Well there was that one time Germany owed everyone a lot of money after the Treaty of Versailles and it kind of directly led to Hitler’s rise to power and another World War… makes sense for them to be a bit more conservative than other countries.
It seems you are under the impression that the venture capital firm cofounder by Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz was created by a single individual.
If you can’t get basic facts correct no one is going to take your other claims seriously. A16Z has a diverse portfolio of investments and are as famous as they are because of how successful their companies have been.
Oh, please. Bitcoin is a protocol with no more inherent value than SMTP.
Aside from being the Catholic cryptocurrency, it has been surpassed technologically in every way by newer and better designed protocols. Why would anyone who doesn't already own Bitcoin choose to use it for anything over, ex. Ethereum?
Bitcoin maxis aren't technologists; they're grifters trying to convince you their magic beans are the most special magic beans.
There are reasons why you'd choose bitcoin over your example, ethereum. For one, supply of ethereum is not deterministically predictable. As money, that makes it less compelling. Some other technical details are very short block time means network splits, orphaned blocks, reorgs are very common. In the short term, ethereum finality is not as reliable.
Generally I agree with your point though. Money over IP can takeany forms, and the likelihood that the first form it took is the best it could possibly be is miniscule.
Study bitcoin long enough and you'll realise it is the best it could possibly be (allowing for small tweaks, additions that don't change the underlying fundamentals)
It's not what it first appears and catches everyone out to start with.
Give me any number of negatives and I'll explain with clear reasoning why you're wrong and why they're a strength.
I've studied bitcoin for over a decade. Deeply. I can talk about ECDSA and the emergent consensus behavior that emerges from the architecture. I can talk about the economics and monetary policy in detail. I like to think I've got a pretty good handle on it.
I know it's not the first attempt at internet money, but it is the first form that didn't require a central intermediary for all transactions. That's what sets all this apart.
I can give you a number of shortcomings and I promise you I've heard what you have to say, and thought about it too. I'm hoping you have something new for me, I enjoy changing my mind.
To start, let's commit blasphemy: the hard cap. It's a bad idea. So is a percentage debasement rate, as is the supposed target of central banks. I'm partial to continuous, linear debasement, which translates to a geometrically decreasing debasement as a percentage of supply. For one, holders free ride the network. Two, no other asset anywhere ever behaves this way. Bitcoin is the most scarce thing in the universe, and that's a good thing until it's not. Something that's always predictably scarce temporally but, taken to infinity, has no hard limit, is superior IMO as long as there's no feedback loops in the supply change.
Bitcoin cannot handle enough transactions. Lightning is just fractional banking with extra steps. Again, you're not here to sell layer 2, you're here to convince me (or at least make the case) that this is a strength.
All monetary exchange for all of history is public to anyone.
For the strongest security guarantee, all history must be stored forever by everyone participating in consensus. Note, if this were solved, block size would be a non issue. It is solved actually, believe it or not, just not in bitcoin.
That's what I've got off the top of my head. Bitcoin isn't the best it could be, it could be the best if everyone's commerce was private and historical data was not needed to ensure security. My other point, hard cap, is more contentious and we could argue that one for days and make no progress.
Note that I did not mention PoW, ASICs, fees, block size (although one of my points alludes to the possibility of getting rid of that entirely) or any of the usual surface level talking points because I don't think they're worth going over again. I tend to like PoW and think trying to prevent ASICs is counterproductivr, as far as fees go, they're a symptom of a couple of the problems I laid out above.
Cool. This is what I've been looking for finally - a reasoned debate with someone who understands bitcoin.
Okay, so the hard cap.
>To start, let's commit blasphemy: the hard cap. It's a bad idea. So is a percentage debasement rate, as is the supposed target of central banks. I'm partial to continuous, linear debasement, which translates to a geometrically decreasing debasement as a percentage of supply. For one, holders free ride the network. Two, no other asset anywhere ever behaves this way. Bitcoin is the most scarce thing in the universe, and that's a good thing until it's not. Something that's always predictably scarce temporally but, taken to infinity, has no hard limit, is superior IMO as long as there's no feedback loops in the supply change.
