too in awe to stop it:

"Cool!"

</comment><comment><USER11> In the habitable zone 74% of its orbit? Although it sounds great, I'm left skeptical: to support life, wouldn't that need to be 100%?

<comment><USER12> It doesn't need to be 100% if the atmosphere of the planet could keep enough heat for the remaining 26% of the time, which is entirely likely.

This find is awesome, but it's not what the headline describes. The planet is no "ExoEarth". It's a fantasticly cool exoplanet that could very probably support life that vaguely resembles life on Earth (not humans, though).

<comment><USER5> It looks like the planet actually slides closer in to the star, thus the issue would be keeping the environment cool enough.

<comment><USER13> Closer to a smaller, cooler star.

<comment><USER5> Yes, but the habital zone scales with star size, so a radial position less than the habital zone would indeed be warmer than desirable for Earth-like life.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Posted similar comment directly to the article. Quite pleased with myself for noticing a typo without having to check. It's probably "Gliese 581g" without the extra "4" that the author is referring to in the list of top candidates. It proves the point, though, that this is a hot area of astronomy. I'm no expert, but I was familiar enough with the first exasolar discoveries to notice the typo immediately.

</comment><comment><USER15> "That's weird! The sky on Cancri 55 f must be out of this world. "

Really, that's the quality of writing from MIT Technology Review?

</comment><comment><USER16> "The sky on Cancri 55 f must be out of this world."

Arrrgh.

</comment><comment><USER17> The planet was discovered in April 2005, nothing news.

<comment><AUTHOR> I thought discovery of 55 Cancri f was published in this paper on the 11th of July this year --> <http://arxiv.org/abs/1107.1936>

<comment><USER17> Well I guess you're wrong --> [http://web.archive.org/web/20061216012023/http://www.aas.org...](http://web.archive.org/web/20061216012023/http://www.aas.org/publications/baas/v37n2/dda05/29.htm)

It was discovered in April 2005. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/55_Cancri_f>

<comment><USER18> Yes, but the 'news' is that it is within the habitable zone. (For certain definitions of habitable.)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Messing with a Competitor's Fundraising - <AUTHOR> http://avc.com/2014/11/messing-with-a-competitors-fundraising/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+AVc+%28A+VC%29

<comment><USER2> Just uninstalled the Uber app. No need to support a company that repeatedly demonstrates they have no ethical core.</comment>


Inside Iron Mountain's Hidden Data Bunker - <AUTHOR> http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/iron-mountains-energy-efficient-bunker/

<comment><USER2> Iron Mountain is a great business.

They are a really defensive company and generate a pretty good return on invested capital (~15%). Their revenues mostly come from recurring monthly payments for storage fees based on volume, marketing, etc.

They actually got their start back in 1951 with an underground facility in Hudson, NY and are now in 39 different countries with 1,000+ facilities. They control something like 5% of the global market for information protection/storage and actually led consolidation in the industry.

The other neat thing is that they have some good tailwinds in place. While there is a lot of talk about moving to paperless offices, electronic communications are actually promoting more printing - especially by old school groups like lawyers, doctors. On top of that, because of regulatory issues and the costs associated with reviewing and destroying physical documents, the volume actually increases. As a result, you actually see their customers' physical volumes growing faster than their rate of removal/destruction.

</comment><comment><USER3> So ... ~ 2700 employees have access to this underground facility?

Obviously not everyone has access to every part, but it kind of takes the shine off the underground super-secure bunker marketing.</comment>