Now yes, that is blasphemy.
1) Personally I don't see holders as freeriding. They are simply storing their wealth until they need to buy something. They can also lend it out to receive interest which most will likely do, once there's safe methods of doing this.
Far better this than storing their wealth in real estate, pushing up prices for people that actually want a home to live in and are forced to be rent slaves for the rest of their lives.
2) That no asset behaves this way is a pro for me. I'm interested to hear why you think an ever increasing supply is superior? As you say, we could deliberate on whether a constant sat rate of issuance is preferable for an economy for days on end, but ultimately, the scarcer asset will always be more attractive to large amounts of wealth that need to be stored and so will go up forever when priced in a less scarce asset. Dare I say "honey badger don't care"?
Next, transaction rate.
> Bitcoin cannot handle enough transactions. Lightning is just fractional banking with extra steps. Again, you're not here to sell layer 2, you're here to convince me (or at least make the case) that this is a strength.
No blockchain will be able to both accommodate retail transactions of 50,000 tx/s like VISA and also be decentralised. The equipment needed will simply be too expensive. The slow transaction rate is a strength for a number of reasons:
- almost anyone on earth can afford to run a node
- the network can run on very low bandwidth networks such as ham radio
- it increases security and is optimal (through decentralisation and robustness) for the transactions that count - large amounts of value. It's the large amounts of value, stored for long periods of time that are going to take bitcoin to $100M+, even without any higher layer payment rails.
> All monetary exchange for all of history is public to anyone. For the strongest security guarantee, all history must be stored forever by everyone participating in consensus. Note, if this were solved, block size would be a non issue. It is solved actually, believe it or not, just not in bitcoin.
Yes, monetary exchange is public to everyone. But the source/destination of the exchange are as anonymous as we need them to be. I see it as flexibility. Coinjoining or moving the value temporarily through an anonymous network like Monero or Lightning helps maintain privacy if required and the public transactions mean we can hold governments and public bodies to account who can voluntarily remove the pseudo-anonymity. More importantly means that everyone is able to confirm that the bitcoin issuance is not being violated - I'm interested in knowing how this has been solved elsewhere - this is obviously very significant if it truly has. My assumption is that the solution is very complex - and this is why being able to validate the supply by looking at all the transactions is important - it's very simple and robust.
I don't think fees are really an issue at all. Ultimately, the network will be used for very large sums of money and to pay even $100 to store $1B losslessly for 50 years sounds like a bargain to me. To the point that the fee is insignificant.
I'm glad we can agree on PoW. After all, what is money if it's not proof of work?
Just to add, I don't think we'll ever stop fractional reserve banking. But as Satoshi's message in the genesis block implies, bitcoin's job is to prevent zero-reserve banking - that is the real cancer on the world. If banks can't print infinite money then they can't be bailed out and so will need to have a hard lower limit on their reserve %age, or else risk going out of business, just like before central banking. Although there will be fractional reserve banking, the total supply will still be hard capped. It will at least be a big improvement on gold - Bitcoin is far more auditable - custodians can easily supply the bitcoin owners with the public keys to the owner's wallet to prove they have not rehypothecated it.
The network has ongoing costs and only people that spend money contribute to, unless there's a tail emission. In that case, in addition, everyone holding contributes to maintenance of the network to the degree they benefit from it's maintenance in the form of debasement of their savings, which go directly to the miners keeping the network alive. Holders are free riders in bitcoin, game theory wise this is a fact.
> No blockchain will be able to both accommodate retail transactions of 50,000 tx/s like VISA and also be decentralised
This is a statement of fact but has not been thoroughly demonstrated. The 2 bottlenecks to throughput are 1) block size, and 2) network latency between nodes. Block size is only an issue for decentralization if you have to store all historical data forever to get theaximum security guarantee possible. Mimblewimble eliminates this requirement, and therefore enables the same decentralization regardless of block size. At that point, block size is only limited by how fast transactions propagate across the network, that is, latency, and verification of them, which is trivial, within the block time. You can have 1GB blocks in mimblewimble and have the block chain shrink one block to the next with no sacrifice in security guarantees.
All transactions count.
> Yes, monetary exchange is public to everyone. But the source/destination of the exchange are as anonymous as we need them to be.
You don't really believe that do you? This is a system built on cryptography and we just accept that our finances are open to anyone, to be blacklisted, to make a single mistake and our entire transaction history can be tied to us, and even, other peoples history can be erroneously tied to us, weust behave with the most rigorous sterile technique or anyone anywhere can know everything we have and everything we have ever bought. You believe this is all we need?
You can voluntarily remove anonymity for example in Monero with viewkeys, and selectively remove it with transaction keys for individual transactions. You can confirm issuance is not being violated with range proofs. Greg Maxwell's bulletproofs are formally proven, and implementation has been thoroughly audited.
Fees are an issue. If I have a not insignificant sum in bitcoin and I can't move it, bitcoin is broken. I've saved nothing, I've thrown it down a well. I don't like to talk about this because my above points are the cause of it and the solutions I talk about that exist already resolve it, so it's not something that we need to go into depth on. But, I did an analysis about this a while ago that I published on nostr and I think that bitcoin fees will rise asymptotically to reach the median transaction value, which is a positive feedback loop. It's not a problem until it is, and it is already a problem for a lot of people.
You can stop fractional reserve banking. It began because moving and protecting gold was expensive. Moving and protecting cryptocurrency is cheap, people don't need custodians, but we are getting fractional reserve bitcoin because it is artificially kept expensive. The tools exist to alleviate this, you can, right now, have astronomically higher amounts of commerce on a layer 1 chain directly than bitcoin provides, and I'm not talking about some sham scamcoin like iota or whatever. The solution was developed at blockstream! It was initially a BIP!
> The network has ongoing costs and only people that spend money contribute to, unless there's a tail emission. In that case, in addition, everyone holding contributes to maintenance of the network to the degree they benefit from it's maintenance in the form of debasement of their savings, which go directly to the miners keeping the network alive. Holders are free riders in bitcoin, game theory wise this is a fact.
I see the hard cap, with 100% fees from transactions, as optimisation for storing large amounts for large periods of time, which is the use-case you want for bitcoin to become as valuable as possible. It's just Gresham's law. People will hoard the hardest money and sell any softer money supply inflation.
> This is a statement of fact but has not been thoroughly demonstrated. The 2 bottlenecks to throughput are 1) block size, and 2) network latency between nodes. Block size is only an issue for decentralization if you have to store all historical data forever to get theaximum security guarantee possible. Mimblewimble eliminates this requirement, and therefore enables the same decentralization regardless of block size. At that point, block size is only limited by how fast transactions propagate across the network, that is, latency, and verification of them, which is trivial, within the block time. You can have 1GB blocks in mimblewimble and have the block chain shrink one block to the next with no sacrifice in security guarantees. All transactions count.
I appreciate that I'm making assumptions that technology like MimbleWimble can't compete for robustness/confidence in the network with Bitcoin's straightforward approach to validating the total supply, but MimbleWimble is also certainly not thoroughly demonstrated. I'll investigate the technology though and get back to you. Are you confident that MimbleWimble will adequately protect against rogue issuance that nation states can use it as their reserve asset?
> You don't really believe that do you? This is a system built on cryptography and we just accept that our finances are open to anyone, to be blacklisted, to make a single mistake and our entire transaction history can be tied to us, and even, other peoples history can be erroneously tied to us, weust behave with the most rigorous sterile technique or anyone anywhere can know everything we have and everything we have ever bought. You believe this is all we need?
The reason I believe it's all we need is because I see the bitcoin network simply as a base layer network or savings tool. The transactions will either be limited to peoples savings, pensions, investments etc. or the transactions will be to/from higher level networks such as lightning, or even centralised payment rails like Paypal. In both cases, supply auditing and simplicity (i.e. robustness) wins over absolute privacy in my view. This is what makes sats the ultimate store of value, and any future faster, more private layer 2 network that doesn't use sats as it's native "token" won't be able to compete, just as the dollar won't.
> Fees are an issue. If I have a not insignificant sum in bitcoin and I can't move it, bitcoin is broken. I've saved nothing, I've thrown it down a well. I don't like to talk about this because my above points are the cause of it and the solutions I talk about that exist already resolve it, so it's not something that we need to go into depth on. But, I did an analysis about this a while ago that I published on nostr and I think that bitcoin fees will rise asymptotically to reach the median transaction value, which is a positive feedback loop. It's not a problem until it is, and it is already a problem for a lot of people.
Fees aren't an issue if its used for large enough values as they tend to 0. I can't see how the fees could ever end up being average transaction value because people will simply stop using the network if it gets anywhere close. As the demand for the network drops, so do the fees.
> You can stop fractional reserve banking. It began because moving and protecting gold was expensive. Moving and protecting cryptocurrency is cheap, people don't need custodians, but we are getting fractional reserve bitcoin because it is artificially kept expensive. The tools exist to alleviate this, you can, right now, have astronomically higher amounts of commerce on a layer 1 chain directly than bitcoin provides, and I'm not talking about some sham scamcoin like iota or whatever. The solution was developed at blockstream! It was initially a BIP!
I firmly believe there will always be a place for custodians. Most people simply aren't capable of keeping private keys safe - especially once it becomes more popular and scams are rife. How much rehypothication goes on depends on how much demand there is for fully auditable custodians - bitcoin provides the option if people want it.
>Bitcoin maxis aren't technologists; they're grifters trying to convince you their magic beans are the most special magic beans.
Replace "bitcoin maxis" with any cryptocoin promoter and the statement remains true and equally as useless to those who refuse to consider digital coinage money.
I took macro in college, I'm pretty well aware of the extent I do not care about fiscal policy. I even was basically mining bitcoin practically from the start (within months of the launch) for less than a week(and have subsequently destroyed the maybe half BTC I generated) before realizing that I had no desire to contribute to that particular mind virus. Money is close to the worst aspect about humans.
I’m creative but have never been adept at sharing visual ideas in my head with the rest of the world. I’ve found genAI image tools empowering because for the first time I can turn an idea into my head into something other people can see and enjoy. I’ve used it for everything from portaits and memes to recreating scenes from my memories that I don’t have photos of to help me remember.
I use credit cards for all of my spending. One gives me 4% back on fuel, another 3x points on travel and dining, etc. Paying with cash/debit is less economical because you forgo these rebates and incentives.
I also pay my cards in full each month so there are no interest charges, just a few with annual fees that are more than covered by the card benefits.
Is this news? I'm genuinely asking - TLO and other skip tracing tools have been around for a while, and have been offering license plate location data for years.
The ACLU issued a report on how ALPR devices are used to track people in July 2013 (1).
Flock Safety (2) was founded in 2017 and has raised $381M from name-brand VCs like Tiger Global and A16Z. The ACLU raised concerns about them a year ago in a report. (3)
No, I don't think people realize it. Also, these brokers are basically the sole gatekeepers for this type of information - as AI recognition software becomes more potent, I think this kind of data becomes much more dangerous.
I think people know these exist. As this thread shows, I think lots of people don't _care_ that it exists, or only object to the data being sold to Amazon rather than DHS.
Maybe this is contrarian but what is the issue for a company looking to help police solve crime? It's ours, and their duty to keep our communities safe
The problem is that once this location data is available, it's easily abused by the police. Here are some quotes for you:
That's what, Cory Hutcheson, ex-Sheriff of Mississippi County, MO, is accused of doing; prosecutors say that for three years, Hutcheson abused Securus's system to track all kinds of people — even a local judge — without a warrant.https://boingboing.net/2018/05/12/extraordinary-access.html
While many departments require warrants to use phone tracking in nonemergencies, others claim broad discretion to get the records on their own, according to 5,500 pages of internal records obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union from 205 police departments nationwide.https://nyti.ms/450FPqK
U.S. Marshal Adrian O. Pena allegedly abused the Securus system by simply uploading blank documents and pretending he had authority to track people he had personal relationships with and their spouses.https://www.vice.com/en/article/k7bqew/us-marshal-securus-ph...
The issue is that most people don't want to live in a surveillance state. It's not about solving or not solving crime, it's about how much police can encroach into the general public's lives. That's what warrants and probable cause are for: to allow the police to get the job done while protecting the general public's privacy/integrity. Otherwise, you might as well go back to the middle ages and deploy the royal guard. The issue at present is that private companies, typically fueled by the advertising industry, have spawned to collect and record literally anything of potential value. Then police get access to this data, often with warrants, but also often without them. See, e.g., Amazon's Ring, or all the other examples in the other reply to your comment.
I think there are basically two questions here:
1. Whether this kind of unrestricted bulk data collection (i.e., mass survaillence) should be allowed in the first place.
2. If it is allowed (presumably because the benefits outweigh the downsides, which isn't my opinion), what controls exist to access the data, what oversight exists, and who enforces it.
The current state of things is basically a free-for-all, where any collection goes, police often work in the shadow, and corporations get, at most, a slap in the wrist.
This story by itself might sound like sour grapes, but in combination with other reports about the CEO(1), I suspect bad news ahead for Stability's investors.
It seems like a narcissist with a very 'dynamic' relationship with the truth chased the AI hype train and ended up with a bunch of money and attention due to a stupid VC. He pissed off the teams that invented Latent Diffusion and his partners at RunwayML in the process, and now it seems like his cofounder as well. What value is there in a company that's only famous because they spent $600k in VC money training an open source model on AWS?
I'm not convinced they are throwing money at nothing this time. If you look into my post history (don't, I'll give you a tl/dr) you can see me being fairly critical about the state of LLMs, but also that I find them incredibly useful for some things. GPT basically writes 95% of our documentation now, only the code we absolutely don't want to share with the internet is still be documented by hand. And that is just a tiny bit of how the new AI boom is actually useful. My wife works with dyslexic people, and the amount of usability AI has in terms of turning the written word into audio is outright amazing. I'm sure this will be hard on a lot of voice actors, copy writers and so on, but AI can do those jobs and a lot of other things.
To me that means that, unlike blockchain, there is actually a viable product behind all the AI hype, and unlike Uber companies have already started selling it rather than waiting for it to become profitable through scale.
Maybe it's just me but the AI hype reminds me a lot more of the dotcom era than any of the recent hype cycles. Of course this means that for every Amazon or Google there will be 9 million failures, and unlike the dotcom era, it's likely that it'll be Google (or most likely Microsoft) who hits the jackpot, meaning it'll be even harder to find the right investment opportunities this time, but I don't think it's a fad.
Right. It's not a discount to the science or discipline but instead to the weird used car men snake oil games we need to play to move the money around.
The royal society and other 18th century science institutions had similar problems. Carnival barkers would shock people with leyden jars, hidden wires and do Stephen Grays flying boy experiment as an amusement to raise money to do actual legitimate science.
Some of the early Copley medal winners were impoverished borderline homeless people who couldn't afford the membership dues to scientific societies. They've got like scientific theories and galaxies named after them today
I have often thought that the current AI hype is a perfect example in some intersection of i) tragedy of the commons; ii) the idea that you don’t have to be smart or skilled to make money; and iii) new fools and new shills are born every minute.
This article is really weird. Am I the only one asking who he pissed off or is a threat to for such a weird article listing off things like over half of all founders do as misdeeds.
Very low quality if not full on paid for “journalism”. Putting only loosely connected logos on a deck? Gimme a break, happens every day in every office in the world.
As I understand the article describes fraud, which has little to do with being a good or a bad player. Fraud is a crime. Assuming, of course, that the article is truthful.
I had a former employer call once and ask me to sign a form confirming that I had opted not to exercise the stock options worth 0.125% of the company when I left.
They were raising a new round and my old grant was a sticking point because the new investors weren't content with the company not having a record of my exercise.
I signed because it helped them out, cost me nothing and seemed like the right thing to do. Just think it was funny that a VC was so averse to dead equity that they made the company make sure someone who wasn't on the cap table agreed that they weren't on the cap table.
Comcast "forced" me off of mine by upping my rate to $180/mo for the cheapest cable-only package when there were contract deals available with internet and more channels for $110/mo.
No contract rates available without turning in the cablecard. Switched symmetric GB fiber provider for $65/mo and pay for streaming TV during the NHL season.
Cable television (and, to some extent "television" in general) has the stink of a dying industry all over it. Of course, "cable TV" during my lifetime has often been a type of business run, in many areas, as a sort of personal piggy-bank / for "rents" extraction, and not in any kind of public or consumer oriented manner at all [1]. But, really, at this point, cable is just milking as much as it can out of the generations that still are very dependent on it as it sinks into oblivion.
Cable wasn't exactly great, well, ever ... but, even through perhaps about 2015, it was at least somewhat watchable. In the past few years, I've had the ... (mis)fortune of being in a household with cable (after years of only even being able to watch when I went to someone else's home). Commercials were bad enough 10 years ago. Now, they hardly show any scenes in shows / movies before there is a commercial. Movies with runtimes of 1.5 hours, will run for 2.75 hours on TV. This can be on "broadcast" stations as well as cable-only. The barrage of ads only drops off after about 10pm.
Even worse, they now have very "dynamic" time slot ads, 5s ads interspersed with 15s ads etc... Plus, the ads themselves often enough feel made for the "TikTok" generation.
Just an absolute mess.
I'll never look back at TV with any deep nostalgia, though there is a bit of nostalgia for some aspects. It was never a highlight of life - like Seinfeld quips in one of his stand-ups: "... everyone on TV is doing something better than what you are doing ... you never see someone on TV sliding off the couch with potato chip crumbs all over their face ..." (something to that effect). But, it's really "jumped the shark", these days.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/30/obituaries/john-j-rigas-d... (I can't quickly find some of the material I was looking for - practices of companies in the 90s, fighting any kind of innovation while fees exploded etc. ... There were noteworthy laws enacted, incl. 1992 cable-related act and the notorious 1996 telco act ... lots of bad anti tech anti consumer crap mixed in all of it, and lots of private corralling of money, in any case)
Cable has definitely gone downhill. I remember we got our first cable box (a fairly large black metal box with a channel selector dial on it) in 1985 or so, and it was actually pretty good. Not that many channels, but as I remember it (I was very young, so it's a bit fuzzy), most channels had no commercials at all, even between programs.
I haven't had cable since 2005 or so, when I canceled it. I think I got cable TV just because I assumed that was just what I was supposed to do, since I'd had it for nearly all my life. But after a year or so of living on my own, I realized I rarely watched it, and got rid of it. Haven't looked back, and I aggressively avoid being exposed advertising as much as possible. When I'm visiting family the TV is usually on in the background (with some cable channel on), and it's astonishing to me how little actual programming is there these days. Feels like mostly ads, and, as you point out, normal-length movies have their time slots expanded by at least 50% to account for ads. Gross.
I wish I could switch. It's ridiculous that in San Francisco my only realistic choice is Comcast. No fiber (despite being one block from the 3rd Street fiber trunk), and MonkeyBrains won't guarantee the speeds I want.
Either way, kudos to you for voting with your wallet here. I wish we could all do that in every situation.
I'm a little bit surprised they didn't offer you a better rate when you called to cancel. A friend of mine has been riding a 1-year signup promotion for a good 5+ years now; every year when they're about to switch him to regular pricing, he calls them and tells them he's unhappy with the new rate and will cancel. But in your case, I guess Comcast's profits are solid enough (and they know most people don't have an alternative) that they can be choosy about their customers.
You can thank your local corrupt politicians for maintaining Comcast's monopoly in your area. Comcast pays good money to have those votes, money it takes from you and your neighbors.
The capital expenditure to build fiber is also quite large, Sonic.net, Astound and others have spent money to build fiber in parts of California, but maintaining and using existing infrastructure is just cheaper than building new, especially if trenching is involved.
